Since Antiquity, painting caused two types of literature: esthetic and philosophical considerations, whose heart is the problem of the mimêsis, i.e. the reproduction, the imitation of reality; and of the technical collections, mixing receipts and councils.

Until the Italian Rebirth, painting is thus plastered with the row of know-how. One readily opposes it to poetry, pure creation of the spirit.

If the work of Cennino Cennini, It libro dell' arte, appeared in 1398, is primarily a guide of the pictorial technique, Of will pictura of Alberti (1435) gives its first noble letters to painting.

All this period is fertile in technical works: Valentine Boltz, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo Fioravanti appear among the most famous authors.

But, to the XVI ^E century, it is certainly the Florentin Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect and collector, which, with its Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects, written of 1542 to 1550, then altered in 1568, gives to the future generations the most important information source on the humanism and the art of its time.

To the XVII ^E century, they are the painters who speak publicly about their art, or who write and publish above. Thus, the Brown one and Chick feed by their judgments and their standpoint the academic quarrels.

The organization of the Living rooms and the development of a European cultural network contribute to the appearance of an artistic criticism in the mediums of amateurs. Meanwhile, Diderot invents truly a new literary kind, the criticism of painting, through its Living rooms.

Created in 1768, the English Academy becomes the place of a new speech on painting, up to that point diffuse. Beauty analyzes, published in 1753 by William Hogarth, is representative of the intellectual climate which reigns then in England. Reynolds, in the speeches whom he pronounces in front of the pupils of the Academy since 1769, pays there homage to his rival, Gainsborough. Its influence, still badly measured, will be very broad: its speeches, translated and published in Italian, French and German, probably contributed, with the work of the Anton Raphael Mengs Germans and of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, with the development of a certain design of the “traditional taste”.

The criticism, initiated by Diderot, develops largely to the XIX ^E century, which the literary kind of the “Living room” knows at Baudelaire its achievement. In parallel, journalistic artistic criticism is not remainder: artistic specialized magazines then headings accommodate more or less enlightened contributions writers or politicians, who feel that painting became a moral and political stake. The painters themselves are done more discrete, expressing themselves through their diary (Delacroix) or their correspondence (letters of Van Gogh to its Théo brother). The hour of proclamations did not sound yet.

Towards the end of the XIX ^E century, then to the XX ^E century, the pictorial innovation is accompanied by a theoretical and esthetic program: proclamations of symbolism, realism, Blaue Reiter, Bauhaus, of Stijl, movement Cobra or new realism.

In a radical inversion, whereas the subject disappears from painting - the fabric becoming itself the subject in parallel developed the speech on painting - so much so that certain contemporary works, such those of Martin Barre, seem to be able to exist or take direction without a discursive accompaniment: the speech on painting became constitutive of painting itself.