 Charles Batteux had somewhat different goals. When he published The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle in 1746, he took up a challenge: to establish Aristotelian ideas firmly as the general basis for a unified system of the arts. The main concept on which he focuses is mimesis, but generalized to any kind of art (thus going beyond Aristotle or Horace). To achieve this generalization, he distinguishes the liberal arts, of which the object is pleasure (i.e., music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance), from the mechanical ones, and he proposes an interpretation of what amounts to the “imitation of the beautiful nature” (Batteux 1746). He insists that imitation is not a matter of slavishly copying the given, but a sensible and enlightened process that struggles its way forward to the best result. Recalling the famous anecdote of Zeuxis who composed his Helen out of parts taken from Crotone’s most perfect women, he concludes that the artist has the responsibility to imitate what reason decides is nature’s essence. That is why Batteux praises artifice so much: “art is made for fooling” (Batteux 1746), not because it is inherently duplicitous but because truth is a complex construction that hides its structure and development. Though sometimes Batteux is criticized for his stubborn defense of excessively rigid standards (as in his Principles of Literature, 1753) and for being an uncompromising advocate of the principle ut pictura poesis, at other times, he is recognized for grasping that the ideal is not to be found anywhere outside fiction.