 Of Magnificence and Of Magnanimity presents Scudéry’s mimetic theory of art in capsule form. All art represents an imitation of nature, “nature” here being understood as the physical world. “Art has imitated what Nature has made in different places of the world” [CN, 1: 23]. Each art imitates a particular section of nature. Dance, for example, imitates the motion of the stars. “The people who invented dance took the order and movement of the stars as their model” [CN, 1: 38]. Through artistic mimesis, a distinctive sector of the natural world is transmuted into a particular genre of art. It is this specialized study of material nature that explains the demarcation among the various genres constituting the beaux arts.