Diderot's insights into expressive and compositional problems, into drawing and colour and into chiaroscuro powerfully reflect the debate in the second half of the 18th century regarding the figurative arts, so much so that his Essay on Painting deeply impressed the most prominent German thinkers of his century - Lessing, Schiller and especially Goethe, who would translate them, adding his own comments - and anticipate many of the issues that later art criticism would address, notably influencing the art writings of authors such as Baudelaire, Zola and Apollinaire.