Starobinski, especially since his two major works The Invention of Liberty, 1700-1789 and 1789, The Emblems of Reason, has chosen gesture as the object of a reflexion enabling a grasp of its range of meanings — anthropological, cultural, aesthetic, and ethical. It is in the field of the visual arts and in particular in painting that the term’s complexity best emerges. From Antiquity’s expressions of generosity to Garache’s painting, through 18th and 19th century painting, Starobinski’s itinerary demonstrates the passage from an aesthetics of the painted gesture whose theoretical limit is that of the expression of the passions, to a pragmatic understanding of the painter’s gesture as both the movement enabling the painting and the gift-giving gesture of the painter.