Evidently, the Emperor tells the Court Chamberlain, my agent was embarrassed to have even brought me this head composed of fish, he considered it beneath him, but often my agents must bring me paintings they deem beneath them because they think (and I know that they mutter as much among themselves!) that my tastes run toward what they consider the perverse, although I of course think that their tastes, in running toward the simple and the natural, not to mention the graceful, run precisely toward the perverse. Each side thinks that the other side’s taste runs right toward the perverse, a symmetry broken only by the fact that one side is supposed to be procuring art for the other side, i.e., they for me, not I for them, I am quoting the Emperor here, the Court Chamberlain said, the astronomer told Leibniz.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs: The Organs of Sense, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019, S. 49f.