Take a Closer Look [Course Book ed.] 9781400848041

Table of contents :
Contents
Cara Giulia: Mars and Venus Surprised
The Snail’s Gaze: The Annunciation
Paint It Black: The Adoration of the Magi
Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece”
The Woman in the Chest: The Venus of Urbino
The Eye of the Master: Las Meninas
Illustration Credits
Index

Citation preview

Ta k e a C l o s e r L o o k

Daniel Arasse Translated from the French by Alyson Waters

P r i n c e t o n U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s  Princeton and Oxford

Ta k e a c lo s e r lo o k

Originally published as Daniel Arasse, On n’y voit rien: Descriptions. Copyright © Éditions Denoël, 2000, 2005. English translation copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press. Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Details of The Annunciation, c 1470–72 (tempera on panel), Francesco del Cossa, (1435/6–c. 1477) / Gemäeldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany / © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / The Bridgeman Art Library French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arasse, Daniel. [On n’y voit rien. English] Take a closer look / Daniel Arasse ; translated from the French by Alyson Waters. pages  cm “Originally published as Daniel Arasse, On n’y voit rien: Descriptions. Copyright © Éditions Denoël, 2000, 2005.” Includes index. ISBN 978-0-691-15154-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Painting—Themes, ­motives. 2. Painting—Appreciation. I. Waters, Alyson, 1955– translator. II. Arasse, Daniel. On n’y voit rien. Translation of: III. Title. ND1145.A6913 2013 750.1—dc23 2012050981 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE). www.frenchbooknews.com This book has been composed in Garamond Premiere Pro and Ideal Sans Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in Canada 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, Tintoretto 1 The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation, Francesco del Cossa 17 Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi, Bruegel the Elder 39 Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece” 71 The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino, Titian 89 The Eye of the Master Las Meninas, Velázquez 129 Illustration Credits 161 Index 163

Cara Giulia

Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan 2

Cara Giulia,

You may find this rather long letter surprising, even a bit irritating. I hope you won’t be angry, but I have to write to you. As I told you somewhat brusquely, I cannot understand how you sometimes look at painting in such a way that you don’t see what painter and painting are showing you. We have the same passion for painting, so why, when it comes to interpreting certain works, are our interpretations so dissimilar? I’m not saying that works of art have only one meaning and so there’s only one “good” interpretation. Gombrich said that, and you know my thoughts on the matter. No; what concerns me is rather the sort of screen (made up of texts, quotations, and outside references) that you sometimes seem to want—­at all costs—­to put up between you and the work, a sort of sun filter to shield you from the work and safeguard the acquired habits on which our academic community agrees and in which it recognizes itself. This isn’t the first time our opinions have differed, but this time, I’m writing to you. Not really with the hope of winning you over to my point of view, but perhaps with that of making you question your firmly held beliefs, and of shaking up certain convictions that, in my opinion, are blinding you. I’m not going to bring up Jacopo Zucchi’s Amor and Psyche. There would be, as you can imagine, a lot to say about it after the interpretation you proposed last month. Perhaps some other time. I will only mention here your lecture on Tintoretto’s Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan. Several times you hit the nail on the head and you made me see what I hadn’t seen. For example, you are right to say that Vulcan, leaning over Venus’s naked body in the bed, is reminiscent of a satyr coming upon a nymph. I like that idea of the husband’s unanticipated desire when he sees his wife’s beautiful body. But the conclusions I draw from

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Tintoretto Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan Alte Pinakothek, Munich

this are not the same as yours. Likewise, when you say that the eroticism of this body, generously exposed to view, encourages women who look at the painting to identify with the goddess of love, you’re off to a good start. When, however, under the pretext that only Vulcan is worthy of esteem, whereas Venus is ashamed and Mars ridiculous, you interpret this to mean that this encouragement is a moral one and that Tintoretto uses the power of the picture and the seduction of his paintbrush to channel female desire (these are not your words, but they’re close), I just don’t get it. For example, you say that Venus, caught in the act, is trying to conceal her nudity. But what makes you think she is not, on the contrary, trying to reveal it to seduce Vulcan? Why couldn’t there be some humor in this painting? I have the feeling that you—­ordinarily so cheerful—­did not want to “do” art history joyfully. As if it were your professional duty not to laugh or even smile, which would not be “serious.” Serio ludere, play seriously: yet you know this proverb from the Renaissance, and the Renaissance’s taste for laughter and paradox. It’s as if in order to be taken seriously you had to take yourself seriously, to be seriosa and not seria, as you say in Italian, to show your credentials to those cemetery guardians who cloak themselves in the so-­called dignity of their discipline and, in the name of cheerless scholarship, never want us to laugh when we look at a painting. You, Giulia, seriosa? Oh, please! So, if you haven’t already tossed this letter out, let me start over. I agree that in this painting Tintoretto has an unexpectedly new take on the hackneyed theme of “Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan.” Usually, Mars and Venus are naked, lying together in their adulterous bed, caught in the web that Vulcan, forewarned by Apollo, drops on them. There’s none of that in the painting in Munich. Venus is indeed naked, and she’s stretched out on the bed. But she is alone. Mars is hiding under the table, wearing his armor, his helmet on his head, while Vulcan, with one knee on the bed, is raising the sheer cloth that conceals his wife’s sex. Next to him, under the window in a cradle, Cupid is sleeping soundly. The subject had never been treated like this before

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Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan 5

and never would be again. According to you, by representing it in such a paradoxical way, Tintoretto, using a counterexample, wanted to pay tribute to the merits of marital fidelity. This wouldn’t be the first time Venus’s infidelity would be used to frighten newlyweds. Granted. To support your thesis, you cite a number of texts published in Venice condemning both adultery and erotic images. Now I’m confused. It’s not because these texts exist, or even because they were published at the same time the painting was painted, that they necessarily contribute to explaining it. That would be too easy. Opposing attitudes and viewpoints can exist simultaneously in a given society. You know that as well as I do. To support your viewpoint, you went so far as to suggest that the painting could be alluding to an episode in Tintoretto’s private life and was addressed to his young wife. But that’s going much too far. First of all, we know nothing about such an incident in Tintoretto’s life and, if the painting can be dated to circa 1550 (and you yourself proposed this), that was probably the year Tintoretto got married: he was thirty-­two years old. It’s not because he would wind up some forty years later resembling his Vulcan that you already have to see here a veiled self-­portrait, or even Tintoretto’s representative in the painting. Okay? Now I’m getting to the main point. Your interpretation relies on a simple principle, which you laid out in approximately these terms: Tintoretto’s Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan is not a usual representation of the subject, so it must be an allegory. That’s cutting a few corners, wouldn’t you say? Everything that is unusual is not necessarily allegorical. It may be sophisticated, paradoxical, parodic, whatever. Comic, for example. You pointed out that Mars was ridiculous, half hidden under the table with his helmet on his head. But you raced to throw a moral blanket over this farcical situation. According to you, Mars’s ridiculous position demeans the lover in order to highlight the melancholic dignity of the scorned, old husband. But what melancholic dignity? Vulcan is just as ridiculous! Take a look! What is this scorned husband really doing? Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan 6

What is he looking for between his wife’s thighs? Proof of what? Traces of what Mars may have left there? Okay, I’ll drop it. His gesture and his gaze make me think of one of Pietro Aretino’s naughty pranks rather than of some moral counsel. In fact, the way Tintoretto presents him to us, poor Vulcan is not only lame but after so much pounding on his anvil, he must have become deaf as a doorknob, too. Look at the evidence: he doesn’t even hear the dog. And yet, the dog is making a lot of noise, yapping away to indicate where Mars is hiding. A nasty little piece of work, that dog! But Vulcan doesn’t hear a thing. And do you know why? Not so much because he’s deaf, but because he’s got other things on his mind.

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At this precise moment (and Tintoretto has done everything to show us that he’s representing a single moment), Vulcan forgets what he has come looking for. He’s distracted. What he sees between his wife’s thighs makes him blind (and deaf ) to everything else. That’s all he can see, that’s the only thing he can think about anymore. I’m not making this up. Just look in the large mirror behind him to see what’s going to happen next. And let me say a few words about this mirror. You didn’t mention that it was oddly positioned. Not only does it block part of the window facing us, but it’s set very low against the wall, practically at the height of Venus’s bed and lower, in any case, than the cradle where Cupid is sleeping. In fact, if you look closely, it’s not hanging on the wall; it must be resting on a piece of furniture concealed from our gaze by the table under which Mars has hidden. What’s it doing there? What’s the point of placing a mirror so low? To reflect Venus’s lovemaking? It’s possible. I don’t doubt you could find this sort of setup in sixteenth-­century Venice. But this hypothesis leads us even further away from a moralizing depiction. Unless it’s not really a mirror. You said it could possibly be Mars’s shield. In that case, it’s a bizarre kind of shield. It’s not just its size that bothers me (it’s really huge), it’s also, and especially, the fact that it can be used as a mirror. I thought it was Perseus’s shield that was smooth and polished to the extent that it could petrify Medusa. True, Aeneas also had a mirror-­shield, as Erasmus Weddigen reminds us in relation to this painting. It was an enchanted shield, made by the Cyclops, and it allowed the future, grandiose destiny of Rome to appear on its surface. This juxtaposition is arbitrary (indeed, you didn’t even mention it), but it works for me. Precisely because of what we see in Tintoretto’s mirror-­shield. You only mention the reflection (barely visible) of a second mirror, “offstage,” on our side of the scene. This would be Venus’s makeup mirror, located on the edge of the bed and reflected in Mars’s shield (a lovely image, by the way, of shared desire: the woman’s mirror reflected in the man’s shield, which transforms it into a mirror of love). Weddigen also mentions this offstage mirror, Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan 8

but since you didn’t say anything about his text, I am putting aside the optical reconstruction he proposes and the conclusions he draws from it. They are very different from yours, but it doesn’t matter. For you, this mirror that we don’t see, this hidden mirror, is what allows Venus to see Vulcan arrive from behind even though her back is turned to the door—­and you brilliantly contrasted this mirror, instrument of deceit, to the other, leaning against the wall, revealing the truth. Granted. But what truth are we talking about? Both you and Weddigen speak a great deal about Venus’s reflection in the mirror of Mars’s shield. I certainly am not one to object to your interest in a barely visible detail. But neither of you say anything about what is clearly apparent in this same shield: Vulcan, seen from behind, leaning over Venus’s body. But take a closer look: it’s an odd reflection, strange, abnormal. And here’s why: From his gesture nearest to Venus to his reflection in the mirror, Vulcan’s position has changed. Look! In the foreground, only his right knee is on the bed; his left leg is stretched out, a bit stiff (that’s only natural; he limps), and his left foot is on the

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ground, quite far from the bed. In the mirror, on the contrary, as we could see quite clearly in the detail you projected, Vulcan seems to have his left knee (which has become his right knee in the reflection) resting on the edge of the bed. I don’t think for a second that this is due to some clumsiness or carelessness on the painter’s part. Quite the opposite, in fact. Facing us, in full view, the mirror shows us what is going to happen the instant after the one that is depicted in the foreground: Vulcan is going to climb on the bed—­and we can easily imagine what will occur next. Does that seem preposterous to you? It shouldn’t; if it is truly Mars’s mirror-­shield, it functions like Aeneas’s to show us the (very near) future of this comic scene. And if, as you believe, it’s a mirror that reveals the truth, it’s pointing to what we are supposed to learn from the scene we are seeing, the moral of the fable. What remains to figure out is what truth, what moral(ity) we’re dealing with here.

Tintoretto preparatory sketch for Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, ca. 1550 Kupferstichkabinett (SMPK), Berlin

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What, in fact, is happening to Vulcan? He came to interrupt the not-­yet-­begun lovemaking of Venus and Mars. However, rather than listening to the dog, he goes looking for the proof of his alleged misfortune between his wife’s thighs. But, according to what the mirror shows us, what he sees makes him forget everything else. He is under the spell of his wife’s sex, and he finds himself—­these are your words—­ aroused like a satyr coming upon a nymph. Weddigen, for his part, suggests Tarquin about to rape Lucretia. On the surface, this connection is paradoxical—­after all, Vulcan and Venus are married and she is the unfaithful one. But in fact it’s rather clever, because the fit of sexual passion in which Vulcan is caught is very explicit in the preliminary study for the painting in Berlin: in the absence of Mars, Cupid, and the dog, Venus seems to want to flee, whereas Vulcan wholly resembles a rapist about to act. In the painting, the context of this typical pose makes it lose its explicit violence: Vulcan is no longer (in the foreground) anything but an old man who is still virile (in the mirror). As I see it, this (rare) gap between the scene and its reflection is essential to the idea that Tintoretto had of his painting, to what was called his invenzione, which condenses the comic center of the painting and the moral that can be drawn from the comic scene that Tintoretto imagined, using Ovid as his starting point. Because this painting is funny. Pardon me for harping on that, Giulia, but I must, because it never even occurred to you—­sorry if I’m being a bit heavy-­handed here. Mars is ridiculous, hiding under the table like a lover in the closet. Vulcan is comical, letting himself be caught once again, blinded by Venus’s fente. The little runt of a dog is comic as well, barking away furiously in vain. Even the sleeping Cupid is comic: exhausted by his own efforts, he defeats himself (not Omnia vincit Amor, but Amorem vincit Amor). The glass vase on the windowsill is more subtle because it is no doubt more irreverent: you have to smile because it irresistibly calls to mind the transparency of the virgin vase of Mary “who never knew a man.” And even the perspectival construction could play a latent comic role: it dramatizes the scene by Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan 11

Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan 12

leading our gaze toward the door where Vulcan came in, but in the same glance, with a movement emphasized by Mars’s pointing index finger, guides our eyes toward the forge that has obviously gone cold. Whose “forge” is it? Is it Vulcan’s? Or is it Venus’s, which Vulcan, having allowed it to stop burning through his own fault, must attempt to reignite? Finally, Venus is the only one who is not really funny. No doubt she finds herself in an uncomfortable position; she risked humiliation and ridicule. But once again, and contrary to what Ovid says, she will get away with everything with the tiniest of effort, or at the smallest price. How much does it cost to sleep with Venus? What gift will her satisfied husband offer her? In any case, it isn’t on this occasion that Vulcan will catch her in the act and make all the gods laugh at her expense. He’ll be so busy that he won’t see or hear Mars tiptoeing out in his armor. So if this fable has a moral (racy and chauvinist, of course), this is it: women are all alike—­harlots, cheating seductresses who betray us men, who exploit our blindness, who play with us and our desire, who lead us by the nose (or rather, by the sex) and drag us all down to the level of either young oafs obliged to hide under a table or contented cuckolds. So, my conclusions are radically different from yours. You might say that all this is amusing, clever, fine and dandy, but it’s only my subjective interpretation, and I have no text to support what I am saying. Wrong! Because of you, thanks to you, in order to write to you and for you to take me seriously, I went looking for the literature. It didn’t take me long to find it. But the credit doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Beverly Louise Brown, who refers to a multitude of texts against marriage published at the time in Venice, in the tradition of Juvenal, Boccaccio, and Erasmus. She cites Anton Francesco Doni, Lodovico Dolce, and the farces, stories, and other commedie erudite whose characters are mismatched couples, betrayed husbands, and ridiculous cuckolds. Her article is faultless and, in all honesty, the context she provides seems more pertinent, more convincing than the references you used. But, deep down, it doesn’t matter. What I find more significant

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is that I don’t need texts to see what’s happening in the painting. My students can attest to this: I’ve been talking about paintings this way for a long time. This is perhaps the main thing that sets us apart. It’s as if you started from the literature, as if you needed texts to interpret the paintings, as if you trusted neither your eyes to see nor the paintings to show you what the painter wanted to express. Another thing. You wanted at all costs to find a matrimonial theme in this painting. Sure, why not? Painting a painting against marriage is still treating a matrimonial theme. But you want a “matrimonial” painting to exalt marriage. That’s nothing but a received idea, the disastrous consequence of the (Anglo-­Saxon to begin with, I believe) mania of seeing “wedding portraits” in every painting of naked women. At first, this hypothesis was not wrong, and it led to some good results. In Renaissance Christian society, after all, it was marriage that legitimized sexuality. (Marguerite de Navarre said it was a “cover.”) In mythology, it’s marriage that authorizes nudity to be seen. (And just barely.  .  .  .) But everything can’t be simplified that way. In 1550, a naked woman is not unusual in painting. This is why the Church began to be concerned. And then, as for this Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, who knows to whom the painting was addressed? You said so yourself: we don’t know anything about its origins or the circumstances under which it was commissioned. Because of its style, it is now dated to about 1550, but we still don’t know for whom or at whose request it was painted. Cupid’s pose alludes to one of Michelangelo’s marbles that belonged to the Gonzagas of Mantua, and sometimes it is thought that the painting was meant to go to the Gonzagas. But it was not part of the Gonzaga collection sold in 1623, and this hypothesis has remained very shaky. In fact, we know nothing about the painting before 1682, when it was sold in England. Moreover, as Beverly Louise Brown also emphasizes, it left no trace in the work of contemporary artists. In other words, hardly had it been painted and it dropped out of sight. That’s surprising for the work of such a master. Let’s come up with our own hypothesis: What if it had been painted for one of the Cara Giulia Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan 14

grand courtesans of Venice at the request of one of her lovers, perhaps even a young Gonzaga? When I mentioned this hypothesis to you, you didn’t want to consider it. Why? You and I both know that in Venice some courtesans were esteemed, admired, and respected—­except by the Church no doubt, but definitely by some clergymen. Must we imagine that they lived in servants’ quarters, in sordid brothels? That there were no paintings in the rooms where they received their guests and even sometimes held their salons? I’m thinking of the beautiful Tullia d’Aragona, and I believe that Tintoretto’s Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan would have been quite at home in her salon, her bedroom, or her antechamber, that it would have satisfied the “decorum,” as they used to say, and that everyone would have immediately noticed its comic strain. I know you don’t agree with this idea. I have neither texts nor archival documents to back me up and so all this is not historically serious. But I fear that “historically serious” is starting to look more and more like “politically correct,” and I think we have to fight against a line of thought that claims to be “historical” while actually preventing us from thinking, making us believe “incorrect” painters never existed. That is the principle of classic iconography, without which it would be completely at a loss. Jean Wirth wrote some smart things about that at the beginning of his Image médiévale. I don’t know if you’ll have read this to the end. I hope so. You are the only one to whom I could send such a letter. I know you like to question received ideas—­even when they are your own. Do you recall our discussion about Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi? We didn’t agree about that either. And what if it were marriage that was keeping us apart? Con tanti abbracci vigorosi. L’Hospitalet, July 2000

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The Snail’s Gaze

The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 18

The Snail’s Gaze

I know where this is headed. You’re going to tell me yet again that I’m going too far—­that I’m having a good time, but that I’m also overinterpreting. It’s true, there’s nothing I like more than having a good time. As for overinterpreting, though, you’re the one who’s going too far. I admit I see a lot of things in this snail; but, after all, if the painter painted it the way he did, it was because he wanted us to see it and to ask ourselves what the heck it was doing there. In Mary’s sumptuous palace, at the precise (and oh so holy) moment of the Annunciation, a fat snail, its eyes popping out of its head, is making its way from Gabriel to the Virgin, and you think this is normal? You find nothing out of the ordinary in this? In the foreground no less! You can almost make out the trail of slime it leaves behind. In the palace of the immaculate Virgin, so pure, so clean, this slimy thing is quite subversive, and there is nothing discreet about its presence either. Far from trying to hide it, the painter has placed this snail right in front of our eyes; we can’t miss it. In the end, it’s the only thing we see, the only thing we can think about, and so we ask ourselves: What the heck is it doing there? And don’t go telling me that it’s merely the painter’s “whim.” Sure, it is one of Francesco del Cossa’s capriccios, and maybe it took a painter from Ferrara to come up with this bizarre figure to confirm his originality. But the capriccio doesn’t explain everything; you know that as well as I do. If this snail were but the painter’s whim, the patron would have refused it, erased it, covered it over. But it’s there, irrevocably. And so there has to be a good reason for its existence at such a place and in such a time. You’ve come up with a solution to the problem, and it’s the same old iconographic one, as always. Once again, iconography comes to the rescue, calming all your fears. I, too, read that article in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, where an expert gives us a text

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Francesco del Cossa The Annunciation, ca. 1470–­72 Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

and an image to “explain” Cossa’s snail. It’s quite simple: because those good old primitive folk believed that snails were fertilized by the dew, the snail could easily represent the Virgin, whose divine insemination has been compared to, among other things, the fertilization of the earth by the rain—­Rorate coeli . . . “Heavens, let your dew fall. . . .” This clever and wise iconographer is so sure of what she is saying that as proof of her hypothesis, she offers a Marian text with, above it, a miserable engraving that represents a few snails sprinkled with gentle raindrops from heaven. For you, the case is closed: the snail is a symbol of the Virgin at the moment of the Annunciation—­and the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes offers us a lifetime guarantee of this fact. That’s it. End of story. Still, I’m not so sure. I have my doubts. If this symbol were so good, so “natural,” other examples of Annunciation snails would exist. Do you iconographers out there know of any? To my knowledge, in any event, they are extremely rare. Frankly, I have seen only one other instance—­ and even in this case, I’m not so sure I was seeing a snail. In the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, there is a mediocre rendering of the Annunciation by Girolamo da Cremona. In that painting, I thought I saw on the ground, level with Gabriel’s lily, two or three pebbles that vaguely—­very vaguely—­resembled empty shells. No, snails are usually found in representations of the Resurrection or in funereal images (because they come out of their shells, like the dead on Judgment Day). There are just too few snails in Annunciation paintings for you to be able to boldly claim that the snail is a customary symbol for the Virgin at the moment of the Incarnation. Once again, you have got what you wanted: you have smoothed out all the rough spots, trivialized the anomaly that attracted your attention in the first place. Your iconography has fulfilled its mission: it has squashed the snail. It’s no longer bothersome. Evidently, iconographers are the firefighters of art history: they are there to calm things down, to put out the blaze that might be lit by something strange because it might force one to take a closer look and admit that everything is not as simple, as obvious, as one would like.

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The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 21

Piero della Francesca The Annunciation, polyptych of Saint Anthony, 1470 (detail) National Gallery of Umbria, Perugia

Let’s be fair. The Journal’s expert did come up with one possible explanation for Cossa’s bizarre innovation: for him to have placed this snail in his Annunciation, Cossa had to be able to find a meaning for it that was acceptable in the eyes of his patrons—­and in his own. But the expert did not explain what the snail was doing there, in the foreground, right under our noses. And for a good reason: this is not iconography’s task. It does not have to tell us why the painter put it there; that’s out of its sphere. And yet, in this painting, the question remains: What the heck is this snail doing there? In my opinion, to answer this question you first need to know where there is, where, in the painting, the snail’s space is. Do you see what I mean? This is the kind of question that is beyond you and that you find superfluous. Why split hairs? We can see where the snail is; why get all worked up about it? Because, precisely, by accepting the evidence (the snail is there, in the foreground, at the edge of the painting), you miss the main thing that the painter is asking you to see. If I’m telling you this it’s because I also thought it was enough to say that the snail was at the edge of the painting in order to grasp Cossa’s idea. I had managed to come up with an interesting—­I’d even say brilliant (no need for false modesty between us)—­explanation, but I abandoned it because it was too fragile, too tentative. But I’ll give it to you anyway. It was quite amusing. I started out thinking that the meaning of the snail’s placement was inseparable from the perspectival construction. I still believe this, because the work is a veritable tour de force of perspective. Its orthogonal lines converge as usual in the middle, but they come up against the majestic column in such a way that the space opens laterally in two directions: on the one hand, toward Mary’s nearby room and, on the other, toward a faraway city where the palaces recede in the distance. In sum, Cossa displays a virtuosity that is fairly rare in Italy in 1469. The sophisticated brio—­so typical of Ferrara—­of this structure is intensified by the placement of the figures, confirming that Cossa very definitely wants to be original. In an entirely unusual way, he in effect presents Gabriel and the Virgin obliquely, in illusory depth: kneeling on the left in the foreground,

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Gabriel is seen almost from behind, while Mary is in the middle distance, in the second bay of the portico, seen in three-­quarter profile. Well, I don’t know if you noticed it, but this placement results in something that seems paradoxical at first glance: within the architectural space where they are located, Gabriel and Mary are almost playing hide-­and-­seek on either side of the central column. It’s not immediately apparent, of course, but it is undeniable: the great central column is located nearly on the axis that relates them to one another. Be careful! This is neither mistake nor clumsiness on Cossa’s part; he knows exactly what he is doing. Nor is he the only painter to have placed a column between Gabriel and Mary. The great Piero della Francesca did the same thing in 1470 in the Annunciation that crowns the Perugia polyptych. You are no doubt aware of this if you’ve read Thomas Martone on the subject. Here, too, Gabriel has a column in front of him, and it is through this column that he sees Mary. This doesn’t trouble us: God can see through mountains; an archangel can easily see through a column. Nor is it an accident that

The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 23

the gaze passes through a column: the column is a well-­known, almost banal, symbol of the Divinity—­of both the Father and the Son—­and in his Meditations the Pseudo-­Bonaventura explains that despite how fast Gabriel had flown, the Trinity, invisible or unrecognizable, was already in Mary’s room when he arrived. In iconographic terms—­this should make you happy!—­the column traditionally stands for the Divinity’s presence at the scene of the Annunciation. What’s more, Cossa in effect underscores this because Gabriel’s hand, lifted toward Mary, visually touches the shaft of the column: as he blesses the Virgin, he points to the majestic and mysterious presence of the divine. It was on this basis that I had first attempted to explain the snail’s placement. Given Cossa’s obvious sophistication, I wondered if by any chance the axis that linked Gabriel, his right hand, the column, and Mary obliquely in perspective depth, and from bottom to top, corresponded to another, less obvious one that, also through the column and Gabriel’s hand, linked the snail to an element, situated in perspective depth and at the top of the painting, that would help explain the meaning of the gastropod. You are skeptical of this line of thinking. And you’re right to be: I don’t believe that painters have some “secret geometry” either. The notion of geometry exists more often in the mind of the interpreter than in that of the artist. However, in this particular instance, the composition is patently geometric, and the arrangement I was looking for, if it existed, was simple. And because my idea went along with the general spirit of the painting, there was no harm in testing it. You never know. Sure enough, to my surprise, I noticed that indeed the axis between the snail and Gabriel’s hand on the column led my gaze more or less toward the small, flat figure of God the Father in the sky. And imagine my delight when I saw that, with his cloud, the Father’s shape strangely resembles that of the snail and that they are nearly identical in size. The structure of the image led to the idea that the snail on earth was the equivalent of God in heaven. But what kind of equivalence are we talking about here? Good question. No matter how hard I looked, I could find no text that described

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The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 25

God as a snail, or a snail as God. Clearly, the God-­Snail or the Snail-­ God has not been taken seriously by Christian exegesis. It’s true that from my viewpoint (but not from yours), there is nothing to prevent a painter from coming up with a new exegesis—­and, even more radically, nothing to prevent his painting from thinking for him. In other words, the configuration imagined by Cossa could, by itself, give rise to a meaning that its creator had not envisioned. I found my interpretation amusing and I often tried it out on my students. I only half believed it, but, in any case, it was not pointless; it showed them that it’s possible to think when one looks at a painting, and that thinking isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My idea, in fact, appealed to a famous medievalist when I proposed it to him long ago in Bologna. According to him, even if this snail were the only one of its kind, it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that it represented God the Father because, as he explained to me, one of the problems that preoccupies medieval exegetes is precisely the intolerable time lag that separates the Fall of Adam and Eve from the Annunciation. This time lag raises the question, among others, of Limbo and the horde of poor souls waiting there for the advent of the Savior—­ who goes there by the way, according to Saint Augustine, as soon as he dies, even before his Resurrection. So the question is: Because God had known for all eternity that he would incarnate himself in order to save us, why did he wait so long to do so? Why had he been so slow? In other words, why did he behave like a snail? The snail might thus be an excellent means for reminding us, in the context of an Annunciation, of the slowness with which God proceeded before he incarnated himself in such a dazzling way. Umberto admitted that he did not have a particular medieval text in mind to support what he was saying. However, he could, if I so desired, find one, and if he couldn’t find one, he could write one himself; he had some experience in the matter. The idea that the snail was there to remind us of the unfathomable slowness of God to incarnate himself was quite attractive. One could imagine that Cossa had used the snail, a well-­known symbol of the Virgin, to give form to God as well, that he had condensed the two, in The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 26

which case the snail would become, by itself, the symbol of the Incarnation. However, rest assured that I was not convinced. What troubled me was the exceptional nature of this snail in painting. If it had really been conceivable to imagine not only Mary but also God in the shape of a snail, there would be additional examples in other representations of the Annunciation. And while I still cannot vouch for the fact that this snail is unique, I have yet to find any of its brothers or sisters; it is therefore difficult, historically speaking, to claim that it is a representation of God. You see that I haven’t completely lost my senses. But nor have I given up trying to understand what that snail is doing there. Where Cossa places it implies that he attributes a particular meaning to it; he in fact did everything possible to draw our attention to it, so that we are forced to wonder about its presence. (When I say “we,” I am also thinking primarily of the priest, because Cossa’s Annunciation is an altarpiece; when the priest raised the Host to bless it, he could not help but see the snail right next to him, and perhaps he too wondered what it was doing there.) For a while this “problem of the snail” obsessed me and I wound up seeing in it the painter’s appeal to my gaze, a question he was asking at the painting’s edge of those who were looking at it and who, for centuries, would continue to look at it. You know how it is: you think, you think, you get nowhere, and then all of a sudden, bingo!—­you see. You see what was in front of your

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eyes all along, what you hadn’t yet seen even though it was, precisely, the most obvious thing. So it was that, one day, what the painting was silently showing me right in the foreground jumped out at me: this snail is enormous, gigantic, monstrous. If you don’t believe me, just compare it to the size of Gabriel’s foot, which is also directly in the foreground. I know that the shoe size of an angel cannot be measured but, as soon as Gabriel takes on a human form, as soon as he manifests himself sub specie humana, the same principle must apply, mutatis mutandis, to his foot—­a human foot, therefore measuring somewhere between twenty-­five to thirty centimeters in length and eight or nine centimeters in width. Now, by this standard, the incongruous gastropod would be some twenty centimeters long and eight or nine centimeters high! Enough is enough, too much is too much. In a word, this snail is quite out of proportion to what surrounds it; no comparison is possible. I could have tried to reflect on the reasons for this enormousness, but it would have complicated the iconographic interpretation of the creature even more. I preferred to face the facts. This snail is indeed painted on the painting but it is not in the painting. It is on its edge, at the boundary between its illusory space and the real space from which we observe it. This is the place of the snail that I mentioned earlier. Don’t act surprised. This is not the only time Cossa paints a figure as if it were in our space. A few years later, in the Hall of the Months in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, he also placed a figure at the edge of the representation: sitting on a low wall that corresponds to the plane of the wall in the exhibition hall, this figure’s legs are dangling in front of it and thus seem to be invading the real space of the hall. Nor is Cossa the first or only one to paint this kind of detail. I have a good example for you: Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in the Santo Spirito church in Florence. Do you recall the transparent vase that Lippi placed in this painting, between Gabriel and Mary, at the edge of the painting in an indentation in the floor, half inside the representation and half outside? The comparison is all the more relevant because, while the snail is a rare metaphor for the impregnated Virgin, the transparent vase is, The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 28

on the contrary, a very well-­known symbol: just as the side of the vase is penetrated by light without breaking, so too the Virgin, etcetera, etcetera. Well, it just so happens that the positioning of Cossa’s snail is similar to that of Lippi’s vase. Thus, set in an equivalent place in two paintings representing the same theme, and both alluding iconographically to the Immaculate Conception of Jesus, these two symbols of the Virgin, the snail and the vase, must play an equivalent role. But what role is that? Reread, if you’ve already read it, what Louis Marin writes about Lippi’s vase. It is placed, according to Marin, at the “edge of the space represented on the pictorial surface and at the border of the space of presentation from which it is viewed”; it signals, so to speak, the locus of the “invisible exchange between the beholder’s gaze and the painting”: it marks the beholder’s point of entry into the painting. You say: Let’s suppose that Marin put his finger on Filippo Lippi’s idea. What relation can it possibly have to Francesco del Cossa’s? How could Cossa have made a snail (even metaphorically) our point of entry into the painting? I’m claiming that, with its horns perked up and its eyes wide open, the gastropod encourages a particular way of seeing. But what way? I’m going to disappoint you, but the answer is simple: one need only take the metaphor literally. Let’s grant that a snail can be a symbol of the Virgin Mary, mother of God; we can also grant that the snail in no way resembles Mary visually: the Virgin never looked like a snail. To claim the contrary would be madness (confusing the object as sign with the object as thing), not to mention blasphemy. All of this makes sense in the allegorical context of the late Middle Ages. However, by placing his snail as he did, at the edge of the painting and not in the painting’s fictional space but on its actual surface, Cossa in a sense positions it as a kind of epigraph or exergue to his work, and in so doing leads us to form the following mental equation: just as in reality a snail is not like the Virgin, this Annunciation that you are looking at is not like the Annunciation that occurred in Nazareth some fifteen hundred years ago. It’s not simply a question of where it takes place or of how

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Carlo Crivelli The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, 1486 National Gallery, London

the figures look—­which is typical of the fifteenth century and, you can be sure, nothing like how they would have looked in Palestine immediately before the birth of Christ. It is, above all, a question of the painting, of the representation itself. The snail—­a figure that does not resemble Mary placed like an inscription on the painting—­leads us to understand that this painting is itself a poor, inevitably inadequate representation of the event it represents: the encounter between Gabriel and Mary, and its amazing implications that will justify its representation so many centuries later. In other words, the snail, symbol of Mary’s divine insemination, leads us to perceive that a representation of the Annunciation will never make us see the providential reason for the Annunciation: the Incarnation of the Savior. Cossa’s stroke of genius was to have pointed to the limits of representation by putting his snail at the threshold of this same representation, at its limit. All that with a mere snail? This is when, despite everything I’ve just explained, you start talking about overinterpretation. And yet I stick to what I’ve said, and I have good reasons for doing so. First of all, in Ferrara at the same time, Cossa’s colleague Cosmè Tura also painted an Annunciation whose majestic perspectival construction apparently had the same intention. This, at least, is the conclusion to which Stephen Campbell’s impeccable analysis leads us. And then, Cossa is not the only one to have placed an animal or an object on the edge of his painting that questions the status of representation in this way. There is, for example, the apple and the squash (or cucumber) that Carlo Crivelli painted in 1484 at the edge of his Annunciation (now in the National Gallery in London). You say it’s not the same thing? You’re right: seeming to loom out of the plane of the painting, the squash works like a trompe l’oeil and, thanks to its positioning directly on the surface of the imaginary street, the incongruousness of its presence expresses above all the artifice of perspective and its visual achievements. In Crivelli’s work, divine omnipotence scoffs at human geometry, as is forcefully demonstrated by the golden ray that, from the depths of the sky all the way to Mary’s room, traverses the panel’s surface in a strictly rectilinear way. By recalling the picture’s materi-

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The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 31

Carlo Crivelli Madonna and Child, ca. 1480 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ality in this way, it negates the illusory depth of the represented space. Cossa’s snail is not a trompe l’oeil because it is painted on the painting itself and does not loom out of its space. It is closer to the flies so often found painted directly on images. But those Flemish flies also belong to the category of trompe l’oeil. (Allow me to recount an anecdote here. I experienced just how effective those trompe l’oeil flies are when, entering a hall in the Metropolitan Museum, I thought from a distance that a big fat fly had landed on Crivelli’s little Virgin and Child. I even remember being outraged that there could be flies in a museum, especially an American one. Only when I moved in to chase away the insect did I realize my mistake, with the thrill of someone who has been taken in by a magician. I felt a little stupid: I should have remembered that Crivelli liked to paint flies on his paintings. This is the kind of misadventure that could never befall you, of course. You never forget what you have already learned. Still, all things considered, I’d rather fall for this kind of trick and continue to be taken aback by the painting and its fly.) But let’s return to our snail. It is a locust that most resembles it—­the one Lorenzo Lotto painted at the edge of one of his Saint Jerome the Penitent paintings, now in Bucharest. It, too, is disproportionate to the rest of the representation (it is almost as long as the saint’s head is wide), and it obviously does not belong in the desert where the saint is doing his penitence. It is placed upon the painting but appears to be in our space. At first it seemed as if it had landed directly on the frame (now lost), at the border between the space represented in the painting and the space where the painting is presented to us by means of the frame and the locust. In other words, like Lippi’s vase and Cossa’s snail, Lotto’s locust determines our gaze’s point of entry into the painting. It does not tell us what we should look at, but how we should look at what we are seeing. I believe one can even say just how this locust wants us to look. There is no point in trying to figure out how locusts see. Lotto did not know or care. What he did know was what the locust could signify in painting. For one thing, the eighth plague visited by God upon Egypt to punish the pharaoh who resisted his will was a plague of locusts. A

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The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 33

locust can also sometimes be found painted in Jesus’s hand, where by contrast it symbolizes the conversion of nations to Christianity. In the case of Lotto’s Saint Jerome the Penitent, it has this second connotation. Marking the frontier where our space and the space of the painting meet and intermingle, the locust prompts us to enter the image mentally, to apply the image to ourselves (as the devout people of the seventeenth century were wont to say—­and God knows Lotto was devout!), and to do in our world what Saint Jerome did in his. We are invited to flee earthly delights and defeat their enticements by delivering ourselves up entirely (even to the point of masochism) to the love of Christ. Let’s say you agree with me as far as the locust is concerned. In any case, Lotto was an odd fellow, and this interpretation of the painting is in perfect accord with what you know about him: “as virtuous as virtue itself,” as Aretino (snidely) wrote to him—­Aretino, who was such a fervent Christian that he, a Catholic, sympathized with Protestant Christocentrism and had himself buried in the sanctuary in Lorette, as close as possible to the Virgin’s house, without a coffin, in the habit of a Third Order Dominican. Unfortunately for you, I’m going to complicate things even more. Saint Jerome’s locust does not elucidate the Virgin’s snail. I merely took a little detour. Even though they are in the same spot and therefore are alike in some ways, they are not the same. There is one minuscule but critical element that distinguishes them. The locust is a desert animal. It is said that Saint John the Baptist fed on locusts when he had already taken refuge from the world, and they often accompany hermits in their mystical experiences. Lotto did not paint any locusts around his penitent (he only put in two serpents and a bird skeleton), and we can therefore imagine that, in a certain sense, it flew from the painting into our world, that it came out of the image the better to help us enter it. This is the “permeability”—­to use Mauro Lucco’s term—­between the world of the painting and our own that the locust implies. And if this permeability can exist, it is because the presence of the locust is logical, predictable in Saint Jerome’s world. The snail, on the contrary, has absolutely no reason The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 34

to be in Mary’s palace, which is as clean as a whistle on this sunny, early spring day. Cossa’s invention is even more bizarre, more surprising; it is, if I may be so bold, intellectual, theoretical. Ouch! I hit you where it hurts. You don’t like theory. Still, it is indeed theory we’re talking about here. I’ll say it once more: Cossa’s snail is inseparable from the demonstration of perspective that serves as background to it. It is thanks to this background—­on it and against it—­that the snail is revealed to be outside the space of the painting. You don’t follow? I’m having trouble expressing myself because I don’t need theory to state what I mean. One simply needs to look at the painting. In fact, I did go to look at it again in Dresden. It was a good idea, for I got a double surprise. First, the painting is smaller than I had remembered it. I had studied it too much from reproductions, and even though its dimensions are always indicated (137 centimeters high and 113 centimeters wide), one doesn’t grasp its size. The architecture of Mary’s palace is so imposing that I had wound up imagining that the painting was very large. It isn’t. And then, the second surprise: the snail isn’t that enormous after all; it’s a fine specimen of a snail, not a petit-­gris, but probably a good old Burgundy snail about eight centimeters high. Go and look for yourself: when you’re in front of the painting, the snail seems normal. It’s the Virgin who is small—­and this is where I was headed. In fact, by virtue of its disproportion, the snail acts as a spatial foil to the illusory depth of perspective and restores the material presence of the surface of the panel, of the medium of the representation. In fact, when I and an architect friend of mine drew a floor plan of the Virgin’s palace, we found that it was absolutely impossible to build. It is only on the surface, superficially, that it is impressive. Its majestic stone walls are no thicker than wood partitions; the octagonal table on which Mary’s book rests smashes right into the pillar next to it; the chest that acts as a base for the virginal bed is deep beyond measure, and so on. In sum, for the inquisitive person who allows him or herself to do what no fifteenth-­century viewer would ever have dreamed of doing, geometry reveals that Francesco del Cossa was not trying to construct a strictly

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realistic perspective. He is not Piero della Francesca; he merely needed to fake depth behind his figures. He constructs a theatrical space in order to represent (present again, or transform into a stage) the meeting between God and his creature. So where is theory in all this? Be patient, I’m getting there. Set upon this space of representation and marking it as such, the snail shows us that we shouldn’t let ourselves be taken in by the illusion that we see, that we shouldn’t believe it. This is the heart of the paradox that Cossa establishes: it is after having performed a tour de force of perspective that the painter stealthily destroys the prestige of perspective. But—­ and you are right to insist—­what are we not supposed to believe in, and why all the games? We’re getting there. Francesco del Cossa hadn’t read Panofsky. He didn’t know that perspective was going to become what the German scholar retrospectively defined as the “symbolic form” of a vision of the world that would be rationalized by Descartes and formalized by Kant. How could he know? What he did know, however, around 1470—­and this historical nuance is sure to please you—­is that perspective is a matter of measurement, that it was a recent instrument that allowed one to construct and to make people see the commensurateness, to use Piero della Francesca’s word, of things. For Cossa, perspective constructs the image of a world that is commensurable in itself and in relation to the observer, according to one’s viewpoint. And this world is not infinite. Only God is infinite. Cossa’s world remains finite, closed, a world of which man is the measure. (In 1435, Alberti said much the same thing when, right before he opened his legendary window—­which doesn’t open out onto the world but onto the measured composition of the work—­he referred to Protagoras and his famous saying that “man is the measure of all things.”) No doubt, Francesco del Cossa knew that much about perspective. And we can, at this point, imagine what his idea of the Annunciation would have been in this context. In the 1430s the most famous preacher of the time, Bernardino of Siena (who was familiar enough with Ferrara to have declined its bishopric), had described something obvious in great detail: The Snail’s Gaze The Annunciation 36

the Annunciation is, with Mary’s acceptance of it, the moment of the Incarnation. It is, among other things, and in the words of the preacher, the coming of the incommensurable into the commensurable, of the unfigurable into the figurable realm. Look at Cossa’s painting. Where is God the Father? Where is the dove? You have to look hard to find them. With its commensurations, perspective has reduced God to a distant little figure in the sky, just above Gabriel. As for the dove, it is there in flight, not far from the Father; but you can hardly see it—­it’s the size of a fly speck. Perspective has taken over everything: How can it possibly let us see what the essence of the encounter is, its finality and its end, the Creator coming into the creature, the invisible into vision? This is what the snail is asking us, if not to see (voir), then at least to perceive (percevoir). Once again, Cossa is not the only one who wanted to make the invisible presence of what escapes all measure break the visible surface of a commensurable image of the Annunciation. Fra Angelico, Piero, and Filippino Lippi are a few of the painters who refused to be satisfied with Alberti’s diktat: “The painter deals only with that which can be seen.” With his snail, Francesco del Cossa does this “à la Ferrara,” in a way that is as precise as it is sophisticated. On the edge of the perspectival construction, on its threshold, the anomaly of the snail reaches out to you; it appeals to you to see differently and makes you understand that you are seeing nothing in what you are looking at. Or rather, in what you see, you fail to see what you are looking at, what you are looking for, what you are expecting to find, namely, the emergence of the invisible into the field of vision. A final question: Did you know that gastropods can barely see? And worse: it seems they don’t look at anything. They find their bearings differently. Despite the eyes at the end of their extended horns, they hardly see a thing; at most they can make out the intensity of the light; they get by on their sense of smell. Cossa most certainly didn’t know that anymore than you did. But he didn’t need to know it in order to make the snail stand for a blind gaze. I don’t know what you think about that, but personally, it blows my mind.

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Paint It Black

Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 39

Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 40

Paint It Black

At first, when he saw Bruegel’s The Adoration of the Magi at the National Gallery in London, he identified what he already knew. As always. In the end it had become tiresome. He couldn’t manage to be surprised by anything anymore. He had looked so much and learned so well how to identify, classify, situate, that he did it all very quickly, without pleasure, simply as a narcissistic confirmation of his knowledge. A place for every painter and every painter in his place. His knowledge resembled a caretaker’s knowledge of his cemetery. So, first off, he recognized the carnivalesque, somewhat Rabelaisian style typical of the “painter of peasants” who, in the early seventeenth century, Karel van Mander had nicknamed “Pier den Droll” (Peter the Droll). This time, though, as he stood in front of the painting, he found that Bruegel really had gone a bit too far. From what he could remember of his other religious paintings, Bruegel had seemed less crude; sometimes he even managed to attain a cosmic scale—­he was thinking of The Conversion of Saint Paul or The Way to Calvary in Vienna. But honestly . . . The Adoration of the Magi! Even if it is only a fairy tale—­ but is that what people thought at the time?—­for every Christian, the Epiphany is a major spiritual and religious event: not only do all the wealth and power in the world bow before the meekness of the Savior but, because the Magi (kings, astrologers, magicians, whatever . . .) come from every corner of the world to be in the presence of Mary and Jesus less than a month after his birth, the Epiphany points to the universal acknowledgment of the Incarnation, the human divinity of Christ. He recalled the (iconographically legitimate) sumptuousness with which the subject had often been treated. Bruegel was obviously and resolutely taking the opposite approach to this tradition, making of it a rather awkward and coarse village spectacle.

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Adoration of the Kings, 1564 National Gallery, London

No longer is there a majestic procession: no camel, no giraffe, no charger, not even a plow horse, and the followers, often used as a (justifiable) pretext for a display of luxury, are now merely soldiers with their coarse, barrack-­room faces, that army rabble—­always and everywhere the same—­who, at Herod’s orders, would soon massacre the Innocents (there is the disquieting presence of the soldier, armed and helmeted, gazing straight down at the Baby Jesus), the ones who, some thirty years later, would mock Christ and crown him with thorns (in the upper left-­ hand corner, there are sinister, premonitory silhouettes of spears that, after the arrest on the Mount of Olives, would accompany Jesus in every phase of the Passion). As for the kings, only their clothing (ermine, slashed sleeves, ruffles) allows them to be recognized as kings. They don’t have the dignity that should characterize the magnificence of royalty, even in exhaustion or adversity. With their long, dirty, unkempt hair, they look more like toothless, wasted old hippies. They look like what they are: doddering old men. When you see the painful stiffness of the one who is leaning forward (lumbago? arthritis? sciatica?), you’ve got to wonder how his even older associate managed to kneel down, and how he’ll ever get up. His painful joints must have creaked. And Joseph, standing above and behind Mary, is hardly treated any better. His face is less comical but, in his walk-­on role, he’s acting the big shot, with his huge potbelly emphasized by the curve of his belt, and his large hat held in front of his privates as if he were hiding a half-­zipped fly. (Did they use the expression in Flemish that we use in French, “porter le chapeau,” to “wear the hat,” meaning to take the rap?) And then, good old Joseph is not really paying attention: he’s tilting his head toward the young farm boy who, with his hand placed familiarly on Joseph’s shoulder, is whispering in his ear. What’s he saying? We’ll never know. It is a secret meant for Joseph alone. Perhaps it’s something trivial (for example, “How come there are no presents for us?” or “What are we supposed to do now?” or “So, what do you think of all this?” or even “Those Magi are nuts!”)—­unless it’s a ribald joke of some kind that he’s just started telling, or that Joseph didn’t hear or didn’t grasp.

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Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 43

This little aside inevitably makes him think of what his grandmother used to say when his brother and he would whisper to each other: “If you’ve got something to confess, tell it to the priest!” This recollection causes him to smile; after all, the connection makes sense: the human-­ divine body of Christ that the Magi recognize as such is the one that the priest will commemorate and celebrate at Mass at the Eucharist—­ and some Adorations of the Magi are treated in a way that alludes specifically to a Eucharistic theme. In any event, “Peter the Droll” did not spare Joseph either. Looking at the painting reinforced his view. Only Mary and the Baby Jesus had found favor with the painter. Admittedly, Mary is not the “Queen of Heaven”; she’s a “simple young woman” chastely and elegantly clothed, and Jesus, a bit on the big side for a three-­week-­old baby (but that is not unusual in painting) has struck a pose both natural and mannered: with the help of his mother who is holding him, he’s in a slightly Michelangelesque contrapposto. (He recalls having read somewhere that the way Mary is holding Jesus’s right hand is borrowed from Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges.) In the center of the painting, these two figures form a unit of sweetness and calm; Bruegel has bound them together using an idea that Diderot no doubt would have characterized as “refined”: all the while presenting her Son with a simple gesture of her right hand, Mary seems to want to hold him tightly against her with her left, sheltered beneath the big white swaddling cloth. Meanwhile, the Baby Jesus, looking at the old Magus with a kind of cautious smile, snuggles up to his mother—­as if he knew (and of course he does know, because he is God) that this entire story will be the death of him, as if he did not want to die, not right away, not yet. But the end is already there: his white swaddling cloth envelops him just as his shroud will and—­he’s now convinced of it—­the soldiers’ weapons that frame the composition, silhouetted against the sky in the upper left, already foreshadow the ones that will escort Christ after his arrest on the Mount of Olives during the Passion.

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Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 45

That’s where he was in his musings—­contemplating this encounter between baby and old man in which Bruegel, with all the naturalness in the world, breathes intense life back into one of the theme’s most hackneyed clichés. So that’s what he was thinking when, suddenly, he noticed the rest of the painting: isolated on the right (the viewer’s right), the tall, vertical figure of the third king, Gaspar, who is black. Unlike the other figures (with the exception of Mary and Jesus), he is not grotesque, or even comical or mildly pathetic like Balthazar and Melchior. Bruegel did not turn him into a Rabelaisian carnival king. He is imposing, majestic, regal. His admirable, simple cloak, probably made of suede, emphasizes his verticality and gives him that calm grandeur particular to kings (in paintings). The gift he is bearing is also the most refined, the most beautiful, the rarest. The two other kings are offering rather ordinary receptacles, despite the richness of their material; Gaspar’s gift, however, is worthy of the most sumptuous and sophisticated mannerist gold work: it is a boat made of gold, a kind of miniature caravel with canons piercing its sides and on whose big belly, rather than bridges and masts, rests a seashell made of some rare material, topped with a tiny gold armillary sphere. The perimeter is decorated with precious gems, and from its orifice the bust of a figure is emerging, holding with outstretched arms another fat, precious gem (an emerald perhaps?) set in gold. This is a strange and magnificent gift, worthy of one of those “cabinets of preciosities” in which princes and other rich individuals collected jewelry, artworks, and curiosities of the natural world. It is also reminiscent of a slightly kitsch travel souvenir, and its exoticism suits Gaspar, the black king who hails from Africa, the only black man in the entire crowd. But this travel souvenir also hails from elsewhere: the minutely detailed complexity of its assembly and, especially, the human figurine coming out of the shell, remind him of Hieronymus Bosch’s inventions, in particular those of the Garden of Earthly Delights. Damn those classifications that flatten everything out. He wonders why it took him so long to see Gaspar when now he can’t take his eyes off him. Probably because the figure—­calm, standing Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 46

Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 47

off to the right—­remains in the background, isolated from the story and the agitation of the scene. At the same time, however, he notices that Gaspar’s tall shape plays a critical role in the composition: it holds the whole thing together by counterbalancing the long diagonal line that, from the lower left-­hand corner, through the bodies of the old Magus and the Virgin with her Child, reaches Joseph’s bowed head and disappears in the upper right-­hand corner; and the broad area of his coat with its gentle folds responds to the quick accumulation of contrasting colors gathered on the other side of Mary and Jesus. If he didn’t see Gaspar at first it is because, in a way, this long beige coat serves as a foil to the rest of the composition, and as such should remain somewhat inconspicuous. But there is something else as well: if it took him so long to see Gaspar, he realizes now, it’s also simply because he is black. It’s odd how we don’t see black people clearly in painting; often, their color creates a kind of “black hole” in which perception gets lost to the benefit of the colors that surround it. In fact, in order for a black man to be seen in painting, the painter has to make him stand out by using a light background, and this is not what Bruegel Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 48

has done. The coat and the lovely red footwear are easy to see, but we don’t pay much attention to them: they are not expressive faces. On the other hand, we don’t see Gaspar’s face. It is too black. What we see more clearly is the white cloth tied on his head to hold, with elegance and ease, a simple crown. He moves in to examine more closely, to get a better view of the black face, and now he is quite surprised. Finally! Not only is Gaspar, along with the Baby Jesus and Mary, the only figure who is not treated in a comic mode, but as he calmly awaits his turn, he is handsome, his features delicate, his gaze puzzled, with a sweet inquisitiveness. His dignity is all the greater, and remarkable, because directly behind him, stuck against the edge of the painting, Bruegel has placed two faces that have clearly been painted to make people laugh. Almost in profile (a profile of a fat-­lipped drunkard, almost Negroid but white) with a kind of big white turban on his head, the first man is bug-­eyed and frantic-­looking; the second, in three-­quarters profile, badly shaven with a gray wool bonnet pulled over his forehead till it touches his eyebrows, is smiling idiotically. He is a perfect picture of drooling stupidity, and his huge glasses with their thick lenses definitely do not make him look more alert. So, what are they doing there, the handsome black king and his two white, imbecilic companions? Clearly, those two are not part of Gaspar’s royal cortege. They are there, with their stupidity and their ugliness as clear as day, to contrast with the almost hidden beauty of the African king. But then, what is he doing there, and what did Bruegel mean by putting him there in such a bizarre way? As he leaves the museum, all he can think about is Gaspar. He does some research. He learns that this is the second of Bruegel’s paintings called Adoration of the Magi, and it is signed and dated on the bottom right: “Bruegel 1564.” The first, in Brussels, if it is indeed by Bruegel, can be dated to around 1555, and the third, in Winterthur, Switzerland, if once again it is really Bruegel’s, probably dates from 1567—­or, according to Tolnay, 1564. Thus, the only Adoration of the

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Magi that is definitely Bruegel’s and not by an assistant or an underling working from one of the Master’s drawings, would be the one in London. And it is radically different from the two others that, paradoxically, look more like some of Bruegel’s other paintings. Here, Bruegel has framed the figures very tightly, not allowing for that vast spatial development, in width or in depth, that we find in the other two variations on the theme. In the one in Brussels, which is twice as large, we see luxurious corteges gathering near the barn. There is, among other exotica, an elephant placed in profile at the top of the painting, in the background, just above the ass in his stable. The black king is kneeling timidly in the foreground. In the painting in Winterthur, which is four or five times smaller, it is hard to make out faces: falling in big flakes on the town square of a Flemish bourg, the snow makes it difficult to see clearly. Everyone is bundled up, and the Adoration is taking place on the left side, a little in the background; the foreground is occupied by a bridge across a frozen river where, on the right, peasants are moving about while a small child is having fun sliding on the ice. A classic Bruegel, in a way. Here we have again “Peter the Droll” or, rather, “the Shakespeare of folk life,” as Max Dvořák nicknamed him in 1921. There is none of this in the London version. The tight framing focuses our attention on the main figures of the action and monumentalizes their parodic treatment. (In the other two versions, even the one in Brussels, which is much larger, the figures are too small to be effectively painted in a comic mode.) Furthermore, the London version is the only vertical one of the three. On confirmation, it is one of Bruegel’s very rare vertical paintings. In fact, it is the only one besides the small grisaille of the Resurrection that he did with pen and brush on paper. This vertical format is so unusual in Bruegel’s work that some have wondered if the painting had been intended for an altar, which in any case would be exceptional for Bruegel. Others have thought that the choice of this format and the arrangement of the figures, cleverly grouped in such a way that by themselves they structure the image, show the influence of his trip to Italy, and they cite Correggio, M ­ ichelangelo,

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Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, and others. It’s possible. He notices, however, that if this were true, Bruegel must have waited a very long time—­almost ten years—­to parody the Adoration of the Magi “à l’italienne.” The other version in London—­the horizontal one—­though it appears to have been painted shortly after Bruegel returned from Italy is much less “Italian.” He also observes that Bruegel placed the Baby Jesus near the center, in plain sight in his swaddling clothes, and he wonders if all these peculiarities are not linked to the date of the work, 1564, the year his first son, Pieter Bruegel the Younger, who was also destined to become a painter, was born. He senses that he is wandering off track. He’s losing the thread of what he wanted to do, which was to understand why Bruegel had spared the black king the comic treatment he made the others undergo, while giving him considerable importance in the composition and the very structure of his painting. All he could glean from his research was precisely that this Adoration is Bruegel’s only vertical work, a fact that reinforces the enigmatic importance of the distinction granted here to Gaspar. He had to come back to the question: What was Gaspar doing there? What did the painter have in mind in honoring him in this way? He continues to read and soon learns that, in a certain way, there is nothing exceptional about this black king. On the contrary, the figure had been a commonplace of the “adoration” theme, a banality, almost an obligation for several decades. It seems that the first painter to have painted a black king was Rogier van der Weyden, around 1460. He had already been painting black attendants or squires in his Adorations of the Magi. They played their usual role as slaves. But it wasn’t until 1460 that the first black king could be found. He is surprised to learn the reason for this novelty. The black man (the Negro) traditionally had a negative, diabolic value in Christian painting; he played the role of slave or executioner. His rise to the prestigious rank of one of the Three Kings has something astonishing, even shocking, about it. Nonetheless, this ennoblement in 1460 cannot be explained by a sudden change in attitude, or an awareness that the Epiphany in fact concerned all the Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 51

Andrea Mantegna The Adoration of the Kings, ca. 1464 Uffizi Gallery, Florence

world’s peoples. (This had been known for a long time, and for theologians, the fact that the third king was black was not in dispute—­but it had never been seen in painting.) It can be explained by what we would call today the “geopolitical situation of Christianity”: when they took Constantinople in 1456, the Turks cut off the road to Jerusalem in the north, and if one hoped to reach the center (spiritual and, at the time, geographic) of the world, the obstacle had to be circumvented, that is, Jerusalem had to be reached from the south. This is when the old myth of an immensely rich Christian kingdom situated in Africa, south of Egypt, inhabited by blacks and governed by a mysterious Prester John, was revived. In 1459–­60, an impostor, pretending to be Prester John’s ambassador, even managed to be received by Pope Pius II, the duke of Milan, and the king of France in Bourges! There are maps with illustrations that attest to his existence: he can be seen painted under a tent surrounded by the members of his court. The hope that this kingdom existed was so great that it would lead to the first explorations of the African interior in the very late fifteenth century. In 1494, Prester John’s kingdom was finally found: after seven years of voyages, John II of Portugal’s envoy made contact with the kingdom of Ethiopia—­Christian and black—­and military, diplomatic, and commercial relations began that would last for centuries. But painting did not wait for history to catch up with it: the presence of a black Gaspar already offered proof that Africa was Christian, and it was believed, in almost messianic anticipation, that this rediscovered Christianity, closer to the origins, would offset the weaknesses, antagonisms, and failures of European Christianity. In any case, the idea of a black Wise Man was a sensational success. Gaspar the African quickly multiplied, and in fewer than ten years he would be seen in Italy: the first black Italian king was Mantegna’s, in his Adoration painted for the private chapel of the marchioness of Mantua. (They loved blacks and jesters in Mantua; owning a few luxury slaves—­who were well treated and very black—­was a sign of distinction and refinement. Mantegna even painted a beautiful, cheerful black servant on the ceiling of the very Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 52

famous Camera degli Sposi, and there are ardent letters from the marchioness pleading that one find for her in Venice a little girl “as black as possible.”) In the early sixteenth century, in any case, Gaspar the black king was almost an obligatory part of the luxurious paraphernalia of the Adorations—­in particular in Flanders where, in the 1520s, he was an inevitable and recurring accessory of those late Gothic painters who were tagged with the unfortunate label of “Antwerp Mannerists.” As he continues to look at these many images in all their variations, he notices three elements that appear so regularly they seem to form three constituent details of the way Gaspar is represented, whatever the general layout of the painting (vertical, horizontal, as a triptych, etc.). First of all, he is luxuriously clothed; Melchior and Balthazar are

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as well, of course, but in Gaspar’s case the luxury of his royal dress becomes ostentatious, with a radiance no doubt both permitted and reinforced by the figure’s exotic nature that allows for the most inventively lavish shapes, materials, and colors, which are sometimes so opulent that the black Magus begins to look like a fashion model (an anachronism, I know). Second, Gaspar is the youngest of the group. For some time already, the Wise Men had been depicted as corresponding to the “three ages of man,” and since the three of them were all properly brought up and polite, the eldest always went first, and the youngest last. This diplomatic and courteous tradition is maintained, and made more obvious, by Gaspar’s new skin color. As for the third element that reappears regularly in the well-­ordered mise-­en-­scène of the Wise Men in a large majority of instances: while Gaspar may well be a fully-­

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fledged Wise Man, he is nonetheless always positioned off to the side, at times just a bit, at times a great deal; sometimes he is isolated, alone, on his own panel of a triptych; sometimes he is separated from the main group by a pillar, a column, a tree; sometimes he is even just arriving at the scene, running or on horseback, whereas the two others are already there making their offerings. If Gaspar is placed closer to Mary, the scene takes on an odd power—­so that the black king is so often off to the side that we become accustomed to seeing him like that. It is as if this distance, beyond that of remote and mythical Africa, betrayed a last trace of wariness in regard to this black newcomer, a reluctance to let him play with the big boys. These three elements (ostentatious sartorial opulence, youth, separation from the group) seem to confirm in his mind Richard Trexler’s belief that the third king is the “exotic pole” of a “dualistic” representation of the “nominal” trilogy of the Magi. Nonetheless, with his young and luxurious handsome king standing off to the side, he realizes now that Bruegel was not inventing anything new; he had even adopted the most widespread convention. Yet the painting is not diminished by this. Although he is indeed following tradition here, Bruegel articulates it in a very unique way: his Gaspar is the only one in the painting who is not a caricature. Once again, there is no way to understand the uniqueness of a work from the outside. It is within the painting itself that the painter’s inventiveness is to be found. So he begins to look again, more closely this time. And he sees a detail that had escaped him until now: the gaze of the black king. Bruegel painted it with an astonishing, admirable economy of means. The eyes are wide open and attentive; but, black on black, they can barely be seen. Bruegel signifies them with three tiny light-­colored strokes: a miniscule white arc for the left eyeball and two little luminous drops that, placed as close as possible to an invisible pupil, show the intensity of the gaze directed at what he is seeing, the spectacle that, precisely, is being offered to this gaze. This intensity is all the more striking in that it is reinforced by the two figures closest to Gaspar: the ugly face in profile is in effect wide-­eyed, but its gaze is frenetic and not aimed at

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any precise point in the painting (the little luminous stroke of his pupil is in fact almost snuffed out); as for the nearsighted fellow, the stunned look about him and his thick glasses make it sufficiently clear that he sees absolutely nothing (and given his positioning, we wonder what on earth he possibly could see). The desire to differentiate Gaspar’s gaze—­ discreetly, but not secretly—­becomes even clearer when he compares it to those of the two other kings. The first one, still standing—­most likely Melchior—­makes us pity him: his eyes are gummy, his right eyelid is closing, covering half his eye, whereas the left eye, the lower lid of which is sagging, doesn’t seem to be able to make out much and, in any case, no luminous drop comes to hint at a living gaze. As for Balthazar, he certainly must be very nearsighted at his age. We can only make out his right eye, wide open, eyebrows raised high, staring intensely at such close range that he can almost touch the body of Baby Jesus. (It’s easy to understand why the little child is recoiling from him.) Then he gets the feeling that this theme of the gaze is at the center of Bruegel’s representation of the subject. There’s nothing surprising about that, really, because after all, that’s what the Epiphany is about: the Magi make a long, very long journey precisely to see the newborn child who they know is God incarnate who will save humanity. Why then did Bruegel specifically paint them, with the exception of Gaspar, so visually handicapped? Also, what is Balthazar looking at? What is he trying to see there from such close range? Given the respective positions of the figures, it can only be Baby Jesus’s penis. Balthazar’s old, hoary head is exactly in front of the Infant’s open thighs, at the level and in the axis of his penis. He then recalls Leo Steinberg’s fairly recent book on The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. He checks. Indeed, on pages 89–­90 Steinberg uses this Adoration of Bruegel’s as one of his examples, and for him there is no doubt about it: the old king is staring at Jesus’s penis. (One can even imagine that Mary is only holding her son’s right hand to keep him from hiding his penis, so that the old king can see it better; Mary is saying something like “See for yourself !” with her right hand.) The idea may seem absurd Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 56

today, the wild imaginings of a sex maniac. But Steinberg’s convincing argument leaves no room for doubt. Using texts and images to support his claim, he demonstrates how, during the Renaissance, there existed something like a cult of Christ’s genitals, how the ostenatio genitalia was at the center of a number of paintings—­and how the evolution of religious practices and nineteenth-­century prudery wound up by blinding us on this subject (sometimes the paintings and frescoes were even touched up to efface the member that had become so shocking). In some instances, perhaps superstition entered into this devotion to Jesus’s penis (masculine fertility, protection, and so on). But this superstition was supported by theologians. When God incarnated himself, they insist, he did so in a body “made up of all the members,” “complete in all the parts of a man,” which includes, of course, the penis. Circumcision in this context takes on considerable importance: it is the first time that God incarnate sheds his “very precious blood” for humanity, and it is through circumcision, as a preacher said in front of Pope Sixtus IV, that he “revealed himself to be authentically incarnate.” From then on, it’s easy for Steinberg to show how, by celebrating the Circumcision on January 1, the Church celebrates the day that “opens the way to Paradise just as it opens the year.” So there is nothing surprising about the fact that the old Magus needs to reassure himself, by seeing the Infant’s penis, that God’s “humanation” (as Steinberg says) really happened. The images are in fact irrefutable, in particular one of Ghirlandaio’s, where the Virgin is spreading the baby’s thighs and the baby himself is lifting his thin veil before the inquisitive gaze of Balthazar; or one of Botticelli’s—­where the king, more than kneeling, gets on all fours to see “it” from closer up. Steinberg is right: that’s also what Bruegel’s Balthazar is doing. But exactly what does Balthazar see? It’s not just a question of his myopia or his cataract. If he’s asking himself the question, it is because we, the viewers of the painting, don’t know anything about it; we can’t see anything there; for us, there is nothing there to see. Jesus’s penis, the central stake of this Adoration, has been deliberately concealed from our

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Sandro Botticelli The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1478–­1482 (detail) Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

gaze. Not by a veil or a piece of material that exhibits the body as it envelops it. More subtly, Bruegel has hidden it from our sight through the very movement of Jesus’s body, so that his thigh and his left knee act as a screen between us and the sacred little member. Steinberg thinks that there might have been a later repainting, evidence of that iconoclastic censure whose devastating effects are well known. But in truth this is not certain: Jesus’s penis is no more visible in the work of Ghirlandaio or Botticelli. Of course, this is not always the case: it can be seen more clearly in Pontormo’s work, and even more clearly in Mantegna’s, and perfectly well in the work of Marco Pino, to mention only the examples Steinberg uses. But, as if some painters reserved this vision-­revelation for the oldest Magus, they make the proximity of the old face and the very young body a zone of intimacy—­silent, suspended in the contemplation of the mystery, the calm and intensity of which are reinforced by the surrounding agitation. Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 58

Domenico Ghirlandaio The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1487 (detail) Uffizi Gallery, Florence

He is on the verge of thinking that the same thing is going on in the Bruegel. At first glance, it’s plausible. This vision that is reserved for Balthazar is depicted at the moment right before it is about to become universal, when it still has the appearance of a secret—­located as it is in the middle of the long diagonal line that ends at Joseph’s head as he leans toward the boy who is also whispering a secret in his ear. He is beginning to think that this mysterious secret of which Joseph is, at this moment, the guardian serves solely to allow us to see that there is another mystery in the painting that we do not see, even though it is right there in front of us, smack in the middle of the painting: the mystery of the divine humanation. This hypothesis is appealing to him; it must contain some truth. But it leaves him less than satisfied because, expressing it in this way, he forgets what he had observed previously: Bruegel’s irony that turns the two old kings into Wise Men who don’t see much anymore. It is in this context (which is not found in either

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Ghirlandaio or Botticelli) that the invisibility—­for us—­of Jesus’s penis takes on a specific meaning, the one that the painter wanted to give it; and it is in this context as well that the singular status given to Gaspar the black man—­isolated, handsome, sharp-­eyed with a luminous gaze—­must be explained. As he looks more carefully, in fact, he notices that Gaspar, like the others, doesn’t see anything there—­or rather, that he doesn’t see what the old, tired eyes of Balthazar are trying so eagerly to make out. As Gaspar is placed, off to the side, he is the farthest of the three Magi from the central point of the revelation; apparently the Infant’s thigh is hiding the divine crotch from him as well as from us and, above all, his gaze is clearly not in that direction: it is turned away, as if he were looking at Balthazar. In some way, Gaspar seems to be our intermediary in the painting, the intermediary of our gaze on the painting: pivoted ninety degrees in relation to us, his gaze almost parallel to the plane of the painting, he is playing the role—­much better than his two sordid and blind companions—­that classical painters assigned to those individuals Louis Marin so aptly called “frame figures”—­figures whose function was not to show what should be seen but rather to suggest how to look at what was offered to see. This extremely important function seems to explain most fittingly the importance of the role Bruegel assigns to Gaspar, at the margins of the composition: using the layout that had become common for the subject, he devises it so that Gaspar’s tall silhouette balances the entire composition by using his tranquil presence as a counterweight, in a zone of calm, to the agitated pressure exerted by the mass of accumulated figures on the other side. This role is not only formal, it is spiritual as well. For in this story of the Adoration of the Magi, what matters is sight, vision, and the making visible of the sexed incarnation of the Word, and the black king is the only one—­along with us—­who has good eyesight and yet does not see what is supposed to be the proof that God’s humanation, the foundational mystery of the Christian faith, has been achieved.

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Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 61

To see Gaspar’s gaze as the intermediary of our own in the painting does not seem without significance to him. What this juxtaposition suddenly suggests is not that we should not believe that the Incarnation has occurred in a body “complete in all the parts of a man.” Rather, there is no need to see that specific part with our own eyes in order to believe in the reality of the Incarnation. Quite a paradox! The painter is there to confirm that faith does not require visual or tangible proof. This paradox, however, can be traced directly to the tradition of the Gospel. As Christ said to Saint Thomas, who needed to come close in order to see and touch his wounds: “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Blessed is Gaspar, then, who, despite his good eyesight, does not need to see to believe and who appears to be wondering, rather, about old Balthazar’s lack of sense for having got on his knees to ogle the Infant’s penis. Blessed are we if we do not need tangible proofs to believe in the mysteries of faith. Still, he’d like to know a little more about the painter’s religious feeling. The opinions of the experts are divided on the subject. We know, for example, that in Antwerp in the late 1550s Bruegel frequented a group of cultured intellectuals, among whom were the printer Plantin and the geographer Ortelius. These intellectuals were reputed to be “libertines,” that is, tolerant as far as religion was concerned—­and, in 1562, when the Netherlands was in the middle of a religious war, Plantin went into exile in Paris to avoid the perilous consequences of his libertinage. Bruegel may have even been in contact with a sect founded by Hendrik Niclaes, the schola caritatis devoted in particular to Bible study. But it is also true that the strict Cardinal Granvelle, who governed the Netherlands from Brussels, was one of Bruegel’s collectors and that, in 1563, Bruegel left Antwerp to go to Brussels. This does not mean that his paintings were “Catholic.” In fact, the great Charles de Tolnay pointed out that Bruegel had personal relations with the engraver Coornhert, a notorious representative of theist humanism who, beyond individual or partisan beliefs, sought and advocated a universal Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 62

truth shared by all. To claim that Bruegel was a “libertine” would be pushing it (he was more likely to have been an “Erasmian”), but the very fact that this hypothesis is not totally absurd again proves that outside documents do not help us to infer the ideas that went into these paintings, which Bruegel’s friend Ortelius said contained “more thoughts than painting.” So once again he returns to the painting itself. And this time, he looks at it from a little farther away. Although he had been able to make out at close range the irony lavished on the two old kings, he had neglected to take into account two pieces of information that he had only intuited: first, the “Italianism” of the painting (especially compared to the two other versions on the same subject) and the fact that this exceptional resonance of Bruegel’s journey to Italy could be felt almost ten years after the painter had returned home. And second, the paradox of Bruegel’s mocking—­with the exception of Gaspar—­the very models from which he took his inspiration. Then a new hypothesis occurs to him. If Bruegel “returned” to Italy in 1564—­and in such a way!—­it is because current events encouraged him to do so. Whereas in 1566 the Protestant condemnation of images, supported by economic and social factors, would lead to a great iconoclastic campaign in the Netherlands, in 1563 the Council of Trent had just ended by strongly reaffirming the legitimacy of worshipping images and relics. The most striking aspect of the controversial resumption of this traditional position is precisely this association of images and relics. The cardinals of the Counter-­Reformation could not have demonstrated more clearly their rejection of Protestant theses, in particular Calvinist ones: in 1543, Calvin (who died in 1564, the year of the painting) had published his “Avertissement très utile,” in which he proposed taking inventory of all the relics accumulated and dispersed throughout the Christian world. The result would have been catastrophic or, rather, edifying, because among other things one would have counted some fourteen nails of the cross. Calvin’s text is fiercely ironic in regard to superstitions encouraged by “Roman” practices, and it begins by tear-

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Hieronymus Bosch The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1510 (detail) Museo Nacional del Prado, Barcelona

ing to shreds the divine foreskin, of which there allegedly existed at least two, one at the Charroux Abbey in France and one at Saint John Lateran’s in Rome. But, as Calvin pointed out, there was no doubt that there had never been more than one foreskin and this was, therefore, an obvious “falsehood.” Already in the thirteenth century, in fact, the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine revealed himself to be slightly skeptical about the authenticity of the holy prepuce. (“If all that is true, you have to admit it’s quite admirable.”) Yet a year before Bruegel painted his Adoration of the Magi—­where Jesus’s penis plays the central role that we saw (or didn’t) above—­the Council of Trent peremptorily reaffirmed the legitimacy of worshipping images and relics. This raises the question of the pertinence of this religious controversy and the late Italianism of the painting (and the parody thereof ), as it relates to the theme of the (in)visibility of the divine sexual organ. Once again, blessed are they who do not see and yet believe, they who do not need relics to believe. Bruegel’s position here would be all the stronger if his Adoration were in fact an altar painting, the only one of his paintings meant specifically for the faithful. One question remains however: Why did Bruegel make the black king the intermediary of our gaze in the painting? A first answer crosses his mind: Bruegel is simply exploiting the traditional position of the black king—­isolated, slightly off to the side, at the edge of the representation, and so on. That answer is simple, accurate even, and—­ why not?—­plausible. But it seems a little unimaginative to him and, moreover, it trivializes the painter’s inventiveness—­never a good idea when dealing with creators of Bruegel’s artistic and intellectual caliber. There must be something more. The importance of the role that fell to the black king is in conformity, for example, with the idea, well established by theologians, that the Epiphany constitutes a universal revelation, addressed to “all the peoples of the earth.” In this context, the three Magi represent the descendants of the three sons of Noah who populate the entire earth, and, very logically, the black king is the descendant of Ham, the evil

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son: when Noah fell asleep, drunk and half-­naked, Ham was the one who wanted to show his brothers Shem and Japheth their father’s penis to mock him, and when Noah awoke, he sentenced Ham to be his brothers’ slave. This idea pleases him: Bruegel made Gaspar—­the remote descendant of the man who laughed at the penis of the father of all Paint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 65

men—­the king who does not attempt to see the penis of the Son. This hypothesis is not unreasonable, but it is a bit hasty, because he also learns that if the skin’s blackness was one of the consequences of the curse on Ham, in the sixteenth century this was not a commonly held belief. (Most strikingly, the third Wise Man has become black, whereas Ham himself remains white in the majority of his depictions.) The answer must lie elsewhere. Once again he is tempted by the idea of Prester John and the allure of a Christian kingdom in Africa. Nevertheless, if at the time it was still conceivable to travel through Africa to reach Jerusalem, Prester John had lost his mythical aura, inasmuch as relations with Ethiopia and the Congo had become close and sustained, and from this point on the focus was on the gold and the “savages” in America. He had to accept what seemed to be an irrefutable historical fact: the figure of the black king had been too widespread for too long to signify a particular geographic location. And having become so commonplace, it had lost all specific meaning; it merely evoked, in the simplest way possible, the universality of the Christian revelation. And yet he immediately observes that this is not what’s happening in Bruegel’s painting. Far from it: everything here is working toward giving the black king a unique status. In fact, Bruegel seems to want to revive the old significance of the figure, to update, in other terms, the prestige that was his more than half a century earlier. Beneath the Italian references, he finds something here in Bruegel in the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch. And it is not just some vague similarity. Around 1500, in his Adoration that is now in the Prado but that, until 1586, had always been kept not far from Brussels, Bosch had already given his black Magus an exceptional presence. Off to the left side, the only one of the three kings still standing (in a garment whose color Bruegel takes up), his face level with Mary’s and the lateral saints’, the black Magus had an unusual dignity that was far from the elegant exoticism that gradually came to characterize his depiction. By his skin color, the black king radiantly manifested the spiritual universality of the ChrisPaint It Black The Adoration of the Magi 66

tian revelation. Admittedly, Bruegel’s first Adoration, the one in Brussels, with its presentation of the barn and the vastness of its landscape seen from a raised vantage point, is more reminiscent of Bosch’s than the “Italian” version in London. But if in the latter painting the reference to Bosch is more discreet, it also feels more personal, intimate almost. Indeed, Bruegel did not merely content himself with using the color of the vestment; he explicitly points to his homage to Bosch by entrusting the black king with a gift that is an opulent allusion to Bosch’s inventions, a gift more “Bosch-­like” than it was in Bosch’s own work and, in a detail that is no doubt significant, Bruegel signed his painting below the majestic figure, just as Bosch had done more than half a century earlier. Thus, beyond the evolution of Flemish painting, and in the guise of an “Italian” composition, Bruegel returned to a source of inspiration where the gaze of the black man was the bearer of the greatest spirituality and attested to the universality of Christian faith, that is, in the terms of the time, to the universality of the humanity of men as well. As Jean Devisse (or was it Michel Mollat?) said, Bosch’s Adoration shows that of the “thousands of other roads in which the progressive ignorance of Africa is inscribed, another road was opened, an opportunity that the West perhaps did not know how to seize.”1 That was before. Before the rest. Especially before the expansion of slavery and the slave trade promoted racist speech and the ideologies that defended the practice. In 1564, Bruegel was going back to this universalist concept. It was not by chance that in 1562–­63, in his terrifying Triumph of Death, Bruegel placed a black man among the whites in the net being dragged by two skeletons—­as if, of all the figures in the painting, it is the black man alone who, like an Albertian admonisher, is looking at us, appealing to us in despair. In his Adoration in London, the carnivalesque treatment of the other figures shows on the one hand that the optimism of the beginning of the century is groundless and, on the other, with the collapse of firm beliefs and From The Image of the Black in Western Art.—­Trans.

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expectations, that the humanity of the black man remained for Bruegel on the sidelines of the corrupted material practices of Europe and Roman Catholicism. He is satisfied with this interpretation, particularly because it allows him to situate a last figure he didn’t know what to do with until now, and who now seems to him to attest to the painter’s personal commitment in the work. At the extreme left of the painting, another “frame figure” discreetly echoes the figure of the majestic black king. The only civilian among the two old kings and the army rabble, dressed entirely in black, he is a middle-­aged man; we see only his bearded face, tilted slightly toward his right shoulder. His gaze is not focused on the group of the Virgin and Child; nor is he attempting to see what old Balthazar is so preoccupied with. Rather, his gaze is parallel to the plane of the painting; he is looking toward the other side, toward Gaspar the black man. And even if this detail has not been remarked upon by experts (an indication of Bruegel’s discretion?), this face oddly resembles the ones we can sometimes recognize in the painter’s self-­portraits, in particular, the last guest sitting at the very end of the table on the right in the Wedding Feast. Of course, he will not let himself get caught in the trap of resemblances. He knows that we will never know what a portrait of Bruegel really looked like. But one thing is certain: along with the black king, the Virgin, and the Infant, this bearded face has been spared the comic treatment conferred on the others. So it matters little whether this is a self-­portrait in the strict sense of the term. This figure, like those Mantegna was already slipping into the edges of his paintings, is a kind of represented signature. It is a figure of the painter in his work, witness to his work. His gaze sends us back to Gaspar, who looks slightly surprised and vaguely dumbfounded by the behavior of his old white colleague. As if, after Saint Thomas, one had to see to believe, to believe only what one sees! This is a very high opinion of painting, indeed.

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Adoration of the Kings, 1564 (detail top right) National Gallery of London

Pieter Bruegel the Elder Village Wedding Feast, ca. 1525–­1569 (bottom and detail top left) Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

Frankly, there would be no point in saying that Mary Magdalene wasn’t a real blond. I’ll grant you that the idea is not uninteresting: the difference between a real blond and a fake blond is a valid concern. But, really, what does “fake blond” mean? Why should the color of one’s body hair be more “honest” than the color of the hair on one’s head? I’m quite aware that people dye their hair, but really, there’s nothing to prevent them from bleaching their pubic hair, or dying it blue, pink, green, or any other color for that matter. I’m sure some people do. And there are others, true blonds, who have dark or even black pubic hair, and who leave it the way God gave it to them. I’ve always wondered why our body hair is often darker than the hair on our head. I’ll have to ask an expert. But to whom can I turn? I doubt anyone ever seriously studied the question. It’s amazing to think of all the useless things we know—­why the sky is blue, for example—­when we don’t even know why the pubic hair of blond women is often almost black! In fact, we don’t even really know the difference between body hair and head hair. All right, the former grows all over the body and the latter on the head. But, beyond that, nothing. Can you imagine that no one knows where the two Latin names—­pilus and capillus—­come from? One authority thought that capillus came from capo-­pilus, or “hair on the head.” That was clever, but it didn’t hold water. Turns out it was an ingenious but completely arbitrary explanation. Capillus calls to mind caput, the head, but one cannot pin down precisely—­and I emphasize here the word “precisely”—­“either [its] form or meaning.” And this according to Alfred Ernout and Antoine Meillet, members of the Institut de France! So who are we to question them? Furthermore, they claim that even Indo-­European languages do not share any word for the “hair” on one’s head. It changes from one language to another. Ditto for pilus,

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“body hair.” Might as well say that no one has a clue why it’s called what it is. In the end, the English got it right. They are pragmatic. No wavering. A single word: hair. That way, no problem or useless questions: hair on one’s body or on top of one’s head, for an Englishwoman it’s all the same. And I’ve heard they are all redheads, and no doubt true redheads at that. In England, if you ask me, fake redheads don’t exist. So, it’s of no help to say that Mary Magdalene was not a real blond. In any case, it’s only the hair on her head that matters. No one has ever seen, or will ever see, her pubic hair. Not even Jesus. And that is exactly where the question lies. As usual, they’ll say I am crazy, but I’m sure that if her hair was so long it was because it was meant to be a distraction. She displays it, spreads it out, unties it, exhibits it, the better to conceal her pubic hair, to distract from it. I know there are many other long-­haired women around. Take Saint Agnes, for example, whose hair grew suddenly in one shot when she was forced to go out naked in the middle of the Roman circus, and no one saw anything because in the blink of an eye a mop of hair covered her all the way down to her feet, front, back, and sides. Anyway, Saint Agnes is rarely seen without some sort of headcovering. And usually she is with her lamb, and the lamb is the one with a “fleece,” a beautiful fluffy white fleece. We recognize Mary Magdalene by her hair. Well, another Mary has a lot of hair, too. I’m not talking about that Mary, the Virgin, the Immaculate. No, I’m thinking of Mary the Egyptian. But she is really a clone, another reformed prostitute who gave up sex and, just to be on the safe side, went wandering in the desert. As if one weren’t enough! In any case, the Egyptian Mary is always depicted as an old lady; well, almost always. There is no danger of being seduced by her, dirty as she is, with her three hunks of bread. And apparently she was also a small, swarthy woman. Mary Magdalene is another story entirely, except when she became old and dirty like the Egyptian Mary, when she left for the desert as well. Mary Magdalene is beautiful: beautiful breasts, beautiful arms, beautiful thighs, and her hair is always clean, shiny, and voluptuous. Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

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Of course, they resolved the issue. Why think too hard? She has hair, a jar of perfumed ointment, jewelry that she spends her time taking off, and sometimes a mirror or a skull, or both. These are her attributes. Personally, though, I have my doubts. Because, honestly, this hair is not your ordinary attribute. Rather, one should say that her hair is her attribute. Do you see what I mean? Her attribute; just as men have their virile attributes, Mary Magdalene’s hair would be her feminine attribute. Have you noticed that there is no equivalent to the word “virile” for women? Feminine is equivalent to masculine; and female to male. But for virile, there is nothing. Don’t tell me this is arbitrary! I say this in passing, but it’s worth considering. That’s why I call her hair her “feminine” attribute. But then, this is an unusual attribute, because most often when women are depicted with feminine attributes, they’ve already lost them. Do you follow me? It’s quite simple: Agatha’s breasts, Lucy’s eyes, even Apollonia’s teeth. They were ripped from them to teach them a lesson—­and, thank you, God—­ that’s why they were granted eternal life. But nobody ever cut Mary Magdalene’s hair. (That story belongs to Samson, and it is Delilah who cuts it. There’s no connection. . . .) So, as I was saying, her hair is not an ordinary attribute. In fact, it is her feminine attribute; it is her image as a woman, the manifestation of her female body, so abundant that it keeps us from seeing anything at all. Woman, the body we “cannot behold,” as Molière’s Tartuffe said. Right? I think we can all agree on this. Good. But what we need to ask at this point is why, precisely, her hair became her feminine attribute. And you think I’m splitting hairs? I am not. Let me tell you what I really think: it’s thanks to her hair that Mary Magdalene exists. Because of it, owing to it, on account of it and it alone. No two ways about it. Without her hair, there would be no Mary Magdalene. That’s why it cannot be torn or cut from her, like Agatha’s breasts. The best proof of this, by the way, is that she never existed. Everybody knows it but pretends not to. I, however, would even go so far as to say that it is of “capital” importance. No pun intended.

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Mary Magdalene does not exist; she never did. I know a whole family was invented for her: father, mother, brother, and sister. The best source on this is probably Jacopo de Voragine. A real Dominican, that one. He doesn’t stint on the details: he even gives her a royal family background. Her father, Syrus, and her mother, Eucharia, together owned a good part of Jerusalem, all of Bethany, and the Magdala castle. Their three children only had to divide up the pie: Jerusalem for the son Lazarus, Bethany for Martha, Magdala for Mary. That’s where she gets her name, Mary Magdalene, and because she is beautiful and rich, she spends her time sleeping around. But when she meets Jesus (by the way, why did she go to see him in the first place? Jacopo doesn’t tell us), miracle! She is ashamed, she cries, she gives up all pleasures to wash his feet and dries them with her beautiful hair, she anoints them, and then she cannot stop crying. It’s all very simple. But no one believes that story, as rosy as it is. Jacopo mixed everything up, but he did not invent a thing; he picked up bits and pieces here and there and came up with a great synthesis. That Dominican knew exactly what he was doing. In other instances, he tells us he is making up all kinds of nonsense, and that even he has his doubts about what he’s saying. (Look at what he wrote about the Holy Cross and the Empress Helena.) But not in this case, that’s for sure. Mary Magdalene is too important to leave any room for doubt. So he goes overboard, just to be sure. On the subject of Martha and Lazarus, I agree: they are well known, brother and sister, they live in Bethany. I also agree that they had a sister, Mary, of whom Jesus was fond. And for good reason. She spent her time listening to him, sitting at his feet while Martha was busy working in the kitchen—­and Jesus said that Mary had “chosen the best part”! Mary liked Jesus’s feet and she knew what to do, she knew how to take care of them: she washed, dried, and anointed them in Bethany just before he entered Jerusalem, where he spent his final week. You have to remember that he had resuscitated Lazarus a few days earlier; he certainly deserved a good footbath. So, I have no trouble accepting the Lazarus-­Martha-­Mary family. Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

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However, all that has nothing to do with Mary Magdalene. Nobody mentions her in all these stories. The only one who says anything about her is Luke, when he lists the women who were with Jesus in Galilee: along with Susanna and Joanna, and a few others, there was also a Mary whose seven—­count ’em, seven!—­demons he had cast out. They called her Mary Magdalene because they had picked her up in Magdala, on the shores of Lake Tiberias. That’s Mary Magdalene, the only one, the real one. But did you notice? Not a peep about her hair or her ointments, or Jesus’s feet. Nothing. Only a hysterical woman whose demons were exorcised by the Lord. Period. Okay, you say. But how did everything get all mixed-­up? Are you kidding me? Everyone knows how! It is the worst-­kept secret in the world. But since you insist, I’ll tell you. Right before he mentions Mary Magdalene with her seven demons, Luke said—­and he is the only one to have done so—­that in Nain, when Jesus was having lunch at Simon’s house, a whore from the city came to wash his feet; she had cried and begged to do it, and then she dried them with her hair before anointing them and kissing them for an hour. That hair must have been quite long and thick. In exchange, Jesus forgave all her sins and told her to go in peace; she had been saved because she had loved a great deal. The apostles didn’t understand. So to be clear, he told them a parable. And the story of this Mary was really a great story, too great not to be used. So, before you know it, the beautiful repentant prostitute gets mixed-­up with Mary Magdalene, the hysterical woman with her seven demons, who comes right after her, and then, because of the foot-­washing scene, Mary Magdalene in turn gets confused with Mary, Martha’s sister. Put it all together in a blender and out comes Mary/Mary Magdalene. Not bad! And later, according to John, she becomes Jesus’s favorite: He appears to her first after his resurrection. But this time, he keeps his distance. He is disguised as a gardener, so of course she doesn’t recognize him right away, and when she does, she wants to embrace him. That’s when he says: “Touch me not!” You never know, with her tears, her perfumed oil, and her hair, she could have cleansed his feet so well that his stigmata would have disappeared!

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I’m losing the thread. Mary Magdalene with the long hair never existed. She is an invention. But whose? No one knows. Chances are she wasn’t invented by anybody in particular. It must have happened little by little. But these days, everyone agrees: Mary Magdalene is a total mishmash. Sorry, let me rephrase that. What I mean is that at least three different individuals are united in her. And this is enough for people who want clear and simple explanations of things. For them, everything is straightforward, and they can prove it. First, Mary Magdalene’s character, well, Mary/Mary Magdalene’s, is the result of the combination of the prostitute from Nain (they use the word prostitute, not the word whore), the girl from Magdala with her seven demons, and Mary, Martha’s sister. Second, that confusion was made possible in particular by Luke’s text when he writes about the meal at Simon’s house, just before mentioning the girl with the seven demons. Third . . . well, that’s enough. QED. No need to complicate things. Let’s move on. And that’s where I say no! I don’t agree! It’s not because you understand how Mary Magdalene was invented that you understand why she was invented! Or why her hair is so important in that invention. You have to agree that neither the girl from Magdala nor Mary, Martha’s sister, has long hair; only the whore from Nain has long hair and knows how to use it. So even if all three were mixed-­up, why keep the hair? Can you tell me? No? Well, let me tell you. The nameless whore from Nain was turned into Mary Magdalene, then into Mary/Mary Magdalene, and later into the saintliest saint of all saints, so that we could see her hair. Those who like clear and simple ideas maintain that Mary Magdalene is the product of a mix-­up. Mix-­up, my foot! As if Jacopo the Dominican could mix things up! Don’t kid yourself. He didn’t mix things up, he condensed them. It’s not the same thing at all. A mix-­up is a mistake; you never do it on purpose, and you regret it and correct it later. A condensation isn’t necessarily done on purpose, but nor is it done without good reason. I also have my references. I know what I’m talking about. Do you know what we call a character like Mary Magdalene with her long hair? No? Well, Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

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I’ll tell you: a composite figure. Yes, a composite figure, composed of characteristics belonging to different individuals. It is the product of a condensation, a combining. Do you know why composite figures are created? Do you know what the point of a condensation is? It exists to express something that cannot be said or thought, because it’s taboo, neither possible nor allowed: censored. The whole point of a condensation is to avoid censorship while respecting its terms. It’s straightforward: Mary Magdalene did not exist, and if she was invented, it was for good reasons. Besides, they did a great job: she became a celebrity, an irreplaceable star. She really served her purpose. And thanks to what? Precisely thanks to her hair, the hair of the whore from Nain. If this hair was saved to be attributed to the girl from Magdala, it’s because it was not totally worthless. In fact, this hair is a symptom. It points to what the condensation was useful for, what was attempted to be said but could not be said. Once you understand why Mary Magdalene’s hair is so long, you’ll understand why she was invented. But I could put forward the opposite as well: once you understand why Mary Magdalene was invented, you’ll know why her hair is so long. But now, you need to think a bit. Not much, just a little. Because the answer won’t pop up in front of you, out of the blue. So here we go. First, Mary Magdalene is a woman. Okay? If she was invented, her purpose was mainly to address women. She is meant for them; she is their saint, the saint “just for women.” In fact, her function is more than that. She is the third woman of a female trinity aimed at women, even if she was invented by men, and I’ll come back to that later. Who are the other two? Well, that’s easy: Mary, the true, the great, the Virgin Mary, and Eve, the first woman, the mother of all women. It is there, between the two, that Mary Magdalene is really useful. What could other women do between those two without Mary Magdalene? Nothing. They had no role model. The Virgin Mary is too perfect to be emulated. Unattainable. She is so perfect as to be immaculate, without a stain, without the faintest flaw. She is not a role model; she is a dogma. End of story. It’s not only that she is a virgin, then a mother,

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then a virgin again. That is almost secondary. We have to go back even further. Before being a virgin, she was immaculate; now that’s another kettle of fish entirely. The first and only woman ever conceived without stain since Adam and Eve, and for eternity. That’s the way it is, period. They waited until 1870 to turn it into a dogma, you know. But it had to come to this. All these discussions about the Virgin Mary’s body—­about how she could have a baby and be different from all other women while being similar to them at the same time—­were becoming too much of a problem, since it was after Eve’s sin and because of it that Eve could conceive, and thus every newborn was already tainted through his parents’ sin. Poor little babies! And Jesus’s birth was not a miracle, which would have explained everything; it was a mystery. And a mystery does not explain anything, on the contrary. Enough already! Mary is a dogma! Move along, there’s nothing to see here! But then, Mary could not be a role model because it was all mystery. And neither could Eve. Everything is Eve’s fault; she is the one who gave in, and she is the bitch who tempted poor Adam. Everyone knows that. Eve is a curse. And once again, the English language does not forget. In English, menstruation is called “the curse of Eve,” or more simply “the curse.” And all women are in fact Eve’s daughters, and like their mother they are all temptresses, seductresses, liars, gossips, and more. So what could women do? From Eve to Mary there was no possible passageway, no possible transformation. Eve and Mary are opposites. To prove my point, I ask you to consider Gabriel when he greets Mary. He says “Ave.” Do you think that was by chance? Ave is Eva backward. Gabriel really knew how to turn a phrase. That first word says it all. Mary reverses Eve. She cancels out the curse. But what can Eve’s daughters do? Nothing—­until Mary Magdalene gets invented for them, because she offers a possible transition from one to the other, or rather from one toward the other, because no woman will ever be like the Virgin Mary, whereas they can become like Mary Magdalene. “Women, they’re all alike, especially some of them,” as someone once said; hussies, all of them. Mary Magdalene offers women a posiMary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

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tive image, a possible role model: the whore with a heart of gold, first a whore and then a saint because her heart was so big, because she cried a lot, and because she transformed her life. If she can help women transition from Eve to Mary, it’s not simply because she is different from both of them (that’s obvious), but also because she resembles them both. Let me explain. Mary Magdalene looks like Eve, no doubt about that: Eve is the first sinner, the temptress, etcetera, and Mary Magdalene is the professional, venal femme fatale. But Mary Magdalene also resembles the Virgin Mary, and I have two types of proof to support my claim. First, Mary Magdalene is Mary Magdalene: she already has “Mary” in her name. You’ll say that the Mary in question is Martha’s sister. All right, but she is also named Mary. Don’t you find that peculiar? Second, Mary Magdalene is one of the Marys who goes to Calvary. She is the Mary seen crying at the foot of the cross, she is one who goes to Jesus’s tomb, and it is to this Mary that Jesus presents himself first after his resurrection. Sure, Mary Magdalene is not like the Virgin Mary, but of all the Marys, she is the closest. Without her hair, she could easily be mistaken for the Virgin. Let me tell you a little story about that. Have you heard the one about Jesus’s umbilical cord, the cord that Mary cut with her own hands? Well, do you know what became of it? No, she didn’t discard it, far from it. It was sacred. She kept it, and much later she gave it to a friend as a souvenir. To whom, do you want to bet? But you already guessed: she gave it to Mary Magdalene, of course. If you don’t believe me, please read the Revelations of Saint Bridget. It is Mary herself, the Virgin Mary, who told Bridget, and only Bridget. And Bridget knew all about umbilical cords, since she was Swedish, got married, and had seven children before finding herself “in saint.”1 In any case, Mary Magdalene inherited the sacred umbilical cord. She was a good girl at this point, but still a bit flirty. So, since she had thrown away all her whorely jewels, she turned the umbilical cord into a necklace and wore it around her alabaster The author makes a pun here on the French “as a saint” (en sainte) and the French word for pregnant (enceinte), which are homonyms.—­Trans.

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neck. Talk about the family jewels! Well, let’s move on. All I wanted to say is that it is difficult to imagine two people closer to each other than the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, so that in the end Mary Magdalene resembles both Eve and the Virgin Mary. But seriously. When they invented Mary Magdalene, they also created a triangle where women could play out their destinies. If I wanted to, I could say that it is a semiotic triangle. No need for the famous square, you know, the semiotic square that demonstrates that to go from one thing to its opposite, you have to go through its contradiction to arrive at the implication or the contrary through the implication to arrive back at the contradiction—­how simple! But I’ll stop there. It’s really too complicated, and we can manage without semiotics. All I have to say is this: since she is neither Eve nor the Virgin Mary, but resembles both of them, Mary Magdalene links the immaculate to the stained, the pure to the impure. She is the path, the way, the door, whatever you want to call it, that allows Eve’s daughters to become the Virgin Mary’s daughters. And Mary Magdalene can do all that only because she converted, on her own, as soon as she saw Jesus and his dirty feet. Unlike Eve, she did not wait for him to lead her out of Limbo by the hand. She only had to convert and give up her life as a daughter of Eve, and she was saved! Forgiven, right away, in her lifetime, no questions asked. A good role model if ever there was one. With Mary Magdalene, women know what to expect and what to do. Repentance, a sexless life but lots of tears, and all will be well in a better world. But what happened to her hair in all this? We are in the middle of it. There is a good reason why it is so long. Obviously, it signals her conversion, but in a rather clever and devious way. First, spread out as it is, displayed, it reminds us that she let it down to wash the Lord’s feet and that she stopped putting it up after that. I suppose she untangled it, she combed it.2 I mean with a comb, not with a paintbrush, Author’s pun: peignait means both “combed” and “painted” in French, from the verbs peigner (to comb) and peindre (to paint).—­Trans.

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even if in the end it boils down to the same thing because her hair only exists in paintings. In any case, after Jesus’s feet, she decided to forget about buns, pigtails, braids, all those tricks used to attract men. She just kept her long mop of hair. Her flowing hair, unadorned, is at first the hair of the repentant woman; then, when she is in the desert and she becomes completely wild, it grows all the way down to her feet. But that’s not all, because a woman only lets down her hair in intimate circumstances; in her bedroom or bathroom, with other women perhaps, in her bed, while sewing, wherever you like except outside. Nowadays things have changed: you can wear anything outside, do your hair any way at all. But in the old days, if you went out with your hair undone, or “bareheaded,” you looked disreputable. When a woman went out with her hair down, “bareheaded,” it meant she was “hatless,” untidy. And if a woman looked untidy, it meant she led an untidy life. Follow me? Only young girls could go out with hair down to their shoulders. No one would say anything to those little innocent things; they were virgins. Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, had not been a virgin for a long time. There is even some fool who took pains to point this out it in Latin: Don’t be deceived by her hair, puella sed non virgo. Mary Magdalene: a young girl, but not a virgin. As if we didn’t know that already! We just have to make sure her hair doesn’t let us forget it. So, Mary Magdalene’s hair is there to remind us of her past immodesty as a woman who went out with her hair undone. Do you see where I’m going? Mary Magdalene was invented by condensing several female figures, and in turn, her hair itself condenses several things. It points both to her past sins and her rejection of them, her casting them out; it displays her present penance and her past shamelessness. Actually, it shows, reveals, and uncovers sin by the very figure that rules it out, puella sed non virgo. To cool things down a bit and reassure the devout, I could say that her hair exhibits the immodesty of repentance. A well-­turned phrase, isn’t it? Well-­crafted, and moreover, not untrue. I don’t know if you noticed, but from the very start, ever since she entered Simon’s house,

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Mary Magdalene was never particularly inconspicuous. She keeps showing off, so much so that you’d think she still enjoys it. But now it’s for a good cause: it has to be made clear that she repents, it has to be noticed, it can’t be forgotten, and people have to be constantly reminded of this, especially those women-­who-­are-­all-­alike. She is their role model. Still, this isn’t enough to explain the hair. Don’t take me for a fool. Women are not the only ones who look at images of Mary Magdalene, and these images were not painted only for them, or especially for some of them. Mary Magdalene remains erotic even as a penitent, and that’s because of her hair. Especially when she is in the desert and pretends to believe that no one is looking at her: when she is naked under her hair, this hair helps us imagine what we cannot see. It makes our mouth water. An entire menu, with its specials of the day, but we can also order à la carte: a piece of breast here, of thigh there, a pinch of nipple, a finger of buttock, a drop of whatever you want, and a belly for dessert. Even in the earliest images, when her hair covers her from head to toe, when all we could see was her face, hands, and feet, her hair was not really modest. In these instances, it is obvious that there is too much of it, because her hair is not an ordinary attribute. Don’t argue with me, you agreed with me a minute ago. It is a growing part of her body. It is a manifestation of her body, of her body’s life. And what a manifestation! So much vitality! Enormous! Lush! Careful, I said lush not lusty. Slow down. Don’t put words in my mouth. Not yet. Anyway, there is too much of that hair. It is a surplus of her body. It is there to hide something. It hides the skin you would normally see. But at the same time it also reveals what came from within and spilled without. It reveals what could not be seen: an intimacy of the body, put on display, a substitute for this skin that hides unspeakable things, as any baroque poet will tell you. If you think about it, her hair is borderline obscene. If you bumped into such a woman on a city street, or even out in the countryside, this is what would occur to you. But it remains borderline, first of all because it is painted and Mary Magdalene’s history justifies it in paintMary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

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ing, and then because it is head hair, not body hair. Are we back to the beginning? Indeed we are. Mary Magdalene’s pubic hair, that visible part of her sex, is still taboo. But before we go on, let me tell you what Mary Magdalene makes me realize: we need a history of body hair in painting. Nothing more, nothing less. How it is showed to us, how it is hidden from us, whose is showed to us, whose is not, and so on. It would make a lovely work of art history. Good questions would be asked. For example, from when do the first paintings of nude women date?3 Two answers are possible. First, we are talking about paintings of naked women, not women with beards, which are at least 450 years old. We are talking about naked women whose body hair we can see. In my opinion, the first one, or at least the first one that interests me, is Courbet’s Woman in the Waves. Her arms are raised and we can see her underarm tufts. As usual, Courbet goes a little overboard. The spume with which he covers the woman’s body looks like sperm, an ejaculation, and he signed his name in red just below it. What a guy! You’ll never guess the second answer. It’s more intelligent than it appears: with the exception of cave paintings, painting with hairs (à poils) has always existed. Because, in order to paint, you need a paintbrush, and paintbrushes are made with hair (poils). Who knows what kind, but hair nonetheless. So, people have always painted with hair. And please don’t say I’m merely playing with words: where does the word pinceau (paintbrush) come from? What does it mean? It comes from the Latin and it means “little penis.” Yes, indeed, little penis, penicillus in Latin. You’ll find it in Cicero. When you think about it, vast vistas open before you. Do you remember the size of Velázquez’s paintbrushes? He had them made especially for him, long and thin, not short and stout. It was Turner who used short, stout ones. Can you imagine the work of art history that could come out of this? Okay, enough. All this is simply to point out that you should always ask yourself why a painter This section plays on the French terms à poil, which, figuratively, means “naked” or “nude” and à poils (with body and/or facial hair).—­Trans.

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wants to become a painter in the first place, what he desires when he paints, and how we see this desire in his paintings. I’m telling you, the entire history of painting needs to be redone. But let’s move on and get to the end. As I was saying: Mary Magdalene’s hair is practically obscene because, while it is her hair, it is not her pubic hair, and I really mean her pubic hair. The hair on her head turns our attention away; it makes us forget about her body hair, her pubic hair, by showing us this other hair, a lot of it, much, much more. This is what shrinks call “considerations of representability”: when you cannot represent something for yourself, when it is taboo, you replace it with something else that resembles it in one way or another. That’s all. The hair on Mary Magdalene’s head is the representability of her body hair. Am I repeating myself ? Perhaps, but I haven’t wasted your time, because now I can be more specific. Mary Magdalene’s hair does not simply point to her conversion from sensual love to spiritual love; it does not simply replace the dark triangle of her pubic hair by a cascade of blond head hair. By hiding her pubic hair, by replacing it, it reveals it—­disguised, transformed—­as well. Mary Magdalene’s head of hair is really her pubic hair in disguise. In fact, the hair on her head is her converted pubic hair. That is Jesus’s great miracle. What a magician! When she washed his feet, he converted her whore’s pubic hair into the head of hair of a saint! Because talk about dark pubic hair! And I don’t mean the color, you fools! I mean the danger it represented for all the sons of Adam living in Nain who had looked at it, kept company with it, tasted it. Evil, alluring pubic hair! What a disgrace! But now that’s the end of that! No one will ever see it again. Mary Magdalene’s pubic hair, her “fleece,” has been converted into a lovely Christian mane. Don’t bother thinking about that other fragrant hair below. It no longer has any purpose; it is unused, unusable, useless. Sad, isn’t it? Well, yes, but for them it was well worth it. Mary Magdalene’s pubic hair scared them, and its conversion is aimed at all women, to all the Mary Magdalenes, so that they—­the apostles—­can sleep peacefully. You think I’m exaggerating? Wait, let me take another Mary Magdalene’s “Fleece”

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tack. Mary Magdalene’s hair condenses the image of the wild, penitent woman alone in the desert with that of a head of hair, loose and flowing, that was only supposed to be seen in intimate, private situations. Don’t you agree? So, I can now say that her hair lets us see her intimacy in her wildness. But I can also say her wildness in her intimacy. No? I can’t? But that’s precisely what a condensation is! And so, I can also say that it lets us see her wild intimacy or her intimate wildness; it’s the same thing. And since Mary Magdalene speaks to all women, all women must think that their own pubic hair makes them real savages, man-­eaters, cannibal women. And they had better behave, I’m telling you, they had better rein themselves in. That’s why men invented Mary Magdalene. Am I exaggerating again? Well then, you tell me why Mary Magdalene has all that hair. I had nothing to do with it.

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The Woman in the Chest

The Woman in the Chest

“A pinup?” “Yup, that’s what she is. Pure and simple.” “Well, it depends on what you mean by that.” “It’s simple: a beautiful, naked woman  .  .  . or, rather, an image of one. The image of a naked woman that’s meant to excite the man who’s looking at it; an image of woman as sexual object.” “You’re saying that the Venus of Urbino is a pinup? Come on!” “That’s right. Anyway, you know the painting’s history. When Guidobaldo commissioned Titian to paint it, his father . . .” “Whose father?” “Guidobaldo’s. Two years earlier, Francesco Maria, his father, had already bought a portrait of the same model, La Bella, which is now in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. But La Bella was wearing a beautiful dress and Guidobaldo wanted to have a nude portrait of her . . .” “Do you realize what you’re saying?” “No. Why?” “Because if you add that the dog sleeping on the bed is practically identical to Guidobaldo’s mother Eleanore’s dog, and that, when he didn’t have enough money to pay for the painting, Guidobaldo asked his mother for some, well, honestly, that’s a bit Oedipal, wouldn’t you say?” “I have no idea. There are no documents about Guidobaldo’s intimate relations with his parents. And, to tell you the truth, that’s not my problem. What is certain is that he wanted a nude, or at least an undressed, Bella. Obviously, for him, it’s a pinup.” “You don’t say! Well, after all, it is true that when he mentions the painting, Guidobaldo calls it la donna ignuda, ‘the nude woman . . . ’ ” “That’s what I said. A pinup.”

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Titian The Venus of Urbino, 1538 Uffizi Gallery, Florence

“Still, for an art historian like you, don’t you think that’s somewhat of an anachronism?” “I call it like I see it. This naked woman, reclining on a bed, stroking her pudenda. . . . You can’t tell me she’s not being sexually provocative. She’s rather direct about it, don’t you think?” “Of course. Don’t worry, I’ve seen her hand. But she’s not exactly a pinup. As you can tell from the word, a pinup is a picture made to be hung, or pinned, on the wall. That may be the only thing they have in common: the Venus of Urbino was also meant to be hung on a wall. Other than that, there’s quite a difference between them. First of all, a pinup is a photograph, or a drawing made from a photograph. Do you remember Atlan’s pinups in Lui?1 You don’t read Lui? That’s too bad. Anyway, a pinup is a photograph or a drawing that is reproducible ad infinitum, which is not true of this painting, even if copies were made of it. And I seem to remember that, at the outset, pinup photographs were supposed to help American soldiers ‘manually’ solve the problem of their forced sexual abstinence. If I’m not mistaken, one of the most famous was a photograph of Marilyn Monroe lying naked on a red satin sheet. And then they proliferated. You can see lots of them in truck drivers’ cabins and in auto mechanics’ shops. One day someone will have to figure out the link between the pinup and the automobile. For the truck driver, I can understand it: he’s alone on the road for a long time. But auto mechanics? They go home at night, back to their beds and their wives. Why do they need pinups? Sex, mechanics, and automotive oil: What’s with this grease monkey trilogy? I think that’s a good question.” “You’re getting sidetracked.” “Not really. Because if the Venus of Urbino’s main purpose was to act as a sexual stimulant, I don’t think she functioned as a substitute for the real thing. Guidobaldo della Rovere certainly had other means of satisfying his desire. By claiming that this donna ignuda is a pinup, I’m French men’s magazine more or less modeled on Playboy.—­Trans.

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sorry to say, you are both simplifying and falsifying things. The times, the sexual practices, and the circumstances under which the painting and a pinup were viewed are too dissimilar to allow them to be analyzed in the same way.” “I’m not analyzing the Venus of Urbino . . .” “And that’s exactly what I’m criticizing you for.” “Let me tell you what her purpose was. It was to excite Guidobaldo. Therefore, even if she was painted by Titian, she had the same function as a pinup.” “Okay. So let’s say the painting is a sexual stimulant. Indeed, the figure is inviting; it’s her sex appeal . . .” “See what I mean?” “But she was obviously destined to be hung in a bedroom. Guidobaldo’s bedroom, to be more precise. And that changes everything.” “Why, for pity’s sake?” “Oh, come on. You know what magical powers were attributed to images back then, and you know why it was advised to hang pictures of beautiful naked people—­men or women—­in married couples’ bedrooms.” “Yes, I do know. If the woman was looking at these gorgeous bodies at the time of fecundation, her child would be more beautiful. Parenthetically, that tells you a lot about what must have been going on in some Renaissance beds. But I don’t see why this would mean she’s not a pinup.” “Elementary, my dear. She would be a pinup meant to be seen in the intimacy of marriage and, in addition, a pinup meant more for Guidobaldo’s wife than for him! You have to admit that makes for a very odd sort of pinup.” “Well, now, you’re the one who’s distorting things. You know as well as I do that this painting was not painted on the occasion of Guidobaldo’s wedding. When he ‘married’ Giulia Varano in 1534, she was only ten.” “Yes, but in 1538 when the painting was painted, Giulia was fourteen and the marriage could have been consummated by then.”

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Giorgione Sleeping Venus, 1508–­1510 Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

“Granted. But in any event, it’s not what we call a ‘wedding portrait.’ ” “That’s not what I’m saying . . .” “Besides, in 1538 in Venice a tradition of the ‘nude woman’ painting had already existed for a long time. This tradition no doubt originated with Giorgione’s Dresden Venus, which was painted prior to 1510, and which was, in fact, a wedding portrait. However, in 1538, you didn’t need a wedding to paint a nude woman anymore.” “I never said it was a wedding portrait. What I’m saying is that, in order to conceptualize his painting, Titian placed it in a matrimonial context.” “That’s a bit out in left field.” “No, it’s more in left hand.” “What are you talking about?” “It’s her left hand that’s caressing her pudenda.” “That’s a good one! That’s nothing but a sexual come-­on.” “Not just any old one! In the nineteenth century, viewers were very shocked by this gesture. Even Mark Twain thought it was an abominable painting, the most ‘vile’ he had ever seen. He seems to have lost his sense of humor this once. The well-­mannered and very serious Crowe and Cavalcaselle, however, don’t seem shocked by this left hand in their excellent book on Titian. And for good reason: they don’t mention it. They describe her right arm, her right hand holding its bouquet of roses, but they don’t say a single word about her left hand. It’s as if the Venus of Urbino were a one-­armed woman!” “I know those texts. They don’t prove a thing. The sixteenth-­century viewers were less easily shocked. It’s the nineteenth century, prudish and bourgeois, that took offense. Do you know any members of the bourgeoisie who like pinups?” “I have no idea. In public, no. But in private. . . . In any case, you can’t play down this gesture. There’s nothing else like it, even in the sixteenth century. Titian never used it again, nor did any other painter. Even in 1538 it must have seemed a bit daring, almost pornographic.” “That’s what I said: a pinup.”

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“Pinups are never pornographic. They are naked, or partly undressed, but basically very well behaved. They are content just to show themselves, to excite, without making too many waves.” “So?” “Titian’s painting is different. In one way, it’s true; you could say that it’s obscene. But that’s because it makes public, brings onto center stage, a gesture that is allowed, and even desirable, within the privacy of marriage.” “My God! Is that all you ever think about?” “Perhaps. But, in any case, Rona Goffen distinctly showed how, in the sixteenth century, female masturbation was accepted and even recommended in a particular context. The science of the times held that women could only be fertilized at the moment of orgasm, and doctors suggested that married women prepare themselves manually for sexual intercourse in order to conceive. This, too, allows us to understand quite a bit about masculine practices. What exactly could a ‘Latin lover’ have been during the Renaissance? And priests also . . .” “What do you mean, ‘priests also’ ”? “Priests also recommended masturbation because, as I’m sure you know, according to men of the cloth, sexuality was sanctioned only in marriage and its sole purpose was reproduction. So, once married, the woman could, was almost obliged to ‘prepare herself ’ for sexual intercourse in order to be more sure of success and not risk committing, or making her husband commit, the sin of copulation for pleasure’s sake, without progeny. Therefore, in the sixteenth century, this painting could not have been conceived or perceived as one of a pinup preparing for illicit sex. Goffen even points out that this woman’s pose, as she rests on her right side, corresponds to recommendations of the same sort. In other words, if it isn’t a wedding portrait, it is a portrait imagined in the context of marriage. In fact, it’s not just her hand that evokes marriage.” “I know. It’s also those old iconographic ‘attributes’ of the Venus of Urbino: the myrtle in the window, the roses in the left hand, the two chests in the background, and the little dog asleep on the bed.” The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 98

“Usually, you like these attributes. An iconographer like yourself who is quoted everywhere . . .” “Just because I’m an iconographer doesn’t mean I cannot see! And these attributes look suspicious to me. The chests? Of course they bring to mind those hope chests in which the young bride would place her dowry of linens to take to her husband’s home; but I am convinced that the great courtesans—­and she is one; just look at the palace where she lives!—­also had this sort of chest in their bedrooms. As for the dog, it’s a well-­known symbol of fidelity, but also of lust. In any case, it’s asleep. And in his Danae in Madrid, Titian painted another little dog sleeping on his mistress’s bed as she is impregnated by Jupiter, who had transformed himself into a shower of gold. So, the little-­dog-­asleep-­on-­ the-­bed is not necessarily a symbol of marital fidelity.” “Long live iconography!” “Yes. Long live iconography! These objects are not necessarily attributes and, in any case, their meaning is not clear, univocal. After all, the myrtle on the window may very well be only a myrtle, and the roses only roses . . .” “And the woman only a pinup. I see where you’re going. Taken separately, each object does not have in itself a clear, indisputable meaning. I agree. But the juxtaposition of these objects weaves a context that makes them less ambiguous, a well-­knit network that is an allusion to matrimony.” “If you insist! And yet, you admit that the painting was not painted for Guidobaldo’s wedding . . .” “I do. I simply think that the imagery of the Venus of Urbino is that of a wedding portrait. Titian treated it very subtly, and as a result the figure of the nude woman became something else entirely.” “So, if it’s neither a pinup nor a wedding portrait, what is it? Will you tell me at long last?” “A paragon of eroticism. It’s not for nothing that Manet was inspired by it three hundred and twenty five years later when he painted

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his Olympia. If it were only a pinup, he wouldn’t have looked twice at it—­and we wouldn’t still be talking about it today.” “I don’t really follow you anymore. You’re making things too complicated. I’m sticking with the great Gombrich’s opinion on this: a painting doesn’t have several meanings, it has only one; that’s its dominant meaning, its intended meaning or its principal intention. The rest is merely overinterpretation. If we are still talking about the Venus of Urbino, it’s because it is a great painting . . .” “Titian thanks you.” “That’s all there is to say.” “Just one question. Why did Manet turn to this painting and not another one to paint his Olympia? He had a lot of other pinups, as you call them. Why this one?” “That’s the sort of question that doesn’t interest me. I don’t have second sight, and I don’t like guessing games.” “It’s not a guessing game.” “What is it then? You’re not claiming to know what Manet was thinking when he looked at this painting, are you? I’m sure he knew nothing about iconography or the history of the painting. He was a painter, after all, not an art historian.” “Well put. But he definitely saw something that interested him enough to paint his Olympia, and even, a few years earlier, to paint a small copy of the Venus of Urbino.” “Are you hoping to figure out exactly what Manet saw? You’re not so naive as to believe . . .” “No. I’m just trying to look at the painting. To forget iconography. To see how it functions.” “That’s not art history.” “Let’s just say that it’s unusual for art history. Maybe it’s time things changed. If art has had a history and if it continues to have one, it’s thanks to artists and thanks to, among other things, the gaze they cast on the works of the past, the way in which they appropriated them. If you don’t try to understand this gaze, to rediscover in an earlier paintThe Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 100

ing what it was that could retain the gaze of a later artist, you are relinquishing an entire part of art history, its most artistic part. In the case of the Venus of Urbino, it’s all the more regrettable because Olympia contributed to the birth of modernity in painting. And you, a student of art history, believe that this question doesn’t concern you? How can you, just like that, forget about the extraordinary fate of the Venus of Urbino when it belongs to what you call the ‘critical fortune’ of the painting, even if it was a painter and not a writer who analyzed it?” “In any event, Manet is on my side. He, too, saw a pinup in the woman, a courtesan if you prefer, because he turned her into a prostitute waiting for her customer.” “More iconography! Look at the painting, for Pete’s sake! I’m talking about composition, space, the relations between figure and ground, between the figure and us, its viewers!” “Everything’s already been said about that.” “Are you sure?” “Do you really want me to repeat what everyone already knows?” “You never know . . .” “Okay. Here goes. But I’m summarizing. In 1538, Titian was inspired by the Dresden Venus. He knew it well because he had finished (or retouched) the painting after Giorgione’s death in 1510. Giorgione had painted his nude wife sleeping in a landscape; a quarter of a century later, Titian modernized her by waking the figure (as others had done before him) and placing her on a bed in a Venetian palace. All of a sudden, the identity of the figure is no longer clear. In Giorgione’s work, she is obviously a nymph or Venus—­only gods, nymphs, and satyrs are naked in nature. In Titian’s work, however, there is no way of knowing if this nude woman is Venus or a courtesan. In my opinion, she’s a courtesan. Her bed is not quite worthy of Venus. Perhaps it was this ambiguity that attracted Manet; despite her perfect beauty, she is not an ideal woman. He could draw inspiration from her to paint his prostitute and take away the myth’s sacred aura. So he used the composition of the whole but altered the relation between the figures and the

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Édouard Manet Olympia, 1863 Musée d’Orsay, Paris

ground, changing the dog into a cat and adding a few ‘modern’ details. I don’t see what else there is to say.” “Maybe you need to look more carefully by reading less iconographically. You never know. For example, you say that in Titian’s painting the nude woman is in a palace.” “It’s obvious.” “Well, if that’s the case, how do you get from the bed to the room at the back?” “What do you mean ‘how do you get’ there?” “What is the link between them? Where is the bed?” “In the foreground.” “Of the painting, yes. But in relation to the room? What is that big area of black paint behind the figure’s torso? What does it represent? And what is that brownish horizontal line that marks the edge of the bed between the woman’s thigh and the sleeping dog?” “How should I know? What do you want it to be?” “Me? Nothing. However, this black zone is not a curtain, as Panofsky thought; he saw in its vertical cut a ‘curtain’s edge’; and the brown line is not the ‘edge of ornamental tiling’ either. Apparently the old Panofsky forgot what the young Panofsky had written. Do you remember his 1932 text on the problems of description? He says that a ‘purely formal’ description should not use words such as ‘stone,’ ‘man,’ or ‘rock.’ ” “Yes. Even if that’s not my cup of tea.” “I’m sure it isn’t. He says that a ‘purely formal’ description should only see elements of composition ‘totally devoid of meaning’ or even having a ‘plurality of meanings’ on the spatial plane. Do you remember? For Panofsky, in 1932, to say that a body is placed ‘in front of ’ a night sky (he is talking about Grunewald’s risen Christ), and I quote, ‘would be to relate something that represents to something that is represented, a spatially ambiguous formal element to an unequivocally three-­dimensional presentation content . . . ’ ”2 From Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).—­Trans.

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“Good Lord! What a memory!” “That is an essential sentence for me. But Panofsky sort of forgot it when much later he described the Venus of Urbino.” “And you have forgotten that immediately after, he states that such a ‘purely formal’ description is impossible in practice. Even before it has begun, every description must transform the purely formal elements of the painting into symbols of something represented. My quote is not exact. I am not a Panofsky fetishist.” “I have not forgotten the rest of his text. And with good reason! It is the very basis, the initial impetus that justifies the validity of his iconographic approach. I am saying, nonetheless, that in certain instances—­ and the Venus of Urbino is a very good example—­this immediate identification, preceding any analysis, of formal elements with specific objects that we rush to name, prevents us from understanding the work of the painter and, in the end, makes us miss the point of the painting.” “That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I am not a big Panofsky fan, but he is a great Titian expert, one of the greatest . . .” “He no doubt knows Titian better than I do. But he missed the point of this painting. And in any case, those two lines, the vertical one and the horizontal one, are neither an edge of a curtain nor an edge of the ornamental tiling.” “Why not?” “Oh, come on! You know what sixteenth-­century Venetian palaces looked like. Did you ever see any that looked like that?” “Like what? What’s the problem with this palace?” “Just look! The bed, for example. You said that it wasn’t worthy of Venus, and you are right. More than you realize. Look at it: Does it look like it’s resting on the floor?” “Obviously. Did you ever see a hanging bed in the sixteenth century?” “No. What I mean is that the two mattresses look as if they are placed directly on the tiling. They are an extension of it.” “Hey, that’s true. I didn’t notice.”

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“Under these conditions, Venus is lying on two mattresses resting on the floor . . .” “So it seems, yes, but that’s absurd. You’re turning her into a student who doesn’t have space in her studio and who opens her hide-­a-­bed when her boyfriend comes over.” “Why a student? You and your iconography. . . . Let’s skip it. You’re right, it’s absurd. The placement of the bed in the room is implausible.” “That’s true, especially since beds in the sixteenth century were very high.” “Exactly. And that black curtain whose edge seems to be at precisely the same level as Venus’s sex? How could Panofsky see a curtain in it? The edge doesn’t have a fold, not a single wave. It’s not a very good curtain. Its edge is nothing but a geometric line, absolutely rectilinear. In point of fact, there is a curtain behind Venus, but it’s green, raised, and knotted above her head. As a result, that big swath of black paint is certainly not a curtain.” “So it’s a wall?” “Do you know of any Venetian rooms cut in half by a wall or a sliding panel? I don’t. . . . You’re not answering?” “No. I admit you’re right, but I don’t know where you’re going with this.” “Precisely. It’s not a curtain, it’s not a wall. It doesn’t correspond to anything we know, nothing that can be found in reality. It doesn’t represent anything. The same is true of the ‘edge of the tiling.’ In fact, Panofsky talks about the edge of a curtain and the edge of the tiling because it allows him to see a coherent representation of a palace room in the painting. But the painting is incoherent . . .” “Oh, no you don’t. I refuse. No painting exists that is as ‘coherent,’ as you say, as this one. Perhaps there is none other more constructed, more obviously constructed, with its two complementary and corollary parts: in the foreground, nudity, horizontality, gentle curves; in the background, clothing, verticality, straight lines. And we could go on and on, with echoes of each part’s dominant formal principle in The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 106

the other part. I know how to look at painting, too. How can you say that this painting is ‘incoherent’? That takes the cake! It is perfectly constructed.” “Careful there! It is not perfectly constructed: it is obviously constructed. Ostensibly, even. Almost too constructed. In the meantime, you still haven’t told me how one gets from the foreground to the background, or what the big black swath behind the figure represents.” “I haven’t a clue. And I don’t care. I don’t see the point of the question.” “I’m going to tell you the point. The only way to describe this swath of black paint is to say that it is a screen . . .” “A screen?” “Yes, a presentation screen for the figure.” “That’s an anachronism. Even more of an anachronism than talking about a wall, a sliding panel, or a curtain!” “Not true. In 1512, in a Sacred Conversation with the Virgin and Child and a donor, Titian had already used this layout to present the Virgin and distinguish her position from that of the donor standing out in front of a landscape.” “Do you mean the Sacred Conversation held in the Fondazione Magnani-­Rocca?” “That’s the one. In 1538, twenty-­six years later, Titian uses this layout again to present his donna ignuda.” “I see what you’re up to. You’re going to say that with this ‘screen,’ Titian is suggesting a sanctification, a divinization of the female body. And you’re going to quote from Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore in which Titian’s paintings are praised to the skies and called the ‘Paradise of our bodies.’ I see what you’re up to!” “And you’d be right. In fact, the Dialogo d’amore was written in Venice in 1537, a year before the painting . . .” “Yes, and in the Dialogo d’amore precisely who, in fact, is praising Titian? It’s Tullia d’Aragona, the most refined courtesan in Venice. So

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we’ve come full circle: I’ve been telling you all along that this naked woman is . . .” “A pinup! Again! Whatever. You’re starting to get on my nerves with your pinup and your iconography. We’re not talking about that now; we’re talking about the screen behind the woman! It’s neither a curtain nor a wall! That’s what I’m trying to get you to see! And its edge is not the edge of a curtain or a wall. Nor is there any tiling edge! They are edges, nothing more. Pure edges. They don’t represent a thing. They merely set the boundary between the painting’s two zones: the bed with the naked woman and the room with the servants. They don’t represent anything, and that’s why it’s impossible to say to what they would correspond in a room in a Venetian palace. They don’t represent anything, but these edges serve a purpose: they link the two zones of the painting. They are edges and as such they do what all edges do, they . . .” “All right. Take it easy. You’re speaking so quickly now that I can’t understand a word you’re saying. They are edges. Okay. Calm down!” “Sorry . . .” “What are you getting at?” “These two zones don’t belong to the same space. That’s what I’m getting at. Spatially, they are not continuous, they are contiguous. That’s why one can’t ‘pass’ from one to the other. And that’s also why one cannot imagine, conceive, the spatial unity of the room in a coherent way. In fact, we should no longer say that the Venus of Urbino is in a palace because the unity of the painting is not a spatial unity. There are two zones juxtaposed and held together by the sole surface of the painting.” “Forgive me, but I think you’re going a bit too far here. What happens to perspective in that case? The entire back room is constructed in perspective. And Titian himself paid a great deal of attention to it, which is extremely rare in all of his oeuvre. The tiling in perspective is carefully constructed; therefore, this geometric perspective must have played a decisive role for him in the painting’s construction.” “I agree.” The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 108

“Good. At least we agree on that! But then, what is this geometric perspective doing if it’s not constructing a spatial unity?” “Now it’s my turn to say ‘forgive me.’ I don’t want to offend you, but I think it’s a little more subtle than that. Perspective indeed constructs the painting’s unity. But it is not a spatial unity, it is a mental unity.” “Go slowly now. I’m afraid I’m not going to understand.” “Not to fear, it’s quite simple. In this painting, perspective constructs a spatial unity. But this unity is limited to the room where the servants are. The bed does not belong to the same space. The perspective is confined; it does not combine the bed and the back room in one spatial unity. So, as far as the whole painting is concerned, perspective plays a different role. It constructs a unity of another order, a mental unity.” “Go on . . .” “It won’t take long and I’ll speak slowly. As you know, in order to construct a regular perspective, you need two points: the vanishing point, which corresponds to the position of our gaze in front of the painting, and the point of distance, which indicates the distance at which we are situated, in theory, in relation to the painting and determines the speed at which things appear to grow smaller ‘in depth.’ Okay? In the Venus of Urbino, the vanishing point of the lines of the tiling is placed level with Venus’s left hand and at the height of her left eye. As for the point of distance, it is located at the edge of the painting . . .” “That was standard studio technique in Venice.” “No doubt. But these two points nonetheless give us—­you, me, Guidobaldo, everyone—­a precise and calculated place in relation to the painting . . .” “You’re not going to claim to know at what height the painting was supposed to be hung and where people were supposed to stand to look at it?” “No. I’m just talking about a theoretical place, the one that the painting’s geometry assigns to its viewer.” “I’m relieved to hear it.”

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“This theoretical place is essential to the painting’s effect—­and to its thinking, to Titian’s thinking. Visually, we are very close to the naked body. It appears in front of the back room. Look at the servants. They are teeny-­tiny. The one who is standing is not even half the size of Venus’s body. They seem to be very close to each other, but they are very far away. Or rather, Titian used the perspective of the background to construct a kind of trompe l’oeil that makes the naked body loom toward us.” “I’m with you so far.” “The vanishing point is set at the height of our gaze in relation to the painting. It is located just above the center, at the level of Venus’s left eye. But, in relation to the space represented in the background, this is a very low point of view.” “What do you mean, ‘low’?” “In relation to the servant, who is standing, our eye is level with the middle of her legs. So we are very low in comparison. In fact, the position of our gaze is practically at the level of the servant who is kneeling, with her hands plunged in the chest. Do you agree?” “Go on . . .” “All right. Well, given the fact that the bed seems (and I said ‘seems’) to be resting on the floor, we are supposed to be kneeling very close to the bed.” “I see. You’re going to say that we are the ones who folded the sheet in the bottom left . . .” “No. I’m not crazy. I am quite aware that the painting was meant to be seen and not touched. But I also believe that this painting plays on the dialectic of touch . . .” “Dialectic . . . I don’t like that word . . .” “ . . . and sight. In fact, we are facing the painting the same way that the kneeling servant in the painting is facing the chest. Let me stress that she is the intermediary of our position, not of our action, in relation to the painting.” “I might as well tell you that these are the kinds of trendy lucubrations I abhor. Today we are supposed to find our intermediary in the The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 110

painting at all costs. As if the painting needed us! You and your colleagues are a pretentious, unbearably anachronistic lot. I, on the other hand, am a historian. Less amusing, no doubt, but I cannot tolerate this appropriation of the past by modern ideas. I don’t know why I’m still discussing this with you. Or, rather, why I’m listening to you ranting and raving about this poor painting!” “Don’t go! I’m almost finished.” “Well, please hurry it up.” “All I’m saying is that the painting’s construction theoretically—­ and I do mean theoretically—­gives us a position in relation to Venus that is the equivalent of the servant’s in relation to the chest: very near her face and kneeling in front of her. I know we are really standing some distance away. This position is an effect produced by the painting’s layout.” “Are you finished now?” “Almost. Just two more consequences. The first is that the room with the two servants acts as a ‘painting within the painting’ . . .” “Where did you get that? You’re like a magician who keeps pulling rabbits out of his hat . . .” “It was an Italian art historian who said that in the 1950s. I forget his name but he was right. The absence of spatial continuity between the back room and the bed, emphasized by the presence of the two ‘edges’ that were bothering you a while ago, make this back room a kind of ‘painting within a painting.’ ” “Agreed.” “So, the fact that we are fictively—­and I do mean fictively—­placed in front of the painting like the servant in front of the chest confirms what Chastel said a long time ago in relation to the ‘painting within the painting.’ ”3

André Chastel, “Le tableau dans le tableau,” in Fables, Formes, Figures (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 2:75–­98.—­Trans.

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“That’s right! Go get André Chastel to the rescue! You’ve got some nerve!” “I admit it. He doesn’t in fact mention the Venus of Urbino in this regard. But he has an excellent way of putting it, much more daring than anything I’ve said until now. According to him, when a painter paints a ‘painting within a painting,’ the latter often presents the ‘production scenario’ of the painting in which it is.” “That’s not exactly what he wrote. You should reread it.” “I know. I’m using what he wrote in order to say that this back room with its two servants allows us to see the scenario according to which the painting we are looking at, the Venus of Urbino, was conceived.” “Woe is me!” “What’s happening?” “Really! The things people say! They’re completely baffling!” “We already discussed the cassoni, those hope chests that the fiancée brings with her . . .” “Yes . . .” “You know as well that the first female nudes depicted without a particular narrative context were painted in the fifteenth century on the inside of the lids of these chests . . .” “I know. You’re not the first to bring up these nudes. Kenneth Clark already mentioned them in his book on the nude. And Edgar Wind alludes to them in his text that begins with a wonderful description of the Venus of Urbino. They were real scholars who didn’t need nonsensical hypotheses to interpret a painting.” “Real scholars indeed. They mention the nudes in the chests but what they say doesn’t lead anywhere as far as the Venus of Urbino is concerned. Clark discusses them in relation to the Dresden Venus, which has nothing to do with our painting. And Wind mentions them in a footnote, without gleaning any idea from them, all caught up as he is in his neo-­Platonic glosses.” “And you? What do you make of them?”

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“It’s quite simple. To respond to the request of his client, who wants a painting of a naked woman outside of any marital context . . .” “A pinup . . .” “ . . . Titian goes to find the naked woman where she is. First, he takes the overall pose of the figure from Giorgione’s painting done thirty years earlier. Then, because he turns her into an urban Venus by having her lie on a bed that seems to be in a palace, he goes to find her on the inside of the lids of those hope chests and places his naked woman in the foreground.” “Very clever. But I don’t know; it’s a bit flimsy.” “Wait. It’s not simply chance that the black swath behind her echoes the color on the inside of the lid that is raised in front of the kneeling servant girl. In fact, the construction of the whole painting is a little rigid, with its abrupt juxtaposition of the two spaces. And in this rigidity, I can see the trace of the operation that produced the painting. In a way, the painting is a kind of working drawing, the first painting of a naked woman lying down that Titian painted outside any narrative context.” “I share your opinion on that last point. But for other reasons. Vasari says she is a ‘young Venus,’ una Venere giovinetta, and Giovanni della Casa believes she looks like a ‘Theatine nun’ if you compare her to Titian’s 1545 Danae. It’s true that she doesn’t have the radiant skin of the women Titian painted after her. It’s also true that it’s his first nude of this type, lying on a bed. And yet he was almost fifty years old. This is probably because no one commissioned him to paint one before. I also agree that the composition is a bit stiff, intellectual. In fact, he never repeated it, whereas he readily repeated his compositions in the nudes that followed. The x-­radiograph of his Danae even showed that he had, while he was painting it, abandoned a layout similar to that of the Venus of Urbino. All of this is true: the Venus of Urbino holds a unique position in Titian’s entire oeuvre; I would even say she is a kind of template or matrix, the crucible, in a way, of his future nudes that will bring him fame in Europe. But I have one objection to your analysis of the chests. The nudes on the lids of these chests were a fifteenth-­century The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 114

Florentine practice that had for the most part gone out of style in 1538. In any case, they are not a Venetian practice. In Venice, the chests were not painted; they were sculpted with decorative motifs, like the ones in the background with the two servant girls. Therefore, as far as your alleged ‘scenario of production’ for the Venus of Urbino based on the chest, the kneeling servant girl, our theoretical position in relation to the painting, and so on, your argument does not hold. Really, your entire reasoning is ‘theoretical.’ It’s not even that. You’re just talking, not producing knowledge. And history is not just talk or theory.” “You’re right. I don’t need to say that Titian was inspired by Florentine chests—­although nothing prevents me from thinking he had seen some, or that he was aware of them. But it doesn’t matter.” “What do you mean, ‘it doesn’t matter’?” “I don’t need that. It was just to please you, because you like proven facts. I was mistaken. I won’t do it again. But I don’t need those Florentine chests . . .” “You don’t?” “No. It’s the painting itself that matters. These horizontal chests, with their convex curves, echo the curves of the female body lying on the bed. And they are also associated with it, because they contain the clothes of the naked figure in the foreground. And by the by, we shouldn’t say that the Venus of Urbino is ‘naked,’ but rather, that she is ‘undressed.’ ” “What a brilliant discovery! You’re joking, right?” “Not at all. The Venus of Urbino is not the first naked woman in European painting. But it could very well be the first painting of an undressed woman, presented as such and aware of it. As they say in English, she is less ‘nude’ than ‘naked.’4 She knows it but she doesn’t feel guilty about it. She doesn’t have the sense of shame that clearly distinguishes nudity before and after the Original Sin, a feeling that should torment all good Christians . . .” “Nude” and “naked” are in English in the original.—­Trans.

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“You’re rambling . . .” “Not so much, but, okay, let’s get back to the point. By placing in the foreground this naked female body, and by showing in the background the servant girls fussing about with the clothing in the chest, Titian is suggesting what the contents of the chest are meant to hide. And there is no need to point out that these hope chests were typically women’s things. I almost want to say that it’s as if this woman had come naked out of the chest, and that it’s not by chance that the curves of the chest and the curves of her body echo each other on a formal level . . .” “The woman as chest, the chest as woman!” “That’s not what I said.” “If you can find a single text to support your . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . your hypothesis, well, I’ll eat my hat.” “Don’t make bets! There must be some somewhere. Besides, don’t you know what these sculpted chests were called in Venice? They were called ‘sarcophagus chests.’ Don’t you think that’s an odd name for a young bride’s hope chest?” “The sarcophagus-­woman! The flesh-­eating woman! Do you realize what you’re saying?” “You’re the one who said it.” “Yeah, right. Go ahead, tell people I’m the one who came up with your nonsense.” “I would never. People know you. No one would believe me.” “And they’d be right not to. Now let me tell you what I think of all your gibberish. It’s not the figure who is masturbating, it’s you! Intellectual masturbation is what you’re doing. You’re complicating the whole thing when it’s really quite simple.” “How so?” “The Venus of Urbino is an erotic painting and the sexual come-­on is evident. The chests are not necessarily allusions to marriage or even to a matrimonial relationship in general. As for the model, she had already been painted by Titian, and the painting would be copied for other customers. In fact, this nude woman plays the same role in The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 116

painting as a courtesan does in reality: she moves from one customer to the next without batting an eyelid. I stand my ground: she’s nothing but a pinup. All your lovely speechifying did not make me change my mind.” “Fine. I give up trying to make you let go of that word. But let’s suppose that, if it is a pinup, Titian staged it in a curious way. We’re not going to go back to where we started, but since you like things to be crystal clear, you agree that the bed and the back room don’t belong to the same space, and that Panofsky is wrong when he talks about the ‘edge of a curtain’ and the ‘edge of the ornamental tiling.’ ” “I do. But you’re going too far in what you’re trying to make of these details.” “Granted. Let’s try to take your pinup from another angle.” “Careful now . . .” “What about what her left hand is doing?” “What about it?” “Is it the same thing as in the Dresden Venus?” “Yes.” “But the meaning has changed.” “Maybe.” “Definitely.” “Why?” “In Giorgione’s work, she’s sleeping. Her gesture is unconscious. Perhaps she’s dreaming. Here, she is wide awake; she knows what she’s doing and she’s looking at us.” “Granted.” “So, she is looking at us and she is touching herself.” “Please, don’t be vulgar.” “It is what it is. You said so yourself. So, she is looking at us and touching herself, waiting to be touched.” “You’re nuts!” “No. I’m staying within the fiction of the painting.” “Really?”

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“Yes. If she is touching herself, it’s in the hope of being penetrated and, with a little luck, fecundated.” “Okay.” “But we . . . I mean, the person to whom the painting is addressed, Guidobaldo della Rovere, would have been nuts if he had begun to make love to this painting.” “It’s happened in the past. The story of Pliny and the young man so mad with desire for the Venus of Cnidus that one night he leaves behind the trace of his pleasure . . .” “That’s a wonderful juxtaposition. You are brilliant. Except for the fact that the Venus of Cnidus is a statue and not a painting, you have grasped everything. We’ll wind up agreeing in the end.” “I don’t think so . . .” “Yes we will. You agree that neither Titian nor Guidobaldo was crazy.” “I do.” “So this painting, which invites us to touch this naked woman, at the same time keeps us in a position of only allowing us to look at her. Otherwise, we would be crazy.” “Agreed.” “So, this painting that makes us want to touch also forces us only to look.” “Thank goodness.” “Of course. But it is not simply a matter of a scopic drive . . .” “What’s that?” “It doesn’t matter.” “Evidently, there are a lot of things that don’t matter to you. It’s becoming worrisome.” “The main thing, and what makes the Venus of Urbino an exceptional painting, is that it stages what constituted the very erotics of classical painting . . .” “Oh? That’s all?” The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 118

“ . . . to go from touch to sight, to substitute sight for touch, to make of sight an almost-­touch but in order to see, not to touch. To see, only to see. And I think that if this painting interested Manet, it’s because it emphasizes this exclusive relationship of sight by exhibiting, in the painting’s foreground, a figure who is seeing and touching herself. Have you read Michael Fried?” “Another one! What’s he got to do with this? As far as I know, he never wrote on the Renaissance. Why do you want me to read him? What’s he got to do with the Venus of Urbino?” “Olympia and the way Manet looked at Titian’s painting.” “Here we go . . .” “Yes. Here we go and here we are. According to Fried, in the 1860s, Manet was working on the ‘primordial convention’ that paintings ‘were made to be beheld.’ ” “And to think that we had to wait for a prophet from the New World to reveal this statement of the obvious.” “Don’t jump to sarcastic conclusions. What Fried says is that Manet wanted to transform the theater of painting. He abandoned classical theatricality based on perspectival mise-­en-­scène and the literary subject. He was looking for a theatricality based solely on painting. According to Fried, Manet sought to make paintings that simply wanted to present themselves to the beholders, to look at them. Manet attempted, as Fried said, to make each part of the surface of the painting face the beholder. That’s what he calls the facingness5 of Manet’s paintings. And this facingness, this face-­to-­face between the painting and its beholders is the birth of modernity.” “If you say so. That’s not my specialty. So how is that related to Titian?” “We’re getting there. Fried also believes that Manet found, in the erotic nude, a support well suited to what he was trying to do. Because In English in the original. From Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).—­Trans.

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nudity presupposes a subject offering itself more ostensibly than any other as object of the gaze of a male public . . .” “A pinup! I was right!” “Please.” “And what happened to Titian in all that?” “I’m getting there. Fried doesn’t mention him. But according to what we just said about the Venus of Urbino, he does enable us to understand what Manet may have seen in the painting and therefore to better understand Titian’s work.” “That’s just sleight of hand. It’s not art history . . .” “One question: Where is the Venus of Urbino?” “In Florence, at the Uffizi.” “I mean, where is the figure of Venus if she isn’t in a palace?” “Good question! She’s in the painting, by Jove!” “Come on, don’t make fun of me. She isn’t in the painting. You know that a painting has no inside. You don’t enter a painting.” “Okay. So she’s on the painting. So what?” “You’re getting hotter! What does ‘on the painting’ mean?” “It means ‘on the painting.’ ” “Now you’re getting cold. Let’s rephrase the question: What space is she in?” “The space of the painting.” “Not really, because the space of the painting is the one that’s determined by perspective, and we saw that the bed did not belong to that.” “You’re sticking to that!” “Yes, because it is the very foundation of the effect of the Venus of Urbino and what Manet saw in it.” “So, go ahead. Where is she? Let’s get this over with.” “Venus occupies a precise place, that of the bed, situated between two spaces that are clearly defined and linked together: the fictional space of the room with the servants and the real space of the room from which we are looking at the painting. But the place of the bed escapes these two spaces. It occupies an area ‘between two spaces.’ ” The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 120

“Could you kindly spare me such disagreeable jargon?” “Let’s just say that the place of the bed—­but I could also say the bed as place (of the naked body)—­is between two spaces . . .” “That’s better.” “And this place, this bed, is nothing other than the surface of the canvas . . .” “Hey, I just remembered that, already in the seventeenth century, Boschini used the word ‘bed’ in regard to the layers of paint with which Titian coated his paintings before painting on them.” “I’ll take it! That’s even better. In the Venus of Urbino, Venus’s bed represents this bed, this surface of paint from which the naked woman emerges, very close to us, and from where she looks at us. And here, I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin and his definition of the aura, ‘the unique apparition of a distance.’ ” “Hold on! What’s this now?” “Skip it. Let’s get back to the painting. The woman is looking at us from the painting’s surface and she is looking directly at us: wherever you are, you are under her gaze. As Fried said, and I’m quoting loosely, and not about Titian but about Manet, she places us under the authority of her gaze, a gaze that is fixed and imperious. That’s what Manet saw. And that’s what he transformed. In his work, the entire surface is looking directly at the beholder: the servant girl has come to the foreground from the dark background, the sleeping dog has become a cat turned aggressively toward the viewer.” “That’s anecdotal.” “But the anecdotes shape the general principle of the painting: to construct a surface that is looking at the beholder. Manet eliminated all perspective. The painting has no depth. It is all surface, and this choice is confirmed by a minuscule transformation. Minuscule and decisive. Manet carefully undid the direct relation that Titian had established between the position of our gaze, the woman’s sex, and the depth . . .” “Which depth? Of the painting or of her sex?”

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“You decide. In Titian’s work, perspective placed our gaze exactly level with the hand caressing the sex, and this position was emphasized by the vertical line that indicates the edge of the black area that stands out against the depth of the back room. Manet undid this condensation. He painted, almost at the same spot, a vertical stripe. But this stripe has slid to the right; it no longer points to the sex. Manet has ‘spread’ on the surface what Titian had condensed between surface and depth. He pulled the depth to the surface. It’s the entire painting that is face-­to-­face with us. The position of our gaze no longer determines the internal structure of the painting and our relation to it. Fried was right. One form of modernity was born.” “If you say so. Okay for Manet. I listened to you without saying a word. That’s not my field. But, honestly, for Titian, what’s the point of everything you’re saying?” “You don’t see it?” “No. Let’s say that Manet appropriated Titian, as you say. Let’s agree, too, that he saw in the painting what you say he saw. Why not? But what does that have to do with Titian? What does that bring to our understanding of his painting? Historically, I just don’t see it.” “There are a variety of ways to be a historian.” “You think so?” “First of all, let me say something else that is obvious according to you: the way in which Manet appropriated Titian shows that Titian’s painting was open to being appropriated, that it contained, potentially, what Manet saw in it—­and this confirms, on another level, its nature as a working drawing. The Venus of Urbino was indeed, as you said, the template or matrix for the female nude. But not only in Titian’s work; it would also be the template for the revolution that Manet introduced into this female nude. So, the transformation of the Venus of Urbino into Olympia allows us to perceive how Titian fabricated—­without his knowing it perhaps—­what would be, for several centuries, the template of a veritable erotics of classical painting. It is also this erotics that Manet undid. Not the erotics of a pinup, but the erotics of painting.”

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“How you do go on!” “Don’t I though?” “So how did Manet do it?” “Not only did Manet ‘flatten’ Titian’s painting; he quashed the erotic relationship that the painting established with its beholder.” “I agree, but how does that help us to understand Titian’s erotics?” “Let’s go back to the left hand.” “Whose?” “Olympia’s. Look at it. It’s no longer caressing her sex; it is firmly resting on her thigh, facing the viewer. It is hiding her sex; no, more than that, it is blocking the entryway. Olympia is looking at us, but she isn’t ‘touching’ herself. In Titian’s work . . .” “You already said it several times: ‘she is touching herself and looking at us, she is looking at us and touching herself, etcetera.’ ” “Yes. And I also said—­and you even agreed with me—­that with this gesture she’s letting us know that we viewers can only look at her, unless we are crazy.” “All right. But all of that is extremely trite. It’s a painting, after all. As they say, it was created to be looked at. I don’t see how any of that makes the Venus of Urbino a matrix or a working drawing for the erotics of classical painting. Once again, you’re exaggerating. You like to argue, infer things. You’re enjoying yourself, nothing more.” “And why shouldn’t I be? Let’s be serious. What allows me to say this is the role that perspective plays in the painting. Do you still agree that, from this point of view as well, the Venus of Urbino is an exception in Titian’s work?” “Yes. But what has that got to do with the erotics of painting?” “Here, too, you won’t be happy with what I’m about to say.” “I promise to stay calm.” “Do you remember Alberti? Good. So you remember that he made Narcissus the inventor of painting.” “He says he’s just taking up the ‘words of the poets.’ ” The Woman in the Chest The Venus of Urbino 124

“That’s what he says. But we still haven’t found the poets to whom he refers. In my opinion, they don’t exist. Moreover, he says that ‘among friends.’ It’s a private statement, not a scholarly one. In fact, it’s pure fantasy, his own invention. But it is not gratuitous. It is in keeping with what he says directly afterward; unlike Pliny, he is not writing the history of painting, but making a very new critical analysis of painting. In other words, a new art of painting.” “Avanti! Per favore!” “You agree that the foundation of this new art is perspective? Good. So, Alberti invents both perspective as the basis of painting and Narcissus as the inventor of painting. In other words, he makes Narcissus the inventor of perspective in painting, of painting in perspective.” “Ah! Reasoning at its finest!”

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“And you! Such bad faith! The relationship between Narcissus and perspective is obviously established through the mirror, the mirror of the fountain where Narcissus looks at himself and the plane of representation as mirror of the world.” “I know, I know. ‘What else can you call painting but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the water in the fountain?’ ”6 “Don’t you find this sentence a bit bizarre?” “No. What’s wrong with it?” “The term ‘embrace’ for the surface of the painting is bizarre.” “Bizarre? What’s so bizarre about it? Alberti knew what he was writing.” “Exactly. The word seems natural but it is very carefully chosen. The word in French—­embrasser—­alludes to the arm [bras], and, as Alberti wrote in book 1, to the basic unit of the entire perspectival construction of the painting. But he also says what he says very directly; the term ‘embrace,’ to take in one’s arms, to touch body to body, and even to kiss.” “Not in Italian: ‘to embrace’ is abbracciare; ‘to kiss’ is baciare.” “True.” “And then, embrasser, ‘to kiss,’ is precisely what Narcissus refuses to do with Echo.” “And that is also what he cannot do with his own image reflected in the mirror of the fountain. He can neither touch it nor kiss it. So he loses it; it is lost. Narcissus is the inventor of painting because he brings forth an image he desires and that he cannot and must not touch. He is constantly caught between the desire to kiss this image and the need to keep his distance in order to see it. That is the erotics of painting that Alberti invented, and that is what Titian stages in the Venus of Urbino.” “That’s quite amusing. It makes me think of a passage in Speroni’s Dialogo d’amore. Once again, the grand courtesan Tullia d’Aragona is Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).—­Trans.

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speaking. She wonders why lovers are always torn between the desire to see and the desire to touch; why, when they hold each other, they pull back a little and stop touching each other in order to see each other, and why, hardly have they seen each other, they once again start to hold each other and kiss. It’s a very charming text.” “So it seems.” “At heart, by giving such importance to perspective in the erotic dynamics of the painting . . .” “Hm. You’re beginning to sound like me . . .” “ . . . you are using the argument of that American woman who talks about the ‘inert perspective’ in the Venus of Urbino and who sees in it a sort of symbol for the shifting of touch toward sight that is characteristic of Alberti’s layout.” “You mean Mary Pardo? Exactly. What she wrote is excellent, and I almost regret not having thought of it earlier, or figured it out by myself. It is precisely this shift, this withdrawal of touch in order to see it that the mise-­en-­scène of the Venus of Urbino forces us to do. The kneeling servant girl touches but doesn’t see anything; we see but we cannot touch, and yet the figure sees us and is touching herself.” “A pinup. That’s exactly what I was telling you. She’s a pinup.” “Oh, Charles! I give up. It’s hopeless. You don’t want to see a thing.”

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The Eye of the Master

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The Eye of the Master

Las Meninas! Oh, no, not again! For pity’s sake! Enough already! Everything’s been said about it! Everything? Or nothing? What’s the difference, enough is definitely enough! It has been exactly thirty-­three years, the “age of Christ” as they say, that people have been going on about Las Meninas. Ever since the great Foucault decided to write about it in The Order of Things in 1966, it’s unbelievable how everyone has been determined to have his or her say. To help us comprehend it better, there was even a volume of critical texts published on it. But that’s nothing compared to the mass of things that have been written about it by serious men and women who argued, confirmed, deepened, or added nuance to our understanding. There were even fools who acted as if Foucault had never existed, as if his chapter had not informed and altered our gaze. And then, very recently, there was a curator at the Prado who noticed a small white spot on the dwarf ’s lace, and saw that the gold ring she had previously held between the thumb and index finger of her left hand had been erased. Goodness! What a discovery! Using technical analyses and x-­ radiographs, the curator managed to come up with a radically new political, dynastic analysis. What a revolution! The worst, as you know, is that she may be right. Everyone else will just have to throw in the towel. So why on earth are you getting involved in this business? What could you still possibly have to say? Everything in the painting has been interpreted, even the things we don’t see. We know all there is to know about it. Its size, its techniques, its date—­or rather, its dates, since Velázquez went back to it to add his Legion of Honor award, the cross of Santiago that the king had given him two years after he painted his masterpiece (unless perhaps he completely repainted the left half and added himself altogether at that time?). We know the names and the

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Velázquez Las Meninas, 1656 Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

functions of the individuals represented. We know the hall in the palace where the painting was painted and that it depicts. We have even identified the invisible paintings that can be seen on it: not only the ones facing us, but also the ones we see from the side. In short, we know everything and have imagined everything about this painting, for better or for worse. Honestly, what do you want to add to this? Leave the painting alone. Let it rest a while so we can look at it, so we can have some small chance of actually seeing it. Nothing doing. You’re back at it. What’s bothering you is precisely the fact that in all the accumulated statements, all the peremptory and intersecting interpretations, there is a seemingly insurmountable distance, an irreconcilable disagreement between historians on the one hand and theorists, philosophers, and semiologists on the other. The latter usually do not take into consideration the former, whom they deem to be narrow-­minded positivists. As for the historians, forget about them! The most open-­minded among them, the most disposed to theory, can do no better than to consider the meninas “intrinsically” interesting. “Intrinsically,” that is, the meninas are interesting in themselves but not in relation to their subject, the painting hanging on the walls of the Prado. That bothers you. Even though you consider yourself to be a historian, you like theories and theorists. They think, and they help others to think. You wonder: How can the treasures of dialectics and the subtleties lavished by theorists leave professional historians indifferent? Their answer, as you know, is that they despise anachronism. They are not entirely wrong. In general, the theoretical analyses of the painting hardly take into account their own historical position. And you, too, are usually bothered by anachronism; when it is used without any real grounds, it often teaches you more about the interpreter than about the object being interpreted. That having been said, you wound up understanding that anachronism is unavoidable, even for a historian. We will never be able to recover The Eye of the Quattrocento, as the title of Michael Baxandall’s book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-­ Century Italy was (badly) translated into French. Now, rather than

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claiming to flee anachronism like the plague, you are convinced that it is better, whenever possible, to control it—­consciously, deliberately—­in order to make it work for you. After all, as one of the great historians of Velázquez wrote (somewhat vaguely, it must be said), time does not exhaust Las Meninas, it “enriches” it. Besides—­and here you are surely correct—­if there exists any painting for which hard-­core historians cannot simply reject the anachronism of “theoretical” approaches, it is this one. We didn’t have to wait for Foucault to “theorize” the painting. As early as 1692, Luca Giordano, nicknamed Luca Fà-­presto (Luke Work-­fast) for his celerity in handling the brush, and a great admirer of Velázquez’s touch, is said to have declared that Las Meninas represents “the theology of painting.” It was Palomino, Velázquez’s biographer, who recorded these words and was quick to explain this surprising phrase. According to Palomino, what Giordano meant was simple: just as theology is “superior to all other branches of knowledge,” Las Meninas is the “greatest example of painting.” This explanation is obviously somewhat limited. According to you, when Giordano spoke of the “theology of painting,” he meant, rather, that in this painting, something of the “divinity” of painting was revealed, of the deità that Leonardo da Vinci attributed to the “divine science” of painting. And, for Giordano, it wasn’t just a matter of the virtuosity of Velázquez’s touch. If this idea occurred to him, it was already because of the famous mirror and what is reflected in it that led to Foucault’s interpretation: the images of the king and queen; the king—­ that is, not just any “subject,” but the monarch, the “absolute subject.” Even a historian can no longer snub this mass of interpretations. From this point on they belong to the painting’s history. In fact, you wonder by what perversion of intelligence some historians and conservators are absolutely desperate to preserve the material traces that history has left on works, sometimes to the point of disfiguring them; you’re thinking of the shameless “codpieces” that were applied to Michelangelo’s nudes in the Sistine Chapel and that, by God’s will, but also and especially the pope’s, were carefully not removed during the The Eye of the Master Las Meninas 134

most recent restoration—­whereas they want, just as fiercely, to erase any mental traces that the history of gazes has left on these works in our memories. You, on the other hand, want to understand how a historically determined painting—­created and viewed under various material and cultural conditions—­could produce unforeseen and unforeseeable effects, unimaginable even for its creator and those to whom he originally addressed his work. What you’d like to understand is how this painting could provoke these “anachronistic” effects without contradicting what you can know or reconstitute about the conditions under which it was conceived. You insist: it is not the anachronism of Foucault’s interpretation that bothers you—­on the contrary, it is this anachronism that gave it its efficacy, that led to new inquiries, and that makes us look at the painting better, and that, in many instances, allows us to see it. What leaves you dissatisfied is the fact that the philosopher did not take the trouble to link his interpretation to the circumstances under which the painting was painted and viewed long ago, in the late 1650s. When he writes, for example, that “We must therefore pretend not to know who is to be reflected in the depths of that mirror, and interrogate that reflection in its own terms,”1 Foucault deliberately has his interpretation rely on a fiction—­a fiction that is particularly arbitrary because no one in 1656 would have thought to “pretend not to know” who is reflected there. You drive home the point: it would have occurred even less to people of that time because, in spite of its large size, this painting was a private painting, and moreover, a painting made for a single viewer, the king himself. As early as 1666, it was hung in his “summer office,” and it remained there until 1736. Indeed, Foucault democratizes the painting, he republicanizes it. His analysis relies on the conditions of museum presentation, perception, and reception. He appropriates Las Meninas. Of course, that’s his right. Like the artist’s. Perhaps he even, philosophically, has the obligation to do so. Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas,” in The Order of Things, trans. not given (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 9.—­Trans.

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You, however, want to question this reflection on its historical terms. It’s neither a matter of contradicting Foucault nor of “saving” him. He doesn’t need to be “saved.” It’s a matter of confronting his “intrinsically interesting” analysis with what might have been the conception of the painting, the concept within it, so that we might get an idea of it based on the historical circumstances of its production. You will have succeeded if you can understand how the painting, when it was no longer perceived under its predictable historical conditions, could—­by itself and through its very composition (dispositif )—­lead to anachronistic interpretations. There are surprises in store for you. You can’t stop now. So here we go. In order to reconstruct the conception of Las Meninas, we must start with the fact that it was a royal commission. It was certainly not Velázquez who decided one fine day to paint this large canvas as a surprise for his king. Obviously, Philip IV commissioned it in 1656 (it is unlikely that Queen Mariana of Austria, who was also Philip’s niece, did so). We can get some idea of what the king had in mind, thanks to the name of the painting in the royal collections: until 1843, when it got the name it now bears, Las Meninas, it was called El cuadro de la Familia (The Family Portrait). One thing is certain: this is no ordinary name. From the start, it was an exceptional painting. The subject was the royal family, first understood as the nuclear family, with the Infanta Margarita who, with her left eye in the central axis of the painting, is looking toward her parents, whose reflection we see in the mirror, and then as the extended family, which includes the infanta’s companions (the meninas or ladies-­in-­waiting) and the royal couple’s regular visitors, represented in particular by the two Velázquezes: Diego, who is painting, and who at the time was the king’s aposentador (that is, his marshal of the palace or great chamberlain), and José Nieto, the queen’s aposentador, who, in the background, appears above the room, through the open door. Basically, you are ready to accept the dynastic interpretation of the painting, which designated the infanta as heir to the throne until the birth of the Infante Philip Prospero in 1657. You The Eye of the Master Las Meninas 136

admit that the modifications to the painting, of which there are many, especially in the area occupied by Velázquez and the large stretcher, no doubt are linked to a radical reworking of the painting in 1659, necessitated by the birth of the male heir. You are pleased with this dynastic interpretation. It is plausible, and you feel that sooner or later you will have to take it into account, compare it with your own hypotheses. Nonetheless, despite the x-­radiographs, we will never really know what the painting looked like before these modifications. It is already tricky to decipher what can be seen on the painting; to interpret what we don’t see at all, or what we can barely see, takes some real mental gymnastics. Notwithstanding all the documentation and the technological apparatus she makes use of, the curator at the Prado isn’t shy about putting forward her own opinions, and you sense that, once again, the interpretation is shaped by the interpreter’s wishes. In any case, what interests you is the painting as it has been seen since 1659, as it has existed in history until today.

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So you go back to where you started: it was a commission. The king asked his aposentador to paint his “family” in the widest sense, and the painter complied. He complied so well that for once the experts haven’t disagreed on who the individuals were; they have all been identified, with the exception of the great big doggy in the foreground and the third man—­standing behind the dwarf Maribarbola—­who is not easily identified because he is in shadow. The conception of the Family Portrait obviously depends on the fact that it is a commissioned work. First of all, it is not an official portrait of the Infanta Margarita, even surrounded by her ladies-­in-­waiting. Velázquez painted her official portrait in 1656, where we see the little five-­year-­old girl all alone, standing straight in her stiff dress. She is wearing the same dress and has the same pose (reversed) in the family portrait, but this time the official stiffness is offset by the movement around her, all the way to Nicolasito, the young dwarf, who is touching the doggie with his foot. As Velázquez’s mise-­en-­scène shows, and as his previous title states more plainly, it is a private portrait of the infanta, of her companions, and the companions of the royal family. You emphasize that this private character is underscored in the “informal” presentation of the nine figures (including the dog who is trying to sleep—­whereas in the official portraits, Velázquez’s dogs always have their eyes open, even if they are lying down). In sum, the king definitely commissioned an exceptional work, this “Family Portrait,” and, in your opinion, Palomino knew what he was saying when he wrote that it was a capricho, a whim, a work of fantasy. Upon reflection, the word seems very significant to you. If there is a capricho here, it can be seen with particular clarity in the presentation of the royal couple as this diffuse reflection in the mirror. A presentation of this kind was absolutely unthinkable without the king’s approval and outside of this “capricious” conception. (Apparently, while they were being mesmerized by this mirror, historians and theorists alike forgot that they were dealing with a capricho.) Moreover, you believe that this reflection is the most brilliant point of the painting’s The Eye of the Master Las Meninas 138

concetto, a concetto most likely proposed by the painter to his king, who accepted it. So, without our thinking yet about its unexpected effects over the course of time, we can still say that in 1656, this reflection was a refined homage to the king, the homage of the great courtier that Velázquez in fact was. More than a double portrait hung in this same spot, the mirror made the royal couple the beginning and the end of the painting, its origin—­because the painter is supposed to paint them, and its destination—­because the gaze of the painted figures is turned toward their presence, which is implied by their reflection in the mirror. The idea is simple, brilliant, and, above all, does not require deep intellectual thought. You certainly would not want to transform Velázquez into an intellectual of painting (la peinture) in order to interpret the painting (le tableau). Nothing tells us that he was. We have no treatise or letter written by him, no words reported by witnesses that would allow us to imagine that Velázquez was some kind of “Spanish Poussin.” Far from it. But you also know that he had a library of 156 volumes, a truly considerable number, especially for a painter. And in all this, the theory of art—­both Spanish and Italian—­was richly represented. Obviously, Velázquez did not need to write in order to think as a painter and to produce, brush in hand, a theology of painting. For him, perhaps, “in the beginning was the paintbrush.” And you add: the courtier’s paintbrush. For if it is indeed the reflection in the mirror that has given rise to all the ruminations about the painting, including yours, its original purpose was to be the greatest capricho to the glory of the monarch. You’re turning in circles. Get on with it! So you approach it from another angle. By sketching the double royal portrait in the mirror, Velázquez created a short narrative whose fictional nature could not be in doubt at the time. You express this fictional narrative in these terms: “While the king’s painter was painting the double portrait of the king and queen in his studio, the Infanta Margarita came down to see her parents, accompanied by her ladies-­in-­ waiting. It is this private, familial moment that the painter painted and places before your eyes.”

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Velázquez Philip IV, 1631–­1632 National Gallery, London

Velázquez Infanta Margarita, 1656 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

So, what about it? Well, first of all, this fiction was convincing enough—­which amuses you—­for some modern historians to take it up. As a result, one of them went to look in the palace archives for traces of a “double royal portrait” that Velázquez might actually have painted. In vain: this double portrait does not exist; it never existed, for the simple reason that the “genre” itself did not exist. If Philip IV had wanted a double royal portrait, he would have commissioned a “double portrait,” that is, two matching, single portraits, perhaps in the style of the full-­length double portraits or the double equestrian portraits painted in the early 1630s. Other historians—­geometry and perspective buffs—­wanted to prove, compass in hand, that the mirror reflected what Velázquez was in the process of painting, the obverse of this large canvas of which we are seeing the reverse side. Thus, they would have seen the invisible, pierced the secret in the place where there is nothing to see. This, too, was in vain: not only could this painting not have existed, not only did everyone in the court know that it could not exist and therefore immediately recognized the fictional nature of the situation Velázquez had imagined, but also the size of the stretcher that we do see leads us to understand that it is the stretcher for the painting we are seeing, The Family Portrait, which is more than three meters tall (three meters eighteen centimeters to be precise)—­much larger than the full-­length royal portrait Velázquez painted the same year (which is barely two meters tall). Besides, you just need to look: even if he is slightly set back within the depth of the painting, Velázquez is much smaller than the stretcher in front of him, and if there is a dwarf to be found in this painting, it is certainly not Velázquez. In sum, rather than attempting, like a good positivist, to debunk the story imagined by Velázquez—­and once again, this was obviously a fiction for his contemporaries—­it would be more useful to recognize it for what it is: a story that pays tribute to the king, discreetly, almost surreptitiously, with that sprezzatura, that studied carelessness where art conceals art and that Baldassare Castiglione had made the greatest quality of the ideal courtier.

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Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo The Artist’s Family, 1664–­1665 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Okay, but you haven’t yet explained what this tribute consisted of. Get on with it! You have a feeling that, in order to recreate Velázquez’s courtier strategy, you need to return once more to the circumstances in which the Family Portrait was both conceived and perceived. So, you recap. Velázquez invented a fiction, and the fictional nature of his mise-­en-­scène was not in doubt at the time. To support what you are saying, you find one more explanation and add it to what you have just said: whether king, queen, or infanta, a royal model never posed for long in front of a painter. A portrait was completed from preliminary sketches in the absence of the model. The fact is well known, but if confirmation is needed, it may be found in the painting by Velázquez’s son-­in-­law, Juan Bautista del Mazo, who succeeded him in 1661 as court painter. This painting is of average size and is called, for lack of anything better, The Painter’s Family. This is an incontestable reference to the Family Portrait (even if a portrait of the king’s bust replaces, at the same spot, the reflection in the mirror), and this painting depicts the painter (Velázquez or his son-­in-­law?) in the background, in his studio, standing in front of his canvas in the process of painting a portrait of the Infanta Margarita in the model’s absence. In 1656, it was therefore out of the question to let oneself fall for Velázquez’s little ruse and to believe that the king and queen would have posed long enough for their daughter to miss them and come to see them in the painter’s studio. In fact, you are amused to learn that the painting very quickly caused the invention of a similar little tale, but its opposite. Again, it is Palomino who recounts that the king, who “greatly admired” the painting, often came to watch Velázquez painting it; and the queen, too, would “come down” often, with her infanta and ladies-­in-­waiting, to entertain herself watching the painter at work. This is the contrary, then, of what Velázquez painted. The story is lovely, but you don’t believe it. It is too reminiscent of the traditional theme of the prince, king, or emperor coming to see the artist in his studio and even going so far as to pick up the

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paintbrush that has fallen on the floor. We find the motif as far back as antiquity, with Alexander the Great and his painter Apelles. This anecdote gave Painting greater prestige—­or, in any case, it raised the prestige Painting would one day enjoy. But whether it is true or not, you’re interested in Palomino’s story anyway because it shows that, already in the late seventeenth century, the reflection in the mirror had given rise to a narrative, and it is entertaining to note that its first version reverses—­like a mirror—­the one that finally became authoritative. Which goes to show that Velázquez’s mute mirror presents a real trap for narrators of painting. But let’s get back to business. The theme of the work (the royal family and its heirs) allows the uniting of the king and queen in a pseudoreflection that confirms the unofficial, private character of both the painting and the relations represented in it. And that’s not all. Under the historical circumstances of the painting’s reception—­the painting was hung in one of the king’s private chambers, reserved for his eyes and for those of his distinguished guests (somewhat like the bridal chamber in the Ducal Palace of Mantua, where the prince is seen wearing slippers, his dog asleep under his armchair)—­the pseudoreflection of the royal couple was a tribute to the king because it confirmed the king in his “absolute position as monarch” (and here you are quoting Louis Marin, because, of course, in order to think about Las Meninas, you reread his Portrait of the King). You even go a little further: the reflection surreptitiously makes the king the “all-­seeing” one in the painting, the God of the painting. (And here you are thinking of Nicholas of Cusa, among others, and his work that you admire so much, De Visione Dei [On the Vision of God], in which the theologian uses the example of painting to make us understand the nature of God’s all-­seeing gaze, a gaze that unites all gazes.) Through this mirror, the king is all-­seeing, because the gazes that come out of the painting are meant to be turned toward him, and he looks at them from both his summer office and from the back of the painting. In your opinion, it would be difficult to come up with a better courtier concetto.

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Obviously, people will argue that Velázquez had read neither Nicholas of Cusa nor Louis Marin. You are turning him into an intellectual of a scope that contradicts what you said earlier. This argument doesn’t stop you for long because you are not claiming that the painter developed his idea conceptually. His concetto is visual; it is the words that you unavoidably must use to explain it that could make it appear that you are imagining Velázquez as philosopher. This objection even seems to you to be verging on bad faith. In fact, there are two possibilities: either one presumes that painters don’t think, that they are content to paint without understanding what they’re doing because they only care about formal issues (as the painter in Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract should have done but didn’t, so he was punished, his eyes gouged out, because he did not respect the “contract”); or else one presumes—­and this applies to you—­that they think visually, “as painters,” with their paintbrushes, and that they put forward their ideas in the works themselves, to be deciphered through the way they use the various subjects they paint, that they are given to paint. From this point of view, the courtier’s concetto in Las Meninas seems to be confirmed by the perspectival construction of the painting, which discreetly indicates that the king is the only one to possess this absolute gaze. Contrary to what one might believe at first glance, the vanishing point of the perspective is not, in fact, in the mirror but in the forearm of José Nieto Velázquez, the queen’s aposentador, whom we see at the back through the open door. This vanishing point indicates the theoretical place of our gaze and so the exacting construction of the painting implies that when we look at it, we are not directly in front of the mirror but a little farther to the right, facing the door. It also implies, therefore, that if the painted figures are looking at the king, they are not looking at us. As far as you know, Hubert Damisch is the only one to have come to truly meaningful conclusions about this slight shift. According to Damisch, by shifting the vanishing point in relation to the mirror, Velázquez “disjoined” the unity of the mirror and the door that was found in one of the models for this painting: The Eye of the Master Las Meninas 146

van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait—­with which Velázquez was well acquainted because it was part of the royal collections and in which the central mirror depicted in the door is the witness to the painting. And again, according to Damisch, this arrangement allowed Velázquez to show and articulate the gap between the “geometrical organization” of the painting and its “imaginary structure”: the first “produces” the subject by marking its place in front of the painting; in the second, this same subject manifests itself by the intent (visée) that defines it as such. You won’t dwell on the wonderful conclusions Damisch draws from this analysis; he has to be read. Besides, what interests you, self-­centered as you are, is what he brings to your own line of thought. And it’s quite a bit. As it relates to the “conception” of the painting, the placement of the vanishing line can indeed be considered neutral. Parenthetically, you are not so sure of this, because the arm of the other Velázquez is lifting a curtain, and you almost think that this gesture constitutes, at the back of the painting, a kind of metaphor for or counterpart to the painter’s activity that allows us to see, that opens the representation. In any case, neutral or not, if this placement is shifted in relation to the mirror, the geometrical horizon that it determines is, in relation to this same mirror, anything but neutral. Clearly, it does not correspond

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to any gaze in the painting except—­and what an exhilarating surprise when you noticed it—­to that of the king, located exactly at the level of the vanishing point. This coincidence is obviously not really coincidental, nor is it an insignificant detail: it quietly declares, at a truly subliminal level, that the Family Portrait was painted, constructed, conceived at the king’s horizon. You’ve got it, your concetto capriccioso, and you can formulate it more distinctly now: it is under the king’s gaze, for the king’s gaze, and according to this gaze that the painting is constructed, seen, known. The king alone is “at the horizon” of the painting. It is in relation to him and him alone that continuity is created between the represented space and the space from which the work is viewed and that Alberti recommended establishing by placing the geometrical horizon at the level of the gaze of the painted figures. No one shares the royal gaze, its horizon. No one, that is, except us, the viewers. But, placed as we are, in front of the other Velázquez’s elbow, we do not meet this gaze; in order for that to happen the king would need to turn his gaze from the mirror on us, something that—­and no one will argue with this point—­has very little chance of ever happening. Obviously Foucault jumped the gun when he wrote that “in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity” (5). In fact, the subtle play and gap between the imaginary structure of the painting and its geometric organization show, even in the heart of a private capricho, the king as monarch and make of him, as you had perceived, the “absolute subject” of the painting. You can now better understand why two years later, with the king’s intervention, Velázquez was finally made a knight in the Order of Santiago—­and that he then altered the Family Portrait to add the red cross to his pourpoint. Good. You are pleased with yourself. All of this seems to correspond to what may have been the painting’s conception, elaborated by the painter before he proposed it to his king for approval. Your conclusions are quite far from Foucault’s, but for all that, you do not refute his analThe Eye of the Master Las Meninas 148

ysis, because a painting’s layout (dispositif ) can produce a new meaning the moment its conditions of reception change. As you mentioned, Foucault democratized Las Meninas. But, after all, he was authorized to do so by the fact that they were, themselves, democratized: they are no longer hanging in the sovereign’s summer office but in a museum, the Prado, accessible to everyone. Foucault is speaking about the painting he saw, as he saw it. Nevertheless, because you don’t reject the interpretations of Foucault and the others, one question still troubles you, and you have to answer it: How could a courtier’s painting that attempted to discreetly praise the king as “absolute subject” be perceived, after the fact, as creating an “elision of the subject”? This is the term that Foucault uses, and unless one rejects his interpretation—­which is exactly what you don’t want to do—­you must understand how this reversal after the fact justifies the effect of meaning that it produces in the painting. In other terms—­and here you are weighing your words because the pertinence of your answer depends on the precision of the question—­how did the arrangement that Velázquez arrived at have the potential to produce the effect that Foucault revealed using a deliberate anachronism that went counter to what the courtier-­painter was attempting to do? Ticktock, ticktock. It took you some time to find your way! Only when you had returned to your starting point did things begin to get organized. This starting point is the little tale, the narrative fiction that the painting stages. So you start again from this short narrative: “While the painter was painting the king and queen, the Infanta Margarita came down to see her parents, accompanied by her ladies-­ in-­waiting. This is what the painter painted.” You tried to formulate this anecdote, without exaggerating its elementary simplicity, in order to bring out what it could imply theoretically that would escape the strict circumstances of the narrative. Then you took things in reverse and came up with: “The painter painted what happened when he was painting the king and queen” (in other words, the infanta’s arrival, etc.). You were on the right track. So you broadened the scope of the idea,

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and you got: “The painter represented what happened when he was representing [the king and queen].” To obtain a less anecdotal wording, you wrote: “He represented the circumstances of his representation.” The word “circumstances” led nowhere. You looked for another one. In fact, you were trying to say that he had represented the space and time of representation, the studio with its gallery of paintings and the arrival of the infanta, the instant of the exchanged gaze. In sum, what you were referring to was the space and time where this representation was made. You crossed out “circumstances” and replaced it with “conditions”—­ the way one speaks about the “conditions of an experiment”—­and you got: “He represented the conditions of representation.” In your opinion, you could go no further. You no longer needed to. This sentence made you hear echoes of old. It opened a path. By shifting the attention from the object represented (in the narrative fiction, the king and queen) to the conditions of its representation, Velázquez’s layout (dispositif ) had the effect of making the very object of representation uncertain: its objective presence—­ its presence as a given object of experience—­can no longer be guaranteed. (Perspective would have confirmed the improbable nature of the reflection in the mirror, but it hardly mattered, because the very idea of a double royal portrait was a fiction, immediately recognized as such in Madrid in 1656. Let’s not mention it again; this reflection has always been a pseudoreflection.) You reread Foucault once more, and you noticed that he implied as much when he wrote that “Among all these elements intended to provide representations . . . [the mirror] is the only one that fulfils its function in all honesty and enables us to see what it is supposed to show” (7). And, a little further down, he notes that “it is reflecting nothing, in fact, of all that is there in the same space as itself. . . . It is not the visible it reflects” (7). Thus, what this mirror shows, what it is “supposed to show” is not the visible, not what can be seen in this place at this time, hic et nunc. The mirror shows “in all honesty” that the presence of the king and queen is impossible to guarantee. Therefore, as much as the subject (and this is what Foucault The Eye of the Master Las Meninas 150

retains above all), it is the object of the representation that is, as he says, “elided.” And on this point what Damisch wrote was again very useful for you. “Elided” does not mean suppressed, excluded, or absent, but assumed present as condition and origin of the representation. This is what the Family Portrait shows us: the presence of the king organizes what we see but remains at the same time unlocatable, out of our grasp; it escapes our “knowledge/consciousness” (connaissance) and yet it is in relation to it and according to it that what we see is defined. This conclusion worried you. On the one hand, it was historically in agreement with the idea of a courtier’s tribute, through the theme of the arcana principis (well known at the time), the mystery of the royal being. But, on the other, it led to a paradox that perplexed you. If your description was correct—­and you could not see where it wasn’t—­it led you to phrases in which you could hear strong echoes of something you’d read before: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Velázquez as precursor of Kant? Stop it! And yet, you did not stop. You even insisted on and clarified this idea. (In fact, you didn’t need to demonstrate any special philosophical subtlety; you simply needed to avoid making any silly mistakes.) You went to reread a few excerpts from Kant that had been slumbering on your bookshelves and you understood: your description turned the king into the “transcendental object” of the painting, that is, according to Kant, something that all the while indeterminate can be determined through the diversity of phenomena and constitutes the corollary of the unity of apperception. It’s complicated. That’s to be expected; it’s Kant. But it corresponds to what you see: a group of different characters whose presence is clearly organized according to an “object,” the king and queen, whose objective presence is enigmatic, elusive. You could also say that the king is the “noumenon” of the painting; something that is not the object of our senses—­that would be the “phenomenon”—­but that is the object of a nonsensible intuition, something that can be thought but not known. And here you did no more than locate the essential characteristic of the monarch in the the-

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ory of the absolute monarchy. Without having read Kant, Velázquez could show in his painting something that was almost a commonplace: the mystery of the king and of royal prestige. Still, you remained perplexed. By using a historian’s approach to the effect of meaning produced by the layout of Las Meninas, your anachronism was in fact worse than Foucault’s. This painting was not only, as he wrote, the “representation of classic representation”; the way you were deciphering it, it had become a Kantian painting, more than a century ahead of its contemporary philosophical thinking. That’s the last straw! You’re going to be criticized again for giving in too easily to the demon of deduction. You’d be better off not mentioning any of this, keeping it to yourself. Nonetheless, the more you think about it, the less you see where you went wrong. First of all, your conclusion does not contradict Foucault’s. After all, Kant’s “critique” occurs in the domain of classical representation. For Kant, like for Descartes, an “I think” must be able to accompany all representation. In this broad classical context, if your analysis led to a result different from Foucault’s, with a shift in relation to his position, you now realize it’s because you focused on the position and the status of the represented object—­implicit in the fiction that establishes the representation—­and not on the position and status of the representing subject—­which is the starting point of Foucault’s text (“The painter is standing a little back from his canvas” [3]) and its end point (“And . . . freed finally from the relation [to the subject] that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form” [16]). Indeed, many of Foucault’s phrases correspond to what you describe. You want to locate some of them in his text, and when you reread those thirteen pages, you notice that they had really struck you. If your analysis led almost irresistibly to a Kantian result, it’s because the story that Velázquez invented to pay tribute to the king as (absolute) principle of the Family Portrait already consisted in shifting the attention from the represented object to the conditions of its representation. And, in the way it functions, this fiction is not radically foreign to the intellectual The Eye of the Master Las Meninas 152

process that dominates Kant’s Critique. You read attentively the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason from 1787: Kant’s goal was, starting from the analysis of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, to “take the object” in two senses (“as phenomenon and as thing in itself ”) to set up a metaphysics “well established as a science.” Velázquez, the great courtier painter, “takes” the king as phenomenon (in the category of his “family”) and as “thing in itself,” imperceptible in the visible realm. He thus establishes in his paintings the metaphysics of royalty. Here, you are struck by a new, powerful idea, or rather, an association of ideas, in regard to the mirror and its aspect, to the way it is presented as mirror. In fact, if we recognize a mirror in the surface where the royal effigies appear, it is because of the thin trickle of white paint that Velázquez slipped in between the black frame and the figures that suggests the refraction, in the thickness of the glass, of the light coming from the window. This refraction also causes a slight shininess throughout the whole mirror, a shininess that both attracts the gaze and slightly veils the reflection of the king and queen. This trickle made you think of the square or rectangular halos that traditionally distinguished saints from living people with sacred powers or a privileged relation to the sacred—­and you say to yourself that this allusion would fit fairly well with the painting’s monarchical context and the theory of the mystery of the royal person. But you did not want to take this parallel any further. You find it a bit too arbitrary even, and besides, it doesn’t really matter, because the idea of the halo leads to another, which seems better to you. Looking at the mirror in which the elusive presence of the royal person is reflected, veiled by his own light, you thought of Saint Paul’s famous words according to which, on earth “we see [God] through a glass, darkly.”2 The mirror of Las Meninas and its problematic reflection are the instruments that allow the painter to suggest the enigma of the royal body, the mystery of its divine nature. Previously you had read Kantorowicz; you have not forgotten the top1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV).—­Trans.

2  

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icality in the seventeenth century of the old theme of the king’s “double body,” the mortal body of the individual and the immortal body of the “royal corporation,” temporarily incarnated in the reigning king. Such an allusion would not be out of place in the royal Family Portrait, whose central character is the infanta. Yet you aren’t sure. This interpretation might be forced because—­ you haven’t forgotten—­the painting is a capricho, a private portrait of the infanta; the allusion to the king’s double body would be justified if it were an official portrait of Margarita; it would make more sense if Velázquez hadn’t painted himself looking at his models, the king and queen, etcetera. So you aren’t sure. And then, you think again of Manuela Mena Marqués at the Prado, and the new historical interpretation she proposed for the painting: a dynastic painting from which the painter was at first absent. It is time for you to pay serious attention to what she is saying: not only does her idea satisfy you as a historian, but you have the feeling that she would not disagree with your own interpretation, on the contrary. She could use it to justify historically the aptness of her anachronism. You summarize. According to Manuela Mena Marqués, two successive versions of the Family Portrait were painted on the same canvas. The painter and his stretcher were absent from the first; in their place, as we can see from the x-­radiographs, Velázquez had painted a young man facing the infanta and showing her what could perhaps be a bâton de commandement, as well as a large red curtain and a table with a bouquet of flowers on it. Far from being a private capricho, this painting was entirely public and official. In the absence of a male heir and in the context of the war against France, Philip IV would have decided, after much prevarication, to accept his eldest daughter’s—­the Infanta Maria Teresa—­marriage to Louis XIV and to designate Margarita as heir to the throne. Commissioned from Velázquez when he, as aposentador to the king, only painted for exceptional occasions, the Family Portrait thus constitutes the document and memory of this major decision: it is an “Allegory of the Monarchy,” and its entire iconography (from the The Eye of the Master Las Meninas 154

gestures of the ladies-­in-­waiting to the subjects of the paintings hanging on the wall in the back, through the gold ring of the dwarf Mari­ barbola) must be reinterpreted in this way—­and this is what Manuela Mena Marqués does brilliantly. In this context, the reflection of the two royal figures in the mirror obviously has nothing to do with any sitting for a nonexistent double portrait; it only shows the presence of the king at the center of the composition (because the painting was then trimmed on the left side). You notice that Manuela Mena Marqués doesn’t say anything about the choice of a mirror to show this presence. After all, Velázquez could have painted a portrait of the king, as his son-­in-­law did a few years later. In your opinion, in the dynastic and allegorical context of the painting, the choice of the mirror is not neutral; it gives this presence a specific status, a mysterious prestige, in a word, this almost divine living aura (the “unique apparition of a distance,” according to Walter Benjamin), which explains why you thought of Saint Paul in this regard. Then, on November 20, 1657, Philip Prospero is born, and he immediately becomes the male heir to the throne. The Family Portrait henceforth loses its meaning and, moreover, its purpose. Still, according to Manuela Mena Marqués, it is abandoned, forgotten, one no longer bothers with it. Perhaps she goes a little too far, but one thing is certain: its dynastic message is no longer valid. As of 1659, the Infanta Margarita is engaged to the emperor, and it is probably at the end of this same year that Velázquez, who as of November 1659 has the right to wear the red cross of the Order of Santiago on his chest, takes up the painting again to bring it up-­to-­date and adapt it to the new conditions of the monarchy. This is when the public painting becomes a private one, and the dynastic portrait a courtier’s capricho. Despite a few reservations—­for example, why is the dog asleep, an exception in an official portrait?—­you are charmed, almost convinced, by this analysis. It takes into account the work’s complexities according to the conventions of the court and (admit it, this is what probably pleases you the most) it explains historically how the painting could

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produce an effect of meaning and interpretations that are anachronistic to it. Once again, you look closely at how the painting works. By introducing himself into the painting, Velázquez celebrates his own glory, which is that of a painter made a member of the Order of Santiago and authorized to represent himself next to a royal highness. (Goya would do it with more modesty the following century.) He also celebrates the glory of painting: through its greatest representative, Velázquez himself, the art of painting is recognized at last, the prestige of a “liberal” and not a “mechanical” art. This aspect of the work had been known for a long time. It was even the most elaborate response that historians had given to Foucault’s breathtaking interpretation. In the tradition of, among others, Vicente Carducho’s Diálogos de la pintura, published in 1633, Las Meninas (in its 1659 version) put a triumphant end to the controversy that pervaded the “golden age” of Spanish painting by extolling, with the king’s consent, the nobility of painting, where the activity of the hand “demonstrates” the idea. Painting, a cosa mentale: Leonardo da Vinci had said as much a long time ago, but it is to Velázquez in Spain that the honor falls of making the principle accepted in actuality and not just in theory. In Las Meninas, his attitude is explicit: stepping back from his canvas, he takes a break in his manual activity but is working “in spirit” and is mentally preparing what the hand will paint. Foucault was not mistaken when he began his description of the painting (“The painter is standing a little back from his canvas”), and you are struck as you reread his text again, by the emphasis he places on the painter’s arm: “The arm holding the brush is bent to the left, towards the palette; it is motionless, for an instant, between canvas and paints. The skilled hand is suspended in mid-­air, arrested in rapt attention on the painter’s gaze; and the gaze, in return, waits upon the arrested gesture” (3). You are struck by this description of the suspended “skilled hand” because you recall a text published in 1983 in the journal Art History. (Which goes to show that art history is not always as stupid or useless as some would have us believe.) You reread it. In his arti-

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cle, John Moffitt draws a convincing parallel between Velázquez’s hand in Las Meninas and the final illustration in Carducho’s Diálogos de la pintura. A true emblem of painting, because it links a title (or motto), an image, and a commentary in four lines, this illustration presents, under the enigmatic title “potentia ad actum tamquam tabula rasa,” a paintbrush posed sideways on a still-­blank panel. Even more than this paintbrush—­the twin brother, reversed in the mirror, of Velázquez’s the commentary impressed you: “The white canvas paintbrush—­ [tabula rasa] sees everything in potentiality; only the paintbrush, with its sovereign knowledge, can reduce potentiality to action.” Carducho gloriously proclaims the omnipotence of the act of the painter, of the verb to paint. You find him to be quite close to Leonardo da Vinci, for whom, if painting was a cosa mentale, its execution was even “nobler” than its mental conception alone because it enacts the image to come. This is indeed what Velázquez painted in the second version of Las Meninas. The white canvas, the “blank slate,” is the reverse of the canvas we see and whose obverse contains, in potentiality, a painting of which we have no knowledge and that is conceived only by the painter who is looking at us—­and the chosen moment is the one of suspense “between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze” (Foucault, 3), before the paintbrush enacts this potentiality of painting, this potential painting that the canvas implies. At the same time, you have the feeling that Carducho’s emblem (of which Velázquez must have been aware, you add from your habits as a historian) offers the historical key to the anachronistic effect of meaning, irresistibly brought forth by the second Meninas. By introducing the paintbrush in the hand, Velázquez also creates the short narrative fiction that already preoccupied you, but at the same time, he radically transforms the function of the mirror present in the first version of the painting. No longer the instrument of the aura that points to the mystery of an almost divine presence, it gives rise only to the enigma of an unlikely presence. Yet its “auratic” brilliance did not fade and, acThe Eye of the Master Las Meninas 158

cording to you, its original function continues to haunt the Family Portrait. It is this persistence (rémanence) that sets in motion the anachronistic effect of meaning that Foucault was the first to bring out and formulate. For the potential of “enacting of a possibility” shifts from the king, representative of the divine here on earth, to the painter, who represents the king. The painter is about to become that Kantian “transcendental object” that a while ago caused you grief. Later, you recalled something else. In 1435, the founder of the classical theory of painting—­good old Alberti, to whom Moffitt thinks Las Meninas is paying tribute in passing—­had innocently affirmed that the painter “only deals with what is seen.” Still, on reflection, from this point of view in this painting, Velázquez behaved like a genuine sorcerer’s apprentice of painting: he constructed his representation around an “object” (the king and queen) that, while it is at the origin of the representation, is not visibly “present” on it—­except in the form of the reflection of a presence as elusive as the original. Now you can better understand how Luca Giordano could qualify the Family Portrait as a “theology of painting.” He could just as easily have said that it expressed the metaphysics of painting. The Family Portrait, which had become Las Meninas, demonstrates that the painter need not be an intellectual in order to think. It is as if the painting were visually producing meaning, independently and beyond the ideas that the painter and the one who commissioned it could make of it—­and long after their deaths. This no doubt is what makes a masterpiece. Obviously, you’re going to have to get to work and write that text on Las Meninas. No kidding.

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Illustration Credits

Pages 2, 5, 7, 9, 12. Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto, Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan. bpk, Berlin/Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlugen, Mu­ nich, Germany/Art Resource, NY. Page 10. Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto, Venus and Vulcan, ca. 1550. Pen and brush in brown on blue paper, 20.1 x 27.2 cm. Inv. KdZ 4193. Kupferstichkabinett Staat­ liche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Kupferstich­kabinett Staatliche Museen/Art Resource. Pages 18, 21, 25, 27. Francesco del Cossa, The Annunciation, ca. 1470–72. Gemälde­ galerie Alter Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Page 23. Piero della Francesca, The Annunciation, polyptych of Saint Anthony, 1470 (detail). National Gallery of Umbria, Perugia, Italy. Scala/Ministero per I Beni e le Attivita culturali/Art Resource, NY. Page 31. Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, 1486. Egg and oil on canvas, 207 x 146.7 cm. Presented by Lord Taunton, 1864 (NG739). National Gallery, London, Great Britain. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Page 33. Carlo Crivelli, Madonna and Child, ca. 1480. Tempera and gold on wood. Overall 14 7/8 x 10 in (37.8 x 25.4 cm); painted surface 14 3/8 x 9 1/4 in. (36.5 x 23.5 cm). The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.5). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Pages 40, 43, 45, 47, 48, 61, 68 (top right). Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Adoration of the Kings, 1564. Oil on oak, 111.1 x 83.2 cm. Bought with contributions from The Art Fund and Arthur Serena through The Art Fund, 1920 (NG3556). National Gallery, London, Great Britain. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Pages 53, 54. Andrea Mantegna, The Adoration of the Kings, ca. 1464. Uffizi Gal­ lery, Florence. Permission courtesy of the Superintendents for Historical, Ar­ tistic, and Ethno-anthropological Heritage and for the Museums of Florence.

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Page 58. Sandro Botticelli, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1478–1482 (detail). An­ drew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Page 59. Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1487 (detail). Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Permission courtesy of the Superintendents for His­ torical, Artistic, and Ethno-anthropological Heritage and for the Museums of Florence. Page 65. Hieronymus Bosch, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1510 (detail). Museo Nacional del Prado, Barcelona. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Re­ source, NY. Page 68 (top left and bottom). Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Village Wedding Feast, ca. 1525–1569. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Pages 90, 93, 94, 105, 113, 123 (bottom left), 125 (left). Titian, The Venus of Urbino, 1538. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Permission courtesy of the Superintendents for Historical, Artistic, and Ethno-anthropological Heritage and for the Museums of Florence. Pages 97, 123 (top). Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, 1508–1510. Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Pages 103, 123 (bottom right), 125 (right). Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190.0 cm. Inv.: RF 644. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: Patrice Schmidt. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Pages 130, 133, 137, 138, 145, 147, 156. Diego Rodriguez Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. Page 141 (left). Diego Rodriguez Velázquez, Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver, 1631–1632. Oil on canvas, 195 x 110 cm. Bought, 1882 (NG1129). National Gallery, London, Great Britain. © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY. Page 141 (right). Diego Rodriguez Velázquez, Infanta Margarita, 1656. Kunsthis­ torisches Museum, Vienna. Page 143. Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, The Artist’s Family, 1664–1665. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Illustration Credits

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italic type refer to illustrations. Adoration, 41–67 Africa, Christianity in, 52 Agnes, Saint, 74 Alberti, Leon Battista, 36, 37, 124–26, 148, 159 Alexander the Great, 144 allegory, 6 anachronism, 54, 92, 107, 111, 132, 134–36, 152, 154, 158–59 Angelico, Fra, 37 Annunciation, 19–37 Antwerp Mannerists, 53 Apelles, 144 Aretino, Pietro, 7, 34 Art History (journal), 157 art history, discipline of, 4, 20, 41, 100–101, 157–58 Augustine, Saint, 26 aura, 121, 155, 158–59 Baxandall, Michael, 132 belief. See faith, independent of vision Benjamin, Walter, 121, 155 Bernardino of Siena, 36–37 biographical approach, 6 black king, in Adoration paintings. See Gaspar, the black king Bosch, Hieronymus, 46; The Adoration of the Magi, 65 (detail), 66–67 Boschini, Marco, 121 Botticelli, Sandro, The Adoration of the Magi, 57, 58, 58 (detail), 60 Bridget, Saint, 81–82 Brown, Beverly Louise, 13–14

Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder: The Adoration of the Kings (London), 40 (detail), 41–69, 43, 45 (details), 47 (detail), 48 (details), 61 (detail), 68 (detail); The Adoration of the Magi (Brussels), 49–50, 67; The Adoration of the Magi (Winterthur, Switzerland), 49–50; The Conversion of Saint Paul, 41; The Triumph of Death, 67; Village Wedding Feast, 68 (details), 68; The Way to Calvary, 41 Bruegel, Pieter, the Younger, 51 Calvin, John, 63–64 Campbell, Stephen, 30 Carducho, Vicente, Diálogos de la pintura, 157–58 Castiglione, Baldassare, 140 Catholicism, 62–64, 69 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista, 96 Chastel, André, 111–12 Christianity, universality of, 41, 59, 64–67 Cicero, 85 circumcision, 57, 64 Clark, Kenneth, 112 columns, 23–24 comedy. See humor and comedy commensurateness, 36–37 composite figures, 78–79. See also condensation condensation, 78–79, 83, 87 Coornhert, Dirck, 62 Correggio, 50 Cossa, Francesco del, The Annunciation, 18 (detail), 19–37, 21, 25 (details), 27 (detail) Council of Trent, 63–64

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Counter-Reformation, 63 Courbet, Gustave, Woman in the Waves, 85 courtesans, 15, 99, 101, 107, 117 Cremona, Girolamo da, The Annunciation, 20 Crivelli, Carlo: The Annunciation, 30, 31; Madonna and Child, 32, 33 Crowe, Joseph Archer, 96 Damisch, Hubert, 146, 151 Della Casa, Giovanni, 114 Della Rovere, Francesco Maria, 91 Della Rovere, Guidobaldo, 91–92, 95, 99, 118 Descartes, René, 36, 152 desire, 126–27 Devisse, Jean, 67 Diderot, Denis, 44 dog, as symbol, 99 Dolce, Lodovico, 13 Doni, Anton Francesco, 13 Dvořák, Max, 50 Ernout, Alfred, 73 eroticism. See sexuality and eroticism Ethiopia, 52, 66 Eve, 79–82 facingness, 119 faith, independent of vision, 37, 62, 64, 69 finiteness, 36–37 flies, 32 Foucault, Michel, 131, 135–36, 148–51, 157–59 frame figures, 60, 69 Fried, Michael, 119–22 Gaspar, the black king, 46, 48–49, 51–69 gaze, as theme in paintings: Bruegel’s Adoration, 56–69; Cossa’s Annunciation, 28–37; Manet’s Olympia, 119–23; Nicholas of Cusa and, 144; Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 109, 118–19; Velázquez’s

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Las Meninas, 144, 148, 157–58. See also looking genitalia: hair covering, 74; of Jesus in Adoration paintings, 56–58; in Manet’s Olympia, 124; in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 96, 117, 121–22. See also penis, paintbrush as geopolitics, 52 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, The Adoration of the Magi, 57, 58, 59 (detail), 60 Giordano, Luca, 134, 159 Giorgione, Sleeping Venus (Dresden Venus), 96, 97, 101, 112, 114, 117, 123 (detail) God, 24, 26–27, 36–37 Goffen, Rona, 98 Gombrich, Ernst, 3, 100 Gonzagas of Mantua, 14 Goya, Francisco de, 157 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, 62 Greenaway, Peter, The Draughtsman’s Contract, 146 hair, 73–87 Hall of the Months, Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, 28 Ham, 64–66 historical basis of interpretation, 15, 36, 100–101, 122, 132–59 humanism, 62, 67 humor and comedy: in Bruegel’s Adoration, 49, 50; in Tintoretto’s Mars and Venus, 3–4, 6, 11, 13, 15 iconoclasm, 63–64 iconography: and Adoration paintings, 41; and Cossa’s Annunciation, 19–20, 22, 24, 28; principles of, 15, 104; and Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 98–102, 108 images, worshipping of, 63–64 Incarnation, 20, 26–27, 30, 36, 41, 56–60, 62, 80 incommensurability, 36–37 infinity, 36–37

interpretation: historical basis of, 15, 36, 100–101, 122, 132–59; looking as basis for, 14, 20, 22, 26, 35, 55, 63, 100–102, 104, 106–7, 127; preconceptions hampering, 3, 14–15, 41, 101–2; questions of, 3–4, 6, 13–15, 19, 30, 100, 116, 132, 134–35; single and correct, 3, 100 invenzione, 11 Jesus: in Bruegel’s Adoration, 44, 56; humanity of, 56–58; incarnation of, 20, 26–27, 30, 36, 41, 56–60, 62, 80; and Mary Magdalene, 74, 76–77, 86; and Thomas, 62; umbilical cord of, 81–82 John, Gospel of, 77 John II of Portugal, 52 Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19–20, 22 Kant, Immanuel, 36, 151–53, 159 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 153–54 king. See royal being, mystery of knowledge, and interpretation. See preconceptions, interpretation hampered by; thinking, in study of paintings Lazarus, 76 Leonardo da Vinci, 134, 157, 158 libertines, 62–63 Limbo, 26 Lippi, Filippo, 37; The Annunciation, 28–29 locusts, 32, 34 looking: faith not dependent on, 62, 64, 69; interpretation based on, 14, 20, 22, 26, 35, 55, 63, 100–102, 104, 106–7, 127; limitations of, 29–30, 37, 153, 159. See also gaze, as theme in paintings Lotto, Lorenzo, Saint Jerome the Penitent, 32, 34 Louis XIV, 154 Lucco, Mauro, 34 Luke, Gospel of, 77, 78

Mander, Karl van, 41 Manet, Édouard, Olympia, 99–102, 103, 119–22, 123 (detail), 124, 125 (detail) Mantegna, Andrea: The Adoration of the Kings, 53, 54 (detail), 52–53, 58; Camera degli Sposi, 15, 54 Mantua, marchioness of, 52–53 Margarita, Infanta, 136, 138, 141, 154–55 Mariana of Austria, 136 Maria Teresa, Infanta, 154 Maribarbola, 138, 155 Marin, Louis, 29, 60, 144 marriage, 13–14, 95, 98–99, 116 Martha, 76 Martínez del Mazo, Juan Bautista, The Artist’s Family, 142, 143 Martone, Thomas, 23 Mary (Martha’s sister), 76–78, 81 Mary, Virgin. See Virgin Mary Mary Magdalene, 73–87; attributes of, 75; eroticism of, 84, 86–87; existence of, 75–78; hair of, 74–75, 78–79, 82–87; invention of, 77–79; repentance of, 76, 77, 82–84; as role model, 79–82, 84, 86–87; Virgin Mary and, 81–82 Mary the Egyptian, 74 masturbation, 92, 98, 117–18 materiality of painting, 28–30, 32, 35, 120–21 Meillet, Antoine, 73 Mena Marqués, Manuela, 131, 137, 154–55 Michelangelo, 14, 44, 50; Sistine Chapel ceiling, 134–35 mirror: Narcissus and, 126; in Tintoretto’s Mars and Venus, 8–10; in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, 147; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 134, 138–39, 142, 144, 146–48, 150–51, 153, 155, 158–59 modernity, 119, 122 Moffitt, John, 158, 159 Mollat, Michel, 67 Monroe, Marilyn, 92

Index

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morality, 6–7, 13 mystery: faith and, 62; of Jesus’s incarnation, 24, 58–60, 80; of royal being, 151–55, 158–59 Narcissus, 124–26 Navarre, Marguerite de, 14 Nicholas of Cusa, 144 Niclaes, Hendrik, 62 Nicolasito, 138 Nieto Velázquez, José, 136, 146–47 nude woman paintings, 14, 85, 91–92, 96, 98–99, 112, 115–17, 119–20, 122 Ortelius, Abraham, 62, 63 overinterpretation, 19, 30, 100 Ovid, 11, 13 paintbrushes, 82, 85, 139, 146, 158 painters: motivations of, 85–86; self-portraits of included in works, 69, 131, 148, 157 painting: intellectual/philosophical character of, 134, 146, 157–59; materiality of, 28–30, 32, 35, 120–21; and sexuality/ eroticism, 85–86, 118–19, 122, 124, 126–27 painting within a painting, 111–12 Palomino, Antonio, 134, 138, 142 Panofsky, Erwin, 36, 102, 104, 106, 117 Pardo, Mary, 127 Paul, Saint, 153, 155 penis, paintbrush as, 85. See also genitalia perspective: in Alberti’s conception of painting, 124–26, 148; in Cossa’s Annunciation, 22–24, 35–36; in other Annunciations, 30; in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 108–10; in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 146 Philip IV of Spain, 135–36, 138–40, 141, 154 Philip Prospero, Infante, 136–37, 155 Piero della Francesca, 36, 37; The Annunciation, 23, 23

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Pino, Marco, 58 pinups, 91–92, 95–96, 98–101, 108, 114, 117, 120, 127 Piombo, Sebastiano del, 51 Pius II, Pope, 52 Plantin, Christopher, 62 Pliny, 118, 125 Pontormo, Jacopo da, 58 preconceptions, interpretation hampered by, 3, 14–15, 41, 101–2. See also thinking, in study of paintings Prester John, 52, 66 Protagoras, 36 Pseudo-Bonaventura, 24 Raphael, 51 received ideas. See preconceptions, interpretation hampered by relics, 63–64 representation: conditions of, Velázquez’s Las Meninas on, 150–53, 159; limits of, 29–30, 36–37, 159; taboos in, 86 restorations, of paintings, 134–35 royal being, mystery of, 151–55, 158–59 schola caritatis, 62 seeing. See gaze, as theme in paintings; looking sexuality and eroticism: Manet’s Olympia and, 122, 124; of Mary Magdalene, 84, 86–87; painting and, 85–86, 118–19, 122, 124, 126–27; Titian’s Venus of Urbino and, 91–92, 95–96, 98–100, 116, 122, 124 slaves and slavery, 51, 52–53, 67 snails, 19–20, 24, 26–30 Speroni, Sperone, Dialogo d’amore, 107, 126–27 Steinberg, Leo, 56–58 texts, as supports for arguments, 6, 13–14, 24, 26, 116 theatricality, 119

theism, 62 theory: and Cossa’s Annunciation, 35–36; historians’ attitudes toward, 132, 134– 35; and Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 109–11, 115; and Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 132, 134–35, 139, 146, 151–53, 157 thinking, in study of paintings, 15, 26. See also preconceptions, interpretation hampered by Thomas, Saint, 62, 69 Tintoretto: Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, 2 (detail), 3–15, 5, 7 (details), 9 (detail), 12 (detail); preparatory sketch for Mars and Venus, 10, 11 Titian: La Bella, 91; Danae, 99, 114; Sacred Conversation, 107; The Venus of Urbino, 90 (detail), 91–127, 93, 94 (detail), 105 (details), 113 (detail), 123 (detail), 125 (detail) tolerance, religious, 62 Tolnay, Charles de, 62 touch, 117–19, 126–27 Trexler, Richard, 55 trompe l’oeil, 30, 32 truth, 9 Tullia d’Aragona, 15, 107, 126–27 Tura, Cosmè, The Annunciation, 30 Turner, J.M.W., 85 Twain, Mark, 96 Urbino, Duke of. See Della Rovere, Guidobaldo

Van Eyck, Jan, Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, 147 Varano, Giulia, 95 Vasari, Giorgio, 114 vase, as symbol of Virgin Mary, 11, 28–29 Velázquez, Diego, 85, 136, 148, 157; Infanta Margarita, 138, 141; Las Meninas, 130 (detail), 131–59, 133, 137 (details), 138 (detail), 145 (detail), 147 (detail), 156 (detail); Philip IV, 141 Venus, 3–15, 101 viewers: intermediaries of, 110–11; space of, 28–30, 32, 34–35, 109–10, 120; visual experience of, 29–30, 60, 62, 109–10, 146–48 Virgin Mary: in Bruegel’s Adoration, 44, 56; in Cossa’s Annunciation, 20, 22–23; as dogma, 79–80; Mary Magdalene and, 81–82; snail as symbol of, 20, 26, 28–30; vase as symbol of, 11, 28–30 vision. See gaze, as theme in paintings; looking Voragine, Jacobus (Jacopo) de, 64, 76, 78 Vulcan, 3–15 Weddigen, Erasmus, 8–9, 11 wedding portraits, 14, 95–96, 99 Weyden, Rogier van der, 51 Wind, Edgar, 112 Wirth, Jean, 15 women, role models for, 79–82, 84, 86–87 Zucchi, Jacopo, Amor and Psyche, 3

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167