Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object 9783110345568, 9783110345414

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Caroline van Eck

ART, AGENCY AND LIVING PRESENCE From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object

STUDIEN AUS DEM WARBURG-HAUS, BAND 16 Herausgegeben von Uwe Fleckner Margit Kern Birgit Recki Bruno Reudenbach Cornelia Zumbusch REIHE „KUNST UND WIRKMACHT / ART AND AGENCY“ Herausgegeben von Caroline van Eck Uwe Fleckner

Caroline van Eck

ART, AGENCY AND LIVING PRESENCE From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object

CONTENTS

9

Acknowledgements

11

Introduction

18 19 21 23 25

Rhetoric Agency Experience and memory The animated image: a growing field The structure of this book

29

Part One

31

Enargeia

32 33 36 39 43

Enargeia, ekphrasis and phantasia Phantasia Phantasia, memory and living presence response The early modern afterlife of ekphrastic enargeia Conclusion

5 | Contents

45 49 52 53 53 56 59 61 67 68 71 73 73 76

Agency Art and agency The experience of living presence Living presence as agency and experience Animacy ‘Laocoon I am’ Bellini’s Brera Pietà Bernini’s Medusa Memory Simulacra in the chambers of memory Perception, memory and emotion Memory is not an art gallery, but a seraglio Ekphrasis as imaginative recollection and recreation Conclusion

77

Part Two

79

Idolatry

80 87 88 91 94 98 101 105 107 108 113 116 119 120 123

François Lemée on the Monument of Louis XIV at the Place des Victoires A new way of considering idolatry The living presence of statues: a question of enargeia or of the sitter’s status? Living presence and idolatry How to control the undesirable agency of images Conclusion Fetishism Persuasive figuration as the foundation of idolatry Fetishism ‘Les rapports intimes des statues avec la société’ ‘Le ministre le plus docile des volontés de la religion’ Conclusion Aesthetic Ambivalence Pygmalion’s dream Petrifying statue lovers

6 | Contents

126 129 131 136

Goethe’s gallery of art lovers Art fetishism Kant’s epistemological barrier against fetishism Conclusion Plates

139

Part Three

141

Framing, Staging and Acting Living Presence

144 147 157 159 168 171 175 179 179 181 183 184 188 191 194 197 197 201 203 206 208

Living presence and a visual history of art Santa Maria del Priorato: anachronism embodied ‘Killing art to write its history’ ‘Glorious visions of the past’ ‘The presence of reality instead of its appearance produced a fearful sensation’ Conclusion The Afterlife of Art Aby Warburg on the lives of art works Pathosformel and Nachleben The life of art as an artistic issue The agency of lifelikeness Mnemosyne: Nachleben as an issue in art history Representation Mnemosyne, Nachleben, and historical experience Conclusion Epilogue: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object ‘The appearance of the soul’ Changing appreciations of viewers attributing life to art An anthropological turn Excessive and transitional objects Homo animans and homo repraesentans

211

Notes

243

Bibliography

265

List of Illustrations

271

Index

7 | Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is one of the results of the Art, Agency and Living Presence project that was hosted by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) and its predecessors at the Humanities Faculty of Leiden University from 2006 to 2011. It was funded very generously by the Dutch Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO). I want to thank NWO, and the anonymous reviewers who judged the grant appplication, for their suppport. Without it, this project, and the line of research that was developed in it, could never have taken place. I also want to thank Groningen University, and particularly Auke van der Woud, for their support in earlier stages of the project, which were equally vital to its coming into being. At Leiden University Ton van Haaften, at the time Dean of the Humanities Faculty, Reindert Falkenburg and Kitty Zijlmans persuaded me to join the Department of Art History, and I have never regretted that decision. Indeed, the Art and Agency project found an ideal intellectual atmosphere in the typically Leiden atmosphere of intense collaboration between art historians, classicists, historians, literary scholars, archaeologists and anthropologists. The other members of the project, Stijn Bussels, Lex Hermans, Joris van Gastel, Elsje van Kessel and Minou Schraven, were ideal sparring partners, but above all they became very dear friends. I thank them all for their sharp thinking, generous contributions and great sense of humor. Our guests at the expert meetings we organized at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar were very generous with their time and expertise: Jeremy Tanner, Robert Layton, Maarten Delbeke, Jürgen Pieters, Karl Enenkel, Frank Fehrenbach, Christine Goettler, Malcolm Baker, Arthur DiFuria, Jeanette Kohl, Arno Witte and Joanna Woodall.

9 | Acknowledgements

Several conferences that we organized in the course of the project also contributed to this book: the sessions we hosted at the Renaissance Society Meeting in Venice in 2010; the conference ‘Waking the Dead. The Poetics of Presence in the Wake of the French Revolution’, held at the Académie de France at the Villa Medicis in Rome in 2011, organized together with Sigrid de Jong, Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt; and the concluding conference of the Art and Agency project held in Leiden in 2011. I wish to thank Marc Bayard, Annick Lemoine and Angela Stahl at the Villa for their generosity and exquisite hospitality. While writing this book I benefited from many conversations with friends and colleagues: Pamela Edwardes, as always a wonderful editor, critic and listener, who pointed me in the way of Alfred Gell; Maarten Delbeke, who drew my attention to Sforza Pallavicino and thus unwittingly provided the clue towards a major step in the argument of this book; Pascal Griener, who very kindly did not point out he had already, twenty years ago, covered in much greater depth many of the ideas on 18th-century viewing practices that I discussed with him; Odile Nouvel suggested towards an entirely new way of thinking about fetishism. Frank Ankersmit, Jas Elsner, Patricia Falguières, Jason Gaiger, Daniela Gallo, Edward Grasman, Sigrid de Jong, Anna Knaap, Alina Payne, Bettina Reitz, Frits Scholten, Philippe Sénéchal, Louk Tilanus, Bram van Oostveldt, Chris Wood, and Hendrik Ziegler all gave generously of their time and learning. Whereas Alfred Gell was the tutelary deity of the first part of the Art and Agency project, Aby Warburg took over that role for the second part. The Warburg-Haus in Hamburg invited Elsje van Kessel, Joris van Gastel and me to speak at one of their graduate student conferences, and there a wonderful collobaration began, which resulted in the series Kunst und Wirkmacht/Art and Agency, in which the books resulting from our project are published in a collaboration with Akademie Verlag (now De Gruyter) and Leiden University Press. I want to thank Uwe Fleckner, Director of the Warburg-Haus, Heiko Hartmann at Akademie Verlag, and Yvonne Twisk at Leiden University Press for their enthousiasm and great efficiency in putting this idea into reality. I also want to thank the present staff of these publishers, Anniek Meinders in Leiden, and Martin Steinbrück and Verena Bestle in Berlin and Munich, for the great care with which they have published this book. Frederik Knegtel and Marit Eisses offered vital assistance in the final stages of editing and finding images. But as often, the greatest debt is the most difficult to put into words. I want to thank Hende Bauer for telling me take the plunge into the deep waters of the life of art. Without one short conversation in the Prado, the intellectual adventure of which this book is one of the results would never have taken off.

10 | Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

In 1790 the French playwright Michel de Cubières wrote an account of his visit to the Villa Borghese in Rome. Like many who went there before him, he claimed he fell in love with the statue of the Crouching Venus, could not restrain himself from touching the marble and described how he felt her body breathe and move under his touch ( fig. 1). She seemed to open her arms to him, and the cold, inanimate stone burned him ‘avec tous les feux de la volupté’. Unlike many previous visitors he did not dwell on the mimetic qualities of the statue, or the illusion of lifelikeness the sculptor had achieved as the cause for his reaction, but on the capacity works of art and love share to inspire desire and affection. When a woman has to return the portrait of the man she loves, he observes, she will always have a copy made, and put it next to her bed. Sometimes, he adds, one is just as jealous of a statue as of one’s mistress.1 Whereas the Crouching Venus made him forget the demarcations between art and life, the Borghese Hermaphrodite was for him transgressive in a more unsettling way ( fig. 2). Cubières is so disconcerted by the sexual ambiguity of the statue that he is taken over by a painful doubt which prevents him from forming any definite judgment, and even suspends all his powers of judgment. His absorption by the statue ends in a loss of self. Bernini’s delicate treatment of the mattress makes him touch it; but when he feels the cold marble terror overtakes him, so that he has to walk past the statue without looking at it, like a schoolboy who is terrified of a dark corner where at night he has perceived some sinister object: ‘Quelque bien couché que soit l’Hermaphrodite, je ne serai jamais tenté de coucher avec lui.’ The statue of Venus, like that of Narcissus or Apollo and Daphne in the same collection, invited him by their lifelikeness to engage in a play of self-delusion.2 Enchanted by their

11 | Introduction

1 Crouching Aphrodite, Roman copy after Greek original of the third century BC, marble, H. 0.78 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

beauty and suggestion of real life, he allows himself to go along with the fiction that he is in love with a statue, that the statue loves him, and to give in to the urge to touch the object of his desires. In the case of the Hermaphrodite however, the combination of convincingly realistic details and sexual ambiguity disrupts this illusion, robs him of his powers to draw on his usual repertoire of reactions in front of statues, frightens him off, and reduces him to the state of a schoolboy frightened in the dark.3 In his insistence on the life, lovability and power to arouse and frighten of these statues Cubières’ account plays on the myths of both Pygmalion and Medusa: the dream of the stone mistress who becomes alive shifts to the nightmare of the sexually ambiguous being that reduces the viewer to a state of abject fear, unable to look again at the statue. It also

12 | Introduction

2 Borghese Hermaphroditus, Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze original of the second century BC, mattress sculpted by Bernini c. 1620, marble, L. 1.47 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

stands at the end of a long tradition of statue lovers, from the admirers of the Cnidian Venus in ancient Greece who arranged to be locked up in her sanctuary during the night to the Grand Tourists who spent entire days gazing into the eyes of her Roman copies, and claimed that the Venus de’ Medici in the Tribuna rested her eyes benevolently on them, or discussed the qualities of her body as if she were a concubine.4 Classical poetry is full of cases of viewers kissing works of art as if they are living beings; it is one of the recurrent themes in the Greek Anthology, which would exert so much influence on ekphrastic texts, in antiquity and the early modern period. To cite just one of the more suggestive poems: What pleasure, Heliodorus, is there in kisses, if you do not press against me with passionate lips, but only on the tips [of mine]? with yours closed and unmoving, as an image of wax at home kisses me, apart from you.5 Such reactions were informed by the viewing habits fostered by classical rhetoric. They singled out vivid likeness, or enargeia, as the summit of artistic achievement and visual persuasion. Viewers also entered into the affective relationships with portraits of their absent loved ones usually reserved for living persons; or they destroyed their painted eyes.6 The ambivalence, unease, desires, and fears underlying such responses are recurrent themes in Western mythology, fiction and art theory. The myth of Pygmalion for instance is a figuration of the desire that statues become alive; that of Medusa of the fear for the living image. They both thematize the oscillation between living beings that are transformed into statues, and works of art exercising the powers usually reserved for living beings. Often these reactions were part of a highly conventionalized, social game of going along with the fiction

13 | Introduction

3 Minerva Giustiniani, Roman copy in marble after a Greek original of the end of the 5th century BC, H. 2.23 m., formerly in the Giustiniani collection, Rome, Musei Vaticani

that the statue was a living being.7 But here, in the account by Michel de Cubières, something changes. Real-life fears and desires intrude and make him deeply uncomfortable. In the decades around 1800, with the rise of aesthetics, the development of academic art history and the birth of the modern art gallery, which were all predicated on some form of aesthetic distance, looking at and engaging with a work of art as if it was a living being became increasingly unacceptable. The account by Michel de Cubières exemplifies this shift in attitude. He paraphrases the account of the Borghese Hermaphrodite by François de Raguenet first published in 1701, which had been copied and plagiarized by many subsequent Rome guides and travel accounts. Raguenet observed how every viewer was seduced into touching the mattress and was surprised and even horrified when the material did not yield like the soft wool it represented, but instead felt cold and hard to the touch.8 But this was a common experience, presented as a matter of physical cause and its psychological effect. Cubières clearly used Raguenet’s account, but transforms it, from a perfectly acceptable conventional exercise of art criticism informed by rhetoric, into a personal account of a

14 | Introduction

4 Simon Louis Boizot (1753–1809), Bust of Marie Antoinette, marble, 1743–1809), mutilated during riots in the Tuileries in 1792, private collection

psychological experience. Gazing at the Borghese Hermaphrodite moves from a comfortable fiction of an erotic encounter with a work of art into a very different realm of experience, that of the sinister and the uncanny. In the same period Goethe and Herder also testify to this increasing unease in their accounts of viewing classical statues. While in Rome in 1787 Goethe observed how viewers kissed the hand of the statue of the Minerva Giustiniani ( fig. 3). The wife of the guardian asked him whether he had a girlfriend that looked like the statue, ‘since the statue attracted him so much’. Despite his disdain for such adoration of a statue, where there should only be ‘brotherly admiration for a human spirit’, he confessed that he did not want to leave the statue.9 That other author of an Italian Journey, Johann Gottfried Herder, moved in his unusually frank description of the Borghese Hermaphrodite from an analysis of the way the sculptor had represented this subject to an account of a living, breathing body that aroused him sexually, but at the same time did not hide the mixture of fascination and discomfort he felt while gazing at the statue.10 Although reacting to works of art as if they are living beings did not disappear as a result of this change in attitude, such responses became increasingly discredited and marginalized in aesthetics, art history and the museum setting as the dominant mode of art viewing. Nonetheless, they did not die out. They occur very frequently, all over the world, in many different situations, and in response to very different art genres. During the French Revolution many royal images were destroyed or defaced, witness this particularly poignant case of a bust of Marie Antoinette ( fig. 4). Paintings are damaged, as in the case of the London Suffragette, subsequently nicknamed ‘Slasher Mary’, who attacked the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London with a knife in 1917 ( figs. 5 and 6). A museum visitor threw a mug at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, threatening that he would ‘wipe that grin off her face’.

15 | Introduction

5 Diego Vélazquez (1599–1660), Rokeby Venus, 1647–1651, oil on canvas, 122.5 by 177 cm., London, National Gallery

A few years ago a widower from Thailand had a statue made of his late wife, in which her ashes were put, and took it to bed with him every night. The Vietnamese artist Randy Sam felt so overcome with passion for an entirely white Cy Twombly canvas that she had to cover it with red lipstick kisses.11 A recent enquiry by two French anthropologists has documented how highly educated, middle-class collectors of non-Western art claim that they do not choose their art works, but that the art works select their owners by turning their gaze on them, that the masks in their collections look at them and possess a character and personality, and that the collectors take their items with them to bed when they feel anxious or depressed.12 In fact these kind of reactions, in which works of art are treated in a wide range of respects as living beings, is so well documented, and so wide spread, both chronologically and geographically, that it may even be considered as much closer to the default mode of engaging with art or images than the modern Western museum setting for looking at art. That is based on aesthetic distancing, and favours an appreciation of formal, stylistic or iconographic qualities, without feeling the emotions or showing the reactions we normally reserve for living beings. At the same time such responses are fraught with uncertainties, puzzles and contradictions. Do viewers ever really believe that a work of art lives? Do they really feel the same emotions for a statue as for a living person? What do they mean when they say so? Can we discern qualities of the work of art, in the viewing conditions, and mindset of the viewers that creates such reactions? How did viewers themselves account for them, and how can we today understand such beliefs? In a way, saying that a work of art is alive, or that a statue excites the same feelings, desires and fears as a living being, is the ultimate testimony to the importance a work of art can have for a viewer. Such responses are also extremely complex and many-sided, and touch on almost all aspects of art making or viewing, from issues of

16 | Introduction

6 Diego Vélazquez (1599–1660), Rokeby Venus, damaged by Slasher Mary photo circa March 10, 1914, London, National Gallery

realism and naturalism to the question what makes an artefact an image and a work of art. They question conventional, and widely accepted viewing habits and settings, and the aesthetic theories on which these are based. They are also a central theme in Western discourse on art, from the second commandment in the Old Testament, through the debates on idolatry and iconoclasm in the Church Fathers and Byzantine theologians to studies on fetishism of the past two centuries. Recently anthropologists have also returned to the topic. To attempt to add something new to this vast field therefore seems, and probably is, foolhardy. Yet the combination of two, at first sight very different disciplines, classical rhetoric and contemporary anthropology, has sparked off a way of thinking about viewers attributing life to images that has not been pursued before. Since attributing life to art works transcends the boundaries between the inanimate object and animate beings, it calls for a new understanding that moves beyond the traditional boundaries between the disciplines that deal with the image, to integrate the artistic, art historical, psychological, and ultimately anthropological aspects of such attributions, since this is a universal feature of the way human beings interact with images. Put in the briefest terms, the aim of this book is to pursue the origins and ramifications of one way of conceiving such response as caused by representations that are so vivid, and possess such agency, that to the viewer they seem somehow to dissolve into the living being they represent. We can discern a shift in ideas about the animated image that starts in the late 17th century, moving from rhetorical theories on how to achieve the utmost vivid lifelikeness to anthropological and ultimately psychological theories about what makes artefacts, including art works, exercise such agency or excessiveness that viewers believe they possess significant characteristics of life.

17 | Introduction

RHETORIC A passage in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was in many respects the inspiration for this inquiry. In it he tried to define figural speech, its effects and its role in persuasion, by comparing the effect of figures of speech such as antithesis, asyndeton, or metaphor, with the movements and torsions of Myron’s Discobolus. It is also one of the first attempts in Western thinking on art to analyse the relation between the effect of a work of art or speech on the public, and living presence: The body when held bolt upright has but little grace, for the face looks straight forward, the arms hang by the side, the feet are joined and the whole figure is stiff from top to toe. But that curve, I might almost call it motion gives an impression of action and animation. So, too, the hands will not always be represented in the same position, and the variety given to the expression will be infinite.13 According to classical rhetoric, the animation of both speech and art is achieved through the use of figures. Most rhetorical attempts to define figures of speech draw on a system of visual metaphors, all playing on the original meaning of the Latin figura, which etymologically is related to the verb fingo, to form or shape: form, shape or figure, and by extension a sketch or drawing.14 Accordingly figura can refer to two ways of modifying normal usage. In a general way it is used for any form or shape (forma) in which thought is expressed, just as figura can be used to refer to any shape or attitude of the body. The use of visual and spatial metaphor when trying to describe the process by which thought is expressed has become so widespread and ingrained that it has almost petrified into a dead metaphor by now. But it is nonetheless a metaphor, and actually forms the bridge to the second, more restricted way in which figura is used. It then means ‘a […] change in meaning or language from the ordinary and simple form, that is to say, a change analogous to that involved by sitting, lying down on something or looking back’, and more specifically poetical and rhetorical changes. The changes in a body’s aspect caused by motion are here used to illustrate modifications of normal use and meaning. Hence figura can refer to all expressions that have ‘received a new aspect’.15 Figures of style are thus first connected to the gestures of the human body; but next they are defined in terms of visuality: as shapes and aspects. Quintilian did not stop there. Figures are among the strongest means of persuasion an orator has at his disposal, particularly to arouse the emotions. Their force surpasses that of gesture and the expressive use of the face or eyes, because, as he puts it, the ‘vultus orationis’, that is the face of speech seen as a whole surpasses the power of its parts. The ‘vultus orationis’ serves in particular to establish a bond with the public. Most translations normalize this metaphor, translating ‘vultus’ as aspect, which can be used of dead matter and living beings alike. But the Latin ‘vultus’ was used almost exclusively of the human face, its countenance or features.16

18 | Introduction

Cicero called it the ‘image of the soul’ and the ‘silent language of the mind’.17 Just as the gestures of the hands can give visible form to the emotions, the expressive movements of the face offer a visual statement of what goes on in the mind. Following the same line of thought the figures of style can be called ‘the face of speech’: through their movement away from ordinary usage they highlight and thereby give visible shape to the emotions of the speaker. The brilliance – another visual metaphor, caught by Cicero when he called striking arrangements of words ‘quasi lumina’, almost lights or even eyes – lent to speech by figures of thought and speech ultimately results in an illusion of life.18 In the visual metaphors Quintilian and Cicero use speech becomes alive: it has hands that gesture, eyes that see and a face that expresses emotion. Without figures speech is lifeless and without force; but if rightly used they endow a speech with life and the power to act on the public. One stylistic strategy that was considered particularly effective to achieve this was enargeia or illustratio, description that is so vivid and lifelike that the audience believes they are seeing what is described, not listening to somebody speaking. This effect can be achieved both by the use of figures of speech or thought, in particular metaphors that represent inanimate objects as animate, and by what we would now call narrative techniques, such as detailed description constructed with telling details, the introduction of an eye witness, or a sudden address of the public. Quintilian argued that ‘oratory fails of its full effect […] if its appeal is merely to the hearing […] and not displayed in [its] living truth to the eyes of the mind’.19 The orator should act on the eyes not the ears of the public, and should excite vivid images before their mind’s eyes. ‘Enargeia, as Quintilian put it, ‘makes us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence.’ As we have seen, Quintilian literally calls figures of speech the gestures and face of oratory and ‘the lights or as it were the eyes of eloquence’. Eloquence itself comes alive.20 If successful, speech appears to dissolve into what it describes. We have here one of the first conceptualizations in Western thought of works of art appearing to be animated, and the effect of this on the public.

AGENCY Considered in these terms, the rhetorical approach to the living presence of art works can be tied to a very recent anthropological theory of art, the late Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, another major conceptual pillar for this book’s consideration of viewers reacting to works of art as if they are alive.21 Gell’s aim was to construct a truly anthropological theory of art, not another aesthetics of non-Western art; that is one that considers art not primarily or exclusively as an object of beauty or a bearer of meaning, but as an actor functioning in a network of social relationships.

19 | Agency

It offers a new departure for the kind of viewers’ response that interests us here, because it singles out precisely that aspect of the impact of works of art on their viewers that makes them similar to living beings: their agency, the power to influence the spectator, to make the latter act as if they are engaging not with dead matter, but with living persons. Or, put slightly differently, one way of defining such response is by singling out the phenomenon that viewers report that the work of art acts on them, makes them feel or act in certain ways. Like real living persons they act upon the viewer; they exercise agency. Gell’s theory is not a theory of art or an aesthetic. He rejects both the semiotic and structuralist perspective of most current anthropological work on world art, and the aesthetic attitude towards art. For him, aesthetic enjoyment of the formal beauties of a work of art is a founding fetish of Western society, and should not be the basis of any anthropological study of world art. Instead, in Gell’s anthropology of art, the stress is on the art nexus, the network of social relations in which art works are embedded, and in which they act upon their viewers; that is, on agency.22 It considers objects of art not in terms of their formal or aesthetic value or appreciation within the culture that produced them. Neither does it consider them as signs, visual codes to be deciphered or symbolic communications. Instead, Gell defined art objects in performative terms as systems of actions, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it. Art works thus considered are the equivalents of persons, more particularly social agents. To understand why and how art objects exercise such influence on their viewers, Gell took art to be a special kind of technology. In an earlier article he had called them ‘devices for securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they are enmeshed’.23 Technology fascinates the viewer because it is the result of barely comprehensible virtuosity that exemplifies an ideal or magical efficacy we try hard to achieve in other domains. Just so the stylistic virtuosity of the orator enables him to change the views of his audience and impose his views. The task of the anthropology of art according to Gell is therefore to ‘explain why social agents in particular contexts produce the responses they do to a particular work of art’. It is Gell’s stroke of genius to develop such a theory by replacing social agents by art objects. His anthropology of art thus becomes an anthropology of the agency of objects.24 One could even argue that by replacing persons by art works as the core of the art nexus and the object of anthropological study, Gell’s theory is in fact one big living presence response. But it avoids the paradox underlying such response, because it is built upon a definition of personhood whose defining characteristic is not life in the biological sense, but agency.25 The core of living presence response in Gell’s theory thus is transformed from the explanandum into the explanans. From this perspective the novelty and explanatory power of his theory of art as agency resides in that it develops a theoretical account of the field of social relationships in which art works are made, viewed and commissioned, or, as Gell put it himself, their ‘production, circulation, and reception’. It provides a theoretical framework with global scope of how art can act on people, and it offers an explanation for the paradox that

20 | Introduction

people believe inanimate objects share qualities with living beings while they are perfectly aware of the difference between dead matter and living beings in the biological sense. That is, Gell takes as his starting-point the logical and factual impossibility of dead matter being animate, and solves it by arguing that objects can indeed be seen to share considerable characteristics with living beings if we consider them not as alive in the biological sense, but as agents. His explanation of idolatry illustrates this. He argues that the distinction between what he calls ‘animacy’ and ‘inanimacy’ does not overlap with that between being alive and not being alive in the biological sense: devotees believe for instance that the idol in whose eyes they gaze also looks at them, just as we can say, and see, that a camera looks at something without claiming at the same time that it is alive. That is, idolatry can be understood if we distinguish between attributing human characteristics to an animate object – in Gell’s terms animacy — from believing the object is alive in a biological sense. So, if animacy does not need to be defined in biological terms, how can we understand what worshipers believe is the nature of the mysterious capacity cult objects possess? How do they reconcile their awareness that the objects of their devotion are dead matter, with the belief they hold simultaneously that they can act, listen and see? The solution is to consider the idols as social agents, because social agency does not depend on a biological basis of being alive.26 Money is the supreme example of this, but one can also think of the effectiveness of performative speech and of official documents like passports, or the functions of heraldic or military insignia: they all make those who see or hear them act, but we do not consider them therefore as living beings.27

EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY Rhetoric thus provides a framework of theoretical precepts on how to achieve vivid lifelikeness, and some reflections on the impact of blurring the boundaries between life and art on viewers, which from antiquity to the late 19th century has shaped viewing competences and the way educated viewers analysed art.28 Art and Agency offers some building blocks for a more systematic, a-historical analysis of living art and its effects on the viewer in terms of agency, animacy and the art nexus. When we return for a moment to Michel de Cubières’ account of the Borghese Crouching Venus and Hermaphrodite, we can now see how it displays a series of traditional rhetorical features, ranging from figures of speech such as the asyndeton ‘c’est un marbre froid […] qui m’a brûlé’, to the topos of the representation that is so lifelike that it miraculously seems to dissolve into the living being it represents, when Cubières is misled by Bernini’s artistry in chiselling the Hermaphrodite’s matress to believe it is made of wool, and touches it. At the same time, a Gellian reading solves some of the paradoxical, not to say counterfactual aspects of his account, with its mix of willingness to go along with the fiction of art’s living presence and real fear when confronted with the

21 | Experience and memory

conundrum of the Hermaphrodite’s sexual identity, which robs him of his power to draw on his usual repertoire of reactions. Gell’s notion of animacy is particularly illuminating here. Just as the Indian devotee attributes some traits of being alive to the idol whom he believes returns his gaze, without attributing to it the full panoply of biological features of life, Cubières’ responses are triggered by a few characteristics which the statue shares with what it represents, such as the softness of the surface of the marble. His remarks on the woman bereft of her fiancé who projects her love on his portrait instead, and on being just as jealous of a statue as of one’s mistress, also show some awareness of the complexities of the responses he describes, with their singling out of some characteristics that statues may share with living beings. At the same time he never goes so far as to state that the statues are actually alive. Yet although rhetorical discussions of enargeia and Gellian accounts of agency and animacy contribute towards an understanding of living presence response, they are not sufficient. They illuminate artistic aspects of the works of art that cause such responses, and by redefining the life attributed to art they clarify in what respects works of art can act in ways that are similar to living beings. Neither enargeia nor agency and animacy, however, can account fully for a defining characteristic of such responses: their experiential character. Even though Enlightenment theories about the religious origins of art played an important role in the way early modern viewers themselves tried to make sense of viewers treating statues or paintings like living beings, one aspect is crucial in understanding these reactions that is not taken into account in religious explanations: the experiential character of such responses. Unless the viewer suffers from hallucinations, or the work of art has been tampered with, providing it with hidden mechanisms to make it move or speak, works of art only become alive in the viewer’s experience. Bernini’s Hermaphrodite does not breathe and move; it is the viewer who, because of the sculptor’s virtuosity, is led to attribute, in his or her viewing experience, significant aspects of life to the cold marble, and thus relive, while gazing at it, earlier experiences with actual living beings. The experiential aspect of living presence response was already noted in Antiquity, in Stoic epistemological accounts of viewers being taken in by the vividness of art works, and by ekphrastic writers such as Callistratus, who showed that the words making up a vivid description do not miraculously dissolve into what they describe. Homer’s words describing the shield of Achilles do not somehow transform themselves into the events they evoke. Instead, what happens is that such description makes the listener (re)live the experience of looking at what the orator or poet describes. In the 17th century this account was further developed by Sforza Pallavicino, a Roman theologian and friend of Bernini, to give a psychological account of viewers reacting to a statue as if it were a living being. He is one of the first thinkers to attempt to understand, rather than dismiss or develop a theological rationale, for such behaviour. Although his account was not taken up at the time, he offers the historical basis for the third element in the account of living presence response to be developed here: the role of experience, and, as we shall see, in particular of memory in such

22 | Introduction

responses. Accordingly, both Gell’s theory of art as agency and rhetorical analyses of enargeia have to be extended. We will see that in the 17th century rhetorical accounts of enargeia become the starting point for analyses of such responses that draw on psychology and theories of memory, to find their most ambitious expression in Aby Warburg’s vision of art history as a process of the survival of antique art forms in the collective memory of mankind, that is, as a process of recurring life and remembrance. Usually 19th century attributions of life to art are considered within the context of the aesthetics of Einfühlung or empathy. According to its best-known proponent Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the properties associated with life we think we experience when looking at nature are in reality projections of our own feelings and thoughts. When we admire a landscape, we lend our bodily sensations, feelings and thoughts to nature and in the process of doing so give it life and even a soul.29 Empathy was taken up by his son Robert Vischer, who considered the symbolic animation of form to be the result of empathy, defined by him as the ‘projection of one’s own bodily form – and with this also the soul – into the form of the object’. Theodor and Robert Vischer’s aesthetic and psychological researches were the inspiration of a series of late 19th century studies into the experience of art and architecture, including Heinrich Wölfflin’s Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur of 1886.30 Stressing the importance of the viewer’s experience to understand the attribution of life to images may suggest that the argument of this book is an exercise in the aesthetics of empathy or Einfühlung. Although 19th century empathy theorists appear to address the same issue, that of attributing, or in the terms of empathy aesthetics, lending human feelings to inanimate nature and objects, they are in fact concerned with a different problem and response to art. Their concern is to explain the significance of natural or artistic forms by assuming the process of empathy; in other words, attributing animation is for them the explanation of the meaning of art or nature, whereas our concern here is with understanding that attribution. Their explanation is our problem. Also, empathy theorists, particularly in architectural theory, often limit the feelings and sensations that are lent to inanimate forms to an awareness of physical processes, for instance when Wölfflin uses the bodily awareness of load and stress, or the struggle with gravity to explain the forms of the Doric order and why they are still meaningful to us.31 They do not venture into the attributions of life, personhood, an inner life or biography that interest us here.

THE ANIMATED IMAGE: A GROWING FIELD Many of the concepts developed after 1750 to account for viewers attributing life to art works – fetishism and empathy for instance – disappeared in the course of the 20th century from the research agendas of the disciplines concerned: art history, anthropology and psychology, to make way for a positivist approach. Just as empathy disappeared from psychology and was replaced by behaviourism, the agency and life of images disappeared from art

23 | The animated image: a growing field

historical research agendas to be replaced by formalism, stylistic inquiry and iconography.32 After a brief spell of interest in such response around 1900, in the work of Aby Warburg, Julius von Schlosser and Rémy Clerc, it disappeared from art historical consideration, to be revived by David Freedberg with his book The Power of Images, published in 1989, and Hans Belting’s Bild und Kult of 1990. Both books, with their wide-ranging collection of illustrations of the powers of images, aimed to deconstruct what they saw was the foundation of Western academic art history and aesthetics, a formal and aesthetic appreciation of works of art that, severed of their religious and persuasive functions, ended up in a museum vitrine bereft of their living presence and agency. This book looks at a category of responses outside the relatively easily definable borders of response in religious contexts, determined by the sacred character of images. We look at viewers’ responses to works of art, in secular contexts, in particular the erotic, the political and the aesthetic, the latter used here in the sense of viewing and appreciating art in a wide variety of settings, from the salon to collections such as the Borghese and papal collections, to museums and other public exhibitions of art. In this wide range of settings and contexts doctrinal and behavioral constraints do not operate in the way they do in ritual contexts of image viewing. Accordingly it is less easy to fall back on theological conceptualisations of such responses in terms of iconoclasm and idolatry, on which the majority of existing studies on such responses concentrate. They are based on religious definitions and regulations produced in the course of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The accounts they offer take their starting point in religious doctrine, the Eucharist and Transsubstantiation, the Second Commandment in the Old Testament, and the vast corpus of texts produced by the successive waves of iconoclasm in the early stage of Christianity, the Byzantine Empire and the Reformation.33 David Freedberg’s The Power of Images for instance assembles a world-wide corpus of cases illustrating the power of images, often very akin to that of living beings, and developed an analytical framework that starts from the theological considerations surrounding the use and impact of images in religious contexts. The recent collection of essays on idolatry and iconoclasm edited by Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd is called Presence. The Inherence of the Prototype within the Image and Other Objects, and defines the problem in theological terms as well, that of the relations between divine prototypes and their representations.34 In the 1990s and 2000s much work was done on such responses, and the wider issues they raise. Georges Didi-Huberman has questioned conventional borders between living bodies, medical images and art; William J. T. Mitchell has offered a semiotic and metaphysical analysis of pictures considered as living beings. In Presence Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd have brought together many cases of identification or elision of the being represented by an image with its representation.35 Marina Warner has recently illustrated in Phantasmagoria the many ways in which people have tried to capture the soul so vividly that the borders between dead matter and living beings dissolve into phantasms and simulacra.36 In the Iconoclash exhibition and catalogue on iconoclasm and idolatry in art

24 | Introduction

and science, curator Bruno Latour has extended discussions of these phenomena from the world of art and religion into that of science, and thus redefined a new field of inquiry. His short book on fetishism, Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, originally published in 1996, is like this book in part an attempt at recovering what one might call the prehistory of fetishism, before Marx and Freud gave it the definitions that still dominate discourse on it.37 But Latour’s interests and aims differ from those of this book in that his concern is ultimately the constructed nature of objectivity and subjectivity in Western science, not understanding the response of individual viewers to particular works of art. Most recently Horst Bredekamp developed an account of the life and agency of images based on the speech act theory of Austin and Searle, which is in many respects a synthesis of the work done in the past two decades inspired by Freedberg and Belting.38 These books share a tendency to give an account of viewers attributing life to art works that concentrates mainly on the work of art and its qualities that may elicit such response.39 Existing studies also tend to focus on definitions of the life that viewers appear to attribute to works of art. The studies by Jacobs and Cole on such Renaissance responses are conspicuous examples of this approach, reconstructing the development of medical definitions of life, or of the role of magic in shaping and accounting for them.40 When they do consider what goes on in the viewer, they tend to define or label such reactions in present-day terms. Many accounts circle around varieties of paraphilia such as fetishism in the Marxist and Freudian sense of endowing an object with a material or emotional value that surpasses its real value: the viewer who kisses a painting or claims to love a statue – Théophile Gautier for example, who famously declared that he preferred statues to women, and marble to living bodies – takes a work of art as the object for feelings that should be reserved for living beings. Fetishism plays an important role in this book as well, since it is one of the central notions in Western thought about such responses. But unlike the recent studies by Pietz, and to a lesser degree Böhme, this book attempts to go back beyond Marxian and Freudian definitions to understand what early modern viewers meant when talking about fetishism in the context of animated cult objects and art works.

THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK Although over the past twenty years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a general theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood at the time they occurred. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses. To do so the historical part of the book concentrates mainly on responses to sculpture, since statues by their very corporeality seem to elicit the strongest and most

25 | The structure of this book

varied kinds of living presence response, and on the histories of sculpture that were written from the 1650s to c. 1800, in a tradition of religion critique that was independent of Winckelmann’s aesthetic and archeological project, and has hardly been studied until now. In the course of the book, the rhetorical and anthropological approaches will be extended by theories on memory and experience, since next to rhetoric and anthropological or ethnographical accounts, ways of understanding such responses increasingly show an awareness of their experiential character and the role of memory in them. The aim of this book is therefore not primarily to add to the growing corpus of viewers’ responses in which works of art are treated as living beings. Instead, it aims to contribute towards an understanding of such responses, both by analyzing them by means of concepts developed in classical rhetoric and Gell’s anthropology of art and agency, and by retracing the history of attempts to understand – or even excite – such response. It therefore combines a history of Western thought about viewers’ treatments of statues as if they are living beings, from Quintilian to Warburg, with a theoretical framework that employs both concepts developed at the time these responses occurred and a present-day anthropological perspective. Since one of the arguments of this book is that a fundamental change in understanding and appreciating such responses took place in the period 1750–1800, evolving from a rhetorical instrumentalization of enargeia to a dismissal of the attribution of life to images as the sign of a primitive or diseased mind, the historical part of this book concentrates on a reconstruction of this shift and its causes. Accordingly, the first part presents the three main conceptual building blocks: vivid representation or enargeia, agency and memory. The second part offers a reconstruction of 17th and 18th century understandings of living presence response, starting at the same incident that led Pallavicino to formulate his psychological account of such responses: the public debate caused by the Roman people’s offer to erect a statue to Pope Alexander VII, during his lifetime, in gratitude for his containment of the plague. Both Andrea Borboni’s Delle Statue (Rome 1661) on Alexander VII’s refusal of a statue erected in his honour by the Roman people on the Capitole, and François Lemée’s Traité des Statues (Paris 1688), a defence of the statue erected by a courtier to Louis XIV to commemorate the Peace of Nijmegen, and in particular of the inauguration ritual, take the shape of a history of sculpture that locates its origins in religious ritual. Both books connect sculpture with the origins of society and civilization and with idolatry. Lemée offers a particularly interesting account, because, drawing both on Borboni and the Swedish antiquarian Figrelius’ compilation of Roman sources on sculpture, he extends the scope of his work by including testimonies of idolatry and adoration of statues from all over the world, arguing in a proto-ethnographic and semiotic argument that often, ‘le figurant est confondue avec le figuré’. The representation is confused with what it represents; but that in the case of the Catholic trinity and saints, or Catholic princes, this should not be considered as idolatry. Instead, he argues for an understanding of idolatry in a proto-Gellian account of royal images exercising agency.

26 | Introduction

Building on this proto-ethnographical account of viewer response 18th-century Enlightenment authors developed an account of the origins of society in which sculpture plays a major role. Religion is the foundation of society; its primitive form is the adoration of stones, shells, or artefacts as the deities they represent. The Président de Brosses introduced the concept of fetishism to describe what he called primitive idolatry in ancient Egypt and contemporary Africa, in which agency and life is attributed to inanimate objects. Building on his Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Égypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (published in 1760), subsequent Enlightenment thinkers such as Guasco, Quatremère de Quincy and Dulaure developed this anthropological account of the origins of society in religion and the role sculpture played in it, to extend it to Western attitudes to art, and eventually suggesting that the viewers in Europe who treat their art works as living beings are not really that much different from African adorers of fetishes. The second part ends with the transition from a religious and ethnographical analysis of the attribution of life to objects towards a dismissal of such attributions because they ignore, or counteract, the attitude of disinterested enjoyment that became so important in the new discipline of aesthetics, and particularly in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). Michel de Cubières’s account of his visit to the Borghese collection illustrates this transitory moment full of aesthetic ambivalence: at the same time he is perfectly prepared to use all the staples of traditional rhetorical art criticism, and uneasily aware of the transgressional nature of living presence response when taken not as a rhetorical genre, but at face value. The rise of this aesthetic ambivalence is traced through Herder’s texts on sculpture, Goethe’s catalogue of living presence responses in Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1799), and an analysis of the role of attributing life to inanimate objects in Kant’s Critique of Judgment as both an epistemological barrier against fetishism, and a condition for any understanding of art and nature. With the third part we enter the 19th century. As a result of the drastic and traumatic break with the past caused by the French Revolution, the character and context of living presence response changes as well. It is dispelled from the art gallery and the museum because it runs against the aesthetic attitude of disinterested formal enjoyment on which these institutions are now predicated, and finds a new outlet in new genres of multimedial popular visual culture such as the phantasmagoria, the tableau vivant or the wax exhibitions produced by Madame Tussaud. With this change of setting their character also changes: increasingly, the living presence viewers experience is not that of a desirable living being, but a return of the dead, or a resurgence, or intrusion, of the past into the present. Finally in Aby Warburg’s work many, if not all of the aspects of living presence response discerned here come together: living presence defined as vivid lifelikeness (even in the introduction to Mnemosyne he spoke of ‘Pathosformeln’ as a ‘restitutio eloquentiae’); the anthropological approach to such responses as a worldwide phenomenon, that is part of both the early development of humanity as a whole as well as the individual’s development;

27 | The structure of this book

and living presence associated with the revival of the past of art, in his key notion of the ‘Nachleben der Antike’. The resulting book, one might say, is a contribution towards a historically-informed ethnography of European responses to art. In the Epilogue the various aspects of living presence response that we have elucidated in the course of this book are tied together and placed in yet another perspective, that of 20th-century developmental psychology, since such responses are not isolated aberrations, but a fundamental component of that universal human characteristic, making representations and endowing them with life and agency.

28 | Introduction

PART ONE

ENARGEIA

A good place to begin is classical rhetoric, which offers not only many examples of viewers reacting to images as if they were the living beings they represent, and of listeners reacting to descriptions as if they see the scene described before their eyes, but also advice on how to achieve such vivid representations. Thereby it provides the foundations for an understanding of such responses. Such advice was usually given under the rubric of enargeia or illustratio, description that is so vivid and lifelike that the audience believes they are seeing what is described, not listening to somebody speaking. It can be achieved both by the use of figures of speech or thought and by what we would now call narrative techniques, such as detailed description constructed with telling details, the introduction of an eye witness, or a sudden address of the public. If successful, speech appears to dissolve into what it describes. Treatment of these issues occurred in discussions of enargeia (vividness) and its Latin equivalents evidentia or illustratio, and of energeia (actuality).41 These were considered as among the most important, if not the main instruments of persuasion. The Greek enargeia, derived from argès, shining light, meant clearness, distinctness or vividness. In the Iliad and Odyssey the word is used to describe the blinding light in which the gods appear to mortals, and was compared to the almost white quality of Mediterranean lightning. By extension it came to mean putting something before the audience’s eyes by highlighting it. In Aristotle’s Poetica it is defined together with the etymologically unrelated term energeia in his discussion of particularly persuasive stylistic strategies: the vivid aspects (enargeia) of a description put what is discussed before the eyes of the audience by using words that signify motion or actuality (energeia). To achieve this the poet should keep his subject before his eyes (pro ommatôn), to see it very clearly (enargestata), as if he was present himself.42

31 | Enargeia

Quintilian argued that ‘oratory fails of its full effect […] if its appeal is merely to the hearing […] and not displayed in [its] living truth to the eyes of the mind’.43 The orator should act on the eyes not the ears of the public, and should excite vivid images before their mind’s eyes. ‘Enargeia’, as Quintilian put it, makes us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence.’44 Aristotle and Quintilian were not unique, nor were they the first in drawing attention to the expreme power of persuasion. The Sophist Gorgias, active in the 5th century BC and the author of one of the first surviving texts on rhetoric, compared the force of words to the effects of poison to suggest the magical power of fascination that words possess.45 Longinus developed the sublime in terms of an experience of extreme vividness, exercising a physical agency on the hearer. Enargeia ‘not only persuades but enslaves the listener’.46 Sublime speech, as he declared in the opening section of Peri Hupsous or On the Sublime, springs like a thunderbolt or whirlwind on the audience and carries them away.47

ENARGEIA, EKPHRASIS AND PHANTASIA In spite of its importance as an instrument of persuasion, most classical rhetoricians, with the exception of Quintilian, devote little detailed attention to the stylistic means through which enargeia is to be achieved. As we have seen in the Introduction, Quintilian and Cicero analysed the role of figures of speech or thought and narrative techniques to achieve vivid lifelikeness in strongly metaphorical language, which suggested that speech itself becomes alive: it has hands that gesture, eyes that see and a face that expresses emotion. Without figures speech is lifeless and without force; but if rightly used they endow a speech with life and the power to act on the public. This concatenation of metaphors is suggestive, but does it make any sense beyond the realm of metaphorical association of movement, the face, life and expression? In the Poetics Aristotle observed that effective metaphors animate the inanimate. To understand the psychological foundation of enargeia and its effects on the mind of the viewer, we have to turn to rhetorical discussions of the genre of ekphrasis. As Ruth Webb has argued very persuasively in her recent Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion, the current usage of the term to refer to a description of a work of art is in fact a late 19th-century coinage. In antiquity, the genre included descriptions of works of art, but had a much wider scope. It was taught in rhetoric schools as part of the progymnasmata, the writing exercises that taught young students the craft of persuasive speech, and could be part of a speech, poem or tragedy. It was not defined, as modern ekphrasis is, by its subject matter, but by its aim: to bring the subject matter vividly before the eyes, as many progymnasmata put it; and by its effect: to make the audience imagine a scene, transforming them from listeners into spectators, and to make absent things seem present. The words of an ekphrasis were con-

32 | Enargeia

sidered to act on the viewer, in an almost physical sense as we shall see. Enargeia, vivid description, is the defining characteristic of this rhetorical genre, which is based on the intimate relationship between words and the visual.48

PHANTASIA The ancients not only developed a range of strategies to achieve enargeia; they also developed causal explanations of the effects of vividness they could create in word, paint or stone. Put briefly, rhetoricians and philosophers, in particular the Stoics, developed a scheme to explain the power of words and images to affect readers and viewers so strongly that they imagined the scene represented and believed the absent present. Rhetoricians did so from the perspective of the creation of such words and images; the Stoics started from their perception. It is a scheme of visualisation that applied in art as well as rhetoric or poetry: the artist’s observation or inspiration leads to mental images or phantasiai, which are given visible or audible form in works of art, texts or speech. In their turn, these words or images act on the public, creating mental images before their mind’s eye. These mental images are endowed with animation, drawing on the public’s recollection of similar experiences with living beings or real situations. In Longinus’ account of vivid description for instance, phantasia is used to refer to the ideas and thoughts in the orator’s mind, which are capable of producing images and words: Weight, grandeur and urgency in writing are very largely produced, dear young friend, by the use of ‘visualizations’ (phantasiai). That at least is what I call them; others call them “image productions” [eidôlopoiias]. For the term phantasia is applied in general to an idea that enters the mind from any source and engenders speech, but the word has now come to be used predominantly of passages where, inspired by strong emotion, you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience.49 Quintilian offers a more detailed account of the persuasive power of enargeia, which has little to say about its linguistic or stylistic aspect, since it is ultimately a psychological process, connected with a quality of language, as Ruth Webb puts it, that ‘derives from something beyond words: the capacity to visualize a scene.50 Instead, he presents it as a technique of mental imaging. The resulting vividness or enargeia is conceived here as the result of an internal, psychological process of imaging, not as the object of stylistic analysis: When I am lamenting a murdered man will I not have before my eyes all the things which might believably have happened in the case under consideration? Will the assailant not suddenly spring out, will the victim not be terrified when he finds himself surrounded and cry out or plead and run away? Will I not see the blow and the victim

33 | Enargeia, ekphrasis and phantasia

falling to the ground? Will his blood, his pallor, his dying groans not be impressed on my mind? This gives rise to enargeia, which Cicero called illustratio and evidentia, by which we seem to show what happened rather than tell it; and this gives rise to the same emotions as if we were present.51 According to Quintilian the orator begins by imaging for himself the topic of his ekphrasis, in an activity that is very similar to daydreaming: phantasia or visio.52 When imagining for instance a scene of murder or a trial, the orator draws on the mental images, resulting from sense perception, that are stored in his memory. This allows him to have present, so to speak, before the mind’s eye absent events, persons or objects: What the Greeks call phantasiai (we shall call them ‘visiones’, if you will) are the means by which images of absent things are represented to the mind in such a way that we seem so see them with our eyes and to be in their presence [eas cernere oculis ac praesentes habere uideamur].53 These words have an almost physical impact; they proceed from the memory and mind of the orator to penetrate the mind of the listeners, where they activate their memories and thus trigger a similar process of imaging, almost a mental staging of the experience of looking at the scene, object or person described by the orator. In the famous passage by Plutarch on enargeia in Thucydides, where he compares poetry (which for him included history writing) to painting, readers are also compared to spectators, but Plutarch connects enargeia to energeia as well, thus directly linking a description’s vividness to its agency on the reader: The most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting. Assuredly Thucydides is always striving for this vividness in his writing, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them.54 As Quintilian observed about Virgil’s description of the Greek warrior Antores in the Aeneid: ‘had the poet not thoroughly [or in his innermost mind] conceived an image of death to be able to say “and, dying, he remembered sweet Argos”’?55 Nikolaos, the early 5th-century Greek author of a collection of progymnasmata calls the listeners ‘theatai’, the audience at a theatre, when he likens the audience of an ekphrasis to spectators.56 This way of conceiving the effect of words and images on their public in what we would now, anachronistically, call creating and watching a movie before the mind’s eye, would endure until the end of the 18th century. To cite but one example, in a 17th century

34 | Enargeia

rehearsal of the equivalence of poetry and painting, Claude Perrault would remind his readers that [la] poésie n’est autre chose qu’une peinture agréable, qui représente par la parole tout ce que l’imagination peut concevoir, en donnant presque toujours un corps, une âme, du sentiment et de la vie aux choses qui n’en ont point. […] [La poésie] ne parle d’aucune chose qu’elle ne la revête de toutes ses couleurs et de toutes les circonstances qui peuvent nous la rendre agréable; de sorte que celui qui lit ou qui écoute réciter un poème bien fait, n’a qu’à livrer son imagination aux images qu’y forme la poésie, sans faire autre chose de sa part que de les regarder […].57 Enargeia draws on the human capacity to visualize a scene when listening to, or reading its description: words trigger images. It is nourished by the collection of images resulting from sensual perception that are stored in the memory of speaker and audience alike. This is the basis for the close kinship between vividness in words and art: in both cases it is based on visualization. The artist gives a visible form to the phantasiai, the images he creates in his mind in paint or stone; the orator gives outward form to his phantasiai in speech. In both cases the process of externalization begins with internal visualization, since, as Aristotle stated in an extremely influential passage in De Anima, all human thought takes place in and through images.58 The orator uses his own store to call up images already existing in the audience’s mind.59 Aristotle described these, in the language of the visual arts, as the imprints or tupoi of sense perceptions on the wax tablet of the mind, or as the paintings after life, the zo¯graphèmata which make the mind into a gallery of images left behind by visual perception.60 Following him authors would often rehearse the metaphor of the painting for mental imaging. Plutarch for instance, in his Dialogue on Love, describes how the impressions (eikones) of the beloved on the lover’s mind surpass those of ordinary things because they possess enargeia: as if they were painted in encaustic and engraved with the help of fire, and leave behind in memory images that are endowed with life, movement and voice [kinoumena kai zo¯nta kai phthèngomena], and that will remain there for ever.61 Enargeia is the power with which sense perceptions directly strike the mind, or with which the imagination creates images before the mind’s eye, inspired by literally striking words or sights.62 Now according to Aristotle, we can consider these images in the mind either as an image of what they represent, or as the represented object, person or situation itself, just as in the case of memories we do not always include an awareness of their representational aspect when we think about them. In this respect memory images are similar to the images excited by vivid description: they can be considered either as a resemblance to what they repre-

35 | Enargeia, ekphrasis and phantasia

sent, or as an equivalent of it. Aristotle stresses the actual physicality of these images, which are impressed on the body itself, just as words were thought by ancient rhetoricians to have a direct impact on the body of the listener, entering into the deepest recesses of the mind.63 These stores, or galleries, of mental images impressed by sense perception on the orator’s mind are the reservoir on which he draws when creating vivid speech. The human capacity to form mental images is the foundation for human speech. In a Stoic fragment cited by Diogenes Laertius phantasia, the capacity to form such images, was presented as the origin of thought: ‘for the impression (phantasia) arises first, and then thought (dianoia), which has the power of talking, expresses in language what it experiences by the agency of the impression’.64 As we will see in Chapter Three, in their analysis of vivid presence in the visual arts 17th-century authors would draw on this epistemological and rhetorical model, replacing the Greek dianoia by the Latin ratio or the Italian discorso, which puts the closeness between thought and language even more in the front light. All communication works through the externalization, be it in words or images, of thought born from the mind’s capacity of phantasia.

PHANTASIA, MEMORY AND LIVING PRESENCE RESPONSE This line of thought has important implications for an understanding of the paradoxes of living presence response. Vivid speech does not conjure up, magically, the living presence of the person or situation described, but excites in the mind of the listener memories that allow him or her to visualize what is described. Thereby presence is not recreated, but the experience of seeing what is described. Similarly, statues or paintings do not by their vivid lifelikeness miraculously dissolve into the living being they represent. Instead, they as well excite images in the mind of the viewers that are animated by their memories of similar situations and living beings, and thus recreate not their presence, but the experience of their presence. The living being is not recreated, but the experience of seeing it, by means of a phantasia. This, Aristotle would say, is the result, literally the impact or impression, of a sense perception.65 In the Introduction we quoted Michel de Cubières’ account of his visit to the Villa Borghese. His responses to the Hermaphrodite became very close to how one would react to living beings: desire, fear, and the kind of intense, gripping ambivalence we usually feel only in our relations with fellow human beings. But his account of the frisson caused by the Hermaphrodite in that collection, which reduced him to the state of a young boy terrified of monsters hidden in dark corners, perfectly illustrates the account of enargeia developed in Antiquity: vivid images, like vivid words, trigger memories that feed mental images and thus make us relive experiences of living beings while looking at their marble representations. In other words, although enargeia is a form of mimesis, like the visual arts or the theatre, its effect on the viewer is not based on its lifelikeness, but on the power of words to activate the experience of seeing in the listener.

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7 Scopas, active 400–350 BC, Bacchante, early Imperial copy, marble, H. 45 cm., Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Skulpturensammlung

37 | Phantasia, memory and living presence response

As Ruth Webb elegantly puts it, ‘Plutôt que faire voir une illusion, [l’enargeia] crée l’illusion de voir’.66 The rhetorical understanding of enargeia, based on Aristotelian and Stoic views of memory and perception, thus offers an important clue to understand why an audience can react as if they are looking at a living being instead of listening to its description or looking at its representation. Works of art in the rhetorical view are externalizations taking the place of the orator’s words, or the phantasiai in the artist’s mind, that by their vividness trigger memories in the mind of the viewer of living beings. When viewers attribute life to a work of art, the experience of looking at a living being is recreated while looking at it, just as the work of art itself recreates the living being. At the end of antiquity the Eikones by the 4th-century rhetorician Callistratus dwell insistently on those qualities of sculptural workmanship that suggest life: its arrangement of limbs suggests movement, but above all the treatment of the surface of a statue suggests breath, the circulation of blood under the skin and even blushing.67 Of a statue of Medea he writes for instance, literally translated, that ‘the marble blushes passion’. But he also spends much time endowing the persons represented (Memnon, Narcissus, Medea) with characters and biographies. Of Medea he writes: I also saw the celebrated Medea in the land of the Macedonians. It was of marble and disclosed the nature of her soul in that art had modelled into it the elements which constitute the soul; for a course of reasoning was revealed, and passion was surging up […].68 Thus he evokes both the physical characteristics of life, and the visible manifestation of characters and passions. The result, one might say, is almost a phenomenology of the impression of life statues can give. By singling out those characteristics of the statues he describes that suggest life and character, Callistratus thematizes enargeia, making the reader think about what characteristics of a statue, and by extension of its description, help to create the experience of living presence. The description of a Bacchante by Scopas (active 400–350 BC) may serve to illustrate this ( fig. 7). It is one of the most explicit explorations of the power of the inspired sculptor to give life to stone, and of the ekphrastic ambition to create the suggestion of life through words: A statue of a Bacchante, wrought from Parian marble, has been transformed into a real Bacchante. For the stone, while retaining its own nature, yet seemed to depart from the law which governs stone; what one saw was really an image, but art carried imitation over into reality. You might have seen that, hard though it was, it became soft to the semblance of the feminine […], and that, though it had no power to move, it knew how to leap in Bacchic dance […] When we saw the face we stood speechless; so manifest

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upon it was the evidence of sense perception, though perception was not present. […] Indeed you might say that art has brought to its aid the impulses of growing life, so unbelievable is what you see, so visible is what you do not believe.69 In terms of the analysis of enargeia developed here, Callistratus retells the impact of Scopas’ statue on him; his account, in the past tense, is a series of images created by the sculptor in his mind, imprinted on it by the statue’s almost uncanny lifelikeness. The sculptor was able to achieve the impossible: to express in hard stone the signs of perception. The vividness of these images aims to create in the listener a similar series of mental images of the boundaries between inanimate marble and living, sentient being. After discussing the signs of life Scopas has given to his material, which almost amounts to a phenomenology of life and sense perception, Callistratus turns to a paragone between the sculptor Scopas and the orator Demosthenes. In it, the equal power of sculpture and oratory to act upon the mind are demonstrated, using the very same phrase that Gorgias had used 800 years before to suggest the power of persuasion: Thus Scopas fashioning creatures without life was an artificer of truth and imprinted miracles on bodies made of inanimate matter; while Demosthenes, fashioning statues in words, almost made visible a form of words by mingling the poisons or spells of craft with the creations of mind and intelligence.70 In a series of carefully balanced contradictions used to unfold the paradoxes of life created in stone and statues made of words (creatures without life, artifice versus truth, living bodies consisting of matter, the creations of the mind versus the spells of craft), Callistratus does not cover up the impossibility of living statues in flourishes of ekphrastic metaphor. Instead he recreates the process of lifelike forms impressing on the mind of the viewer an image of a living being in the very process of creating an ekphrasis that has that same effect on the listener.71

THE EARLY MODERN AFTERLIFE OF EKPHRASTIC ENARGEIA Through the French translation by Blaise de Vigenère, first published in 1578, the descriptions of Callistratus became widely read in humanist circles.72 They became one of the most influential models for the description of statues until Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums of 1763, in their favouring of the sense of movement of life over proportion, the elision of the statue with the being it represents, but above all because of what his French imitators would call ‘le sentiment de la chair’: the suggestion of the softness and sentience of living skin, and even of blood coursing through the veins or the movement of muscles underneath. Franciscus Junius quoted him extensively in the third book of

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8 Pierre Puget (1620–1694), Milon de Crotone, 1683, marble, H. 2.70 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

De pictura veterum, to illustrate various ways of describing statues. In his Essay des merveilles de nature et des plus nobles artifices, a widely read common place book and what we would now call a conversation lexicon, the French Jesuit Binet included a chapter ‘Sur la façon de louer les statues’ largely based on Callistratus, in which he combines the Medusa and Pygmalion themes: ‘Les hommes ravis deviennent comme pierres, et les pierres ravies par la force de l’art semblent devenir animées, et sortir hors de soy’.73 This capacity was considered by many French and Italian theorists and critics in the 17th and 18th century as what distinguished sculpture from painting, but also the achievement through which the Moderns, in particular Bernini, proved their superiority over the Ancients. From the period of Bernini’s visit to France in 1665 to the end of the 18th century sculptors and critics drew

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9 Pierre Puget (1620–1694), Persée et Andromède, 1684, marble, H. 3.20 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

on Callistratus’ aproach and vocabulary to define in what respect contemporary sculpture is superior to that of the ancients or even the work of Michelangelo: in what they would call ‘le sentiment de la chair’.74 Pierre Cureau de la Chambre for example, one of the first biographers of the Italian sculptor, observed that [Le Bernin] n’a quitté le gouste antique que pour donner à ses figures plus de mouvement et de vie, plus de tendresse et de vérité […] Il a osté, pour ainsi dire, la dureté au marbre (qui s’ammolit sous son ciseau), qu’il luy a donné de la legereté et de la transparence, et que l’on croit voir et toucher de la chair en regardant et maniant ses figures.75

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10 Edme Bouchardon, Sleeping Satyr, copy after the Barberini Faun, a hellenistic statue of c. 200 BC, 1726, marble, H. 1.84 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

A century later, in 1761, the sculptor Falconet would still draw on the same vocabulary and critical approach to sculpture to demonstrate again that the Moderns had triumphed over the Ancients in their skill in endowing stone with the illusion of pulsating life ( figs. 8 and 9): Cette partie de la sculpture a peut-être été portée de nos jours à un plus haut degré de perfection. Dans quelle sculpture grecque trouve-t-on le sentiment des plis de la peau, de la mollesse des chairs, et de la fluidité du sang, aussi supérieurement rendu que dans les ouvrages de ce célèbre sculpteur moderne [that is, Puget]? Qui est-ce qui ne voit pas circuler le sang dans les veines du Milon de Versailles? Et quel homme ne serait tenté de se méprendre en voyant les chairs de l’Andromède?76 Bellori, Diderot, Caylus, and Falconet would all celebrate this capacity of sculpture in ways that rephrase and recall Callistratus. Caylus for instance, in his Vie d’Edme Bouchardon, praises his copies after classical statues not only for his precision, but also for ‘les détails intérieurs [étant] accompagnés de la réminiscence et du sentiment de la chair et

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de la nature’ ( fig. 10).77 We will see in Chapter Three how important remembrance will become in understanding the animation of statues.

CONCLUSION Enargeia, the vividness of art and speech that makes the viewer or listener believe she looks at living beings instead of their representation, is therefore, according to the accounts developed by rhetoricians, Aristotle and the Stoa, not a mysterious capacity of words and images that borders on the magical. In the psychological account they developed, it is connected to the fundamental human condition that thought takes place in and through mental images, and the no less mysterious power of words to enter the mind and imprint images on it, which are stored in memory and can be reactivated. Rhetoricians and Stoics addressed different issues connected with vividness: for the first, understanding the principles that govern the creation of vividness was the main issue; for the second, following Aristotle, to understand in epistemological terms how viewers come to mistake an image for the living being it represents. Together they offer some elements that help to understand how it comes to be that viewers react to works of art as if they are living beings, and explain that such reactions are not delusions, but may be understood when we take into account the psychological and experiential nature of such reactions. This analysis of enargeia cannot offer a complete account of living presence response to works of art, although its reconstruction of the perceptual and psychological process through which words or images recreate the experience of viewing in the public’s mind is illuminating. But it also points to another element that is essential to understanding these responses. Quintilian, but even more so Longinus, insisted on the agency, if not actual power, of words to excite such responses. As the latter put it, enargeia ‘not only persuades, but enslaves the listener’.78 He was not the only classical author to insist on the power of vividness. As we have seen, the Sophist Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, described the magical power of fascination that words possess, comparing the force of words to the effects of poison – a term that Callistratus would also use to describe the effect of Demosthenes’ eloquence.79 They thus singled out the persuasive force of such vivid representations. In the next chapter we will turn to an anthropological theory of our own time to further understand this aspect, the ways in which images act upon viewers, moving from artistic qualities and psychological processes to the social context in which works of art act on their viewers.

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AGENCY

Ancient Greek myths often expressed desires and fears for images that are not discussed so fully in the literature of art. Two among them explore the precarious borders between a lifeless image and the living being it represents, the viewer’s desire that an image lives, and fear of its powers: those of Pygmalion and Medusa.80 Ovid’s retelling of the story of Pygmalion presents the desire of the sculptor that his creation become alive, and that he can have an affair with it, shown with unparalleled explicitness in Hans Speeckaert’s Allegory of Sculpture of 1582 ( fig. 11). Ovid’s account dwells insistently on the tactile experience of statues, when he describes how the sculptor touches the ivory, feeling and caressing it in the hope that it might turn out to be alive, and easing himself into this illusion.81 Persuaded by his own artistry, Pygmalion is inflamed with desire: Indeed, art hides his art. He marvels: and passion, for this bodily image, consumes his heart. Often, he runs his hands over the work, tempted as to whether it is flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. He kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned; and speaks to it; and holds it, and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs, and is afraid lest bruises appear from the pressure.82 When he returns home from sacrificing to Venus and praying her to give him a wife similar to the statue, ‘for he dares not ask for an ivory virgin’, he kisses the statue again; but this time, her body grows soft and warm under his caresses.83 Startled, he again explores her body, and feels how her veins throb with life under his hand: ‘corpus erat’, the narrator exclaims, she has become a living body. As we have seen in

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11 Hans Speeckaert (1535–1575/80), Allegory of Sculpture (Pygmalion), etching,1582

the previous chapter, sensory exploration of a statue or body – the soft skin, similar to wax softening in the rays of the sun, the breathing body, circulation and movement – will often return when viewers are persuaded by the supreme artistry of the sculptor to believe in the living presence of the statue. Diderot for instance, in his 1763 Salon review of Falconet’s Pygmalion, exclaimed: ‘Quelles mains! Quelle mollesse du chair! non, ce n’est pas du marbre. Appuyez-y votre doigt et la matière qui a perdu sa dureté, cédera à votre impression. […] O Falconet, comment as-tu fait pour mettre dans un morceau de pierre blanche la surprise, la joie et l’amour fondus ensemble. Emule des dieux, s’ils ont animé la statue, tu as renouvelé le miracle en animant le statuaire.’84

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A very different tale of the life and agency of statues is told in the story of Medusa. In the Metamorphoses Perseus recounts it as an episode in the tale of how he rescued Andromeda and vanquished Phineus, her intended bridegroom. It has rarely been noted that the Gorgon is here presented as a kind of anti-Pygmalion, petrifying where the sculptor animates. The countryside surrounding the home of the Gorgons is described as a statue garden, full of the petrified victims of their gaze. Later on, after Perseus has decapitated Medusa and uses her head to deal with Phineus and his comrades, Ovid employs words to describe their petrification that are usually associated with statuary: ‘Thescelus became a statue, poised for a javelin throw’; ‘there he stood; a flinty man, unmoving, a monument in marble’; ‘Astyages, in wonder, was a wondering marble’. Finally, Phineus sees the simulacra, the stone statues of his comrades in arms, and calls their names. Like Pygmalion he does not believe what he sees and touches their bodies because he fears their metamorphosis, only to realize that they have been turned into stone. ‘They were marble’, he cries out, ‘marmor erant’ in a clear echo of Pygmalion’s corpus erat: [Phineus] sees them all, All images, posing, and he knows each one By name, and calls each one by name, imploring Each one for help: seeing is not believing, He touches the nearest bodies, and finds them All marble, all.85 Representations of Medusa as a petrifying sculptress are not very frequent, but some 17th-century versions, such as the one by Sebastiano Ricci reproduced here, play on the similarities between her petrifying powers and those of the sculptor by locating this scene in a statue gallery ( fig. 12). Ovid’s version of the Medusa myth figures the ambivalences surrounding the agency of art when it becomes very close to life in its power to fix and petrify, and in particular in its suggestion that sculpture is an act of petrifaction that can become uncomfortably close to Medusa’s paralyzing gaze. Here she turns out to be a sculptor, but not an entirely benign one. Few studies have distinguished this aspect of the myth, with the notable exception of the French ancient historian Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, who has drawn attention to what she calls the paradigm of ikonopoesis or figuration presented by the myth.86 In the first place the Gorgon’s petrifying gaze, changing living beings into lifeless statues; secondly Medusa’s figuration on the reflecting mirror of Perseus; and in the third place the petrification resulting from a confrontation with that mirror image. These three kinds of figuration, of image making, all thematize the agency of art and the dangers of looking. Viewers die, petrified by the power of Medusa’s gaze, or, one might say, they die by representation. Underlying these Medusean paradigms of figuration and petrifaction is an uneasy awareness that the relation between a living being and its image is not a matter of harmless

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12 Sebastiano Ricci, Perseus slaying Phineas (Perseus confronting Phineas with the head of Medusa), circa 1705–1710, oil on canvas, 65 by 80 cm., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum

distancing or abstraction through representation in another medium. It is an ambiguous, precarious relation, in which inanimate images turn out to possess the same agency as the living beings they represent. As we saw in the previous chapter, ancient rhetoricians and philosophers stressed the direct, physical impact of persuasion by words or images. They enter the mind, trigger emotions and memories, change the public’s ideas or opinions, and influence their actions. As Longinus put it, ‘[visualization, phantasia] may be said generally to introduce a great deal of excitement and emotion into one’s speeches, but when combined with factual arguments it not only convinces the audience, it positively enslaves them’.87 The agency of words and images, in fact of all human artefacts, is the central issue of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, published in 1998. Although it is a systematic consideration of the impact of art in terms of social interaction, based on recent anthropological research, it displays many points of contact with classical rhetoric, both in its focus on persuasion, which is a variety of agency, and in its Aristotelian concentration on the social function and effect

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of art instead of its beauty or symbolic functions. It also provides the second major conceptual building block for the account of living presence response this book develops. The life viewers attribute to works of art is not taken here in the literal, biological sense of sentience, procreation and metabolism but as ‘animacy’; that is possessing some of the characteristics, but not all, we associate with living beings. Most importantly images share with living persons the capacity to act on those who enter into contact with them.

ART AND AGENCY Since its posthumous publication in 1998, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency has been both hailed as a major new departure in the anthropology of art, and dismissed as a deceptively complicated jeu d’esprit, whose intricacy fascinates its readers in the same ways as the Trobriand canoe prows Gell analysed acted upon their Polynesian viewers.88 It also offers a new departure to understand living presence response because it singles out precisely that aspect of the interaction between works of art and their viewers that makes them similar to living beings: their agency, the power to influence their viewers, to make them act as if they are engaging not with dead matter, but with living persons. Because Gell’s is an anthropological theory of art, the stress is on the art nexus, the network of social relations in which art works are embedded.89 It considers them not in terms of their formal or aesthetic value, or their appreciation within the culture that produced them. Neither does it consider them as signs, visual codes to be deciphered or symbolic communications. Instead, Gell defined art objects in performative terms as systems of actions, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it. Art works thus considered are the equivalents of persons, more particularly social agents. To understand why and how art objects exercise such influence on their viewers, Gell took art to be a special kind of technology. In an earlier article he had called works of art ‘devices for securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities in which they are enmeshed’.90 Technology fascinates the viewer because it is the result of barely comprehensible virtuosity that exemplifies an ideal or magical efficacy people try hard to achieve in other domains. Gell’s own examples are often taken from Polynesia, where he did his field work, and the Pacific. The very intricate large-scale images of war gods, consisting of millions of feathers, were used by the tribes that made them to stun their enemies ( fig. 13); just as the virtuosity of Vermeer’s paintings, another of Gell’s examples, capture and hold the attention of the viewer who tries in vain to catch the moment when paint is transformed into an illusion of reality ( fig. 14). Both artefacts, however different in origin, nature and purpose, can be said to function as mantraps, catching the attention of the viewer and keeping him or her spellbound. Gell’s main concepts are agency, index, prototype, artist and recipient. Agency is mediated by indexes, which are material objects that motivate responses, inferences or

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13 Polynesian war god, probably eighteenth century, wicker framework with feathers, dogs’ teeth and shells, H. 1.07 m., London, British Museum

14 Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), The Lacemaker, circa 1669–1671, oil on canvas, 24 by 21 cm., Paris, Musée du Louvre

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15 Bronze head of Augustus, copy after Prima Porta Augustus, circa 27–25 BC, bronze, glass inset eyes, London, British Museum

interpretations. Indexes can stand in a variety of relations to their prototypes, artists and recipients. Prototypes are the objects or persons that indexes represent or stand for, mimetically or non-mimetically, visually or non-visually. Recipients are those who are (or are intended to be) affected by the indexes. Artists are those persons considered to be the immediate cause or author of the existence and properties of the index. For example, the emperor Augustus was the prototype for the index which is now known as the Prima Porta statue; the people attending a court case in a basilica where one of the many copies of this statue stood, and which they treated as if the emperor was present in person, are the recipients; its artist’s technical ability to create the illusion of lifelikeness by suggesting movement, sight and speech fills the public with awe and admiration. But in a reversal of fortune, Sudanese conquerors of the Roman colony of Meroe severed the head of another statue of Augustus and buried it beneath the steps of a native temple dedicated to Victory, to lie permanently under the feet of its Meroan captors ( fig. 15).91 Agency is achieved through technical virtuosity. It can enchant the viewer: ‘The technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantment of technology’.92 But although Gell mainly discussed technical virtuosity in the handling of material, other varieties of technical refinement may also achieve agency. Stylistic virtuosity, and in particular the artifice that results in vivid lifelikeness is an instance. Using Gell’s theory to configure the social networks in which art works exert such agency on their viewers that they believe the work of art is a living presence, is very useful to

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identify the actors involved, the network of relationships in which the viewer becomes enmeshed, and the effects of agency on the viewer’s behaviour or beliefs. It thus helps to integrate the analysis of living presence response in a much wider range of anthropological and psychological enquiry.93 The living presence response a work of art elicits can thus be redefined as a kind of agency. But they do not overlap entirely. I would argue that there is a defining characteristic of such response that is not covered by Gell’s theory: its experiential character. Art and Agency maps the ways in which indexes make viewers do things (in the widest sense of the word), and this mapping depends heavily on the cognitive psychology of Pascal Boyer.94 But it does not engage in much detail with the actual experience of the patients on which the index exercises its agency. Yet it is precisely the experience of a work of art turning out to be alive, of the creeping awareness or sudden appearance of the inanimate as an animated, living being that defines living presence response. This experience can be profoundly unsettling, and resists any form of scientific explanation.95

THE EXPERIENCE OF LIVING PRESENCE Most people, at some stage of their life or in some situation, have reacted to, or treated objects as if they are living beings: persons that act upon them, share a significant number of characteristics with living beings such as sentience, motion, sexual attractiveness, the power to affect the viewer emotionally, and the power to act or influence actions and beliefs.96 This is no new observation; nor is it new to say that such response to inanimate objects as if they are animate, acting persons, causes embarrassment to the viewer involved, or is the object of derision or rejection. As we have seen in the Introduction, both Michel de Cubières and Goethe were deeply troubled by their feeling attracted to a statue as if it were a living being. That other author of an Italian Journey (1788–89), Johann Gottfried Herder, moved in his unusually frank description of the statue of a hermaprodite in the Villa Borghese from an analysis of the way the sculptor had represented this theme to a description of a living, breathing body that aroused him sexually, but did not hide the mixture of fascination and discomfort he felt while gazing at the statue.97 In the course of his Salons Denis Diderot offers a long series of such responses to works of art. Since he recorded them during his entire writing career, they allow the reader to trace the evolution in their appraisal. In the early Salons (1759–63) the atmosphere is that of unconcerned libertinage, where he offers slyly salacious observations such as: ‘J’ai vu une fois une clef de montre imprimée sur la cuisse d’un plâtre voluptueux’. Later on this changes into moral disapproval of images exciting young male viewers.98 These cases of living presence response are not unique, but what distinguishes them is that they articulate the ambivalent feelings such responses cause. This points to an important aspect of living presence response that has received comparatively little attention in the

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fast-growing literature on this subject: such response is not simply behaviour triggered by inanimate objects. Put in these reductive terms, such reactions become totally incomprehensible, because it is obvious that works of art are made of lifeless matter, and that therefore reacting to them as if they were alive can only be a mistake, delusion, projection, or an expression of idolatry, fetishism, magical thinking or hysteria. But the feelings of ambivalence, derision or shame recorded here, and which also occur outside the rhetorical context in which description full of vivid lifelikeness can exercise its effect, indicate that living presence response is not exclusively a matter of behaviour. Instead, I would argue, living presence response can only be understood adequately when thought of primarily as the viewer’s experience of an artwork coming alive. It is this experience that causes the feelings of ambivalence, discomfort, shame and fascination, which indicate not only how the subject feels about such response, but also, and primarily, that he or she is conscious of such response, is experiencing it. Only when the locus of living presence is moved from the object to the viewer’s experience can such responses become understandable. Viewers react to works of art as if they are living and acting persons not because for some miraculous or supernatural reason they have become alive, or because these spectators suffer from cognitive or semiotic confusion, confounding the signifier with the signified – which is a way of redefining living presence response, but not of explaining it – but because they experience the work of art as living. In Chapter One we have discussed rhetorical accounts of the ways in which ekphrasis can achieve enargeia, making a description so lifelike that it makes the viewer or listener relive the experience of seeing the persons, objects or situations described. We have also looked at Stoic explanations of this effect, based on a theory of perception in which words and images enter the soul of the public and affect it. The rhetorical account rightly points at the experiential character of living presence response, and the role of memory in it; but the perception theory that went with it is no longer tenable. Gell’s introduction of the Wittgensteinian family concept of animacy, referring to the graduation of degrees of life viewers attribute to images helps provide a bridge between his systematic anthropological theory of art as agency and a historical account of how viewers understood such attributions themselves at particular moments in history.

LIVING PRESENCE AS AGENCY AND EXPERIENCE ANIMACY Gell’s discussion of idolatry has received far less critical attention than his notions of the art nexus or the problematic aspects of intentionalities to be inferred from art indexes, but is very useful for a further understanding of viewers attributing life to art works.99 In the course of it he introduces the concepts of animacy and inanimacy to account for the be-

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haviour of viewers who attribute characteristics of life to images. They do not consciously claim that these images possess all the properties of life in the biological sense (movement, metabolism, procreation etc). Instead, Gell argues, drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of the family likeness, they only attribute a limited number of the features of living beings to them, for instance that they have eyes that see.100 To refer to such limited attribution of characteristics of life or animation he introduced the terms ‘animacy’ and ‘inanimacy’. The distinction between these concepts does not overlap with that between being alive and not being alive: devotees believe for instance that the idol in whose eyes they gaze also looks at them, just as one can say, and see, that a camera looks at something without claiming at the same time that it is alive. That is, what we call idolatry, believing that a cult statue possesses characteristics of life, can make sense if a distinction is made between attributing human characteristics to an animate object and believing the object is alive in a biological sense. So, if animacy does not need to be defined in biological terms, what is the mysterious capacity worshipers believe the cult objects possess? How do they reconcile their awareness that the objects of their devotion are dead matter, but at the same time can act, listen and see? The solution is to consider the idols as social agents, because social agency does not depend on a biological basis of being alive, that is, being sentient, able to move or having a metabolism. One can think of their agency as similar to the effectiveness of performative speech: when a priest during the marriage service declares a couple man and wife, his words act on his audience, makes them act in certain ways, and calls into being a new situation.101 Making a distinction between life in the biological sense and animacy is an elegant solution, but one that depends on Gell’s decision to concentrate almost exclusively on behaviour, and, more fundamentally, on his refusal to differentiate between aesthetic and religious experience. Because of this refusal it is both extremely illuminating and too reductive from an art historical point of view: for Gell there is no difference between the behaviour of the art lover in front of the Broadway Boogie-Woogie and the devotee in front of a religious image or object. But of course Kant, Schiller and many other proponents of the aesthetic experience would argue that there is a fundamental difference, not to say opposition and incompatibility between the two, and that aesthetic experience can only come into being once the true character of idolatry has been revealed, that is the enslavement of the rational mind by superstition. Another defect of its qualities as an anthropological theory is that there is no historical dimension. Gell’s theory operates in the here and now, but does not consider whether viewer’s responses, the objects or their agency have developed in the course of time. He analyses living presence response by means of a distinction between animacy and agency, but does not systematically investigate whether this is how people actually thought about their response in 16th-century Italy or 20th-century India. From an historical point of view it is not enough to concentrate on behaviour, of the viewer, maker or art work itself, considering only how they act within the social networks they are part of, because very few living presence respondents thought about their reactions in these terms. Gell’s concentra-

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tion on an object’s agency within its art nexus cannot account for the particular kinds of response individual works of art trigger in some viewers, but not in others: a conceptual analysis like Gell’s solves the logical conundrum of such responses, but does not make them go away. His account makes it impossible to dismiss these reactions as cognitive confusion, paraphilia or illogical primitivism. By understanding them conceptually he cleared the way for a historical and artistic understanding of such responses. Gell himself proceeded to analyse agency in terms of present-day cognitive psychology and philosophy and arrived at two basic ways of understanding how inanimate matter can be transformed into agents, one of which is simply by claiming or stipulating such a role, the other by assuming a homunculus.102 Here I would favour a more historical approach, and consider how, or in what terms, viewers attributed agency to art at particular moments of history. The starting point is to look at such responses as experiences. At first sight Art and Agency seems to offer little scope for a study of living presence response in terms of experience. The only extended discussion of the recipient’s experience of agency occurs when Gell describes what he calls ‘the primordial kind of artistic agency’: fascination. This feeling – a logical bind – is caused by gazing at a virtuoso work of art (Gell gives the example of his own fascination by Vermeer’s Lacemaker, fig. 14) while the viewer, because of his or her own attempts to create an art work, realizes both that such a work is possible and part of the viewer’s world and that it is the result of a virtuosity that far surpasses the viewer’s capacities. This may be a central aspect of many living presence responses, although possibly the source of fascination is artistry and virtuoso craftsmanship, rather than the contrast between the technical virtuosity of the artist and the limited artistic powers of the viewer.103 In any case technical virtuosity certainly does not account for all kinds of living presence response: when Quattrocento Florentines gave the Madonna of Impruneta money for a new dress for instance, or when mediaeval devotees reported that the Madonna of Auxerres dissuaded her viewers from idolatry, the virtuosity of the artist played no role in such response.104 To see in what other ways viewers at particular moments in history attributed characteristics of life to works of art I will consider three such cases: reactions to the rediscovery of the Laocoon in 1506 start from description of the vivid presence of the statue, aiming to achieve enargeia; Bellini’s Brera Pietà uses word and image to dissolve the boundaries between the world the painting depicts and that of the viewer, and to make the viewer take part in the emotions the painting expresses; and finally the Medusa by Bernini plays a very complex game with the viewer, suggesting petrifaction as the ultimate evidence of the statue’s life.105

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‘LAOCOON I AM’ There is one group of viewers’ response that abundantly illustrates how the vividness, the enargeia of a work of art makes the viewer react as if looking at living beings and recall the emotions he or she felt when confronted with real life pain and suffering: the poems inspired by the recovery of the Hellenistic statue of Laocoon ( fig. 16). When the statue of the Troian priest Laocoon and his sons was rediscovered on January 1st 1506 near the Coliseum it caused an enormous stir, galvanizing both archaeologists, architects and poets into action. One theme is very prominent in the immense amount of poetry written in reaction to this event: the statue, though made of marble, lives. In one of the first and best known Laocoon poems, De Laocoontis statua by Jacopo Sadoleto (1477–1547) the sculptors are praised because they were able to render rigid stone animate with living figures and endow the marble with living senses.106 As a result the beholder sees movement, anger and grief, and almost hears the groans of Laocoon and his sons. This may be described as a typical, not very original example of the cliché of the work of art that seems to breathe. But many poems all written shortly after 1506 go much further. The poem by Elio Lampridio Cerva (1462/3–1520) opens by exclaiming that ‘the stone image lies [mentitur] true colours’, in an interesting ungrammatical transitive use of the verb ‘to lie’, which here takes an object, viz. the true colours of the living body. It continues with ‘Here the marble displays the true signs of fear’.107 Evangelista Maddaleni de’Capodiferro’s Latin poem (c. 1450–c. 1527) offers an even more original, and very subtle take on this topos: in the opening lines it is not the poet, but Laocoon himself who speaks: ‘Laocoön I am’. Then in the course of the poem the speaker is transformed from the person into the statue: ‘you will say, when you look at me, that the pains are real for the stone, and that death and fear are not fictive for my sons’.108 A short poem by Antonio Tebaldi (1463–1537) offers yet another take on the statue’s agency on the beholder. The statue again speaks: ‘I am Laocoön, so expressive and alive/that, if you are not made of the material/out of which I am made and my sons, you will make of your eyes a sorrowful river’.109 This statue is so lifelike that looking at it the viewer, if he is a human being, is overcome by pity: ‘I, Laocoön, though a stone statue that is nonetheless able to speak, will not cry, but you, living human being, will (…).’ That is, the representation of Laocoon’s suffering is so vivid that the viewer is overwhelmed by feeling it and will take over the priest’s complaint in an ultimate act of empathy. In Sadoleto’s poem the sight of suffering is so strong that it cannot be borne; again, the statue’s enargeia makes the viewer feel what the priest felt: What shall I speak of first? […] Real agonies of stone that reallly dies? The mind recoils, and the mute image strikes The heart with a pity joined with no small terror. […]

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16 Unknown sculptor: Laocoon and his sons, early 1st century, Roman copy after the Greek original by Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athanadoros, marble, H. 2.42 m (from Laocoon’s right hand to the base of the statue), Rome, Musei Vaticani

Scarce can the eyes support the sight of cruel Death and dreadful fates […].110 Evangelista Maddaleni de’Capodiferro also builds his poem on the conceit of the prosopopeia: the statue is made to speak, and by this supreme act of humanizing the viewer is forced to empathize, and feel the fear Laocoon felt: You will say, when you look at me, that the stone feels real pain […] Tear away the countless coils and knots of the snakes, Spectator, if the double dragon does not deter you.111

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17 Raphael (1483–1520), The Ecstacy of Saint Caecilia, 1516–1517, oil transferred from panel to canvas, 220 by 136 cm., Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale

In another display of poetic virtuosity, the death of the Trojan priest, the eternal fixation of his suffering in stone, and Athena’s vengeance are associated in an act of Medusean petrifaction: While Laocoon suffered the anger of the violated deity and bemoaned the death of his sons so that he would become a monument for eternal, immense grief, and while dead would live as an example in hard stone, Pallas turned her face with the Gorgon in the middle of her breast towards the enemy shore. Suddenly bodies became rigid stone and remained in the attitude they had before.112

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Put in rhetorical terms, the statue possesses so much vivid lifelikeness, so much enargeia, that it creates in the viewer the experience of looking at real, living beings suffering the pains of violent death. Put in Gellian terms, through its artistic virtuosity, it entraps the viewer, and forces him or her to identify with the prototype, the unfortunate priest. Pliny and Vasari had already noted the power of art to entrap the viewer. See for instance the case of the Bolognese painter Francesco Francia reported by Vasari who, upon opening the case in which Rafael’s Saint Caecilia (1516–17; fig. 17) had travelled, became half mad with terror and beauty at the sight of ‘la tavola di Raffaello divina, e non dipinta ma viva’. Having realized as well that he would never equal the genius of Raphael he took to his bed and died soon afterwards. It is a classic case of a work of art turning into a living presence. It no longer inspires aesthetic delight in the artist’s disegno or handling of colour, but terror, desire or even death itself, as the Latin epigram by Fiviziano (active c. 1470) illustrates that Vasari quoted to conclude his Life of Francia. By gazing too long at his image of death, the painter died, but the painting of death continues to live, and speaks: While the painter, when the work is finished, gazes down on it too intensely he turns pale and dies. Alive therefore I am death, not dead an image of death.113 For a clearer grasp of how animacy can help to understand a work of art’s agency, we have to turn to a later example, Bellini’s Brera Pietà.

BELLINI’S BRER A PIETÀ Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà of c. 1460 ( fig. 18), now in the Brera Gallery in Milan, has a small tablet painted on the tomb that is to receive Christ’s body, which carries the inscription Haec fere quum gemitus turgentia lumina promant/ Bellini poterat flere Ioannis opus. When these swelling eyes can produce groans/ The work of Giovanni Bellini could have wept.114 For all its brevity it is a surprisingly layered and elusive statement. Does it suggest, because of its conditional formulation, that the Mother of God will cry when the viewers of this painting are moved to groans (and hence to repentance)? Or does it suggest a close sympathy, bordering on the magical, between the image and what it depicts, so that the painting will cry when Mary cries? That the viewers will groan at the sight of the Virgin’s swollen eyes? That imagining Her swollen eyes made the painter so contrite that he could produce

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18 Giovanni Bellini (1433–1516), Brera Pietà, 1460, tempera on wood, 86 by 107 cm. Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera

a painting that is capable of weeping? Or that Bellini’s painting actually surpasses the swollen eyes of Mary in their power to move the viewer? In its refusal to declare what it refers to, who is speaking, and whom it addresses, it makes the viewer think about the painting’s power to speak to the eye and to move the viewer to tears, but also suggests that the painting itself possesses traits we usually only associate with living beings, such as emotions or grief.115 Renaissance works of art were not made primarily for aesthetic enjoyment. The idea that art is made for its own sake, the notion of l’art pour l’art is a 19th-century view. Instead they were made to move viewers and incite them to virtuous actions on the basis of emotional identification with what was depicted. Lodovico Dolce, the 16th-century Venetian art theorist and translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Cicero’s De Oratore articulated this briefly but clearly: […] it is necessary that the figures move the soul of the viewers, perturbing some of them, making others cheerful, moving some to piety and others to disdain, in accord-

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ance with the nature of the story. Otherwise it will be thought that the painter has achieved nothing: because this is the spice [condimento] of all his talents; as happens equally to the painter, historian and orator: that if things written or recited do not have this force, they lack also spirit and life.116 But the records suggest something else. Viewers identified indeed with what they saw, but this led them not to act or change their ways. At least that is not what they deemed sufficiently important to mention. What they did mention is the basis of their identification. The paintings or statues they saw were so vividly lifelike that they felt to be in the presence of living human beings. The inscription of Bellini’s Pietà points to the same phenomenon. It stresses the work of art’s capacity not only to speak to the eye, but to act on the viewer as well, and it identifies those aspects of the work of art that make viewers engage with it as if it were a living being: its power to feel, to speak, and to weep. Although the painting is very different in character, context and function from the statues Callistratus described, the subscriptio functions in a similar way: it forces the viewer to consider those aspects of art that suggest life. In the case of the Imagines the phenomenology of life developed there singled out skin, texture, breath and inner life; here the subscriptio draws attention to the power of an image to speak and grieve. As Daniel Arasse has argued, mimesis has become so effective here – the painting itself appears to weep – that it almost performs the miracle of a sacred image capable of weeping. But because this miracle does not quite happen, the painter makes the viewer aware of the limits of mimesis, and thereby achieves a transference of the viewer’s feelings of devotion from the image unto the persons depicted.117 Both the descriptions by Callistratus and Bellini’s subscriptio thus thematize, we might say, what Gell called animacy: the phenomenon that viewers, under the influence of a work of art’s technical virtuosity, attribute not all, but some significant aspects of living beings to inanimate paintings or statues.

BERNINI’S MEDUSA We began this chapter by juxtaposing Ovid’s versions of the myths of Pygmalion and Medusa: whereas the first presents the sculptor as the lover of a statue, who secretly hopes that his creation will come alive, Medusa embodies the opposite, the sculptor who, in an ultimate case of agency, petrifies living beings. After isolated instances in the 16th century pictorial versions of Medusa sculptrix become slightly more common in the 17th century: Annibale Carracci’s version in the Palazzo Farnese for instance (1597; fig. 19), showing how Perseus petrifies Phineus, with very suggestive allusions to the Laokoon in the torso of the latter. There are also slightly later versions by Luca Giordano in Naples (c. 1650, fig. 20), Sebastiano Ricci (Santa Monica: the Getty Museum, 1705), or in other media, such as the

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19 Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Perseus and Medusa, fresco, 1597, Rome, Palazzo Farnese

20 Luca Giordano (1634–1705), Perseus petrifying Phineus, c. 1650, oil on canvas, 285 by 366 cm., Naples, Museo di Capodimonte

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21 Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) (attr.), Head of Medusa, c. 1630, marble, H. 40 cm., Rome, Capitoline Musea

22 Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Anima Damnata, 1619, marble, H. 30 cm., Rome, Palazzo di Spagno

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early eighteenth-century versions in the Brussels Museum of Fine Art. They all suggest that Medusa’s petrifying gaze transforms living bodies into statues that in their handling of muscles and skin, movement and porportion, come very close to sculpture of the classical period in a rather unsettling way. To conclude this chapter I will discuss a subtle case where Pygmalion and Medusa, stone coming alive and life turning into stone, come together: the bust of Medusa attributed to Gianlorenzo Bernini, in the Capitoline Musea in Rome (c. 1630; fig. 21), which is one of the most suggestive cases of a work of art itself showing the agency of animation.118 It shows the head of the Gorgon not facing the viewer frontally, as most images do, but looking down, with an expression that suggests fear and horror. The similarities between this bust and that of the Anima Dannata ( fig. 22), and with the head of Laocoon strengthen this impression. Locks of hair surround the head, from which snakes grow and coil. The direction of Medusa’s gaze makes the viewer wonder what she may be looking at. Irvin Lavin has suggested that she is here represented at the moment when she is petrified by gazing at her own reflection in the glittering chisels of the sculptor. He called the bust an awful pun, thus stressing the fictional character of the work, a sculpted jeu d’esprit or concetto.119 Many poems written about Bernini testify to his powers to animate stone. He was often called a new Pygmalion, or a new Amphion. Agostino Mascardi for instance wrote that he surpassed the Greek singer in his power to endow stone with the sense of life.120 Other poets describe how the marble grows soft under the strokes of the chisel, and is endowed with a soul. Tomaso Stigliani called the sculptor a new Medusa, whose scalpel surpasses the power of her severed head: The face of Prometheus and the shield of Medusa, O good Lorenzo, give way to your scalpel. The face in bringing to life senseless bodies, And the shield in petrifying living members. For every single one of your statues is so lifelike, and I remain so stupefied in beholding [mirare] them, that they seem the animated, I the petrified. They seem alive, I seem sculpted.121 Contemporary poems on Medusa also play on this conceit. Giambattista Marino for instance, in his Galleria (…), transforms the classical opposition between a living being represented by inanimate marble by adding an allusion to Narcissus to the equation. Medusa speaks: I do not know if I were made by a mortal chisel or that by looking at myself in a clear mirror my own life made me in this manner

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In a second fragment Medusa has lost none of her petrifying powers, even though she is represented in marble. The viewer is stupefied and transformed into stone: Still alive one can see Medusa in living stone And who turns the eyes on her Will be turned into stone by stupor Crafty sculptor, you have thus vivified the marble So that next to it the living are of marble.122 Marino here builds on a conceit we already encountered in 16th-century poets when describing the Laocoon: only when looking at this supreme image of grief does the spectator become truly human. Moved by pity they realize that the statue lives, whereas they had a heart of stone. In other words, the materiality of the statue is constantly transcended, and changed in the exchange between statue and viewer into a living being, endowed with consciousness and intentionality, that gazes at the spectator. In the terms of Alfred Gell, by their technical virtuosity the viewer is moved to endow the bust with animacy, attributing not all, but a significant number of similarities with a human being, in this case the capacity to gaze in a not entirely benign way. But the logic of the situation in which Bernini portrayed Medusa can be explored even further. His stone version shows her literally petrified. Since she can only be petrified by gazing at her own face or its image, she must be looking at her own reflection. This implies that this bust must be so vivid that it can exert its Medusean agency. That is, being petrified here becomes the ultimate sign of a living statue capable of exercising the agency of the living being it represents. This is also where Gell’s concept of animacy helps to clarify this counterfactual response, the pun or rather paradox of Bernini’s bust. It shows the effect of Medusa’s gaze on herself, petrifaction in progress so to speak, an agency associated with her gaze. As the myth tells, her reflection, and after her death her dead eyes as well, exercised that agency. A typical case, that is, of Gell’s animacy: just as in the case of the Indian faithful who, after gazing for a long time into the eyes of statues of their divinities, claim that the idol returns their gaze, in the case of Medusa the stone representation of her eyes continues to exercise its agency without her being fully alive in the biological sense. Even if we do not for a moment go along with the fiction, dream or fear of the living statue, Bernini’s bust does put in front of our eyes the power of that vividness, leaving us with its stone effect. 150 years later, in the 1780s, the French art critic and theorist Claude-Henri Watelet would also, almost in passing, dwell on Bernini’s Medusean powers. He had observed that the sculptor and his followers had established new conventions of conveying the illusion of life by ignoring or transforming the natural appearance of bodies; but he also noted that this ‘porte à l’âme par les regards qui la fixent l’idée de la vie, et les sensations de la volupté’.123 That is, the ‘living’ eyes of the statue fix the viewers and bring to the soul of the viewer an

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idea of life, and the sensations of gratified desire. As we shall see in Chapter Six, images of Medusa and the reactions they cause are the locus where in the decades around 1800 conflicts would become manifest between the fear, desire and ambivalence images of this mythological figures inspire, and the aesthetic attitude of disinterested enjoyment of the formal qualities of a work of art.

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MEMORY

In the previous chapters we considered the attribution of life to works of art from two perspectives: rhetorical discussions of enargeia, and Gell’s anthropological theory of the agency of art, and animacy. According to the first, vivid speech does not magically conjure up the living presence of the person or situation described, but excites in the mind of the listener memories that allow him or her to visualize what is described. Thereby presence is not recreated, but the experience of seeing what is described. Similarly, statues or paintings do not dissolve miraculously by their vivid lifelikeness into the living being they represent. Instead, they as well excite images in the mind of the viewers that are animated by their memories of similar situations and living beings, and thus recreate not their presence, but experiencing the living presence of the being they represent. The living being is not recreated, but the experience of seeing it, by means of memory and imagination. Vivid images, like vivid words, trigger memories that feed mental images and thus make us relive experiences of living beings while looking at their representations in stone or paint. In other words, although enargeia is a form of mimesis, like the visual arts or the theatre, its effect on the viewer is not based on its lifelikeness, but on the power of words to activate the experience of seeing in the listener. Gell’s theory as well focuses on the agency of word and image, but has not so much to say about what makes them possess this power, since his main interest is in the social network in which agency occurs. Nonetheless, his definition of agency in terms of personhood and animacy is of major importance to our inquiry, because it allows us to understand the attribution of life to art without falling into logical paradoxes or plainly counterfactual statements.124 We no longer have to go along with the attribution of life in the literal, biological sense. Instead, Gell’s family concepts of agency and animacy, drawing

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on Wittgenstein’s notion of the family likeness, open up the insight that when viewers attribute life, they usually only attribute a few, conspicuous traits we associate with living beings but are not exclusive to them, to statues or paintings: eyes that see in particular, but above all the power to act upon them in ways that are similar to those of living persons.125 We also saw that Gell’s theory has to be extended to accomodate the experiential nature of the attribution of life to art. In that respect as well rhetoric offers important clues, since enargeia does not cause representations to dissolve mysteriously into the living beings they describe, but triggers experiences related to these representations in the mind of the public. These experiences are nourished by memories stored in its mind. In this chapter we will turn to one of the first psychological accounts of viewers attributing life to art that attempts to understand the mental process behind such responses, not dismiss it as a misapprehension or condemn it as idolatry. It draws in many respects on classical rhetoric and philosophy, and offers the third main element of the account of such attributions this book attempts to develop.

SIMULACRA IN THE CHAMBERS OF MEMORY As a result of Protestant attacks on Catholic adoration of the eucharist and veneration of holy images, idolatry had become a very sensitive issue in 17th-century Rome. As we will see in Part Two of this book, erecting statues to princes or prelates during their lifetime led in the 17th century to new ways of thinking about treating images as the living being they represent. But first I want to present a highly original contribution to such debates, by the Jesuit Cardinal and moral philosopher Sforza Pallavicino (1607–1667), who started his career in the Barberini circle of Pope Urban VIII and was a close friend of Bernini.126 He was an historian of the Council of Trent, critic of Jansenism and apologist for the Jesuit Order. Of his numerous writings the ethical treatise Del Bene libri quattro (published in 1644 and often reprinted) concerns us here, in particular his treatment of the question how we can tell the difference between inanimate images and living beings. In Book III of Del Bene he argues that human cognition takes place in three stages: first there is the prima apprensione, in which we perceive ‘as between our hands’, in a prerational, or pre-cognitive, observation or perception.127 We do not yet pronounce, when looking at a painting of the dead Christ for instance, whether we are looking at a living being or an image; neither do we decide on the truth or falseness of what we perceive. In the second stage, that of the giudicio or judgment, we reflect on, and judge, the observations made during the prima apprensione. ‘We base our judgement here’ on the appearance of our objects of perception, and decide whether they are alive or inanimate, move, or on the relation of the parts to the whole. We do not, in this stage, use previously acquired knowledge, but only pronounce judgements about the appearance of objects as perceived in the prima

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apprensione.128 Finally, in the third stage, that of discorso, we refine our judgments and connect them with previously acquired knowledge. In itself this reasoning is not very original. It is a rehearsal of Aristotelian and Stoic theories on perception and knowledge.129 In De Anima, the founding text on human psychology which since the late Roman Republic has been part of the Western core curriculum, Aristotle argued in a passage on the workings of the mind that would resound throughout Mediaeval and Renaissance thought that ‘To the thinking soul images serve as if they were contents of perception. That is why the soul never thinks without an image’.130 Under the pressure of Sceptic attacks on this empiricist model of knowledge, the Stoics added that true knowledge arises when the images in the mind correspond to true, existing objects in the world ‘out there’. Therefore they added a third stage, that of grasping the object of perception, which serves as the basis of true knowledge. Hence they defined three stages in the process of knowledge formation. The early Stoic Zeno for instance distinguished between belief or opinion (doxa), knowledge (epistèmè) and cognition (katalepsis). The latter term was translated by Cicero in the Academica, a major source for our understanding of Stoic theory of knowledge, as comprehensio, which plays on the same prehensile metaphor as Pallavicino’s apprensione.131 According to Cicero, the mind, when having a cognition, is in touch with things so as to grasp them. Cicero’s term for this grasp, perceptio, is a literal translation of the Greek katalepsis. Pallavicino’s triad of prima apprensione, giudicio and discorso thus rehearses this Stoic analysis of knowledge.132 In Diogenes Laertius’ account of the life and views of Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoa (334–262 BC), the famous anecdote about the philosopher Sphaerus is used to illustrate these stages of knowledge: […] having been summoned to Alexandria by King Ptolemy, on arrival there, he [Sphaerus] was presented at dinner on one occasion with birds made of wax and when he stretched out his hands to grasp them, he was charged by the King with having assented to something false. But he cleverly replied that he had not assented to the claim that they were birds, but rather that it was reasonable (eulogon) that they were birds; for the cataleptic impression differs from the reasonable one, in that the former is infallible, while the reasonable may turn out otherwise.133 Here as well, the metaphor of grasping an object with the hands is used to illustrate the first, non-discursive apprehension of objects of perception, whether they are objects themselves of their representations. Pallavicino himself mentions among his Stoic sources Epictetus (Book 5 of his Discourses, as recorded by Arrianus), Zeno and Chrysippus. He mentions the latter’s distinction between two kinds of fear, one based on opinion about evil and misfortune, the other caused by a ‘violenta apparizione esterna del male’, which should remain in the realm of phantasy since it is not confirmed by reason. He also mentions the account of Stoic doctrine in Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae. We tremble with fear in the dark if we have to keep a wake next to a corpse,

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even though we know that the dead cannot do us any harm. But because of the combined effect of our strong imagining of such dead bodies and the memory of tales of horror heard in our childhood, which at the time were impressed on our minds as if on soft wax, the irrational passions thus impressed on the emotional part of our souls return when we see objects that recall these terrors. It seems to announce De Cubières’ brief remark, quoted in the Introduction, about the fears of ghosts or monsters in the dark and other phantasms that continue to haunt people from their childhood. In Chapter Eight we will return to the image of an impression imprinted on wax as a metaphor for human memory, and the use Warburg made of it in his theory of Mnemosyne, the remembrance of Pathosformeln, the physical expression of extreme emotions imprinted on the common memory of humankind.134 Now how does this bear on our perception of art? Pallavicino only discusses works of art in so far as they can represent, or convey, the truths of the Christian faith. They should possess varietà and vivacità; the first, to attract and hold the viewers’ attention, and suggest, by their ingenious composition, the qualities of divine creation. Vivacità, both in the sense of lifelikeness and of forceful, pregnant expression, causes the strongest emotional involvement in the viewer, because it works not on their reason but on the affetti. When we look at a painting of the suffering Christ for instance, and it touches us by its detailed, varied representation of his woes, it moves us because it appeals to the affetti, in the prima apprensione. As Pallavicino puts it: ‘Più vivace l’apprensione, e più fervida la passione’.135 In such reactions we do not differentiate between looking at an image or at a living being; we react to the painting in the same way as to a living being in the same situation. According to the traditional Aristotelian position we can imagine terrible scenes and remain as unaffected as when we are looking at paintings of such scenes, because we are aware that we are looking at a scene imagined by us.136 Pallavicino argues against this that we are moved by paintings just as by real living beings because our perception, or experience of art in the prima apprensione, triggers memories or mobili simulacri that had been stored in the chambers of our memory, of our experiences of encounters with real living beings: The more like the real object, the stories of poetry or the figures of the brush are, down to the tiniest details, the more efficiently they will awaken the movable simulacra that rest in the different chambers of memory. This results in livelier knowledge and more fervent passion. The kindling [of passion] therefore does not require belief in the truthfulness of the object.137 We can observe here the basic elements of a psychological explanation of reacting to an image as to the living being it represents. In Pallavicino’s account of human perception and cognition, a distinction is made between the representation or perception of something and the truth, that is the ontological status, of that representation. Reacting to a particularly vivid and lifelike painting or statue as if it is a living being is for him no longer an error, a theological aberration or a sign of a primitive mind, but a normal feature of standard human

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cognition. It is only when, on reflection, the viewer continues to think the image of the dead Christ is alive, that we can speak of an error or even idolatry. In other words, a statue or painting’s vivacità or lifelikeness is based on, but not the same as, its verisimilitude. The first quality addresses the prima apprensione, and moves the emotions of the viewer; the second is judged by the giudicio. It is therefore in the domain of emotions, and what in the 19th century would be called Einfühlung or empathy, that viewers can be so much struck by a work of art that they react to it as if it were a living being.138

PERCEPTION, MEMORY AND EMOTION Pallavicino’s introduction of the role of memory to account in psychological terms for such identifications of images with the living beings they represent, is particularly interesting and new. Lifelike art works, displaying varietà and vivacità, awaken in the viewers vivid memories, moving simulacra in Pallavicino’s terms, of previous experiences. He draws here on traditional memory theory, as developed by Simonides, Socrates and Plato, and codified by Aristotle in On the Soul and the short treatise On Memory and Recollection. Starting with the Stoa, memory also became a staple of rhetorical training, resulting in the first codifications of mnemotechnics in the Rhetorica ad Herennium of the first century AD.139 What concerns us here is not the rhetorical training of the orator’s memory by connecting the parts of a speech to the parts of a building or city, but the essentially visual and representational character of remembrance. As Aristotle put it, just as thinking cannot take place without images, memory as well is visual and a part of the mental faculties of sense perception and the imagination.140 Sense perceptions create images ( phantasiai) in the mind, just as a seal creates an impression in soft wax. Subsequent Stoic and Epicurean philosophers argued against the suggestion of a static, unchanging record suggested by the metaphor of the wax image, and instead stressed that the imagination plays a major role in changing memories in the process of recollecting them, thereby contributing to their vividness.141 In recollecting something absent, we are aware both of the object or event that caused the impression and of the mental image it created, and we do not always distinguish between the two. For just as the picture painted on a board is both a picture and a representation: that is, while one and the same, it is both of these, although the ‘being’ of both is not the same, and just as it is possible to contemplate it both as a picture and as a representation, so it must also be assumed that the mnemonic presentation within us is both something in itself and of something else.142 In other words, memories are both signs and mental images of the experience that is remembered. In the Posterior Analytics Aristotle gave a more detailed description of the process of experience formation, which consists of memories:

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Thus a sense-perception [aisthèsis] gives rise to a memory [mnèmè], as we hold; and repeated memories of the same thing give rise to experience [empeiria]; because the memories, though numerically many, constitute a single experience. And experience […] provides the starting-point of arts [technès] and sciences [epistèmès]; art in the world of process [genesis] and science in the world of facts [to on].143 In rhetorical theories of memory phantasiai are used to refer to emotionally laden mental representations or fictions that act strongly on the memory and the mind. Memory images are thus composed of two parts, the likeness that serves as a sign or token of the matter to be remembered, and the inclination or attitude that we have to the remembered experience, and that helps to store and retrieve it.144 Memories are therefore always images, and always carry an emotional weight, but we are not always clearly aware, when remembering an experience, that what we remember is the mental image with its associated emotions and not the experience itself.145 This recalls Pallavicino’s observation that in initial sense perceptions we do not always distinguish between a living being and its representation. Recollection is thus a re-enactment of visual experience before the mind’s eye, involving reflection, judgment, emotion and imagination. Mental images are always emotionally charged; in fact, their emotional charge makes it easier for them to be fixed in the mind. Perceptions literally affect the mind: the word Aristotle uses for memory images is that of pathos, a ‘state or affection that follows perceiving, apprehending, experiencing or learning’.146 Hence the view of a painting of the suffering Christ, or a statue of Charity personified as a mother giving her child the breast awakens in the viewer memories of similar experiences, with their attendant emotions. There is no fundamental difference in potential emotional effect between looking at these works of art or at real-life situations they represent. The emotional impact of such works of art results not in the judgment that the statue is alive, but, much more interestingly, that the viewer can feel the emotions the statue represent. The resulting giudizio is not: the statue lives; but: I recall the emotions the statue is represented as feeling, just as I would experience them when looking at a real woman holding her child and feeding it. The problem of confusing an image with what it represents, and particularly their most problematic varieties for Pallavicino and his contemporaries, idolatry and iconoclasm, has thus been redefined. It has become a reaction that can be explained in terms of cognitive psychology and memory theory, but also in what may be called the rudiments of a theory of empathy, that recall the rhetorical account of the working of enargeia on the mind of the listener or viewer.

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MEMORY IS NOT AN ART GALLERY, BUT A SER AGLIO The problem of the living image has thus been relocated, from the work of art to the images in the mind of the beholder. The perception of art works calls forth, or awakens, moving simulacra that were kept in the memory of the viewer. Whereas for Aristotle this awakening of memories was a process that entirely obeyed the conscious mind, in an essay by Pallavicino’s friend the poet Giovanni Ciampoli (1589–1643), published in the Prose of 1649, these memories acquire a life and will of their own. Arguing against Aristotle’s passive metaphor of memory as a wax tablet, Ciampoli writes that memory is not a gallery decorated with mute and immobile paintings; behind it there is a seraglio, a harem, full of living images. Memory should therefore be conceived rather as a theatre of the mind, in which the sensible images kept in the harem are produced on stage, and return to life.147 This is in fact a baroque reformulation of a very old way of thinking about memories that unites their enargeia and agency. In a text by the early 4th century Christian orator Johannes Chrysostomus about the removal of a Christian martyr’s bones to Dafné near Antioch, the power of the monument is praised to evoke memories that make the martyr present and living in the mind the faithful: For the sight of the coffin, entering the soul, acts upon it and affects it in such a way that it feels as if it sees the one who lies there joining in prayer and drawing nigh. […] The vision of the dead enters the soul of the living […] as if they saw instead of the tomb those who lie in the tomb standing up.148 Mental images, be they excited by works of art or sacred objects like the coffin of the Christian martyrs at Dafné, can act so strongly on the viewer’s mind that they create the experience of looking at the living beings they recall. The life of an image according to these theories of memory is no longer a feature of the work of art we behold. Instead it has become a feature of our recollection of art, a psychological process, but no less mysterious for all that. As we shall see in Chapter Eight of this book, remembrance will return as a key towards understanding the attribution of life to images in the work of Aby Warburg. There, the collective memory of humanity from its earliest origins will replace individual recollection as the focus of attention. But the life of images was for Warburg just as unfathomable, both attractive and dangerous, and just as difficult to tame by reason, as it was for Ciampoli.

EKPHRASIS AS IMAGINATIVE RECOLLECTION AND RECREATION Pallavicino’s account of viewers taking works of art for living beings, for all its originality in connecting epistemology and memory theory, was not taken up by his contemporaries. This may be because of the context: his main concern was to explain how the simulacra

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of art are able to reveal the truths of the Catholic faith that are beyond the grasp of human, mortal rationality. Hence his severance of art’s vivacità and its attendant affective and persuasive power from its truthfulness became the focus of his reception, not the implications of his views for understanding the attribution of life to art. Also, his ideas were developed in the entourage of the high Baroque of Bernini and Barberini artistic patronage, with their interest in art’s power to persuade and deceive through its vivacità. When this way of conceiving and using art went out of fashion at the end of the 17th century, so did Pallavicino’s ideas.149 Nonetheless Pallavicino did single out an essential feature to understand such responses: the vivid lifelikeness of works of art makes the viewer engage emotionally with them as if he or she is looking at the living beings or scenes represented, not their representation. This emotional engagement, which is an experiential, not a cognitive process, is nourished by the viewer’s memories. To conclude this chapter I will present a few cases of such response, from classical antiquity to the 18th century, which originate in the ekphrastic tradition of which Callistratus was such an important example, but branch out into a response that moves beyond the sphere of reading or listening to a text to that of theatricality. The earliest case of a literary ekphrasis describing a series of situations, actions and persons as if they breathe, live and move in front of the reader or listener’s eye is the description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad.150 It had an immense progeny, ranging from Hesiod’s archaic poem on the same shield, through Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to Leopold Bloom’s phantasizing on the digestive organs of the classical statues in the Dublin Public Library, or Wallace Steven’s Modernist reconfiguration of ekphrasis in Notes towards a Supreme Fiction.151 Homer describes the lifelikeness of Vulcan’s work without thematizing the reader’s reactions. In Vergil’s description of the reliefs on the doors of Juno’s temple in Carthage, we see the images of the Trojan war through the eyes of Aeneas: What first Aeneas this place beheld, Reviv’d his courage, and his fear expell’d. For while, expecting there the queen, he rais’d His wond’ring eyes, and round the temple gaz’d, Admir’d the fortune of the rising town, The striving artists, and their arts’ renown; He saw, in order painted on the wall, Whatever did unhappy Troy befall […] He stopp’d, and weeping said: “O friend! ev’n here The monuments of Trojan woes appear! […]” He said (his tears a ready passage find), Devouring what he saw so well design’d, with an empty picture fed his mind:

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For there he saw the fainting Grecians yield, And here the trembling Trojans quit the field […]. Elsewhere he saw where Troilus defied Achilles, and unequal combat tried […].152 In present-day terms we would say that the scene is visualized through the eyes of the main actor, not that of the narrator; or that we envisage the scene through the perspective of an internal spectator.153 The poet alerts us to this by observing that Aeneas feeds his mind with an ‘empty picture’: the simulacrum of the Trojan war sets off a series of memories that makes him lose himself in the recollection of past woes and allow himself to be completely absorbed in the scenes depicted on the temple doors. Vergil thus achieves a double effect of imaginative absorption. By allowing the reader access to what Aeneas sees, and what goes on in his mind (‘sunt lacrima rerum’ he sighs at the end of this passage, an expression notoriously difficult to translate, but which might mean here ‘tears are all that remains’), the hero’s absorption in the sculptures is doubled by the reader’s identification with the emotions of the epic personage. Where the images of war cause Aeneas’ recollections and attendant emotions to flow, the reader’s identification with him awakens his or her emotions and recollections. Whereas Vergil concentrates on the representations of war and uses the compositional device of focalizing through a personage to touch the reader’s emotions, Callistratus uses an even more implicit technique to show that what he describes is not so much the statue, as the impact its lifelikeness has on the viewer. Practically all of his descriptions are full of expressions and passages that relate the impression of touching the stone as if it were a living body, gazing into its eyes as if it were a living being, or exploring to what degree the sculptor seems to have transformed hard stone into soft, living and breathing flesh. That is, these texts all take Ovid’s description of Pygmalion’s exploration of his transfigured ivory lover much further. They are shorter and more restrained, but do without Ovid’s divine intervention, and thereby make the miracle of quasi-divine artistry even stronger. This miracle is displayed through the author’s choice of words, based on empathy as if speaking about a living being not a block of stone or bronze: On a Satyr: You could have seen the veins standing out as though they were filled with a sort of breath, the Satyr drawing the air from his lungs to bring notes from the flute, the statue eager to be in action, and the stone entering upon strenuous activity […]. On a Bacchante: You might have seen that, hard though it was, it became soft to the semblance of the feminine […] stone though the material was, it lent itself to the lightness of hair and yielded to the imitation of locks of hair, and though void of the faculty of life, it never-

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theless had vitality. Indeed you might say that art has brought to its aid the impulses of growing life […]. In each case, Callistratus stops on the brink of stating downright that the statue is alive. Instead, he uses words that convey both the vividness of the work of art (its softness to the touch, for instance, or the virtuosity with which moving hair is suggested) and suggest the experience of touching or seeing such a living body. Ekphrasis here becomes a recreation of experience, a fictional game played between the work of art, the author and the reader/ viewer.

CONCLUSION So far, we have assembled three main elements to understand the attribution of life to art. In the first place vivid lifelikeness or enargeia, the artistic virtuosity persuading the viewer that he or she is not looking at a representation, but at a living being. Secondly agency and animacy, which allow us to understand the life attributed to art as the attribution of some qualities works of art can share with living beings without claiming they possess the biological characteristics of life. Finally the role of memory in providing the recollections, together with their attendant emotions, that are triggered by the perception of art works full of enargeia, and that make viewers react to the sight of a statue of Charity in the same way as to a sight of a real mother feeding her infants. But is this also how early modern viewers made sense of such responses? To answer that question I will reconstruct one line of thought that in its successive transformations uses the three elements distinguished here in varying combinations to make sense of viewers taking a work of art for the living being it represents. We will take up our story in Rome, with the events that made Pallavicino write about the uses of art by the Christian religion.

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PART TWO

IDOLATRY

One of the issues that made Sforza Pallavicino rethink the problem, how the sacred truths of the Christian faith could be known through the vain, treacherous illusions of art, was the public debate sparked off by the Roman people’s offer to erect a statue to Pope Alexander VII, in gratitude for his quick and efficacious action against the bubonic plague that had ravaged Southern Italy in 1656–57.154 Full of pious modesty the Pope declined, following Pallavicino’s suggestion that an inscription would be far more appropriate.155 The offer was fraught with unwanted implications. It raised the issue whether it would be presumptuous for a prelate to accept such an honour while still alive, and whether accepting it would in fact mean an encouragement of idolatry. There was also a risk of iconoclasm: previously erected statues of popes on the Capitoline Hill, such as Leo X’s, had been defaced, or dragged through the City and thrown into the Tiber.156 This citizen initative thus raised issues of idolatry, adoring the statue as if it were the living being it represents; and iconoclasm, identifying the person represented with the statue to such a degree that it can replace the protoype in a way that is satisfactory to the aggressors, or even attributing feelings to a statue. There was yet another, implicit worry: how to control, as the sitter, the patron, or even the artist, the agency of a statue? The Roman offer was declined; but apart from an inscription in the Palazzo dei Conservatori recording its refusal and a medal designed by Bernini and Gioacchino Francesco Travani, it did leave a tangible result, Giovan Andrea Borboni’s Delle Statue of 1661, a defence of Pope Alexander VII’s decision which served as the starting point for an apology of sculpture and its religious role.157 Borboni presented his defense of sculpture in the guise of a religious history of sculpture which locates its origins not in the invention of

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Daedalus, but in the supreme creative act of God: the universe is God’s colossal statue. He eventually defends Alexander’s decision not to accept the Senate’s gift as an act of supernatural virtue, arguing that since sculpture is God’s original creative act and hence first of all an act of ineffable love, it is all right to accept a statue as the expression of such love, and hence a sign of supreme virtue not to accept it.158 Next to Pallavicino’s epistemological and psychological account of viewers reacting to works of art as if they are living beings we here see the birth of another new approach to what had traditionally been condemned as idolatry and iconoclasm: a historical inquiry into the origins of sculpture in religion, which then serves to defend the adoration of statues if it is part of the beliefs of the author, and to condemn such behaviour when it belongs to the rites of other religions. Pope Alexander VII declined the offer of a statue, which inspired Borboni to write a history of sculpture defending both that art and this refusal. A few decades later Louis XIV did accept the offer, and there as well the decision led to a new history of sculpture, inspired in part by Borboni’s treatise. In this and the next chapter we will trace the development of this line of thought in the 17th and 18th century, from the earliest full statement in François Lemée’s Traité des Statues (1688) to 18th-century ethnographical studies of fetishism; and to the aesthetic turn, around 1800, when this religious and ethnographical consideration is replaced by uneasy attempts at dismissing the attribution of life to art from the artistic and aesthetic domain altogether.

FRANÇOIS LEMÉE ON THE MONUMENT OF LOUIS XIV AT THE PLACE DES VICTOIRES From its inauguration in 1686 the monument to Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires in Paris caused unprecedented controversy in France and abroad ( figs. 23–26).159 In their Mémoires the Duc de Saint-Simon and the Abbé de Choisy accused the King of pagan, if not catholic idolatry. Saint-Simon recalled that Ce n’est pas trop dire que, sans la crainte du diable, que Dieu laissa [au roi] jusque dans ses plus grands désordres, il se serait fait adorer, et auroit trouvé des adorateurs ; témoin […] ces monuments si outrés, la statue de la Place des Victoires et sa païenne dédicace, où il prit un plaisir si exquis.160 Choisy compared the inauguration of this statue with Roman ceremonies to consecrate imperial statues : according to him, it was ‘une imitation flagrante de toutes ces prosternations que les païens faisoient autrefois devant les statues de leurs empereurs’.161 The anonymous pamphlet Sur la statue du roy élevée à la Place des Victoires en 1686 presents a conversation between the abbé Louis Feuillet and a group of persons at the court, including Monsieur, the brother of the king, Madame de Guise and the Grand-Duchess of Tuscany, in

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23

Pierre Aveline (1702–1760), Perspectival view of the Place des Victoires, etching, c. 1750

which the King is accused of presumption, and his subjects who assisted at the inauguration, of idolatry: Que voulez vous dire Monsieur, repris je, est ce que le Roy sera doresnavant le Dieu des français? On dedie à Dieu des temples mais je n’avois point vue que l’on eut fait la dedicace d’un homme mortel et Chrétien […]. Quoy Monsieur, repris je, vous allez donc […] devenir des Idolatres? Qu’allez vous faire vous allez attirer sur la personne du Roy et sur tout le royaume la colère de Dieu […] Si j’avois le pouvoir d’Elie je ferois descendre le feu du Ciel sur la Statue et sur tous les faux adorateurs qui s’y trouveroient.162 The monument also caused diplomatic incidents, because the Germans, Dutch or Spanish were not at all amused to see themselves represented as slaves subdued under Louis’ feet.163 The accusations of idolatry were not entirely unjustified. In his Histoire de la révolution française Jules Michelet recorded that the monument was venerated as if it were a cult statue: ‘A la façon des madonnes italiennes, le lieu devait avoir sous lui une lampe toujours allumée […]’.164 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure noted in his Histoire de Paris of 1821 that people knelt before the statue and burnt incense in front of it.165 Eventually it would become one of the first victims of republican iconoclasm during the French Revolution.

81 | François lemée on the monument of Louis XIV at the Place des Victoires

24 Martin Desjardins (1637–1694), Four slaves for the monument de Louis XIV, 1679–85, bronze, H. 2.20 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

These public reactions stand out by the gravity of the charges against Louis XIV and their vehemence: the roi très-chrétien is here accused of idolatry and presumption, claiming for his effigies the kind of adoration that was reserved for images of Christ, Mary or the Saints. Although not unique in itself the controversy excited by this monument presents a turning point in European thought about idolatry. In the Traité des statues, published in 1688 by the Parisian lawyer François Lemée to defend the King from these charges, we can observe the first stages of a fundamental change in thought about idolatry. Lemée considered the Place des Victoires controversy as a theological and political problem: how to control the agency of the royal image. To exonerate Louis from accusations of presumption and idolatry he drew on ethnographic accounts from all over the world to explain idolatry and iconoclasm as a permissible confusion by the viewer, held in thrall by the persuasive power of the image or the status of the person represented, of the image with what it represents. What began as an attempt to defend the adoration of images of princes becomes in effect a profound rethinking of the problem how the effects and agencies of images can be controlled. Lemée thus prepared the foundations for a body of thought on the agency of images, and on viewers attributing to statues the attributes normally reserved for living beings, that by the end of the 18th century would develop into theories on fetishism on the one hand, and would contribute to philosophical aesthetics on the other.

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25 Israël Silvestre (1621–1691) (attr.), La place des Victoires in 1686, 1686, drawing, Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz

What had caused such controversies ? The Duc de la Feuillade, one of the King’s favourites, proposed to erect a monument in 1681 as a sign of his profound devotion to the King. As Michelet would put it, ‘‘La Feuillade attendit. A sa mort, la chapelle devait être son propre tombeau. Une voie souterraine permettait de placer sous son maître le fidèle esclave’.166 Martin Desjardins sculpted the statue of Louis crowned by a colossal Victory. At his feet four slaves crouched, representing the nations Louis had vanquished during the war of 1672–78: the Imperial Austrian, Dutch, Spanish and Brandenburg nations. Reliefs on the pedestal showed French victories, such as the passage of the Rhine, taking Besançon, or the Peace of Nijmegen. Under his feet Louis tramples Cerberus, an allusion to the Triple Alliance. The statues measured thirteen Parisian feet, and the complete group sixteen; together they formed the largest sculptural ensemble in Paris at the time. As in the royal portraits by Henri Testelin or Hyacinthe Rigaud, the King wore his coronation robes, which for this occasion had been borrowed from Saint-Denis. Only the slaves and some of the reliefs survive, and are now on show in the Louvre ( fig. 24). The present equestrian statue in the Place des Victoires dates from the nineteenth century.167 Preparations started in 1681, when Louis visited Desjardins’ atelier to see the model. The Mercure Galant reported how ‘Le roi alloit voir un reliëf auquel il ne fallait plus que prêter une âme’.168 La Feuillade, who was probably the model for the courtier in Molière’s

83 | François lemée on the monument of Louis XIV at the Place des Victoires

26 Paul Grégoire (Active 18th c.), View of the statue of Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires, 1786, crayon, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

27 Louis Bretez (16??–1736), Plan of Paris,‘Plan de Turgot’, 1739, engraving, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Précieuses ridicules, bought the immense Hôtel de la Ferté-Sauveterre and had it largely demolished to create a new urban space which would allow that one could see the monument from the Louvre, and from five different streets.169 This project was not completed, but as the plan by Turgot shows, the statue of the King was very well visible from different

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28 Nicolas Guérard (1648–1719), ‘A la gloire de Louis le Grand […] Monument dressé en la place des Victoires, le vingt huit Mars 1686’, 1686, engraving, Paris, Musée Carnavalet

angles ( fig. 27). Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed the square and the surrounding hôtels, and at present it is still one of few urban ensembles in Paris that survive in its original seventeenth-century state. The monument was surrounded by four large lanterns standing on elaborate pedestals, showing an abbreviated histoire médaillée of the reign of Louis. Originally the lights were to have burned all day and night, like the lights before sacred images, but the King changed his mind and preferred a nocturnal illumination. A pasquinade published soon after the inauguration of the statue may have contributed to this change of ideas: Cousin de la Feuillade, tu me bernes D’avoir mis le soleil entre quatre lanternes.170 The inauguration ceremony – where the absent King was represented by his brother – was modelled on those of Roman emperors’ statues as reconstructed in 1686 by ClaudeCharles Guyonnet de Vertron in the Nouveau Panthéon, ou le rapport des divinités du paga-

85 | François lemée on the monument of Louis XIV at the Place des Victoires

29 François Lemée, Traité des statues (Paris: Arnould Seneuze 1688), frontispice by Cornelis Vermeulen (1644–1708), Paris, Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art

nisme aux vertus et aux actions de Louis le Grand ( fig. 28). It was not the first ceremonial inauguration of a royal statue (those of Henri IV in 1614 and of Louis XIII in 1639 had gone before), but the scale and borrowing of religious elements were unprecedented at the time. Apart from the account by Lemée several eye-witness reports survive. The most detailed ones were written by the Abbé Régnier-Dumarais, who was also the author of the Latin inscriptions, and by Pierre Marteau. After the magistrates and representatives of the city of Paris and the regiments of the garde française had arrived, Monseigneur was welcomed and joined the procession. Several eye-witnesses describe how, upon his arrival in front of the statue, the Duke de la Feuillade dismounted from his horse and saluted the statue. In his account Choisy added that the Duke prostrated himself in front of the statue just as the pagans used to do before statues of their emperors.171 The monument and the inauguration ceremony were part of a consistent policy on the part of Louis and his court to create a cult of the king, and suggest an identifi-

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cation between him and divinity. They drew on the mediaeval tradition of the king’s two bodies and the Roman Imperial tradition allowing the Emperor that his images could be adored like those of a divinity. Yet the similarities to catholic and pagan rites, and particularly the dedication divo immortali, met with a very mixed, not to say hostile reception.172 Robert Challe commented in his Mémoires (…) that the whole world had been astonished to see religion put to shame by Louis allowing himself to be addressed as ‘divine immortal’.173 Some of the King’s subjects came to his defence. The most interesting and original among these is François Lemée, who published Sur les statues in 1688 ( fig. 29). Starting out as a defence of the monument and its inauguration, this text develops into the foundation for a new way of thinking about idolatry and iconoclasm, and even about a larger category of reactions to statues in which the latter are treated as living beings.

A NEW WAY OF CONSIDERING IDOLATRY In 1688 François Lemée, a French lawyer originating from Normandy and apologist for Louis XIV, about whom we know very little except that he lived near the Place des Victoires, worked for La Feuillade and was involved with its construction, published a treatise on statues.174 Unlike the majority of previous authors on sculpture such as Leon Battista Alberti, Pomponius Gauricus or Orfeo Boselli, he is much more interested in the effects of statues on the viewer than on matters of invention, design or execution, and he is much more inclined to allow his ambivalences about these effects to come to the surface. In the chapter devoted to statues that excite their viewers to treat these blocks of marble or bronze as living beings, he first rejects such behavior as benighted and deluded. He dismisses not only those viewers that claim that statues can speak as blind, but the idols they adore as well. At the same time Lemée spends much more time trying to understand and excuse such behavior than in refuting it. His ambivalent attitude becomes particularly clear in his description of the consecration or inauguration of the King’s statue on the Place des Victoires: he records that the officers present bowed their head and took off their hats for the statue, but whereas he had rejected such behavior in antiquity as an error, here, in the case of his own king, he thinks it entirely justified and saw nothing out of the ordinary in this ceremony: La dédicace donc ou la consécration des statuës Roiales & purement honoraires parmi les Chrétiens, n’est autre qu’une simple cérémonie, telle qu’elle s’observoit anciennement le jour que ces sortes de monumens paroissoient en public […]. C’est ainsi que nous l’avons vû pratiquer à Paris, lorsqu’on a découvert aux yeux du peuple le monument de la place des Victoires.175 Similarly he defends believers adoring the statues of their God. Lemée appeals to Aristotle’s Physics, attributing an argument to the philosopher that inanimate objects, ani-

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mals and small children are capable of feelings, and quoting Protarchus who claimed that the stones of an altar are happy because they receive the gifts and honors of sacrifice.176 Therefore, Lemée argues, it is not absurd to adore Catholic images as if they were living beings; and he thinks it equally reasonable to take off one’s hat before the cradle of the Dauphin, the furniture of Louis XIV, or his portrait. To explain why it is rational to act in front of a royal portrait as if the king himself is present, he analyses the relation between the sitter and his image in a mix of Aristotelian metaphysics and semiotics: Pourquoi dire que les honneurs rendus à cette même statuë roiale ne se rapportent pas à celuy qu’elle représente? Pourquoi l’homme qui mérite d’être respecté à cause qu’il est appellé l’image de Dieu, le bronze n’aura-t-il pas un pareil avantage, puisqu’on peut dire en le montrant, voilà le Roy? Or les Philosophes nous enseignent que cette façon de parler n’est point impropre: car encore qu’il y ait bien de la différence entre la substance de l’un & de l’autre, & que le Roy ne soit pas la moindre particule de sa statuë, comme elle n’est pas la moindre particule du Roy. La ressemblance néanmoins, qui se rencontre entr’eux leur communiquant le même nom & la même figure, fait qu’ils paroissent aussi une même espèce: la figure étant l’indice & la compagne de la forme substantielle.177

THE LIVING PRESENCE OF STATUES: A QUESTION OF ENARGEIA OR OF THE SIT TER’S STATUS? Here we find the early signs of a new way of thinking about the attribution of animation to a statue. Lemée no longer considers the artistic power of mimesis as the cause of such response, but locates its origins in the social position or divine status of the statues’ prototype or model, and in the context of rites and contexts in which statues are inaugurated and viewed. To explain such responses, the artistic quality of the image, and the virtuosity of its mimesis, are replaced by the powers attributed to art and the model, as well as to the ritual observations of the society in which the statue exercises its agency. At first sight he continues the traditional line of reasoning, going back to the right accorded to Roman emperors to have their images venerated and the mediaeval doctrine of the king’s two bodies, which justifies such veneration through the quasi-divine status of the ruler represented, but as we shall see, his approach is much more ambivalent. Lemée’s way of thinking about the life of images, and the powers they exercise over the viewer presents the early stages of a shift from rhetorical or humanist ways of formulating living presence responses. As we have seen, this stress on enargeia as one of the main virtues of oratory, and by extension all human art considered as communication, had from Antiquity until the end of the XVIIIth century conditioned the response of educated viewers to art, and informed the ways in which they looked at, and spoke about, statues, build-

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30 Niobides [Roman copies, possibly after Scopas and Praxiteles], Rome, Villa Médicis, plaster copies made by Michel Bourbon, 1976. Photo by the author

31 Daughter of Niobe [Roman copy, possibly after Scopas and Praxiteles, formerly in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome], Florence, Uffizi. Photograph, private collection

ings or paintings. To give another example, the group of Niobe showing the mother petrified by grief and her children dying by the arrows of Apollo and Diana, on display in the Villa Medici in Rome, inspired François Raguenet to write a long description, in which, following the classical rules of ekphrasis, the statues are described as actors in an event unfolding on stage ( figs. 30 and 31). The sculptor has succeeded in presenting:

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32 Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Bust of Louis XIV, 1665, marble, H. 105 cm. Château de Versailles

La vie même de la Mort […]. On ne croit plus voir des statues, mais des personnes véritables […] On peut ressentir toute l’histoire comme si elle s’était passée dans une présence […] si on considère qu’un sculpteur peut donner la vie et le mouvement à la pierre dont il fait un être humain, qui par conséquent doit être une figure mouvante et animée […] On peut penser que c’est beaucoup plus facile de faire paraître une pierre un être humain plein de vie, que de faire paraître un être humain au même temps une femme véritable et une pierre véritable.178 Cold inanimate marble transformed into living and breathing flesh; an image of an event turned before the beholder’s eyes into the unfolding of the event itself; and the ultimate achievement of mimesis, showing both life in stone and the petrification of that life: Raguenet’s descriptions clearly obey the rules of classical and humanist poetics of ekphrasis, which valued enargeia, concentrated on the vivid representation of an istoria, and bestowed its highest praise when it claimed the sculptor had transformed the inanimate into the animate. As we briefly mentioned in Chapter Three, according to many 17th- and 18th-century authors on sculpture, the Moderns surpassed the Ancients in their capacity to give life to inanimate marble.179 Bernini in particular was often praised for his almost superhuman capacity to represent what his French critics called ‘la chair vivante’. Sometimes visitors at the Villa Borghese were so much seduced by the softness and illusion of life in the Apollo

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and Dafne or the Rape of Proserpina that they admitted they had to touch these statues, or even fell in love with them. Such reactions did not always respect rhetorical or poetical conventions, as is shown by the reactions to the bust Bernini made of Louis XIV ( fig. 32). Paul Fréart de Chantelou describes how the sculptor was forced to add a pedestal to protect the portrait from the importune hands of over-enthousiastic admirors. French amateurs increasingly imitated the Italian custom of showing two kinds of appreciation: ‘en les contemplant et en les maniant.’

LIVING PRESENCE AND IDOLATRY In Lemée’s Traité des statues we find a similar interest in vivid lifelikeness. But it is no longer exclusively a matter of artistic excellence. He acknowledged the role of vivid lifelikeness in sculptural persuasion, but he was also aware that treating the statue of the king like a living being comes dangerously close to idolatry. To solve the ambiguity that the veneration of the King’s statue caused, Lemée distinguished carefully between statues and idols, defining the former as representations of a living being, and idolatry as the confusion of a statue with what it represents: La Statuë est définie, la représentation d’un corps vivant; c’est à dire de l’homme ou de la brute; elle est un être permanent qui subsiste par soy même, & dépend absolument de l’art comme de sa cause naturelle. Le simulacre a deux étymologies selon les Théologiens, qui veulent après Isidore qu’il soit dérivé tantost de similitude, & tantost de simulation; les Simulacres & les Statuës font voir ce qu’ils représentent entier & de tous côtez, imitant mieux en cela la nature que les signes, qui ne font que des figures à demie bosse, ou extrêmement au dessous de la grandeur naturelle.180 He then associates idolatry and simulacra. Even though the idolater mistakes the idol for the divinity it represents, idolatry lacks a stable referent: Nous disons encore fort bien qu’un homme fait son idole d’un autre, ou de quelque créature que ce soit, lorsqu’il luy porte une affection déreglé. […[. Les meilleurs auteurs Grecs & Latins n’ont jamais appellé proprement & indifferemment toutes sortes d’images; & il ne se trouvera pas qu’on ait attribué [le terme de idole] à une simple Statuë honoraire, ou à celle non consacrée d’une chose réelle & subsistante. L’idole se prend pour la chose même, & non pour l’image de la chose, & semblable à un ombre & à un phantôme, ne dépend d’aucune chose qui soit ferme & stable.181 In the case of the King or the Christian God the adoration of their statues does not run the risk of degenerating into idolatry because their prototype is ‘ferme et stable’.

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33 Bernard Picart, ‘La mise en scène cérémonielle de Saint Pierre à Rome’ (1712), Cérémonies et coutumes religieux de tous les peuples du monde représentés par des figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picard: avec une explication historique & quelques dissertations curieuses, (Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1723–1737), vol. 1, part 2, after p. 150, engraving after Pietro Ostini, Theatrum canonizationis SS. Pij V. Andreae Auellini, Felicis à Cantalico, et Catharinae de Bononiae à S. Smo d.n. Clemente Pp. XI an. 1712. celebratae, Leiden University Library, Special Collections

Lemée’s long refutation of idolatry is followed by an even longer discussion of the agency of statues, ending with a rehearsal of the classical view, to be found for instance in Dio Chrysostomus’ XIIth Olympian Discourse but also voiced by Alberti in De pictura, that people collect statues and want to have them in their homes in large numbers because they vividly remind them of their loved ones, and above all of benevolent rulers. Just as their subjects need images to keep the memory of their rulers alive, rulers need images to have the memory of their good actions perpetuated.182 Lemée’s reluctance to dismiss living presence response as idolatry leads to an opening up of horizons. Whereas traditionally idolatry – how is it to be defined; is any image an idol, or only the image of a false or non-existing deity; what are its origins – had been primarily a problem of Bible exegesis, he used ancient history and philosophy and early descriptions of travels outside Europe to account for a way of responding to art that becomes increasingly uncomfortable, introducing his list of ancient accounts of speaking and moving statues by observing that ‘statues have sometimes borrowed strange mouths to answer the questions people asked them’.183 As we shall see, it will lead in the next century to the studies of religious rite all over the world by Picart or Gibelin and of fetishism by the Président de Brosses. By associating the veneration of the eucharist, with non-Western festishism, they would implicitly, but radically, question catholic ritual ( figs. 33 and 34).184

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34 Bernard Picart, Temple of 1000 Idols in Japan (1726), Cérémonies et coutumes religieux, vol. IV, after p. 310, Leiden University Library, Special Collections

In another interesting combination of traditional rhetorical views on the effects of enargeia with a consideration of the impact or agency of statues on their viewers, Lémée observes that statues are often confused with what they represent: Après tout la figure, qui est souvent confondue avec la chose figurée, étant sortie de la situation, & du geste, comme j’ay dit, n’est jamais plus ou moins figuré, ne reçoit aucune contrariété, & donne le nom & l’étre à la chose figurée. Le bronze, si vous voulez, dont on fait la figure d’un homme, n’est plus appellé bronze, mais statuë […].185 The statues and portraits of Louis XIV, his furniture and collections acted as his signs, but they were also imbued with his real presence. As Lemée had noted, courtiers lifted their hats not only in front of royal statues, but also before the cradle of the Dauphin or the King’s serving board.

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HOW TO CONTR OL THE UNDESIR ABLE AGENCY OF IMAGES These observations seem to announce the anthropological analysis of art’s agency by Alfred Gell in terms of the art nexus, the network of social relations between a work of art, the artist, patron or sitter, and the public, in which it exercises an agency that can act outside the presence of the prototype, and through multiple copies of the index. In the case of Louis XIV, his statues, portraits and possessions were perceived as objects full of agency. Many pamphlets illustrate this, for instance one called Les soupirs de la France esclave, published in 1689: [Le roi] se fait mettre en or, en argent, en bronze, en cuivre, en marbre, en toile, en tableaux, en peintures, en arcs de triomphes, en inscriptions. Il remplit tout Paris, tous ses Palais, & tout le Royaume de son nom & de ses faits […].186 The destruction of the statues in the collection of Cardinal Mazarin by his nephew, Armand de la Porte, offers a contemporary illustration of these new ways of thinking about idolatry and iconoclasm in terms of agency. Mazarin’s collection of classical statues was as controversial as his politics, exciting jealousy and admiration in equal measure, but also more ambivalent or even troubled reactions ( fig. 35). Thus in 1649 an anonymous pamphlet, called Inventaire des merveilles du monde rencontrées dans la palais du Cardinal Mazarin, presented the Cardinal as a second Armida who forced art and nature to live in his palace, a hotbed of idolatry and ambition, showcasing barbaric art, where the only piety to be found was directed at paint, and the only charity was made of stone.187 It presents his art collections as a means of attracting the admiration and affection of the public that is far more powerful than rational argument. Curiosity will guide the visitor, first to a Salle basse, bien sale à la vérité, car un grand nombre de Statuës y sont un peu trop au naturel, & la license de leurs representations blesse les yeux des spectateurs, & semble leur dire, qu’on descouvrit icy les choses les plus cachées dans la Nature.188 Another room displays classical statues, whose unfeeling forms are considered by the Italians – unlike the French, who despise such idols – as living images and objects of desire: Pour leur témoigner nostre amour nous desirons, que puis qu’ils ont tant de passion pour du marbre figuré, ils soient changez heureusement en la chose aymée.189 But at the end of the guided tour the narrator observes: Toutes ces richesses peuvent bien arrester nos sens, mais non pas les captiver. La Charité a pour eux de plus belles chaisnes que l’or & l’argent. Icy la Charité les ravit, encore

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35 Wounded Amazon of the type created by Sosicles, Roman copy of the Imperial period after a Greek original of the 5th century BC, marble, H. 1.55 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

qu’elle soit de marbre. La statuë d’une femme qui semble donner la vie avec son laict à un enfant qu’elle sevre amoureusement entre ses bras, represente cette noble vertu. Il semble que l’amour anime ce marbre, & qu’il luy aye donné la forme de son visage & de ses yeux pleins d’appas. Le lieu obscur où est cet ouvrage accomply, fait croire à tous qu’on condamnoit icy la Charité aux fers & aux : & prisons: l’insensibilité de ce marbre monstre que cette Maison ne loge rien que d’insensible, & que s’il y a de la chrité elle est de pierre. […] Fuyons de cette Maison […]. The statues did not only excite moral opprobrium. In 1670 Armand de la Porte, the Cardinal’s nephew who had married one of his nieces and was hence known as the Duc de Mazarin, had been appointed keeper of the collection after the Cardinal’s death. He fell in love with the statues but was so ashamed of his desire for them that one day, in an excess of iconoclast fury, he damaged or destroyed a large number of them. Accounts of this event by Saint-Simon and Saint-Evremond survive. The latter clearly saw the conflict that drove him to his frenzy:

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[…] il choisit pour son partage ce sexe qu’il fuit et qu’il désire, se jette sur les parties les plus éminentes et avec tant d’emportement que l’on voyait bien, à la fureur de ses coups, que ces marbres froids et insensibles, l’avaient quelquefois échauffé, et que son repentir vengeait peut-être les erreurs de son imagination.190 The incident was widely reported. One of the most curious reactions is an anonymous lament by the statues, probably written shortly after the event.191 At first sight this looks like yet another variety of the rhetorical and poetical concetto of the speaking statues that is so familar through the Anthologia Palatina or Roman Pasquinades. But these statues are not only able to speak, they are also endowed with a memory, they are capable of suffering and they possess an awareness of the effect of their beauty on viewers. The poem opens with an appeal to Louis XIV to protect them against the ‘zèle trop ardent’ of their admirers turned into prosecutors: Sage et puissant heros dont les loix equitables Sauvent les malheureux … Nous venons implorer ta Royalle clemence, D’un zèle trop ardent reigle la violence Deigne encor secourir des marbres animés … De nos persecuteurs nous craignons la foiblesse nous pouvons malgré nous ranimer leur tendresse.192 After their forced departure from Rome they believed they had found a safe haven with Cardinal Mazarin. But after surviving the tribulations of Roman idolatry they have now fallen victim to misguided desires: Quand les hommes trompés par leurs propres ouvrages adoroient en tremblant d’Insensibles images et dressant à leur gré de profanes autels prennoient des hommes morts pour des dieux Immortels l’on ne nous immouloit que d’Impures victims les voeux qu’on nous offroit, estoient autant de crimes. […] Nous ne seduisons plus les peuples infidelles nostre crime o grand Roy n’est que destre trop belles de mouvoir les esprits, de surprendre les sens, et de trop ressembler à des objets vivans: hélas où nous reduit la foiblesse des hommes nous les attendrisons tous marbres que nous sommes nos attraits innocens offensent leur pudeur,

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en attirans les yeux nous corrompons le Coeur, et ralumans les feux de leurs desires frivolles nous sommes malgré eux encor leurs Idoles Que n’avons nous un air moins aimable, et moins doux, ou que ne sont ils faits de marbre comme nous, et sans nous imputer leurs foiblesses extremes que ne punissent il leurs crimes sur eux mesmes.193 The statues could serve the glory of France, instead of being the object of improper and idolatrous desires, if French sculptors would take their classical perfection as a model for their portraits of the King. These could also act on their viewers, but would exercise a benign agency, which would inspire respect and love. Once saved from the furor of Armand de la Porte, the statues hoped that the destruction of classical sculpture would be over, and that it could again exercise its original function: that of giving life to the illustrious dead: Fasse le Ciel qu’un iour tes brillantes Statues Sur des arcs esleves iusques au sein des nues Laissent de ta grandeur un fameux Souvenir Et te rendent presens aux siècles a venir. […] que tous les portraits un iour soient des originaux que tes bustes portés sur la terre et sur l’onde montrent l’art de Reigner a tous les Roys du monde.194 Louis acted indeed, putting the Palais Mazarin under surveillance, and ordering the statues to be restored. One of the Amazones that survived the massacre is now in the Louvre ( fig. 35), the other at Wilton. The difficulties of controlling the agency of statues was therefore already a public issue in the 1670s; the inauguration of the monument on the Place des Victoires was not the first portrait of the King to excite such controversy. As Maarten Delbeke has shown, the bust by Bernini and the question whether it needed a pedestal, had also been much debated.195 In that case, the problem was how to find the artistic means to give visible form to the grandeur, nobility and virtue of its sitter. The epigrams on the pedestal preserved in the Journal by Fréart de Chantelou show the stylistic strategy that was adopted: that of the sublime with its outré metaphors and grandiose gestures. To conceive an adequate representation did one give the world as a pedestal to the bust; or rather, should the King himself be considered as the support of the entire universe ? Chantelou recorded the alternative proposed by the abbé Butti: Le Bernin entra dans un refléchissement profond Pour faire un beau soutien au Buste Royal,

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Et disait (puisqu’il ne trouva nul digne) : Une bien petite base est le monde pour un tel Monarque.196 But Bernini rejected this: Réponse. Du Chevalier Bernino. Je me souviens de cette pensée profonde : De faire un support digne d’un Roi si grand La pensée serait vaine ; puisque soutenir n’est pas le métier De celui qui soutient le monde.197 Like the bust itself, these epigrams represent the King himself as sublime, which is no longer a variety of the rhetorical grand style. Allegory is no longer employed to represent what cannot be represented by its very nature. Instead, the rhetorical stylistic strategy employed here – the sublime – is identified with what it should describe or evoke. As in the confusions of the sign with what it represents – le figurant and le figuré – described by Lemée, the representation is identified with what it represents. Nonetheless, Lemée was aware of the controversy caused by Bernini’s bust, and knew the texts by Chantelou and Cureau de la Chambre, or the analyses by Bouhours of the sublime used to represent Louis. But he did not ask how a sublime image of such an elevated subject could be achieved; instead, what interested him was how to understand and contain the effects, the agency of such powerful images.198 By thus redefining the problem of the royal image from an artistic issue into one of the agency of art, he opened up an entirely new way of thinking about the political and religious effects of art.

CONCLUSION Lemée’s defence of adoring statues against charges of idolatry on the grounds of the superiority of their models, in this case Louis XIV, thus took place in a charged atmosphere of debate about sculpture’s agency. Lemée, even though he borrowed some material from Borboni, comes to an opposite conclusion.199 For him, the divine virtue of Louis XIV justifies erecting statues of him and adoring them. He even compares Louis’ power to instill his image into the minds of his subjects to the divine power to do so.200 Both, that is, are aware that the risk of idolatry is based on statues risking to be identified with the living body they represent; but whereas Borboni in the closing pages of his book presented Christ as the ultimate and most perfect statue ever made, Lemée sought a double solution for this danger. On the one hand, he presented the king as such a sublime being that adoration of his images is justified. In choosing this strategy he was not alone. We have seen how the epigrams

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written about Bernini’s bust used the same ploy of projecting the sublime, used previously when speaking about his statues, onto the person of the King himself. Pierre Cureau de la Chambre’s Préface à un éloge de M. le Cavalier Bernin for instance offered a similar argument.201 On the other hand, and unlike Borboni, Lemée took more traditional ways of considering sculpture and viewers’ reactions – in the theological terms of simulacrum, idol and idolatry, and the rhetorical concern with persuasive lifelikeness – and uses them as the foundation first for a defence of adoring the royal statue, and second for a much wider, one might say proto-ethnographic way of thinking about how viewers react to statues. Whereas in the Jewish and Christian tradition confusing the image with what it represents, that is adoring the statue as if it is the deity it figures, is the sign of idolatry, for Lemée the confusion of the figurant with the figuré is the starting point for a new way of thinking about living presence. It is no longer thought of in terms of the artistic power needed to achieve enargeia. Lémée’s analysis moves away from such artistic considerations focusing on the work of art. Instead he locates the power of the statue to elicit such response in the status of the person it represents and the context of social rites in which statues are erected and viewed. Enargeia begins to be replaced by agency as the key to understanding living presence response. The classical rhetorical concept of enargeia, developed in the context of strategies of persuasion, is transformed here into a key towards an understanding of such adoration, and of the agency of images associated with it. Lemée takes the effect of this rhetorical instrument of persuasion and applies it to human behavior: he points out that in idolatry, men offer inordinate affection to lifeless objects; and that often, in such cases, the ‘figurant’ is confused with the ‘figuré’. In particular, adding a human face to a statue very much enhances its lifelike qualities. Humanizing art and speech was one of the main foundations of persuasion for Cicero and Quintilian. Here however it is used to account not for persuasion, but for the process by which the viewer attributes agency to inanimate stone, and subsequently personhood. In other words, Lemée turns rhetorical advice on persuasion into an instrument to understand what we might now call projection; and next he removes such behavior from the traditional context of Jewish and Christian rejections of idolatry, as formulated in the Book of Wisdom, and begins to provide it with a context of ethnographical enquiry.

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FETISHISM

Lemée’s defence of the monument on the Place des Victoires is, as we have seen, rather ambivalent. He justified the idolatrous inauguration on the grounds of the sublime character of the person portrayed, and by showing that this way of treating statues, in which the figure is confused with what it represents, is a very old phenomenon, that occurs all over the world. This proto-ethnographical argument, intended to set off the correctness of French adoration of the King against the benighted adoration of false deities by primitive people outside the realm of Christendom, had unintended implications, that would be spelled out, increasingly explicitly, by 18th-century enlightenment thinkers. But this line of thinking also transformed the way viewers attributing life to works of art were considered. Instead of a response that was acceptable if it remained within the confines of rhetorical and artistic discourse or accepted religious practice, it increasingly became an aberration, the sign of a primitive or diseased mind. In the course of the 18th century viewers’ attributions of a significant number of the characteristics of living beings to an inanimate object, including movement, breath, sensation, consciousness, or emotions, become increasingly well-documented. Through this process of attribution these artefacts become the object of emotions, desires and even behaviour usually reserved to living beings. The reactions of Grand Tourists to the Venus de’ Medici, on show in the Tribuna of the Uffizi since 1677, document this change ( fig. 36). The statue stood originally in the Villa Medici in Rome, but Pope Innocentius III had allowed Grand Duke Cosimo III to take it to Florence because it suffered too much from the importune attentions of indecent young men: da’ più scoretti abusata, as Baldinucci noted: abused by most improper men.202 In the 18th century viewing this statue became one of the highlights

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36 Venus de’ Medici, Roman copy after Praxiteles, marble, Florence, Uffizi. François Perrier, etching after the Venus de’ Medici, from Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum, Paris, 1638

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of the Grand Tour. Edward Gibbon for instance paid ten visits to the statue before he turned his attention to the pictures in the Uffizi. In his autobiography he wrote: Je mettrai toujours cette belle pièce parmi le petit nombre des objets qui surpassent les espérances des plus fortes. Dès mon berceau j’avois toujours entendu parler de la Venus de Medicis; les livres, les conversations, les estampes, les modèles me l’avoient mille fois mis devant les yeux, et cependant je n’en avois aucune idée. Pour la connoître il faut la voir.203 He then goes on to describe her proportions and physical strong points as if she were a racehorse or a cocotte. Sometimes viewers would be carried away by its enargeia and come close to treating the statue as a living being. In the 1720s Jonathan Richardson for instance wrote about her full of admiration, in particular of the ‘softness of her flesh, which seemed it would yield to the touch’, but also noted that the statue needed ‘rigid surveillance […] to repress the too vivid enthusiasm of some spectators’.204 Hogarth produced a witty variation on both the Pygmalion theme and the projections of desires on the statue by putting her in the centre of the sculptor’s yard, ogling her male counterpart, the Apollo Belvedere, in the centre fold of his Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753 ( fig. 37). The Scottish painter Andrew endowed the statue with a personality and an inner life, observing that she displayed three different passions […] in three different postures. Before, she seems to invite you to her; move to the right and she seems in a more rapturous degree of pleasure, and on the left she seems to turn away from you, either in scorn or being tired: disdaining, inviting and enjoying 205 Both the sensuality projected unto her and the unease this caused were put very clearly by the Victorian viewer James Whitehouse in 1845, who while condemning the statue at the same time rendered it into a living being: There is no flinching from the fact, that the antique collections which fill the Gallery or the Museum, the Vatican or the Louvre – which the aged are directed to venerate, the young to study for instruction – are pervaded by the most debasing sensuality breathing in the marble or the bronze […].206 [italics added] Since the work of Binet and Freud it has become usual to label such responses as fetishism, or paraphilia: attributing agency, and projecting emotions, onto lifeless objects that should be reserved for living beings.207 Kissing the armpit of Canova’s Psyche, as Flaubert did, or stating, like Théophile Gautier, that he preferred marble to living flesh, and statues to living women, are clear cases of such a displacement of affections.208 Before Freud, Marx had used the concept of fetishism to explain the mysterious process through

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37 W. Hogarth, folding plate 1 from The Analysis of Beauty, engraving, London, 1756, Leiden University Library, Special Collections

which goods acquire a commodity value which stands in no rational relation to their value as useful objects or the labour needed to produce them. In his turn, Marx had drawn on 18th-century ethnographers and critics of religion, chief among them the Président de Brosses, who had introduced the term ‘fétichisme’ to describe the practice, widespread among ‘primitive people’, whether they be ancient Greeks or 18th-century American Indians or inhabitants of Africa, to adore objects, often aniconic, worthless pieces of wood or stone or parts of animals, as the deity they represent, and attribute its agency to them. But neither Freud nor Marx nor De Brosses explicitly and specifically address the question whether such responses to works of art, endowing them with life, personhood or agency, should also qualify as fetishism, and as we shall see in the next Chapter, the term was first introduced to describe such behaviour towards European art in a rather different context. There is, however, another strand in European thought about viewers responding to images as if they are living beings which singled out one feature in these responses that is also at the core of fetishism: in attributing agency or even personhood to the object of such responses, the object loses its representational character and is identified or confused with what it represents.209 The art lover kisses statues or talks to paintings as if they were the per-

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son represented, just as the fetishist treats his fetish as if it was the person with whom he cannot enter into a satisfactory relationship. As Karl Krauss observed, ‘There is no more unhappy being under the sun than a fetishist who pines for a boot and has to content himself with an entire woman’.210 Such loss of the art work’s representational character is a recurring topic in a series of historical studies of sculpture that predate Winckelmann’s history of Greek sculpture as a fine art and originated in ancient history, discussions of idolatry by the Church Fathers, and Renaissance anthropology with its roots in the study of ancient religion.211 The accounts they give of such responses are distinguished by varying combinations of the traditional rhetorical focus on enargeia as a main factor in causing such responses with an awareness of the agency of the object. In the previous chapter we have looked at Borboni’s Delle Statue (1661) and Francois Lemée’s Traité des statues (1688). We will now turn to their 18th-century successors. In the early decades of the 18th century the collections of ethnographical research published by Picard and Gibelin would provide the material to turn the claim of the universality of religious customs against Catholic rites. The fairly unknown history of idolatry by the Chevalier de Méhégan, published in 1757, shows a clear view of the transition between a rhetorical way of conceiving living presence in sculpture towards an ethnographic approach in which it is considered as a kind of superstition. His work was taken up by a line of Enlightenment critics of religion, chief among them the Président de Brosses, Ottaviano de Guasco, and Jacques Antoine Dulaure. It ended with Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy’s Jupiter Olympien (1814). All these studies did not consider sculpture primarily as a fine art, did not analyse its artistic or aesthetic merit, but looked at the religious or political agency of statues and the kinds of worship they received and thus developed the foundations for an ethnographic consideration of viewers attributing life to art.

PERSUASIVE FIGURATION AS THE FOUNDATION OF IDOLATRY In his Origines, progrès et décadence de l’idolâtrie (1757) the French cleric, deist philosophe and journalist Guillaume-Alexandre de Méhégan (1724?–1766) identified a series of links between the origins of pictorial language, the cult of hieroglyphs, the figurative use of language by orators, and the mechanism of personification which transformed stones into divinities – and by implication, princes into gods.212 Ostensibly he took as his startingpoint the Catholic project, started early in the 17th century in response to Protestant criticism of the eucharist as an idolatrous practice, to reconstruct the pagan origins of idolatry to defend the present Church against such charges. His conclusions, however, turned out to be just as applicable to the Mother Church as to the rites of illiterate tribes in darkest Africa. Méhégan differs from Picard or Gibelin in the very explicit connection he made between idolatry and rhetoric to understand the psychological mechanism through which believers adore as living gods abstractions such as hieroglyphs or inanimate stones. The origin of

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language is not verbal but visible. Primitive people spoke in images not abstractions, starting by pointing to the things they wanted to signify: En un mot, on commença à parler aux yeux avant que de parler aux oreilles : on se fit entendre des autres en leur montrant l’objet de son idée, où l’image de cet objet tracée sur la terre, gravée sur les métaux, peinte sur les écorces d’arbre, sculptée sur l’argile et sur les pierres.213 The entire universe, stars, planets, animals, or plants came to be used to express the ideas and feelings of primitive man. These origins of language in gesture and image, that is figuration, account for what Méhégan calls the sublime images of the earliest surviving religious texts. They used the figures of the living beings that surrounded man to express their ideas. There is no abstracting distance between the objects or emotions they want to express, and the signs and symbols used to achieve this: Voilà donc le premier langage des hommes. Voilà le principe de ces figures hardies de l’écriture, […] de ces images sublimes employées si souvent dans les Livres Saints comme un langage que son antiquité rendoit plus expressif et plus vénérable. Voilà le principe de ces éloquentes métamorphoses qui, personifiant tout, animent toute la nature. Voilà l’origine de toutes ces brillantes fictions, d’abord jouets, ou présents innocents des hommes, mais dans la suite chargées des plus coupables mensonges.214 Idolatry began when the priesthood withheld the real meaning of these iconic symbols, and encouraged the ignorant masses to adore these hieroglyphs as if they were the gods whose attributes they signified: Ces images et ces hiëroglyphes destinés à exprimer les attributs du Créateur, devinrent ainsi l’expression des autels. Le peuple les voyant sans cesse dans ces endroits augustes […] s’en forma bientôt des objets de respect, & insensiblement la superstition augmentant son imbécile vénération, il finit par métamorphoser ces emblèmes innocents dans des Dieux redoutables qu’il invoqua. Tel est le germe de l’idolâtrie. Telle est la tige antique de tant de cultes sacrilèges, qui dans la suite ont couvert la surface de la terre.215 Although Méhégan does not spell it out, there is only one step from the use of hieroglyphs in Egyptian rites to the ritual of the Latin mass, drawing equally on very vivid imagery, and equally incomprehensible to the large mass of believers. In a short final observation that announces the arguments of Guasco and Quatremère, Méhégan adds that idolatry when transplanted to Greece found a very powerful protector in the imagination, with all the charms and graces of the fine arts in its train.216

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FETISHISM The Président de Brosses is now probably best known for his refusal to go along with Bernini’s representation of divine ecstasy in his Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, calling it ‘une expression merveilleuse, mais franchement beaucoup trop vive pour une église’, thus drawing attention to a vividness that transgresses the boundaries of what was considered acceptable.217 But he wrote another book as well about the different ways in which the borders between works of art, what they represent, and their viewers are questioned: Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie, published in 1760. Largely inspired by David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he argued that the adoration of inanimate objects, plants and animals, and more in particular the attribution of life, agency and personhood to them, is the first, primitive stage of religion all over the world.218 For such endowing of inanimate objects with life or conscious and active personality De Brosses introduced the term ‘fétiche’. At the time he wrote the book this variety of religion could still be found among the Indians of North America, in the Caribbean and in Africa, but it equally held sway in Egypt, Israel or Greece and Rome before it was replaced first by polytheism and then by monotheism.219 It is based on the inability of primitive man to discern that different or even contrary phenomena can share an identical cause. Everything that happens to him, causes his fear, happiness, anger or envy, is attributed to a different deity animated by the same emotions he feels himself.220 Fetishism is therefore not the same as idolatry. Fetishes are inanimate objects or artefacts possessed of inherent (or attributed, depending on the perspective of the speaker) agency and life; whereas idols are images of gods which are adored as if they are the god they represent. This presents a clear break with the Christian traditional view of idolatry as a sign of religious decadence because it is a lapse from monotheism, and with the Catholic tendency to defend idolatry in figurative or allegorical terms as the adoration of a divinity through its image: when the divinity is the Christian God, idolatry is redeemed and becomes eidulia.221 Instead, fetishism is an adoration of the deity inherent in the object. Like so many authors on fetishism, De Brosses has little to offer about the actual nature of this process of attribution. In one passage he uses the terms ‘métaphore’ and ‘figurer’, which is interesting because it suggests that we should think of this process as akin to creative processes, and suggests some similarity with rhetorical views on the creation of metaphor, in particular Quintilian’s.222 Fetishes possess agency and life because primitive man attributes these properties to them, and De Brosses thinks of this process of attribution in terms derived from the rhetorical analysis of producing persuasive speech. What makes this Enlightenment essay in the history of religion relevant here, is that De Brosses, like Lémée before him, but now in the course of a critique of religion based on ethnographic inquiry, develops a new way of thinking about the attribution of sentient being and agency to statues both iconic and aniconic. De Brosses’ discussion of early Greek

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aniconic cult statues illustrates this. These form the very first cult objects that have been preserved, but represented no divinity outside themselves ; they were simply adored as animate presences. When adoring the oaks of Dodona or fountains, primitive Greeks had no concern with beauty or art: their attribution of agency or presence was not caused by the artistic qualities of the representation, but fuelled by their own fears and desires.223 De Brosses’ Du culte des dieux fétiches is one of the first attempts to analyze the process by which life and agency are attributed to inanimate objects, plants and animals, and it looks at some of the behaviour that was until then discussed under the heading of the persuasion achieved by the enargeia of art. Lémée and De Brosses discussed very different issues; but they share a redefinition of the lifelikeness that causes living presence response in terms of agency and personhood. The statues that, according to Lémée, cause the viewer to take off his hat because of the power or status of the person they represent, and the fetishes that act upon their primitive believers do so not in virtue of their artistic qualities, but because of the agency they possess.

‘LES RAPPORTS INTIMES DES STATUES AVEC LA SOCIÉTÉ’ For a return to the question why ancient viewers attributed life and agency to statues of great artistic value, and an attempt at further elucidation of this mysterious process, we have to turn to an admiring reader of De Brosses, the Italian Ottaviano de Guasco (1712–1781). In 1768 this Piedmontese érudit published a highly original book about the Egyptian origins of ancient sculpture: De l’usage des statues chez les Anciens. A friend and translator of Montesquieu, member of the main learned societies of France and England, and a highly original thinker about the origins of art and religion, his career suffered from an overambitious attempt to be elected by the Académie Française, publishing letters by Montesquieu doctored by him, and the one sin that was not forgiven in Parisian salons of the 18th century: appalling table manners. Casanova offers a snapshot of him in Rome in 1770, working as a pimp, and trying to seduce young novices for his clients.224 The originality and importance of De l’usage des statues was obscured even before its publication by Winckelmann, who claimed he had already refuted his theories in his Monumenti antichi inediti, even though Guasco’s book was finished and circulated in manuscript before the publication of Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Althertums.225 Winckelmann did not recognize the book’s true merit, a study in the conceptualisation of history and not an essay in antiquarianism. Like the work of Picart or Méhégan it originated in the study of idolatry propagated by the Vatican in the 18th century, but asked questions about ancient religion that could equally well be asked about the Roman rite. Guasco was much inspired by the approach Montesquieu had developed in De l’esprit des lois and the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur et décadence des Romains. In a radical break with the humanist tradition, he had taken as his point of departure the funda-

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mental strangeness of ancient society. Montesquieu no longer looked at the remains of Roman civilization as exempla virtutis to be imitated, but instead sought to discover the principles underlying the myriads of particular facts of ancient history. Guasco: Vouloir rendre modernes les siècles anciens, transporter dans les siècles reculés les idées du siècle où l’on vit; c’est, dit l’illustre Montesquieu, des sources de l’erreur, celle qui est la plus féconde. Je dirai encore, c’est faire paraître les Héros Grecs sur notre scène avec nos moeurs et nos habits.226 Just as Montesquieu no longer saw the development of law as governed by divine providence, but as the result of the social, moral and political characteristics of the societies of which it was a part, Guasco considered the origins and development of sculpture not as an independent progress towards ever greater artistic perfection or decadence, but as part of the religious, political and moral development of society. From the outset he distanced himself both from the collector’s transference onto statues of emotions usually reserved for human beings, and from the antiquarian study of antiquity. What he did not want to do, was to write a sequel to the book about ancient sculpture written by the Swedish antiquarian Figrelius, which had collapsed, he claimed, under the weight of its unstructured erudition. Guasco’s aim is not to collect as many facts as possible, but to understand why statues were made. As he put it, noting in passing the fetishism of many collectors: Pour un Antiquaire, les statues sont des trésors, l’amateur les caresse comme ses délices, elles sont des poupées pour l’homme riche & fastueux; le connoisseur voit en elles les efforts de l’art, ses perfections & ses défauts, elles rappellent à l’Historien Philosophe les causes mêmes de l’art qui les produit; il combine les degrés de l’art avec l’histoire des nations, il le voit naître et s’éteindre, monter & descendre avec la liberté, & les révolutions politiques, il voit enfin les rapports intimes que les statues tant sacrées qu’honorifiques ont avec les virtues, les vices & les erreurs des sociétés.227 The origin of sculpture is the veneration by primitive man of pieces of stone or wood which nomadic tribes had erected as a monument to what they took to be the benefits of their gods. Guasco gives examples from the entire world, from Japan to northern Europe, to illustrate this custom and its transformation. These monuments were first believed to be a sign of divine will, then the locus where divine spirit resided, and eventuelly identified with the divinity itself.228 Motivated by the same fears and superstition which led primitive man to attribute to stone and wood the agency of living persons, aniconic statues were gradually replaced by statues in the shape of man. The aniconic objects were believed to be animated by the divine spirit; gradually the idea took hold to give these stones the shape of the most noble of living beings.229 The ancients did not consider these statues as art, but as

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38 Octavien de Guasco, De l’usage des statues chez les anciens, Brussels, 1768, illustration II: idole égyptien, The Hague, Royal Library

the locus where the gods became present and could be influenced ( fig. 38). The veneration of statues is therefore not a sign of primitive culture, but of superstition, of misdirecting veneration for the god to his representation. Iconic sculpture in the shape of man or animal is born from fear and superstition, because these were the motives which made primitive man venerate the aniconic monuments nomadic tribes had left behind. Through the use of the human form to shape cult statues, the tendency to attribute life, personhood and agency to these inanimate objects was strengthened. Idolatry was thus kept alive because the human appearance of statues led the believer to attribute the mental characteristics that go with human form to these statues.230 As sculptors became more successful in giving their statues human form and making them beautiful, the believers were led to think that those statues which appeared so alive, by the same token also had to be more virtuous. Thus fear and superstition first led to the belief that inanimate stone was animated by divine spirit, and next to the development of anthropomorphic statues.

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Idolatry was encouraged by priests and rulers; it often slowed down the development of sculpture because of its inherent conservatism. But they lost their power once nations grew richer and developed a love for luxury. This did not end idolatry however: as statues became better representations of the human form, the gods were adored more intensely. This led finally to a belief in the Olympus being populated by ever more gods in human form. If, Guasco concludes, ‘the Olympus populated the earth with imaginary gods, the earth, by the effort of art, populated in its turn the Olympus with new gods.231 Fifty years later, Quatremère de Quincy, who owned a copy of Guasco’s book, would argue in his Jupiter Olympien that art created the gods. Guasco thus overturns traditional views of the origins of sculpture and the nature of their living presence. Man-made sculpture did not begin with the desire to imitate the living human form, but with the attribution of animation and agency to inanimate and aniconic objects. The gradual mastery of human beauty was not motivated by an aesthetic or artistic drive, or the desire to achieve vivid lifelikeness as the ultimate instrument of persuasion as Quintilian had suggested, but by idolatry based ultimately on fear and superstition. Such superstition, fed on the one hand by the attribution of agency, and on the other by priests and politicians, led to the adoration of statues as if they were living gods. The artistic progress this also caused was only a secundary, unintended result: ‘Chez les Payens, l’histoire des statues est presque l’histoire de l’Idolâtrie, une statue d’un Dieu était un Dieu.’232 Ultimately, however, the aesthetic contemplation of statues would disincarnate them. The earliest origins of this development took place in Egypt. For Guasco, as for many enlightenment historians of religion, the origins of both art and religion are tied to the development of figural speech, that is, with hieroglyphs. Since the publication by Piero Valeriano of the Hieroglyphica by Horapollo Nilus in the Renaissance, hieroglyphs had been considered by humanists as a language given by God, presenting a resemblance between sign and what it represents that rests on iconic resemblance and not on a contingent connection as in man-made languages. Following Bishop Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated on the Principles of a religious Deist of 1738–1741, translated in French in 1744 as Essai sur les hiéroglyphes des Egyptiens; où l’on voit l’origine et le progrès du langage et l’écriture, l’antiquité des sciences en Egypte, et l’origine du culte des animaux, Guasco argued that hieroglyphs were the first, universally understandable, iconic language. They were used by priests in Egypt to write down their religious prescripts, so that they could be understood by the illiterate masses, but became the object of idolatrous adoration because of their very iconicity. But he added, and thereby made his book potentially very damaging to Catholic doctrine and rites, that because of its origins in hieroglyphs, sculpture became subject to external, that is priestly control. Guasco was probably the first to apply Warburton’s theory to sculpture. An important intermediary can be found between the latter and Lemée in the Chevalier de Méhégan’s small book on idolatry published in 1757, the Origines, progrés et décadence de l’idolâtrie, which we discussed above.

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Thus what Quintilian, and Renaissance humanists using his vocabulary, had praised as enargeia, the summum of artistic power and persuasion, is turned by Guasco into a manifestation of superstition and idolatry. The living statue is no longer the triumph of artistry that makes the viewer confuse the image with what it represents, or the figurant with the figuré, as Lémée might have said. As a result of Guasco’s Enlightenment critique of religion, living presence is now considered as the manifestation of agency, and the expression of primitive attitudes towards art and religion. In a large section about statues that spoke, moved, wept or acted he proceeded to show how in each of these stories a natural explanation was at hand: statues wept because of the humidity of stone, they moved because priests had hidden mechanical devices in them, they spoke because a speaker was hidden in the sanctuary etc. He introduces these refutations by asking the reader to imagine believers who saw ‘une vertue divine et agissante’ in the objects of their adoration.233 If one were to look for an archaeology of Gell’s anthropology of art conceived in terms of the agency artefacts exercise within the network of social relations of which they are a part, the first chapter of Guasco’s book would be a good candidate. He tersely dismisses the traditional tale of the origin of sculpture as a fine art when the daughter of the Corinthian potter Dibutades outlined the shadow of her lover with charcoal on a wall, which inspired her father to copy these outlines and fill them with clay, thus creating plastic form. Instead, Guasco states, he is looking for the ‘moral origins of art’: ‘Nous considérerons leurs origines et leurs progrès physiques dans les causes morales qui les ont fait naître’.234 That is, he is interested in the social role of art, not its aesthetic value. Attributing life to inanimate objects was therefore not a deviation, coming at the end of a long development of artistic improvement. Rather, both Guasco and De Brosses showed that the living image is not a culmination or perversion of a normal development of art and the response to art. Instead, the animated image forms the origin of art, which is born from religion, that is, in their enlightened eyes, from fear and superstition. They thus offer the rudiments of an account of how, as Lemée would put it, the figurant may be understood to dissolve into the figuré: not by some artistic quality inherent in the statue itself, but by the attribution of agency. For Lemée this was based on the status of the model for the statue; for De Brosses, but even more for Guasco, such attribution was part of the way primitive man tried to survive in a hostile and dangerous world. At the same time, even though De Guasco tried to write a history of statues adored as if they were living gods, he only succeeded in giving an historical account of the cult objects, not of the reactions to them. In 1760 De Brosses argued that the fetishism of tribes living at the time in the Caribbean or Africa was entirely similar to that of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. By that gesture he relegated these peoples, with their cult of images, to an eternal present without history or evolution. For both, the attribution of the power to act like a living being originated in fear and superstition, and thereby placed these responses to sculpture outside the realm of aesthetic behaviour. This will become very explicit in Herder’s Plastik, to which we will turn in the next Chapter.

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39 Gregório Fernández (1576–1636), Statue of the dead Christ, polychrome wood, glass, and ivory, L. 1.60 m, Seville, Iglésia de San Miguel y San Julián

Even today we can observe the same phenomenon. Spanish religious sculpture has not been studied in any great depth, because of its conspicuous lack of stylistic development over the centuries: the dead Christ by Gregorio Fernández of the 17th century is very similar to statues produced today ( fig. 39).235 They possess a terrifying realism, with their very faithful renderings of the wounds of Christ, the pallor of his skin, and the streams of blood. The hyper reality effect is strengthened by the use of glass for his eyes, ivory for his nails and human hair for his eyebrows and hair. The living presence of these statues is achieved not by employing artistic means that draw attention to the fictive nature of these images, but on the contrary by the use of forms and materials that approach as much as is possible human figures and the form of their suffering. They cause the same reactions as the fetishes and idols described by De Brosses and Guasco: spectators embrace them, try to hold them, and are even today asked not to kiss them.

‘LE MINISTRE LE PLUS DOCILE DES VOLONTÉS DE LA RELIGION’ ‘If’, Guasco concluded, ‘the Olympus populated the earth with imaginary gods, the earth, by the effort of art, populated in its turn the Olympus with new gods.236 Fifty years later, Quatremère de Quincy, who owned a copy of Guasco’s book, would take this argument to its logical conclusion in his Jupiter Olympien: the arts, and chief among them sculpture, had created the gods.237

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40 Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Le Jupiter Olympien […], ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le goût de la sculpture polychrome, Paris: Firmin Didot 1814, frontispice, Paris, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art

For Quatremère the connection between sculpture and religion was manifest, and profoundly connected to the actual nature or meaning of religious statues. Greek sculpture was not the expression, as it was for Winckelmann, of autonomous human creativity or pure human beauty and greatness. In ancient Greece there was no such thing as autonomous art: Ce n’est pas la théorie des rhéteurs qui a produit l’éloquence, et la poésie ne serait jamais née du seul désir de flatter le goût des hommes instruits. […][l’art de la sculpture] fut l’art favori de la religion et le ministre le plus docile de ses volontés238 Primitive people around the world are all affected by imitation; they are driven by the urge to touch and to possess. The first idols, before man had become capable of drawing shapes, were stones, twigs and shells. The fetish was the ancestor of the statue, and when

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primitive tribes, whether in ancient Egypt and Greece or 19th-century Polynesia, began to make statues, their instinctive urge was to associate form and colour, because the colour of a body for the primitive eye is the sign of life. This served the needs of religion very well: statues that through the use of colour seemed to be alive exercised a very strong agency on their viewers, instilling in them a sense of presence that was the stronger for the simple character of their representation ( fig. 40).239 Statues were not only painted, but also literally dressed. Quatremère cites numerous instances of Greek and Roman gods who not only wore rich garments, but also employed in their temples their personal dressers or vestitores. The use of polychromy, different materials, and clothes strengthens the suggestion that the representation is actually what it represents. Such identification undermines the imitational character of these statues, because for Quatremère true imitation is based on the use of different materials in the representation from what it represents, but at the same time very much strenghtens the illusion of reality and living presence: Il n’est pas douteux que les simulacres dont je parle, ont par-dessus tout la propriété d’imprimer dans l’âme crédule de la multitude […] l’opinion et le sentiment de l’existence matériellement effective et locale de la Divinité, sous une forme palpable et revêtue des atrributs sensibles de la vie et de la réalité.240 This use of materials that are identical to the being represented strengthens another human tendency, to confuse a sign or representation with what it represents. Ultimately, this led Quatremère to the conclusion that it is not the gods who create religion, but art that created gods: C’est par la propriété qu’ont les signes de prendre la place des choses signifiées, que l’art de la sculpture servit très activement la superstition, en employant les moyens les plus capables de faire prendre le change aux spectateurs ignorants. Associé ainsi à la puissance théogonique, l’art ne reproduisait pas seulement, mais il créait des dieux.’.241 Where Guasco simply signalled fear and superstition as the basis for primitive man’s attribution of agency and life to statues, Quatremère has a much more detailed account of how such attribution works. He singles out aspects of the statues that are identified with what they signify, to explain what excites such identification in the viewer: the use of materials that share too many characteristics with the person represented, using cloth, wax and real hair for instance instead of white marble with its suggestion of abstraction. For Quatremère, living presence is suggested because the polychromy and dressing of statues totally undermines their representational character as an imitation, and brings them too close to the being they represent. In his view on the origins of sculpture, superstition led to the creation of fetishes, which as the artistic powers of primitive man increased, became statues of the gods, which in their turn led to new deities and the belief in them.

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Borboni and Lemée were concerned with the idolatry of honorific statues representing a prince who was still alive at the time these were made. But Quatremère, and before him Guasco, had replaced this notion, ultimately going back to the condemnation of idolatry in the Old Testament, with the culturally less circumscribed and condemning concept of superstition. They used this to describe all kinds of early religious practices involving the adoration of aniconic objects, fetishes and statues as if they were the gods represented, fuelled by fear and the desire to placate the unknown powers that surrounded primitive man. Hence Quatremère disagreed both with the view of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom that statues are the cause of idolatry, and Winckelmann’s rehearsal of this view in the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums.242 This also makes him stand out from the long tradition, going back to Aristophanes, Plutarch, Cicero and Varro, that skillful sculptors were responsible for the pagan proliferation of idolatry, rehearsed in Lemée’s time by CharlesCésar Baudelot de Dairval in his L’utilité des voyages of 1693, and repeated throughout the 18th century.243

CONCLUSION Fetishism has two aspects: projection and personification. The fetishist projects all kinds of qualities usually reserved for living beings, including supernatural agency, to a lifeless object; as a result the fetish is considered and treated as a living person. The 18th-century studies that borrowed the term from Portuguese and Dutch travel accounts to define the earliest stages of religion and to account for the origins of sculpture in the fetishist adoration of inanimate objects, offered several explanations for such projection and the resulting treatment of objects as if they were living persons. They assumed the credulity of the primitive mind, whether in darkest Africa or the earliest stages of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, and the cunning of priests who realized that a persuasive representation of the gods would enhance their power over the minds of the believers. Quatremère for instance posited an early history of sculpture as one of the most faithful servants of religion because it offered believable anthropomorphic images of the deities. Such accounts of fetishism located the explanation for the attribution of personhood to inanimate objects in the credulity of the primitive mind and formal properties of the objects revered, but were much more detailed about what it was in these sculptures that transformed them into fetishes, than about the psychological processes involved. In that sense they are the opposite of late 19thcentury accounts of sexual fetishism developed by Binet and Freud. These were rather vague about the qualities of fetishes, and pursuing Marx’s theory of the fetish as irrational surplus value, argued anything could become a fetish, but offered much more detailed theories of the psychological aspects. In their secularized world view they had to replace the presence of the deity in the object as an explanation for the agency attributed to it by another account, that of the accretion of surplus value in Marxian terms, or the attribution of

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emotions and desires normally reserved for human beings in Freud. In a disenchanted world, fetishism is still as present as ever, but becomes an enigma. Insofar as De Brosses, Guasco or Quatremère tried to explain how the process of attribution worked, they employed the topos of the confusion between the sign or image and what it represents. As we have seen, this topos has a long pedigree, going back to the rhetorical stylistic strategy of enargeia as one of the most important means of persuasion, both in oratory and the arts. It was used by early historians of sculpture such as Borboni and Lemée in combination with an appeal to the superior character and agency of their models, primarily to defend the erection of statues to honor living rulers against charges of idolatry. But in the course of this line of defence they developed an argument that would, as we have seen, become an important strand in 18th-century thought about fetishism. In the case of superior models it is defensible that statues are erected in honour of them; but it is also understandable that people treat the statues as if they were those rulers they represent, because these rulers have the godlike power to instill living images of themselves into the hearts of the viewers. In Gellian terms, these prototypes possess the power to distribute indexes that partake in their agency. Accordingly we do not find the concept of fetishism applied explicitly to Western responses to art in 18th-century historians of religion. But one continuous strand in thought about fetishes was developed in that context: the idea that the fetishist attributes personhood and agency to a statue, and in doing so confuses the image with what it represents. This idea was developed by Borboni and Lemée to account for European viewers adoring statues of their rulers and gods. They did not say so explicitly, but in fact prepared the way for an ethnography of European reactions to art.

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AESTHETIC AMBIVALENCE

In the winter of 1788 Johann Gottfried Herder visited the Villa Borghese. He left us an unusually frank account of viewing the Borghese Hermaphrodite ( fig. 41), in which he noted how the soft modelling, sensuous posture and gender ambiguity of the statue aroused him sexually: Das rechte Bein, das auf der Decke liegt, dehnt sich gleichsam, sie sanft zu berühren, das Knie etwas vorwärts. Wade, Bein, u. Fuß sind sanft angespannt, u. mit dem Zeh hebt er spannend die Decke, die vom linken aufgelegten Fuß herunterläuft. Eine ungemein wollüstige Stellung […].244 The lifelikeness and virtuosity of carving enticed Michel de Cubières, who saw the Hermaphrodite again a few years later, into an erotic engagement with the statue. When he became aware of its sexual ambiguity he became afraid and lost his poise, nourished by a mastery of the viewing competences shaped by the rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis. Whereas in his case enjoying the fiction of enargeia was disrupted by the unclear gender of the statue and changed into fear, for Herder it changed into a mixture of fascination and discomfort that he translated into an ethical and aesthetic conflict: one should not entertain adulterous desires, even for a strange statue, and one should not allow aesthetic, disinterested enjoyment to be disrupted by a heightened awareness of the sexual allure of this young body. In this respect Herder’s account is exemplary of the difference in attitude towards viewers reacting to statues as if they were living beings between Germany and France in the latter half of the 18th century. Whereas in France such reactions increasingly became the

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41 Borghese Hermaphrodite, Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze original of the second century BC, mattress sculpted by Bernini c. 1620, marble, L. 1.69 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

domain of ethnography or history of religion, contemporary German treatments of this phenomenon belonged to a different context, that of the new discipline of aesthetics, and showed much more ambivalence, not to say discomfort. Recent ethnographical findings played an important role, but in counterpoint to the new debates that arose after 1750 on the autonomy of art and the aesthetic experience as an expression of the independence of the rational subject.245

PYGMALION’S DREAM More than a century after Lemée, Herder published an essay on sculpture: Plastik. Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume. Where Lemée had attempted to control the agency of images that manifested itself through the confusion of the representation with the living being it represents, by appealing to the political and

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religious context of such behaviour, Herder sought an answer in an appeal to aesthetics as the discipline founded on the rational independence of the embodied viewing subject. Herder’s essay was published in 1778, but had been largely written in 1768–1770, not in the last place as a reaction to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie of 1766. Both essays start by arguing against the rhetorical and humanist belief in the representational equivalence of painting and poetry in favour of these arts having each their own, unexchangeable character. Herder takes this line of reasoning several steps further by arguing that among the visual arts sculpture and painting are just as fundamentally different: vision can show us only shapes in two dimensions, only touch can grasp them. Painting shows us appearances and narrative; it is a dream, offering narrative magic; but sculpture makes present, and is truth.246 Herder’s attempt to define the borders between these two arts is literally an essay in aesthetics, because it attempts to link the experience of painting, sculpture and music to a particular sense: sight, touch and hearing. Sculpture in this view has a more immediate effect on the viewer because it can only be properly experienced through touch, preferably in the dark or with closed eyes. Since tactile experience lends itself much less easily to mediation, verbal description or reflection than sight, it is an experience that is much more direct, and closer to the experience of the body of the person who touches a statue than looking at a painting is to the viewer. Looking at a statue will never lead to an adequate understanding that does justice to its three-dimensional corporeality; even worse, just looking at it will reduce it to a series of planes and angles instead of recreating it in the physical experience of touch: Lasset ein Geschöpf ganz Auge, ja einen Argus mit hundert Augen hundert Jahr eine Bildsäule betrachten: ist er nicht ein Geschöpf, das Hand hat, das einst tasten und wenigstens sich selbst betasten konnte; ein Vogelauge, ganz Schnabel, ganz Blick, ganz Fittig und Klaue, wird nie von diesem Dinge als Vogelansicht haben. Raum, Winkel, Form, Rundung, lerne ich als solche in leibhafter Wahrheit nicht durchs Gesicht erkennen; geschweige das Wesen dieser Kunst, schöne Form, schöne Bildung, die nicht Farbe, nicht Spiel der Proportion, der Symmetrie, des Lichtens und Schattens, sondern dargestellte, tastbare Wahrheit ist.247 Real lovers of sculpture will instead try to transform their vision into feeling, and to gaze as if they were trying to find their way in the dark, endlessly changing their position and point of view. Their eye becomes a hand, and the light their fingers. In the end, this intense tactile exploration transforms inanimate matter into a living being: […] sein Auge wird Hand, der Lichtstrahl Finger, oder vielmehr seine Seele hat einen noch viel feinern Finger als Hand und Lichtstrahl ist, das Bild aus des Urhebers Arm und Seele in sich zu schaffen. Sie hat’s! die Täuschung ist geschehn: es lebt, und sie fühlt, daß es lebe; und nun spricht sie, nicht als ob sie sehe, sondern taste, fühle.248

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As in the tale of Pygmalion, the statue is transformed under the viewer’s gaze into a living being. But in this case there is no need of a divine intervention, only of the capacity to concentrate so powerfully on the experience of one sense that all the senses seem to come together in one tactile sensation, and the viewer can identify completely with the act of the sculptor. Herder here argues against the 18th-century consensus on vision which postulates that a viewer does not become directly conscious of visual perception, but only through the mediation of a mental idea or representation of perception. Touch, unlike vision, is an unmediated sense which allows the viewer – although that is not really the right term here – to identify so closely with what he or she experiences that the act of touching becomes a creative reconstitution of the act of the statue’s maker. In this experience the boundaries of the self are dissolved, not in abject fear or admiration, but in a creative identification with the artist, which is ultimately based on a shared sense of corporal being. Hence Herder’s statement that sculpture is truth and makes present, whereas painting offers only narrative magic. This is shown, Herder continues, by the fact that Eine Bildsäule kann mich umfassen, daß ich vor ihr knie, ihr Freund und Gespiele werde, sie ist gegenwärtig, sie ist da. Die schönste Malerei ist Roman, Traum eines Traumes.249 Sculpture presents itself to the sense of touch, which is more direct and physical than sight. Because of that direct presence it can exert an agency on the viewer that is similar to that of living persons. In other words, in and through tactile sensation the viewer responds to statues as if they are living beings. By singling out the literally aesthetic aspect of looking at paintings or touching statues Herder articulates in a new manner the experience of inanimate matter dissolving into the living body it represents. But it is the opposite of the traditional rhetorical poetics of enargeia, because his focus is not on the object, on how to create a statue that is so lifelike it seems to breathe; nor is its aim the recreation of an experience in the mind of the public. Its aim is to engender, to create, a direct, unmediated experience of touching a living body. In the intense experience of exploring a statue’s form by letting one’s hand wander over it, the subject can only make sense of this experience by relating it to one’s own experience of one’s body. It is an unreflected, physical experience, a loss of self that results in a complete identification with the statue and through it with the sculptor. Yet although Herder here created a new way of understanding the experienve of a statue becoming alive, he is very critical of idolatry or fetishism, for the fear and horror they inspire are the mark of a primitive mind: Bei allen Wilden oder Halbwilden sind daher die Statuen belebt, dämonisch, voll Gottheit und Geistes, zumal wenn sie in stille, in heilige Dämmerung angebetet werden, und mann ihre Stimme und Antwort erwartet.250

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Herder employs the same ethnographic evidence to put the aesthetic experience into sharper relief, that Lemée or Guasco used to explain in what manner statues can subdue their viewers into idolatry all over the world, in primitive societies just as in contemporary Paris. The idolatry of primitive people must therefore be distinguished from the Pygmalion experience of enlightened sculpture amateurs. In their case primitive superstition has been replaced by the capacity of infinite aesthetic concentration on tactile experience; loss of self has in fact become the supreme affirmation of the creative self in an experience of beauty and presence. The agency of the statue’s presence is controlled here not through the social or ritual context in which it is allowed to exert its effect on the viewer, as in the case of Lemée’s defence of the monument of the Place des Victoires, but by transforming the viewers’ attitude. They are no longer the object of the ruler’s powers as made present in the statue. Hence they are able to change their absorption by the statue into an autonomous aesthetic experience in which there is only room for the sensual experience of the object.

PETRIFYING STATUE LOVERS In a letter of 1766 describing the Niobe group ( fig. 42) Herder’s Swiss contemporary Heinrich Füßli shows a comparable ambivalence and struggle to deflect the sexual attraction exercised by a statue into an aesthetic and, in his case, moral appreciation: Ich gehe in die Villa Medicis […] da staun’ ich ungestört eine Gruppe der höchsten weiblichen Schönheiten an. Niobe, meine Geliebte, du schöne Mutter schöner Kinder; du schönste unter den Weibern, wie lieb’ ich dich! […] lernensbegieriger Jüngling, steh mit Bewundrung stille! Das ist kein liebäugelnde Venus. – Furchte dich nicht, sie will nicht deine Sinnen berauschen, sondern deine Seele mit Ehrfurcht berauschen, und deinen Verstand unterrichten: Nimm wahr, die ernste Grazie auf ihrem Gesichte […] ihre Augen sind nicht, von verliebter Trunkenheit, halb zugeschlossen, ihr Blick nicht schmachtend, sondern unschuldig […]. Es ist dir vergönnt, Jüngling! athme bey diesem Anblik tiefer herauf, geniesse einer reinen Wohllust, und kröne deinen Genuss mit dem stillen Wunsch, eine Gattin zu finden, die diesen Mädchen gleich sey.’251 The viewer is here admonished not to dwell on Niobe’s physical attractions, but to analyse the artistry of the statue. In an almost literal repetition of Pygmalion’s appeal to Venus to give him a wife identical to the statue he created, Füßli tries to control the agency of this statue by finding a wife that is similar to a statue – and hence eminently controlable as well. Pygmalion here turns into Medusa, and the desire for a petrified lover becomes the ultimate implication of employing aesthetic response as a defence mechanism against the desires statues can excite.

123 | Petrifying statue lovers

42 Daughter of Niobe [Roman copy, possibly after Scopas and Praxiteles, formerly in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome, Florence: Uffizi. Drawing by Willem Doudijn, engraving by Jan de Bisschop, published in Signorum Veterum Icones, The Hague 1671.

Aesthetic defence mechanisms and ambivalences also sound through Goethe’s accounts of the uncanny and persistent fascination the Medusa Rondanini exercised on him, ( fig. 43).252 Thus he wrote about the recently discovered Medusa mask in the Rondanini collection: Gegen uns über im Palast Rondanini steht eine Medusenmaske, wo, in einer hohen und schönen Gesichtsform, über Lebensgröße, das ängstliche Starren des Todes unsäglich trefflich ausgedrückt ist. […] Ein wundersames Werk, das, den Zwiespalt zwischen Tod und Leben, zwischen Schmerz, Wollust ausdrückend, einen unnennbaren Reiz wie irgend ein anderes Problem über uns ausübt.253 The Medusa Rondanini continued to exercise its spell over him throughout the rest of his life. In 1826, at the very end of it, he finally obtained a plaster cast of it from the King of Bavaria, which is still in the Goethe-Haus in Weimar, and occupied a very prominent place

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43 Medusa Rondanini, late Hellenistic or Roman copy after a Greek bust of the 5th century BC, marble, 0.29 m., Munich, Glyptothek

among his collection. He also gave her an important role in one of the fragments connected with the second Faust, ‘Helena’s Antecedents’, where Medusa figures in Hell, stopping the dead from leaving by her terrible gaze, and the living from entering. But at the end of his life he had forgotten about his uneasy fascination with Medusa when he first saw her in Rome. Instead, in a splendid case of aesthetic defense or Aesthetische Abwehr, he now called her ‘wohltätig und heilsam.’ He added: ‘Diesen Anblick, der keineswegs versteinerte sondern den Kunstsinn höchlich und herrlich belebte’. In an ironic passage the novelist Jean Paul Richter alludes to this atmosphere when writing about his preparations for a visit to Goethe’s home: […] blos Kunstsachen wärmen noch seine Herznerven an (daher ich Knebel bat, mich vorher durch einen Mineralbrunnen zu petrifizieren und zu inkrustieren, damit ich ihm etwa im vortheilhaften Lichte einer Statue zeigen könnte. […] Ich gieng, ohne Wärme, blos aus Neugierde. Sein Haus (Pallast) frappiert […] ein Pantheon vol Bilder und Statuen, eine Kühle der Angst presset die Brust.254 Petrifaction here is no longer the ultimate form of agency. It has instead become the final implication of the aesthetic response as a way of dealing with the desire, ambivalence and fear statues can excite.

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GOETHE’S GALLERY OF ART LOVERS Setting apart the adoration of cult images from the aesthetic appreciation by the art lover, is also an important theme in Goethe’s Der Sammler und die Seinigen, published in Propyläen in 1799.255 Ostensibly an informal series of letters by a collector to the editors of the journal about collecting, and the various characters of artists and art lovers, it is in fact a very nifty summary of Goethe’s ideas about art and its reception by the viewer. It is also shot through with living presence responses presented as various identifications and confusions between an image and what it represents. Many of such responses occur in Goethe’s work, from the painter in Des Künstlers Erdewallen, written in 1774, who wants to embrace a statue of Venus Urania with the ‘violence of a bridegroom’, to the accounts in the Italian Journey that are pervaded with ambivalence of the cult of the Minerva Giustiniani, or his infatuation with the statue of a muse from Palazzo Caraffa Colombiano in Naples.256 The cases of identifying an image with the living being it represents that occur in Der Sammler und die Seinigen, however, do not share the erotic character of the majority of such responses in Goethe’s work. Instead they are all the manifestation of a desire not to make present absent lovers, but to bring back the dead. In this short book Goethe not only summarizes a century of idolatry crticism, he also makes explicit a hitherto relatively minor element in such responses that would become, as we shall see in the next chapters, increasingly important in the 19th century. The letters making up this novella begin with a history of the collection which the main narrator, a doctor, inherited from his father, but quickly move on to a catalogue of artistic genres concerned with representing the living and dead, ranging from cut-out lifesize figures presented as if they are part of a tableau vivant and portraits of all sizes, to plaster casts and wax portraits after living sitters or coffin portraits, to more indirect portraits of the dead by means of still lives representing their favourite attributes. The collection was founded by the narrator’s grandfather; his father had added to the collection, starting with precise imitations of natural objects, but moving on to portraits of himself and his family, preferably in life size, ‘akkurat wie er sich im Spiegel sah’. Here the theme of the relation between images and what they represent is announced for the first time. After the attempts of a painter trained in the French school, which did not please the narrator’s father because they did not come sufficiently close to the sitters’ appearance, a young German painter was more successful. He portrayed the sister not with much taste, but very much as she looked when she went into the garden, thus reaching ‘die höchsten Wahrheit der Nachahmung’. The painter went on to paint not only the entire family, but its entire household. He and the narrator’s sister fell in love and married.257 In a first questioning of the borders between images and what they represent the painter portrays the narrator’s parents lifesize, but placed in a door opening behind a door, as if they had just come home. In the next, the painting suffers the same fate as living bodies: it decays through the influence of the weather: ‘so fand man nach einem strengen Winter […]

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Vater und Mutter völlig zerstört, worüber wir uns um so mehr betrübten, als wir sie schon vorher durch den Tod verloren hatten’.258 Death, and funerary images, then become increasingly prominent. First plaster casts and wax images of the family are made, but the narrator dares not to show the ‘phantom’ image of his father, complete with wig and damasque dressing gown, sitting behind a curtain. The painter painted his dead wife in her coffin; but he also made still lives with her favourite possessions. These small, mute images did not lack coherence or even speech. Unable to forget his loss and only capable of seeing the present as a constant reminder of his bereavement he became very melancholic, and the last painting he made was yet another still life of his own possessions which all suggested transitoriness and separation, but also a reunion. Soon afterwards he died. This transference of feelings for persons unto their possessions continues in the treatment the narrator’s cousins give to the images they receive: Julie, who often takes over from the narrator, receives a set of Heinrich Füßli’s works (‘diese elfenhaften Luftbilder […] diese durch einanderziehenden und beweglichen Träume’). It is an interesting choice, given Füßli’s interest in sexual deviation and Goethe’s collection of erotic images by him. Her sister receives from her absent bridegroom coloured etchings of happy families.259 After the editors of Propyläen, that is Goethe and Schiller, have paid the narrator a visit during which he has shown them not only the portraits of his family, but also his cousins, the ‘lebendige Familienbilder’, the subject changes from collecting art to drawing up a catalogue of artists, connoisseurs and amateurs. The first category among these are the imitators (‘Nachahmer’) whose main ambition is to make as exact a reproduction as possible; they do not rest until they have replaced the object of representation by its image. His father and uncle’s collecting clearly fell into this category, with their sole interest in faithful portraiture. But this observation is also the foundation for Goethe’s analysis or diagnosis of what we would call image fetishism – the transference of emotions from the person who is or should be their object to inanimate possessions belonging to them – and which is such an insistent pattern in the elder generations’ dealing with death and art. In the fetishist replacement of persons by their images as the object of affection that characterizes the family life of the Collector, works of art should replace what they represent; thereby they lose their autonomy. In fact the title of the book already alludes to this theme: ‘die Seinigen’ turn out to be as much the collector’s friends and family as – increasingly – his collection. This point is further pursued when a new guest enters, an unknown connoisseur who is simply named ‘the Guest’. This figure was probably based on Alois Hirt, who in 1809 became the first professor of archaeology at the new university of Berlin, and made the first design for what would become the Altes Museum, one of the first public art galleries housing a royal collection.260 He has an argument with the young philosopher who also stays at the house of the collector, and who is the voice of Schiller’s view, about the highest aim of art. The guest believes that the aim of art is not beauty but ‘das characteristische’, and argues

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against Lessing and Winckelmann that classical art is not exclusively concerned with beauty or silent grandeur: the cries, spasms and distortions of Laocoön, Niobe’s grief, the bald heads of barbarians or damaged skin and weak muscles of old people all show that the ancients’ main concern was to express the characteristic, their aim truth not beauty. Goethe seems to argue here against Lessing, who had argued that when the expression of emotions dominates in a work of art, its aesthetic and artistic character suffers. To illustrate this point he quotes an epigram by Philippus from the Anthologia Graeca in which the viewer is so outraged by a painting of Medea killing her children that he wants to send her to the executioner; which for Lessing indicates both a mistake on the part of the artist and the viewer. The artist has destroyed the artistic, that is representational character of his work by making it too vivid, which causes the viewer to ignores this character.261 The philosopher objects to this that the subject matter of a work of art or tragedy may be unbearable, but that its artistic treatment redeems this. The flaw in the guest’s argument is that he confuses artistic representation with the events or situations represented.262 To judge whether art’s aim should be truth or beauty, he suggests that we consider the point where its reception and creation meet, that is, in the human mind, and look at the origins of art in human emotions and desires. When man feels love for an object or a living being, and the desire or instinct (Trieb) to imitate it, he begins to make images of the object of his affections. To achieve this, he may establish an ideal pattern; but to create a work of art that satisfies his emotional needs, beauty is needed, which is the only thing that lends life and warmth to the general idea established on the basis of scientific study. Thus artistic creation begins with love or desire of an individual, passes through a stage of scientific comparison to establish an ideal pattern, but in the end results in the creation of a living, beautiful work of art. The foundation of all this is the innate desire to represent what we feel vividly and experience, as an artist, but also as a viewer: Ein schönes Kunstwerk hat den ganzen Kreis durchlaufen, es ist nun wieder eine Art Individuum, das wir mit Neigung umfassen, das wir uns zueignen können. […] Wer fühlt lebhaft ohne den Wunsch das Gefühlte darzustellen?263 These same ideas on the difference, essential to art, between an object of desire and its representation are repeated, but in a comic way, in the visit described by Julie in the seventh letter. Some noble acquaintances come to see the collections, but when Julie shows one of their most precious possessions, a cabinet with a painting of a reclining Venus, the lady is shocked that Julie is not offended by her nakedness. In an ironic twist Goethe shows us a viewer in a museum situation who cannot differentiate between viewing an actual person and viewing her image, nor choose the appropriate viewing attitude.264 Goethe here gives us a polyphony of artists and viewers identifying, or confusing, images with what they represent. He also brings to the surface the emotional basis of such identifications in misattributed emotions, grief seeking consolation in the objects the dead

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left behind, or desire making the viewer love the image as much as what it represents; and he suggests the implications of such identifications for the concept of art.

ART FETISHISM Indeed we find here the basic elements of a theory of fetishism applied no longer exclusively to non-Western believers and their idols but to European art viewers. Before 1800, it is extremely rare to find Western art lovers accused of fetishism; the notion was restricted to the adoration of cult objects by non-Western and primitive societies, which were not considered to be works of art.265 We also find here an aesthetic dialectic in which the representational character of images is considered as the foundation of their status as works of art because they are ultimately an expression of human freedom. The deaths of Laocoon or Niobe are horrifying, almost too terrible to look at in reality; but their representation in sculpture or tragedy is made bearable, and even the object of aesthetic enjoyment, because they are representations, which must keep an uneasy balance between vividness and aesthetic distancing, between reality effects and framing. In fact Goethe here achieves the reversal of the rhetorical tradition, in which, as we have seen, vivid representation was considered as the height of persuasive power, which deprived the spectator of his or her autonomy, but at the same time made manifest the orator’s freedom to exercise his talents to persuade. Here, on the contrary, it is the awareness of the representational character of art which serves as the basis of the subject’s freedom. In a few pages, we find here a sketch of what would become one of the major preoccupations of Aby Warburg, and following him Julius von Schlosser and David Freedberg: how to resist the dangerous fascination of images by creating a space in which to reflect; a Denkraum as Warburg would call it. In his early manuscript notes for a psychology of art he noted: ‘Du schaust mich an, aber das tut kein weh’ – you gaze at me, but that does not hurt’.266 Later on, in the same collection of fragments written between 1888 and 1905, he concluded that our act of mental distancing from the image helps us to become aware of ourselves as an independent, viewing subject, and thereby master the image’s agency.267 Without explicitly labelling them, Goethe presents all varieties of the veneration of objects catalogued by De Brosses and Guasco: the veneration of the images and masks of forebears; funerary portraits; stagings of the dead as if they are returning; and fetishism proper in the sense of attributing to objects emotions and desires that should be directed at persons. Underlying all these varieties of veneration there is the confusion of the sign with what it signifies. It is not quite clear when, and how Goethe became acquainted with the 18th-century studies on fetishism. He started to use the term ‘fetishism’ from 1800 onwards, particularly in his scientific writings and letters between 1814 and 1828, but he may have read the travel accounts by Bosman, published in 1704 and translated into German in 1708, or the German translation of De Brosses published in 1785. He was also

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in touch with Christoph Meiners, the author of the first German discussion of fetishism based on De Brosses, in his Grundriß der Geschichte aller Religionen published in 1785. In Der Verfasser teilt die Geschichte seiner botanischen Studien mit of 1817 for instance, Goethe describes how during his visit to the botanical gardens of Padua in 1786 he first conceived the idea of the metamorphosis of plants, and asked a keeper to cut off the parts of a palm that had given him this idea. He carried these specimens with him: Sie liegen wie ich sie damals mitgenommen, noch wohlbehalten vor mir und ich verehre sie als Fetische, die meine Aufmerksamkeit zu erregen und fesseln völlig geeignet mir eine gedeihliche Folge meiner Bemühungen zuzusagen scheinen.268 As in Der Sammler, this botanical fetish serves as embodied memory. In Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre fetishism is also a recurrent morif, with a similar commemorative connotation.269 Be this as it may, in Der Sammler und die Seinigen Goethe turns the rhetorical view of vivid representation as the summum of persuasive power, in which the conscious, free exercise of artistic skill deprives the audience of its critical autonomy, on its head. Here the awareness by the viewer of the representational nature of art serves as the foundation of her autonomy. It would take another ten years after Goethe’s novella appeared before the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge would say in so many words that fetishism is a universal human characteristic: Could we emancipate ourselves from the bedimming influences of custom, and the transforming witchcraft of early association, we should see as numerous tribes of Fetish Worshipers in our streets of London and Paris, as we have on the coasts of Africa.270 The French Jesuit historian of religion Dulaure, who also recorded the idolatry lavished on the monument to Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires, was even more sweeping in 1805: All things, and even all words, spoken or written, to which one attributes a miraculous force foreign to their essence and contrary to the laws of nature, must belong to fetishism.271 This is not only a clear definition of fetishism in terms of the attribution of supernatural agency, but also an implicit extension of the range of possible fetishes to everything under the sun, including European works of art.

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KANT’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL BARRIER AGAINST FETISHISM The scientific study of fetishism and the philosophical discipline of aesthetics were both born in the 1750s: Du culte des dieux fétiches was published in 1760; Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten published his Aesthetica in 1750. As we have seen, the book by De Brosses is a contribution to the new rationalist and critical study of religion. Baumgarten defined the aesthetic judgment as founded in the autonomous exercise of the human subject’s faculties of experience and reason, and thus separated it from religious sentiment. Nonetheless aesthetics and fetish studies have in common their effort to master the impact of what one might call excessive objects, including non-European cult images and classical statues, which exercise an agency over their viewers that exceeds their materiality or formal qualities – resulting in what William Pietz recently called ‘our passionate apprehension of sensuously material objects’.272 Perhaps not accidentally, in the very decade in which Kant published his Critique of Judgment, arguing for an aesthetics of disinterested enjoyment as the ultimate expression of the autonomy the human rational mind can attain, the Medusa motif enjoyed a new lease of life, both in the neoclassical art of Canova, and in the popular art produced by the French Revolution. The attitudes of the henchman in the print by Arcangelo Magini after Beau, holding up Canova’s Perseus (1790–1801), and Louis XVI’s decapitated head show a troubling similarity ( figs 44 and 45).273 The French Revolution exacerbated the contrast between the political uses of art and such arguments for its autonomy and aesthetic appreciation. Kant’s Critique may accordingly be read as a manoeuvre to contain art’s agency, and particularly the agency of sculpture, with its historical roots in the cult images of primitive religion. The first part of Kant’s book, the Critique of Teleological Judgment, identified teleological unity or Zweckmäßigkeit as the defining characteristic of living organisms; but it also limited the range of objects or organisms to which one can attribute such unity without falling prey to unfounded projections. The critical rationalism of De Brosses and Hume, and Kant’s critique of any unfounded attribution of Zweckmäßigkeit to artefacts or objects are both part of the Enlightenment project to refute the attribution of life and agency to inanimate objects, be they cult images or classical statues. Human reason, according to Kant, is aware of the human tendency to attribute fitness for purpose or Zweckmäßigkeit to the products of nature, but is at the same time also aware that these are only hypotheses needed to form adequate knowledge of such objects. Or, put in the terms of Kant’s epistemology, such attribution is a condition for the possibility of obtaining rational knowledge of natural organisms. Without going into all the epistemological details of the reasoning that brings Kant to this conclusion, it is important to note that for Kant in any aesthetic experience of nature and art, whether it be of sublime or beautiful objects, the Ding an sich remains fundamentally unknowable; we only have access to our own experiences or representations of it.

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44 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Perseus, marble, 1790, 2.20 m., New York, Metropolitan Museum

Fetishism operates on the basis of a similar attribution of characteristics associated with life to inanimate objects, but in that case the spectator is not aware of the hypothetical character of these attributions. Unlike the adorer of fetishes, who believes that the tree trunk or shell he adores is alive and can act, the rational, enlightened and autonomous subject Kant has in mind is capable of aesthetic enjoyment. This is directed only at the formal properties of an object of art or nature and abstracts from its practical use, monetary value, or capacity to inspire fear or desire. In the aesthetic experience, all feelings of love, hate, fear or desire have been left behind or left out, in the sense that aesthetic enjoyment consists of the enjoyment of the harmonious and free interplay of our cognitive powers and senses. The symbol, or manifestation, of this aesthetic attitude is the museum, where works of art, deprived of their religious status, of their life and death, are exposed to the gaze only of the art lover, and protected by their glass cases from his or her desires and fears.

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45

Arcangelo Magini (17??–18??), Fin tragique de Louis XIV, engraving, 1793

Recent studies of fetishism often present Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) as a fundamental deconstruction of the attribution of life or agency to art or cult objects. In the final chapter of his study on wax images, later published under the title Tote Blicke (1910–11), Julius von Schlosser had already shown how the formalism of German academic art history with its Kantian conceptual underpinning had made an understanding of the function and agency of such funerary images almost impossible. His arguments were taken up in the 1980s and 1990s by David Freedberg, W.J.T. Mitchell and William Pietz.274 The latter takes the most radical position, arguing that one of the aims of the Critique of Judgment was to refute the attribution to inanimate objects of traits characterizing life. But when one considers Kant’s own work a bit more closely, things turn out to be more complex. Two of his books address fetishism directly, the early, pre-critical Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764) and the late Die Religion innerhalb der

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bloßen Grenzen der Vernunft (1793). In the first work, more of an essay in Schreibtischanthropologie using Burke’s Enquiry than an independent contribution to an aesthetics of the sublime, the black inhabitants of Africa are denied any sublime experience because of their innate tendency to frippery and frivolity: they are too läppisch, too frivolous, to experience the elevated feelings connected with the sublime. Their adoration of fetishes is a similar expression or symptom of their Läppischkeit, because they adore the most insignificant objets trouvés: mussel shells, feathers, bits of plants and bones of animals.275 In the second, the topic of fetishism is introduced as an example of religion – or rather, superstition – which is based not on a moral desire to lead a virtuous life, which is the sign of intellectual and ethical autonomy, but on the superstitious belief or fear that the will of God can be swayed through the rigorous observation of rites, penance etc, or by making fetishes that can serve to act upon the deity.276 Both treatments of fetishism limit themselves to religious and anthropological aspects. But they share with the Critique of Judgment’s treatment of the sublime the same concern for the autonomy of the human mind. In the early Beobachtungen, the capacity for such autonomous reasoning is sought in racial or national characteristics. In the late Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Vernunft (1793) the basis of true religion in the desire for a virtuous life is the expression of the same critical faculties that led in the Critique of Judgment to an awareness of the difference between the purposiveness inherent in artifacts and the one attributed to natural organisms. The connection between the unjustified attribution of inherent purposiveness to artefacts or works of art and the equally unwarrantable attribution of life or agency to images is not primarily based on a concern with art. This is shown by Kant’s discussion of the Mosaic law against idolatry. He cites this in the Critique of Judgment as one of the most sublime passages in the Pentateuch, because precisely by forbidding the Jews to make images of their God, their imagination or Einbildungskraft is not fettered. But as the context of this passage shows, Kant’s primary aim here is not to legislate appropriate response to art, but to show how for the enlightened mind religion or morals no longer need images. In a complete reversal of the rhetorical tradition similar to the one Goethe operated, images lead to idolatry because they hinder the subject’s rational self-determination.277 This is even clearer in the conclusion to a very late work, Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie (1796), where Kant illustrated the difference between his critical philosophy and the direct or intellectual apprehension of pure Ideas such as God by presenting a veiled image of Isis, goddess of nature, to whose law both parties bend their knee ( fig. 46).278 But the adherent of direct apprehension of Ideas – or ‘Afterplato’ – wants to make the veil of the goddess so thin that even though he cannot lift it, he nonetheless will be able to discern her body through it. This might be interpreted as an allusion to living presence response. But again, the issue that Kant addresses is not a response to art or even its legislation, but the epistemological and ethical problem of the demarcation of rational judgment and intuition, knowledge and belief, and ultimately

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46 Louis-Ernest Barrias (1841–1905), La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science, 1899, marble and polychrome onyx, 2.00 m., Paris, Musée d’Orsay

enlightened freedom or benighted superstition.279 A comparison of this illustration to the passage where the inscription on the temple of Isis is cited in the Critique of Judgment to illustrate the impossibility to reduce aesthetic ideas to concepts also suggests that Kant’s concern was not with aesthetics, but with ethics and the theory of knowledge. That is, Kant nowhere connected fetishism with the agency of images or art in the way Pietz and others have recently suggested. The literal attribution of life unto art does not figure in his aesthetic work. But he did construct an epistemological foundation for the autonomy of art and the aesthetic judgment. Through that foundation, and through his distinction between the finality or Zweckmäßigkeit attributed to works of nature and to human artifacts he also erected, so to speak, a logical and conceptual barrier against fetishism or living presence response. According to Kant, we can no longer reasonably hold that objects may possess the same agency or animation as living beings.

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CONCLUSION The refusal or sometimes incapacity to distinguish between the image and what it represents is an important element of Lemée’s apology for the idolatry lavished on the monument for Louis XIV. In his reluctance to condemn such reactions, and his interpretation of idolatry combining a semiotic analysis with ethnographical data that replaces traditional theological and rhetorical views, he announces 18th-century Enlightenment studies of fetishism. When De Brosses stated that the fetishism of Caribbean or African tribes of his own day was identical to that of ancient Egyptians or Greeks, he condemned these people and their cults to a primitive present without history or development. De Guasco attempted to write the history of statues adored as the divinities they represented, but succeeded only in giving these objects a historical context by tracing the development from aniconic objects to statues using the human form to represent the god. Viewers’ reactions remained fixed in an eternal present, deprived of history. Herder and Goethe, as we have seen, also refused to admit such responses into the repertoire of accepted reactions to art that would become part of the new discipline of academic art history. Fetishism replaced idolatry in the 18th century as the concept under which identifications of an image with what it represents were categorized. Like the idolatry discussed by Lemée, it presents two aspects: projection and personification. The fetishist projects all kinds of qualities usually reserved for living beings, including supernatural agency, to a lifeless object; as a result the fetish is considered and treated as a living person. The 18th-century studies dicussed here offered several explanations for such projection and the resulting treatment of objects as if they were living persons. They assumed the credulity of the primitive mind, whether in darkest Africa or the earliest stages of ancient Egyptian and Greek civilisation, and the cunning of priests who realized that a persuasive representation of the gods would enhance their power over the minds of the believers. Similar responses by Western viewers were increasingly dismissed from the range of acceptable behavior, and either excused as the expression of grief and mourning, or dismissed as a misunderstanding of the aesthetic attitude required by the enlightened towards works of art. We can therefore observe a double development. On one side, traditional reactions, formed by the rhetorical interest in enargeia, claiming that statues seem to move or breathe; or rather, are transformed in the experience of the spectator into a living being capable of feeling and acting, are dismissed in the proto-ethnographic studies of Lemée and the religion critiques by De Brosses and De Guasco. Such responses are no longer the sign of a good humanist education, but of the incapacity to respect the barriers between the work of art and the viewer, between inanimate matter subjected to the laws of physics and the autonomy of the viewing subject. This barrier would become the foundation of Kant’s aesthetics. On the other side, reactions that used to be associated with enargeia continue to occur and to be discussed, but in a very different context. Isolated from the artistic features that caused them, they became the object, in the course of the eighteenth century, of the new

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disciplines of ethnography or religious studies. They are now classified as the primitive expressions, incapable of development, of the first phases of humanity, and therefore unfit to be considered by aesthetics or academic art history. If Western viewers indulged in them, they were dismissed as inappropriate. Hegel for instance, in his Ästhetik, would dismiss the archeologist Carl August Böttiger’s fondling (‘Herumtatscheln’) of female marble statues as the somewhat unhealthy negation of the spiritual dimension of art.280 In the next chapters we will see how such reactions continued to occur, despite their banishment from the realm of the museum and the academy. We will also see how in the decades around 1900 the themes treated so far as issues in the reactions by individuals to works of art, will return, this time conceived on a universal scale, as phases in the development of mankind, in the work of Aby Warburg.

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PLATES

1 Crouching Aphrodite, Roman copy after Greek original of the third century BC, marble, H. 0.78 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre

12 Sebastiano Ricci (1609–1734), Perseus slaying Phineas (Perseus confronting Phineas with the head of Medusa), circa 1705–1710, oil on canvas, 65 by 80 cm., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum

13 Polynesian war god, probably eighteenth century, wicker framework with feathers, dogs’ teeth and shells, H. 1.07 m., London, British Museum

18 Giovanni Bellini (1433–1516), Brera Pietà, 1460, tempera on wood, 86 by 107 cm. Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera

19 Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Perseus and Medusa, fresco, 1597, Rome, Palazzo Farnese

20 Luca Giordano (1634–1705), Perseus petrifying Phineus, c. 1650, oil on canvas, 285 by 366 cm., Naples, Museo di Capodimonte

21 Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) (attr.), Head of Medusa, c. 1630, marble, H. 40 cm., Rome, Capitoline Musea

39 Gregório Fernández (1576–1636), Statue of the dead Christ, polychrome wood, glass, and ivory, L. 1.60 m, Seville, Iglésia de San Miguel y San Julián

40 Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Le Jupiter Olympien […], ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le goût de la sculpture polychrome, Paris: Firmin Didot 1814, frontispice, Paris, Institut National d’Histoire del’Art

61 Hubert Robert (1733–1808), La violation des caveaux des rois dans la basilique de Saint-Denis, en octobre 1793, c. 1793, oil on wood, 54 × 64 cm, Paris, Musée Carnavalet

65

Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), the Bank of England as Ruin, watercolour, 1830, London, Soane Museum

68 Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), Sir John Soane’s, town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1810–1820, plaster cast room, watercolour by Joseph Gandy, London, Soane Museum

74 Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), scene from the Sassetti Chapel showing Poliziano and his pupils, 1485, fresco, Florence, Santa Trinità

78 Benjamin Zix (1772–1811), Napoleon visits the recently arrived Laocoön group in the Louvre by torch light, 1810, watercolour, Paris, Musée du Louvre

80 Hunting cave lions, detail of the large frieze in the end chamber of Chauvet cave, c. 30.000 BCE, charcoal on rock

PART THREE

FRAMING, STAGING AND ACTING LIVING PRESENCE

With the rise of Idealist aesthetics and the spread of ethnographic studies of fetishism, attributing life to a work of art was rejected from the range of acceptable reactions and relegated into the realm of the primitive, the uncivilized, the pathological or simply the tasteless. The rhetorical topos of the living statue remained in use among art critics, but increasingly became a cliché formula of praise. Writing in 1836, Quatremère de Quincy for instance used all the ingredients of the classical ekphrastic technique to describe Canova’s Mary Magdalen ( fig. 47): Or, l’admiration dont la Madeleine pénitente fut alors l’object, ne peut être comparée qu’au sentiment indescriptible qui lui donne l’être […] aucun ouvrage n’avoit jamais paru tenir autant que celui-là, de cette idée de création […]. Rien de remarquable […] dans sa composition, tellement simple, qu’elle exclut tout soupçon de composition, et qu’on ne sauroit trouver de formes pour la décrier; rien dans les accessoires qui arrêtent les yeux; […] rien dans son action, puisqu’elle est immobile; rien dans son exécution, parce qu’elle ne laisse percevoir aucune trace propre à révéler la main de l’artiste. Et cependant […] on lui trouvait une affection indéfinissable de douleur religieuse, dans ce visage qui cesse d’être du marbre, et qui pleure.281 Canova’s Mary Magdalen is so vivid that she not only weeps: she has also lost all trace of the artistic genius that made her. Yet the attribution of life to art we are studying here, in which the vividness of the representation makes the viewer believe he or she is looking at the living being represented, did

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47 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Mary Magdalene, 1809, marble, H. 94 cm, Saint Petersburg, Hermitage

not dwindle into an empty phrase of praise from critics with classicizing leanings. Instead, it moved out of the art gallery and the salon into a very different setting, that of new varieties of multimedial theatre. At the same time, the experience of art’s vivid presence became increasingly an experience of the presence of the past. Because of the immense disruption caused by the French Revolution, the desire that works of art could somehow bring back to life the dead or the past itself became infused with a pathos of an intensity hitherto unknown. In itself, the claim to bring back the dead is one of the oldest claims of art. Leon Battista Alberti for instance included this claim in his praise of the painter’s art in De Pictura, where it is part of the humanist interest in the rhetorical concept of enargeia. But in the decades following the French Revolution this endeavour to animate the inanimate matter of the work of art was no longer part of the traditional endeavour of high art to persuade and act on the viewer. It changed from an artistic problem into an existential effort, used to cope with the irreparable gap that had opened between the past of the Ancien Régime and the present times which seemed completely out of joint to those who lived them. In the decades after 1800, intense attributions of life to art that moved beyond the conventions of classical ekphrasis occurred in different contexts, settings and media, from the staged exhibitions of sculpture to the new multimedial genres of the tableau vivant or the phantasmagoria. These new art forms are of particular interest to us because they take the living presence of art into a new atmosphere and a new intellectual context, moving beyond the artistic or rhetorical challenge of creating the utmost suggestion of lifelikeness towards

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48

Alexandre Lenoir, Musée des monuments français, salle du XVIe siècle, engraving

the historical and metaphysical problem of creating an experience in which the past is made present through works of art. Ultimately it would touch on an existential issue, that of bringing back the dead to life through art. A comparison of Michelet’s account of a visit to the Musée de Monuments Français, founded by Alexandre Lenoir to save the monuments of the French royal past from the iconoclast fury of the Revolution, with Quatremère’s calm mastery of rhetorical art criticism is instructive ( fig. 48): Tout un monde de morts historiques, sorti de ses chapelles à la puissante voix de la Révolution, était venu se rendre à cette vallée de Josaphat. […] Je me rappelle encore l’émotion, toujours la même et toujours vive, qui me faisait battre le cœur, quand, tout petit, j’entrais sous ces voûtes sombres et contemplais ces visages pâles, quand j’allais et cherchais, ardent, curieux, craintif, de salle en salle et d’âge en âge. Je cherchais, quoi? Je ne le sais ; la vie d’alors, sans doute, et le génie des temps. Je n’étais pas bien sûr qu’ils ne vécussent point, tous ces dormeurs de marbre, étendus sur leurs tombes; et quand, des somptueux monuments du XVIe siècle, éblouissant d’albâtre, je passais à la salle des Mérovingiens où se trouvait la croix de Dagobert, je ne savais pas trop si je ne verrais point se mettre sur leur séant Chilpéric et Frédégonde.282

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Part Three of this book pursues the nexus between vividness, agency and memory as a way of understanding the attribution of life to works of art in the 19th century. We will look at transformations in attributing life to art from an individual, psychological process to a historical, and often public endeavour to recreate the past and bring back the dead in works of art and their stagings, if only in a suggestion of smoke and mirrors in the new multimedial creations of animated art that were developed in the decades following the French Revolution.

LIVING PRESENCE AND A VISUAL HISTORY OF ART The notion of a visual history, even in a metaphorical sense, is very old, and is a topos in rhetorical thought on persuasive historical discourse.283 Plutarchus has recorded the famous comparison between poetry and painting by the Greek Sophist Simonides, to which he added that ‘The best historian is he who gives life to his story, like a painting with emotions and persons […]. Thucydides always took great trouble to achieve this effect of liveliness to transform the hearer into a viewer.’284 Historical discourse should be built around descriptions or ekphraseis that should be so vivid that they present before the mind’s eye the scene they describe. As we have seen in Chapter One, they should display so much spot-lit presence that they make the viewer relive the experience of looking at such a scene.285 Until the dissolution of the humanist tradition of writing history by the end of the 18th century, the ideal of speaking to the eye would remain central. In a passage that was incessantly quoted Cicero wrote: ‘History is the witness of the ages, the light of truth, life’s remembrance, and its teacher, the messenger of past times’.286 Piranesi’s engraving of the so-called Cuthbert vase, now in the entrance of the Museo dei Termini in Rome but in the 18th century still to be seen in the courtyard of the monastery of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, may be considered as a visual commentary on the power of images and objects not words to achieve such vivid presence ( fig. 49). The dimensions, the monumental staging, the location of the gaze of the viewer di sotto in sù, as if it were a life size portrait of a living being, and the glistening light that runs down the sides of the vase all make the vessel seem very present, and almost render it animate. In classical rhetoric, enargeia was also credited with the power to transfer the viewer to the past. In Quintilian’s discussion of enargeia as a ‘placing before the eyes’ or sub oculos subiectio, he includes it as a variety of the rhetorical figure of speech listed variously as evidentia or hypotyposis. Because of its capacity to evoke events and objects from the past, this was also called translatio temporum, a transference of time.287 One could even consider this image a visual emulation of the celebrated description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, the founding moment of ekphrasis’ animating powers, where we find the same effort to animate inanimate matter and blur the boundaries between representation and what it represents.288

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49 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Cuthbert Vase, from Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi (Rome 1778), etching, Ghent University Library

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50 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), Grottesco, 1748, etching, Ghent University Library

In Piranesi’s work this effort to increase the vividness of representations goes very far. It is present in his earliest works as a persistent play of ambivalence and ambiguities. In the Grotteschi ( fig. 50) for instance the skulls have eyes that glitter and see; stone is transformed into vegetation, the statue of a satyr gazes at the Hercules Farnese, and broken idols seem to hesitate on the brink between life and petrification. We know, incidentally, from the biography by Piranesi’s contemporary Le Grand, that the artist, though usually taciturn, was in the habit of speaking to his burins and etchings, calling upon them to become stone and sunlight: Le feu de ses yeux n’était qu’une faible lueur de celui dont il brûlait sans cesse, et qu’il exhalait avec passion sur ses planches. Ce n’était qu’avec elles qu’il faisait volontiers les frais de la conversation. “Ah! nous verrons” leur disait-il […] “si vous ne rendrez pas le soleil d’Italie! pour toi, tu seras brique, et toi, tu seras marbre”289 These cases of suggesting that inanimate matter is somehow animated, or that the image has the power to suggest the presence of what it represents, have implications that reach further than traditional humanist vivid description. They are no longer figures of speech or descriptive virtuoso pieces enhancing the persuasive power of a historical discourse, but are

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part of a conscious and sustained effort to make present the remains of the past through the visual means of the pictorial strategies that Piranesi developed in the course of his life. After Piranesi’s death, the visual techniques he developed in the Carceri and Vedute to suggest the actual presence of the spaces and buildings he depicted – perspectives with fleeing vanishing points, irruptions of indirect light and manipulations of view point – were adopted by the creators of new multi-medial genres such as the phantasmagoria to create similar experiences of presence.

SANTA MARIA DEL PRIOR ATO: ANAC HR ONISM EMBODIED Perhaps the most striking aspect of the complex of Santa Maria del Priorato, which includes a piazza, a gateway to the Villa di Malta and the church of the Maltese Order in Rome, is its insistent incorporation of objects, architectural elements and figuration taken from the past: from Rome’s pagan past, but also from the history of the Maltese order. In this obsession with resuming, representing or transforming the past, Santa Maria del Priorato is the culmination of Piranesi’s oeuvre, which is one immense attempt to recreate on paper by means of visual narratives the ruins, and through them, the magnificence of the Roman past.290 Piranesi designed the complex, including a piazza and the restoration, or rather reinvention, of the church, in 1764–66, at the end of his career ( figs. 51–53). Somewhat ironically, the only executed work of this artist who signed himself Architectus Venetianus, and had a somewhat ambivalent relation with the Roman Catholic faith, is a church. The location of the complex is highly charged with religious symbolism. In Roman times it was from the earliest beginnings of the Urbs the location for the armilustrium, the religious ceremony, held every October, in which Salian priests performed a ritual dance to purify the army and the officials of the state.291 From time immemorial, and preceding the founding of the Roman kingdom, the Aventine Hill had housed the shrines for various cults, including that of the Bona Dea, whose sacred animal was the snake; located outside the Pomoerium, the city wall, it also overlooked the port for traders who came from Etruria. Piranesi’s designs for the Piazza and the Church are saturated with references to the origins of this place in times immemorial, above all Roman and pagan; and to the history of the Maltese order. He drew on the same universe of forms he had created in the Parere (1765), his polemical essay against Winckelmann and Julien-David Leroy, to argue that the origins of classical architecture are Italic, that is Etruscan and Roman, and not Greek; and in his essay on chimney design, the Diverse Maniere di adornare le cammine (1769) to advocate the employment of forms Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek or Roman in contemporary design. The piazza is framed by a wall decorated by elements that most authors describe as stelai, Greek funeral reliefs. They are marble trophies, recalling the trophies of Marius on the Capitole. On the other side, the façade of the entrance to the Villa di Malta is decorated with

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51 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), Piazza of the complex of Santa Maria del Priorato, 1764–66, Rome, Photograph Caroline van Eck

a frieze crowded with heraldic elements carrying references to the Maltese Order and the Prior who gave Piranesi this commission, Giovambattiste Rezzonico, a nephew of his Venetian compatriot Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico ( fig. 53). Several writers have already noted the strangeness, not to say disconcerting character of Piranesi’s design. Sylvia Pressouyre observed in her 1976 article in Piranèse et les français that […] parmi les stèles dressées, règne un climat funèbre; dans l’attirail antique et militaire des casques et des boucliers, il passe des serpents; on aperçoit, sous l’amoncellement des trophées, des attributs étranges dont on ne saisit pas le sens. Tout est mat, comme décoloré, spectral et irréel.292 In a recent article on Santa Maria del Priorato, Fabio Barry argued that the piazza is not simply a reconstitution of the location where the armilustra were held, but also a cenotaph to the knights of Malta. It includes christian elements in a collage of visual references to the pagan past of this location, and the design of the Piazza in particular consists of a rather equivocal mix of references to the monument to the Praetorian Guard on the Via Appia and

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52 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), Façade of Santa Maria del Priorato, 1764–66, Rome, Photograph Caroline van Eck

other heathen funerary emblems, urns, obelisks. It combines similarities with the spina of a Roman circus with references to Piranesi’s own recreations of the Via Appia ( fig. 54). It also includes masks evoking the origins of art, but combines them with a set-up of stelai that recalls stations of the cross. Another, even more suggestive ambiguity is displayed by an element of the façade of the church which in my view is central to understanding how Piranesi conceived his buildings as incarnations of the past: the oculus that survives from the church that already existed is incorporated into a sarcophagus displaying an Egyptian reeded exterior ( fig. 55). It is a circular panel surrounded by a wreath and flanked by console brackets consisting of snakes

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53 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), Piazza of the complex of Santa Maria del Priorato, wall displaying trophies, 1764–66, Rome, Photograph Caroline van Eck

gradually transformed into what looks from a disance like a ionic volute, but on closer inspection turns out to be an egg list framing acanthus leaves. It is a small, but quite singular ornament. Snakes are present everywhere, in the piazza and the church, for instance in the capitals behind the altar. They also recur in the plates of the Magnificenza ed Architettura dei Romani, and already present in the Grotteschi ( figs. 56 and 57). Only here however, and I have as yet not found a comparable instance in Roman architecture, do we find a visual statement of the origin of this ornament. In the historical and religious context of the Aventine Hill the snake motif is overdetermined. In Antiquity the Aventine was known as the Mons Serpentarius, snake hill. In the anonymous description made by a contemporary of Piranesi, and probably prompted by him, the snakes slithering away over the arms of the Maltese knights in the entrance to the Villa are considered to be symbols of eternity. The snake motif on the façade according to the same Description ‘alludes to the eternity of the Faith protected by the Sacred Order [of the Maltese Knights]’.293 They also suggest, because the snakes seem to be transformed into the egg and dart motif, a representation of the history of that motif: how it grew out of the shape of snakes and their skins. As Fabio Barry, and before him John Wilton-Ely and Sylvie Tessouyre, noted, neither traditional Vitruvian readings, nor iconographic analysis, nor the Christian reading of the

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54 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), Via Appia, from Le Antichità Romane (Rome, 1756), vol. II plate II, etching

meaning of Piranesi’s design of the anonymous Description does full justice to the richness, ambivalence, ambiguity and layeredness of Piranesi’s design of Piazza and church.294 As Tessouyre put it, La transposition des profils et des volumes abstraits dans des formes empruntées au monde réel est donc l’un des ressorts de la poétique ornementale de Piranèse. La console se mue en serpent […]. La métaphore investit cet art décoratif qui rivalise, de l’aveu même de Piranèse, avec la poésie. L’image en soi est cultivée hors de tout protocole accoutumé […].295 In its abrupt iuxtaposition of pagan, early Christian, Egyptian, classical and neo-classicist elements in the fabric of the Piazza and the church, Santa Maria del Priorato literally incorporates the past into the present. The egg-and-snake motif embodies the origins of the volute; the early Christian altar in the interior of the church makes present the oldest past of the Church. To understand Piranesi’s unique way of endowing architectural form with meaning in S Maria del Priorato, we need to start from the one unifying, and overarching theme that is present here, as in all his work: his work is always a record, a resumption, transformation or presentation, of the Roman past. In other words, we are no longer dealing

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55 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Façade of Santa Maria del Priorato, 1764–1766, Rome, oculus, Photograph Caroline van Eck

here with the humanist tradition of vivid description to evoke the past, but by that valued stones, medals and buildings even more as silent surviving witnesses, as the Byzantine humanist Chrysoloras put it so eloquently: Herodotus and the other historians did great things with their works; but only in images is it possible to see everything as if in the time at which it happened, and thus this [image-based] history is absolutely and simply exact: or better, if I may say so, it is not history, but direct and personal observation [autopsia] and living presence [parousia] of all the things that happened to them.296 Instead we are dealing here with a very different phenomenon, that of anachronism: the irruption or introduction of elements from the past into the present. This concept has received much interest recently due to the book by Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel, Anachronic Renaissance, published in 2006. They present a series of cases where images or buildings include art works from the past; iuxtapositions, or substitutions, that is, of works that date from different periods. In Leon Battista Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano for instance in Rimini (c. 1450), the classical arcades designed by him frame the walls of the original Gothic church ( fig. 58). To analyse this widespread and complex phenomenon,

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56 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), snakes from Grotteschi, c. 1747, etching, Ghent University Library

Wood and Nagel introduce a distinction between two ways of defining origins: the performative or authorial way, in which a sequence of works is considered in a temporal or spatial perspective, in which each work has an individual appearance; and the substitute, in which successive works are superimposed one upon the other. The guiding metaphor of this second way of conceiving anachronism is that of the impression, which allows for a repetition without fundamental change. The link uniting the substitutions is often imperceptible, but nonetheless present.297 The anachronisms presented by Wood and Nagel are all based on a paradox: on the one hand there is the possibility that a material remainder from the past can be a very strong witness of that past, which has disappeared; on the other hand, this remainder could be the substitute for another artefact, which is no longer there. It could be at the same time a witness and a substitute: To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms was to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. The artifact was connected to its unknowable point of origin by an unreconstructible chain of replicas. The chain could not be perceived ; its links did not diminish in stature as they receded into the depths of time. […]

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57 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), snake capital from the Magnificenza della Roma Antica (Rome, 1761), etching, Ghent University Library

58 Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), Tempio Malatestiano, c. 1450, Rimini

Whereas under the performative or authorial theory of origins a given sequence of works is viewed perspectivally, each one with a different appearance, under the substitutional theory different objects stack up one on top of another without recession and without alteration.298 In other words, the anachronism has to achieve the presence of some element from the past, even though by its very nature as a substitute it cannot do so. These theories of origins proposed by Wood and Nagel also have two dimensions which do not figure very promi-

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59 Two euro coin showing profile of Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands, copper and other metals, 2010

60 Wax statue of Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands, wax, 1.68 m., Amsterdam, Madame Tussaud’s

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nently in their book: they bear directly on the problem of the attribution of living presence to art works, and they reflect different conceptions of the poetics of historiography, of the way in which historians, be they Thucydides or Piranesi, present the elements of the history they produce in a way that is either perspectival or substitutional. The distinction between a substitutive and a performative relation between an original and its copies is highly relevant for us, since it is played out in terms of resemblance. Now resemblance is a variety of representation, and the two major conceptualizations of representation are defined in these same terms: representation operates through substitution, or by resemblance. In the first case, the Dutch Queen is represented by her highly stylized profile on euro coins, in the second by a life-size wax statue in Madame Tussaud’s ( figs. 59 and 60). This distinction will therefore help us to further understand the claim of representations to make present what it represents, whether they be the visual history of architecture Piranesi produced or the multi-medial stagings of statues or the dead we will come to shortly. Two persistent but ultimately irreconcilable convictions are the basis for these two views of anachronism: material evidence is the most reliable kind of evidence, but, at the same time, this evidence has been replaced at some time in the past: The apprehension of historical artifacts in the late mediaeval and early modern period, as well as in the production of new images and buildings, was built on the following paradox : the possibility that a material sample of the past could somehow be both an especially powerful testimony to a distant world and at the same time an ersatz for an another, now absent artifact. The interpretation of artifacts rested on two logically incompatible convictions, neither of which could be easily abandoned : on the one hand, that material evidence was the best sort of evidence ; on the other, that it was very likely that at some point material artifacts had been replaced.299 Again, there is a close proximity between the artistic and the historical perspective, between making works of art and being aware, as a spectator or historian, of the value of artifacts from the past as historical evidence. At the same time, it is evident that the image is accorded superior value or agency as evidence, or rather, as a witness of the past. As such, it allows the past to intrude anachronistically into the present. The question formulated by Wood and Nagel is fundamental to all humanist history writing: how to make the past present? What are the implications of such an irruption or insurrection of the past into the present? Ultimately, the only solution for these paradoxes and conundrums resides in the visual document. Images, because of their double nature of both visual and fictive representations, can indeed make the past present. All anachronisms as discussed by Nagel and Wood – or practised by Piranesi – are visual anachronisms. There is a complex dialectic at play here between the persuasive, but nonetheless fictional nature of the image that produces the illusion of the simultaneity of the past and

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the present; and the degree of success in creating that fiction. If the image succeeds too well, the spectator is no longer aware of looking at an image, and the resulting anachronism destroys historical awareness. The anachronism does not strengthen historical knowledge, but merely disrupts continuous historical narrative. Also, it is only in the realm of art and its history that this doubly paradoxical nature of the anachronism plays itself out fully. In that respect anachronisms and the historical experience they create are very similar to the living presence of art works and their effects: when a statue, in the experience of the viewer, appears to be alive, aesthetic appreciation or art-historical awareness is destroyed as well. The vividness of the work of art disrupts narrative discourse about it. For the moment we will leave the experience of the presence of the past created by Piranesi’s work, and the paradoxes of anachronism, to turn to other ways of recreating the presence of the past through art, but we will return to them in the final chapter of this book.

‘KILLING ART TO WRITE ITS HISTORY’ When Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français opened its doors in 1795 to show the remains of the royal tombs that its founder Alexandre Lenoir had saved from revolutionary iconoclasm, it attracted huge crowds but met with a very mixed reception ( fig. 61).300 Lenoir had devised a picturesque staging of royal remains, in which visitors could wander from century to century through rooms dimly lit, and decorated to suggest a recreation of the period. His aim was not to offer a scientific visual classification of art from the past. Many visitors were struck with the uncanny suggestion of living presence that Lenoir’s picturesque staging of the past created. As we already saw, the visit made an unforgettable, painful impression on Jules Michelet with its unsettling suggestion of animated statues. Other visitors were also sensitive to the spell cast by Lenoir’s spectacular arrangements, but did not share Michelet’s romantic fascination with an historical experience in which the past appeared to come alive. The Abbé Grégoire for instance appealed to the traditional discourse of idolatry. Transferring the remains of the ancien régime to a museum because of their artistic quality was for him not only the ultimate iconoclast insult, because it deprived them of their sacred character. Making them the objects of the aesthetic gaze also subjected them to a new kind of idolatry, that of purely artistic enjoyment.301 The Italian archival art historian Leopoldo Cicognara objected to the lack of chronology, and to Lenoir’s sacrifice of distinctions between genres and materials to create suggestive ensembles. The most radical criticism however was voiced by Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, one of the first commissioners charged by the Assemblée Nationale to oversee the inventories of the French artistic patromony.302 He objected to the removal of the funerary statues of the French kings to a museum setting because it deprived them of their religious and historical setting and thereby inflicted a double death on them:

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61 Hubert Robert (1733–1808), La violation des caveaux des rois dans la basilique de Saint-Denis, en octobre 1793, c. 1793, oil on wood, 54 × 64 cm. Paris, Musée Carnavalet

Qui fera connaître à notre esprit, ce que signifient ces statues, dont les attitudes n’ont plus d’objet, dont les expressions ne sont que des grimaces, dont les accessoires sont devenus des énigmes ? […] Que me disent ces mausolées sans sépulture, ces cénotaphes doublement vides, ces tombeaux que la mort n’anime plus ?303 Moving the monuments into a museal setting was not the worst crime committed by Lenoir. To take them out of their original setting for the purposes of art history was the ultimate form of iconoclasm: Déplacer tous les monuments, en recueillir ainsi les fragments décomposés, en classer méthodiquement les débris, et faire d’une telle réunion un cours pratique de chronologie moderne ; c’est pour une raison existante, se constituer en état de nation morte ; c’est de son vivant assister à ses funérailles ; c’est tuer l’Art pour en faire l’histoire ; ce n’est point en faire l’histoire, mais l’épitaphe.304

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Lenoir’s museum made these issues particularly urgent because it was one of the first public museums which aimed to preserve the achievements of French art in an historical framework, but at the same time excited intense reactions that broke through such historical distancing. Michelet was so impressed by the vividness of the monuments that he feared the statues would return to life; Quatremère felt that by writing its history, art had been killed. It thus presented in a particularly compelling way the problematic nexus between the life and powers of art, the fear, iconcoclasm or idolatry it can evoke, and the precariousness of attempts to neutralize these aspects of art by removing it from its original religious context into a museum setting where it is presented in an historical framework. As Pascal Griener put it in his recent book on changes in the perception of art in the 18th century, viewers and historians became torn between ‘d’un côté le désir d’une présence excédant toute représentation, de l’autre, l’appel à une science de la représentation analytique.’305 These conflicting desires were at the heart of the polemics caused by Lenoir’s museum. They were also acted out, as we shall see, in the vogue for the tableau vivant, which took off in the same years as the foundation of the Musée.

‘GLORIOUS VISIONS OF THE PAST’ The British architect Sir John Soane was a great admirer of Lenoir’s Musée, which he visited in 1808.306 In the decades around 1800 he produced a series of meditations, both written and built, on the recreation of the past, the survival of buildings as ruins, buildings presented as the portrait of their owner, and the staging of his collection of antiquities. They all articulate possible ways of conceiving the animation of buildings, and throw some light on the endeavour to recreate the past through the living presence of a work of art from yet another angle. Like the French architects and theorists Boffrand, Le Camus de Mézières and Ledoux, all of whose work he knew very well, Soane was convinced that architecture speaks to us, and that it ‘speaks in a language of its own’.307 Not that he was in favour of facile analogies between bricks and letters, parts of buildings and stones, or buildings and sentences. Buildings speak to us because they are monuments, and the language they speak is in fact not an articulation of sense, but that of acting upon the emotions and memories of the viewers. Ruins excite trains of associations and a wide range of emotions in the mind of the beholder: The monuments of the Horatii and Curatii fills us with respect for the patriotic and the heroic deeds to which it refers, whilst the remains of many towering structures, broken arches, and massive walls, bring back to our recollections interesting, important and instructive incidents of history which call forth all the nobler feelings of the sympathetic mind […]. [W]hen such sensations are raised, if the ruins of buildings bring the

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recollection of such deeds fresh to the mind, as if then acting, we are only anxious for time to spare such monuments, that the same effect may be to the latest ages. Here there is no delusion, no imaginary colouring: the effect on the mind is complete.308 The phrase ‘deeds […] then acting’ suggests that the viewer of such powerfully evocative monuments is present at the actual performance of heroic actions. Ruins are capable to affect the mind of the viewer to such a degree that the past seems to return in the present. They stage the past so effectively, that they achieve enargeia: a representation of actions or situations that is so vivid that in a suspension of disbelief, to quote Coleridge’s definition of the effects of the imagination, representation dissolved into presence. Or, as Soane put it, ‘history is then open to all.’ Soane was extremely well read in classical rhetoric.309 The common ground between architecture and eloquence is that they both speak, and act upon the public. He repeatedly stressed the affecting power of the architecture of the ancients, and in doing so transformed looking at a building into watching a play: The front of a building is like the prologue of a play, it prepares us for what we are to expect. If the outside promises more than we find in the inside, we are disappointed. The plot opens itself in the first act and is carried on through the remainder, through all the mazes of character, convenience of arrangement, elegance and propriety of ornaments, and lastly produces a complete whole in distribution, decoration and construction.310 Designing and looking at a building thus conceived both draw on a cultural memory shared by the architect and the viewer, and appeal to the viewer’s capacity to appreciate the building as a whole whose experience unfolds in time as he or she walks through it.311 This happens in Soane’s buildings through the activation of cultural memory and the representation of character, as his own remarks on Pitzhanger show, the London house he largely rebuilt for himself in 1800–1803 ( fig. 62). Here the façade is transformed into the face of the owner, full of visual clues as to this character and occupations: Describe the front. No man will suppose that the architect or owner had attained civic crowns for saving the lives of his fellow citizens […]. To judge of this species of building we should endeavour to discover the object to be attained: for example, in the building before you, if we suppose the person about to build possessed of a number of detached pieces of ornament, such as eagles and wreaths, demiboys and foliage, columns and statues, pedestals and acroters &c, and that from a desire to preserve them from ruin, or to form a building to give a faint idea of an Italian villa […] this building may thus be considered as a picture, a sort of portrait.312

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62 Sir John Soane (1753–1837), Pitzhanger Manor, Reading, 1800–1803, Photograph Martin Charles

That is, cultural memory, activated through the use of iconic, figural elements borrowed from painting and poetry, is used as the material with which character is represented in a building. Somehow buildings must become human or at least suggest a common ground between the built and man. This is achieved by means of theatricality, which conditions both architectural design and the viewers’ reponse to buildings, who have to draw on their memories to engage with a building in the way they engage with a play that is acted before their eyes. At the same time, this view of buildings portraying characters enabled Soane to use devices of plot that are found both in historical painting and in drama. The best-known

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63 Sir John Soane (1753–1837), town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1810–1820

instance of this use of the sister arts is his own house in Lincoln Inn’s Fields ( fig. 63), designed as an unfolding series of stage sets. His house offered ‘glorious visions of the past’, as contemporary visitors recalled, dramatized scenes without actors, transformed images into actions all within the immobile and inanimate stone setting of Soane’s mansion. It filled the viewer with a ‘delirium produced by the blaze of effects’ and ‘transfixing them with its great illusion’, as the painter Constable put it, to the degree that viewers mistook representations for reality. But as we shall see, these effects were not only rooted in an 18thcentury rhetorical conviction that architecture, like oratory, should move the spectator, but equally part of the late 18th-century interest in the sublime and the uncanny, and the theatrical means to stage such effects. Soane built himself a townhouse at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. By the 1820s this was no longer simply the place where he lived, worked and housed his immense collection of books, art works and fragments of architecture, but also the setting for stagings of the collection. He organized soirées in which his guests, the artistic and political elite of Regency society, were conducted through the house in carefully orchestrated tours, experiencing a series of unfolding scenes staged in carefully lit rooms and corridors. It had become, as Helene Furján has shown in her studies of Soane’s house, a hybrid museological and theatri-

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64 Sir John Soane (1753–1837), Bank of England, Consols Office, London 1797–1799

cal structure, where the architectural setting gradually changed from the passive setting of the collection to an active participant in the shows that were staged.313 In the open house for instance that was held at night in March 1825, the well-lit upper spaces were contrasted with the gloom of the dimly lit and labyrinthine spaces below, which housed Soane’s Egyptian and mediaeval collections. Barbara Hofland, one of Soane’s guests and a collaborator on the guide to the house and its collections, noted that the recently acquired sarcophagus ‘sheds from within a pale, unearthly light upon the silent awe-struck beings that surround it, a light that, like the faint gleams that rise like ignes fatui from the adjoining crypt’, could barely illuminate ‘the deep masses of shadow’. The beings Hofland mentions are not just the spectators, but the statues and sculptural fragments surrounding the sarcophagus. Soane, who was a master of indirect lighting, as is shown by his handling of light and darkness in the Bank of England ( fig. 64), contrived to dematerialize solid stone in his house, suggesting that his antiquities had acquired movement and a life of their own. As another observer, John Britton, noted: ‘the light now streams down, in the most picturesque manner, into this angle, thereby producing a very striking bit of scenery.’ In these soirées, and their visual record by Soane’s draughtsman Joseph Gandy, the house was transformed and immaterialized, and became a multimedial staged ruin.

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65 Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), the Bank of England as Ruin, watercolour, 1830, London, Soane Museum

In fact Soane often preferred to think of himself not as an architect of new buildings, but as a creator of ruins. He had Gandy make watercolours of his new designs not in their pristine integrity, but as ruins ( fig. 65). These ruined visions of for instance the Bank of England are not simply Picturesque versions of Tempus edax rerum or Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet, the two standard statements accompanying the majority of images of architectural ruin from the Renaissance onwards. By robbing his buildings in these views of their functional aspects and solidity, they foreground the pictorial and sculptural character of these remains, and thereby offer yet another illustration of Soane’s conviction that the effect of architecture on the mind of the spectator is achieved by treating a building as a union of painting, sculpture and architecture. He highlighted the iconic, pictorial, one might almost say bodily nature of architecture, vulnerable, like any living being, to illness and decay, and drew on the powers of all three arts to engage the viewer and set off trains of memories, feelings and associations. In his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields Soane transformed architecture into a moving and animated spectacle by using the techniques of staging and lighting developed in contemporary theatre, in particular in the new genres of the panorama, diorama and phantasmagoria introduced by Jacques de Loutherbourg, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Etienne Robert or Robertson.314 By their use of hidden mirrors, smoke, sources of light hidden from sight and shifting stages they created the suggestion of moving images, flowing seamlessly from one into another, and thereby they animated their scenes, transforming images into

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66 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), Eidophysikon, watercolour, c. 1800, London, British Museum

actions. The phantasmagoria in particular, which used a magic lantern hidden at a distance behind a transparent screen to illuminate moveable images of the main victims of the French Revolution, often made such a lifelike effect that viewers had to be carried out in hysterics, convinced they had not watched a slide show but the resurrection of Marie Antoinette or the lynching of the Princesse de Lamballe.315 What all these shows had in common was their illusionism. By means of the handling of light, images, smoke and perspective they offered dematerialized images of buildings and human beings. But in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of their illusionistic character they only gained in vivid presence. Loutherbourg’s Eidophysikon for instance showed Pandaemonium, the palace of Satan, from Milton’s Paradise Lost, in a setting framed by Ionic columns not unlike the use Soane made of orders to frame his mausoleum for Noel Desenfans ( fig. 66); it also used very small spaces to suggest immense effects in the way Soane handled light in the Bank of England to suggest vast uninterrupted vistas. The dioramas of Rosslyn Chapel and Ruins in a Fog achieved part of their effect through the contrast between the dark, small auditorium and the large transparent fabrics lit from behind and moved by a complex mechanism of lines, cords and pulleys. We find the same contrast behind the dark space in which the public is confined and the suggestion of large spaces through the handling of light in the

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67 Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), Sir John Soane’s town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, Gothic Basement, watercolour, c. 1820, London, Soane Museum

presentation – or staging – of the Gothic basement of the Soane Museum ( fig. 67). As Sir David Brewster, a contemporary viewer of phantasmagorias, put it, quoting Milton: The small theatre of exhibition was lighted only by one hanging lamp, the flame of which was drawn up into an opaque chimney or shade when the performance began. In this “darkness visible” the curtain rose […].316 Soane drew on Piranesi’s strategies of presenting Roman ruins, in particular collage and bricolage, heaping Roman monuments from different periods on top of each other in his

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68 Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), Sir John Soane’s, town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1810–1820, plaster cast room, watercolour by Joseph Gandy, London, Soane Museum

images of the Via Appia for instance, and showing the accretion of layers of time. In the course of the guided, carefully staged tours Soane offered to his guests the building is transformed into an image, becomes dematerialized and is transformed into a succession of scenes. Underlying this transformation is a range of theatrical techniques offered by the London stage Soane could draw on: the dramatic use of light and dark, close, confined or open spaces, the direction of a parcours through a building, the use of mirrors. Barbara Hofland noted its illusion of a gradual crowding of shadows on a stage from the wings of the plaster cast room ( fig. 68):

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By degrees the space becomes peopled – figure after figure emerges from the crypt and corridors, where they had loitered in the gloom: they assemble round the sarcophagus, which sheds from within a pale, unearthly light upon the silent, awe-struck beings that surround it. […] Pensive is every countenance, and soft is every falling footstep; yet in gentle accents a voice breathes thanks to him who hath rolled back the current of time to show them glorious visions of the past […].317 Paradoxically the effect achieved by this dematerialization of architecture is that of living presence and animation. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had noted that shadows, massed in the dark recesses of a Gothic cathedral can thicken into substances, just as the substance of living beings can become immaterialized in the feeble moonlight struggling to pierce the darkness: ‘Now in glimmer, and now in gloom’; often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows, of fantastic shapes yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work images […] In short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while every where shadows were deepened into substances: ‘If substance may be call’d what shadows seem’ed, for each seem’d either!’318 Just as the evocation of the ghosts of Marie Antoinette or Robespierre was so vivid that people felt they could touch their bodies, visitors to Soane’s house were struck dumb by the unparalleled vividness of the visions of the past he had created. Ultimately the result was an experience of the uncanny, of animation or life where there should only be inanimate matter. Soane’s theatre of architecture is a staging of the intrusion of the past into the present.

‘THE PRESENCE OF REALITY INSTEAD OF ITS APPEARANCE PRODUCED A FEARFUL SENSATION’ The ambivalent reactions of visitors to the Musée des Monuments français or Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields were triggered by the efforts of Lenoir and Soane to bring back the past and the dead by means of the theatrical strategies developed in the decades following the French Revolution in the new multimedial genres of the eidophysikon or the phantasmagoria. They transformed traditional ways of showing art and engaging the viewer and seemed to encourage viewers to leave restraint behind and become emotionally very involved with what they saw, as is witnessed by the reports of viewers fainting in the shows re-enacting events of the Revolution. Above all, the attitudes made fashionable by Lady Hamilton, as well as the tableaux vivants which became such a fashion after 1815

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69 Francesco Novelli (1774–1836), The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, etching, after 1791, London, Victoria and Albert Museum

became the locus where viewers could still find the liberty to express their desires for statues which one could no longer display in a museum context in front of a marble one. Goethe noted for instance, in a well known passage from his Italian Journey, that Lord Hamilton literally looked at his wife as if she were a work of art, and one that he fetishized intensely: ‘Der alte Ritter hält das Licht dazu und hat mit ganzer Seele sich diesem Gegenstand ergeben’.319 A few weeks later Goethe also described how the transformation of Lady Hamilton into a painting and an object of desire had progressed even further: she now performed her attitudes literally framed by a large sculpted and gilded picture frame. His lordship was no longer satisfied with seeing his wife as a living statue, he also wanted to gaze on her as a painting ( fig. 69).320 Within a theatrical setting Lady Hamilton achieved a changeant effect of representation, embodiment and actual presence that viewers found irresistible and sometimes deeply troubling. The setting encouraged a willing suspension of disbelief, and created a viewing situation in which viewers could allow themselves to enjoy a divided consciousness. They could go along with the fiction of looking at a living, breathing statue, and allow themselves the behaviour that would not be acceptable in either a museum or when looking at Lady Hamilton when not performing. At the same time they were well aware of the safety valves offered by its performance character. But this was an exceptional situation. As the attitudes and their older cousins, the tableaux-vivants, gained in popularity, the balance between voyeurism and the awareness of going along with a fiction became more precarious. Twenty years later Julie von Egloffstein, one of the female participants in a tableau vivant performed during the birthday celebrations of the Duke of Weimar in 1817, complained about the blatant, persistent gazing of the spectators, who ogled her as if she were the passive object of their desires. She felt very uncomfortable being in a situation some-

169 | ‘The presence of reality instead of its appearance produced a fearful sensation’

where in between a work of art and an object of desire, and felt alienated from her fellow participants and herself.321 In Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), the novel that played a major role in creating the fashion for tableaux vivants, the public marveled at the tableaux staged by Luciane, their costumes, mise en scène and effects of the illumination. But at the same time, the presence of real, living human beings instead of their images, made them afraid : ‘die Gegenwart des Wirklichen statt des Scheins [brachte] eine Art von ängstlicher Empfindung hervor[…]’.322 In the decades around 1800 a double development takes shape. There is the birth of the modern art museum, predicated on aesthetic distance and the scientific study of art. Almost completely synchronically, the vogue takes off for for the tableau vivant, the staging of sculpture, as in Soane’s house, or the nocturnal viewing of the Borghese collection in Rome, which Michel de Cubières described.323 In tableaux vivants, aesthetic distance is abolished in favour of the absolute appropriation of the art work by the spectators turned actors, culminating in their literal incarnation or embodiment of the work in their bodies and gestures. Aesthetic distance is also abolished in the uninhibited gazing of the spectators at the actresses. One could call this a case of inverse fetishism, which treats living beings as if they are objects. Very few images or detailed accounts of these tableaux vivants survive. Texts reflecting on their aesthetic implications are equally rare. There are a few reviews of such stagings in Weimer, Dresden and Vienna by the German archeologist Carl August Böttiger.324 It is Goethe who, in his short remarks on the genre in his essay on his monodrama Proserpina that culminates in a tableau vivant of Arcadia, the descriptions in the Wahlverwandtschaften and the observations in Der Sammler und die Seinigen offers the first elements for a more thorough analysis. All these texts have one common theme: that of the very precarious relation between life and the inanimate objects that represent it. Above all, that instability or oscillation is to be sought, even though it frightens. In the Wahlverwandtschaften, as in many contemporary novels, particularly those by Jane Austen, such theatricals serve as a free space, where things may be expressed or accomplished during the representation, which cannot be said or done in real life. In a recent study Gisela Brude-Firnau has shown how the tableaux vivants organized in the Wahlverwandtschaften figure or recall in the memory of the viewers recent events of the French Revolution, and above all the recent French occupation of Weimar.325 But they do so in a rather strange way. The actors represent Belisarius, Ahasverus or Esther on stage, can take their place and assume their identity for a few brief moments. They cannot exercise the agency of these personages in real life (the Duchess of Weimar for instance had hoped to protect her people the way Esther did with the Jews), but they can represent it on stage and literally embody it. By assuming the role, figure and gestures of painted persons, the actors learn to know very deeply the paintings they enact and the actions they represent, and how they interrelate. Through their eloquentia corporis they become, for a few minutes, these painted persons, and embody the situation or emotions depicted.

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Carl August Böttiger also noted the ontological hybridity of the genre. In his review of the Wahlverwandtschaften he situated it between spatial and temporal forms of art that, being permanent, display themselves in space; and those, more ephemeral, that deploy themselves in time. In tableaux vivants by contrast, he wrote, ‘die Wellen des bewegten Lebens sind wie durch Zauberkraft festgehalten’: the waves of moving life have been fixed as if by magic – a formula which seems to announce Aby Warburg’s description of pathos formulas, and to which we will return in the next chapter.326 Because of their hybrid and ephemeral character, tableaux vivants are closer to dance than to painting or sculpture. A few years later, in another review, Böttiger singled out another hybrid aspect of the genre : because of the presence of living actors, it differs from the fine arts, and comes closer to wax figures exhibited in curiosity cabinets, churches or anatomy museums. They can even look like the victims of Medusa’s petrifying agency. In his review of Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften he suggests Goethe held up Medusa’s head to the actors.327 In an essay of 1819 he presented tableaux vivants as the not very desirable result of such an action, and as a hybrid between painting and sculpture. Through the effects of light they can become reliefs, but they will never be real paintings – apparently for Böttiger the ideal situation.328 In 1861 the philosopher Friedrich Schaller would go even further in an essay on the aesthetics of play. The participating actors need to identify completely with the figures and the situation they incarnate. At the same time, because of their embodied nature, tableaux vivants become too close to wax works. The actors look as if they are half dead, because despite their human appearance they do not behave like them.329 In the case of a very vivid painting, we can enter into an affective relationship with the depicted figures, desire or fear them. Such a relationship is based on an act of imagination, stimulated by the aesthetic distance created by the use of the artistic medium. In the case of tableaux vivants, such an imaginative act is not needed, since we are looking at living human bodies, present in an unmediated way before our eyes. Since they remain immobile like statues, we think either that we are dealing with the living dead, or the illusion of the tableau vivant is disrupted.330

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have considered various ways of framing, staging and acting the living presence of art works developed in the decades surrounding 1800. They all show a desire to recreate a presence, either of the living represented by a statue or the past documented by a work of art. Such desires go against the aesthetic stance of disinterested contemplation of art’s formal qualities that was such an important factor behind the birth of the modern art museum. Piranesi even tried to transcend the distance created by the historical verbal narrative and instead presented the disconnected remains of ancient Rome in

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images. The life attributed to a work of art by ancient or early modern viewers because of its vividness is based on a continuum of some sense between the art work, what it represents and the viewer. But attempts at animating art in this period are all founded on a new sense of distance, or even of the profound break caused by the French Revolution. The strategies Piranesi used in his Groteschi or views of Rome still fit in the traditional rhetorical repertoire of ekphrastic strategies to achieve enargeia, but the abrupt inclusion of Roman or mediaeval fragments in the neoclassical fabric of Santa Maria del Priorato already hints at a sense of disruption and loss of continuity. It points at an important feature of attempts to bring back the presence of the past through art’s power to create historical experience: its anachronistic nature. Piranesi’s anachronisms are part of the humanist conviction that visual remainders of the past are more powerful agents to recreate it than texts. At the same time, if successful, such anachronisms disrupt the awareness of historical continuity because of their power to create an historical experience, in the sense of a sudden intrusion of the past into the present. Similarly, successful stagings of the life of art disrupt art historical awareness and aesthetic distance. In John Soane’s house the stagings of his ancient fragments of sculpture did not serve to create a knowledge of the development of past art. Instead, his employment of light flickering on stone and plaster faces and piercing through the shadows served to create an illusion of living beings and an intense sense of the presence of the past. Lady Hamilton’s incarnations of classical vase figures and statues, and the tableaux vivants created in the entourage of Goethe, were not only ontologically ambiguous in their oscillation between living presence and embodied representation, but also occupied a hybrid position between the traditional classifications of the fine arts. They were aesthetically ambiguous and sexually dubious, since they were found to be too close to the inferior genre of wax statues, and allowed free space for uninhibited voyeurism. In all these respects they provided the opposite of aesthetic distance. These varieties of recreating the living presence of art share a common characteristic that can perhaps best be elucidated in terms of the kinds of anachronism Wood and Nagel discuss. Anachronism and the staging of artworks to suggest they are alive, are both disruptive. The first disrupts the historical continuity and the linear unfolding of time on which it is based; the second the distance created by the very fact of art being a representation. In the first, the past irrupts in the here and now; in the second, the living being represented is made present. The historical experience, like the experience of the work of art coming alive, is an experience in which the human subject loses its distance from what it perceives. In the case of history, such experience is driven by the desire to bridge the gap with the past ; in the case of art, to transcend the limits of representation. Both experiences are also profoundly unsettling, because they entail a loss of the rational self, as is testified by the mixed reactions to tableaux vivants. Where for Lemée, De Brosses, Guasco or Quatremère such loss of rationality was the sign of the primitive, non-Western adorer of fetishes, it has now moved into Western perceptions of art as well.

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In this chapter we have thus moved from the traditional, humanist ideal of vivid recreation of the past to a first awareness that works of art appearing to be alive are profoundly unsettling. In the next chapter we will see how the rhetorical concern with persuasive vividness, the anthropological analysis of fetishism, and the fraught awareness that art can be alive, come together in Aby Warburg’s lifelong engagement with art’s life and agency.

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THE AFTERLIFE OF ART

‘Killing art to write its history’: Quatremère’s crushing dismissal of the Musée des monuments français summarizes in a few words the dilemma that faced nineteenth-century art historians who wanted to do justice to the power of images to act on the beholder in ways that transcend aesthetic distance, but also to write a detached, scientific account of the historical development of art. The conflict was intensified by the gradual dissolution of the old link between the formal, artistic or aesthetic notion of the life of statues and the ritual notion of their life, to which the 18th-century studies on the origins of sculpture and fetishism by De Brosses and Guasco had contributed so much. Quatremère himself, in his essay on the Olympian statue of Jupiter, had put the finishing touch to this severance when he observed how lifelikeness was used in religious contexts to instill in the viewer the belief that the statue is in fact the deity’s living presence: Il n’est pas douteux que les simulacres dont je parle, ont par-dessus tout la propriété d’imprimer dans l’âme crédule de la multitude […] l’opinion et le sentiment de l’existence matériellement effective et locale de la Divinité, sous une forme palpable et revêtue des attributs sensibles de la vie et de la réalité.331 At the same time, such lifelikeness obscures an appreciation by the viewer of the representational character of a cult statue, and thereby destroys its artistic character. A statue has to transcend, to transform the material of the being it represents; materiality has to be transformative in order to become the medium of sculpture, instead of a means to instill the illusion of living presence in the gullible masses:

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C’est par la propriété qu’ont les signes de prendre la place des choses signifiées, que l’art de la sculpture servit très activement la superstition, en employant les moyens les plus capables de faire prendre le change aux spectateurs ignorants. Associé ainsi à la puissance théogonique, l’art ne reproduisait pas seulement, mais il créait des dieux.332 The tensions between unmediated living presence and artistic representation, between the desire to recreate the living presence of the past or at least an experience of it, and the ambition to write the history of art in a scientific way, that is in a well-documented continous chronological narrative, were made manifest by the Musée des monuments français. They continued to echo throughout the nineteenth century in debates about the way collections should be arranged, and in the polemics surrounding the introduction of period rooms in the early 20th century.333 They also served as the backdrop for Aby Warburg’s lifelong preoccupation with the life of art. Images exerting Medusean powers on the viewer that come close to those of living beings are a key issue in his Kulturwissenschaft. There are the intriguing notes he made from 1888 to 1905 for a book on the psychology of art, which are preceded by the motto ‘Du lebst und tust mir nichts’, and include the note, ‘Wir schauen es an, aber das tut kein Leid’.334 Throughout his work on the revival of antique forms, there is an uneasy oscillation between a metaphorical and a literal use of the term ‘Nachleben’. Finally in the late introduction to the Mnemosyne atlas the evolutionary development of art is presented as a struggle between two conflicting urges, one to vanquish the fear that images inspire, the other to endow the forms of art with the vividness of life. Warburg’s preoccupation with the life of art is often placed against the background of 19th-century evolutionary thought, or of attempts to rethink the temporal character of art in a fundamental, almost ontological way.335 It can also be argued that his Kunstwissenschaft is to a large degree fuelled by his desire to distance himself from the Kantian disinterested aesthetic enjoyment of the formal qualities of art that had become the conceptual basis of German academic art history in the 19th century.336 Much of his work can be read as attempts to show how precarious such an aesthetic attitude is in psychological terms, and how limited to one short phase of European history, when one considers art from an anthropological, that is global, perspective. At the same time, his key notions to understand the power of images, those of the Nachleben der Antike and Mnemosyne, give a new perspective to the old topos of the life of art, because they introduce the irruption of the past into the present, and the role not of individual memory, as Pallavicino had done to understand why viewers can attribute life to images, but of the memory of mankind. The connections he forged between the animation of art and memory allow us therefore to place him in the context of the slow change, documented in Chapter Seven, in the nature and context of the animation viewers attribute to images. As we have seen, the life attributed to images was no longer a desired living being or a divinity, but increasingly that of the past and the dead. Considered in these terms, many parallels become manifest, hardly explored, be-

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70

Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Plate V from Mnemosyne Atlas, London, Warburg Institute Archive [1929]

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71 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Campus Martius Antiquae Urbis, Rome 1762, etching, Ghent University Library

tween the Musée des Monuments français, one of the first museums to present the material remains of the past to the public, and Warburg’s late work on the Mnemosyne atlas. Both relinquish consecutive historical narrative in favour of a visual presentation that needs a visitor who experiences the past represented to complete the recreation of the past. Lenoir staged funerary statues that served to evoke an entire century. Warburg exhibited montages of images from various ages, periods and genres to configure series of Nachleben, the return of forms and motifs from Antiquity in later periods without clear chronological connections. These were made explicit by Warburg himself in his exposés, or perhaps performances is a better word, of the images he iuxtaposed, with their striking similarity to Piranesi’s collages of Roman architectural elements ( figs. 70 and 71).337 As we have seen, for some visitors Lenoir’s exhibitions made the statues seem to come alive; others reacted against the idolatry and iconoclasm, revolutionary or aesthetic, the museum seemed to embody. Lenoir’s museum made these issues particularly urgent because it was one of the first public museums which aimed to preserve the achievements of French art in an historical framework. It removed art from its original religious context into a museum setting where it was presented in an historical framework, in an attempt to preserve the material remains of the past and thus to keep alive its memory. At the same time it excited intense reactions that broke through such historical distancing. It thus presented in a particularly compelling way the problematic nexus between the life and powers of art,

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the fear, iconcoclasm or idolatry it can excite, and the precariousness of attempts to neutralize these aspects of art by removing it to a museum setting. Considered against this background, Warburg’s thought on Nachleben and Mnemosyne may be read as an attempt to develop a Kulturwissenschaft in which the life and power of art is not sacrificed to the distancing framework of historical narrative and aesthetic attitudes. Both Pygmalion’s dream of the statue that would become a living person, and the Medusean power of the image to petrify the beholder resonate in his work. It is fraught with this tension between fascination with the life and power of art and the need to distance oneself from it. His ideas should therefore not be read as contributions to a historical narrative of the recurrence of classical forms, but in terms of anachronistic historical experience, in which the past suddenly intrudes into the present, and thereby disrupts the flow of historical narrative. Its disruptive intrusion is similar to that of the living presence of art works that disrupt aesthetic distance.

ABY WARBURG ON THE LIVES OF ART WORKS PATHOSFORMEL AND NACHLEBEN In his essay on the astrological program of the Palazzo Schifanoja in Ferrara of 1912 (published in 1922), Warburg formulated the object of art history to become a ‘historische Psychologie des menschlichen Ausdrucks’, a cultural and psychological history of what classical rhetoricians had called the eloquentia corporis, the eloquence of the body.338 Warburg would also call these forms of expression ‘Pathosformeln’, pathos formulas, the facial expressions, gestures and figures, in particular drapery, that result from the impact of extreme emotions. Its investigation was based on a polar theory of culture, shared by Warburg and Freud, that every cultural fact or artefact is ultimately a psychological and embodied compromise between magical defence mechanisms against, and rational control of, affects which for him were always ‘pathetisch’: the suffering of a power that is greater than the subject that experiences these affects. Central to such a psychological history of human expression is the question that occupied Warburg throughout his academic life: how to understand the significance of the afterlife of classical art for the artistic culture of the Renaissance.339 Afterlife or ‘Nachleben’ is often taken in a metaphorical sense of remembrance, resumption or even imitation of the remnants of classical art. For Warburg however it was not simply a matter of reception history or presentations of ancient remnants in museums, but a mechanism fundamental to human culture: the often irresistible power of forms from the past to resurge in moments of great cultural crisis, such as the birth of humanism in Quattrocento Florence or the Reformation in early 16th century Germany. Its retrieval may be described as an archaeology of the irruptions of the past in the present – at least, that is how he described his own endeavours several times: as the unearthing

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72 Niccolò dell’Arca (c. 1435–1440–1494), Bewailing of Christ, 1485, terra cotta lifesize figures, Bologna, Santuario di Santa Maria della Vita

of villages and towns of which only isolated road blocks and fading road numbers survive.340 Very often the occurrence of Nachleben was not a conscious act of artistic volution by which an artist decides to reuse forms, shapes or motifs from classical art. Some of the most telling cases Warburg presents, such as the conspicuous similarity between the handling of drapery in Niccolò dell’Arca’s Mary Magdalene in S. Maria della Vita in Bologna of about 1480 and an anonymous Nereid of the 4th century BC preclude any straightforward interpretation of Nachleben in terms of conscious imitation or direct influence, because it is highly unlikely that Niccolò dell’Arca was familiar with this Hellenistic Nereid ( figs. 72 and 73). Instead, in practically every formulation of Nachleben throughout his work, Warburg presents it only in a highly charged metaphorical sense as an impersonal, irresistible force or ‘Wucht’. Extreme emotions, phobias or homicidal frenzy in the early development of humanity had the power to impress themselves on the human mind, causing extreme facial and bodily expressions and gestures. Such embodiments imprinted or inscribed themselves onto human memory, possessing an ‘engrammatic energy’, which enables such emotions and their expression to be remembered, that is relived in the present of its resumption. At times, he wrote that the affects have the power to imprint themselves on the human body, resulting in ‘Ausdrucksformen’, the corporal expression of these overwhelming emotions. But he also spoke of ‘Verleibung’ (embodiment) or ‘Einleibung’ (the appropriation into the body of these affects), which also suggests that they have the power to form the body into expressive attitudes, shapes or gestures, and with such power that the body itself becomes the storehouse of the memories of these affects and their expression. This central

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73 Marble statue probably representing a Nereid, from the Xanthos Monument, c. 400 BC, marble, 1.42 m., London, British Museum

concept of Nachleben, which occurs from his earliest texts onwards, but always in a very metaphorical presentation raises many questions, not the least of which is this: is there a connection, and if so, what is it, between his views on the Nachleben of classical art, and his attribution of life to art works? What is the life of the past?

THE LIFE OF ART AS AN ARTISTIC ISSUE In Warburg’s work one can distinguish a range of ways in which life and art are brought together. They vary from a clearly metaphorical use to a very close associaton or even identification, and range from general historiographical concepts such as the Nachleben of classical art to very concrete and particular statements about the life of individual art works. In his doctoral thesis on Botticelli for example he quoted Burckhardt’s remark that Italian festival art is the true transition from life into art (‘das Festwesen in seiner höheren Form ist

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ein wahrer Übergang aus dem Leben in die Kunst’); somewhat later, he goes much further in the suggestion that classical art lives, in a statement preceded by a dig at Winckelmann: […] denn nicht der Gipsabguß, wohl aber der festliche Aufzug, in dem heidnische Lebensfreude eine Freistätte volkstümlichen Fortlebens sich bewahrt hatte, war die Form, in der die Gestalten des Altertums in der bunten Pracht bewegten Lebens vor den Augen der Italienischen Gesellschaft leibhaftig wiedererstanden.341 Already in his short essay Die Bilderchronik eines florentinischen Goldschmiedes of 1899, Nachleben is introduced, although in slightly different terms: Die Kunstfreunde unserer Tage bemühen sich fast ebenso pietätvoll, die Kultur der Renaissance in lebendiger Erinnerung zu halten, wie sich die führenden Geister der Renaissance bestrebten, ihre große antike Vergangenheit in lebensvollen Schöpfungen wiederzuerwecken.342 Art is endowed with life in this passage in two ways: explicitly when Warburg states that the classical past is revived in the Renaissance in creations full of life, but also implicitly through his use of the metaphor of reawakening: only living beings can do so. In his essay on Medicean festivals, written in 1927, the metaphorical character of the term afterlife is downplayed even further, when he speaks of the ‘aktuelle Lebenskraft eines solchen nachlebenden heidnischen Natursymbols’.343 The role of festivals as the preservers of classical art is presented even more intensely in terms of death and life in Warburg’s 1895 essay on theatrical costumes: Alle jene heute ausgestorbenen Zwischenformen zwischen dem wirklichen Leben und dramatischer Kunst, die das XV., XVI., und XVII. Jahrhundert […] in so überreicher Fülle hervorbrachten, waren ja gerade die einzige Gelegenheit für die Gesellschaft, um verehrungsvoll angestaunte Figuren des Altertums leibhaftig vor Augen zu sehen.344 The life of art is often considered as an artistic issue: to preserve the image of moved life is the greatest task for the figurative arts (‘das schwierigste Problem für die bildende Künste, […] das Festhalten der Bilder des bewegten Lebens’).345 In his own response to art as well Warburg often transforms what he sees into living beings: thus in his description of the Ghirlandaio fresco in Santa Trinità, the figures of the Sasseti, Medici and their entourage are described as full of consciousness of themselves, and filled with their very own life (‘von eigenstem Leben erfüllt’; ill. 8.5).346 In the same article, the appearance of Poliziano and his pupils is described as a theatrical scene performed against the background of a Florentine piazza; that is, in his description the painted figures are transformed into living actors, performing before Warburg’s eyes.347

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THE AGENCY OF LIFELIKENESS In a second category, it is not the art historian who presents works of art as if they are living beings. Here patrons order effigies of themselves which should be as close to life as possible, to bring the sitters by means of these images nearer to God. The lifesize wax votive images the Sassetti, Medici and many other Florentines had put up in SS. Annunziata are an example of this, as are the images of the patrons in Memling’s Last Judgment of about 1467–1471 ( figs. 74 and 75).348 Warburg called such use of images fetishism or ‘Bildzauber’.349 They also present interesting cases of what Alfred Gell would define as distributed agency in Art and Agency.350 Warburg was much occupied with discerning a dualism in the Renaissance mind, divided between rationality and a scientific or contemplative attitude to the world on the one hand, and the recourse to the name fetishism of astrology and other archaic relics as the ‘urtümlich totemistische Verknüpfungszwang’. This drove the Renaissance obsession with casting horoscopes at the birth of a child, or even as part of the foundation rituals of buildings.351 There are also the intriguing notes he made from 1888 to 1905 for a book on the psychology of art preceded by the motto ‘Du lebst und tust mir nichts’; and including the note, ‘wir schauen es an, aber das tut kein Leid’ quoted above. Usually these mottoes have been interpreted as a summary of Warburg’s views on the development of art as ‘Angstumarbeitung’ (transformation of fear), inspired by the work of the historian of religion Hermann Usener and the anthropologist Tito Vignoli.352 According to Vignoli, entification is the basis of all animal and human psychology: we see for instance a fluttering piece of paper and assume it is a threatening animal or enemy. Such entification leads to projection, that is the creation of images, to which life may also be attributed, as is seen most clearly by the way viewers treat portraits.353 In Warburg’s case, the process has three stages: all art, culture and religion are the reworking of fear or ‘Angstumarbeitung’. In the first stage of ‘Verkörperung’ or ‘Einverleibung’ (embodiment) the results are fetishes and totems, with which the viewer identifies in a process of projective identification; not in the Freudian sense, but in the meaning Warburg gave it, that is the psychological needs and drives fuelling the making of images. In the next stage, that of figuration or ‘Gestaltung’, symbols and images are created. Such objects create a distance between the viewing subject and the frightening object, what Warburg would call a ‘Denkraum’ (space for thinking). He also called these images ‘Energiekonserven’ (conservations of energy), that transform violent emotions; they become batteries of life force. It is in this context that he made his famous observation ‘Du lebst und tut mir nichts’: the energy embodying the transformation of violent emotions is what explains the strange, secret, mysterious life of images; the immense power of what surrounds primitive man threatens to overwhelm the Ego in its immediacy. Creating images thus helps to create a separation, a distance: ‘Indem wir die Dinge entfernen, den Raum produzieren, denken wir – ich! Indem wir zusammen sind, aufgesogen sind, sind wir Material – nichts!’354

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74 Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), scene from the Sassetti Chapel showing Poliziano and his pupils, 1485, fresco, Florence, Santa Trinità

MNEMOSYNE: NACHLEBEN AS AN I SSUE IN ART HISTORY To understand how Nachleben and the life of art works are connected in Warburg’s thought, and the wider implications of this connection, we have to turn to his ideas on the continuing life of classical art as an issue not in the creation or viewing of art, but as a founding concept for art history as he conceived it, that is as a Kulturwissenschaft or historical psychology of art. In the work of Renaissance artists – the Pollaiuolo brothers, Donatello, Michelangelo – attitudes, expressions and gestures often figure that recall ancient statues, sarcophagi or medals. Thus the drapery of Botticelli’s female figures recalls that of ancient maenads. This raises fairly concrete art-historical issues of recognition, attribution and artistic intention: what antique works did these Renaissance artists know? What did they borrow, from whom, through what channels of transmission, and what artistic problem did they aim to solve by the employment of classical elements? For Warburg such instances of Nachleben became an issue with immense ramifications. He did not consider every reuse of classical elements, but above all what he called ‘Pathosformeln’: draperies, facial expressions, attitu-

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75 Hans Memling (1430–1494), Madonna with child and Angelo di Jacopo Tani (Last Judgement, detail), c. 1467–1471, oil on wood, 242 × 90 cm. Gdansk, Muzeum Narodowe

des or gestures that express strong emotions suggesting the living presence of these images. By focusing on these elements he introduced into the historical study of origins, transmission, influence and imitation or transformation of the classical heritage much wider methodological and cultural issues stemming from a Nietzschean view of the origins of art in Dionysian ritual as a way of taming primal fears and desires.355 The final formulation of his ideas on Nachleben in the introduction to the Mnemosyne atlas (written 1927–29) shows that it had branched out from a way of thinking about the classical heritage and its revivals into a philosophy of history which tried to preserve a precarious balance between a rational attempt to understand the mechanisms and motivations of these revivals as an artistic issue – that is an issue of representation and therefore of metaphorical character, at one remove from life’s fierce realities; and an uneasy awareness of the uncanny continuing life of ancient art. The introduction to the atlas is a consideration of the psychological roots of art, its origins in Dionysian rites, the way its evolution can be understood, and ultimately a statement about the function of art in culture. It is not an essay on the history of art in the archival or monumental sense, preserving the memory of important events, actors or works of art and their paper sources, but a meditation on art history conceived as remembrance

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and manifesting itself in the revival or ongoing life of past art forms. If recollection is a storehouse, ‘Nachleben’ is the process through which it is filled. With his Mnemosyne atlas Warburg added a new chapter to the German historiographical debate on the nature of history. In Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers of 1822 Wilhelm von Humboldt had defined the task of the historian as the ‘Darstellung des Geschehens’. But the ‘Geschehen’, that what took place, is not the series of acts and events that had made up the subject of the humanist historia rerum gestarum, but what connects them as an apparent unity, in a much more abstract sense, as a set of inner causal connections.356 The events themselves are no longer the first objects of history writing serving as a magistra vitae, but rather the form which adheres to the events, their inner causality. Similarly, Warburg’s aim, certainly in the atlas, was not to collect individual cases of survival of classical art, but to understand the inner, psychological mechanism that form the hidden cause determining the process of Nachleben.357 Nietzsche had added new zest to this debate by contrasting monumental, antiquarian and critical history in his second Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung of 1874, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (a text Warburg knew very well).358 All historiography ultimately serves the living. Monumental history inspires and consoles active man, fired by the ambition for great achievements and for a change of life, by keeping alive the heroic endeavours of mankind in the past. Antiquarian history serves life by preserving the conditions under which the heritage of the past came into being, by carefully looking after it; but it can only preserve the life of the past, not create new life, and has no sense, unlike monumental history, for what is new. It threatens thereby to suffocate the present, and thus creates the need of a last variety of history writing: critical history. In order to live, one has to forget and to demolish those recollections of the past that can no longer help the living. In its analysis of history writing as ways of preserving the life of the past, but also of serving the life of the present, and its arguments against indiscriminate conservation of anything remaining, Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung provided much of the conceptual scaffolding supporting Warburg’s practice of art history. The Mnemosyne introduction opens with a statement of the founding act of civilization: to create, consciously and intentionally, a distance between one’s self and the world outside; when such a space becomes the foundation of artistic creation, the conditions are fulfilled to give such a consciousness of distance a socially enduring function. Artistic activity moves between two extremes: a religious and a mathematical or scientific world view. Memory helps the creative artist, both the individual and the common, collective memory of mankind. Not because it creates space to think or a ‘Denkraum’, but because it strenghtens both extremes of psychological attitudes: quiet contemplation and orgiastic rapture or ‘Hingabe’ (loss of self). Memory, or rather remembrance, throws the ‘Eindruckserbmasse’ (inheritated mass of impressions) of primal fears, extasies and phobias of people shocked in religious mysteries, into a work of art, and thus is one of the factors forming style. One extreme is extasy, the other moderation or sophrosyne. To understand the phases in this artistic pro-

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cess (here Warburg, as often, employs metaphors taken from electricity), the polar nature of artistic creation should be noted: a process oscillating between imagination swinging in, and reason swinging out, in the neologisms Warburg tended to coin. Between imaginative grasping and conceptual contemplation the artist touches and traces the object with his hands, which leads to plastic or painterly mirroring, that is, the act of artistic creation. Warburg’s study of culture takes the psychological history of the space between instinct or urge and act as its object. The ‘Entdämonisierungsprozeß’ (process of de-demonization) of the mass of phobical impressions comprises and expresses the entire range of being raptured in a language of gesture: from helpless immersion to homicidal cannibalism. This process lends to the human dynamism of movement, of fighting, running, walking, dancing or grasping, the ‘Prägrand unheimlichen Erlebens’ (minted edge of uncanny vital experience).359 In the precarious process of creating a distance, a ‘Denkraum’ between man and the phobias that torment him, the impressions of lived – and sometimes living – experience are received, creating pathos formulas. The aim of the picture atlas Mnemosyne is to illustrate this process by means of the images collected in it. Warburg also called this process one of ‘Einverseelung vorgeprägter Ausdruckswerte bei der Darstellung bewegten Lebens’ endowing the pre-coined forms of expression to represent moving life with a soul.360 Life and art are thus connected here in three ways. First by the power of remembrance, the moving force of the artistic process. Second as an artistic task, to convey life to the representation of moving life. Finally as the life of art itself, the impression of uncanny vital experience. But they are merged here into one grand view of the role of art in human culture. It originates in the struggle between loss of self in orgiastic phobia and scientific contemplation. The forms thus created in the earliest stages of human development, and that found their first artistic expression in Greek antiquity, are inherited and preserved in the common cultural memory of antiquity and continued life and re-emergence of these forms in the Renaissance. Forms are impressed into man’s mind in the mass psychoses of Dionysian rites; the forms expressing inner rapture in so far as it can be expressed through gesture, are beaten into memory with such intensity that these engrammata, literally inscriptions or engravings, of passionate experience survive as an heritage preserved by memory. They serve as examples that guide the contours the artist’s hand traces. The summum of such expression in antiquity, of life affirmation and negation of the self, can be found in the representations of Dionysus and his orgiastic entourage on pagan sarcophagi, and on imperial triumphal arches. In both cases we find symbols of the masses following a ruler; in the case of Dionysus’ Maenads sacrificed children; in the case of Roman triumphs, soldiers cut off the heads of barbarians to give them as a tribute to the emperor. It would therefore be a naive kind of evolutionary history writing to characterize the Renaissance as the result of a new consciousness of historical facts and artistic empathy with antiquity. Instead, one should dare to descend into the most primitive regions of the human mind to find the ‘Prägewerk’

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(series of impressions) which coined the expressions of pagan extasy, which originated in the experience of Dionysian rites: the thiasos or groups of believers gathering to perform rites, and the double Herm that came from such rituals, representing both, Apollo and Dionysus.361 For Warburg, as for early historians of sculpture and Enlightenment critics of religion such as De Brosses, Guasco or Quatremère, sculpture is the ultimate, primitive form of art; for him as for them, the origin of art lies in the fearful veneration of terrible deities. But unlike them, and following Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie, Warburg believed that this primitive stage of creating sculptures and venerating them as living beings is never really surmounted by humanity or left behind. It survives in the collective memory as the force that drives the resumption of these ancient forms to express movement and life. In the Renaissance, because of the mnemonic character of shapes already formed by other artists, the restitution of ancient forms remained an act caught between instinctual exteriorization of the self and conscious formal discipline – between Dionysos and Apollo. The visual language of gesture as preserved on sarcophagi and triumphal arches, and often intensified by inscriptions, force the viewer to live again the human rapture they record, through their irresistible force of expression, in their entire tragical range from passive suffering to active victoriousness. Triumphal arches celebrate the affirmation of life, whereas sarcophagi of heroes declaimed the tragic struggle of the human soul to the heavens. The force of these images was shown most forcefully and poignantly by the sarcophagi flanking the stairs leading to S. Maria Aracoeli, ‘Traumbilder aus der verbotenen Religion heilloser paganer Dämonie’, that accompany the pilgrim on his ascent into the Christian church.362 The life of art in Warburg’s work therefore is an issue of representation, of memory and cultural psychology. These aspects are all connected, and are all fraught with unclarities and ambiguities. In the context of Warburg’s fundamental rethinking of art history as Kulturwissenschaft they also raise the issue of the relation between the life of art, writing history, and the historical experience.

REPRESENTATION The processes through which ‘Denkraum’ is created, a collective memory of expressive forms is built up, and antique forms return to express movement and life with new vividness, are all issues of representation. The term as such rarely occurs in Warburg’s work. Instead, key concepts in his thought – ‘Pathosformeln’, ‘Nachleben’, ‘Denkraum’, ‘Prägrand’ or even ‘Angstumarbeitung’ and ‘Mnemosyne’ itself – all circle around the notion, central to 19th century artistic theory and aesthetics, that the essence of artistic creation, the basis of its artistic character and the freedom of the artist, lies in the representational character of art. As we shall see, on the one hand Warburg adheres to this conviction, but at the same time his thought, in its quest for the ultimate anthropological and psychologic-

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al foundations of art, tends to twist and subvert it to such a degree that it threatens to turn into its opposite. As we have seen, in the Introduction to the Mnemosyne atlas the conscious creation of distance between one’s self and the exterior world is the foundational act of civilization; the resulting intermediate space is the basis for artistic creation. Memory, both individual and collective, helps to create such a ‘Denkraum’; not directly, but by strengthening the mind’s tendency to quiet contemplation or passionate surrender. Memory offers the storehouse of images, emotions and fears that assist and feed the artist in making ‘Spiegelungen’ (mirror images). The process of de-demonizing the inherited mass of phobic mental images leads in a way to a history of art conceived as a process of the return of pagan forms to depict life and movement. In the artistic act a double process of representation is therefore at work: a mental one, reflecting and remembering, and a creative one, in which memory helps the artist to give movement and life to his or her work to express the strongest emotions.363 Both the appropriation of existing expressive forms, and the endowment of these forms with life in the ‘Darstellung’ (representation) of moving life, through the magical use of images to influence the gods to the transformation of fears, results ultimately from the phobic fear and fascination for pagan idols. Warburg’s conception of this double process of appropriating existing, inherited forms and their endowment with life rests on an approach to thinking about animating images which is very old: classical rhetoric. At the same time it shows striking parallels with what was the latest movement in art in his time: surrealism.364 The mass of inherited memories and their formal expression, what Warburg sometimes calls ‘Engramm’ is the result of ‘Einprägung’, of coining, imprinting, inscription or engraving. All these terms circle around the Greek terms charaktèr and túpos, which share the sense of outline, contour and living shape with the Latin term figura. In classical rhetorical theory much has been said about the nature and effect of figurae; their connections with Warburg’s thought have hardly been explored, even though at one moment he considered ‘Restitutio eloquentiae’ as a possible title for the Mnemosyne atlas.365 As we have seen in Chapter One, the Latin figura originally meant the living shape of things; etymologically it is related to fingere, effigere and fictor (to form, to feign, to make, and somebody who engages in these activities). The related Greek term túpos shares this sense of shape: it can mean both a stamp, mould or matrix or the outline, shape or impression produced by such a matrix, for instance a seal that is impressed on wax. Quintilian defined figura as any ‘form of expression to which a new aspect is given’: they are what he calls gestures or attitudes of language, occurring when rhetorical or poetical changes to ‘the simple and obvious method of expression’ have been made.366 All these visual metaphors play on figura’s original meaning of form or shape, that is, physical appearance. By using figures, a speaker becomes an animate person, changing its facial expression and using gestures. For Quintilian as for Warburg, the animation of speech and art results from an intensification, which Quintilian considered as a technical issue, but which Warburg sought to understand by means of an analogy with linguistic developments over a longer period in which intensification of

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expression is achieved through changes in the core form of a verb, as described by the linguist Osthoff. We have also seen that Quintilian literally calls figures of speech the gestures and face of oratory and ‘the lights or as it were the eyes of eloquence’. As a result, eloquence itself appears to become alive.367 All this suggests that the belief in the persuasive power of vividness and living presence was rooted in the conviction, shared by speakers and public alike, that among all visual representation, the living human form was considered most significant; but also, that the ability to see is the most important sign of life. By creating a strong suggestion of life, the orator would blur the boundaries between gods and men, in the sense that the capacity to make dead matter alive or the absent present was a capacity generally attributed to the gods. The result was not persuasion by force of rational argument, but fascination exploiting ancient fears and ambitions. This is precisely the mental attitude of fascination that occurs when one is watching a play in the theatre and is gripped by it: the same suspension of disbelief occurs, or the feeling that the representation dissolves into what is represented.368 The effect on the public is also similar: fear and pity, resulting in catharsis. Hence, one might argue, Warburg felt that the theatre, and in particular the ephemeral stagings of festival theatre, was particularly apt at creating the illusion of a Nachleben of classical forms, as he wrote in his dissertation on Botticelli mentioned above. At the same time, the result of such vivid, living representation was not always so felicitous: sometimes a Denkraum would be created, and with it the possibility of catharsis, but very often art’s living presence would only be uncanny. There is one group of viewers’ response nurtured by rhetoric that illustrates the animating effects of enargeia, of Nachleben and its uncanny impact on the viewer very well: the poems discussed in Chapter Two that were inspired by the recovery of the Hellenistic statue of Laocoön and his sons. This group of figures exercised a particular fascination on Warburg for several reasons: its links to the snake rituals he studied among the Hopi Indians of New Mexico; its extreme representation of emotions, what Warburg called their ‘superlative capacity to express pathos’; and because for him it presented the perfect case of a representation of moving life.369 Goethe had already noted its almost cinematographic quality in a passage Warburg knew very well. Many aspects of the animation of images come together here: conceiving such animation as petrified movement, the combination of fascination and fear, and the importance of viewing the statue by night. Um die Intention des Laokoons recht zu fassen, stelle man sich in gehöriger Entfernung mit geschloßnen Augen davor; man öffne sie und schließe sie gleich wieder, so wird man den ganzen Marmor in Bewegung sehen, man wird fürchten, indem man die Augen wieder öffnet, die ganze Gruppe verändert zu finden. Ich möchte sagen, wie sie jetzt dasteht, ist sie ein fixierter Blitz, eine Welle, versteinert im Augenblicke, da sie gegen das Ufer anströmt. Dieselbe Wirkung entsteht, wenn man die Gruppe nachts bei der Fackel sieht.370

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MNEMOSYNE, NACHLEBEN, AND HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE We touch here on a fundamental aspect of Warburg’s ideas on the life of art. The vivid representation of moving life by means of pathos formulas or energy conservations, as a manifestation of the afterlife of ancient art, was not for him the ultimate manifestation of art’s representational, that is free but fictive character. The animation of artworks was no longer, as it had been for classical rhetoric, a proof of technical or stylistic virtuosity. Insofar as it was a matter of artistic merit, it was very much fuelled by the collective memory of expressive forms inherited from the first beginnings of humanity, still carrying the traces of the phobias that had been imprinted on the human mind. Living art, the animated representation of moved life, was therefore always intensely precarious, a tight balance between the uncanny return of ancient vital experience and the calm contemplation needed to create works of art. Nachleben itself occupied an uneasy position between a storehouse of artistic forms and the sudden, uncontrollable irruption of the past into the present, just as the Laocoön group had unexpectedly emerged from the Roman rubble in 1506. Warburg’s concept of Nachleben thus strongly thematizes the historicity of art and the way we experience it. It provides the storehouse of artistic forms and expressive gestures and formulas, unites in it both the ongoing life of art, and its pastness: it is not a rebirth or simple revival, but literally the afterlife of art. This process partly depends on artistic virtuosity but cannot be contained by it, because it obeys to its own laws, or perhaps patterns of force, only partly determined by religious ritual or contextual factors such as the wishes of the patron. Because of its ambivalent character of both a revival and an afterlife, the impact of the Nachleben of classical forms on the viewer, especially when appearing in its uncanny guise of a return to life of vital experience, is not quite that of an aesthetic experience, or the appreciation of beauty. Rather, it comes close to an historical experience, in the sense of the sudden irruption of the past into the present, as described recently in Frank A. Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience and Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation.371 These studies are relevant to understand the animation of art because almost all the characteristics of suddenness and irrationality of the historical experience they describe, apply as well to the reactions of viewers who claim works of art are in some sense animated. The past cannot become present again, just as inanimate matter cannot turn out to be alive. Such experiences share with the historical experience a profound power to illuminate and at the same time completely unsettle the subject to whom these experiences happen. When Goethe evoked the presence of the past in Dichtung und Wahrheit he spoke of ‘etwas Gespenstiges’ that comes into the present, and we might say the same of Warburg’s ‘Nachleben’: something ghostly in the work of art is emerging from the night of time into the present, all the more unsettling because, as we have seen, pathos formulas are often used to express emotions that are very different from those they expressed originally. At the same time, Ankersmit makes a compelling case for the intensely problematic character of historical experiences for the historian engaged in writing an historical

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narrative. As he puts it, memoria, the sudden re-emerging or remembrance of the past in the present, does not lead automatically into narratio, the narrative of history. There is no clear, simple, unambiguous or constant relation between the remembrance or re-emergence of the past and historical narratives of the past. In fact, historical narrative destroys the vivid remembrance of the past. Ankersmit articulates the sublime historical experience in Hegelian and Nietzschean terms as one of dissociation, discontinuity or trauma, and does not consider rhetoric or the animation of art works. He does however raise a fundamental question, which may help to understand the issues Warburg struggled with: how are memoria, the sudden experience of the past in the present, and narratio, the historical narrative, related to each other? Reframed in art historical terms: what is the relation between the experience of art becoming alive and writing art history? In what sense, if any, can the stagings of funerary monuments from the past in the Musée des monuments français, with their power to make the viewer feel the persons portrayed have returned to life be called art history? Or, in Warburgian terms, what is the art historical pertinence of Mnemosyne, and how must we understand the afterlife of ancient art it makes possible?372 To find some rudiment of an answer to these questions, we have to return to the discussion of visual history and anachronism in the previous chapter. For Wood and Nagel the paradox of the anachronic presence of the past is above all a problem of discontinuity and of legitimacy. In the early modern instances they discuss, it operates in a theological context. But one should consider it as well as a problem in the philosophy of art history, because the anachronisms produced by a visual history and its efforts to achieve the presence of the past are always attemps to somehow reconnect with it. The two models Wood and Nagel presented to understand anachronism offer a first clue to understand these attempts to reconnect: on the one hand the substitutive model, according to which works are superimposed on each other to replace the disappeared original; on the other the authorial or performative model, in which succeeding cases of anachronism are gradually transformed in a temporal or spatial perspective. Their distinction plays on substitution and resemblance in a way that recalls the basis for two major models to understand representation. As Frank Ankersmit has recently shown in Meaning, Truth and Reference, representations succeed in making present what they represent either by substitution – the profile of the Dutch Queen on euro coins – or by resemblance – her lifelike wax statue in Mme Tussaud’s ( figs. 59 and 60).373 The model of representation based on resemblance however does not suffice to explain why an image can have a presence or aura that surpasses that of the original. It is therefore towards the qualities of the representation that we must turn.374 In the visual histories by Piranesi and Warburg the images often do not resemble closely the absent objects they represent. In the photographs iuxtaposed in the Mnemosyne atlas, as in Piranesi’s etchings, there is a rhetoric of enargeia at work which causes the illusion of presence, but very little sense of mimetic faithfulness to reality. In the case of one of Piranesi’s etchings of the Pantheon for instance, where the spectator is introduced among the columns of the porti-

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76 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Pantheon from the Vedute, Rome 1756–1761, etching, Leiden University Library

co, an analysis on the site of perspective and view point has shown that he eliminated several pillars ( fig. 76). These etchings try to solve the paradox of anachronism: to make present the past by means of substituting images, while at the same time Piranesi was very well aware that in reality these buildings had been damaged, that the past is truly gone, and that his etching, in spite of its visual rhetoric of being a reliable record, is in fact an unreliable witness. In Ankersmit’s terms, the experience of presence is caused by the qualities of the representation. In the religious cases that make up the majority of anachronisms cited by Wood and Nagel, it is ultimately the object itself that guarantees its anachronistic presence. But as Ankersmit has argued, the qualities of the representation create this experience of presence, not the way its pedigree is presented by the object or constructed by the viewer. Like Warburg, and before him Nietzsche, Vignoli, Quatremère or Guasco, he turns to the origins of art in religious cult to locate the origins of such experience in the most primitive desires of mankind. Nietzsche, and before him Schopenhauer, had argued that ancient Greek tragedy, with its clear demarcation between the dionysiac actors and the public, made the public aware, because of theatrical framing, of the strong presence that the tragic representation nonetheless evoked, and which always staged some stage of the primitive origins of mankind. For Nietzsche, and even more for his assiduous reader Warburg, this became the foundation for a primitivist aetiology and a psychological analysis of the development of

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primitive man.375 According to Warburg, primitive desires and terrifying fears were imprinted on the collective memory of mankind, to resurge at great moments of crisis such as the Renaissance or Reformation in the shape of pathos formulas, figurations of emotions that are felt both in the present and in the long-forgotten past of mankind. They create a very strong experience of living presence in the viewer, but one which has been rendered bearable because the representational character of art works creates some Denkraum, some reflecting distance.

CONCLUSION For Warburg the animated image presented both a challenge to the art historian and a threat to the rational autonomy of the viewer, which could not be solved within the conceptual or scientific framework of German art history with its foundation in Kantian aesthetics. Thinking about the life viewers attribute to art works in terms of Nachleben and Mnemosyne, anachronism and historical experience, helps to put such reactions in a wider historical and ultimately anthropological perspective. The life of art works now can be understood as a phenomenon that is not confined to individual, momentary viewing experiences, but can be contextualized as a defining characteristic of Western, or even world art history. Nagel and Wood developed a performative and substitutional model to understand how anachronisms can be both a witness to, an substitute for, an origin that has disappeared. This model offers a way of thinking about the life of art, an equally paradoxical or counterfactual notion as that of the presence of the past, in terms of the relation between works of art and their models or prototypes. Such an approach moves away from artistic considerations of lifelikeness or verisimilitude, and thereby opens room for religious or legal definitions of that relation. Once we have taken the step of thinking about the life of art in terms of anachronism, we can move beyond the religious and legal conceptions current in the Renaissance to use the analysis of historical experience as developed by Ankersmit: the sudden, anachronistic irruption of the past into the present shares with art works appearing to be alive the same sudden, unsettling character, disruptive of normal historical narrative or arthistorical analysis. The power of historical records, be they texts or art works, to create this experience does not depend on their relation to the original they represent, but on the qualities of the representation. The gradual sensation of being in the portico of the Pantheon that takes hold over the spectator of Piranesi’s etching depends on his manipulation of perspective, aided by his refusal to include clear markers of the presence of his contemporaries on the site. In its power to evoke the presence of the Roman building from the past Piranesi’s Veduta is similar to the creeping awareness that figures in his Grotteschi, or many African masks for that matter, turn out to have eyes that look at the spectator, that exercise the Medusean spell of what Warburg called their Gegenblick.

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For Ankersmit the experience of the past’s presence can only be understood as a sublime experience. Only in those terms can the paradoxes of anachronism, of the survival of the past, or of representations that dissolve in presence, be resolved, since the sublime experience is no longer one of the autonomous, fully self-aware consciousness reflecting on its objects of knowledge, but an immediate and unreflected experience.376 But we do not have to stay, in our analysis of viewers attributing life to art, within the confines of Kantian epistemology or aesthetics.

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EPILOGUE FR OM THE ANIMATED IMAGE TO THE EXCESSIVE OBJEC T

‘THE APPEARANCE OF THE SOUL’ This book ends where it began, in the Villa Borghese. In 1804 Prince Camillo Borghese asked the sculptor Canova to make a statue of his wife Pauline, Napoleon’s favourite sister. The result, finished in 1808, was a lifesize portrait of Pauline reclining naked on a bed, represented as Venere Vincitrice, Venus victorious: she holds the apple that Paris gave her when asked to choose the most beautiful goddess ( fig. 77). It was shown to the public for the first time in 1809, in the Palazzo Chiablese in Turin, where the Prince at this time held court, as governor of Piemonte appointed by his brother-in-law. It is probably the first statue of this size representing a living woman, and a very public figure as well, naked, and as a goddess. From the moment the Venere Vincitrice was shown it became scandalous. The beauty of the model, the pose, the nudity, and the fact that Pauline Borghese had posed naked for Canova were already sufficient to attract a crowd. But the extreme virtuosity of Canova’s treatment of the body of the goddess and in particular his ability to suggest the softness and lustre of living skin also made the statue a celebrity. Both Canova’s biographer Missirini and his friend Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy report on the crowds that came to gaze at the statue at night, illuminated by torches, to appreciate, as Canova himself also claimed, much better than by daylight ‘le gradazione della carnagione’, the rendering of the living and breathing body.377 These nocturnal viewings of Pauline Borghese as Venus are part of the fashion for looking at statues by torch light that had originated in late 18th-century Rome, where it had been

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77 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Pauline Borghese as Victorious Venus, 1808, marble, L. 2.00 m., Rome, Villa Borghese. Photo Alinari

propagated at the Villa Albani, and reached its culmination in the nocturnal visits by Napoleon and his court to the newly arrived Laocoon in the Musée Napoléon ( fig. 78). The French diarist Joseph Joubert observed how, under such viewing conditions, in the flickering light statues seem to move towards the viewer from the dark. The play of light on the marble suggests living skin, and ‘ces formes idéales et molles dont les corps animés semblent comme environnés [apparaissent] à chaque trait et qu’un philosophe appelait les apparences de l’âme’.378 Often, however, aesthetic appreciation and the frisson of the uncanny, when inanimate stone appeared to be a living and sentient body, gave way to less elevated sentiments among the viewers, and ultimately the Princess Borghese would ask her husband to remove her statue from public viewing. After its removal to Rome the Prince put the statue in a specially constructed cage of which he kept the keys. In the 1830s the Pope and his vicar were still so uneasy about the indecency of the pose and the reactions it caused that one of the inheritors of Canova asked the engraver Domenico Marchetti to make a new version of his etching of the Venere Vincitrice, this time with veils added to cover her naked torso.379 Another feature added to the excessive nature of this statue: its genesis. As mentioned, Pauline Borghese had posed naked to the sculptor. When asked how she felt about this, she

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78 Benjamin Zix (1772–1811), Napoleon visits the recently arrived Laocoön group in the Louvre by torch light, 1810, watercolour, Paris, Musée du Louvre

famously replied, ‘well, the room was heated’.380 But the fact that Canova had made a moulage à vif of her body added to its scandalous character. In itself the use of a mould made on the living body of the model to serve as the plaster model from which the statue would be made was considered slightly disreputable, because it was felt to be a sign of poor craftsmanship on the sculptor’s part, as in the famous allegations of moulage à vif when the Elgin Marbles were first shown to the public.381 But there was also a whiff of scandal because of the intimacy it implied between the sculptor and his model and the transgressive nature of the interaction that took place in the sculptor’s studio. Neo-classicist art theorists rejected such procedures because the result would be too naturalistic, and thereby excite base feelings in the viewers.382 Finally, such a moulage completely went against the idealist view of the sculptor’s act, going back to Michelangelo’s famous formulation, that the sculptor liberates the form hidden in the marble. Here, on the contrary, the intellectual aspect of sculptural disegno was obscured by the very material act of making a mould of her body.383 In the case of the Venus Borghese viewers were excited by the almost corporeal presence of the statue and its virtuoso rendering of a living body, but sometimes their excitement

199 | ’The appearance of the soul’

79 Domenico Marchetti (b. 1780), Venere Vincitrice, engraving after Canova’s statue, 1825

was transformed into more mixed feelings. Heinrich Heine tells the story, in his novella Florentinische Nächte, of an inveterate statue lover who throughout his life has preferred statues to living women. Here is his account of his infatuation with a ‘beautiful marble statue’ in the old, neglected garden of his mother’s estate: […] da lag sie unverstümmelt, die marmorne Göttin, mit den rein-schönen Gesichtszügen und mit den straffgetheilten, edlen Busen […]. Ich erschrack fast als ich sie sah; dieses Bild flößte mir eine sonderbare schwüle Scheu ein […] He promises himself to go and kiss her the next day, but his desire is too strong, and he returns to her the same night: […] endlich küsste ich die Göttin mit einer Inbrunst, mit einer Zärtlichkeit, mit einer Verzweiflung, wie ich nie mehr geküßt habe in diesem Leben. Auch nie habe ich diese grauenhaft süße Empfindung vergessen können, die meine Seele durchflutete, als die beseligende Kälte jener Marmorlippen meinen Mund berührte.384

200 | Epilogue

The narrator’s career as a lover of statues, in which he falls not only for derelict garden statues but also for exemplary masterpieces such as Michelangelo’s statue of the Night in the Medici Chapel, culminates in his encounters with statues in Italy by torchlight: […] jenen Licht- und Schatteneffekten, die uns in Erstaunen setzen, wenn wir Statuen in der Nacht bey Fackelschein betrachten. Diese Marmorbilder offenbaren uns dann, mit erschreckender Wahrheit, ihren innewohnenden Geist und ihre schauerlich stummen Geheimnisse.385 Whereas these statues live and seem to have an inner life, the statue of Pauline Borghese is finally dismissed by Heine’s statue lover, in spite of his desire for statues or, if needs must be, a plaster cast of his dying lover, as the ultimate manifestation of the ‘pathetic materialism’ that for him is the essence of the Napoleonic period: the period of official proclamations of immortality, artificial nobility, Napoleon reading Ossian, and Pauline Borghese ‘ließ sich mulieren als Venus, denn das Zimmer was gut geheizt’.386 Heine thus draws together, 30 years after the completion of the statue, all the aspects that made this statue possess a living presence and agency that proved difficult to control: its scandalous nakedness and divine pretence; the excessive virtuosity that made the statue seem so lifelike that it excited the viewers; its genesis in a moulage à vif. All resulting in an almost uncanny suggestion of life, in a setting that is at the same time a summum of artificiality, if not artistic distancing. The marble is made to suggest a living and breathing body; the wooden bed is disguised as a marble couch. Thus what Quatremère called the characteristic of high art – aesthetic distance resulting from a use of materials that mark the difference between the living being represented and its representation – here almost topples over and becomes its opposite, a statue that is so lifelike it appears to be animated.

CHANGING APPRECIATIONS OF VIEWERS ATTRIBUTING LIFE TO ART These reactions to Canova’s statue of Pauline Borghese document the moment of transition in the appreciation of viewers attributing life or animation to art in the decades around 1800, the chronological pivot around which the argument of this book has been constructed. We saw in the case of the Venus de’ Medici or the Canova Venus instances of the attribution to works of art of feelings normally reserved for other human beings. As we have seen, up to the 1750s, such attributions were generally understood in the rhetorical terms of enargeia; Sforza Pallavicino developed a psychological account of them, one of the first to consider it as a normal human reaction, explicable in terms of the way the human mind works. In the 19th century they would be increasingly banned from acceptable behaviour towards sculpture – witness James Whitehouse in 1845, who while condemning the Venus de’ Medici at the same time rendered it into a living being:

201 | Changing appreciations of viewers attributing life to art

There is no flinching from the fact, that the antique collections which fill the Gallery or the Museum, the Vatican or the Louvre – which the aged are directed to venerate, the young to study for instruction – are pervaded by the most debasing sensuality breathing in the marble or the bronze […].387 [italics added] In the nineteenth century treating art works as living beings increasingly became dismissed from the range of acceptable behaviour. Art theorists rejected it as an un-aesthetic attitude that denied the representational character of art and disrupted disinterested enjoyment of the formal or stylistic properties of art works. Historians of religion and ethnographers from the 1750s onwards, including De Brosses, Guasco and Dulaure, after having labelled such behaviour among non-Western art viewers as fetishism, began to include such reactions by Western viewers under the same label. Whereas Marx and Freud would define fetishism as a matter of excess, attributing more value or emotional power to an object than its material or use value warrants, eighteenth-century students of this behaviour gave more weight to the issue of representation. Such viewers confuse the representation with the being it represents – thus applying enargeia, the aim of rhetorical ekphrasis, in ethnography. In the words of François Lemée: ‘L’idole se prend pour la chose même, la figure est souvent confondue avec la chose figurée.’ By the end of the 19th century psychologists such as Binet and Freud, ranged such reactions under the large category of paraphilia or fetishism, now defined in the Marxian sense as the attribution of excessive affective value or agency to an object, in an attempt to form a relationship with that object which the sufferer from paraphilia cannot form with a real human being. They were much clearer about the psychological mechanisms involved, but had far less to say about the qualities of the object that makes it into a fetish. In a disenchanted world, fetishism is still as present as ever, but becomes an enigma. In Aby Warburg’s lifelong preoccupation with the life of art all these strands return, and one might argue come to a deadlock, spilling from the sphere of professional interests into his own life. Ultimately, the power of, and fear for, living art would become a deeply personal issue for Warburg. He had been troubled by panic attacks throughout his life, but in the long breakdown he suffered after World War I, he came to believe that all inanimate things spoke to him. The basis of rational sanity – a clear demarcation between the animate and the inanimate – no longer applied to him in his psychosis.388 The Denkraum, the space between a thinking subject and the objects that threaten him, had dissolved completely. This is not, I believe, just a story of personal misfortune. It also points to the fundamental, disruptive aspect of art’s living presence. Warburg’s central notions of Denkraum, Nachleben, Pathosformeln, Mnemosyne or even that of the representation of moved life are all characterized by a profound instability, unclarity or ambivalence. It never becomes entirely clear for instance what the subject of Mnemosyne is. Is it a collective (unconscious?) memory or the memory of individual artists? The way the process of recording, transmission and retrieval of pathos formulas is treated is never that of clear analysis or definition, but a series of metaphors all circling

202 | Epilogue

round the notion of impression, inscription or engraving, or coining – a notion with an impressive mnemotechnical and rhetorical pedigree, but treated in too vague a manner to give a precise idea of the how these processes work psychologically. The pathos formulas themselves are characterized by a similar oscillation between a view of the process of artistic creation as driven by individuals or by culture and its problems in general. They also point to the precarious balance between artistic control and surrender to emotions with the resulting loss of self. In fact all these ambiguities point to one wider problem: Warburg’s history of art is a collective, general process, in which the interventions or actions of individuals, based on conscious decisions, have very little place. His comparison between Pathosformeln and intensifications in linguistics is telling in this respect. Just as a language change is rarely the result of the actions of one individual user, but a question of slow development over many generations, artistic development is a matter of slow, impersonal evolutions or of sudden breaks, but the individual artist, like the individual language user, can do little to inflect its course. Warburg’s view of art history as a series of remembrances of pathos formulas from the past that originated in the earliest stages of human development is therefore a history without individual actors. This can be related, I would argue, to a characteristic shared by the Nachleben of art and the living image. The genuine – that is, not part of some social setting of make-believe, fiction or divided consciousness – experience that a work of art, after all an inanimate artefact, appears to be alive, is so profoundly unsettling, while at the same time so frequent, that it cannot be dismissed. At the same time it can only be accounted for by assuming a loss of rational consciousness in such an experience. Just so the vivid resurgence of past art disrupts the normal linear unfolding of artistic chronology. Art for Warburg is for a large part the result of the transformation of fear or image magic. Sometimes it is successful, and a space is created between us and the world around us. In writing the history of art as the episodes in this process of creating a space to reflect and represent, Warburg succeeded in refounding art history as a historical psychology of culture and was the first to integrate anthropological and evolutionary research into the animation of art into an arthistorical narrative. But it privileged precisely those artistic phenomena that are most disruptive of the basic elements of any historical discipline, the rationality of the viewer and historian, and the linear unfolding of time.

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN In taking seriously viewers attributing life to art works we seem therefore to have reached a deadlock. Yet Warburg’s radicalization of the problems implied by such reactions also offers the perspective of new solutions. Just as he himself, dissatisfied with the limitations of German formalist art history, decided to turn to an anthropological study of the rituals

203 | An anthropological turn

and artworks of the Pueblo Indians, several elements in the account of animated art works developed here in this book offer ways of opening the horizons of studying this phenomenon. Endowing representations with life, whether as a conscious artistic effort, the projection of desire or a manifestation of the fear images can inspire, seems to be a universal human tendency. It occurs in most cultures, and in most periods. Even the oldest drawings now known, those discovered in 1994 in the cave of Chauvet in the Ardèche, France, probably made c. 30.000 years BCE, display what to our eyes looks like an effort to convey the illusion of life: the draughtsmen who depicted horses and lions appear to have used the texture of the rock to suggest movements of limbs and the ripple of skin, and located eyes so that their reflection of light seems to suggest sight ( fig. 80).389 Warburg and the 19th-century evolutionists and anthropologists whose work he used, from Darwin to Tylor or Vignoli, considered this tendency to endow art with the characteristics of life as a typical of the earlier stages in the development of humanity, which they shared with animals. Darwin noted his dog’s tendency to bark at the moving shadow cast by an umbrella as if it were a living being.390 This tendency, Vignoli noted, did not altogether disappear with the development of civilisation. Even the purest art lover in fact is moved by the same desires and fears as his African tribal fellow men: Even when a man of high culture and refined taste for beauty stands before the canvas or sculpture of some great ancient or modern artist, his spiritual and aesthetic enjoyment of these works is, as he will find from the observation of his inmost emotions, combined with the animation and personification of what he sees; he is so far carried away by the beauty and truth of the representation that the passions represented affect him as if they were those of real persons.’391 Before Vignoli, De Brosses had considered fetishism as a characteristic of the earlierst stages of mankind, and following him Auguste Comte had pointed out that in case his readers would find it difficult to understand the fetishism of primitive civilizations, they would only have to recall their own childhood, or situations in which they had been extremely affected by objects they did not understand, to recognize that the tendency to attribute life to inanimate objects is universal, and pervades every variety of analogical thinking or metaphorical languages in which dead objects are presented as alive or personified, including ‘the obscure pantheism of certain German metaphysicians’.392 Attributing life to art and indeed all kinds of inanimate objects is not only a universal human characteristic, it is also part of the early stages of the development of young children.

204 | Epilogue

80 Hunting cave lions, detail of the large frieze in the end chamber of Chauvet cave, c. 30.000 BCE, charcoal on rock

EXCESSIVE AND TRANSITIONAL OBJECTS Sforza Pallavicino based his account on the attribution of life to art works on the psychological make-up of human beings. Aby Warburg developed an anthropological account of attributing life to art based on the psychological development of humanity as a whole. At the end of the twentieth century anthropologists became interested in the other end of this process, the qualities of an object that make viewers attribute characteristics of life to it. Among these theorists of what is now begining to be called the excessive object Alfred Gell stands out because he formulated a theory that accounts for that excessiveness as a social phenomenon, the agency of objects as it manifests itself in networks of actors involved in the production, use and perception of artefacts. His concepts of personhood and animacy enable a more fine-grained analysis of the animation of art works because they can be

205 | Excessive and transitional objects

applied to living beings and artefacts alike and thus allow an understanding of viewers attributing characteristics of life to art works as a social phenomenon. Some important aspects of agency, the keystone of his theory, are present as well in classical and early modern figurations and conceptions of the animated image. Many versions of the myth of Medusa present the agency of the image as the ultimate manifestation of its animation; Lemée’s reading of the propaganda of Louis XIV is a perfect illustration of distributed agency avant la lettre. Warburg and Gell both provide ways of understanding the animated image in a general anthropological context. They do not consider the role of the individual development. By its excessive character, playing on the demarcations of representation, Pauline Borghese’s statue suggests a series of reflections on the psychological processes that lie behind the attribution of life to works of art, and more in particular to treating them as living beings, loving or hating them as if they were sentient and capable of emotions or feelings. Through its origin in moulage à vif – not a creative process characterized by representational distance – and its vivid lifelikeness, causing viewers of the statue to become a bit too familiar with it, the statue transgresses the aesthetic distance needed according to 19th-century art theory and aesthetics, for an object to become a work of art. Its origin in moulage à vif in particular makes it almost a transitional object, in the sense that it inhabits an intermediate space between the living body itself and the image that was made after it. It is this transitional character that suggests an account in present-day psychological terms of the power of art to evoke reactions normally reserved for human beings. Thanks to the developmental psychology of individuals developed in the twentieth century by the second generation of psychoanalysts, in particular Melanie Klein, and subsequently by object relation theorists such as David Winnicott or Thomas Ogden, we are now able to develop an account of such attributions that stays much closer to individual developments, and is actually based on empirical observation of how children develop.393 The ideas of Klein and Winnicott have often been used to understand the making of art, but far less to understand the kind of phenomena that concern us here. When present-day psychologists consider art, they are usually more interested in phenomena such as image recognition or empathy. With the current vogue for investigating the neuro-physical substrata of mental processes object relation theory has gone out of fashion, but it has much to offer here, particularly since it engages with the psychogenesis of experience and awareness rather than their neurophysical substrata. In an important extension, not to say revision of Freud’s theories, Klein, Winnicott and Ogden have developed an account of early childhood development in which they distinguish two stages or positions in the infant’s first two years.394 The manner in which the infant relates to inner or outside objects is that of projective identification; that is, the emotions of fear and terror, love and hunger the infant feels are projected outward, or splitted off, at first on the mother’s breast, and later on other objects or persons.395 In the first six months of its life, an infant cannot disitnguish between inner world and outside world, be-

206 | Epilogue

tween the mother’s breast and the mother as a whole person; when its mother leaves the room, it does not yet register the absence of an independent person with a life of her own, but feels an incompleteness of itself. Gradually, over the next eighteen months, the infant acquires an awareness of the difference between inner world and outside world, and some self-awareness. With this comes an acceptance that the mother is a person with a life of her own; her absences are not absolute withdrawals. In this phase the infant learns to take some distance towards its own feelings. It begins to form an inner world of internal object relations, that is, representations of its feelings towards others. Finally when the child turns three, the infant develops from an immediate and unmediated experience of reality into a world mediated by representation; it is also the stage in which it starts to speak, that is to begin to grasp the symbolic dimensions of being in the world. Transitional objects are vital to this process: these are the toys, bears, or bits of blankets that practically all toddlers have between six months and three years of age. They serve, as Winnicott has shown, to negotiate the transition from the unreflected and immediate experience of the first six months to an awareness that there is a difference between the child, what it experiences, and the outer world filled with other human beings. As Freud already observed, such infantile identifications are the earliest form of emotional attachment (Gefühlsbindung) to an object.396 Gradually, the transitional object takes the place of the mother’s breast as the primary focus of affection and thus helps negotiate the transition from the first to the second phase of infantile development, because it acts as a provider of neutral, free space for the infant to act out its desires, anger and frustration or love on an object instead of its mother. After the child becomes acquainted with art works, they lose their importance; but in adults with a disturbed development they can take on the role of fetishes. According to Winnicott we touch here on the wellsprings of human creativity. But the notion of the transitional object, and the view of human psychological development also helps us to understand the animation of lifeless works of art. In the first stage of development the infant is as yet incapable of differentiating between itself and others, the inner and outer world. In a process of splitting and projective identification the emotions of fear, desire, love and hatred the child feels are projected onto the outside world. These tendencies do not disappear when the child grows up. They recur in periods of great stress or mental illness. They also help us to understand the psychological mechanisms that lead to the attribution of life and emotions to objects such as statues. Both Sforza Pallavicino and Michel de Cubières pointed out the importance of intense experiences of fear in early childhood in shaping the tendency of adult viewers to react to statues as if they are living beings. In his account of a torch-lit viewing of the statues in the Villa Borghese in 1798, Cubières uses almost the same words as Pallavicino to describe the mixture of attraction and growing unease caused by gazing at the statues that seemed to breathe and move in the flickering torchlight. He felt similar, he wrote, ‘à ces écoliers qui n’osent point retourner la tête vers l’endroit où, la nuit, ils ont aperçu quelqu’objet sinistre, ou entendu quelque bruit qui les a effrayés’.397

207 | Excessive and transitional objects

HOMO ANIMANS AND HOMO REPRAESENTANS Whether considered in global anthropological terms or as an essential aspect of the development of individual human beings, the tendency to attribute life, personhood, emotions and an inner life to art is too present and pervasive to qualify it simply and dismissively as a relict from the earliest stages of the development of humanity, as eighteenthand nineteenth-century students of fetishism did, or as a passing phase in the development of infants. I would suggest instead, that this tendency is the expression of two conflicting basic traits of human nature: the capacity to form representations and the need for, or fear of, attributing characteristics of life to inanimate objects. As Aristotle already pointed out in Book One of the Metaphysics, man stands out among living beings through his capacity to learn through representation or mimesis. Recent palaeo-anthropological research has suggested that one of the main contributing factors towards the early survival of homo sapiens was his capacity to make representations, more specifically, to create material images.398 As Warburg noted, it is through man’s capacity to create representations, that is to distance himself from his terrifying and uncontrollable surroundings by creating a Denkraum, that he creates consciousness and thereby the capacity for reflection and survival. Man is also primed to attribute life to inanimate objects, because in evolutionary terms it is safer to act on the assumption that inanimate objects such as trees or stones are animate beings and therefore potential animals, than on the opposite assumption, that living beings are dead objects and cannot harm us. There is, one might say, an ongoing conflict between homo repraesentans and homo animans, between the tendencies to create distance and to attribute life, which man needs both to survive. Since they have such old roots, they are not easily dissolved, disciplined or even balanced in an aesthetic attitude towards art. Canova’s statue of Pauline Borghese was created at the very moment when ethnographic studies of fetishism began to include Western religious and artistic practice, when aesthetic disinterested enjoyment became the dominant mode of art viewing in the recently founded museum at the Louvre, and the ideals of enargeia as embodied in classical sculpture were again, but perhaps more anxiously than ever before, held up as a model for Empire art. It raises the issues of animation versus representation, empathy, projective identification and embodied viewing, the aesthetic enjoyment of art versus the fetishization of the human body in particularly compelling ways. By its very nature and origin, the statue suggests a connection between its ambiguous, not to say intermediate character – is it art, or simply an attempt to come as close as possible to its living original – and 20th-century theories on the development of consciousness, the capacity to form inner representations, and ultimately to create works of art, that all locate the onset of these developments in the infant’s attitudes towards his or her mother’s body. Ogden, Winnicott and Warburg sometimes sound almost uncannily alike, when they argue for the importance of a Denkraum, a thinking space, that allows primitive man or the infant

208 | Epilogue

to take some distance towards the terrifying emotions that tend to submerge it.399 This Denkraum manifests itself as the capacity to create representations. Precisely this representational character had been singled out by Canova’s friend Quatremère de Quincy as the defining characteristic of art. The capacity to recognize and respect the representational character of art, accordingly, is what separates rational, enlightened man from the benighted, terrified adorer of fetishes. Warburg turned this principle of neo-classical aesthetics on its head, transforming it from a primitive aberration into a basic characteristic of the early development of mankind. The intellectual project he conceived, widening the scope of art history into an anthropological and psychological global study of image making and viewing, has lost none of its actuality. What still remains to be done, is to investigate in what manner the capacity to become conscious of emotions in infancy and to create representations, leads to the capacity to create art, but is always counteracted by an equally powerful tendency to attribute life to art. Homo animans and homo repraesentans need each other; the one cannot survive without the other; but how these tendencies operate exactly still remains mostly unknown to us. To understand the universal human tendency to attribute life to art, we need to move beyond the confines of the Kantian assumptions of art history. In collaboration with child psychologists we need to investigate whether the model of transitional object formation helps to understand the tendency of individual human beings to attribute life to inanimate artefacts; building on that inquiry we need to work with anthropologists to understand the excessiveness of objects as a universal feature of human society. In any case, studying what makes viewers deny the representational character of art will help understanding why art is such a universal feature of human life.

209 | Homo animans and homo repraesentans

NOTES

Michel de Cubières-Palmézeaux (1752–1820): Lettre écrite de Rome au commencement de l’année 1790, et renfermant une description de la Villa Borghèse, in: Tribune de la Société Nationale des Neuf Soeurs, April 14 1791, p. 278–281: ‘Ah, lève les yeux […] regarde cette Vénus accroupie qui est près de toi, et tu cesseras de l’aimer? Vous le dirai-je, cher ami? J’ai passé la main sur tous les charmes de cette Vénus accroupie: j’ai cru les sentir palpiter, et plus heureux que Narcisse, c’est un marbre froid, un marbre inanimé, un marbre insensible, qui m’a brûlé, au même instant, de tous les feux de la volupté. […] une femme qui est affligée de rendre le portrait de son amant ne manque jamais de le faire copier et de placer à côté de son chevet l’image qui lui est si chère. Le sentiment qu’inspirent les beaux-arts ressemble beaucoup à celui de l’amour, et l’on est quelquefois aussi jaloux d’une statue que de sa maîtresse.’ Michel de Cubières was a playwright of aristocratic descent, who after a rather unsuccessful career as a man of letters under the Ancien Régime became a friend and associate of prominent aristocrats and intellectuals who supported the Revolution; of Olympe de Gouges and Marie-AnneFrançoise de Beauharnais for instance, who hosted one of the major revolutionary Salons in the rue de Tournon. He founded the masonic lodge of the Neuf Soeurs, frequented by Benjamin Franklin and Sébastien Mercier and others, but changed allegiance smoothly with every regime change after 1789. On his life and works see Jean-Luc Chappey: Sortir de la Révolution. Inventer le XIXe siècle, in: Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 40/2010, pp. 43–57; Roman d’Amat (ed.): Dictionnaire de biographie française, Paris 1961, vol. 9, col. 1338–1339; on his writings on art see Pascal Griener: The Function of Beauty. The Philosophers and the Social Dimension of Art in late Eighteenth Century France with particular Regard to Sculpture, Oxford 1989, p. 192 ff.; Annegret Dinter: Der Pygmalion-Stoff in der europäischen Literatur. Rezeptionsgeschichte einer Ovid-Fabel, Heidelberg 1979; Hans Körner: Der fünfte Bruder. Zur Tastwahrnehmung plastischen Bildwerke von der Renaissance bis zum frühen 19. Jahrhundert, in: Artibus et Historiae 42/2000, pp. 165–196, pp. 188–189. 1

See Jason Gaiger: Depiction, Make-Believe and Participatory Imagining, in: Caroline van Eck, Elsje van Kessel and Joris van Gastel (eds.): The Secret Lives of Art Works, Leiden 2014, pp. 340–360.

2

3 Cubières 1791, pp. 289–290: ‘[Les désirs] de l’hermaphrodite se manifestent de la manière la moins équivoque, la plus indécente […] représenter un hermaphrodite tout nud, lorsqu’il rêve de sa maîtresse! […] me rappellant le fameux chevalier d’Eon, lorsque pour la première fois j’ai vu l’Hermaphrodite,

211 | Notes

il s’est lévé en moi une espèce de doute pénible, un doute qui ne me permettait pas à me livrer à aucun sentiment bien décidé, et suspenda, pour ainsi dire, tous les facultés de mon âme, et m’a privé de mon existence entière ou au moins d’une moitié de mon existence. Le matelas est de marbre, et j’ai vu […] qu’il était de laine; j’y ai posé le doigt pour le toucher, et sentant un corps dur qui repoussait ma main, au lieu de lui céder, un frisson m’a saisi tout-à-coup; j’ai reculé deux pas en arrière, et une sorte de terreur s’emparant de mon âme, j’ai repassé deux fois avant l’Hermaprodite, sans le regarder, semblable à un jeune écolier qui ne veut point retourner la tête vers l’endroit où la nuit, il eut apperçu quelque objet sinistre, ou entendre quelque bruit qui l’a effrayé. Quelque bien couché soit-il, je ne serai jamais tenté de coucher avec lui.’ 4 For Greek and Roman reactions to the Cnidian Aphrodite by Praxiteles see Stijn Bussels: The Animated Image. Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power, Berlin and Leiden 2012 (Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus, Reihe ‘Kunst und Wirkmacht / Art and Agency’, vol. 11), pp. 161– 170; for an overview of such reactions see John R. Hale: Art and Audience: the Medici Venus c. 1750–1850, in: Italian Studies 32/1976, pp. 37–58; for the implications of the way works of art were exhibited in the Tribuna of the Uffizi on viewers’ reactions see Cecilia Hurley: In the Shadow of the Tribuna, in: Studiolo 9/2013, pp. 128–140. 5 Greek Anthology, XII.183. All English translations of Greek and Latin authors, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Loeb Edition.

See Elsje van Kessel: The Social Lives of Paintings in Sixteenth Century Venice for a detailed analysis of such behaviour in sixteenthth-century Venice (Unpublished PhD Thesis Leiden University 2012).

6

John Barrell: ‘The Dangerous Goddess’: Masculinity, Prestige, and the Aesthetic in Early EighteenthCentury Britain, in: Cultural Critique 12/1989: pp. 101–131.

7

8 François Raguenet: Les Monuments de Rome, ou Description des plus beaux ouvrages de peinture, de sculpture et d’architecture qui se voyent à Rome & aux Environs, Amsterdam 1701, pp. 32–33: ‘Le Bernin a fait telle matelas de marbre sur lequel cette statue est couchée, qu’il n’y a personne qui ne croye d’abord que c’est un matelas de vraie futaine. Tout le monde, sans savoir trop pourquoy, y porte le doigt, et tout le monde sent, avec je ne sais quel horreur qui fait frémir, la dureté du marbre qui résiste, là où il étoit naturel de croire que le doigt allât enfoncer’. For Raguenet’s imitators see Körner 2000, pp. 187– 188. 9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Italienische Reise, in: Goethes Werke, Hamburg 1967, vol. 11, p. 158–159, 13 January 1787: ‘Im Palaste Giustiniani steht eine Minerva, die meine ganze Verehrung hat. […] Als wir die Statue besahen und uns lang dabei aufhielten, erzählte uns die Frau des Kustode, es sei dieses ein ehmals heiliges Bild gewesen, und die Inglesi, welche von dieser Religion seien [that is, for a Roman Catholic they are heathen like the ancient Romans], pflegten es noch zu verehren, indem sie ihm die eine Hand küßten, die auch wirklich ganz weiß war, da die übrige Statue bräunlich ist. Auch setzte sie hinzu, eine Dame dieser Religion sei vor kurzem dagewesen, habe sich auf die Knie niedergeworfen und die Statue angebetet. […] Da auch ich nicht von der Statue weg wollte, fragte sie mich, ob ich etwa eine Schöne hätte, die diesem Marmor ähnlich sähe, daß er mich so anzöge. Das gute Weib kannte nur Anbetung und Liebe, aber von der reinen Bewunderung eines herrlichen Werkes, von der brüderlichen Verehrung eines Menschengeistes konnte sie keinen Begriff haben.’ See also Goethe: Briefe, in: Goethes Werke, Weimar 1887–1896, vol. 8, pp. 130–131. On the reception of this statue from the Renaissance onwards see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny: Taste and the Antique, New Haven and London 1982, pp. 269–271. 10 Johann Gottfried Herder: Reisetagebuch, in: Italienische Reise. Briefe und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1788–1789 (Edited, annotated and with an afterword by Albert Meier and Heather Holmer), Munich 1988, pp. 560–619, pp. 602–603. For a version that predates the Plastik, where Herder also discusses the ethical/sexual ambivalence, but in theological terms, connecting the nudity of Greek statues with the innocence of Paradise, and the colours of painting with the Fall after original sin, see

212 | Notes

also Herder: Von der Bildhauerkunst fürs Gefühl. Gedanken aus dem Garten zu Versailles, in: Werke in 10 Bänden, Frankfurt am Main 1994, vol. 4, pp. 1016–1022, p. 1018. 11 Unknown author (BBC News): Painting meets its femme fatale, in http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ si/europe/6910377.stm, published on July 21 2007 – consulted in September 2008. 12 Brigitte Derlon and Monique Jeudy-Ballini: La Passion de l’Art Primitif: Enquête sur les collectionneurs, Paris 2008. 13

Quintilian: Institutio oratoria XII. xiii. 9–11.

14

Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short: A Latin Dictionary, Oxford 1975, s. v. ‘figura’.

15

Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria IX.i.10–14.

16

Cf. Lewis and Short 1975, s. v. ‘vultus’.

17

Cicero: De Legibus I.ix.27 and De Oratore III.lix.22.

Cicero: Orator XXXIX.134: ‘Et reliqua, ex collocatione verborum quae sumuntur, quasi lumina […].’ In Institutio Oratoria VIII.v.34 Quintilian calls epigrams ‘lumina orationis’.

18

19

Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria VIII.iii.62.

20

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria VI.ii.32; see also Longinus, Peri Hupsous XV.1

21

Alfred Gell: Art and Agency. An anthropological theory, Oxford 1998.

22

Gell 1998, pp. 6–7.

Alfred Gell: The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology, in: Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds.): Anthropology and Aesthetics, Oxford 1992, pp. 40–63, p. 43; for a comparable consideration of rhetoric as a technique for securing the acquiescence of the audience see e.g. Cicero De oratore I.202, II.35 and II.337, and Brutus II.7–8.

23

24

Gell 1998, pp. 2–4.

25

Gell 1998, p. 5, p. 66 and p. 96.

26

Gell 1998, pp. 96–122, in particular pp. 118–120, and pp. 121–122.

On speech act theory see John L. Austin: How to do Things with Words, Cambridge 1962, and John Searle: Speech Acts. An essay in the philosophy of Language, Cambridge 1969.

27

On these roles of rhetoric see Caroline van Eck: Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge and New York 2007.

28

29 See for instance the discussion of Einfühlung in Friedrich Theodor Vischer: Kritische Gänge [1847], Munich 1922, vol. 5, p. 45.

On 19th century German aesthetics of architecture based on empathy see Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds.): Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873– 1893, Santa Monica 1994, in particular p. 17, pp. 21–22, and p. 28.

30

See Heinrich Wölfflin: Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, in: Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1994, pp. 149–193, originally published as Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, Munich 1886. On the ideas of Wölfflin, Burckhardt and Warburg on empathy and animation in architecture see also Alina Payne: Living Stones, Crying Walls: Burckhardt, Warburg and the Dangers of Enlivenment in Architecture, in: Caroline van Eck, Elsje van Kessel and Joris van Gastel (eds.): The Secret Lives of Art Works, Leiden 2014, pp. 308–340.

31

32

I am much indebted to Elsje van Kessel for this observation.

213 | Notes

On idolatry and iconoclasm see for instance the catalogue of the 2013 Tate Britain exhibition Art under Attack. Histories of British Iconoclasm; Anthony Julius: Idolizing pictures. Idolatry, iconoclasm and Jewish art, London 2000 (Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures, vol. 32); Ernst Kitzinger: The cult of images in the age before Iconoclasm, Cambridge 1954 (Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 8), pp. 83–150; Oleg Grabar: L’iconoclasme byzantin: le dossier archéologique, Paris 1984; Margaret Aston: The English Iconoclasts, Oxford 1988; David Freedberg: Iconoclasm and Painting in the Revolt of the Netherlands 1566–1609, New York 1988; id.: The Power of Images. A Study in the history of Response, Chicago and London 1989; Alain Besançon: The forbidden image. An intellectual history of iconoclasm, Chicago and London 2000; Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay (eds.): Iconoclasm. Contested objects, contested terms, Aldershot 2007; Anne McClanan (ed.): Negating the image. Case studies in iconoclasm, Aldershot 2005; Michael W. Cole (ed.): The Idol in the Age of Art. Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World, Aldershot 2009.

33

Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (eds.): Presence. The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, Aldershot 2006.

34 35

Peter Stewart: The Image of the Roman Empire, in: Maniura and Shepherd 2006, pp. 243–259.

36 Rémy Clerc: Les théories relatives au culte des images chez les auteurs grecs du Ier siècle après J. C., Paris 1915; Hans Belting: Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, Munich 1990; English edition Hans Belting: Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1994; David Freedberg: The Power of Images. A Study in the Theory of Response, Chicago and London 1989, in particular pp. 436–437; Georges DidiHuberman: La peinture incarnée, Paris 1985, pp. 77–84; Georges Didi-Huberman: Ressemblance mythifiée et ressemblance oubliée chez Vasari: la légende du portrait ‘sur le vif’, in: Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome 106/1994, pp. 383–432, pp. 422–425; William J. T. Mitchell: What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago 2005; Marina Warner: Phantasmagoria. Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford 2006.

Bruno Latour: What is Iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image-wars?, in: id. and Peter Weibel (eds.): Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Cambridge 2002, pp. 14–37; id.: Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, suivi de Iconoclash, Paris 2009.

37

38

Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2010.

39 The reader may find this term laborious, but it is used here instead of ‘living image’, a term that was used in particular by David Freedberg in The Power of Images, but was criticized because it tends to blur the distinction between two different responses: one in which an image is perceived to be alive, the other in which a fusion occurs between an image and the living being it depicts. See the reviews of Freedberg’s book by John Nash: Art and Arousal, in: Art History 13/1990, pp. 566–570, and Arthur C. Danto: Review of Freedberg, The Power of Images, in: Art Bulletin 72/1990, pp. 341–342. For similar reasons, when we speak here of the animation of images, what is meant is the attribution of life, animation, or, to use Gell’s term, animacy by the viewer to the art work.

Frederike H. Jacobs: The Living Image in Renaissance Art, Cambridge and New York 2005; Michael W. Cole: Cellini’s Blood, in: Art Bulletin 81/1999, pp. 215–235.

40

41 On vividness as an issue in visual persuasion, and a bibliography of the wider context of verbal and visual rhetoric, see Caroline van Eck: Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 2007, Chapter III and V. 42

Aristotle, Poetics 1455a.

43

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VIII.iii.62.

44

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VI.ii.32; Longinus, Peri Hupsous, XV.1.

214 | Notes

45 Gorgias of Leontini: Encomio di Elena. Testo critico, introduzione e note a cura di Francesco Donadi (Translated and edited by Francesco Donadi), “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, Rome 1982, sections 10 and 13.

Longinus, Peri Hupsous 15.9. For a reading of living presence response as a sublime experience see Caroline van Eck: Living Statues: Living Presence Response, Agency and the Sublime, in: Art History 32/2010, pp. 642–659. 46

47

Longinus, Peri Hupsous 1.iv.

Ruth Webb: Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Ashgate, Farnham 2009, pp. 1–8.

48

49 Longinus, Peri Hupsous 15.1, quoted from Longinus: On the Sublime (Translated by William H. Fyfe and Revised by Donald A. Russell), Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1995. The first, rhetorical kind of phantasia is the Stoic variety: see Claude Imbert: Stoic Logic and Alexandrian Poetics, in: Michael Scholfield et al. (eds.): Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1980, pp. 182–216. 50

Webb 2009, p. 105.

51

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria VI.ii.31–2, quoted from . Cf Webb 2009, p. 88.

52 On ancient theories of imagination see Alessandra Manieri: L’Immagine poetica nella teoria degli Antichi. Phantasia ed enargeia, Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, Pisa and Rome 1998; Gerald Watson: Phantasia in Classical Thought, Galway University Press, Galway 1988; Stijn Bussels, The Animated Image, Akademie Verlag/Leiden University Press, Berlin/Leiden 2012, pp. 57–83. 53

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria VI.ii.29–30.

54 Plutarchus, Moralia 346f–348d. Cf. Longinus, On the Sublime XXV: ‘Again, if you introduce events in past time as happening at the present moment, the passage will be transformed from a narrative into a vivid actuality [enago¯nian pragma]’. 55 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria VI.ii.33: ‘non idem poeta penitus ultimi fati concepit imaginem, ut diceret: “Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos”’. The reference is to Virgil, Aeneid, X.782. 56 Nikolaos: Progymnasmata (Edited by Joseph Felten), Teubner, Leipzig 1913, p. 68; cf. Webb 2009, p. 104 and Ruth Webb: Mémoire et imagination: les limites de l’enargeia dans la théorie rhétorique grecque, in: Carlos Lévy and Laurent Pernot (eds.): Dire l’évidence (Philosophie et rhétorique antiques), L’Harmattan, Paris 1997, pp. 229–248, p. 231. 57 Charles Perrault: Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, tome III. En ce qui regarde la poésie, Coignard, Paris 1692, p. 7 ff., italics added.

That paintings and words move the public in similar ways without the need of the actual presence of the subject represented is attested in many ancient sources, the best known of which is Simonides’ comparison between painting and history, which both strive after enargeia; Lucian’s essay on how to write history draws a parallel not between poetry and painting, but between history writing and sculpture; finally Dio Chrysostomus’ XIIth Olympic Discourse has a long comparison between the vividness of Homer’s words and Phidias’ marble and ivory statue. 58

59 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria VIII.iii.64–5; XI.ii; Rhetorica ad Herennium III.xvi.28–xxiv.30; Cicero De Oratore II.354–60; Gorgias, Helena 17; cf. Webb 2009, pp. 105–112. 60

Aristotle, De Anima 427b21–4; On Memory and Recollection 450a30–32.

61

Plutarch, Moralia 759c.

62

Cf. Webb 1997, pp. 235–236.

215 | Notes

63

Aristotle, On Memory 450b20–451a2; 453a14–16.

64 Diogenes Laertius 7.49, quoted from Anthony A. Long and David N. Sedley: The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987, Chapter 33 D, by Webb 2009, p. 114. 65

Aristotle, De Anima 432a9–10).

66

Webb 1997, p. 248.

On Callistratus see Balbina Bäbler and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (eds.): Ars et Verba: die Kunstbeschreibungen des Kallistratos, K. G. Saur Verlag, Munich and Leipzig 2006; and Philippe Hoffmann and Paul-Louis Rinuy (eds.): Antiquités imaginaires. La référence antique dans l’art moderne de la Renaissance à nos jours, Presses de l’École normale supérieure, Paris 1996 (Études de littératures anciennes 7). Blaise de Vigenère: La description de Callistrate de quelques statues antiques tant de marbre comme de bronze (1602) (Introduction and notes by Aline Magnien), Éditions La Bibliothèque, Paris 2010.

67

68 Callistratus: On the Statue of Medea, in: Callistratus: Descriptions (Translated by Arthur Fairbanks), Harvard University Press, Cambridge/ Heinemann, London 1979, p. 419. 69

Callistratus: On the Statue of a Bacchante, p. 381.

70

Callistratus, On the Statue of a Bacchante, pp. 382–385, by translation modified by the author.

In this respect it is illuminating to compare Callistratus with the traditional ekphrastic response, e.g. in epigram IX.774 from the Anthologia Palatina, quoted by Fairbanks on p. 381: ‘The Bacchante is of Parian marble, but the sculptor gave life to the stone, and she springs up as if in a Bacchic fury. Scopas, thy god creating art has produced a great marvel, a Thyad, the frenzied slayer of goats.’

71

72 De Vigenère, La description de Callistrate de quelques statues antiques tant de marbre comme de bronze, Paris 1578, modern edition by Aline Magnien: B. de Vigenère, La description de Callistrate de quelques statues antiques tant de marbre comme de bronze. Introduction et notes par Aline Magnien, Editions La Bibliothèque, Paris 2010.

Étienne Binet: Essay des merveilles de nature et des plus nobles artifices, R. de Beauvais, Rouen 1621, p. 373.

73

74 Callistratus, La description de Callistrate de quelques statues antiques; for his reception in France see Aline Magnien: Callistrate et le discours sur la sculpture à l’âge moderne, in: Philippe Hoffmann and Paul-Louis Rinuy (eds.): Antiquités imaginaires. La référence antique dans l’art moderne de la Renaissance à nos jours, Presses de l’École normale supérieure, Paris 1996, (Études de littératures anciennes 7), pp. 21–41. 75 P. Cureau de la Chambre, Préface pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages du Cavalier Bernin, in : Tomaso Montanari: P. Cureau de la Chambre e la prima biografia di G. L. Bernini, Paragone 24–25/1999, pp. 103–132, p. 126. See also Frédéric Cousinié: De la morbidezza du Bernin au “sentiment de la chair” dans la sculpture française, in: Chantal Grell and Milovan Stanic (eds.): Le Bernin et l’Europe, Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris 2002 (Mythes Critique et Histoire 9), pp. 285–302.

Étienne-Maurice Falconet: Réflexions sur la sculpture, lues à l’Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, le 7 juin 1760, Prault, Paris 1761, p. 21–22.

76

Anne-Claude-Philippe, comte de Caylus: Vie d’Edme Bouchardon, sculpteur du roi, n.p., Paris 1762, p. 15. On the influence of Callistratus see Magnien 1996, pp. 23–41 and the introduction to her edition of Blaise de Vigenère’s translation.

77

78

Longinus, Peri Hupsous 15.9.

79

Gorgias, Encomium of Helena, sections 10 and 13.

216 | Notes

On both myths and their artistic representations the literature is vast. On Pygmalion, see most recently, Kenneth Gross: The Dream of the Moving Statue, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1992, and Victor Stoichita: The Pygmalion Effect: from Ovid to Hitchcock (Translated by A. Anderson), Chicago University Press, Chicago 2009; on Medusa see the exhibition catalogues: Werner Hofmann (ed.): Zauber der Medusa. Europäische Manierismen, Edition Löcker, Vienna 1987; Valentina Conticelli (ed.): Medusa, Il Mito, l’Antico e i Medici, Edizioni Polistampa, Florence 2008; Caterina Caneva (ed.): La Medusa del Caravaggio restaurata, Retablo, Rome 2002; and Elena Bianca Di Gioia (ed.): La Medusa di Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Studi e restauri, Campisano, Rome 2007.

80

81 For French Enlightenment versions of the Pygmalion myth see most recently Henri Coulet (ed.): Pygmalion des Lumières, Les Editions Desjonquères, Paris 1998 and Aurélia Gaillard: Le corps des statues. Le vivant et son simulacre à l’âge classique, Champion, Paris 2003.

Ovid, Metamorphoses X.252–58 (Translation Anthony S. Kline), http://etext.virginia.edu/ latin/ovid/trans/Ovhome.htm#askline, consulted on January 24, 2012: ‘[…] ars adeo latet arte sua. Miratur et haurit pectore Pygmalion simulati corporis ignes. Saepe manus operi temptantes admovet, an sit corpus, an illud ebur. Nec adhuc ebur esse fatetur. Oscula dat redditque putat loquiturque tenetque, et credit tactis digitos insidere membris et metuit, pressos veniat ne livor in artus’.

82

83

Ovid, Metamorphoses X. 275–6.

84 Denis Diderot: Essais sur la peinture. Salons de 1759, 1761, 1763 (Edited by Gita May and Jacques Chouillet), Hermann, Paris 1984, p. 250. The statue group is now in the Louvre. Falconet shared these Pygmalionesque ambitions. In his Réflexions sur la sculpture (read at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 7 June 1760, published in Amsterdam in 1761), he observed: ‘En se proposant l’imitation des surfaces du corps humain la sculpture ne doit pas s’en tenir à une ressemblance froide tel qu’aurait pu être l’homme avant le souffle vivifiant qui l’anima. Cette sorte de vérité quoique bien rendue, ne pourrait exciter par son exactitude qu’une louange aussi froide que la ressemblance; et l’âme du spectateur n’en seroit point émue. C’est la nature vivante, animée, passionnée, que la sculpture doit exprimer sur le marbre, la pierre, le bronze.’

Ovid, Metamorphoses V. 1–236, translated by Rolfe Humhries (Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1955), in particular lines 183: in hoc haesit signum de marmore gestu ; 197 : Incursus erat : tenuit vestigia tellus/inmotusque silex armataque mansit imago; 205 : Dum stupet Astyages naturam traxit eandem/marmoreoque manet vultus mirantis in ore ; and 211–214 : Simulacra videt diversa figuris/agnoscitque suos et nomine quemque vocatum/poscit opem, credensque parum sibi proxima tangit/corpora : marmor erant [italics added].

85

Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux: La Gorgone, Paradigme de creation d’images, in: Les Cahiers du Collège Iconique: Communications et Débats I, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paris 1993; English translation in Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.): The Medusa Reader, Routledge, London and New York 2003, pp. 262–267. See also the fundamental study by Jean-Pierre Vernant: La mort dans les yeux, in: Jean-Pierre Vernant: Oeuvres. Religions. Rationalités. Politique, Seuil, Paris 2007 [1985], vol. II, pp. 1477–1525.

86

87

Longinus, Peri Hupsous, XV.9.

88 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998. A good sample of reactions can be found in the contributions by Layton, Graburn, and Derlon & JeudyBallini in Michèle Coquet, Brigitte Derlon and Monique Jeudy-Ballini (eds.): Les cultures à l’œuvre. Rencontres en art, Biro éditeur/Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris 2005, and in Robert Osborne and Jeremy Tanner (eds.): Art’s Agency and Art History, Blackwell, Malden and Oxford 2007. Matthew Rampley’s Art History and Cultural Difference: Alfred Gell’s Anthropology of

217 | Notes

Art, in: Art History 28/2005, pp. 524–551, is the most detailed and thorough analysis of Gell’s importance for art history to date. See in particular pp. 529–542 for an overview and critique of Gell’s theory, and pp. 542–545 for a discussion of the methodological importance of Art and Agency for art history, in particular where the agency of images is concerned. 89

Gell 1998, pp. 6–7.

90 Alfred Gell: The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology, in: Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds.): Anthropology and Aesthetics, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992, pp. 40–63. p. 43.

Peter Stewart: The Image of the Roman Empire, in: Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (eds.): Presence. The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, Ashgate, Aldershot 2006, pp. 243–59.

91

92

Gell 1992, p. 4.

93 See for example Elsje van Kessel: Not Painting but Flesh. Venetian Thinking on the Lives of Painting in the Early Modern Doge’s Palace, in Caroline van Eck, Elsje van Kessel and Joris van Gastel (eds.): The Secret Lives of Art Works, Leiden University Press, Leiden 2014, pp. 95–116, for a development of Gell’s theory into a model for historical anthropological enquiry into the agency Venetian paintings of the 16th century exercised in particular contexts.

Pascal Boyer: What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations, in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2/1996, pp. 83–97.

94

One of the most uncanny recent instances of the animation of a work of art occurs in the Japanese film Airdoll by Kore-Eda Hirokazu (2009), in the episode where the animation of the lifesize plastic doll is shown by the transformation of her empty doll’s eyes into seeing human eyes. 95

96 According to Stewart Elliott Guthrie: Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1993, ‘anthropomorphism’ or the tendency to attribute human characteristics such as will, sentience or animation to inanimate objects, is a constant feature of human cognition. He accounts for this tendency on cognitive grounds: it is always safer to attribute the highest degree of organization to what we encounter. As Gell points out, there is a strong empirical basis to Guthrie’s theory, but it does not explain ‘what a thing must be or do to count as ‘animate’ or ‘anthropomorphic’ (Gell 1998, p. 121).

Johann Gottfried Herder: Reisetagebuch, in: Italienische Reise. Briefe und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1788–1789 (Edited, annotated and with an afterword by Albert Meier and Heather Holmer), Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1988, pp. 560–619, here pp. 602–603.

97

98 Denis Diderot: Pensées detachées sur la peinture, in: Denis Diderot: Œuvres esthétiques (Edited by Paul Vernière), Garnier, Paris 1994, p. 769. See also ibidem, pp. 767 and 769–770; the Salon of 1767 in Denis Diderot: Salons (Edited by Jean Adhémar and Jean Seznec), Oxford University Press, Oxford 1964–68, pp. 471–472; 519; 530–533; and 562–578, a very layered meditation on living presence, viewer involvement and theatricality occasioned by one of Vernet’s seascapes. On the latter see Bram van Oostveldt: Ut pictura hortus/ ut theatrum hortus: Theatricality and French picturesque garden theory, in: Art History 33/2010, pp. 364–78. 99

Gell 1998, pp. 96–122, in particular 118–120 and 121–122.

100 Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Blue Book, in: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigation’: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford 1969, p. 17.

On speech act theory as the foundation for understanding the animation and agency of images see Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, in particular pp. 101–58.

101

218 | Notes

102

Gell 1998, p. 133.

In a recent article in the London Review of Books (June 2007) Peter Campbell noted that museum visitors spend much more time looking at painters copying great masters than at the masterpieces themselves. Peter Campbell: At the National Gallery: Copying the Masters, in: London Review of Books 29/2007, p. 10.

103

104 On the Madonna of Impruneta near Florence see Richard C. Trexler: Public Life in Renaissance Florence, Academic Press, New York 1980, pp. 61–71; on the Auvergne Madonna see Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn: An Unsentimental View of Ritual in the Middle Ages, in: Journal of Ritual Studies 6/1992, pp. 63–85.

For a much more detailed argument to extend Gell’s theory to include the experience of the viewer in the art nexus see Caroline van Eck: Living Statues: Living Presence Response, Agency and the Sublime, in: Art History 32/2010, pp. 642–659.

105

106 On reactions to the rediscovery of the Laocoon see Leopold D. Ettlinger: Exemplum Doloris. Reflections on the Laocoon Group, in: Millard Meiss (ed.): De Artibus Opuscula XL. Essays in honour of Erwin Panofsky, New York University Press, New York 1961, pp. 121–126; Matthias Winner: Zum Nachleben des Laokoon in der Renaissance, in: Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 16/1974, pp. 83–121; Leonard Barkan: Unearthing the Past. Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1999, pp. 42–65 and Salvatore Settis: Laocoonte. Fama e stile, Donzelli, Rome 1999, from which all of the Laocoon poems quoted here are taken. Jacopo Sadoleto: De Laocoontis statua Jacobi Sadoleti Carmen: ‘vos rigidum lapidem vivis animare figuris/eximii et vivos spiranti in marmori sensus/inserere’, in: Settis 1999, p. 120.

Settis 1999, p. 122: ‘Saxea quam veros mentitur imago colores/et simulat verum Laocoon lapis! […] Hic marmor veri signa pavoris habet.’

107

Evangelista Maddaleni de’Capodiferro: Laocoon in Titi imperatoris domo Julio II Pontifici Maximo repertus: ‘Laocoon ego sum (…) . Dices, me aspicias, veros lapidi esse dolores,/et natis haud fictum exitium atque metum./ (…) / Si mortem atque metum saxo vivumque dolorem/qui dederunt, possent vocem animamque dare,/abnuerent: mirum magis est sine voce animaque/niti, ferre, queri, flere, timere, mori’, quoted from Settis 1999, p. 126.

108

Antonio Tebaldi, from his Rime (quoted from Settis 1999, p. 132): ‘Laocoonte son, sì expresso e vivo/che, se de la materia tu non sei/onde son io formato e figli mei,/farai de gli occhi un doloroso rivo.’

109

Jacopo Sadoleto: De Laocoontis statua, quoted from Settis 1999, p. 118: ‘Quid primum (…) loquar? (…)/ Vulneraque et veros, saxo moriente, dolores?/Horret ad haec animus, mutaque ab imagine pulsat/Pectora non parvo pietas commixta tremori.’ The translation is by Michael Baxandall: Jacopo Sadoleto’s Laocoon, in: Michael Baxandall: Words for Pictures. Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2003, p. 98.

110

Settis 1999, p. 126: ‘Dices, me aspicias, veros lapidi esse dolores,/et natis haud fictum exitium atque metum./Innumeros nexus spirasque avelle draconum,/spectator, nisi te terret uterque draco.’

111

112 Bartolomeo Leonico Tomeo: Epigrammi, in: Settis 1999, p. 136: ‘Dum meritas patitur violati numinis iras/natorumque gemit funera Laocoon/ut foret aeterni monumentum immane doloris/mortuus et duro viveret in lapide/exemplum, medio de pectore Gorgone Pallas/ora ex adverso terra inimica petit./Protinus in rigidum venerunt corpora saxum/atque habitus illis qui fuit ante manet.’

Giorgio Vasari: Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori (Edited by Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi), Sansoni, Florence 1967 (originally published in 1568), vol. III pp. 590–592: Dumque opere in facto defigit lumina pictor/Intentus nimium palluit et moritur./Viva igitur sum mors non morta mortis imago […].

113

219 | Notes

114 The Latin is ambiguous. I have translated ‘fere’as ‘every time’, not as ‘almost’, which it can mean as well, and construed the second line as an accusativus-cum-infinitivo; but many other translations have been offered, which mainly take ‘opus’ as the subject of ‘poterat’. Charles Brink was the first to observe that the expression ‘turgentia lumina’ could be based on Propertius, Elegies Book I. xxi, line 3: ‘quid nostro gemitu turgentia lumina torques?’ (and not 21. 1. 3 as Goffen writes on p. 300 note 56); cf. George Robertson: Giovanni Bellini, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1968, p. 55 note 1. For the meaning of the lines by Propertius see his Elegies Book I (Edited by William Anthony Camps), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1961, pp. 98–99. Although Propertius’ Elegies were not very widely read author at the time, Goffen has observed that they did circulate in manuscript in Venice before the first printed edition of 1472. 115 For this Pietà, her place in Bellini’s oeuvre and in Venetian painting of the 15th century see Daniel Arasse: Giovanni Bellini et les limites de la mimésis: la Pietà de la Brera, in: Thomas Gaehtgens (ed.): Künstlerischer Austausch. Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte Berlin 15–20 Juli 1992, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1993, pp. 503–509; Rona Goffen: Giovanni Bellini, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1989, pp. 67–89; Hans Belting: Giovanni Bellini. Pietà, Ikone und Bilderzahlung in der venezianischen Malerei, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1985, in particular pp. 28–36. For painters’ painted signatures see Lorna Matthew: The Painter’s Presence: Signature in Venetian Renaissance Pictures, in: Art Bulletin 80/1998, pp. 616–648. 116 Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura di M. Lodovico Dolce, intitolato L’Aretino, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, Venice 1557 [modern reprint in Mark Roskill: Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto University Press, Toronto 2000, first edition 1968, p. 301, fol. 41r.: ‘[…] bisogna, che le figure movano gli animi de’ riguardanti, alcune turbandogli, altre rallegrandogli, altre sospingendogli a pietà, & altre a sdegno, secondo la qualità della historia. Altrimenti reputi il Pittore di non haver fatto nulla: perché questo è il condimento di tutte le sue virtù: come aviene parimente al Poeta, all’Historico, & all’Oratore: che se le cose scritte o recitate mancano di questa forza, mancano elle ancora di spirito e di vita.’ For a few instances of this view, which was not held exclusively by Counter-Reformation authors, but received the most explicit formulation in their work: Sperone Speroni, Della Rhetorica, Dialoghi, Venice 1596, p. 124 verso; Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura di M. Lodovico Dolce, intitolato L’Aretino, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, Venice 1557, fol. 19v–20r; Giovanni Andrea Gilio: Due dialoghi nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa l’istori, Andrea Gioioso, Camerino 1564, modern reprint in Paola Barocchi: Trattati d’Arte, Laterza, Bari 1962, vol. II, pp. 1–115, p. 27 and p. 77: ‘anco le pitture edificano e scandellezzano’; Gabriele Paleotti: Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (Edited by Stefano della Torre, Gian Franco Freguglia and Carlo Cheni), Libreria editrice vaticana, Città del Vaticano 2002 (originally published by Alessandro Benacci, Bologna 1582), p. 215: the aim of the painter of Christian images was to ‘move people to the right obedience and submission to God, to penitence or to voluntary grief, to charity, or to despise the world, or other similar virtues which are all means by which man can be united with God. That is the true and chief aim of such representations.’ Giovanni Battista Armenini: De’ veri precetti della pittura di M. Gio[vanni] Battista Armenini da Faenza libri tre, Francesco Tebaldini, Ravenna 1587, pp. 151–152; Johannes Molanus: De Historia ss. [sanctarum] imagimum et picturarum pro vero earum usu contra abusus libri IV, Jean Bogard, Louvain 1594, pp. 183–184. Cf. Marcia Hall: After Raphael. Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1999, p. 268 about the use made by the Counter-Reformation of classical rhetoric and humanist teaching to execute its programme of religious reform. 117

Arasse 1993, pp. 503–509.

118

On the attribution and dating see most recently De Gioia 2007.

Irving Lavin: Bernini’s Medusa: An Awful Pun, in: Elena Bianca Di Gioia (ed.): La Medusa di Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Studi e restauri, Campisano, Rome 2007, pp. 120–134.

119

220 | Notes

Agostino Mascardi: Discorsi morali su la tavola di Cebete Tebano, Girolamo Pelagallo, Venice 1627, p. 321: ‘Cavalier Bernino, […] nell’ età sua giovanile, con lo scarpello sà dar senso di vita alle pietre meglio, che non fece co’l canto favoloso Anfione’.

120

Tommaso Stigliani: Il Canzoniero, Bartolomeo Zanetti and Giovanni Manelfi, Rome 1623, p. 445: ‘Cedano, o buon Lorenzo, al tuo scalpello / Di Prometeo la face, / E’l teschio di Medusa. / La face in avvivar corpi insensati, / E’l teschio in impetrir membri animati. / Poscia ch’ogni tua statua è sì vivace, / Ed io resto sì stupido in mirarla, / Ch’ella par l’animato, io l’impetrito. / Ella rassembra il vivo, io lo scolpito.’ I am much indebted to Joris van Gastel for these passages. A more extended discussion of them can be found in his Il Marmo Spirante, Akademie Verlag, Berlin/Leiden University Press, Leiden 2013, Chapter VII: Metamorphosis.

121

Giambattista Marino: Le Statue I. 272, quoted in Lavin 2007, p. 122 ff.: Non so se mi scolpò scarpel mortale/o specchiando me stessa in chiara vetro/la propria vita mia mi fece tale. […]Ancora viva si mira/Medusa in viva pietra/e chi gli occhi in lui gira/pur di stupore impètra./Saggio scultor, tu cosi ‘l marmo avivi/che son di marmo a lato al marmo i vivi’.

122

Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Lévesque: Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, Prault, Paris 1792, vol. I, p. 324, s.v. ‘Chairs’.

123

Hence much of the criticism of Gell’s work, summarized in Robert Layton’s observation that ‘Gell makes a good case for art as agency, but not for agency of art’ [italics added], is not relevant in the context of this book, and tends to obscure the major breakthrough that his work offers to understand reactions to art that do not fit Western aesthetic appreciation. Cf. Robert H. Layton: Structure and Agency in Art, in: Michèle Coquet, Brigitte Derlon and Monique Jeudy-Ballini (eds.): Les cultures à l’œuvre. Rencontres en art, Biro éditeur/Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris 2005, pp. 29–46, p. 45.

124

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Blue Book, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigation’: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford 1969, p. 17.

125

126 See Maarten Delbeke: The Art of Religion. Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome, Ashgate, Aldershot 2012, in particular pp. 38–41; on the relations between Bernini and Pallavicino see also Tomaso Montanari: Gian Lorenzo Bernini e Sforza Pallavicino, in: Prospettiva 87–88/1997, pp. 42–68, and Tomaso Montanari: Sulla Fortuna Poetica di Bernini, in: Studi Secenteschi 38/1998, pp. 129–165.

Sforza Pallavicino: Del bene. Libri quattro, Heirs of Francesco Corbelletti, Rome 1644, vol. III, ch. 49, p. 526b: ‘L’uno dunque di questi tre modi si chiama prima apprensione perciocchè apprende quasi l’oggetto fra le sue mani, senza però autenticarlo per vero nè riprovarlo per falso’. On Pallavicino’s medieval epistemological sources see also Eraldo Bellini: Scritture letteraria e scrittura filosofica in Sforza Pallavicino, in: Claudio Scarpati and Eraldo Bellini (eds.): Il vero ed il falso dei Poeti. Tasso, Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori, Sacro Cuore, Milan 1990, pp. 75–150. Pallavicino’s major sources are Aristotle: De Anima 630a26–28; Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica I quaestio 85d5, in Roberto Busa (ed.), Opera Omnia, Fromann Holzboog, Bad-Canstatt 1980; Fr. Suárez: Commentarium una cum quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis De Anima III.vi, in Salvador Castellote Cubells (ed.), Commentarium una cum quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis De Anima and Fr. Suárez: Disputationes Metaphysicae, in: C. Berton (ed.), Opera Omnia, Paris 1866–1878, vols. XXV and XXVI.

127

Sforza Pallavicino: Del bene. Libri quattro, Heirs of Francesco Corbelletti, Rome 1644, vol. III, ch. 49, p. 526b : ‘Il secondo modo con cui conosciamo ha nome giudicio, perchè come il giudice dal tribunale, così egli proferisce sentenza intorno alla verità o falsità dell’oggetto. E benchè il far ciò sia comune a tutti i conoscimenti che non sono prima apprensione, tuttavia, in quanto questa seconda specie distinguesi dalla terza, contien solo que’giudicj non che da noi son formati per lume recatoci da un altro precedente giudicio, ma che alla sola apparenza dell’obbietto sorgono in noi: come allora ch’io affermo di esser vivo, di muovermi, che il tutto è maggior della parte’.

128

221 | Notes

On Stoic epistemology see Michael Frede: Stoic Epistemology, in: Keimpe Algra et al. (eds.): The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 2005, pp. 259–322, in particular pp. 301–302. See also the discussion of Stoic accounts of living presence response in Stijn Bussels: The Animated Image. Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power, Akademie Verlag, Berlin/Leiden University Press, Leiden 2012, pp. 66–71.

129

Aristotle, De Anima III.7, 431a vv, translation quoted from Richard McKeon (ed.): Introduction to Aristotle, Chicago University Press, Chicago and London 1973; on the importance of this treatise see for instance Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.): Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992; for its impact on artistic theory see the introduction to Claire J. Farago: Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone. A Critical Interpretation and a New Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbinas, Brill, Leiden 1992. 130

131

Cicero, Academica I.41

Cf. Gary Hatfield: The cognitive faculties (Published within part VI: The Understanding), in: Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.): The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1998, vol. 2, pp. 951–1002, in particular pp. 956–957 for an overview of the persistence of this Aristotelian/Stoic tripartite model of knowledge. 132

133 Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Doctrines of the Philosophers, 7.177; see also Bussels 2012, pp. 68–70. 134 Pallavicino 1644, pp. 425–426; Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae XIX.i; Cf also Aristotle, De Anima 427b. 135 Sforza Pallavicino: Trattato dello Stile e del Dialogo del padre Sforza Pallavicino, Mascardi, Rome 1662 (quoted after the edition published by Torregiani & C., Reggio Emilia 1824), Chapter 9, p. 75: ‘Dall’altra parte il fin del Poeta è ancora il recar piacere con isvegliar immaginazioni vive e maravigliose: ma l’immaginazione sempre è più viva quando maggior numero di proprietà nell’oggetto immaginato ci si rappresenta […]’. 136 Aristotle, De anima 427b18–25: ‘For imagining lies within our own power whenever we wish […]. Furthermore, when we think something to be fearful or threatening, emotion is immediately produced […]; but when we merely imagine we remain as unaffected as persons who are looking at a painting of some dreadful or encouraging scene’. 137 Pallavicino 1644, p. 425: Quanto più vivace è la cognizione, tanto è ella più perfetta, più dilettevole, e più feritrice dell’apetito. […] Ora quanto più simili in ogni minutissima circostanza son le favole della poesia, ò le figure del pennello all’oggetto vero, ed altre volte sperimentato da chi ode l’une, è mira l’altre, con tanto maggior efficacia destano elle que’mobili simolacri che ne giacevano dispersi per le varie stanze della memoria. E quindi risulta e più vivace l’apprensione e più fervida la passione. All’accendimento di questo non richiedesi, come voi presupponeste, che si creda la verità dell’oggetto.’ 138

Cf. Delbeke 2012, pp. 40–41.

139 On the development of Greek and Roman theories of memory see Mary Carruthers: The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1990, Chapters 1 and 2; for their role in medieval culture see Mary Carruthers: The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1998; on the development of rhetorical memory theory in the early modern period see Lina Bolzoni and Pietro Corsi (eds.): La Cultura della Memoria, Il Mulino, Bologna 1992, and Lina Bolzoni: La Stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa, Einaudi, Turin 1995. 140

Aristotle: On Memory and Reminiscence, 450a13–22.

222 | Notes

141 See for instance Epicurus: Epistola ad Herodotum 50–51; Elizabeth Asmis: Epicurean epistemology, in: Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld and Malcolme Schofield (eds.): The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, pp. 260–293; Alessandra Manieri: L’Immagine poetica nella teoria degli Antichi. Phantasia ed enargeia, Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, Pisa and Rome 1998, pp. 13–39, and Bussels 2012, pp. 66–71.

Aristotle: 450b20–25, translation David Bloch: Aristotle on Memory and Recollection. Text, Translation, Interpretation and Reception in Western Scholasticism, Brill, Leiden 2007, p. 33.

142 143

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II.19.100a1–5; cf. Carruthers 1990, pp. 60–68.

144 Carruthers 1998, p. 14. The role of emotion in imprinting memories has been confirmed by recent psychological and neurological research, for instance by Antanio Damasio: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Grosset/Putnam, New York 1994. 145 Cf. Claude Imbert: Stoic Logic and Alexandrian Poetics, in: Michael Scholfield et al. (eds.): Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1980, pp. 182–216, in particular pp. 182–185. 146

Aristotle: On Memory and Recollection 449b4.

Giovanni Ciampoli: Prose, Manelfo Manelfi, Rome 1649, Discorso XIII, sections 6 and 7, pp. 347–348: ‘Non ha la memoria una galeria muta di pitture variabili: non vi si stampano, non vi si fissano. E una popolatione di simolacri viventi, vi habitano strepitosi, vi tumultano indomiti. […] Nel primo [i.e., in the conscious theatre of the mind] ingresso la mente vigilante gli vede assai quieti; arrivano poi nuove truppe di fantasmi forestieri; gli antecedenti, ricevuta la loro udienza, si ritirano nelle celle della memoria, nelle quali si riposano non veduti, aspettando il tempo d’esser riconduti alle loro operationi nel teatro. Ma nel sonno, quando le guardie dormono, prorompono in ogni licenza. Che fracasso fanno allora senza il consenso questi fantasmi incustoditi dentro alle nostre teste? cantano, sospirano, danzano, guerreggiano, depredano gli altari, violano gli dèi, senza differenza, senza legge, temerari, sregolati, furibondi e superando con le invenzioni del sogno le opere della natura, ci fanno vedere un mondo impazzito d’impossibili sproporzionati’, quoted in Bolzoni 1995, pp. 266–267. 147

148 Johannes Chrysostomus: Discourse on Blessed Babylas, in: St John Chrysostom: Apologist (Translated by Margaret A. Schatkin), The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C. 1985 (Fathers of the Church 73), pp. 75–152; quoted in Carruthers 1998, p. 46. 149

On Pallavicino’s fortuna critica see Delbeke 2012 (2), pp. 16–17 and 203–206.

Homer: Iliad, Book XVIII, ll462–617. On this description and its influence on Western art and poetry see most recently Anne-Marie Lecoq: Le bouclier d’Achille. Un tableau qui bouge, Gallimard, Paris 2010. 150

151 James Joyce: Ulysses, Random House, New York 1986, pp. 144–145; on the literary tradition of the statue coming alive see Kenneth Gross: The Dream of the Moving Statue, Pennsylvania University Press, University Park 2006.

Virgil: The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis (Translated by John Dryden), Jacob Tonson, London 1697, Book I lines 453–60, 463–68: ‘Namque sub ingenti lustrat dum singula templo, reginam opperiens, dum, quae fortuna sit urbi, artificumque manus inter se operumque laborem miratur, videt Iliacas ex ordine pugnas, bellaque iam fama totum volgata per orbem, Atridas, Priamumque, et saevum ambobus Achillem. Constitit, et lacrimans, ‘Quis iam locus’ inquit ‘Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? […] Sic ait, atque animum pictura pascit inani,

152

223 | Notes

multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine voltum. Namque videbat, uti bellantes Pergama circum hac fugerent Graii, premeret Troiana iuventus, hac Phryges, instaret curru cristatus Achilles’. On the compositional device of the internal spectator in art and film see Richard Wollheim: Painting as an Art, Thames and Hudson, London 1992, pp. 102–140.

153

154 The most recent analysis of this episode is by Maarten Delbeke: “Oprar sempre come in teatro”. The Rome of Alexander VII as the Theatre of Papal Self-Representation, in: Art History 33/2010: pp. 352–363; and Maarten Delbeke: The Art of Religion. Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 98–112. 155 See Sforza Pallavicino: Della vita di Alessandro VII libri cinque. Opera inedita del P. Sforza Pallavicino della Compagnia di Gesù, Tipografia dei fratelli Giachetti, Prato 1839–40, vol. 2, book 4, p. 167, quoted in Maarten Delbeke (2): The Art of Religion. Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome, Ashgate, Aldershot 2012, p. 126, note 17.

On the Capitoline statues, see Ernst Steinmann: Die Statuen der Päpste auf dem Kapitol, in: Miscellanea Francesco Ehrle. Scritti di storia e di paleografia, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, Città del Vaticano 1924, vol. 2, pp. 480–503 (Studi e testi 36); Monika Butzek: Die Kommunalen Repräsentationsstatuen der Päpste des 16. Jahrhunderts in Bologna, Perugia und Rom, Bock und Herchen, Bad Honnef 1978; Tilmann Buddensieg: Zum Statuenprogramm im Kapitolsplan Pauls III, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 32/1969, pp. 177–228; Tilmann Buddensieg: Die Statuenstiftung Sixtus’ IV. im Jahre 1471: von den heidnischen Götzenbildern am Lateran zu den Ruhmeszeichen des römischen Volkes auf dem Kapitol, in: Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20/1983, pp. 33–73.

156

157 The inscription and medal are reproduced in Delbeke 2012 (2), pp. 99–100; Giovanni Andrea Borboni: Delle Statue, Giacomo Fei, Rome 1661. On Borboni see most recently Maarten Delbeke: Bernini and the Measure of Greatness. The bust of Louis XIV and its pedestal seen by La Chambre, Lemée and Bouhours, in: Claudia Lehmann and Karen Lloyd (eds.): Der späte Bernini, Akademie Verlag, Berlin (forthcoming); Kaspar Zollikofer: Berninis Grabmal für Alexander VII. Fiktion und Reprësentation, Wernerse Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 1994, pp. 82–93; Elisabetta Neri: Bernini, Michelangelo e il Delle statue di Giovanni Andrea Borboni, in: Prospettiva 113–114/2004, pp. 32–47. The connections between sculpture and idolatry had already been studied in the Swedish antiquarian Figrelius’ De statuis illustrium romanorum liber singularis, Johannis Janssonius, Stockholm 1656, pp. 11–24, an important source for Borboni et Lemée, but consisting largely of a rehearsal of Greek and Roman passages on sculpture and the condemnations of idolatry by the Church Fathers; by Gabriele Paleotti: Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (Edited by Stefano della Torre, Gian Franco Freguglia and Carlo Cheni), Libreria editrice vaticana, Città del Vaticano 2002 (originally published by Alessandro Benacci, Bologna 1582), pp. 138–149; and by Giovanni Marangoni: Delle cose gentilesche, e profane trasportate ad uso, e adornamento delle chiese, Pagliarini, Rome 1744; but also by Catholic historiographers such as Michelangelo Lualdi: Argomento, in: Michelangelo Lualdi: L’origine della christiana religione nell’Occidente. Istoria ecclesiastica, Francesco Moneta, Rome 1650. Anne Betty Weinshenker: Idolatry and Sculpture in Ancien Régime France, in: Eighteenth-Century Studies 38/2005, pp. 485– 507 has defined this issue as the ‘sculpture-idolatry nexus’. 158 Cf. the last chapter of Borboni’s book: Della Virtù di ricusare l’honore delle Statue, in: Borboni 1661, pp. 327–345. 159 A more extensive version of this chapter is published in Caroline van Eck, François Lemée et la statue de Louis XIV sur la Place des Victoires: les débuts d’une réflexion ethnographique et esthétique sur le fétichisme, Centre Allemand d’histoire de l’art/Maison des sciences de l’Homme, Paris 2013. 160 Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint Simon: Mémoires. Additions au Journal de Dangeau (Edited by Yves Coirault), Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris 1983–87, vol. V: 1714–1716, p. 486, quoted by Hendrik Ziegler: Le demi-dieu des païens. La critique contemporaine de la statue pédestre de Louis

224 | Notes

XIV, in: Isabelle Dubois, Alexandre Gady and Hendrik Ziegler (eds.): Place des Victoires. Histoire, architecture, société, Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris 2003, pp. 49–64, p. 305, note 15. 161 François-Timoléon de Choisy: Mémoires, ed. G. Mongrédien, Paris 1966 (originally published by Librairie des bibliophiles, Paris 1888), p. 603. 162 Anon.: Sur la Statue du Roy élevée à la Place des Victoires en 1686, Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères, Mémoires et documents, France, vol. no 978, fol. 343–345, reprinted in Dubois, Gady and Ziegler 2003, p. 345. See also the article by Hendrik Ziegler in the same volume: Le demi-dieu des païens, in: Dubois, Gady and Ziegler 2003, pp. 49–65.

On the reactions of the nations thus represented see Hendrik Ziegler: Der Sonnenkönig und seine Feinde. Die Bildpropaganda Ludwigs XIV. in der Kritik, Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2010.

163

164

Jules Michelet: Histoire de France, A. Lacroix et Cie., Paris 1874–76, vol. 13, pp. 371–372.

165 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure: Histoire physique, civile et morale de Paris, depuis les premiers temps historiques jusqu’à nos jours; contenant, par ordre chronologique, la description des accroissements de cette ville, Guillaume et compagnie, Paris 1829, vol. II, p. 303. 166

Michelet 1874–76, t. 13, pp. 371–372.

Arthur-Michel de Boislisle: La Place des Victoires et la Place Vendôme. Notices historiques sur les monuments élevés à la gloire de Louis XIV, in: Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-deFrance 15/1888–1889, pp. 1–93. The circumstances of the commission, the history of the design and its execution, as well as the architectural and urban interventions associated with the statue group, have been very well documented, first by Boislisle in 1889 in the Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris, and more recently by Isabelle Dubois, Alexandre Gady and Hendrik Ziegler in the beautiful volume devoted to the Place des Victoires published on the occasion of the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art’s opening on the Place des Victoires (Dubois, Gady and Ziegler 2003). 167

168

Mercure Galant of 1681, pp. 252–72; quoted in Boislisle 1888–1889, p. 34.

169 On La Feuillade see the article by Bettina B. Cenerelli: Le courtisan et le roi. François, duc de la Feuillade, in: Dubois, Gady and Ziegler 2003, pp. 37–47. 170

Boislisle 1888–1889, p. 55.

171

De Choisy 1966, p. 130.

On the cult of Louis see Orest Ranum: The Court and Capital of Louis XIV: Some Definitions and Reflections, in: John C. Rule (ed.): Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship, Ohio State University Press, Columbus 1969, pp. 265–285; Peter Burke: The Fabrication of Louis XIV, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1992; and Louis Marin: Le portrait du roi, Minuit, Paris 1991. On the use of the arts as royal propaganda see most recently see Allan Ellenius et al. (eds.): Iconographie, propagande et légitimation, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2001; Gérard Sabatier: Le Prince et les arts: stratégie figuratives de la monarchie française, de la Renaissance aux Lumières, Champ Vallon, Seyssel 2010, pp. 348–379 and 438–459.

172

173 Robert Challe: Mémoires (Edited by Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques Popin), Droz, Genève 1996, p. 41. For other reactions see Neil R. Johnson: Louis XIV and the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 1978 (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 172) and Anne Betty Weinshenker: A God or a Bench. Sculpture as a Problematic Art during the Ancien Régime, Peter Lang, Bern 2008, pp. 138–144. On the reactions of the nations represented as slaves see Ziegler 2010.

François Lemée: Traité des statues, Arnould Seneuze, Paris 1688. A new critical and annotated edition by was published in 2012: François Lemée: Traité des statues (Edited by Hendrik Ziegler and Diane Bodart), Verlag- und Datenbank für die Geisteswissenschaften, Weimar 2012.

174

175

Lemée 1688, p. 418.

225 | Notes

176 Lemée 1688, p. 427: ‘En effet Aristote nous apprend [in margine: Lib. 2 Physic 6] que les choses inanimées, les animaux, & les enfans, sont capables de bonheur ou de malheur, par rapport à autrui. C’est pour cela, ajoute ce Philosophe, que Protarchus disoit que les pierres des Autels sont heureuses, parce qu’elles reçoivent des honneurs; & c’est sans doute aussi la raison, pourquoi les Cours complimentent un fils de France dans son berceau, qu’on est nuë tête devant le Buffet du Roi, & qu’on se tient avec le même respect dans sa chambre en presence de son portrait.’ In fact, in Physics II.6, 197b Aristotle examined the relations between fortune, chance and morality; in that context he cited as eamples inanimate objects, children, or the lower animals, who, by their nature are incapable of doing anything by chance because they are equally incapable of deliberate action. They can only have luck in a metaphorical sense, ‘as Protarchus said, who said that the stones of altarts are happy because they are honoured, whereas other stones are trodden under the feet of passers-by’. 177

Lemée 1688, p. 424.

François Raguenet: Roma Illustrata, Dan Browne and S. Chapman, London 1723, pp. 100–101: ‘[…] the very life of Death […]. One would no more think them statues, but real Persons […] one may feel the whole History as if it passed in one Presence. […] if one considers that a Statuary can give Life and Motion to Stone, out of which he makes a Man, who by consequence must be moving and animated Figures […] one may think it much more easy to make a Stone appear a Man full of Life, than to make a Man to appear at the same time both a real Man and a real Stone’.

178

Frédéric Cousinié: De la morbidezza du Bernin au “sentiment de la chair” dans la sculpture française, in: Chantal Grell and Milovan Stanic (eds.): Le Bernin et l’Europe, Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris 2002 (Mythes Critique et Histoire 9), pp. 285–302 quotes many instances of this view. 179

180

Lemée 1688, pp. 8–9.

Lemée 1688, pp. 8–9 and 11: ‘La Statuë est définie, la représentation d’un corps vivant; c’est à dire de l’homme ou de la brute; elle est un être permanent qui subsiste par soy même, & dépend absolument de l’art comme de sa cause naturelle. Le simulacre à deux étymologies selon les Théologiens, qui veulent après Isidore qu’il soit dérivé tantost de similitude, & tantost de simulation; Les Simulacres & les Statuës font voir ce qu’ils représentent entier & de tous côtez, imitant mieux en cela la nature que les signes, qui ne font que des figures à demie bosse, ou extrêmement au dessous de la grandeur naturelle. […] Les meilleurs auteurs Grecs & Latins n’ont jamais appellé proprement & indifferemment toutes sortes d’images; & il ne se trouvera pas qu’on l’ait attribué [le terme de ‘idole’] à une simple Statuë honoraire, ou à celle non consacrée d’une chose réelle & subsistante.’ 181

Lemée 1688, p. 387: ‘Peut-on après cela ne pas approuver avec Dion Chrisostome la complaisance qu’on a toûjours eû pour les statuës? Et les peuples qui les ont multipliées chez eux, n’avoient-ils pas raison; puisqu’outre la joye qu’on ressent de voir en elles des personnes aimées, & principalement, dit Saint Cyrille d’Alexandrie, des Princes bienfaisans; y a-t-il rien de pareil pour rappeller la memoire des Illustres, & pour en avoir sans cesse devant les yeux les circonstances de la vie, qui les ont rendu celebres?’ Cf. Dio Chrysostomus, XIIth Olympian Discourse, §§ 60–61, and Alberti, De pictura Book III, § 1.

182

On theological debates about idolatry see Francis Schmidt: La discussion sur l’origine de l’idolâtrie au xviie et xviiie siècles, in: Roland Recht: L’Idolâtrie (Rencontres de l’Ecole du Louvre), La Documentation française, Paris 1990, pp. 53–69, in particular p. 56. Cf. also Lemée 1688, pp. 365–366: ‘[…] les statues ont quelquefois emprunté des bouches etrangeres pour répondre à ce qu’on leur demandoit. Le Mercure d’Acaie n’avoit point d’autre moien pour s’expliquer, car quand on avoit allumé ses lampes & qu’on luy avoit mis une piece de monoie dans la main droite, c’etoit assez de luy déclarer sa demande à l’oreille, & de boucher aussitôt les siennes jusqu’à ce que l’on fût chez soy, où les premiers bruits & les premieres paroles qu’on entendoit, se prenoient ordinairement pour une réponse infaillible de l’Oracle.’ 183

226 | Notes

[p. 368:] ‘Comme un Capitaine [assiégeoit Alexandrie], il songea la nuit de devant sa prise que quelqu’un s’ approchant de son lit luy disoit, passe outre Luculle […] Antolicus vient, & veut parler à toy. Surpris à son réveil de ce songe, il n’eut pas plutôt pris la Ville, qu’en poursuivant fuiards, il trouva une très belle statuë sur le bord de la Mer, qu’ils n’avoient pû emporter, & qu’on luy dit être celle d’Antolicus & l’un des chef-d’œuvres de Stenis.’ On Picart see Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt: The Book that Changed Europe. Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 2010, in particular pp. 211–247.

184

185

Hunt et al. 2010, p. 82.

186

Soupirs de la France esclave, n.p., Paris 1689, p. 18.

Inventaire des merveilles du monde rencontrées dans la palais du Cardinal Mazarin, Rolin de la Haye, Paris 1649. 187

Anonymus: Inventaire des merveilles du monde rencontrées dans le palais du cardinal Mazarin, Rolin de la Haye, Paris 1649, p. 4.

188

189

Anon. 1649, p. 5.

190 Mélange curieux des meilleures pieces attribuées à Monsieur de Saint-Evremond (Paris 1740), vol. 2, p. 284, quoted by Katherine Ibbett: Who makes the statue speak? Louis XIV and the plainte des statues, in: Word and Image 24/2008, pp. 427–438, p. 427; longer fragments are reprinted in Patrick Michel (ed.): Mazarin, prince des collectionneurs. Les collections et l’ameublement du Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661), histoire et analyse, Réunion des Musées nationaux, Paris 1999, pp. 320–322 and appendix B, pp. 570–572. 191

Ibbett 2008; Weinshenker 2005.

192 The Plainte is reproduced in Patrick Michel (ed.): Mazarin, prince des collectionneurs. Les collections et l’ameublement du Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661), histoire et analyse, Réunion des Musées nationaux, Paris 1999, here p. 570. 193

Michel 1999, p. 571.

194

Michel 1999, p. 572.

Maarten Delbeke: Elevated Twins and the vicious Sublime. Gianlorenzo Bernini and Louis XIV, in: Caroline van Eck, Stijn Bussels, and Maarten Delbeke (eds.): Translations of the Sublime, Brill, Leiden 2012, pp. 117–138.

195

Paul Fréart de Chantelou: Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France (Edited by Milovan Stanic), Macula/L’Insulaire, Paris 2001 (originally published by Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1885), p. 189: ‘Entrò il Bernino in un pensier’ profondo/Per far al Regal Busto un bel sostegno,/E disse (non trovandone alcun degno):/Picciola basa a tal Monarca è il mondo’.

196

Chantelou 2001, p. 203: Risposta./Del Cavalier Bernino./Mai mi sovenne quel pensier’profondo:/Per far di Re sì grande appoggio degno,/Van’sarebbe il pensier’; che di sostegno/Non è mestier’a chi sostiene il mondo’. On the genesis of the bust and its reception see Rudolf Wittkower: Bernin, le sculpteur du baroque romain (Translated by Dominique Lablanche), Phaidon, Paris 2005, cat. no. 70; Philipp Zitzlsperger: Die globale Unendlichkeit: Berninis Sockelplanung für seine Porträtbüste Ludwigs XIV, in: Horst Bredekamp and Pablo Schneider (eds.): Visuelle Argumentationen: die Mysterien der Repräsentation und die Berechenbarkeit der Welt, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 2006, pp. 61–78; Philipp Zitzlsperger: Kontroversen um Berninis Königsbüste, in: Pablo Schneider and Philipp Zitzlsperger (eds.): Bernini in Paris: das Tagebuch des Paul Fréart de Chantelou über den Aufenthalt Gianlorenzo Berninis am Hof Ludwigs XIV, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2006, pp. 397–341. 197

198

Lemée 1688, p. 6.

227 | Notes

199 Cf. the last chapter of Borboni’s book, Della Virtù di ricusare l’honore delle Statue, in: Borboni 1661, pp. 327–345, pp. 327 ff. 200 Lemée 1688, p. 459: ‘Mais pour un marbre dont [Louis XVI] se prive, combien peut-on dire qu’il se consacre de statuës vivantes; car y a-t-il un homme qui ne porte dans son coeur d’une manière bien plus noble l’image de ce Prince magnanime (in the margin: Tot habebis statuas, quot orbem habitant homines & habitabunt St Chrisostomus hom. 20 tom. 5 vid. Dio Cass. l. 52 [‘You will have as many statues as there live, and will live, men on the earth]).’

P. Cureau de la Chambre : Eloge de M. le Cavalier Bernin, in : Journal des Sçavans 24 February 1681; P. Cureau de la Chambre, Préface pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages du Cavalier Bernin, new edition by Tomaso Montanari: P. Cureau de la Chambre e la prima biografia di G. L. Bernini, in: Paragone 24–25/1999, pp. 103–32.

201

Filippo Baldinucci: Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, Franchi, Florence 1681–1728, vol. IV, Chapter 16. See Stijn Bussels: “Da Più Scoretti Abusata”. The Venus de’Medici and its history of sexual responses, in: Caroline van Eck, Elsje van Kessel and Joris van Gastel (eds.): The Secret Lives of Art Works, Leiden University Press, Leiden 2014, pp. 38–56, which has an extensive bibliography of secondary studies on reactions in the Villa Medici.

202

Edward Gibbon: Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome (Edited by G.A. Bonnard), Thomas Nelson and Sons, London 1961, pp. 185–186.

203

204 On Richardson see most recently Carol Gibson-Wood: Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2000. 205 Quoted by John R. Hale: Art and Audience: the Medici Venus c. 1750–1850, in: Italian Studies 32/1976, pp. 37–58, here p. 46 from Joseph Spence: Observations (Edited by James Marshall Osborn), Clarendon Press, Oxford 1966, vol. I, no. 1289.

J. Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, Richard Bentley London 1849, vol. I, p. 58, quoted by Hale 1976, p. 54.

206

On the history of the concept of fetichism see Alfonso M. Iacono: Le fétichisme. Histoire d’un concept, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1992; William Pietz: The Problem of the Fetish, I, in: Res 9/1985, p. 5–17; William Pietz: The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa, in: Res 16/1988, pp. 105–123, pp. 121–122 and William Pietz: Fetish, in: Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds.): Critical Terms for Art History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2003 (originally published in 1996), pp. 306–317, pp. 307–308; William Pietz: Le fétiche. Généalogie d’un problème, Kargo & L’éclat, Paris 2005; Hartmut Böhme: Fetischismus und Kultur. Eine andere Theorie der Moderne, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2006; Michèle Tobia-Chadeisson: Le fétiche africain. Chronique d’un “malentendu”, L’Harmattan, Paris 2000; Hartmut Böhme and Johannes Endres: Der Code der Leidenschaften: Fetischismus in den Künsten, Fink, Munich 2010; and for an alternative view on the origins of Congolese fetishes see Cesare Poppi: Wonders taken for signs: rethinking the ‘fetish’, in: Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (eds.): Presence. The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, Ashgate, Aldershot 2006, pp. 231–242.

207

Gustave Flaubert: Voyage en Italie, in: Oeuvres Complètes, Club de l’Honnête Homme, Paris 1973, vol. X, p. 377. Both Madame Bovary and L’Education sentimentale offer galleries of fetishism, ranging from Emma’s adoration of clothes and fabrics to Frédéric’s transfer of his love for Mme Arnoux to her gloves and slippers. 208

Among recent attempts to define fetishism one of the clearest is Roy Ellen’s analysis of fetishes as cultural representations (whether objects or phenomena), and in particular as cases of the interplay between cognition and collective representation. He lists four underlying cognitive processes, supported by recent anthropological evidence: – concrete existence or concretisation of abstraction; – attribution of qualities of living organisms;

209

228 | Notes

– –

conflation of signifier and signified; ambivalent relations between control of objects by persons or persons by objects. In his view of fetishes as resulting from the conflation of signifier and signified he uses Jean Pouillon’s Fétiches sans fétichisme, Maspero, Paris 1975. Cf. Roy Ellen: Fetishism, in: Man (N. S.) 23/1988, pp. 213–235. Karl Kraus: The Eroticism of Clothes, in: The Rise of Fashion (Edited by Daniel L. Purdy), University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota 2004, pp. 239–244.

210

On the history of idolatry see Francis Schmidt: Polytheisms: Degeneration or progress?, in: History and Anthropology 3/1987, pp. 9–60, Roland Recht (ed.): L’Idolâtrie (Rencontres de l’Ecole du Louvre), La Documentation française, Paris 1990, and Ralph Dekoninck and Myriam WatthéeDelmotte (eds.): L’Idole dans l’imaginaire occidental, L’Harmattan, Paris 2005. 211

On Méhégan see Louis-Mayeul Chaudon: Nouveau dictionnaire historique, G. Leroy and Bruyset, Caen and Lyon 1789, vol. 6, pp. 144–145; John S. Spink: Un Abbé philosophe à la Bastille (1751–53): Méhégan et son Zoroastre, in: W. H. Barber, J. H. Brumfitt, R. A. Leigh et al. (eds.): The Age of Enlightenment. Studies presented to Theodore Besterman, Oliver and Boyd, London and Edinburgh 1967, pp. 252–274; Neil R. Johnson: Louis XIV and the Age of Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 1978 (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 172), pp. 65–66; and the article by Fr. Weil in Jean Sgard (ed.): Dictionnaire des journalistes 1600–1789, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 1999, vol. 2, pp. 700–701.

212

213 Guillaume-Alexandre de Méhégan: Origines, progres et décadence de l’idolâtrie, P.-D. Brocas, Paris 1757, p. 42. 214

Méhégan 1757, pp. 42–45.

215

Méhégan 1757, pp. 45–47.

216

Méhégan 1757, p. 185.

Charles de Brosses: Lettres d’Italie du président de Brosses (Edited by Frédéric d’Agay), Mercure de France, Paris 1986, vol. II, pp. 64–65.

217

Gottfried Böhme has pointed out that Augustine’s discussion of idolatry in De vera religione, where adoring images as if they are the deity they represent is presented as a pars pro toto for all idolatry, and his polemic in De civitate dei I.410 against Hermes Trismegistus very much announce the definition of fetishism developed by De Brosses. The false gods of the heathen are dismissed as human artefacts, and hence factitius, man- or counterfeit. Just as for De Brosses, Egypt is considered as the origin of false religion and hence fetishism. Cf. Böhme 2006, p. 162.

218

219 Charles de Brosses: Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (Edited by Madeleine V.-David), Fayard, Paris 1988 (originally published in 1760), p. 34: ‘Si du nouveau monde nous passons aux climats voisins de notre pôle, où il se trouve encore des nations sauvages, nous les y voyons infatuées du même Fétichisme: car, encore un coup, j’appelle en général de ce nom toute Religion qui a pour objet de culte des animaux ou des êtres terrestres inanimés.’ See also pp. 36–37: ‘Telle est l’espèce de croyance que nous trouvons auhourd’hui généralement admise parmi les peuples sauvages […] soit au Midi, soit à l’Occident, soit au Nord. Remarquons, avant d’aller plus loin, que ce culte rendu à certaines productions naturelles est essentiellement différent de celui que l’idolâtrie vulgairement dite rendoit à des oeuvres d l’art, représentatifs d’autres objets, auxquels l’adoration s’adressoit réellement; et qu’ici c’est aux animaux vivans ou aux végétaux eux-mêmes, qu’il est pratiquement adressé.’ 220

De Brosses 1988, pp. 96 and 109–111.

221 See Francis Schmidt: La discussion sur l’origine de l’idolâtrie au xviie et xviiie siècles, in: Recht 1990, pp. 60–63.

229 | Notes

De Brosses 1988 [of 1760], pp. 109–111: ‘Et quoique celles-ci ne s’imaginent pas toujours réellement, non plus que ceux-là, que ces êtres physiques, bons ou mauvais à l’homme, soient en effet doués d’affection et de sentiment, cet usage de métaphores ne laisse pas de prouver qu’il y a dans l’imagination humaine une tendance naturelle à se le figurer ainsi.’

222

223 De Brosses 1988 [of 1760], p. 108: ‘Mais un pauvre Sauvage nécessiteux, tel qu’on voit qu’ont été les plus anciens hommes connus de chaque nation, pressé par tant de besoins et de passions, ne s’arrête guères à réfléchir sur la beauté ni sur les conséquences de l’ordre qui règne dans la nature, ni à faire de profondes recherches sur la cause première des effets qu’il a coutume de voir dès son enfance’. See also p. 82: ‘Je dis, et je le dis après Hérodote, que la Grèce donna dans la suite à ses vieux boetyles les noms des Dieux étrangers, et que les pierres et les autres Fétiches animaux ne représentoient rien, et qu’elles étoient divines de leur propre divinité.’ For a very well documented and thoroughly revisionist view of the origins of Greek sculpture, ancient theories on this topic, and the relations between imitations of the human form and idolatry see A. A. Donohue: Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture, Scholars Press, Atlanta 1987. 224 On the life and work of de Guasco’s see Baron Joseph Dacier: Eloge de M. L’Abbé de Guasco, in: Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, n.p., Paris 1793, vol. 45, pp. 186–196, reporting on the winter session of 1784, and Pascal Griener: Ottaviano di Guasco, intermédiaire entre la philosophie française et les antiquités de Rome, in: Letizia Norci Cagiano (ed.): Roma Triumphans? L’attualità dell’antico nella Francia del Settecento, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome 2007 (Quaderni di Cultura Francese 41), pp. 26–51. 225

Griener 2007, pp. 36–38.

Octavien de Guasco: De l’usage des statues chez les anciens: essai historique, J. L. de Boubers, Brussels 1768, p. xi, where he refers to Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois XXX.14. See also Griener 2007, pp. 41–44. On Guasco and Montesquieu see also Alessandra Sarchi: Quatremère de Quincy e Octavien Guasco: abozzo per una genesi dello Jupiter Olympien, in: Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 64/1998, pp. 79–88, pp. 82–83.

226

227

Guasco 1768, p. xii.

228 Guasco 1768, p. 17: ‘C’est ainsi que le signe de la volonté de l‘esprit, devient le siège du même esprit, et que le symbole se fut converti en Divinité principale dont les traces se conservent toujours’. 229 Guasco 1768, p. 29: ‘L’esprit de superstition leur en fit bientôt faire un autre. Le principe étant établi que ces signes sacrés étaient animés, et comme le siège de l’esprit divin: il fit naître l’idée de leur donner quelque ressemblance avec l’homme, le plus noble des êtres vivants’. 230 Guasco 1768, p. 34: ‘Il n’est pas douteux que les traits et les parties du corps de l’homme, attribués aux anciens signes des Divinités, contribuèrent infiniment à faire prendre de la consistence à l’idolâtrie […] puisque on se fortifia de plus en plus dans la persuasion que ces figures divines étoient animées par un esprit vivant et actif.’

Guasco 1768, p. 76: ‘Cette émulation des artistes à animer, pour ainsi dire, les images des Dieux, augmenta l’illusion du peuple porté à croire que les figures qui leur paroissent vivantes devaient avoir plus de virtu. Si l’Olympe peupla la terre de Dieux imaginaires, la terre par les efforts de l’art, peupla à son tour l’Olympe de nouvelles divinités.’ He here summarizes a view already expressed by Lucian in the 2nd century AD in his essay On Sacrifice, c. 11; see Stijn Bussels: The Animated Image. Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power, Akademie Verlag, Berlin/Leiden University Press, Leiden 2012, pp. 139–161, for a discussion of Imperial Greek and Roman debates about the animation attributed to cult statues. 231

232

Guasco 1768, p. xi, cf. Griener 2007, pp. 44–45.

233

Guasco 1768, p. 172 and 181 ff.

230 | Notes

234

Guasco 1768, p. 4. For the story of the origins of painting see Pliny, Naturalis Historia, XXXV.xii.

Xavier Bray et al. (ed.): The Sacred Made Real. Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700, National Gallery, London 2009.

235

236 Guasco 1768, p. 76: ‘Cette émulation des artistes à animer, pour ainsi dire, les images des Dieux, augmenta l’illusion du peuple porté à croire que les figures qui leur paroissent vivantes devaient avoir plus de virtu. Si l’Olympe peupla la terre de Dieux imaginaires, la terre par les efforts de l’art, peupla à son tour l’Olympe de nouvelles divinités.’ Cf. Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy: Le Jupiter Olympien, ou l’Art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue; ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le goût de la sculpture polychrome, Firmin Didot, Paris 1814, p. xxiii; his discussion of polychromy includes many references to living presence response defined as fetishism, e.g. p. 220: ‘le signe une fois identifié avec la chose signifiée’.

Although the literature on Quatremère is growing, there is still no recent biography or overview of his work. On his early career as a conservationist and museum theorist see Edouard Pommier: L’Art de la liberté. Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française, Gallimard, Paris 1991, in particular pp. 63–91 and 168–174. On his role in the polychromy debate see Yvonne Luke: Quatremère de Quncy’s Role in the Revival of Polychromy in Sculpture, Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Leeds 1996.

237

238

Quatremère de Quincy 1814, p. xxiii.

On polychromy in ancient sculpture see Amanda Claridge: Looking for Colour on Greek and Roman Sculpture, in: Journal of Art Historiography 5/2011, pp. 9–12; Roberta Panzanelli (ed.): The Color of Life: Polychromy in sculpture from antiquity to the present, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2008; Vinzenz Brinkmann, Oliver Primavesi and Max Hollein (eds.): Circumlitio: the polychromy of antique and mediaeval sculpture. Proceedings of the Johann David Passavant Colloquium, Hirmer, Munich 2010.

239

240

Quatremère de Quincy 1814, p. 2.

241 Quatremère de Quincy 1814, p. xxiii. See also p. 220: ‘le signe une fois identifié avec la chose signifiée’. For earlier statements of the view that the first statues were the creators and not the images of the first pagan gods see for example Charles-César Baudelot de Dainval: L’Utilité des voyages, Aubonin, Emery and Clousier, Paris 1693, vol. I, pp. 95–98 and 101–103, Antoine Banier: Histoire generale des ceremonies, moeurs et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde, Jean Frédéric Bernard, Amsterdam 1723–37, in particular pp. 6 and 7, and the illustrations in Bernard Picart: Histoire des religions et des moeurs de tous les peoples du monde, Prudhomme, Paris 1807, vol. VI, pp. 17, 296–297 and 432–433. 242 Quatremère de Quincy 1814, p. 4: ‘Le livre de la Sagesse, en faisant mention d’idoles sculptées et coloriées, nous apprend le motif de cet usage, l’impression qu’il produisait sur les sens, et quel ressort la superstition trouvait dans l’illusion produite par l’union de la couleur et du relief. Effigies sculpta per varios colores, cujus aspectus insensato dat concupiscentiam. [Livre de la Sagesse 15 :4–5.] Cette pratique, si propice à l’idolâtrie, parût en avoir tellement favorisé l’établissement, que quelques écrivains, fondés sans doute sur la réciprocité d’action qui existe entre les signes et les idées, ont semblé croire que ces statues, au lieu d’être l’effet de la superstition, en avaient été la cause’. Quatremère ajoute dans une note: ‘Winckelmann a presque adopté en entier cette opinion, qui se trouve toutefois réfutée par le P. Ansaldi, De sacro et publico aput Ethinicos pictarum tabularum cultu, cap. 10, pag. 193 (Winckelm. Storia del’Arte, t. I, pag. 261, Edit. de C. Fea)’. 243 Charles-César Baudelot de Dainval: L’Utilité des voyages, Aubonin, Emery and Clousier, Paris 1693, vol. 1, pp. 95–98. 244 Johann Gottfried Herder: Reisetagebuch, in: Italienische Reise. Briefe und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1788–1789 (Edited, annotated and with an afterword by Albert Meier and Heather Holmer), Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1988, pp. 602–603. See also Johann Gottfried

231 | Notes

Herder: Von der Bildhauerkunst fürs Gefühl. Gedanken aus dem Garten zu Versailles, in: Werke in 10 Bänden, J. Brummack and M. Bollacher, Frankfurt am Main 1994, vol. 4, p. 1018, for a version that predates the Plastik, where Herder also discusses the ethical/sexual ambivalence, but in theological terms, connecting the nudity of Greek statues with the innocence of Paradise, and the colours of painting with the Fall after original sin. 245 See Christine Weder: Erschriebene Dinge. Fetisch, Amulett, Talismann um 1800, Rombach, Freiburg i.Br. and Berlin 2007, pp. 39–59.

Johann Gottfried Herder: Plastik, in: Herders Werke. Dritter Teil, Zweite Abteilung (Edited by Hans Lambel), Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart n.d., pp. 277–279 and 289: ‘Endlich die Bildnerei ist Wahrheit, die Malerei Traum: jene ganz Darstellung, diese erzählender Zauber […].’

246

247

Herer, Plastik, pp. 284.

248

Herder, Plastik, p. 284.

249

Herder, Plastik, p. 289.

250

Herder, Plastik, p. 344.

H. Füßli, Letter to Hans Conrad Vogelin, the translator of Daniel Webb, Enquiry into the Beauties of Painting, Zürich 1766; see also the observations by Oskar Bätschmann on the role of the spectator in this fragment, Pygmalion als Betrachter, in: Wolfgang Kemp (ed.): Der Betrachter ist im Bild. Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, DuMont, Cologne 1985, pp. 183–224, pp. 184–189.

251

252 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Italienische Reise (Edited by Christof Thoenes, Andreas Beyer and Norbert Miller), in: Goethe: Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Hanser, Munich 1992, Bd. 15, pp. 641–642, April 1788. On the fascination that this Medusa continued to exercise on Goethe throughout his life see Ernst Buschor: Medusa Rondanini, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1958, Johannes Grave: Goethes Kunstsammlungen und die künstlerische Ausstattung des Goethehauses, in: Andreas Beyer and Ernst Osterkamp (eds.): Goethe-Handbuch, Metzler, Stuttgart 2011, vol. 3, pp. 46–83, pp. 80–83; Johannes Grave: Ideal and History: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Collection of Prints & Drawings, in: Artibus et historiae 27/2006, pp. 175–186; Johannes Grave: Der ideale Kunstkörper. Johann Wolfgang Goethe als Sammler von Druckgraphiken und Zeichnungen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006; and Pascal Griener: Un romantisme de marbre, in: Critique 745–746/2009, pp. 550–561.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Letter to Frau von Stein, 20 December 1786; Italienische Reise 4 January 1786. Cf. Buschor 1958, pp. 1–6.

253

254

Jean Paul to Christian Otto, 18 June 1796, quoted by Grave 2011, p. 54.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Der Sammler und die Seinigen, in: Goethe: Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Hanser, Munich 1988, Bd. 6.2, pp. 76–130; see also the critical edition by C. Asman: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Der Sammler und die Seinigen. Herausgegeben und mit einem Essay von Carrie Asman, Verlag der Kunst, Amsterdam and Dresden 1997, and her article Zeichen, Zauber, Souvenir: Das Portraitmedaillon als Fetisch um 1800, in: Weimarer Beiträge 1/1997, pp. 6–16; and the analysis of this text by Lothar Müller in Beyer and Osterkamp 2011, pp. 357–369. 255

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Des Künstlers Erdewallen, in: Goethe: Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Hanser, Munich 1985, Bd. 1.1, p. 745: ‘Meine Göttin deiner Gegenwart Blick/Überdrängt mich wie erstes Jugendglück/Die ich in Seel u. Sinn himmlische Gestalt/Dich umfasse mit Bräutigams Gewalt/Wo mein Pinsel dich berührt bist du mein/Du bist ich bist mehr als ich ich bin dein’; Italienische Reise, in Goethe: Italienische Reise, pp. 187–188, 13/1/1787 (Minerva Giustiniani); pp. 453, 29/7/1787 and pp. 641–642, April 1788 (Medusa Rondanini); pp. 646–648, April 1788 (Muse of the Palazzo Caraffa Colombiano). Cf. Grave 2006. 256

257

Goethe, Der Sammler und die Seinigen ed. 1988, pp. 77–82.

258

Ibidem, p. 83.

232 | Notes

Ibidem, p. 86. See also Gerhard Femmel and Christoph Michel: Die Erotica und Priapea aus den Sammlungern Goethes, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993. 259

260

Ibidem, p. 1007. Goethe and Schiller had visited Hirt in 1797.

261 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, M. Dt. Klassiker-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2007 (originally published in 1766), pp. 33–34. The epigram is in the Anthologia Graeca lib. IV, cap. 9 ep. 10. Edgar Wind noted in his Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics, in: Jaynie Anderson (ed.): The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1983, pp. 21–37, p. 29 how ‘Lessing’s refutation of the reasons Winckelmann gave for Laocoön’s suffering in silence contains in embryo the whole problem that Warburg was investigating. The notions of the ‘transitory’ and of the ‘pregnant moment’ contain an intimation of that crisis in which the tensions embodied in a work of art irrupt and threaten to destroy the artistic character of the work’.

Goethe: Der Sammler und die Seinigen ed. 1988, p. 106: ‘wenn man vom Kunstwerke spricht als hätte man, an seiner Statt, die Begebenheiten in der Natur erfahren’.

262

263 Ibidem, pp. 108–16. The philosopher here presents the views of Schiller on the role of the human mind (Gemüth) as the locus of transition where passive feelings are transformed into active thoughts and volitions. See Schiller, Letter 22 in Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, Reclam, Stuttgart 1965 and Goethe 1997, p. 163.

Goethe: Der Sammler und die Seinigen, ed. Assmann, pp. 116–22. In her edition Asman has connected the lady’s reaction to an actual event, an account by the Weimar art historian Johann Heinrich Meyer of a woman’s outrage at seeing one of Titian’s naked Venuses, which Meyer hoped Goethe would use for a poem: Goethe 1997, p. 140.

264

The travel accounts by Pieter de Marees and Olfert Dapper, which were widely read in the 18th century, are representative of this attitude: they only uses the term ‘fetish’ for natural objects or artefacts revered as divine beings, that is, in an ethnographical and religious context. Cf Michèle TobiaChadeisson: Faiseurs de dieux. Les notions de fétiche et de fétichisme en France depuis la découverte de l’Afrique jusqu’à la première guerre mondiale (PhD Thesis), University of Lille, Lille 1996, pp. 124– 126. One possible exception is the case of the Italian priest Petrus Martyr, active at the Spanish court in the 16th century, who suggested that African fetishes be analysed and ordered according to a western iconographical model: ‘les spectres que peignent nos artistes’. See Serge Gruzinski: La Guerre des Images de Chistophe Colomb à “Blade Runner”, Fayard, Paris 1990, p. 32. 265

266 This phrase is the motto of the manuscript notes, written between 1888 and 1905 for a psychology of art that have never been published ; they are kept in the Warburg Institute Archive in London: Aby Warburg: Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer monistischen Kunstpsychologie, Warburg Institute Archive, London c. 1888–1895, no. 33 (Bonn: Rosenmontag, 1888 – New York, October 16, 1895). 267 Cf. also Aby Warburg: Matteo de’Strozzi. Ein italienischer Kaufmannssohn vor 500 Jahren, in: Hamburger Weihnachtsbuch, Meißner, Hamburg 1892, p. 236: ‘Indem wir die Dinge entfernen, den Raum produzieren, denken wir – ich! Indem wir zusammen sind, sind wir Material – nichts’. 268 For Meiners see his Allgemeine Kritische Geschichte der Religionen, Helwing, Hannover 1806/7, vol. I, pp. 364 ff and 400 ff; and the edition of 1820, vol. III, p. 617; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Gesammelte Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe II, Bd. 6, pp. 119–121. Cf. Hartmut Böhme: Fetisch und Idol. Die Temporalität von Erinnerungsformen in Goethes Wilhelm Meister, Faust und Der Sammler und die Seinigen, in: Peter Matussek (ed.): Goethe und die Verzeitlichung der Natur, Beck, Munich 1998, pp. 178–202, p. 179. 269 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden, in: Goethe: Goethes Werke, Wegner, Hamburg 1950, Bd. 8–9, p. 145 and 1967 vol. IX, p. 412.

233 | Notes

270 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Friend (Edited by Barbara E. Rooke), Routledge and K. Paul, London and Princeton 1969, vol. I, p. 106; cf. Coleridge 1969, p. 518: ‘Falling prostrate before lifeless images, the creatures of [man’s] own abstraction in himself sensualized […] he becomes a slave to the things of which he was formed to be the […] sovereign’. 271 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure: Des cultes qui ont précédé et amené l’idolâtrie ou l’adoration des figures humaines, Imprimerie De Fournier Frères, Paris 1805, pp. 18, 20 ff and 68. 272

Pietz 2003, pp. 307–8.

273

See Daniel Arasse: La Guillotine et l’Imaginaire de la Terreur, Flammarion, Paris 1992.

Julius von Schlosser: Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs, in: Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 29/1910–11, pp. 171–258, modern edition with the added title Tote Blicke: Julius von Schlosser: Tote Blicke: Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs; ein Versuch (Edited by Thomas Medicus), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1993; see also Pietz 1985, pp. 5–17 and Pietz 1988, pp. 121–122 and Pietz 2003, pp. 307–308; Cf. Mitchell 2005, p. 180. See also Annabel Wharton: Icon, Idol, Totem and Fetish, in: Antony Eastmond and Liz James (eds.): Icon and Word. The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies presented to Robin Cormack, Ashgate, Aldershot 2003, pp. 3–11; Freedberg 1989, p. 436.

274

Immanuel Kant: Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, in: Immanuel Kant: Gesammelte Schriften, Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1905–12, p. 253.

275

276 Immanuel Kant: Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Edited by Wilhelm Weischendel), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1977, pp. 849–851. 277

Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, B 159 and 124–5.

On the veil of Isis see Pierre Hadot: Le voile d’Isis. Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de nature, Gallimard, Paris 2004, in particular pp. 341–358.

278

Immanuel Kant: Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie, in: Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.): Werkausgabe, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1977, vol. 6, pp. 377–397, pp. 395ss. See also Kant: [Kritik der Urteilskraft], A 195: ‘Vielleicht ist niemals etwas Erhabeneres gesagt, oder ein Gedanke erhabener ausgedrückt worden als in jener Aufschrift über den Tempel der Isis (Mutter Natur): “Ich bin alles was da ist, was da war, und was sein wird, und meine Schleier hat kein Sterblicher aufgedeckt”.’

279

280 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I–III (Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, in: Hegel: Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1970, vol. 14, p. 255: ‘Böttigers Hervontatscheln an den weichen Marmorpartien der weiblichen Göttinnen gehört nicht zum Kunstbeschauung und zum Kunstgenuß. Denn durch den Tastsinn bezieht sich das Subjekt, als sinnliches Einzelnes, bloß auf das sinnliche und dessen Schwere, Härte, Weiche, materiellen Widerstand; das Kunstwerk aber ist nichts bloß Sinnliches, sondern der Geist als im sinnlichen erscheinend.’

Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy: Canova et ses ouvrages ou mémoires historiques sur la vie et les ouvrages du célèbre artiste, A. Le Clerc, Paris 1836, p. 68. On Canova and Quatremère see Pascal Griener: Le génie et le théoricien. Canova selon Quatremère de Quincy, in: Pascal Griener and Peter J. Schneemann (eds.): Images de l’artiste – Künstlerbilder, P. Lang, Bern 1998, (Neue Berner Schriften zur Kunst 4), pp. 149–160.

281

282 Jules Michelet: Histoire de la révolution française, Pléiade, Paris 1952, vol. II, book XII, chapter VII, p. 538.

François Hartogh: Evidence de l’histoire. Ce que voient les historiens, Gallimard, Paris 2007 (originally published in 2005), pp. 21–140.

283

234 | Notes

284

Plutarchus, Moralia 346f – 348d.

285 Ruth Webb: Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Ashgate, Farnham 2009, chapter 4: Enargeia: Making Absent Things Present. 286 Cicero, De Oratore II.ix.36: ‘Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis, qua voce alia, nisi oratoris, immortalitati commendatur?’ On the humanist historiographical tradition and its dissolution in the first half of the eighteenth century to make place for antiquarianism and archaeology see Anthony Grafton: What Was History? The art of history in early modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 2007, chapter 4: The End of a Genre. 287

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria IX.ii.40–1; cf. Webb 2009, p. 100.

Cf. most recently Anne-Marie Lecocq: Le bouclier d’Achille. Un tableau qui bouge, Gallimard, Paris 2010.

288

289 Jacques-Guillaume Legrand: Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de J.-B. Piranesi, architecte, peintre et graveur né à Venise en 1720 mort à Rome en 1778, in: Georges Brunel (ed.): Piranèse et les Français. Colloque tenu à la Villa Médicis 12–14 Mai 1976, Edizioni dell’Elefante, Rome 1978, pp. 221–249, here p. 226. 290 On Piranesi’s position in the historiographical debates of his time see Lola Kantor-Kasovsky: Piranesi as Interpreter of Roman Architecture and the Origins of his Intellectual World, L. S. Olschki, Florence 2006, and John Pinto: Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in EighteenthCentury Rome, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2012. 291 Varro: De lingua latina V.153 and VI.32; Livy: Ab urbe condita XXVII.37; Plutarch, Roman History 23.3; Alfred Merlin: L’Aventin dans l’Antiquité, Fontemoing, Paris 1906 (Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 97). 292 Sylvia Pressouyre: La poétique ornementale chez Piranèse et Delafosse, in: Georges Brunel (ed.): Piranèse et les Français. Colloque tenu à la Villa Médicis 12–14 Mai 1976, Edizioni dell’Elefante, Rome 1978, pp. 423–42, p. 426.

Fabio Barry: “Onward Christian soldiers”: Piranesi at Santa Maria del Priorato, in: Mario Bevilacqua and Daniela Gallavotti Cavallero (eds.): L’Aventino dal Rinascimento a oggi. Arte e Architettura, Artemide, Rome 2010, pp. 140–176, here p. 144.

293

294

John Wilton-Ely: Piranesian Symbols on the Aventine, in: Apollo 103/1976, pp. 214–227.

295

Pressouyre 1978, pp. 429–430.

M. Chrysoloras, Comparison of the Old and New Rome (1411), quoted from Michael Baxandall: Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1971, pp. 81 and 148–149.

296

297 Christopher S. Wood and Alexander Nagel: Anachronic Renaissance, Zone Books, New York 2010, pp. 29–35. 298

Wood and Nagel 2010, pp. 30–31.

299

Wood and Nagel 2010, pp. 30–31.

On Alexandre Lenoir and his museum see Jennifer Carter: Narrative and Imagination. Remaking national history at the Musée des Monuments français, in: Simon J. Knell et al. (eds.): National Museums, Routledge, London 2011, pp. 88–104; Jean-Michel Leniaud: Piranèse, moyen âge et Musée des Monuments français, in: Dominique Poulot (ed.): Le musée de sculpture comparé. La Naissance de l’art moderne, Editions du Patrimoine, Paris 2001, pp. 56–67; Pascal Griener and Cecilia Griener Hurley: Wilhelm von Humboldt im Garten des Musée des Monuments français, in: Uwe Fleckner et al. (eds.): 300

235 | Notes

Jenseits der Grenzen. Französische und deutsche Kunst vom Ancien Régime bis zum Gegenwart. Thomas W. Gaethtgens zum 60. Geburtstag, Dumont, Cologne 2000, vol. 1, pp. 345–357; Dominique Poulot: Musée, nation, patrimoine, 1789–1815, Gallimard, Paris 1997. 301 Abbé Grégoire: Premier rapport sur le vandalisme, August 1794, reprinted in Christine Tauber (ed.): Bilderstürme der Französischen Revolution. Die Vandalismus-Berichte des Abbé Grégoire, Rombach Verlag, Freiburg i.Br 2009, p. 21: ‘[L]orsque des monuments offrent une grande beauté de travail, leur conservation, ordonné par la loi du 3 frimaire, peut simultanément alimenter le génie et renforcer la haine des tyrans, en les condamnant par cette conservation même, à une espèce de pilori perpétuel; tel est le mausolée de Richelieu, un des chefs-d’oeuvre de Girardon’. Grégoire refers here to the monument to Richelieu in the chapel of the Sorbonne, which Alexandre Lenoir had managed to save. On 24 October 1794 the Convention Nationale had issued a decree forbidding the destruction of art works under the pretext of removing any trace of the monarchy. Grégoire’s text was first published in the Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur universel, vol. 22 nr 9, 30 September 1794. 302 Edouard Pommier: L’Art de la liberté. Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française, Gallimard, Paris 1991, pp. 29 ff. 303 Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy: Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art, Fayard, Paris 1989 (originally published in 1815), p. 48. 304

Quatremère de Quincy 1989, p. 48.

Pascal Griener, La République de l’oeil. L’expérience de l’art au siècle des Lumières, Odile Jacob, Paris 2010, p. 133.

305

306 Soane owned all eight volumes of Lenoir’s catalogue. See Gillian Darley: John Soane. An accidental Romantic, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1999, p. 256 n. 16. See also David Watkin (ed.): Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, p. 716, appendix 4, for the extract Soane made from it.

On the theoretical background to Soane’s ideas in French 18th-century discussions of caractère see David Watkin: Sir John Soane: Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1996, pp. 196–198.

307

308

Soane and Watkin 2000, p. 626.

309 For a more detailed treatment of this see Caroline van Eck: Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 200, chapter four. 310

Soane and Watkin 2000, pp. 187–188.

On the relations between vividness, associations and cultural memory in Picturesque aesthetics see Caroline van Eck: “The splendid effects of architecture, and its power to affect the mind”: the workings of Picturesque association, in: Jan Birksted (ed.): Landscapes of Memory and Experience, Taylor & Francis, London 2001, pp. 245–58. 311

312

Soane and Watkin 2000, pp. 187–188.

Helene Furján: Scenes from a Museum, in: Grey Room 17/2004, pp. 64–81; Helene Furján: Sir John Soane’s Spectacular Theatre, in: AA Files 47/2002, pp. 12–22; and Helene Furján: Glorious Visions. John Soane’s Spectacular Theater, Routledge, London and New York 2011, in particular pp. 42–48.

313

314 On the rise of these new genres see Marina Warner: Phantasmagoria. Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2006, pp. 147–59, and Diethard Sawicki: Die Gespenster und ihr Ancien Régime. Geisterglauben als ‘Nachtseite’ der Spätaufklärung, in: Monika Neugebauer-Wölk (ed.): Aufklärung und Esoterik, Meiner, Hamburg 1999, pp. 364–396.

236 | Notes

315

Warner 2006, p. 147.

316 Quoted in Richard D. Altick: The Shows of London. A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1600–1862, Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 1978, p. 217. 317 Barbara Hofland: Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Residence of Sir John Soane, privately printed, London 1835–1836, pp. 38–39; cf. Furján 2011, p. 158. 318 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, Rest Fenner, London 1817, vol. I, pp. 291–292. The quote is from John Milton: Paradise Lost, Book II, ll. 666 ff. Cf Furján 2011, pp. 147–148. 319

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Italienische Reise, 16 March 1787.

Goethe, Italienische Reise, 27 May 1787, from Naples; see also Karl August Böttiger: Tischbeins Vasen, Lady Hamilton’s Attitüden, in: Journal des Luxus und der Mode February 1795, pp. 58–85, and Andrei Pop: Sympathetic Spectators: Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare and Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes, in: Art History 34/2011, pp. 934–957. 320

321 Birgit Jooss: Lebende Bilder: körperliche Nachahmung von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit, Reimer, Berlin 1999, p. 355.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Cotta, Tübingen 1809, Part II Chapter 5.

322

See for instance Goethe, Italienische Reise, November 1787, pp. 523–525; Madame de Staël: Corinne ou l’Italie, Peltier, London 1807, p. 242; Karl Philipp Moritz: Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien, in: Karl Philipp Moritz: Werke in zwei Bänden (Edited by Jürgen Jahn), Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin and Weimar 1981 [or 1973?], vol. 1, pp. 164–165; Karl August Böttiger: Die Dresdner Antikengalerie bei Fackelbeleuchtung gesehen, in: Anzeiger für Literatur, Kunst und Theater 2/1808, pp. 3–9; Oskar Bätschmann: Das Historienbild als “Tableau” des Konfliktes. Jacques-Louis Davids “Brutus” von 1798, in: Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 39/1986, pp. 145–62; Griener 2010 (2), p. 133.

323

Elena Agazzi: Carl August Böttiger und seine Rolle als Vermittler zwischen Bühne und Altertum, in: Euphorion 94/2000, pp. 423–434; Julia A. Schmidt-Funke: Karl August Böttiger (1760–1835). Weltmann und Gelehrter, Winter, Heidelberg 2006 (Ästhetische Forschungen 14). 324

Gisela Brude-Firnau, ‘Lebende Bilder in den Wahlverwandtschaften : Goethes Journal Intime vom Oktober 1806’, Euphorion 74/1980, pp. 403–16; see also Karin Leonhard: Goethe, Diderot und die Romantik: de lebende Bilder in den “Wahlverwandtschaften”, in: Jahrbuch des freien Deutschen Hochstifts, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2003, pp. 29–54.

325

326 Karl August Böttiger: review of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in: Zeitung der elegante Welt 2, 2 January 1810, pp. 9–13, quoted in Jooss 1999, p. 295. 327

Böttiger 1810, pp. 9–13.

Karl August Böttiger: Tableaux, in: Abend-Zeitung 126, 27 May 1819, n.p., quoted in Jooss 1999, p. 378: ‘Diese Bilderstellungen durch Lebenden sind sehr alt. Die gepriesener Zauberer der Pantomime, die im alten, nicht mehr freien Rom alle andern dramatischen Künste verdrängten, gründeten sich darauf. Aber es waren Bilder in geregelter, fortschreitender Bewegung, keine Minutenlang zur Unbeweglichkeit verurtheilten – Versteinerungen (Apolithosen). Denn wer die Wirkungen des alles versteinernden Medusenhaupts in Ovids Verwandlung auf Seriphos lieset, wird darin die wahren Urbilder unserer jetzt so beliebten Bilderstellungen finden.’

328

Julius Schaller: Das Spiel und die Spiele, Hermann Böhlau, Weimar 1861, p. 293–294: ‘Sie machen den Eindruck von scheintodten, verzauberten Menschen, von Gespenstern, eben darum weil sie wie wirkliche Menschen aussehen, und doch sich nicht wie wirkliche Menschen benehmen’. 329

237 | Notes

330

Schaller 1861, p. 294.

Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy: Le Jupiter Olympien, ou l’Art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue; ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le goût de la sculpture polychrome, Firmin Didot, Paris 1814, p. 2.

331

332

Quatremère de Quincy 1814, p. xxiii.

333 See Pascal Griener: Florence à Manhattan: le Period Room des magasins américains aux GratteCiels, in: Studiolo 8/2010, pp. 123–134, and the Introduction by Patricia Falguières to the French edition of Julius von Schlosser, Wunderkammer: Patricia Falguières: La société des objets, in: Julius von Schlosser: Les Cabinets d’art et de merveilles de la renaissance tardive (Translated by Lucie Marignac), Paris, Macula 2012, pp. 7–54. 334 Aby Warburg: Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer monistischen Kunstpsychologie, Warburg Institute Archive, London c. 1888–1895, August 27, 1890, London, Warburg Institute Archive.

On the evolutionary context see Ernst H. Gombrich: Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, Phaidon, Oxford 1986, pp. 71 ff, and Spyros Papapetros: On the Animation of the Inorganic. Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2012, pp. 31–71; on the temporal aspect Georges Didi-Huberman: L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes chez Aby Warburg, Editions du Minuit, Paris 2002.

335

336 On the role of Kantian aesthetics in the establishment of art history as an academic discipline in Germany see Michael Podro: The Critical Historians of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1982, pp. 1–17; on Warburg’s dislike of German formalist art history, which contributed to his decision to travel to New Mexico, see Aby Warburg: Reise-Erinnerungen aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer, in: Aby Warburg: Werke in einem Band (Edited by Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel und Perdita Ladwig), Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2010, pp. 567–602, p. 569. 337 On Warburg’s exposés in front of the Mnemosyne panels see the introduction to the new edition of Warburg’s exhibitions at the Warburg-Haus: Uwe Fleckner and Isabella Woldt (eds.): Aby Warburg: Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2012.

Aby Warburg: Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara, in: Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schriften (Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance) (Edited by Horst Bredekamp and Michael Diers), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1998, Bd. I.2, pp. 459–481, p. 478.

338

On Warburg’s thought cf. Gombrich 1986; and the criticism by Edgar Wind of what he thought was a too rationalist reading of Warburg’s ideas in: Edgar Wind: ‘On a Recent Biography of Warburg’, in: The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, Clarendon Press. Edited by Jamie Anderson, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1983, pp. 106–113; Philippe-Alain Michaud: Warburg and the Image in Motion (Foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and Translated by Sophie Hawkes), Zone Books, New York 2007; Didi-Huberman 2002; Matthew Rampley: From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of Art, in: Art Bulletin 79/1997, pp. 41–54, which contains a very extensive bibliography to 1996; Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Edited by Kurt W. Forster and Translated by David Britt), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 1999; Claude Imbert: Warburg de Kant à Boas, in: L’Homme 165/2003, pp. 11–41. The introductions to the sections in Aby Warburg. Werke in einem Bande also allow the reader to follow the development of his ideas, in particular in their reconstruction of the various versions of his account of his visit to the Pueblo Indians.

339

Cf. Hartmut Böhme: Aby Warburg, in: Axel Michaels: Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft. Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade, Beck, Munich 1997, pp. 133–157, in particular pp. 137–141.

340

Aby Warburg: Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling” (1893), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 1–68 and 307–328, p. 37 and pp. 66 f.

341

238 | Notes

342 Aby Warburg: Die Bilderchronik eines florentinischen Goldschmiedes (1899), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 69–75, p. 71. 343 Aby Warburg: Mediceische Feste am Hofe der Valois auf flandrischen Teppichen in der Galleria degli Uffizi (1927), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 255–258 and pp. 392–393, p. 258.

Aby Warburg: I costumi teatrali per gli intermezzi del 1589 (1895), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 259–300 and pp. 394–438, pp. 432 f.

344

Aby Warburg: Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling” (1893), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 1–68, p. 54.

345

346 Aby Warburg: Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum (1902), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 89–126, p. 116. 347 Aby Warburg: Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum (1902), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 89–126, p. 115. 348 Aby Warburg: Flandrische Kunst und florentinische Frührenaissance (1902), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 185–206 and pp. 370–380, p. 204. 349 Aby Warburg: Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum (1902), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 89–126, p. 100; Aby Warburg: Francesco Sassettis letztwillige Verfügung (1907), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1, pp. 127–158 and pp. 353–365, pp. 138 f. 350 See Alfred Gell: Art and Agency. An anthropological theory, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1998, Chapter One. 351 On Renaissance foundation rituals as the locus for the attribution of life and personhood to buildings see Minou Schraven: Metallic Presence. Patrons, Portrait Medals and Building Deposits in Renaissance Italy, in: Caroline van Eck, Joris van Gastel and Elsje van Kessel (eds.): The Secret Lives of Art Works, Leiden University Press, Leiden 2014, pp. 132–52.

On the influence of these historians of religion on Warburg’s thought see Roland Kany: Mnemosyne als Programm. Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin, Niemeyer, Tübingen 1987 (Studien der Deutschen Literatur 93).

352

353 Vignoli’s theory here shows a striking similarity with Darwin’s observations on the tendency of animals to attribute life to inanimate shapes and objects and its evolutionary role: it is safer to assume a stick or branch is a snake than the other way around. See Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, D. Appleton and Co, New York 1871, pp. 64–65, and Papapetros 2012, pp. 31–71. 354 Cf. Böhme 1997, pp. 143–147. The quotation is from Aby Warburg 1892, quoted in Kany 1987, p. 147. 355 On the relation between Nietzsche and Warburg see Helmut Pfotenhauer: Das Nachleben der Antike. Aby Warburgs Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche, in: Nietzsche Studien 14/1985, pp. 298–313. 356 For an overview of German concepts of history in the 18th and 19th centuries see Reinhart Koselleck: Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (Translated by Keith Tribe), MIT Press, Cambridge 1985. 357 On German historiographical debates in the 18th and 19th century, particularly in relation to art and architecture, see Mari Hvattum: Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 2004, pp. 162 ff.; for humanist views of history see Grafton 2007, pp. 123 ff.

239 | Notes

358 See Friedrich Nietzsche: Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, in: Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Bänden (Edited by Karl Schlechta), Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1982, Bd. 1, pp. 219–237. 359 Aby Warburg: Mnemosyne. Einleitung, in: Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schriften (Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne) (Edited by Martin Warnke), Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2000, Bd. II.1, pp. 3–6, p. 3. 360

Warburg 2000, p. 3.

Warburg 2000, p. 3. On the background of Warburg’s use of the thiasos and the influence of Walter Pater’s essay on Euripides’ Bacchae on his thought, see Ulrich Port: “Katharsis des Leidens”. Aby Warburgs “Pathosformeln” und ihre konzeptionellen Hintergründe in Rhetorik, Poetik und Tragödientheorie, in: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 73/1999, pp. 5–42. See in particular note 105, where he lists recent scholarship questioning Warburg and Nietzsche’s views on the origin of the theatre). 361

362

Warburg 2000, p. 6.

On the relations between images and what they represent, in terms of Warburg’s historicizing version of Robert Vischer’s theory of empathy, see Rampley 1997, in particular p. 41.

363

On the connections between Warburg, his colleagues in Hamburg and surrealism, which cannot be explored here, see Uwe Fleckner: Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2006, and Spyros Papapetros: Microcosme et macrocosme, entre l’académie et l’avant-garde. Notes sur la correspondance éditoriale de Carl Einstein (Documents) et Fritz Saxl (bibliothèque Warburg), in: Gradhiva 14/2011, pp. 122–44. 364

365

See Port 1999, pp. 13 f.

366

Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria, IX.i.13–14.

367

Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria, VI.ii.32; see also Longinus: Peri Hupsous XV.1

Aristotle: Poetics 1447a–1453a, 1454b and 1455a. See also the notes and translation by Donald Russell and Michael Winterbottom (eds.): Ancient Literary Criticism. The Principal Texts in New Translations, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1972, pp. 85 ff. On the origins of Greek rhetoric in ritual see Emmanuelle Danblon: La fonction persuasive. Anthropologie du discours rhétorique: origines et actualité, Armand Colin, Paris 2005, pp. 13–41, and Emmanuelle Danblon: Rhétorique et rationalité. Essai sur l’émergence de la critique et de la persuasion, Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Brussels 2002. 368

Aby Warburg: Die Eintritt des antikisirenden Idealstils in die Malerei der Frührenaissance (1914), in: Aby Warburg 1998, Bd. I.1., pp. 173–176 pp. 367, p. 176: ‘superlativistische pathetische Ausdrucksfähigkeit’.

369

370 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Über Laokoon (1798), in: Goethes Werke, Wegner, Hamburg 1967, Bd. 12, pp. 56–66, pp. 59 f. For Warburg’s views on the Laocoon see Aby Warburg: Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer, in: Warburg 2010, p. 524–566, p. 551 and Philippe-Alain Michaud: Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement, Macula, Paris 1998, pp. 81–83.

See Frank Ankersmit: Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2005; and Frank Ankersmit: Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 2012, pp. 157–220.

371

372 On that last question, see also Gottfried Boehm: Der Topos des Lebendigen. Bildgeschichte und ästhetische Erfahrung, in: Joachim Küpper and Christoph Menke (eds.): Dimensionen ästhetischer Erfahrung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 94–112. Boehm argues not only that aesthetic experience is always an experience of life, but also that it might be very useful to rethink art history as a “Wissenschaft vom Lebendigen”.

240 | Notes

373 These models of anachronism and representation are not limited to Western image making. They are similar to David Summers’s categorization of image making across the world in two groups, icons that are representational substitutes or replacements, and effigies that are traces of the being represented in David Summers: Real Spaces. World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, Phaidon, London 2003, pp. 251–342. 374

Ankersmit 2012, pp. 157–165.

Ankersmit 2012, pp. 165–73; Friedrich: Die Geburt der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus, in: Friedrich Nietzsche, in: Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke in drei Bänden (Edited by Karl Schlechta), Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1982, Bd. 1 vol. 1, pp. 37–45.

375

376 For these arguments by Frank Ankersmit see his History and Tropology. The rise and fall of metaphor, University of California Press, Berkeley 1994, pp. 88–94, and Frank Ankersmit: Historical Representation, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2001, pp. 11–13, 81, 82, 236, 237.

Melchior Missirini: Della Vita di Antonio Canova Libri Quattro, Fratelli Giachetti, Prato 1824, Book II, Chapter 4, p. 189; Quatremère, Canova et ses ouvrages, ou, mémoires historiques sur la vie et les ouvrages du célèbre artiste (Paris: A. Le Clerc et cie, 1834), pp. 147–149. 377

378 Joseph Joubert: Essais (1779–1821) (Edited by Rémy Tessonneau), Nizet, Paris 1983, p. 45. See also Joseph Joubert: Les carnets de Joseph Joubert (Edited by André Beaunier and André Bellessort), Gallimard, Paris 1938, vol. II, pp. 748 and 573.

Hugh Honour: ‘Canova e l’incisione’, in: Grazia Pezzini Bernini and Fabio Fiorani (eds.): Canova e l’incisione, Bassano del Grappa, Rome and Bassano 1994, pp. 11–21. Kristina Herrmann-Fiore: Lettere inedite sulla statua di Paolina, in: Anna Coliva and Fernando Mazzocca (eds.): Canova e la Venere Vincitrice, Electa, Milan 2007. 379

380

Flora Fraser: Pauline Borghese, John Murray, London 2012, p. 109.

See for instance William Hazlitt’s defence of the marbles against these accusations in his essays On the Elgin Marbles: the Ilissus (originally published in the London Magazine of February 1822) and its sequel On the Elgin Marbles (London Magazine of May 1822), reprinted in William Hazlitt: The Fight and Other Writings (Edited by Tom Paulin and David Chandler), Penguin Books, London 2000, pp. 212–238, in particular pp. 213–217. 381

382

Tom Flynn: The Body in Three Dimensions, Abrams, New York 1998, pp. 115–122.

Maria Anna Flecken: “Und es ist Canova, die sie machte”, Georg Olms, Hildesheim 2008 (Studien zur Kunstgeschichte 172), pp. 92–136 for the genesis of the statue.

383

Heinrich Heine: Florentinische Nächte I, in: Heinrich Heine: Sämtliche Schriften (Edited by Klaus Briegleb), Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 2005, vol. 1, pp. 561–64 and 609.

384 385

Heine 2005, p. 209.

386

Heine 2005, p. 244.

J. Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, Richard Bentley London 1849, vol. I, p. 58, quoted by John Hale: Art and Audience: the Medici Venus c. 1750–1850, in: Italian Studies 32/1976, p. 54.

387

388 See the recent publication of Ludwig Binswanger, Warburg’s psychiatrist, the history of his illness: Ludwig Binswanger: Die unendliche Heilung. Aby Warburgs Krankheitsgeschichte, Diaphanes, Zurich and Berlin 2007.

On the Chauvet cave see the research reports regularly published in INORA, International Newsletter on Rock Art, from vol. 21 (1998), onwards.

389

Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, D. Appleton and Co, New York 1871, p. 64.

390

241 | Notes

Tito Vignoli: Mito e Scienza, Fratelli Dumolard, Milan 1879; English translation as Myth and Science. An Essay, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London 1882, pp. 292–293. See also pp. 94–7, 163 ff, and 290. Frank Fehrenbach has recently shown how such fetishism also was part of the motives of art collectors around 1900, and even of that arch-formalist, Bernard Berenson. See his “Du lebst und thust mir nichts”: Aby Warburg und der Lebendigkeit der Kunst, in: Hartmut Böhme and Johannes Endres (ed.): Der Code der Leidenschaften: Fetischismus in den Künsten, Fink, Munich 2010, pp. 124–46.

391

See Auguste Comte: Cours de Philosophie Positiviste, deuxième partie, période theologique et métaphysique, La Société Positiviste, Paris 1892 [first published 1830–1842] vol. 5, pp. 19–20 and 66 note 1; cf. his Système de philosophie positiviste, ibidem, vol. 2, pp. 81–86 and vol. 3, p. 6. See KarlHeinz Kohl: Die Macht der Dinge: Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte, Beck, Munich 2003, p. 87 and Georges Canguilhem: Histoire des religions et histoire des sciences dans la théorie du fétichisme chez Auguste Comte, in: Georges Canguilhem: Etudes d’Histoire et de philosophie des sciences, J. Vrin, Paris 1979, pp. 81–99. 392

On object relation psychotherapy as the successor to Freudian psychoanalysis see Glen O. Gabbard: Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice. The DSM-III Handbook, American Psychiatric Press, Washington 1994, p. 37. 393

Thomas Ogden: The Primitive Edge of Experience, Jason Aronson, Northvale 1989, p. 56. In clinical terms these stages are defined as the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive, and not to be confused with the everyday use of these terms to define psychological pathology. Schizoid here is to be understood in the sense of ‘that aspect of all personalities that is organized around unconscious defensive attachments of aspects of self to internal objects’; that is, organized around the internal representation of internal relations to others.

394

395

Ogden 1989, pp. 22–25.

Sigmund Freud: Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse , Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1921, p. 146; cf. Gerlinde Gehrig and Ulrich Pfarr (eds.): Handbuch psychoanalytischer Begriffe für die Kunstwissenschaft, Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2009, essay on ‘Identifizierung’. Cf. p. 146: ‘Menschen brauchen Bilder um sich darin sinnend zu erfahren, und sich so ihrer selbst und ihrer Subjektivität zu vergewissern’. 396

Michel de Cubières: Lettre écrite de Rome au commencement de l’année 1790, et renfermant une description de la Villa Borghèse, in: Tribune de la Société Nationale des Neuf Soeurs, April 14 1791, p. 290; Carole Paul: The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour, Ashgate, Aldershot 2008.

397

André Leroi-Gourhan: Préhistoire de l’art occidental, Mazenod, Paris 1971 remains one of the best introductions to the subject, not in the least because of the wealth of visual documentation; for recent summaries of the discussion about the role of image making in the evolution of man see Alain Testart: Avant l’histoire. L’évolution des sociétés de Lascaux à Carnac, Gallimard, Paris 2012, pp. 254–271, and, in spite of the anachronism of the title, Jill Cook (ed.): Ice Age Art. Arrival of the Modern Mind, British Museum Press, London 2013, pp. 10–26. 398

399

See for instance Ogden 1989, pp. 12, 22 and 60.

242 | Notes

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Introduction 1 Crouching Aphrodite, Roman copy after Greek original of the third century BC, marble, H. 0.78 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre [© Musée du Louvre Paris] 2 Borghese Hermaphroditus, Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze original of the second century BC, mattress sculpted by Bernini c. 1620, marble, L. 1.47 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre. [© Musée du Louvre, Paris]. 3 Minerva Giustiniani, Roman copy in marble after a Greek original of the end of the 5th century BC, H. 2.23 m., formerly in the Giustiniani collection, Rome, Musei Vaticani. [© Leiden University, Institute of Art History]. 4 Simon Louis Boizot (1753–1809), Bust of Marie Antoinette, marble, 1743–1809), mutilated during riots in the Tuileries in 1792, private collection [Photo by the author]. 5 Diego Vélazquez (1599–1660), Rokeby Venus, 1647–1651, oil on canvas, 122.5 by 177 cm., London, National Gallery [© National Gallery London] 6 Diego Vélazquez (1599–1660), Rokeby Venus, damaged by Slasher Mary photo circa March 10, 1914, London, National Gallery [© National Gallery London] Chapter One 7 Scopas, active 400– 350 BC, Bacchante, early Imperial copy, marble, H. 45 cm., Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Skulpturensammlung [© Jürgen Karpinski, Skulpturensammlung Dresden] 8 Pierre Puget (1620–1694), Milon de Crotone, 1683, marble, H. 2.70 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre [© Musée du Louvre Paris]

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9 Pierre Puget (1620–1694), Persée et Andromède, 1684, marble, H. 3.20 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre [© Musée du Louvre Paris] 10 Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762), Sleeping Satyr, copy after the Barberini Faun, a hellenistic statue of c. 200 BC, 1726, marble, H. 1.84 m, Paris, Musée du Louvre [photo: public domain] Chapter Two 11 Hans Speeckaert (1535–75/80), Allegory of Sculpture (Pygmalion), etching,1582, [photo: wikipedia commons] 12 Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1734), Perseus slying Phineas (Perseus confronting Phineas with the head of Medusa), circa 1705–1710, oil on canvas, 65 by 80 cm., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum [© J. Paul Getty Museum] 13 Polynesian war god, probably eighteenth century, wicker framework with feathers, dogs’ teeth and shells, H. 1.07 m., London, British Museum [© British Museum] 14 Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), The Lacemaker, circa 1669–1671, oil on canvas, 24 by 21 cm., Paris, Musée du Louvre [© Musée du Louvre Paris] 15 Bronze head of Augustus, copy after Prima Porta Augustus, circa 27–25 BC, bronze, glass inset eyes, H. 46.2 cm., found in Meroë, Sudan, London, British Museum [© British Museum] 16 Unknown sculptor: Laocoon and his sons, early 1st century, Roman copy after the Greek original by Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athanadoros, marble, H. 2.42 m (from Laocoon’s right hand to the base of the statue), Rome, Musei Vaticani [© Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Leiden University] 17 Raphael (1483–1520), The Ecstacy of Saint Caecilia, 1516–1517, oil transferred from panel to canvas, 220 by 136 cm., Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale [© Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna] 18 Giovanni Bellini (1433–1516), Brera Pietà, 1460, tempera on wood, 86 by 107 cms, Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera [© Pinacoteca di Brera] 19 Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Perseus and Medusa, fresco, 1597, Rome, Palazzo Farnes [© public domain] 20 Luca Giordano (1634–1705), Perseus petrifying Phineus, c. 1650, oil on canvas, 285 by 366 cm., Naples, Museo di Capodimonte [© Museo di Capodimonte] 21 Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) (attr.), Head of Medusa, c. 1630, marble, H. 40 cm., Rome, Capitoline Muse [© public domain] 22 Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Anima Damnata, 1619, marble, H. 30 cm., Rome, Palazzo di Spagna [© public domain] Chapter Four 23 Pierre Aveline (1702–1760), Perspectival view of the Place des Victoires, etching, c. 1750 [© Bibliothèque nationale de France] 24 Martin Desjardins (1637–1694), Four slaves for the monument de Louis XIV,1679–85, bronze, H. 2.20 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre. [© Réunion des Musées Nationaux]

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25 Israël Silvestre (1621–1691) (attr.), La place des Victoires in 1686, 1686, drawing, Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz. [© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz]. 26 Paul Grégoire (Active 18th c.), View of the statue of Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires, 1786, crayon, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France [© Bibliothèque nationale de France] 27 Louis Bretez (16??–1736), Plan of Paris,‘Plan de Turgot’, 1739, engraving [© Réunion des Musées Nationaux] 28 Nicolas Guérard (1648–1719), ‘A la gloire de Louis le Grand […] Monument dressé en la place des Victoires, le vingt huit Mars 1686’, 1686, engraving, Paris, Musée Carnavalet. [© Bibliothèque nationale de France] 29 François Lemée, Traité des statues (Paris: Arnould Seneuze 1688), frontispice by Cornelis Vermeulen (1644–1708), Paris, Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art [© Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris] 30 Niobides [Roman copies, possibly after Scopas and Praxiteles], Rome: Villa Médicis, plaster copies made by Michel Bourbon, 1976 [photo by the author] 31 Daughter of Niobe [Roman copy, possibly after Scopas and Praxiteles, formerly in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome], Florence: Uffizi. Photograph, private Collection [© Royal Library, The Hague] 32 Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Bust of Louis XIV, 1665, marble, H. 105 cm, Château de Versailles [photo: Wikipedia Commons]. 33 Bernard Picart, ‘La mise en scène cérémonielle de Saint Pierre à Rome’ (1712), Cérémonies et coutumes religieux de tous les peuples du monde représentés par des figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picard: avec une explication historique & quelques dissertations curieuses, (Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1723–1737), vol. 1, part 2, after p. 150, engraving after Pietro Ostini, Theatrum canonizationis SS. Pij V. Andreae Auellini, Felicis à Cantalico, et Catharinae de Bononiae à S. Smo d.n. Clemente Pp. XI an. 1712. celebratae [© Nelke Bartelings, Leiden University Library] 34 Bernard Picart, Temple of 1000 Idols in Japan (1726), Cérémonies et coutumes religieux, vol. IV, after p. 310. [© Nelke Bartelings, Leiden University Library] 35 Wounded Amazon of the type created by Sosicles, Roman copy of the Imperial period after a Greek original of the 5th century BC, marble, H. 1.55 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre [© Marie-Lan Nguyen] Chapter Five 36 Venus de’ Medici, Roman copy after Praxiteles, marble, Florence: Uffizi. François Perrier, etching after the Venus de’ Medici, from Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum, Paris, 1638, [Photo in the public domain] 37 William Hogarth (1697–1764), folding plate 1 from The Analysis of Beauty, engraving, London, 1756 [© Leiden University Library] 38 Octavien de Guasco, De l’usage des statues chez les anciens, Brussels, 1768, illustration II: idole égyptien [© Royal Library, The Hague].

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39 Gregório Fernández (1576–1636), Statue of the dead Christ, polychrome wood, glass, and ivory, L. 1.60 m, Seville : Iglésia de San Miguel y San Julián [© Wikimedia Commons]. 40 Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Le Jupiter Olympien […], ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le goût de la sculpture polychrome, Paris: Firmin Didot 1814, frontispice [© Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art] Chapter Six 41 Borghese Hermaphrodite, Roman copy in marble of a Greek bronze original of the second century BC, mattress sculpted by Bernini c. 1620, marble, L. 1.69 m., Paris, Musée du Louvre [© Musée du Louvre, Paris] 42 Daughter of Niobe [Roman copy, possibly after Scopas and Praxiteles, formerly in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome, Florence: Uffizi. Drawing by Willem Doudijn, engraving by Jan de Bisschop, published in Signorum Veterum Icones, The Hague 1671. [© Royal Library, The Hague] 43 Medusa Rondanini, late Hellenistic or Roman copy after a Greek bust of the 5th century BC, marble, 0.29 m., Munich, Glyptothek [© Wikimedia Commons] 44 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Perseus, marble, 1790, 2.20 m., New York, Metropolitan Museum [© Metropolitan Museum] 45 Arcangelo Magini (17??–18??), Fin tragique de Louis XIV, engraving, 1793, [© Bibliothèque Nationale de France] 46 Louis-Ernest Barrias (1841–1905), La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science, 1899, marble and polychrome onyx, 2.00 m., Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Paris [© Wikimedia Commons] Chapter Seven 47 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Mary Magdalene, 1809, marble, H. 94 cm, Saint Petersburg, Hermitage [© Wikimedia Commons] 48 Alexandre Lenoir, Musée des monuments français, salle du XVIe siècle, engraving [© Wikimedia Commons] 49 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Cuthbert Vase, from Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi (Rome 1778), etching, [© Ghent University Library] 50 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Grottesco, 1748, etching [© Ghent University Library] 51 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Piazza of the complex of Santa Maria del Priorato, 1764–66, Rome [photo by the author] 52 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Façade of Santa Maria del Priorato, 1764–66, Rome [photo by the author] 53 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Piazza of the complex of Santa Maria del Priorato, wall displaying trophies, 1764–66, Rome [photo by the author] 54 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Via Appia, from Le Antichità Romane (Rome, 1756), vol. II plate II, etching [© Wikipedia Commons]

268 | List of Illustrations

55 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Façade of Santa Maria del Priorato, 1764–66, Rome, oculus [photo by the author] 56 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), snakes from Grotteschi, c. 1747, etching [© Ghent University Library] 57 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), snake capital from the Magnificenza della Roma Antica (Rome, 1761), etching [© Ghent University Library] 58 Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), Tempio Malatestiano, c. 1450, Rimini [© public domain] 59 Two euro coin showing profile of Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands, copper and other metals, 2010 [© public domain] 60 Wax statue of Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands, wax, 1.68 m., Amsterdam, Madame Tussaud’s [photo: public domain] 61 Hubert Robert (1733–1808), La violation des caveaux des rois dans la basilique de Saint-Denis, en octobre 1793, c. 1793, oil on wood, 54 × 64 cm, Paris, Musée Carnavalet [© Musée carnavalet] 62 Sir John Soane (1753–1837), Pitzhanger Manor, Reading, 1800–1803 [© Martin Charles] 63 Sir John Soane (1753–1837), town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1810–1820 [© public domain] 64 Sir John Soane (1753–1837), Bank of England, Consols Office, London 1797–1799, [© Soane Museum] 65 Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), the Bank of England as Ruin, watercolour, 1830, London, Soane Museum [photo: Soane Museum] 66 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), Eidophysikon, watercolour, c. 1800, London, British Museum [© British Museum London] 67 Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), Sir John Soane’s town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, Gothic Basement, watercolour, c. 1820, London, Soane Museum [© Soane Museum] 68 Joseph Gandy (1771–1843), Sir John Soane’s, town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, 1810–1820, plaster cast room, watercolour by Joseph Gandy, London, Soane Museum [© Soane Museum] 69 Francesco Novelli (1774–1836), The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, etching, after 1791, London, Victoria and Albert Museum [© Victoria and Albert Museum, London] Chapter Eight 70 Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Plate V from Mnemosyne Atlas, London: Warburg Institute Archive [1929] [© Warburg Institute London] 71 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Campus Martius Antiquae Urbis, Rome 1762, etching [© Ghent University Library]

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72 Niccolò dell’Arca (c. 1435–1440–1494), Bewailing of Christ, 1485, terra cotta lifesize figures, Bologna, Santuario di Santa Maria della Vita [© public domain] 73 Marble statue probably representing a Nereid, from the Xanthos Monument, c. 400 BC, marble, 1.42 m., London, British Museum [© public domain] 74 Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449–1494), scene from the Sassetti Chapel showing Poliziano and his pupils, 1485, fresco, Florence, Santa Trinità [© public domain] 75 Hans Memling (1430–1494), Madonna with child and Angelo di Jacopo Tani (Last Judgement, detail), c. 1467–1471, oil on wood, 242 × 90 cm, Gdansk, Muzeum Narodowe [© Muzeum Naradowe] 76 Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Pantheon from the Vedute, Rome 1756–61, etching [© Leiden University Library] Epilogue 77 Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Pauline Borghese as Victorious Venus, 1808, marble, L. 2.00 m., Rome: Villa Borghese [© Alinari] 78 Benjamin Zix (1772–1811), Napoleon visits the recently arrived Laocoön group in the Louvre by torch light, 1810, watercolour, Paris: Musée du Louvre [© Réunion nationale des musées] 79 Domenico Marchetti (b. 1780), Venere Vincitrice, engraving after Canova’s statue, 1825, engraving [© Calcografia Nazionale, Rome] 80 Hunting cave lions, detail of the large frieze in the end chamber of Chauvet cave, c. 30.000 BCE, charcoal on rock [© public domain]

270 | List of Illustrations

INDEX

Alberti, Leon Battista 87, 92, 142, 152, 154 Alexander VII, Pope 26, 79, 80 Ankersmit, Frank A. 191–195 Arasse, Daniel 61 Arca, Niccolò dell’ 180 Aristophanes 116 Aristotle 31, 35–36, 43, 69, 71–73, 87, 208 Augustus 51 Aulus Gellius 69 Austen, Jane 170 Austin, John L. 25 Aveline, Pierre 81 Baldinucci, Filippo 101 Barrias, Louis-Ernest 135 Barry, Fabio 148, 150 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 131 Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands 155 Bellini, Giovanni 55, 59–61 Bellori, Pietro 42 Belting, Hans 24–25 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 11, 21–22, 40, 63–65, 68, 74, 79, 90–91, 99, 107 Binet, Alfred 40, 103, 116, 202 Bloom, Leopold 74 Boffrand, Germain 159 Böhme, Gottfried 25 Boizot, Simon Louis 15 Borboni, Giovan Andrea 26, 79, 98, 105, 116–117

271 | Index

Borghese, Camillo 197 Borghese, Pauline 197, 198, 201, 206, 209 Boselli, Orfeo 87 Botticelli, Sandro 181, 184, 190 Böttiger, Carl August 137, 170–171 Bouchardon, Edme 42 Bouhours, Dominique 98 Boyer, Pascal 52 Bredekamp, Horst 25 Bretez, Louis 84 Brewster, David 166 Britton, John 163 Brosses, Charles de 27, 92, 104–105, 107–108, 112–113, 117, 129, 131, 136, 172, 175, 188, 202, 204 Brude-Firnau, Gisela 170 Burckhardt, Jacob 181 Burke, Edmund 134 Butti, Francesco 97 Callistratus 22, 38, 39–43, 61, 74–76 Canova, Antonio 103, 131–132, 141–142, 197–199, 201, 208 Capodiferro, Evangelista Maddaleni de’ 56–57 Carracci, Annibale 61–62 Casanova, Giacomo 108 Caylus, Anne-Claude de Tubières-Grimoard de Pestels de Lévis, Comte de 42 Cerva, Elio Lampridio 56 Challe, Robert 87

Chantelou, Paul Fréart de 91, 97–98 Chilpéric, King of Gaul 143 Choisy, Abbé de 80, 86 Chrysippus 69 Chrysoloras, Manuel 152 Chrysostomus, Dio 92 Chrysostomus, Johannes 73 Ciampoli, Giovanni 73 Cicero, Marcus Tillius 19, 34, 60, 69, 99, 116, 144 Cicognara, Leopoldo 157 Clerc, Rémy 24 Cole, Michael 25 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 130, 160, 168 Comte, Auguste 204 Constable, John 162 Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany 101 Cubières, Michel de 11–12, 14, 21–22, 27, 36, 53, 70, 119, 170, 207 Cureau de la Chambre, Pierre 41, 98–99 Dagobert, King of Gaul 143 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 164 Dairval, Charles-César Baudelot de 116 Darwin, Charles 204 Delbeke, Maarten 97 Demosthenes 39, 43 Desenfans, Noel 165 Desjardins, Martin 82–83 Dibutades 112 Diderot, Denis 42, 46, 52 Didi-Huberman, Georges 24 Diogenes Laertius 36, 69 Dolce, Lodovico 60 Donatello 184 Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine 27, 81, 105, 130, 202 Egloffstein, Julie von Epictetus 69

169

Falconet, Etienne 42, 46 Fernández, Gregório 113 Feuillade, François, Duc de la 83, 86–87 Feuillet, Louis 80 Figrelius, Edmundus 26, 109 Fiviziano, Giacomo 59 Flaubert, Gustave 103 Francia, Francesco 59 Frédégonde, Queen of France 143 Freedberg, David 24–25, 129, 133 Freud, Sigmund 25, 103–104, 116–117, 179, 202, 206–207 Frontisi-Dutroux, Françoise 47 Furján, Helene 162 Fußli, Heinrich 123, 127

272 | Index

Gandy, Joseph 163–164, 166–167 Gauricus, Pomponius 87 Gautier, Théophile 25, 103 Gell, Alfred 19, 20, 22, 26, 48–49, 51–55, 61, 65–68, 94, 112, 183, 205 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 182 Gibbon, Edward 103 Gébelin, Antoine Court de 92, 105 Giordano, Luca 61, 62 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 15, 27, 52, 124–130, 134, 136, 169–172, 190–191 Gorgias 32, 39, 43 Grégoire, Paul, Abbé 84, 157 Griener, Pascal 159 Guasco, Ottaviano de 27, 105–106, 108, 109–117, 123, 129, 136, 172, 175, 188, 193, 202 Guérard, Nicolas 85 Guise, Madame de 80 Hamilton, Emma, Lady 169, 172 Hamilton, William, Lord 169 Hardouin-Mansart, Jules 85 Heine, Heinrich 201 Henri IV, King of France 86 Herder, Johann Gottfried 15, 27, 52, 112, 119, 120–122, 136 Hirt, Alois 127 Hofland, Barbara 163, 167 Hogarth, William 103 Homer 22, 74 Houdon, Jean-Antoine 46 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 186 Hume, David 107, 131 Innocentius III, Pope

101

Jacobs, Frederieke 25 Joubert , Joseph 198 Junius, Franciscus 39 Kant, Immanuel 27, 54, 131–136 Keats, John 74 Klein, Melanie 206 Krauss, Karl 105 Lamballe, Marie-Thérèse de Savoye, Princesse de 165 Latour, Bruno 25 Lavin, Irvin 64 Le Camus de Mézières, Nicholas 159 Ledoux, Claude-Nicholas 159 Lemée, François 26, 80, 82, 86–88, 91–93, 98–99, 101, 105, 107–108, 112, 116–117, 120, 123, 136, 172, 202, 206

Lenoir, Alexandre 157–159, 168, 178 Leo X, Pope 79 Leroy, Julien-David 147 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 121, 128 Longinus 32–33, 43, 48 Louis XIII, King of France 86 Louis XIV, King of France 26, 80, 82–88, 91, 93–94, 96, 98, 130–131, 136, 206 Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de 164–165 Magini, Arcangelo 131, 133 Maniura, Robert 24 Marchetti, Domenico 198–200 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France 15, 165, 168 Marino, Giambattista 64 Marteau, Pierre 86 Marx, Karl 25, 103–104, 116, 202 Mascardi, Agostino 64 Mazarin, Cardinal 94, 96 Méhégan, Guillaume-Alexandre Chevalier de 105–106, 108, 111 Meiners, Christoph 130 Memling, Hans 183, 185 Michelangelo 41, 184, 199, 200 Michelet, Jules 81, 83, 143, 157, 159 Milton, John 165–166 Missirini, Melchior 197 Mitchell, William J. T. 24, 133 Molière 83 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de 108–109 Myron 18 Nagel, Alexander 152–154, 156, 172, 192–194 Napoleon 197, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich 186, 193 Nikolaos 34 Nilus, Horapollo 111 Ogden, Thomas 206, 208 Osthoff, Hermann 190 Ostini, Pietro 92 Ovid 47, 60–61, 75 Pallavicino, Sforza 22, 26, 68–70, 72–74, 76, 79–80, 176, 207 Perrault, Claude 35 Philippus 128 Picart, Bernard 92–93, 108, 105 Pietz , William 25, 131, 133, 135 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 144–157, 166, 171–172, 178, 192–194 Plato 71 Pliny 59

273 | Index

Plutarch 34–35, 116, 144 Poliziano, Angelo 182 Pollaiuolo, Antonio 184 Porte, Armand de la 94–95, 97 Pressouyre, Sylvia 148 Protarchus 88 Puget, Pierre 40–42 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome 27, 105–106, 111, 113–117, 141, 143, 157, 159, 172, 175, 188, 193, 197, 201, 208 Quintilian 18–19, 26, 32, 34, 43, 99, 107, 111–112, 144, 189, 190 Raguenet, François de 14 Raphael 58 Régnier-Dumarais, Abbé 86 Rezzonico, Giovanbattista 148 Ricci, Sebastiano 47, 61 Richardson, Jonathan 103 Rigaud, Hyacinthe 83 Robert, Hubert 158 Robertson, Etienne Robert or 164 Robespierre, Maximilien de 168 Sadoleto, Jacopo 56 Saint-Evremond, Charles de 95 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de 80, 95 Sam, Randy 16 Schaller, Friedrich 171 Schiller, Friedrich 54, 127 Schlosser, Julius von 24, 129, 133 Scopas 37–39 Searle, John 25 Shepherd, Rupert 24 Silvestre, Israël 83 Simonides 71, 144 Soane, Sir John 159–165, 167–170, 172 Socrates 71 Speeckaert, Hans 45–46 Sphaerus 69 Stevens, Wallace 74 Stigliani, Tomaso 64 Tebaldi, Antonio 56 Tessouyre, Sylvie 150 Testelin, Henri 83 Thucydides 34, 156 Travani, Francesco 79 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 84 Tussaud, Madame (Marie Grossholtz) 27 Twombly, Cy 16 Tylor, Edward Burnett 204

Urban VIII, Pope

68

Valeriano, Piero 111 Varro 116 Vasari, Giorgio 59 Vélazquez, Diego 16–17 Vergillius, Publius Maro 34, 74–75 Vermeer, Johannes 49, 50, 55 Vertron, Claude-Charles Guyonnet de 85 Vigenère, Blaise de 39 Vignoli, Tito 183, 193, 204 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 23 Vischer, Robert 23 Warburg, Aby 23–24, 27, 73, 129, 137, 171, 173, 176–194, 202–205, 208

274 | Index

Warburton, William 111 Warner, Marina 24 Watelet, Claude-Henri 65 Webb, Ruth 32–33, 38 Whitehouse, James 103 Wilton-Ely, John 150 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 26, 39, 105, 108, 114, 116, 128, 147, 182 Winnicott, David 206–208 Wölfflin, Heinrich 23 Wood, Christopher 152, 153–154, 156, 172, 192–194 Zeno 69 Zix, Benjamin

199

This publication has been made possible by funding from the Dutch Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO). Cover: Sebastiano Ricci, Perseus slaying Phineas (detail), circa 1705–1710, oil on canvas, 65 by 80 cm, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum

© 2015 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin/Munich ISBN 978-3-11-034541-4 eISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034556-8 eISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038035-4

Co-published in the Netherlands by Leiden University Press, Leiden © Leiden University Press, Leiden 2015 ISBN 978-90-8728-231-8 eISBN (PDF) 978-94-0060-220-5 eISBN (EPUB) 978-94-0060-221-2

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