Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 9781400872756

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REFIGURING THE REAL

Refiguring the Real Picture and Modernity in Word and Image

I4oo-I700 CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER

Princeton University Press, Princeton, New jersey

Copyright © 1993 by Princeton Unil'cr~ity Pre» Pubhshed by Princeton Unil'ersity Press, .jl Wilham Street, Pnnceton, NewJcrsey o8:i4o In the United Kingdom; Princeton UllIl'ersity PreS!>, Oxford All NighL' Reserved I.I/Jral)' of Crmgrrss Call1/ogmg-i1l-l'llblzral101l Dalll

Braider, ChrIStopher, 1950Refigunng the real; picture and mockrnlly in I\ore! ami Image. qoo-I7oo / Chri~topher Br,uder. p. em. Includes bibliographic.ll references ,lIlt! iude". ISBN o-b91-{)6957-3 I. Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetic~) 2. Art~, ~1cdiel:d 3. An" ~Iodcrn. I. Title. NXqo.B73 1992

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix xiii

INTRODUCTION

UtjJictum JJOesis: Image and Text in Postmedieval Writing and Art

3

Una jJiu grassa Minerva: The Origins of Perspective and the Aesthetics of the Incarnation in Alberti's Della pittura

20

La verite en peinture: Space, Place, and Truth in Rogier van der Weyden's St. Ivo

37

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: The Death of Allegory and the Discovery of the World in the Elder Pieter Bruegel

71

2

3

4 A Double-Silvered Glass: Christian Imitation and the "Curious Perspective" in Cervantes's Don Quijote

100

Idols of the Mind: Baroque Illusion, Theatrical Pers1lasion, and the Aesthetics of Iconoclasm in Jan Steen

12 9

The Denuded Muse: The Unmasking of Point of View in the Cartesian Cogilo and Vermeer's The Art of Painting

174

The Art of Mis/Reading Art Text, Image, and Modernity in Rembrandt's Philosopher

199

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v i i i . CONTENTS

8 Et in Anadia Ego: The End of Ut Pictura and the Invention

of the Aesthetic in Nicolas Poussin CONCLUSION

The Poetry of Absorption and the Ontology of the Modern in Lessing, Gre llZe , and Kant NOTES

INDEX

221

ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOR PLATES I.

2.

3. 1. 5. 6. 7.

8.

(jollowingjJage 50)

Rembrandt van Rijn. Belslwz::.ar's Feast. National Gallery, London. Rogier van der Weyden, Sl. Iva (?). National Gallery. London. Pieler Bruegel the Elder. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Musccs Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. Jan Steen. O;,ster-Eating GirL Mauritshuis, The Hague. Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Rembrandt van Rijn. The Philosopher. Musee du Louvre. Paris. Nicolas Potlssin, Et in Arcadia Ego (A1'Cadian Shepherds) (1630-1635). Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Nicolas Pomsin, Et in A1'Cadia Ego (Arcadian Shepherds) (ca. 1655). Musee du Louvre, Paris.

FIGURES

1. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child. Accademia Carrara, Bergamo. 2. Correggio, Madonna of the Basket. National Gallery, London. 3. Jusepe de Ribera, Entombment. Musee du Louvre, Paris. 1. Jean Maloucl, Pieta. Musee du Louvre, Palis. 5. Willem Key, Pietd. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 6. Miniature showing the Lover being seiz.ed with sexual passion as the God of Love shoots the arrow of Beauty into his eye, from the Roman de La Rose, MS 126. fol. 13v. Robert Garrett Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Princeton University Libraries. 7. Jan \'an Eyck, Madonna in a Church. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. R. The Limbourg i\rothers, AfaTch, calendar 1\Iustration from Les Ires riehl'S }wurl's dl' j('Qll, due de BerT),. Musce Conde, Chantilly. 9. Rogier \~IB del' Weyden, linnuncialioll (detail), exterior, the .-1/Joea~)'J}se altarpiece. Hotcl-Diell, Beaulle. 10. Master of Marie de BO\lrgognc, Portrait of owner with the Virgin in a Church, HOUTS of Marie de BOll Tgogne, Cod. 1857, fo!' 14\'. BildArchiv cler Osterreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. 1 1. Jan and Hubert \"dn Eyck, AnnuTlciation, central tier, exterior, the Ghent Altarpiece. St. Bavo's, Ghent. 12. Od)'sseus in the La7ld of the LaislT),gonians (a party of Odysseus's men meet the daughter of Antiphates). Vatican Library.

30 30 30 31 31

41 47 48 49

51 53 55

x •

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

13. Master of Marie de Bourgogne, page from the Hours of the Cross (Vespers), Hours of Engelbert of Nassau, MS DOllce 219, fo!. 88. The Bodleian Library, Oxford. 14. Rogier van del' Weyden, Christ Appeanng 10 His Mothe!: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 15· Rogier van der Weyden, Descent fmm the Cmss. The Prado, Madrid. 16. Rogier van del· Weyden, interior, the AjiOcal)psl' altarpiece. HotelDieu, Beaune. 17. Jan and Hubert van Eyck, The Mystic Lamb, interior, the Ghent Altarpiece. St. Bam's, Ghent. 18. Petrus Christus, AjJocal)'pse. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. 19. Jan van Eyck, Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. Musce du Louvre, Paris. 20. Rogier van der Weyden, St. Luke Pa in ling the Virgin. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 21. Rogier van der Weyden, St. Lulie Painting the Vi/gin, detail. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 22. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Harvesters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 23. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle between Ca1'71ival and Lent. KUllsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 24. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunlers in Ihe Snow. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 25. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children's Games. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 26. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (?), The Pamter and the Connoisseur, pen drawing (Munz, No. 126). Albertina, Vienna. 27. Raphael, The School of Athens, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura. Vatican Palace. 28. PieLer Bruegel the Elder, Adoration of Ihe Kings. National Gallery, London. 29· Hans Memling, Annunciation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 30. Frontispiece to Francis Bacon, ]nstauratio magna (London, 1620). 31. Master of Catherine de Cleves, Christ in the Wint'j)1"P.s~. figure at the bottom of a page containing a minialure of Christ Stalldl11g on the Lowered Cross, the "Morgan book" portion of the IIoun of Catherine de Cleves, M. 917, p. 121. The Pierpon t Morgan Library, New York. 32. Jean Dubreuil, cabinet of catoptric devices, from IB Pl'TsjJf(tivl' !ml· tique (Paris, 1663)' 33. Esme de Boulonnais, II faut mourir, woodcut. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 31. E. G. Boring's object-ambiguom mother-in-law. 35. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors. National Gallery, London.

55 58 59

60 61 62

64 65 66 73 77 82 8'1 87

89 91

91 97

106

I 12

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Ii!

IIG

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xi

3G. The Soul illumined by Sacred Love, from Hugo I'lerman, Pia desidma: Emblnnatis, Elq,Tlis & affeclilllls SS. Palmm lUustrata (Antwerp, l(i28).

37. Francis Quarles, Emble11les, Book 3, Emblem 11· 38. William Hogarth, Perspectival Absurdities, frontispiece to Dr. Brook '1hylor's Method ofPen/Jective made easy both in Theory and Practice (London,1751)' 3~). "E.lck spiegle hem sc\vcn," from Jacob Cats, Spiegel van de Oude en de Ni£'1lWI! Tyt, in AIle de We/ken (Amsterdam, 1655). '10. Jan Steen, Bean Feast. Gemaldegalerie Wilhclmsh6he, Cassel. '11. Jan Steen, In weelde siet toe (Beware of luxury). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. '12. Jan Steen, OldDlll1lk and Sleej)ing Woman in a Bordello. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. ,13. Rembrandt van Rijn, Tlw Ra/Je of Ganymede. Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. +1. Gerard DOli, The Night SchooL R\jksmuseum, Amsterdam. '15. Jan Steen, Doctor Feeling a Young Woman's Pulse. The John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 'IG. Jan Steen, Paljas with a Violin Being Robbed by a Young Woman. Mauritshuis, The Hague. .17. Rembrand t van Rij n, SelfPortmil With Saskia or The Prodigal Son Dissipating His Patrimony. Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. .18. Jan Vermeer, The Procuress. Gemaltlegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. 19. Giotto, The Adoration of lhe Magi, fresco. The Arena Chapel, Padua. 50. Giotto, Lamentation, fresco. The Arena Chapel, Padua. 51. Charles Le Brun. Exjmssive Head: Anger, from Conference de M. le BIll11 sllr I 'expression generale et parllculjere des Passions (16g8; Verona. 1751, following the Amsterdam ed. of 1713)' 52. Frans Hals, Banquet of the Officers of lhe St. George Militia of Haarlem (IllIG). Frdns Halsmuseum, J-Iaarlem. 53. Diego Velazquel, The Count-Duke Olivares. The Prado, Madrid. 54. Thomas de Keyser, ConstanlijnlJuygens and His Clerk. National Gallery, London. :;s. Andrea PoZ:to, Allegory of the Missionary Work oftheJesuil Order, fresco, ceiling of the nave. S. Ignazio, Rome. ;;b. Petcr Paul Rubens, Mirad,'s of SI. Francis Xavier. KunsthisLOrisches :Ylu,eulll. Vienna. ;;7. Georges de La Tour, The Magdal;me. ~lllScc du Louvre, Paris. ;iH. Peter Paul Rubens, SelfPortratt (ca. tli33-1639). Kunsthistorisches :-'lmeulll, Vienna. ;;q. Jan Steen, Self Port ra it. RijkSIl111SeUm, Amsterdam. 60. Jan Vermeer, Offi((7' and Laughing GirL The Frick Collection, ~cw York. 61. Jan Vermeer, Allegory of the Fazth. The Metropolitan Museum of An, New York.

123 123

130 131

136 136

138 140 141

142

144 146 147 150 150

152 153 151

155 161 163 168 170

173 175 182

x i i . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

62. Jan Vermeer, View of Delft. Mauritshuis, The I-Iague. 63. Giorgione (?), La Veccliia/ Col Tempo. Aecademia, Venice. 61. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bathsheba. Musee du Louvre, Paris. 65. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait (1628). Rijksmuseum, Amstel'darn. 66. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Port mit (1669). Mauritshuis, The Hague. 67. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Partrait (1658). The Frick Collection, New York. 68. Rembrandt van RUn, Self-Portrait as Laughing Old Man (ca. 16651668). Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. 69. Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait as the A/Jostle Palll (1661). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 70. Nicolas Poussin, The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Wildenzess. Musec du Louvre, Paris. 71. Nicolas Poussin, The Woman Taken m Adultery. Musec du Louvre, Paris. 72. Nicolas Poussin, 1\SS1l1llption of the Virgin. National Gallery of An, Washington, D.C. 73. Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with John the Evangelist. The Art Institute of Chicago. 74. Nicolas Poussin, A.pollo and Dap/me. Musee elu LouVTe, Paris. 75. Nicolas Poussin, Summer. Musee elu Louvre, Paris. 76. Caspar David Friedrich, The Cross on the Mountain, or the Tetschen Alta7piece. Gcmaldegalcrie Neue Meister, Dresden. 77. Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Love Leiters. The Frick Collection, New York. 78. Franr;:ois Boucher, Resting GirL Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 79. Jean-Baptiste-Simcon Chardin, A Lady Taking Tea. Hunlerian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. 80. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Ungrateful Son. Musee du Louvre, Paris.

198 201 208 20g 20 9

218 21 9 220

260 202

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

he author owes what authors do. Thanks go first to those friends and colleagues who read and commented now on individual chapters, now on the manuscript as a whole: Anthony Cascardi, Dorrit Cohn, Philip Fine, Ernest Gilman, Ilona Karmel, Daniel Shine, JurU Striedter, Andreas Teuber, Christopher Wood, and Francis Zucker. I list them alphabetically, not to disguise how much lowe anyone of them in particular, but to mark how entirely I have relied on the goodwill, tact, and in telligence of each and all. And I only wish there were some better way to recognize the reader for Princeton University Press whose continued anonymity robs me of the pleasure of thanking her/ him properly. But other debts must be paid: to Michael Spence, quondam Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, to his assistant, Katherine May, to David Perkins, Professor of English and sometime Chair of the Literature Concentration at Harvard, and to the Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust for putting me in the way of a Lurcy Faculty Fellowship securing the second half of the year of presidential leave during which much of the writing and research were done; and to Jeremy Knowles, current Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, for a generous grant helping defray the costs of ill ustration. I am grateful for permission to reprint large portions of two of my articles, 'The Art of the Ambidextrous: The Fall of Icarus, the Death of Allegory, and the Meaning of Spatial Realism in the Light of William Carlos Williams's PicturE'S from Brlleghef' (originally published in Stanford Literature Review +2; © 1987, Anma Libri; reprinted by permission of the publisher) and 'The Denuded Muse: The Unmasking of Point of View in the Cartesian Cogito and Vermeer's The Jirt of Painting' (originally published in Poetics Today 10: 1; © 1989, Duke University Press; reprinted by permission of the publisher). I am also grateful for permission to reprint "Musce des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden (originally published in Collected Shorter Poems, 1930--1944; © 1950, by Faber & Faber, Ltd.; reprinted by permission of ule publisher) and "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," "J-Iaymaking," "Self-Portrait," and large segments of 'The Adoration of the Kings" and "Children's Games" by William Carlos Williams (origi-

T

xiv. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

nally published in Pictures from Brueghe~ © 1962, by William Carlos Williams; replintcd by permission of the publishers, New Directions and, for British rights to 'The Adoration of the Kings" and "Children's Games," Carcanet Press Ltd.). It would take too long to name the many museums, galleries, and libraries whose U-easures grace the pages of this book; the acknowledgments accompanying the pictures they have provided are no less heartfelt for their formality. And now for both the easiest and the hardest part: sending thanks (and love) to Sandra Naddaff and, in her name, to the tutors, adminisU-ators, and students of the Literature Concentration at Harvard, with whom I shared ten joyful and sustaining years. Together, we created something unique and irreplaceable; I only hope this book gives some faint taste of what it was like. Of my wife, finally, whose steadying Yankee influence is everywhere, I say nothing. She insists.

REFIGURING THE REAL

INTRODUCTION

Ut pictura poesis: Image and Text in Postmedieval Writing and Art niqUe feature of Western culture from the via modema of the later Middle Ages down to the wellsprings of our own experience of modernity in the final decades of the seventeenth century is its deep and pervasive commitment to forms of picturing. The aim ofrhis book is to explain both the nature of these forms taken for themselves and their contribution to postmedieval culture as a whole. The ideal with reference to which pictorial form affirmed its peculiar authority and scope was chiefly supplied by painting. To this is traced painting's promotion, on the threshold of the modern era, from the lowly status of a mere "mechanical" art, a glorified potting or weaving, to a position comparable to that of the seven liberal arts of medieval tradition.] To it also we owe the doctrine of the Sister Arts encapsulated in the famous Horatian dictum ut pictum poesis, "as in painting, so in poetry," a creed dominating Western aesthetics from the Renaissance clear to the close of the E.nlightenment. But the crucial thing is Jess what this meant for pain ting than the way it informed the conception and practice of all of the arts, and thus even the liberal arts, with Poetry, what we today call Literature, at their head. Nor is this just a question for aesthetics. In chapter I we shall explore important links between Albertian perspective and the theology of the Incarnation, and in chapter 3 how a landscape by the cider Pieter Bruegel prefigures the space-time of modern geography and history. Chapter 5 takes up the promiscuous intermingling of painting and theater with philosophy, religion, and politics characterizing the baroque, while chapter 6 expounds the kinship between an allegory of painting by Vermeer and Cartesian meditations on the structure of natural science. Far from being confined to the domain of visual and literary art, the pictorial serves as a central cultural model spanning the entire spectrum of modes of representation: beyond the light shed on artistic form is its impact on the world at large, the kind of place it is and the sort of creatures who inhabit it.

~

-1 • INTRODUCTION

The following account of the collusions and coincidences unIung postmedicval painting, literature, philosophy, and science aims, however, at more than a mere tendentious drawing of parallels and analogies; it speaks to what these point to without quite grasping: a deeper identity embracing the several arts and sciences as integral moments of a single evolution. It avoids, moreover, the clumsy-Michael Baxandall would say '\actless"-referring of the pictorial to some putatively more fundamental, "infrastructural" because exu·a-aesthetic dimension of a larger cultural environment we would then say "caused" or "determined" it. Albeit for reasons related to many things besides picturing itself, t1Ie pictorial assumes the force of a determining cause in its own right, a source of the world by which we see it as conditioned. To take a brief example, a telling antecedent of modern pictorialism comes down to us in a page from a set of commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard written sometime before 1323 by the great Franciscan logician, William of Ockham. This page tackles the nature of concepts or "universals." Ockham begins by rejecting several prominent versions of the prevailing Realist interpretation, in which concepts are said to possess a mode of existence independen t of and logically and on to logically prior to that assigned the multitude of particulars subsumed under them. He denies that a universal is something real having what he terms esse suajectivum: being or existence as an inheren t property of the thing of which, as the "subject" of an attributive proposition, it is a predicate. He thus deprives it of any permanent footing either "inside the mind" through the mediation of a Platonic Archetype or Idea, or "outside the mind" by participation in an Aristotelian "substance," granting it only esse objectivum in anima: existence as a contingent thought-object subordinate to the particular mental act that forges it for conceptual purposes of its own. The universal is then neither derived from things themselves, nor an innate possession of our own minds, but something we malie: more specifically it is a kind of picture Lficturn] which, as a thought-object, has a being similar to that which the thing out~idc the mind has in its real existcncc. What I mean is this. The intellect, seeing a thing outside the mind, forms in the mind a picture resembling it, in such a way that if the mind had the power to produce [virlutem /Jrociuctivam] as it has the power to picture [virtulem Jictivam] , it would produce by this act a real outside thing that would be only numerically distinct from the former real thing. The case would be similar, analogously speaking, to the activity of an artist. For just as the artist [artifex] who sees a house or a building outside the mind first pictures in the mind a similar house and later produces a similar house in reality that is only numerically distinct from the first, so in our case the picture in the mind that we

INTRODUCTION·5

get Ii'om seeing something outside would act as a pattern [exemplar]. Forjust as the imagined house would be a pattern for the architect, if he who imagines it had the power to produce it in reality, so likewise the other picture would be a pattern for him who forms it. And this can be called a universal, because it is a pattern and relates indiffercnuy to all of the singular things outside the mind. Because of the similarity between its being as a thought-object and the being of like things outside the mind, it can stand for such things. And in this way a universal is not the result of generation [non est per generationem: is not engendered in the mind independent of things], but of abstraction [sed per abstraclionem: by a process of abstraction from things], which is only a kind of picturing [quae non est nisi jictio quaedam]. 2 It is by now a common place that "modern" in the broad sense of "postmedieval" art is indebted to the nominalist reworking oflate-Scholastic thought,~ and a signal virtue of this passage from the hand of one of nominalism's most conspicuous exponents is to show just how and why. What chiefly distinguishes modern from prenominalistic art is naturalism: the capacity to depict persons, objects, places, and events in a form consonant with that found in natural sensory experience. But despite the name conventionally given it, naturalism is anything but natural-if only because it demands a turn of mind for which the facts of natural experience have intrinsic interest and importance,4 properties notably denied them prior to the moment in thc history of Western thought marked by the emergence of nominalism. Yet what strikes us in this passage is not ule light cast on painting's dcbt to nominalism, but the reversc. Portraying thought as induction, a rcaching of gencral truths through abstraction from particular things embraccd as irreducibly real in themselves, Ockharn lays a philosophical basis for a similar process in painting. Still, he is interested here less in art for its own sake than in what it teaches about the being of universals, and thus about the nature of concepts and knowledge: the whole point of the analogy between thinking ab the formation of concepts and picturing as that of images is not what the philosopher shows the artist about art, but what the artist shows the philosopher about thought. Indeed it is striking that, in searching for an example of what it means to form ideas abollt "real outside things," he should turn to the case of an artist working direcuy from somc model in UIC world. For it implies that something at \cast approaching the "inductive," naturalistic art to which nominalism is said to contribute already exists. But ule decisive step comes at the text's close where Ockham suggests not just that thinking is in some general way like but that it actually is "only a kind of picturing": non est nisi jictio quaedam. Far more than what Ockham brings to the art of picturing, the passage foregrounds what he

6 • INTRODUCTION

takes fmm it, which is nothing less than the basis of philosophy itself: just where we would normally look for a prior condition or source, we find the art of picturing already in place, imparting something of its own form and character to the very cause of which it is a presumed effect. Nor is this reversal of causal values limited to nominalism or even early modern philosophy at large as reformed in part in nominalism's image; every phase of Western experience is to some degree reconceived in terms of pictures and images. When about a century after Ockham's death Leon Battista Alberti claims that it is "scarcely possible to find any superior art ~hat does not look to painting, ,,5 this is no idle boast; he simply states the nature of the case. And it is by the nature of the case as so stated that we shall be guided in the effort to understand how this situation came about and what consequences it had for the direction and temper of the culture's subsequent evolution. Exploring this topic inevitably engages the complex of historical, aesthetic, and methodological issues surrounding the theory of the Sister Arts embedded in the Renaissance espousal of the plinciple 1ft pictura poesis laid down in Horace's An poetica. As Rensselaer Lee andJean Hagstrum have shown,6 in its capacity as the cornerstone of the "humanistic theory of art" the doctrine of the Sister Arts is the single most tangible fact about Western art and poetry alike from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. But simply registering the fact and chronicling its progress during the period over which ut pictura reigned is not enough. For the rise of the doctrine of the Sister Arts is as much a signal historical problem as it is an inescapable historical event. There is for instance the celebrated paragone: an affair that, beginning as a simple "comparison" in which each term is honed by juxtaposition with its "paragon" or "touchstone" in the other, quickly degenerated into a rivalry or dispute over the honor of being "elder" Sister. Though this dispute has been duly aired in the scholarly literature, it has never been taken quite as seriously as it deserves. This is in part because attention has chiefly focused on the relevant texts rather than the corresponding images, a circumstance alone sufficient to distort the case. But it is also

due to the way the paragone has always been regarded a priori as a family affair incapable as such of casting ut jJictura in doubt since its very terms beg the question to be decided. Yet it is already telling that in one of the most powerful contributions on painting's behalf, Leonardo argues not, like Piles or Du Bos, from painting's capacity to do what poetry docs, only better, but instead from its privileged link with sensory "experience" and, through experience, with another mode of picturing emerging at just this time, namely, science: 7 a form of representation not only qualitatively different from but even inimical to poetry. Still more significant, however, is the way the initial equation, "as in painting, so in poetry," syntactically weighted in favor of the first term,

INTRODUCTION. 7

almost immediately changed course. That the aesthetics of the Sister Arts gave pride of place to the visual is undeniable. Despite the paragone poetry was meant to conform to an ideal of graphic imagination for which painting supplied not only the paradigm but the basic theoretical vocabulary: the figural idiom in which poems paint and depict, draw and adumbrate, color and sketch, delineate and portray. But while theory pointed one way, practice went the other. Thus Sidney's Apologie defines poetry as "an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth-to speak metaphorically, a speaking picrure."8 "Imitation" as Sidney means it here is nevertheless subject to a major prejudicial restriction, as the narrative representation of "significant human action," i.e., action already singled out as significant by the existing literary inheritance. 9 Similarly, though in the long Dissertation appended to the Cours de peinture Roger de Piles labors mightily to prove painting superior to poetry both as imitation and as a vehicle of moral improvement, in the Abrige de fa vie des peintres he concedes that "one should think of a Picture as a Stage on which each Figure plays its role."lo Despite his own forwardlooking defense of color and line or design (dessein) , rather than narrative, allegorical, or historical "invention," as the central, constitutive element of painterly art, 1 1 what he conceives painting essentially to be and strive for remains dominated by poetic and, more specifically, dramatic notions of con ten t, form, and effect. All of this helps explain why, in the system of borrowings ut pictura licensed, the ostensible parity of the Sister Arts in effect turned painting into a mirror in which poetry ceaselessly con templatcd its own likeness. Nor is it just that there is no work on painting's side equivalent to Caylus's Tableaux tires de l'Iliade, de l'Odysee, d'Homire et de I'Eneide de Virgile laying out for painters' benefit suitable subjects from heroic verse, with "general observations on costume. "12 Even when we find a poem, say James Thomson's evocation of the advent of summer in The Seasons, arguably emulating a speCific painting (Guido Rcni's Aurora), 13 the striking thing is how far the picture is itself mere illustrated verse. What ul pictura poets tend to imitate is simply poetry at one remove. While aI;sing as an avowal of poetry's envious sense of inadequacy relative to a mission of concrete visual representation common to both arL6 as the creation of a deliberate program or as the symptomatic index of the social, cultural, and historical order that produces it, art has of course always had meaning. Meaning, and more specifically the possibility of meaning, is indeed an obsessive preoccupation of Western art from the declining Middle Ages on. It is telling, however, that it is above all as a document, an expressive piece of historical evidence rather than a purposeful symbolic communication, that scholars most comfortably interrogate a work of art for the intelligence it contains. This is because, in the West at least, largely under the impetus of painters like Rembrandt, but even more as a reflection of the Romantic shift from a rhetoric grounded in heroic expression and poetic allegory to an aesthetic rooted in the "natural symbol" conceived as organic embodiment rather than conventional sign, reading art for its meaning has come to be more or less explicitly experienced as reductive. As the very terms "monument" and "document" suggest, to read art is somehow to address it in a way incompatible with the gesture that makes it. Who looks to painting for meaning is always more or less explicitly felt to dispossess it of iL". peculiar reality as painting, emptying it in the reference to something that does not and cannot manifest itself in the image as such, but solely in an indirect, indicial, that is, textual form. And it is in fact remarkable how tl1e more stringent iconologists, say, Nelson Goodman or WJ.T. Mitchell, or the Derrida of La venti en peinture, rehearse a deep and inderacinable iconoclastic impulse with which Western art has had to contend [rom the very beginning. When in a book frankly entitled The Languages of Art Goodman reduces music, visual an, and literature to a triad of "notational" principles, "score, sketch, and script," the very choice of terms betrays a fundamental bias in favor of verbal and, more particularly, sCliptive form. 7 The same general point holds for Mitchell, who opens his lconology by arguing that the whole problem of the image is essentially verbal, stemming from the variety of senses assigned the word "image" itself, and on this basis confines himself to analyzing what people say about images without once confronting the relevant dicta with the evidence of images themselves. s And of course

204 • CHAPTER 7

Derrida's sole purpose is to demonstrate that "truth in painting," as truth, is nothing more than the play of traces and traits, cartouches and copperplate frames-that is, yet another of the characteristically mystifted/self-demystifying guises writing assumes in the logocentric West. 9 The vocabulary is no longer that of biblical prohibitions on the worship of graven idols or overheated apocalyptic imprecations against the scarlet woman or painted whore of Rome; the slier solvent of irony replaces the zealot's hammer and the Tablets of the Law. But the underlying gesture remains the same: the pagan image is subjected to the hegemonic discipline of the Word; the brutish idols must join Dagon in the dust. 10 Needless to say, fear of the iconoclast is not the only motive for resisting the insights of iconography: there is also the post-Romantic cult of the Old Masters first formulated by Fromentin. ll Thus behind Panofsky's apparently purely formal contrast between "monuments" and "documents" we detect a more pervasive opposition thematized in the literary domain as the contrast between "allegory" and "symbol" or "allegory" and "representation": themes that, as de Man has shown, express the tensions latent in the general Romantic and post-Romantic ideology of poetic or literary "voice" and "vision." His point is that literature, tile rhetorical deployment ofwritten language, what he caIls Allegory, simply does not and cannot directly or naturally lend itself to vocal or visionary uses, tending instead to destroy the sense of meaningful presence the categories of "voice" and "vision" imply. 12 But the resistance also reflects something of the nature, if not of art in general, at least of postmedieval Western art, and to this extent cannot be written off as a mere, characteristically Romantic mystification. Nor is it an accident that the problem of iconography first arose in the context of Emile Male's and Erwin Panofsky's work on late medieval and Rt:naissance art. As we saw at the beginning of tllis book, driven in large part by the evangelical function defined by the Franciscan senno of the Imitation of Christ, the visual art even of the early Gothic Middle Ages is already committed to the secular metamorphosis registered in the realism of Giorgione's old woman. True, the art of Giotto or Massaccio poses fewer difficulties in this regard. This is partly because, insofar as they are more candidly narrative and homiletic and correspondingly less mimetically descriptive than Renaissance painting,13 their relation to Scripture and thus to the authoritative presence of an underlying anagogic text is more explicit. And it is also because, in pursuing its "historical" mission as illustration of Holy Writ, adorning the sacred Word in conscious contradistinction to the mere carnal profanity of the body, it still nourishes the hope of turning its back on the secular world as available in ordinary temporal experience.

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But the Flemish and Italian fifteenth century wiUlesses the advent of an an nova, a new, unmistakably "modern" mode of represen tation rooted in the techniques of naturalist illusion and defined above all by the power of producing convincing natural forms systematically recalling rather than conscientiously avoiding those of vernacular experience. Though the intent remains at least nominally the ascetic one associated with Rogier van del' Weyden, the artistic means and aesthetic temper are increasingly those of Jan van Eyck. Where the nameless masters of the higher, pre-Eyckian Middle Ages devote their energies to producing ornamental hieratic symbols immediately perceived and venerated as such, the late medieval or Renaissance painter creates forms appealing to us first and last on unmistakably carnal grounds as, say, the image of una vecchia rather than as the cautionary reminder, col tempo: the old woman herself as she appears on panel or canvas rather than the transparently legible token of the moral lesson she is subsequently found to embody or represent. Yet none of this alters the fact that, since Panofsky in particular, the question of iconography and along with it that of language, and more specifically the graphic language of allegory, has been posed at the very center of thought about art since the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Even where this seems most irrelevant, not to say irreverent, as in the presence of Giorgione's beautifully incontrovertible vecchia, the question of iconography has to be taken seriously: its leadings, as William James would say, must be followed to the end, however great our resistance. But as Giorgione's image also testifies, we must follow it as a question, tl1at is, as a problem. For what exactly docs it mean, practically and theoretically, to say that painting participates in the Text? How should that ~hapc our conduct as student,> of art? Can an iconographic reading Ix: pursued with total disregard for the specificity of pictorial art per se, and thus of all the ways in which it seems to resist exegetic consumption? It is, then, in the context of iconography conceived as a problem that we should think of a picture like the Rembrandt Philosopher in the Louvre. As already hinted, one of the things I will try to show (and I use the loaded word "show" advisedly) is the degree to which we cannot properly see it, even taken as an image, until we have committed ourselves to reading it. For this painting is a remarkable palimpsest: one formed, however, not by an image superimposed on another image, but by an image superimposed on a text. \Vhat shines tl1fough Rembrandt's painting is an antecedent writing, and not just any writing: one of the central texts of Westem culture, Plato's Allegory of the Cave. But in tracing what becomes of Plato's text in Rembrandt's picture we will not be led simply to reaffirm tl1e rights of the literary, semiotic, or textual over what are oflen set do-wn as the deluded claims of the image: claims based

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in an allegedly naive, "mystified" sense of painting's pictural values conceived as irreducible to the semantic play of allegOIical signifiers. Rather will it deepen our feel for the image itself, and even for the peculiar meaning, the peculiar mode of textuality uniquely accessible to it precisely by virtue of its non textual status and form. But since at least in plinciple both what the image is and what it is not are conditioned by its own nature, the time has come to turn to the picture itself (pi. 6). This is of course one of the canonical works, readily available in thousands of reproductions. Often these are cropped versions that isolate the seated figure of the philosopher from the rest of the composition. However, this editorial mutilation is not wholly unfaithful. For the picture presents itself first of all as a genre scene in which, though displaced toward the background, the philosopher becomes the focus of in terest through a countervailing concentration of light in the corner of the room where he sits absorbed in meditation. The genre setting houses him, providing a visual context for his exemplary introspection. This quality of housing and even ministering to his quiet meditations is, moreover, amplified by the genre anecdote. Busying herself with the menial details of domestic life, the female servant tending the fire in the right foreground frees him for studious thought in exactly the way tile shadows in which she moves play up the warm dayligh t by which tile picture brings him into focus. If the maid is often cut out of the image, this attests to her office and efficacy in terms of both the anecdote and the global aesthetic effect. She frames the aged thinker, anchoring the field of darkness needed to set off his exemplary zone of light, thereby encouraging us to dwell the more exclusively on him. In our experience of the painting, and in particular in what this experience tends to leave out, we mime the signal act of serene inwardness he embodies ano, by embodying, gently champions at the picture's glowing surface. And of course, focusing on the philosopher, we also focus on the light. For this is a "Rembrandt," after all, and one of the things we naturally expect it to foreground, beyond the sheer, minutely observed fact of light, is the extraordinary mastery displayed in handling it: the exceptional light effects he achieves in his handling of texture, color, and shade. Indeed, the Louvre PhilosojJher was originally one o[ a series o[ pictures dealing with similar themes whose common thread was Rembrandt's virtuosic luminarism. 14 This gives us an opportunity to examine more closely what we take [or granted in labeling a picture as "a Rembrandt." No one would deny that Rembrandt "does" allegories and history paintings: whether or not, left to his own devices, he would have chosen allegorical and historical themes, as a professional artist obliged to fill commissions reflecting the

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tastes of the times, he had little choice. Whence pictures like Belshazzar's Feast (pI. 1): an example all the more decisive in that, as Schama shows, the theme of the Writing on the Wall recommends itself not only on general grounds, as an interesting biblical story and vanitas paradigm, but as an expression of a peculiarly Dutch self-awareness, a cautionary fable with special meaning for tlle newly independent United Provinces.lf> Still, even in his biblical pictures, what makes them "Rembrandts" is the way they transcend their historical-that is, verbal, scriptural, or literary-pretext. Consider the actual figure Belshazzar strikes in Rembrandt's portrayal of the crucial moment at the feast. With his scrawny neck, pugilist'S nose, and beady protruding eyes, Rembrandt's Belshazzar resembles a jumped-up fishmonger far more than anything one would normally associate with even the most despicable of biblical tyrants. One might argue that this enables Rembrandt to draw the minatory moral of Vanity twice over, depicting not only the fall of temporal power but the deludedness of carnal pride betrayed by the gap betw'cen Belshazzar's hubristic pretensions and the coarseness of his actual person. But the form Rembrandt winds up with is much nearer that of a character out of Overbury or Earle than that of a personification out of Ripa's Iconowgia. The ultimate effect of the vanitas image here is less to remind us of the transcendent metaphysical forces to which in his conceit Belshazzar is so blind than to make us laugh by exposing the ironic contrast between his egomania and his mere genre-bound humanity. It is this gravitation toward genre that accounts for the special kind of spirituality evinced by a marve11ike the Louvre Bathsheba (fig. 64), where the elevation of feeling and expression lies precisely in the lovingly observed ordinariness of the mournfully thoughtful queen. And it also accoun ts for the impact of the self-portraits (figs. 65-66), where the story becomes neither more nor less than a Life whose central protagonist, discerned in tlle transformations the identical face undergoes in evolving from one image to the next, is Time itself-but time as the form of the chances and changes of sublunary experience rather than as providential necessity or the typologized History of allegorical convention. And yet, returning to the Philosopher, this standard, Old Master reading is not enough: it simply leaves too much out to do justice to what Rembrandt has painted. Consider the maid. We have already seen how her most obvious [unction, a purely visual one, is to frame the true focus of the picture, the philosopher. But in addition to providing a visual, she supplies a temporal, narrative frame. For even assuming that the picture is just what, and only what, it appears to be, a genre scene depicting a philosopher's meditations, Rembrandt still has a story to tell, the supporting anecdote. By her presence and activity the maid enables the art-

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Fig. 64. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bathsheba. Musee du Louvre. ist to indicate not simply that the philosopher meditates, but, by showing how long he has been at it, how deep his meditations are. The maid stirs the fire, presumably, given the way she manipulates the caldron, to cook a meal: while the philosopher pursues his private meditations, time passes, clocked by the importunities of a hunge,ing body. We thus get a measure of time and, so measured, time in tum helps gauge the profundity of the philosopher's unimageable thoughts. Ifwe assume, for example, that the maid prepares an evening meal, the philosopher's meditations have run from dawn to dusk; if we assume, on the other hand, that she readies his breakfast, they have lasted from dusk to dawn. We may also add at this point that she plays a role in setting forth what might be called the formal theme of light for which the anecdote serves above all as a pretext. For one of the things that distinguishes this particular image from the point of view of light is the way it incorporates not just one but two light sources, the natural daylight flowing in at the window and the artificial light produced at the hearth, thereby enriching the fund of available luminarist effects by intToducing two conu-asting

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Fig. 65. Rembrandt van Rijn, SelfPortrait (1628). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 66. Rembrandt van Rijn, SelfPortrait (1669). Mauritshuis, The Hague.

series of light and shadow forms. Just as the seated philosopher concretizes the sunlight flowing through the window, so the servant, crouching in her corner, helps fix the firelight by giving it a volume and irregular textured surfaces to play on. And in this sense, taking the sort of view Svetlana Alpers has recently advanced regarding the "Rembrandt enterprise," the maid is there chiefly to enable the artist to display his multifarious gifts as Master Luminarist: his powers, precisely, as "Rembrandt. ,,16 But we can do still better. For the rival light sources insinuate an imponant semantic and emblematic as well as a purely visual contrast. In the context of the general theme of the philosopher, especially given the dark, vaulted, cavclikc character of the mom, allusion to Plato seems inevitable: what is posed here is not simply the contrast between firelight and sunlight, but that between the Fire and the Sun. True, unlike the prisoners in the original Cave, the woman herself tends the fire, stoking it ,\~th the poker in her right hand while holding back the caldron with her left-and is her tending the fire related to the decidedly haggish, witchlike appearance Rembrandt has given her? Nevertheless, in the general economy of U1C Platonic myth, the motifs of the Fire and the Sun emphasize and "moralize" the fact tllat, by contrast with the philosopher deep in his meditations, the maid occupies herself ,~th mundane matters, the trivial contingencies of domestic life. Moreover, her absorption in domestic affairs lends resonance to the way, unlike the philosopher, who positively bathes in it, the maid turns her back on the sun: for her

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indeed, performing the task appointed her, there is no sun, only her labors at the fire. And here it is worth drawing attention to the spiral staircase in the darkened background. The vaulted, cavelike kitchen sits at the bottom of a stair leading up, and this stair holds the compositional center, defining the axis on which the entire configuration turns. And that it does in fact lead up is established by the shadowy figure (male or female?) just visible at the turn of the stair, in the attitude of one pausing to look back before continuing the climb. (For a clearer view of this crucial figure than that afforded by the transparency available from the Louvre, see the full-page color plate in Rembrandt [New York: Rizzoli, 1980], 1:38-39.) The contrast betv,een philosopher and maid, doubled by that between fire and sun, is thus caught up in a dialectic of ascent, and this theme of ascent stands as the clinching signature of Rembrandt's Platonic text. Still, the very means by which the painting designates its source in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, simultaneously soliciting and orienting an interpretive act on the viewer's part, also disrupts this economy, complicating it beyond anything the original myth licenses. Recall, besides, the scornful way in which Plato's Socrates speaks of the art of painting elsewhere in The Republic, dismissing it as the mere "image of an image," as helplessly in thrall to delusive appearances as the prisoners in the Cave. It is hardly surprising that the picture should mark a certain ambivalence toward its authorizing story, and this ambivalence is expressed above all by the form Rembrandt lends the dialectic of ascent. The stair rises in a spira~ as the key element in a proto-Viconian gyre from left background (philosopher) to right foreground (maid), then left again to the underside of the upper flight before veering right once more to the person at the first turn, and so up to the invisible chambers above. This alone would suggest that the dialectic involved is no longer quite what Plato understands thereby: a dialogic return to first principles by "division" and "definition" leading to a later coun termovemen t of deduction from secure logical premises. Without unduly stressing how this foreshadows Hegel, for instance, we may fairly argue that, in the way it presents its opposed terms as embodied in the philosopher and his maid, the picture reproduces the inventio medii of a Scholastic disputation: the evolution, through the sic et non of an instigating question, toward a solution in the form of a middle term. We note at this stage that it is not the philosopher who makes the ascent, but the mysterious third person at the turn of the stair. Is this because, having already made the ascent, the philosopher has since (as the Platonic myth further prescribes) returned to those below to induce them to turn around and climb the stair? In this reading his meditations would assume the character of a reminiscence, the recollection of the

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Ideal fortifying him in his temporarily suspended missionary work. Or is it rather that, merely meditating it, cut off from the bustle of actual doing left entirely to his servant, he has made himself as incapable of ascent as she herself seems to be? It is also suggestive that, given the room's geometry, the philosopher lies outside the third person's field of vision: all he or she sees, pausing to look back at the start of the ascent, is the maid. What might this represent? A minatory reminder of a former captivity; an expression of concern for the one left behind in the hell of illusion; or a sly hint that there is some valued lesson in the maid herself just as she is, and all unconscious of it as she appears to be: that we discern, in her bustling activity as contrasted with the signal inactivity of her meditative master, a second condition of ascent without which his first were wholly vain? The philosopher meditates, indulging in the luxury of pure, untrammeled thought; yet for him to go on thinking, somebody has to mind the fire, cook the meals, clean kitchen and hearth. And the kitchen is, as it happens, spotlessly neat: clearly, a lot of hard work has gone into keeping it that way.l7 In any event, valuable as they may be in themselves, his meditations are no mere free exercise of the power of thought, a pure triumph of mind over matter, but the expression of someone else's labor: the maid who makes it possible for him to think by looking to those physical needs from which, sitting in his far corner, he so conspicuously distances himself. The fact is that any or all and thus none of these readings will do on its own; and as a result, as allegorical statement, the painting proves completely undecidable, at least within the framework of the story in which our reading begins. Rembrandt is surely no crude materialist: the practical concerns animating the maid are plainly not an end in themselves. Yet the terms of the image exceed those mandated by the Platonic allegory, thereby forcing a re.ision of the original myth that undermines Plato's absolutist philosophical idealism by asserting, as a condition of ascent, the other side of the equation, identified with humble labor in the pragmatic light of the kitchen fire. Here we see a dialectical movement that asserts, through the impasse they reach, each face of the initial opposition, confirming them in their simultaneous presence in the space of the image. By tllis same movement tlle picture nonetheless transcends them both as existing in themselves merely relative to each otller, and thus to the whole that exceeds and contains them. But who or what finally is the beneficiary of this dialectical movement? Who or what if not the artist and his beautiful work of art? For indeed the more we read the image, the more we find to read, and the more we find to read, the more the image as such emerges opposite, as standing utterly outside our efforts to circumscribe it within

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a single, monocular interpretive frame. More specifically, the more we u·y, in conformity with its allegorical thrust as narrative, to contain it in the reductive scheme of a symbolic equation destined to yield the unity of a single solution, the more the narrative seems to collapse under the weight of its own abundance, falling back into the kind of senseless naturalist description from which we originally had to rescue it. Or put it this way. As it moves toward the instant when, through a superabundance of possible readings, its narrative dimension collapses into description again, the picture develops a dialectic in which, through the mediating presence of the mysterious third person on the stair, philosopher and maid transcend each other's limitations toward a certain ascent in whose light both of the original terms are paradoxically held by being withheUl from the reduction involved in a univocal, atomistic solution to the riddle they pose. We can now take this as an allegory of painting's own relation to literature, and thus to the mode of reading implicit in the writings (say, Plato's Republic) from which it draws its source. Representing the narrative moment of Rembrandt's composition, naming its subject, the Platonizing figure of the philosopher imposes its authority over the painting by dictating the story it tells. And in this sense, borrowing its subject from literature, the painting surrenders its own authority as a picture: a surrender all the more pronounced for placing the image under the wing of a text notably hostile to the art of painting, specifically on the grounds of its unreadability-the way it satisfies us with the mere images of things as against the Forms or Ideas that constitute their essential Truth. Yet with the figure of the maid representing, through the practical chores she performs, the descriptive principle countering the allegorical thrust of the narrative, Rembrandt distances the philosopher, intimating a revisionary interpretation of the initial authoritative myth. Nevertheless, within the picture's dialectical economy, neither the narrative demand on Rembrandt's art epitomized by the philosopher nor the descriptive demand of his art represented by the maid suffices by it. So in this first version a grammatically correct construction of the Latin tag produces a memento mori, a brutally unequivocal reminder of the ubiquity of inevitable death. The second (pI. 8), by contrast, composed twenty to lwen ty-five years later (ca. 1650-1655), just as Poussin's career enters its late maturity, proposes an altogether different reading. Here too shepherds and a shepherdess chance on a tomb bearing the inscription "Et in Arcadia ego," painfully deciphered one letter at a time; and here too the important thing is less the words themselves than Poussin's gloss. But where the first version imposed a grammatically correct interpretation in which the gnomic "I" unambiguously refers to Dea.h, situating the picture in the long line of vanitas emblems, the second employs a grammatically indefensible reading as the starting point for a wholly new tradition in which the mood shifts from contemptus mundi to pastoral elegy. In this new reading the initial "et" applies not, as syntax demands, to "in Arcadia," but to "ego"; and "ego" itself points not to personified

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Death, but to the inhabitant of the tomb the words are written on. Poussin turns the trick by deleting the determinative skull. For once the skull is removed the text recovers the ambiguity the first version eliminates; and since it need no longer refer to the generalized Death for which the original tomb serves as a symbol, the text now reverts to the person for whom the new one stands as a memorial. The words "Et in Arcadia ego" are henceforth spoken by the man whose tomb this is, a dead swain who once lived in Arcady even as those now reading his epitaph do: "And even in Arcady am I, Death" becomes "And I too was" or "I too once dwelt in Arcady." As Panofskl' puts it, "We have the occupant of the tomb substituted for the tomb itself, and the whole phrase projected into the past: what had been a menace has become a remembrance.,,5 And as Panofsky documents, it is in this guise that the theme has chiefly come down to us not only in the paintings of Watteau, Reynolds, and Fragonard, but in the verses of Gray, Goethe, and Schiller and the art-historical commentaries and salon criticism of Felibien, Du Bos, and Diderot. But the question posed here is less whether a change occurred and in what it generically consists than why it occurred and thus what it signifies. What is at stake in the conversion from memen to mori to pastoral elegy; and in particular what is so important as to lead a confirmed ancien like Poussin to play low tricks with Latin grammar? One thing clearly is his relation to poetic tradition. Despite the marked divergence in interpretation, both pictures draw on an identical classical source, Virgil's Arcadian Ecwgues. 6 The first, however, treats this source with pietistic rigor, reworking it to suit a late Tridentine fear and loathing denuding it of the idolatrous reverence its status as an authoritative classical text otherwise demands. Painting's true calling lies, after all, not in aping the graces of the pagan past, but in directing our thoughts to the perils-and promise--of the life to come: religion, not carnal poetry, is the ultimate subject ofpictural art. The second. by contrast, reviving the sweet melancholy yearning for the vanished Golden Age that forms the burden of Virgil's songs, restores their authority as an inspiration and model. Where the first implicitly condemns. the second proposes what amounts to a defense of painting. and more specifically ut pictura painting, at its highest and purest: as devoted to the pictorial development of themes from ancient verse. But this already suggests that, beyond the need to choose between pious severity and the pagan pleasures of ut pictura art, the real issue is Poussin himself: the kind of painter he is and the peculiar body of work he has left as his monument. For it is not just the reading lhat changes from one version to the next, the basic mode of painting changes too; and the fruit of this change is nothing less than the neoclassicism of which Poussin is the great canonical exponent.

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In both pictures the central deed, decoding an inscription, is essentially static; but the first displays a dramatic energy and focus wholly absent from the second. The action fills the frame almost completely; and all the key clements fuse together in a single powerful view fixing the beholder's attention on the matter in hand. In keeping 'with this intense focusing of attention there is virtually no transition between picture space and viewing space: both the river god and the near corner of the tomb press close to the plane, all but projecting through it as they might in Rubens or Caravaggio. But though the effect of movement through the plane promotes a sU'ong and even violent sense of recession, the background is reduced to a strict minimum. The patch of open landscape and sky to our left is quite featureless, and the eye is in any case drawn away by the forcefully directed grouping of the three Arcadians; and on the right the view beyond the foregrounded encounter with Death is cut off by the pair of trees and towering rock risingjust the other side of the tomb, further concentrating attention on the critical event and the fatal lesson in which it culminates. The action itself is narrated in similarly uncompromising terms. The first shepherd leans strenuously into his task while his two companions anxiously follow his pointing finger, hanging on an ominous outcome already registered by the mourning river god, a tragic commentator whose presence goes quite unheeded, so engrossed are the principals in discovering the fate to which the text condemns them. As again in Rubens or Caravaggio, a determined use of chiaroscuro deepens a sense of impending doom further underscored by the severity ofPoussin's colors: the dominant hues, extending even to the shepherds' swar!by, weather-beaten skin, arc all earth tones, brown, stone gray, forest green, and olive black. The underlying geometry serves the same controlling purpose. The focus of dramatic interest is set dynamically to right of center as the end point of the movement bringing the Arcadians to the climactic deciphering of the text; and the presiding structural motif is a series of aggressive diagonals in tersecting at the crucial triangle formed by the first shepherd's arm and head with the telltale skull: left-to-right following the path described by the Arcadians and the pattern of light bursting in on the scene, left-to-right again along the rising axis of the tom'" then right-to-left along a line drawn from the river god's torso and the first shepherd's shoulder and head up through the larger of the two trees on the far side of the tomb, and left-to-right once more, linking the river god's head, the shepherd's elbow, and the skull. Most striking of all, however, is the treatment of time and the picture's own spatial present as an image. For in the unfolding process of their reading, clocked by the first shepherd's pointing finger, the protagonists have got no further than the "i" in "Arcadia": the "ego" with which Death

226 • CHAPTER 8

speaks his lethal name still awaits them. But though they have yet to make the awful discovery encoded in the text, the impending catastrophe is already announced by the grieving liver god and the taut foreboding in their own faces. Poussin sets before us less the moment directly imaged than the instan t immediately to follow when, their reading complete, the Arcadians will at last positively know what as yet they only dimly guess at. The scene thus takes the form of a Wolffiinian "appearance": a visual present wholly surpassed by its own inexorable flight toward what lies next and beyond. 7 And this also contributes to and indeed clinches the theme. For the lesson contained in the inscription is the negation of our present life. That the world visible to us here should be destined to destruction by the very form in which it appears is precisely the point, giving the painting not just its peculiar energy, authority, and pathos, but its overriding moral as well. To move now from the first to the second Et in Arcadia Ego is to pass into an entirely different aesthetic universe. The later version contrasts with the first in virtually every respect, a common thread of the changes it introduces being a pronounced easing of the original's overwhelming dramatic power. The figures retreat from the picture plane; and where the earlier painting fuses the protagonists in a single dynamic group, the new one sets them sedately apart, each secure within his or her own outline. The scene moves out into the open, clear of the towering rock and trees dominating the original, and a broad expanse of landscape emerges in the background, further easing tension by yielding wider scope for the beholder's roaming eye. In the narration the sense of urgent expectancy gives way to a mood of graceful meditation conveyed in the actors' peaceful postures and expressions: the first shepherd kneels down to trace the letters more at his ease while a second calmly leans against the tomb to watch; and the third, propping an idle foot on a convenient stone, turns sadly away to point for his pensive miSU'ess a lesson no longer anxiously looked for, but already grasped even as tlle text is deciphered. Shadows linger in the near corners, but the stark chiaroscuro is gone: the play of light is more evenly distributed, gently falling over rather than violently breaking in on tlle scene; and Poussin's palette has enlarged to include not only the brighter green of open pasturage and the luminous blue ofa late spring sky, but the royal blue and aristocratic red and gold of the rather opulent and distinctly classicizing robes his characters now wear in place of the ruder, vaguely windblown garments of the first picture. In conformity with the revised mood the action shifts to the center, stabilizing the arrangement of forms in space; the powerful diagonals largely vanish in favor of soothing horizontals; and instead of intersecting. such diagonals as remain run parallel to each other, restoring the harmonic balance the first picture destroys.

ET IN ARCADIA EGO. 227

And then there is the image's altered temporality. Where the first version hurries on to its own annihilation by focusing our attention less on what we immediately sec than on what will happen next, the second is cntirely self-contained, refcrring to nothing beyond what it directly shows. The key to the new tense is the pensive shepherdess replacing the gricf-su'icken river god. For as suggested a moment ago, like the god, and unlike the Arcadians of the earlier picture, she already grasps what in the time of the reading has yet to be disclosed. Nor is she alone in possessing this knowledge: the rueful gesture with which he points to the tomb suggests her lover does too, as presumably do their two companions, neither of whom betrays the least sign of uncertainty or alarm. Her function here is thus not to establish the dynamic conU'ast between insight and blindness by which the first version projects the scene into a doom-laden future; because the discovery the first represents as yet to come is depicted here as already come and gone, her office is rather to lead inward along the track of the bittersweet remembrance of things past clearly legible in her quiet, musing face. Two pictures could then hardly be more different either in the moral drawn from an identical text or in the sustaining mode of painting itself. For the first is distinguished not just by the formal consequences attending its status as a vanitas emblem; it is a pocket compendium of the stylislie traits Wolffiin identifies with the baroque, especially as contrasted with the kind of "classical" painting associated not only with Poussin's great Renaissance masters, Raphael and Titian, but with Poussin himself.8 The "pain terly" emphasis on fleeting visual appearance; the remarkable openness of form, relating the subject to more than is strictly visible in the immediate frame of the image; the stark chiaroscuro and fiercely directed use of color and light; the robust diagonals and dynamically asymmetrical arrangement of shapes in space; the aggressive penetration of the plane stressing a recession in depth no less strongly felt for being violently cut off by the rock and trees at the rear; and the way the picture gathers everything up in a single transforming view all the more forcefully unified for binding so much explosive energy to one highly focused end: all of this condenses the essential features not only of the still-dominan t international style of the decade in which the painting was composed, but of the work Poussin himself did in his own early, preRoman years-the kind of art he is abandoning at the very moment he painted this picture. The second, on the other hand, distills the sort of art Poussin abandons the baroque for. The "classical" sense of harmony and order, lucidity, rationality, and balance; the cool yet eminently "tactile" self-possession of the figures and rigorously "objective" outlines by which each element, though carefully calculated in its conuibution to the developing

228 • CHAPTER 8

whole, is nonetheless clearly stated in its autonomy; the fondness for the plane, eschewing muscular recession in favor of rhythmic disuibution across the surface of the canvas, distancing rather than involving the beholder to obtain a statuesque impersonality rescued from mere coldness by disciplined warmth of color and serene refinement of form; the way finally the image achieves perfect closure by presenting, in an action subtly over even as it sti1l unfolds,9 a world so complete nothing can ever change it: all these features of the new version define the neoclassical art [or which Poussin has come to be specifically known and prized. The contrast between memento mori and pastoral elegy thus charts the course Poussin had to follow to reach those qualities of subject, form, and tone needed to create the neoclassical monument of Western art history, "Poussin" himself. From this poin t of view we begin to see how overdetermined the memento mOli theme is: by using the baroque to state death Poussin in effect states the baroque i tsdf as death, as in fact he had to to become the painter he is. Nor is it in tlle least coincidental that the chief beneficiary of the change from baroque to neoclassical here is landscape, the principal theme of the late meditations consti tuting what Blunt calls the "last synthesis," the work of summation begun just when the Poussin of the 1650S returns to this particular theme from the relative youth of his early Roman years. lO But while all of this makes our original question more precise by grounding it in the details of Po us sin's actual practice of painting, it does not yet answer it. For what is at stake in the neoclassical that Poussin should represent it, and along with it his own possibility as an artist, in such singularly mortal terms, as a revisionary experience of Death? This seems the moment to observe that unlike the great virtuosos of his century, Reni, Rubens, or Rembrandt, Poussin was not a "natural" painter. I I One can adduce all sorts of explanations for this, ranging from his highly developed formal self-consciousness as a neoclassicist or the singularity of his personal temperament and gifts to the simple accident of finding in his youth no painter of stature to turn to as a teacher. But whatever the reason, the fact remains that to do art, Poussin had to thinh it: there is nothing remotely spontaneous or naive about his work. Even at his most dramatic and circumstantial, as in the great history paintings from the later 1630s, when the residue of baroque theatIicality is still much in evidence, the pictures evince unyielding intellectual control. For all the centIifugal energy of its multiplicitously gesticulating characters The Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Wilderness (fig. 70) notoriously reads from left to right and foreground to back as a consecutive narrative studiously plotting the carefully differentiated phases of the miraculous tale. 12 Thus the mother in the far left corner giving suck to her parent instead of her child depicts the horrors of the famine visited

Fig. 70. Nicolas Poussin, The Israelites Gathering Manna in the Wilderness. Musee du Louvre.

230 • CHAPTER 8

on the wandering Hebrews, while the pair of male figures to the immediate light register the moment at which divine help arrives; then further to the right is the actual gathering of the manna, followed in the middle ground, about the persons of Moses and Aaron, by the concluding prayers of thanksgiving. And in later narratives like The Judgment of Solomon or The Woman Taken in Adultery (fig. 71) the control is more exacting still: through its commanding architectural frame and scenic distribution of characters across the plane in telling, yet curiously frozen expressive attitudes, it achieves a geometric perfection worthy of the Racinian rather than Corneillean stage. 13 Even "machine" narratives like the Rapture of St. Paul or the paintings depicting the Assumption of the Virgin in Washington and Paris (fig. 72), whose soaring sainted figures evoke the ceilings of Baciccia or the mechanized extravagances of baroque theater and the nascent opera, refine dramatic fantasy to the point of rarefaction. This extraordinary self-discipline helps explain why his career was so late in developing; but it also explains why a contemporary admirer called him pictor phiwsophicus: 14 someone for whom painting was above all a mode of critical reflection on the nature of painting itself. Where other southern artists take painting as a self-ratifying given, Poussin experienced it as a problem requiring deep and sustained critical atten tion to be possible at all. But this is just what makes him so exemplary: because he experienced art as a problem, he was exceptionally attuned to what was problematic about it, at least in the period in which he was called to paint, the one that witnessed the eclipse of the baroque art resumed in the first Et in Arcadia Ego. And indeed if the first Et in Arcadia Ego states the baroque as death, the reason is not simply biographical, an episode in Poussin's private artistic itinerary; it more deeply marks the failure of the baroque itself. As we saw in chapter 5, the baroque is essentialIy an art of rhetOIical illusion self-consciously seeking to mobilize and persuade with a view to a miraculous metamorphosis to come, a transformation it hastens by performatively representing it as already at hand. But we also saw how this transformative rhetoric is undermined by its own formal and instrumental dependence on a certain critical intelligence and the demystifying realism with which that intelligence is inherently linked. The devices it employs iconoclastically expose it to ironic dissection, to a reductive Baconian "interpretation" disclosing the poetic fallacy on which it is based. A dichotomous tension is thus built into the very fabric of the baroque and expressed, above all, by its dynamically unstable fusion of the real and the ideal. The baroque is constantly and even programmatically torn between the high, heroic character of the ends at which it aims ("imitation" as the portrayal of "significant human actions" drawn from

Fig. 71. Nicolas Poussin, The Woman Taken in Adultery. Musee du Louvre.

Fig. 72. Nicolas Poussin, Assumption of the Vi11fin. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund.

232 • CHAPTER 8

poetry and Scripture . . vith a view to inspiring by example) and the lowly carnal character of the relevant means ("imitation" as the naturalistic embodiment needed to locate, mediate, and persuade). This tension proved sustainable for a time, a source of tremendous energy yielding the puns and paradoxes, inversions and antitheses that make baroque art. But the golden age of the baroque wholly coincides with the "age of expansion" spanning the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the heady years of the post-Tridentine rollback of the German Reformation; the creation of the modern state during the rational, "Cartesian" phase of absolutist centralism; and the wave of economic growth fueled by an emerging capitalist market, the colonial exploitation of America, and the aggressive penetration of Asia. By the 1630s, on the other hand, when Poussin's career makes its Roman turn, and even more so by the 1650s, when he takes up again the moral theme of his youth, the famous Crisis has set in, producing a retrenchment lasting well into the century of the Enlightenment. Outside the Netherlands the economy stagnates and colonial growth slows nearly to a halt; plague and famine return with a virulence unknown since the fourteenth century; the Counter-Reformation and its political twn, the Hapsburg Imperium, meet their final catastrophe in the Thirty Years War. And with the beheading of Charles I (Gryphius's ermordete Majestat) 15 and the ceding of independence to the non dynastic United Provinces at the Peace of Westphalia, the divine monarchic right of the first third of the century becomes the contract of Hobbes's Leviathan: a contingent and thus rescindable convention su~ject to the very historical process over which it claims to triumph. Under these sobering conditions the baroque loses inner conviction, and with it the power to persuade at once served by and sustaining the heroic illusions it purveys: history refuses to end; the worlel to which it preaches the coming Rapture refuses to answer or conform. Nor is this link to social history grounded merely in the external fact of temporal coincidence. The baroque is essentially a confidence trick relying not only on "objective" conditions of practice and form, but on the "subjective" condition of the beholder's predisposition to swallow it. Thus it is morbidly sensitive to an environing climate of response over which it exerts at best only incomplete command. And the baroque is in any case uniquely at the mercy of history because it uniquely incorporates the awareness of it: its very idealism expresses an emerging "hot," historical, rather than "cold" or "traditional," consciousness. History is a process of necessary and irreversible yet essentially purposeless change rooted in the blind causal mechanisms governing a world of brute empirical facts, and as such history serves as a motive for this new consciousncss: it is history that it is preeminently called on to aCknowledge and savc.

ET IN ARCADIA EGO. 233

But by ule 1650S history is seen to be just what cannot be saved, not at any rate in the idealized form of heroic baroque projection. If then, in the light of his own late revision, Poussin's first Et in Arcadia Ego states the baroque as death, this is at least in part because the baroque is dead: the metamorphosis it simultaneously presupposes and hopes to precipitate proves impossible: mere "illusion" indeed, an empty dream. And yet, vitally, what is at issue is not just the baroque itself; it is the possibility of idealist art in general, and thus especially of the ut pictura art of which both the baroque and Poussin's own neoclassicism are canonical if rival exemplars. Let us return in this context to the contrast between Poussin's two treatments of "Et in Arcadia Ego." One thing the shift from memento mori to pastoral elegy achieves is a repression of the macabre in favor of the lyrical and decorative and a concomitant conversion of a pious contemj)tus mundi in favor of an idealized, theatrically ennobled humanity artfully posed against a gracefully scenic Nature. Poussin takes up the traditional minatory moral, but softens and humanizes it. Where the first picture challenges not only the value but the very reality of the world of human acts and interests, bringing it into sharp collision with the ironic skull, stark reminder of extinction, the second suppresses the skull in order to redeem the world it negates. Nor is the world alone rescued in this way: art is rescued too, as the embodiment of everything that is most precious and desirable therein. For art remains and, through the landscape on which the second picture luminously opens, specifically reaffirms itself as remaining an imitation not just of human actions, significant or otherwise, but of nature. However beautiful it may be, however elevated and heroic, art remains a "mirror" of the world it adorns. Where there is no world, U1Cre is no painting either: the fate of the one implies that of the oUler. But the world for which Poussin makes the lyrical case expressed by his noble Arcadians and Ule radian t spring landscape beyond is not the one chronicled in contemporary Dutch art or the bodegones and rural genre scenes of the young Velazquez and the brothers Le Nain: the fallen, subheroic world of con tingen t vernacular experience embraced not simply as a legitimate source of interest, but as an unavoidable corollary of pictural reprcsen tation, something art must come to terms with as a reflex of its own essential mimetism. Even at its most dramatic and detailed, Poussin's art remarkably avoids the "anecdotal" registration of those accidents of the concrete visual environment to whose charm the most polished and high-minded of baroque painters at some point succumb. Poussin aims rather at a world precisely purged of such things: a world of beauty that, for all it is "drawn from" the life of the one we actually inhabit, nonetheless lies beyond the reach of chance and

234 • CHAPTER 8

change, the factitious lapses, mutations, and deformities of everyday experience. It is here in fact that we get our clearest view of what is most characteristically neoclassical in him: his exacting and even extortionate sense of decorum. The notion of decorum, and with it the conception of a rigorous separation of genres and styles in conformity with canons of beauty, nobility, and propriety keyed to a hierarchy of contexts, subjects, and types, is of course of ancient pedigree: though it was never applied in antiquity as insistently as it came to be from the High Renaissance on, it remains a central part of the general classicallcgacy. But as ancient as it is, and as general its currency, it is in neoclassicism, and most especially in neoclassical France, that it comes most strictly and systematically into play. Where the baroque tries to bridge the rift between real and ideal, high and low, the heroic and mundane, neoclassicism decrees an absolute separation, compulsively policing the frontiers the baroque tries to overleap: a policing particularly draconian in painting in that, identified with a certain ideal of visual beauty, it lacks the predominantly comic generic categories (satire, epistle, epigram, maxim, comedy of character or manners) ,'lith which neoclassical literature is so Iichly endowed, leaving room for the development of realist themes forbidden in the rarefied realms of epic and tragedy. And indeed if Poussin so readily evokes Racine in particular as a literary parallel it is because, like Racine, he knows only one register, pursued to the utmost limit of purity. So the world Poussin rescues from the annihilation with which the first Et in Arcadia Ego threatens it, and thus the kind of painting for whose sake it is to be saved, are those only of the very highest art at its most recondite and exclusive, devoted to portraying not "things as they are" but heroic deeds-p01'lmit (Geneva: Skira, 1985). 25. E.g., Panofsky. Early Netherl--I6oo, 123-24.

8. See, e.g., Piles, Cours de Peinture par Principes, 452-53: "La principale fin du Poete est d'imiter les moeurs & les actions des hommcs: la Peinture a Ie me me objet: mais elle y va d'une maniere bien plus etendue: car on ne peut nier qu'elle imite Dieu dans la Creation des choses visiblcs. Le Poete peut bien en faire la description par la force de ses paroles, mais les paroles ne seront jamais prises pour la chose meme, & n'imiteront point cette Toutepuissance, qui d'abord s'est manifestee par des Creatures visibles. Au lieu que la Peinture avec un peu de couleurs, & comme de rien, forme & represente si bien toutes les choses qui sont sur la Terre, sur les Eaux, & dans les Airs, que nous les croyons veritables: Car l'essence de la Peinture cst de seduire nos yeux & de nous surprendre." 9. See I' abbe Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Reflexions critiques sur fa Poiisie et sur la Peinture; James Harris, Three Treatises, the first concerning Art, the second concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry, the third concerning Hal;Piness (London, 1744); Moses Mendelssohn, "Betrachtungen tiber die Quellen und die Verbindungen der

NOTES TO CONCLUSION. 295

schonen Kiinste und Wissenschaften" (1757), in Schriften zur Philosophie und Asthetik, cd. Frill Bamberger, facsimile reprint of Berlin ed. of 1929 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1971), I: 165-90. 10. Mitchell also makes this point. Sec Iconology, 116. 11. Piles, I1In-ege, 433-38. 12. Joshua Reynolds, A Journey to Flanders and Holland ( 1781 ); as cited in Alpers, The Art of Describing, xviii. 13. David Burne, Dzalogues conceT7Iing Natural Religion, cd. Norman Kemp Smith, zd cd. (1947; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979), 128. 11. Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), II. 297-98. 15. On the uses of emblem in Hogarth, see Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 16. Descartes, Disco!lTS d£ La methode, Ig; Locke, An Essay concenzing Human Understanding, 30-3 I. 17. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. 18. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 102. 19. Fried, Absorption and Theatl1cality, 61. 20. Ibid. 21. The phrase is of course Wordsworth's. See the preface to Lyrical Ballads (17g8), cd. WJ.B. Owen, 2d cd. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Ig69), 173· David Burne, A Treatise conceT7ling Human Nature, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, Ig85), 45· 23. Kant, Critique afJudgment, §1O, "Of purposiveness in general,~ 55. 22.

INDEX

AI~lard.

Pierre. 50 Abrams, M. H .• 2'15 absolutism. 127. 166.232 absorption, 68, 155, 200, 209, 213; versus lheatncality, 167,258-65 abstract an, 215 Addison,Joseph, 133 aestheticism, 2 15 aesthetics, 3, 131; and dc Man, 215; in Diderot, 131; in Kant, 11, 15,222,238, 20'1-65; 111 Lessing, 222; and neoclassicism, 237; in Poussin, 238, 240, 2'15, 2,.8; ill Rembrandt, 206; and Romanticism, 203, 221-22; and uilliel1lm /lOfm, 250-5'1. See also beauty Alocrti, Leon Battist.a, 3, 6, 52, 09, So, 86, 8S, 93, 162, 270-71; Del/a jJilt1lTa, 20, 26, 3'1; De plclllra, 79, go, 221; and "f1eshlier" Minerva, 21, 25-26, 28,35-36; and painting, 23-2.1; on perspective, 20-22; ;\nd picturalmcarnation, 3'1-36: and III flIrt /1m IIOC';I.I, 221-22 allegory: in baroque. 98: III Bruegel, 78, 82-83,90--:J8; in Descartes, I~H!Jo: .lIal drl'am, 37, .10,195-90: in Cothic archilccturl', 27; hierarchy of lJlealllngs in, 176; and idealism, I -18; and iJnagc, 202, 206; and interpretation, 12,

78, 212-13; and literature, 212-1.1; and modernity, 199; and myth, 192!J3: and naturalism, -15, S2-83. g0-9 2, 95-99, 179, 181, 212; anrl painting, 7, .1.~emination, 103 documcllt (versus monument), 203-'1 Dolce, Lodovico, 16; Dialogo delia j,il/uTa, 8, Dou, Cerrit, 78; Night ScJwo4 139-10 ciream, 37, 4 0 , 18 5, 195-g6, Ig8, 250-5 1 dualism, 32 Du Bo~,.fean-Baptistc, 6, 16, 2z4, 252; Rijle:>:lUlis critiques SUT Ill/JOfsie ella peilliUTI',

8 Dubreuil,jean, PnsjJfctivf llratiql/e, 112 Duby, Georges, 8, 12, 26, 33, 50 Diirer, Albn.:chl, 11 Dutch aft (sc"cntccnth-cclltufY), 233, 261; absence of subjects in, 254; crudity of, 2:')0; deSCription in, 8-g, 78, 98, l3~10' qS, 249; emblem in, 138-1°; and genre, 183; iconoclasm in, 144-48; and literature, 18'1; maps in, 9; and moralism, 1,14; reading in, 139-40; Scr'ipture in, I :~~)-·lo,

l.j4

Dutch culture (~\'entcenth-cenlury), 139, l.J:,)-·15, '.!°7 Dlltdl Reform Church, LJ.j Earle,john, :!07; Mirro(u'lmogT'atJilze, 13:!-3:, Albc n. 5 I ekphrasis. 9, 75. 199 e1q.,'Y' Si'f p;l~toral elegy Elizabethan stage. 222 emblem, 15. 12:!-2.1, 132-3,1, 139,202, 20g; an,ullorphic. 12. 112-15. 119-20. 12i>-2g; ill Cervantes, 110, 119-25, 128; III Hogarth, 256; in Poussin. 223, 227. 213: in \'erlnccr. 181 emblcm books. 78, 83. 96, 115 empiz·icz~m. 17.1.2.13.268.271 Empson. Willi'lIn. 98 cllargria, 9. 16, 253 England, 3:-\. 1,15 English poetry, :!2 I ElJl~tein.

engraving, 122. 130. 133-3'1 Enlightenmcnt,3, 10-11, 1'27, 129, 17374. 243, 25'1-57 epic, 231 epigram. 223. 234 Epiphany, 125 epistcme. &i' knowledge epistemology. &e knowledge epistle, 231, 237 epiL1.ph, 224, 2'P-42 Erasmus, De~lderius. 80, 10'2. 127; Adagw. 139 essay, 133 ethics, 131 ethnography, 11 Eucharist, 12.1-'25, 145, 160 Euclid,27 0 Euripides, 236, 246 Europe, 23, 27, 33-3'1. 7 1 , 110, 12 7, 115. 151,16&-67, 184 evidence (rules of), 171 exegesis. &e interpretation; moralization experiment, 79, 12 9, 13 1, 169, 181-85,

261 expression (in p;linting): in Alberti, 23; in baroque, 151.2°3; in GiOllO. 149; in Grem~e, 263-64; in neoclassicism, 237; in Poussin, 230, 236; in Renaissance, 16; in Rubens, 164; and u/ piC/UTa Poesis, 221, 2'1 0 , 253 expressionism, 215 Eyck, Hubert van, 49; GhentAltarpiece. 52, 57,61 Eyck.jan van. 10. 13 •. 1-1. 49, 205; Ghent Altarpiece. 52, 37. 61; Mad01lna m Church. 16; IHaacmlQ Of Chancellor Rolm. 5g-66; SI. JeroTTle m fils Study• .15; space in, 50-57. 63; and van der Werden. 56--66; Women's Bath, .15 fable, 207. 21,j faith, 107-g, 122, 125, 127-28, 16'1-65, 181 fanta;,tic. the, 110, 159 Fazio. Bartolommeo. 44-46 •. 18, 56 feeling. go, !W7. 240-45. 257. &e also sensation; sensibility Felibien. Andre, 22'1 femil1lsm, 50 fiction, 18; III absorptive art. 258, 263; aesthetic, 1/6, :!54; and allegory, 196; in baroque. 162; in Cervantes, 102; and

302 • INDEX fiction (conI.) differance, 216; and literature, 213; painting as, 179, 216; as synonym for picturing, 14; theatrical, 167 fietum:. versus figmelltllm, 14; as pattern or exemplar, 15; as synonym for picture, 14 Jljnschillkrij, 253 First World War, 215 Fish, Stanley, 202, 282 Flanders, 33 Flemish art. Sec Netherlandish art Fletcher, Angus, 98-99, 167, 213 Florence, 28 folk.lore, 90 form: autonomy of, 45; coercive energies of, 101; committal to, 216; and content, 71-72; mediating, 202; and necessity, 23; Platonic, 4, 22-23, 212 formalism, 23, 214 Foucault, Michel, 50, 80, 215 Fragonard,jean-Honore, 224; Love Letters, 254-55 Francastcl, Pierre, 12 France, 10,33, 101, 234 Francis of Assisi, St., 28 Franciscanism, 12,27-28,125,204 Franciscans (Order of St. Francis), 4 Frankfurt School, 215 French Academics, 8, 16, 237 French painting (eighteenth-century), 25 8--64 French poetry, 221 French style, 253 Freud, Sigmund, 102 Fried, Michael, 258. 260--63 Friedrich, Caspar David: Cros~ all Moun/ain, 247 Fromentin, Eugene, 204 Galileo GaJilei, 80, 95, 169 GasscndI, Pierre, 16g gaze, 147-49, 15g, 171-7 2 ,174,192,24 0 . See also glance; look Genesis, 190, 192 genre painting, 11, 78, 98, 119-20, 13137,139.183.201-2,235; and Cervantes, 109-Ill; conventions of, 135; and narrative, 135; nature of, 135; in Rembrandt, 206--7; scope of, 135; in Steen, 135-37, '4 0 ,149,157,17 2 geography, 3, 144 geometric optics. See geometry; optics

geometry, 177; in Descartes, 192, 195-g7; and optics, 21-22,80; and perspective, 20-22, 7g-80; in POllssin, 230-31 Gericauit, Theodore, 249 Germany, 33, 184, 194-95, 232 gestalt drawings, 113-14,129 Ghent, 52 Gilman, Ernest, 9, 12, Ill, 117, 11 g-20, 128 Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli), 16,34; (?) La Vecchia/ Col Tempo, 200-205, 216--17 Giotto, 10, 22, 26, 28,14, 131, 149, 204; Adoration oj Magi, 150; Lamentation, 150 glance, '74, 217. See also gaze; look gnosticism, 33,215 Goethe,Johann Wolfgang von, 224, 265 Golden Rule, 25. See also proportion; Rule of Threc Gomberville, Marin Lc Roy, sieur dc, 101 Gombnch, E. H., 13-14 gongorism, 101 Goodman, Nelson, 13,203 Gothic art and culture: allegory in, 27; architecture of, 27; beauty in, 257; and naturalism, 10, 26--28, 45-45; painting and theater in, 159; and preaching, 149; and realism, 204; and Renaissance, 26; and sexuality of Christ, 32; statuary, 26; and theology ofIight, 27. See also Middle Ages Graces, 145, 165 Gray, Thomas, 224 Gregory the Great, St.. 1'15 Grcu1.e,.!ean-Baptiste, 257; and Hume's ·cxperimenull Method," 26.1; and K;ultian beauty, 264; Son Punished, 263; Ungrateful &m, 261-64 Grimmelshausen, HaI15Jacob Christoffel, 18 3 Grosscteste, Robert, 2 i1 Gryphius, Andreas, 151, 232; Gardenia U1ul CelilUu. 159; CaroltLl Stuardus, 159 Guillaume de Lorris, 38, 40, 50, 70, 196. Sec also Roman (U la Rose Guinevere, 50 Habermas,jurgen, 291 Hagstrum,jcan, 6 Hall, joseph: Characters of Virtucs ami Viet's, 13 2 Hals, Frans, 236, 253; Banquet oJOfficers oj St. George Civic Guard (1616), 153 Hapsburg, 232

INDEX. 303 Harris. James. 252 Hau!Jtllktiollf1ldrama. 167 Hazliu. William. 133 Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 210 Heidegger. Martin. 21,1-::::' Helen of Troy. 158 IIeloisc, 50 Henry VIII, 115 Heraklcitos. 217 I-lerman, Hugo, 123, 134; Pia Desideria, 121 heroic. the: in baroque. 149. 156-62. ITz', 230-34; eclipse of, 235; and human sclfassertion, 210; in humanism, 11; and judgment, 171; and knight errantry, 104, 119; and narr-ative, 148; and poetry, 7, 16; in Poussin, 234; in Renaissance, 95; and rheLorical expression, 203. See also history; idealism hierarchy of genres, 7,95, 234, 262. See also high art high art, 24,135,151,176,222,224,230, 231, 238, 253. See also hierarchy of genres history, 16, 19,33,117,125-28,160,23233,236.241; as heroic narrative, 16,26, 69.71. 125, 182.207. See also history (historiography); history painting; istana; narrative hislOry (historiography), 3,215; cultural, 22; natural, I I ; social, 8 history painting, 7, 21, 79-80, 139, 113. 193.204.249.253.262; and genre. 135: and imitation. 177: in Poussin. 228-31, 23.'. 239; in Rembrandt, 17. 206--7: in Stccn, 137; in Verlllcer, 176--77. See also history; Istoria; narrativc; ut P'CluTa poesis Hobbes. Thomas. 127. 168; on art. 167; on Eucharist. 166; on "forms and ceremonies: 167; on image, 166: Leviathan, 166-67.232; on nature. 167; and political science. 166 Hogarth. William: Marriage Ii fa Mode. 133, 256; Pmpectiual Absurdities, 129-30; Rllkl':~ Progress. 133.256

Holbein, Ham, the Younger. 83; Ambassadors. 115-19

Holland. See NeLherlands. United Provinces of Homer. 256 Honig, Edwin, 98 Hooke, Robert, l.1 Horace (QuinLus Horatius Flaccus), 10,

230-37; Ars poetlca, 6; and 111 pictura poesis. 3, 6 horae. See book illumination Howard, Frances, countess of Somerset, 162 Hughes, Robert, 214 Huguenots, 144 Huizinga,Johan,33 humanism. 71. 76,80, 182; art of, 8; heroic strain of, 11; literary bias of, 139; and naLuralism, 9-11; northern, 139; and art t11eory and method, 20-28 humanist theory of art, 6, 16, 156, 221. Sec also paragolllr, Sister Arts; ut pic/UTa poesis H ume, David, 244, 251; Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 254-55; Treatise COlIceT7ling Human Nature, 264 Hundred Years War, 34

Icarus, 78 icon (Orthodox), 90-92 iconoclasm, 18-19, 144-48, 168, 171-72, 203-4, 230, 248-49. See also iconophobia; idolatry iconography, 12, 133. 199-200.203-5, 213; and allegory, 205; in Netherlandish art, 14-46; in Orthodox art, 90-92; in Poussin, 239; in Vermeer, 177-78. See also allegory; emblem; iconology; interpretation; moralization iconology. 12, 203. See also iconography iconophobia. 146. 240. See also iconoclasm; idolatry idea (Platonic). 4. 23.133.212 idealism. II; and allegory, 148; in baroque, 159, 162, 166,232-33,236,249; in Cervantes. 104; and description, 148; in Italian art, 16; and mirror for nature, 15; PlatOI1lC, 23, 211; in Poussin, 233-38. 24041, 245; and Renaissance canons of beauty, 76; and rhetoric, 24; and ul piclura poesis. 245. 253 ideology, 251,263 idol. 18. 171-72. 199,204,243. See also idolatry idolatry, 18-19. 168, 176,201.215.224, 248. See also iconoclasm; iconophobia illusion. 18, 147-49,157,162.215,263; in baroque, 15, 149,151,166,169,17172,230-31; carnal, 129-30; in Descartes, 18'1; and faith. 109; moral, 115, 118, 211; and naturalism, 9, 205, 211; optical,

illusIOn (coni.) I 12. 118; spatial. 57; trompe-I·oeil. 49. 1 18. 151. 159. 166. Set> aLw curious perspectiye; illusionism; perspectiYG illusionism. 18.19, Ill, 156.160.162, 242.253. See aLlo illusion; perspective IIllage: and allegory, 202--6, 211-13; claims of. 205; distrust of. I'H-.15; graphic energy of, 253; Hobbesian ontology of. 166; as idol. t8; love of. 145; and mirror of nature, L1-15; nature of, 12-13, 17;and Platonic Idea!>. 212; Platonic theory of, 210; relation to word, 13, 42-.1-j; spalial present of, 225. 242; ~ublimalion of, 253; as term, 203; and text, 6, 13. 1 2-'i-!, 1:)1, 213.215,217 imagination: in baroque, 159, 166; Christian, 54; in Descartes. 185, 19-91; in devotional art. 6'1; and faith, 107, 109; and fiction, 102; graphic, 7; and perspective, 193; spatial, 95; and sublime, 21 8 zmitalio Clmsti. See Imit.·llion of Christ iIllit.'ltion: in baroqlle, 156-59, 230-33; of nature. 10,14,23, So, 156-59,232-33; and painting, 119, 233, 252, 267; and persuasion, 159; and poetry, 7. 252; in Poussin, 233,238,210; as rectification of nature, 158-59; in Renaissance an. 201; of significant human action. 7, 156-57, 230-33, 238; in theater, 1'19; in Vermeer, 177-78, 181, 192. See also naluralism; nature; painting; 1l1/JiclllrrJ fJOesis imitation of Christ, 28, 80; zn Cervantes, 107-9. 121-22, 125; and perspective, 3'1; and naturalisl'n, 10, 12, 28, 20.1

impressionism, 215 Incarnation: aesthetic., of, ! 2; In Cervantes, 125; III Gothic an, 27; iconography of, 12; and naturalism, 27-36, '16; and per'pective, 3; ill Steen, I ;~7; theol06'Y of, 3· See aLm Chri,t Industrial Revoluuon, 215 Inquisition, 102 inscription: and character,. 132; and emblems, 132; logic of, 216-17; painting as, 12; in painting, 202-3, 222-26. See also text; writing intention: authorial, 69,78,82,97, 102-3, 205, 253; of human life, 160; of nature,

158-59 interior (genre), 68, 78

interpretation: and allegory, 12, 7S, 21213;ofan, 13,.15,72-78,92,95-98,199206,210-1.1,216-17; "historical: 12; as iconoclasm. 203-1; and literature, 103, 213-14,216-17,282; and natllr.i1ism, 12; of nature, 1'11, 1(}9, 197; of the real, 171,230; and Rembrandt, 210-13. See also iconography; moralization; reading intcnextuality, 37 invention. 7.18.101.126.156.169,190, 210, 287 Islam, 33 is/ana, 23-24, 79,125,221, 2:i3. Seeillsohlstory Ir.llian art, 16-17,3.1. 6S, 81, 95, qo, 205, 221 ltalianate novella, 10.1 It;lly. 10, 22,33, .1'1, 76,81,99; Clllturc 0[, 139; Renai'-Sance Ill, 16,26,162,271; theatrical architcclllre of, 156 JvO, St., 67 Jakobson, Roman, 92, 202 James I, 162 James, Henry, 215 James, William, 205 Jean de Mcun, 37,40,40. See also Roman cil' la ROSI! Jones, Inigo, 169 Jonson, Ben, 151, 166, 169; H)'Illl!lIaez. 16062; masques of, 160; Oberon, 162 journalism, 215 Judgment. 18. 129. 169-7 I .Julian of NoZ'\nch, 187 ~Illl,

Immanuel: and ae'lhelics. I.J-I ;,. 222,238, 26'1-6r,; ;munomie; of, 13-ili, 128, 2.14; on arl, 238; on an and nalur(', 264; on b,u,b of beauty, 2(i'1; and zdlcclion. 244, 2(j;j; on Rl'zz and Riilmlllg. 257; and secondar)' qualities. 2'13; and ,uIr lime, 99, 257; transcendental aesthetic of, 54,251 Kepler,Johannes, 22, 80 Keyser, Thom,L~ de: C011st(l1ZtZj'1l 1I1lygells ami His Clerk, 155 Kneller, Sir Godfrey: Chi1ll'se COllIJI'rl. 15355 knowledge. 131, 183-89, 19'1; and faith. 1°9; forensic character of, 169-71; hmils of, 254-57; and naturalism, 11,79-80; and nominalism, ;j--6; and painting, 23,

INDEX·305 25. 181-89; and picturing. 5--6. Sep aiso philosophy; science La Bruyere.jean de. 132. 157.237; Caracleres. 133 LI Calprenede. Gamhier de Costes de. 101 landscape: in book tllumination. 18; in Bruegel. 96; in Dutch art. 78. 139; elegiac. 245. 219; in van Eyck. 63; literary. 235. 215; and maps. II, 235; in Memling, 93; mythological, 235; and naturalism. 95. 98; and perspective. 85; in Poussin, 225-26. 228. 233. 239-10 , 243-15, 219; in van der Weyden. 63. 67--69 languagc: and an. 13.203-1; and consciousness. 215-16; in Descartes. 188; sequential axis of. 101 Laokoon group. 248. 250 lapidary writing, 129 L'l Rochcfoucauld. Fran~ois, duc de. 101. 133 L'l Tour. Georges de: lHagdalelle. 167-68 Launcelot du L'lc. 50 Le Brun. Charles, 151-52.235-37 Lee. Rensselaer. 6. 156 Leeuwenhoek. Anthony van. 185 Le Goff,jacqucs. 8. 33 Le Nain.Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu, 159, 233 Leonardo da Vinci. 6, 11,26.79.185. 268 Lepanto. Battle of, 125 Lc",ing. GottllOld Ephraim: ambivalence toward painting. 8. 250-51; and an the01 y. 250-51; beauty 111. 250-51; on dbtinction between palll Ling and poetry, S, 221-22.248-52.257; and end ofut picIllra poesis. 221-22. 2.18-50; Laokoon, 8. 221-22. 2-18-52; and sublime. 248 Lcwi~. C. S.. 50. 98. 213 hheral arts. 3. :;0, 222 light: and allegory. '10. 9lJ; in Descartes. 188-89; III \~Ill E)'ck •. 15-'16; in Gospel of John. 139; l..othic theology of. 27.94; iconography of, 46. 94; and Incarnate Word, 27, 32, 46; inner. 32; in Netherlandi~h art, .15-,,6; and painting. 25253; and perspective, 22, 79; and realism, ~H-g5; In Rembrandt, 17, !w6, 208-10. 218; in Vermeer, 197-98; in van der Weyden, 69. See aiso Jummarism Limbourg brother1>: Tre..r riches ju:urt's. -18

literacy, 139 lIterature. 3, 13.20'1; and allegory, 212-L1; and an. 36; as fiction. 213; and interpretation, 212-11, 216-17, 282; invcntion of term, 8; Lessing's and theory of, 25051; and painting, 4, 79; and picturing. 35 Lillie Flowers of SI. Frallcis. 27 liturgy, 78• 1.19 Locke,john, 11, 133, 169-71,251,268, 271; Essay concerning Human Underslanding. 213. 256-57 logocentrism, 204 Lohcnstcin, Daniel Casper von. 151 Lomazzo. Giovanni Paolo: '[mllalo della Pit/UTa, 151

Lombard, Peter, 4 look. /16, 169, 174. See also gazc; glance Lope de Vega, 151; FUC1lleovejlma, 168 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio and Pietro. 26. 28 Louis XIV. 153. 235 Loyola. St. Ignatius. 15 Luke. St., 63---U6. 182 luminarism. 15. 4 8 • 63, 95. 179. 206. 208-g lyric, 10, 233, 23 6, 265; devotional, 124 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 166 "machine" plays. 156, 230 Macrobius, 40; Commelliary on Dream of Sci/Jio, 37 Male. Emile. 204 Mammon, 25 Man: as "measure of all things," 10. 17; as spectator, 188-~9 mannerism. 3-1. 159. zq ~fan tegna, Andrea, ~6 manllscript I1luminauon. See book illumination maps, 9. 84-8 5, 139, Ii 5-76. 18+ See also cartography Marian imagery, 15. 94- Sec also Virgin ~1ary Marino. Giambattista. 235 Martin,john Rupert, 159 Masaccio (Tolllma50 Guidi), 26, 20{ masque, 93.156,160--62.167, 16g, 17172, 202. See also theater Master of Marie de Bourgogne. 'lll; Nassau HOUTS, 55; Vie/llla HOUTS. 51-52 l\laster of Catherine de Cleves: HOUTS of Cathmlll: de Cleves, 105--6 Master of the Aix Annunciation. 46 Master of the Goldellcs Rosse!, 46 materialism, 2'1, 169, 211. 257

30G. INDEX mathcmatics: commcrcial, ~q-25; and painting, 21-22, 80, 271 m,LXlm, 23.1 lIlcalllllg . .Ye iconography; llltcrpretauon; languagc mechanism, 128,169,172,174,192. medieval. See Middle Ages melancholy, 167,224 memento mori. 15. 3.1.78,82-83. I Lj. l1G, 118, 120, 159. 223-24, 228, 233, 23 8 Memling. Hans: :\mumaalion, 93-95 Mendelssohn. Moses. 252 MerCIer. Louis-Sebastien: Tableau ,Ie Pans. 133 metaphor: and allegory. 92; in Descartes. 196; "footprints: 169-71; heroic. 135; iconography as. 213; and metonymy. 92, 135; opucs as. 180; philosophical. 18'1 Metaphysical poets. 120. 130-31 metaphysics: and anamorphic emblem. 115; and basis of beauty in Kant, 264; and baroque, 149. 156; of curious perspecuve. 9; in Descartes. 183. 189. 196; and feehng, 20/1: and genre. 135. 148. 207; and limits of knowledge, 256; and painting, 254; and picturing, 35; and representation. 16; and transformation of pictural art, 83; and ul pic/ura poesis. 253 method,6, 13; in Alberti, 22, 25. 88; in Descartes. 183. 186. 18g. 192.lg4;andexpcriment, 79, 264; in Hume. 264; and imItation, 15; in Orthodox art, 90; in painting, 184, 193; and perspective, 22, 25-26,79,85.183: in science. 79.127; in theater, 156 metonymy: and genre. 135; and metaphor, 9 2 ,135 MicheLangelo Buonarroti. 76 ~1ichelet,Jules, 33 microscope, 11, 1.1. III, 186 Middle Ages, 9; aesthetics of, 10. 257; allegory in. 37, 41, 90. 96. 99, 105; art of. 10. 26-34. 203-5; book Illumination 111. 26; and Bruegel, 77-79, 83; iconography of, 44-45, 204; image since, 12, 17, 35; naturalism in, 10, 26-34.46-49; painting in, 12,49-50, go; and Renaissance. 23. 26-27,71,76, 794!l; representation since, 15,35, 127; and self-portraIt. 87;

space in, 51-56; and ulllielUTa POf5!5. 4.1; uza 7nodrma of. 3 Set also GothIC art and culture Mignard, PIerre, 236-37 MillOn,John: Comus, 202; Paradise Lost. 245-4 6 mimesis. See imitation Minerva: as classical personification, 21, ~5; as Ideahzation. 26, 35-36; as meL1phor for knowledge. 21-22, 25; as metaphor for painting, 21-22, Z5. 28, 35-36; in Ovid. 78 miracle plays. 149 mirror: beholder as, 217; of common sense. 107; as example or ideal. 35.10.1.107. 109. 119; and illlltation, 14; in ma.~'lue. 162; for nature. 15. 128; of nature. 1415. 128,233.24'1-'15; in painting. 11112. t39. 185; and uanilas. 202 ~lirror for Magistrates. 18 mise en al,)rTU!. 120 Mitchell. WJT.. 13.203.250-51 modernism. 71-72.75.78.214-17 moderrllly: and allegory. 199, 215; and beauty. 236; and Bruegel. 76-78; 1lI Cer\'antcs. 100. 125-28; definition of. 2 LI15,291; and Enhghtenment, 172-73; and experience of art and literature, 215-17; and history. 125-28,236; ;llld iconophobia, 240; legitimacy of. II; and naturalism, 11. 8~9; and neoclassicism. 236-38; ontology of, 257. 263; painung and science 1lI. 185-89. :.qo. and picturing. 3.100,174; and POll!..'>in. 235-37; and reprcscntauon. 11. IG, :w5; and Romantic symbol. 98; and Vermeer. 174. See also Quarrel Df Ancienl'o ilnd Moderns Moliere (jean-Baptiste PO'luclin). 151. 157 Montalgne, Michel Eyqucl11 de. 88 monument, 202, 223. 235; versus dOClIment. 203-.1 mOI.lII~m, 12 9, 137, 144, 147,174-75. 26 '1 moralil.ation. 37,76.95.125.138.148. 202-3, 209. Sa also allegory; emblem; iconography; interpretation More, 51. Thomas, 127 mourning, 127, 167,235,241 Muses. 145, 176, 182 music. 93. 216, 248 mystery plays, 149

INDEX·307 myth, 12, 214, 216; in Alberti, 34; and allegory. 192-93; Christian, 192; and idealization, 15: and painting, 7 Narcissus. fountain of, 10, 88 narrative: in Bruegel, 76, 95; in Descartes, 19(}--{j2, 194-96; and Dutch art, 254; and expression, lSI; and genre, 13S; and me(Heval art, 204; and painting, 43-44, 71, L19, 250; in Poussin. 225-26,228-31, 238-40, 244-45; in Rembrandt, 199, 207-8, 212; and sublime, 248; and theater, 149; time in, 8, 43-44, 10 I; and ut pictura poem, 156-57. See also history; history painting; istaria Nativity, 45, 9 2 Natura. 29 natural science. See science naturalism. 5,14,44,71,215,253.267; in Alberti, 21-25; and allegory, 45, 82-83, 90-92, 95-99. 179, 181, 212; and art history, 9-10; in baroque, 156, 159; in Bruegel, 76, 81-88, 90-93, 95-99; critique of, 13; and curious perspective. 117-19; and description, 11-12, 76; and genre, 13'1; and history. I 1; and history painting. 79; and humanism, 9-10. 80; as iconography. 44-'16; and illusion. 9. 205; and imitation of Christ. 10; and Incarnation,27-36 ,16;andinduction,5;andinterpretation, 12; and modernity, 11. 80entation. 13-16 ThIrty Years War, 18+ 1~J.i-g5. 232 Thoma~ it Kempls, 187 Thomson . .Janu:s: ThI'SI'tLWILI, 7 Thucydlele~, 176 time: as "aesthetic" category. 251; in allegory, 98-99, lflo. 192-93, 195-96; in Cervante~, 101. 120. 125-27; in De>carte~. 192, 195; as e>capc. 257; and 1Il0rtality, 202; and narrative, 8 .•13 .•1-1.101; naturalism, 88, 92; in painting, 98-99, 151. 176. ~!12; in poetry. 8. ,13-1'" 221. 249-52; in Pou!>Sin, 225-27, 234-35, 238. 241-43; in Rembrandt, 207-8; in science, 95; in Vermeer, 194, 198 Tir~o de Molina, 159 Titian (Tiziano Vccelli), 16,34,227,235

INDEX·313 Tolstoy, Leo: War alld Peace, I 26 tragedy, 231; revenge, IG2, 167 Trauer.I!Jiel, I G7 Trent, Council of, 115,221,232 TI;dentine. &p Trent, Council of trompe-l'oeil. See illusion truth: and absorptive art, 2G I; and allegory, 4°,45,98, 10 7, 181, 19 2--93, 195--9 6 ; and appearances, 19,83; and Aristotelian deduction, 23; and artistic form, :!I3; in Descartes, 180, IS8, 195--96; in Enlightenment, 256; and "foolish curiosity," 103; ideal, 26; and induction, 5; and mirror of nature, 15; and naturalism, 9, 14; to nature, g, 79, 156, 159; and painter'scogito, IS0-81; in painting, 14, 70-71,200-202, 204; plain face of, 131; in Platonic dialogue, 214-16; and PlatOIllC theory of image, 212; and the real, 16, 195; sacred, 15,23,27,67; spiritual, 127,130,133, 145;st;mdardsof, 17; temporal estrangement frolll, 124; vision of, 161. See aLIO imitation; knowledge Tuchman, Barbara, 33 Turner,Joseph, 98, 219 unity, 156 universals, '1-5 utopia, 159 ut /Ji(tuTfl poe.'iis, 3, 13, 14, 93; and aesthetics, 250-5.1; and Alberti, 221-22; and baroque, 156,233,249; distinction betweell painting and poetry in, 251-53; cnd of, 8, ~~ 1-~2, 245, ~.!.18-50; and Greme, 263; and Le,,~ing, 8, 221-22, :q8-5z; and natur.llism, g-10; and neOclassicism, 233, 237; and pamgollE, 6---8; and Poussin, 224, 233, 238-.1°, 245, :q8-.19; and rococo, 251; and sublimation of painting and picturing, 6-8, 22122,252-5,1; and theater, 151. See also hUlllaniM theory of art; paragonC', Sister Ans Valery, Paul, 2 15 vallilas, 15, 18,78,115-16,207,217,223,

Vermeer,Jan, 3, 16,78,98, 148; and allegory, 174-76, 17g-81, 192, 197-98; AIlegoryoJFaitl4 171, 176, 181-82; Art oJ Painting, 174-83, 189, 192--94, 197-98; brushwork in, 253; and Cartesian Ego, 177-81, 192; and critique of Cartesian science, 189, 192--91, 197--98; defense of painting, 176; and description, 175-76; emblem in, lSI; Girl in Turbatl, 197; and history painting, 176-77; iconography m, 177-78, 197; and imitation, 177-78, 181,192; Let/er, 197; light in, 197-98; and moralism, 171-75; and naturalism, 179, lSI; OJficer and Laughing Girl, 17475; painter's cogito in, 180-83, 189; perspective in, 177-81, 193--94; Procuress, 145-47, 174; Prodigal Son in, 145-46, 171; and science, 185-86, 189, 190--9 2; and social status of painter, 176-77; space in, 193--94, 197--9S; theater in, 183,192; time in, 191, 198; ViewoJDelJt, 197--98; vision in, 175, 179; Womall Holding Balance, 171 Verne!, Clallde:Joseph, 257 via 71I6'iema, 3, 16, 214 via lIegatiufl, 214 Vico, Giambattista, 210 viewer. See beholder Virgil, 234-35; Ecwgues, 224, 244 Virgin Mary, 90; Assumption of, 33, 23031; as Church (Body of Faithful), 46; cult of, 33; Life of, 28; Madonna with Child, -16, 5g-66; Mother of Christ, 33, 273; and redemption of flesh, 273; visited by Son, 57. See also ~!arian imagery vision: and anamorphic emblems, 113-14; 111 Chardin, 258-61; in Descartes, IS689; in Dutch art, 9, 139; and gcst.'l.lt drawings, 113-1.1; and perspecti\'e, 85, 11112,271; and picturing. 22, 249-50, 271; in Renaissance art, 140; in Vermeer, 175, 179. See also perception Visscher, Roemer, 133; Si71llefoppen, 134 Vitruvian Man, 17 Volt.'l.ire, Fran