On Spectacles and Magnifying Glasses: the Connoisseur in Action
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On spectacles and magnifying glasses: the connoisseur in action Valérie Kobi Figure 1 Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Shopsign of Gersaint, 1720, oil on canvas, 163 x 306 cm, Berlin, Charlottenburg Palace, Inv. no GK I 1200/1201. Source: Wikimedia Commons. The painting The Shopsign of Gersaint (fig. 1), kept at Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin today, is probably the most emblematic work of French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau. Painted shortly before the artist’s death, the artwork has often been regarded as Watteau’s artistic legacy. It was originally destined to hang on the Pont Notre-Dame outside the boutique of Edme-François Gersaint, a Parisian art dealer and close friend of Watteau’s.1 Serving as an advertisement for Gersaint’s business, the canvas shows a wealthy clientele interacting with staff and examining various art objects. As such, it not only conveys an idealised depiction of Gersaint’s establishment, but also fashions an image of the contemporary rituals of connoisseurship.2 At the I am tremendously grateful to Bettina Gockel and Joris Corin Heyder for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article. I also would like to thank the participants in the workshop Doing Connoisseurship: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow for the fruitful exchanges and discussions. 1 On Gersaint, see: Émile Dacier, Albert Vuaflart, Jean de Jullienne et les graveurs de Watteau au 18e siècle, Paris: Rousseau, 1929, vol. 1, 106ff; Guillaume Glorieux, À l’Enseigne de Gersaint. Edme-François Gersaint, marchand d’art sur le Pont Notre-Dame (1694–1750), Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002. 2 On The Shopsign as marketing device, see: Andrew McClellan, ‘Gersaint’s Shopsign and the World of Art Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in Mary D. Sheriff dir., Antoine Watteau. Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of his Time, Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2006, 150–160; Donald Posner, Antoine Watteau, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Journal of Art Historiography Number 24 June 2021 Valérie Kobi On spectacles and magnifying glasses: the connoisseur in action centre of the composition is a couple focusing its attention on a large mythological scene. Whereas the woman is scrutinising the background of the artwork with a lorgnette, her companion is kneeling down in order to better appreciate the outlines of the nude figures situated at the front bottom. While the behaviours of the two art lovers are clearly tinged with humour—a common feature in the representation of connoisseurs throughout the eighteenth century—, the scene also emphasizes the couple’s eagerness for in-depth observation. Indeed, they absorb the art at the very surface of the painting, a detail accentuated further by the use of the lorgnette. Far from being a commonplace behaviour, this form of contemplation goes, in fact, against the classical conventions of pictorial composition, which stipulates that the beholder be situated at a certain distance.3 Early modern art theory, with advocates such as Giorgio Vasari or Karel van Mander, therefore largely refuted this practice. In reality, the up-close investigation of artwork gained significance only slowly during the seventeenth century—in parallel to the considerable improvement of optical devices4—and served the necessity to define reliable protocols for the attribution and authentication of paintings in a growing art market.5 It then widely spread over the course of the eighteenth century, at a time when a broader public started to access art exhibitions, and grew in importance to the point of becoming a satirical trope of the Enlightenment culture.6 3 Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000. 4 On the topic, see, for instance: Ulrike Hick, Geschichte der optischen Medien, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999. 5 For first reflections on this matter, see: Daniel Arasse, Le détail: pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris: Flammarion, 2008; Bettina Gockel, ‘Gemalte Sehweisen. Sehen in Kunst, Ästhetik und Naturwissenschaft der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Gabriele Dürbeck et al. dir., Wahrnehmung der Natur, Natur der Wahrnehmung. Studien zur Geschichte visueller Kultur um 1800, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001, 199–219; Bettina Gockel, ‘Bilder für Blinde – Sehen und handeln in Malerei, Fotografie und Film’, in Horst Bredekamp et al. dir., Sehen und Handeln, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011, 65–98; Harry Mount, ‘The Monkey with the Magnifying Glass: Constructions of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Oxford Art Journal, 29:2, 2006, 167–184; Donald Posner, ‘Concerning the ‘Mechanical’ Parts of Painting and the Artistic Culture of Seventeenth-Century France’, The Art Bulletin, 75:4, 1993, 583–598 and Martin Warnke, ‘Nah und Fern zum Bilde’, in Michael Diers dir., Nah und Fern zum Bilde. Beiträge zu Kunst und Kunsttheorie, Cologne: Dumont, 1997, 6–15. Furthermore, on the growing importance of attribution and authentication during the seventeenth century, see among others: Enrico Castelnuovo, ‘Attribution (Histoire de l’Art)’, Encyclopaedia Universalis, 3, 1996, 411–415. Finally, Jeffrey M. Muller showed that in other domains, like numismatics, questions of authenticity were already theorized over the sixteenth century: Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on Connoisseurship’, Studies in the History of Art, 20, 1989, 141–149. 6 For an analysis of this topos, see: Katalin Bartha-Kovács, ‘Loupe à la main: la construction médiatique de l’amateur, littérateur d’un genre nouveau au 18e siècle’, in Florence Boulerie dir., La médiatisation du littéraire dans l’Europe des 17e et 18e siècles, Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2013, 187–202; Heinrich Becker, Studien zur Ikonographie des Kunstbetrachters im 17., 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2005; Eva Kernbauer, Der Platz des Publikums: Modelle für Kunstöffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert, Cologne: Böhlau, 2011; Heinz Herbert Mann, Augenglas und Perspektiv. Studien 2 Valérie Kobi On spectacles and magnifying glasses: the connoisseur in action It is in this particular context that we must see art theorists’ and art lovers’ interest in optical devices, such as the lorgnette. The technological innovations that profoundly transformed optical science since the end of the sixteenth century were directly appropriated by the artworld as a new way of looking at, and ultimately, theorising artworks. Yet, while the scientific revolution generated by these emerging technologies has been thoroughly analysed,7 their impact in the field of art history has thus far received little academic attention.8 This article proposes some initial thoughts on the topic. It focuses on the beginning of this tradition, aiming to examine the changes it produced in the reception of artworks, as well as to explore its repercussions on early modern art theory. Connoisseurship and optical devices Aside from magnification technologies, which seem to have existed in various variants since Antiquity, spectacles are one of the oldest optical tools conceived to improve human vision. Even though the exact context in which spectacles were invented remains relatively vague, this vision aid has definitely been employed since the thirteenth century, at first, principally by scribes and scholars. Their use extended to a broader spectrum of social classes over the course of the fifteenth century as the printing press revolutionized reading habits.9 These early eyeglasses zur Ikonographie zweier Bildmotive, Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1992; Mount, ‘The Monkey with the Magnifying Glass’ and Anja Weisenseel, Bildbetrachtung in Bewegung. Der Rezipient in Texten und Bildern zur Pariser Salonausstellung des 18. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. 7 A large body of literature, which cannot be fully listed here, has been published on the topic. For a few examples, see however: Lorraine Daston, Elizabeth Lunbeck dir., Histories of Scientific Observation, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011; Christoph Hoffmann, Unter Beobachtung: Naturforschung in der Zeit der Sinnesapparate, Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006; Jutta Schickore, The Microscope and the Eye. A History of Reflections 1740–1870, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007; Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World. Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 8 While brief considerations on the matter can be found in different publications, only Harry Mount has—to my knowledge—directly outlined the correlation between connoisseurship and optical devices in his article: Mount, ‘The Monkey with the Magnifying Glass’. Jonathan Crary and Arnaud Maillet further approach the topic for a later period in their respective books: Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990; Le miroir noir. Enquête sur le côté obscur du reflet, Paris: Kargo & L’éclat, 2005. Finally, the volume edited by Alina Payne, Vision and its Instruments. Art, Science and Technology in Early Modern Europe, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015 raises central questions for our topic but does not address the field of connoisseurship. 9 The literature on the history of spectacles and other vision aids is astonishingly vast. Some of it is the result of research led by passionate collectors. Among the