Molière and Perrault on the Sister Arts by Michael Call According to an Early
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The Poet’s Vision and the Painting’s Speech: Molière and Perrault on the Sister Arts by Michael Call According to an early biographer, Nicolas Poussin once stated that the allegorical figure in the background of his self-portrait represented “the love of painting and friendship” (Cropper and Dempsey 182). In this pre-Lessing era of ut pictura poesis when poetry and painting were the axiomatic sister arts, painting certainly counted many friends among the writers, some of them rather unlikely. Of the many literary works produced in the mid- seventeenth century in praise of painting and painters, few, though, are as unexpected as Molière’s 1669 La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce: the playwright’s longest non-theatrical work, the poem represents a striking anomaly in the Molière corpus with regards to subject matter and style. While this uncharacteristic foray into the visual arts and the genre of didactic poetry can be justified as a gesture of friendship—the poem was written in defense of the artist Pierre Mignard, a close acquaintance of the playwright—such a cursory explanation fails to appreciate how the unusual features of Molière’s poem constitute a careful and deliberate response to a rival pair of painters and poets and to the contemporary identity crisis of French painting. The uncertain relationship between La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce and the rest of the Molière corpus—in fact, the poem’s marginalization—is concretely apparent in the anthologizing of Molière’s work. While the La Grange edition of Molière’s complete works, published in 1682, situated the poem in chronological order among the plays, more modern editions, including the Despois and Mesnard edition of 1873-1927 and the 1971 Pléiade edition edited by Georges Couton, relegate the poem to an appendix.1 By comparison, these two editions place 1 It should be noted that the recently-issued Pléiade edition (2010), edited by Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui, again places the poem in chronological order. THE POET’S VISION AND THE PAINTING’S SPEECH 125 Molière’s other significant poetic work, Le Remerciement au roi (1663), in its proper chronological place between L’Ecole des femmes (1662) and La Critique de l’Ecole des femmes (1663). These editorial decisions imply that while Le Remerciement has immediate and obvious topical relevance to Molière’s theatrical works and career, La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce has no such evident connection. In its light-hearted satire of the nobility, Le Remerciement pursues a theme and strikes a tone familiar to readers of Molière; La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce represents an abrupt departure from both. Such a view is difficult to question, and Molière’s poem is admittedly problematic in a number of ways. The prominence given to the visual arts in the poem has no real equivalent in Molière’s theatrical corpus. While Le Sicilien ou L’Amour peintre (1667) also deals with themes of art and composition, the familiar literary topos of portraiture encourages a metaphorical reading of these passages, as Emmanuelle Hénin has pointed out in her discussion of the play: “[L]a fréquence de la métaphore du portrait dans la critique dramatique d’inspiration aristotélicienne oriente d’emblée vers un second niveau, celui de l’esthétique dramatique” (34). As Hénin demonstrates, Le Sicilien contains examples of specialized artistic terms or métalangage (32), yet it is apparent that art in the play serves neither as a satirical target, as medicine or literary criticism do elsewhere in Molière’s theater, nor as the direct focus of the play. Molière’s characters are discussing art primarily in order to discuss something else: the portrait is the excuse to bring together the young lovers in spite of the jealousy of the old guardian, similar in this fashion to the lovers’ duet in Le Malade imaginaire (1673).2 By contrast, the majority of La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce consists of an extensive theoretical commentary, 2 As Jacqueline Plantié puts it regarding Le Sicilien, “[C]’est l’occasion qui fait le peintre” (484). However, if Molière rarely deals directly with the visual arts, the notion of portraiture in a broader sense is vitally important to his dramaturgy, as Hénin and Plantié establish (Plantié 483- 508). 126 MICHAEL CALL employing with a straight-faced determination the vocabulary and conceptual framework of seventeenth-century art theory.3 If La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce represents a radical departure from the comic playwright’s usual subject matter, even more puzzling is the dissonance between the poem’s stated title and actual content. The poem casts itself as an exercise in ekphrasis— gloire at the time meant a painted representation of heaven and its inhabitants, or as Furetière describes it, “une representation imparfaite de la gloire céleste,” adding as an example of usage, “Mignard a peint au Val-de-Grâce une gloire” (2:s2v). The title of Molière’s poem clearly announces that the subject of the poem is the painting. Curiously, though, this ostensibly ekphrastic poem does not spend a single line describing the content of the painting, and the reader, even upon completion of the poem, is left with no idea of what the painting actually depicts. This is not because the painting’s content is either limited or without need of commentary—the abbé de Monville, Mignard’s eighteenth-century biographer, spends six entire pages explaining the work’s complex iconography, which includes over forty individual saints, numerous Old Testament prophets, and symbols from the Book of Revelation (Monville 77-82). Molière’s decision to avoid describing Mignard’s painting seems peculiar, particularly given that poetic descriptions of paintings were certainly not unknown in seventeenth-century French poetry.4 Equally peculiar, however, is the lengthy 3 The example of Le Sicilien, where the language of art theory is used for theatrical ends, has perhaps influenced or even rerouted the reading of La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce. Despite the poem’s earnest discussion of Mignard’s painting, critics as early as Boileau and including Hénin and Couton have insisted on reading the poem as a commentary on Molière’s theatrical approach. See Hénin’s “Du portrait à la fresque ou du Sicilien au Val-de-Grâce: Molière et la peinture” and Couton’s commentary on the poem (Molière 2:1527). 4 A notable example is George de Scudéry’s Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry (1646), a collection of poems that take paintings as their subject, in imitation of Marino’s Galeria (1620). THE POET’S VISION AND THE PAINTING’S SPEECH 127 description of the artistic rules that Molière claims that Mignard’s fresco demonstrates, and that makes up the majority of the poem. For Molière to privilege artistic principles and rules over a description of the end result seems to run directly counter to statements the playwright made regarding theater. While Molière’s contemporaries such as Pierre Corneille wrote extensive published commentaries on their works and on dramatic theory in general, Molière notoriously avoided any such pronouncements. In the published preface to Les Fâcheux (1662), he announced, “[L]e temps viendra de faire imprimer mes remarques sur les pièces que j’aurai faites, et je ne désespère pas de faire voir un jour, en grand auteur, que je puis citer Aristote et Horace” (1:483). He adds, however, “En attendant cet examen, qui peut-être ne viendra point, je m’en remets assez aux decisions de la multitude, et je tiens aussi difficile de combattre un ouvrage que le public approuve, que d’en défendre un qu’il condamne” (1:483). A similar deferral to the judgment of the public, as opposed to the theoretically grounded scrutiny of the scholars, occurs in Dorante’s statement in La Critique de l’Ecole des femmes (1663): “Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles n’est pas de plaire, et si une pièce de théâtre qui a attrapé son but n’a pas suivi un bon chemin” (1:663). The peculiar features of Molière’s poem, however, come into proper focus when placed in the perspective of both their literary and artistic context. Critics have long recognized that Molière’s poem was written in response to Charles Perrault’s 1668 poem La Peinture that celebrated Charles Le Brun, Mignard’s rival and the director of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, even pointing out the similarities in the format of the published editions: both poems appear as in-quarto editions with engravings by François Chauveau after drawings executed by Le Brun, for Perrault’s work, and Mignard, for Molière’s (Aronson 591-93; Perrault 161; Molière 2:1526). But La Gloire du Val-de-Grâce does far more than tout the talent of Mignard over Le Brun—it presents a fundamentally opposed vision of painting’s theoretical foundations and pointedly underlines the contradictions and ignorance present in Perrault’s work. In doing so, it also outlines its own unique vision of the relationship between painting and 128 MICHAEL CALL poetry, a relationship that determines many of the poem’s stylistic characteristics. Perrault’s love of painting was official—the 1663 statutes of the Académie royale had created the position of amateur honoraire, that is, someone neither an artist nor a student, but an admirer of fine art, one interested in promoting the arts and in learning to appreciate the subtleties of art criticism. Perrault’s status as amateur honoraire however was not due entirely to a disinterested love of painting; he attended the Academy on official business, as a royal officer (along with Gédéon Barbier du Metz) working under Colbert.