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Reciprocal Desire in the Seventeenth Century

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Reciprocal Desire in the Seventeenth Century CHAPTER 8 The Painting Looks Back: Reciprocal Desire in the Seventeenth Century Thijs Weststeijn The ancients attributed the invention of painting to an act of love: Butades’s daughter tracing her lover’s shadow on a wall, according to Pliny.1 Likewise, the greatest works were deemed to spring from the artist’s infatuation with his model, from Apelles and Campaspe to Raphael and his Fornarina.2 Ever since Ovid’s Ars amatoria, the art of love had been seen as a discipline more refined than the art of painting, which the Romans did not discuss with similar sophistication. By the late sixteenth century, however, courtiers’ literature had become a conduit between poetic and artistic endeavours, ensuring that the nuanced vocabulary of amorous talk affected the theory of painting.3 In Italian and Dutch sources, both the making and the appreciation of art were described in terms of the lover’s interest in a woman: Dame Pictura. She was a vrijster met vele vrijers: a lady with a host of swains, in the words of the artists’ biographer Cornelis de Bie.4 True artists came to their trade by falling helplessly in love The research resulting in this article was sponsored by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. 1 Bie Cornelis de, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vry schilderconst (Antwerp, Meyssens van Monfort: 1661) 23. 2 Hoogstraten Samuel van, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (Rotterdam, Van Hoogstraten: 1678) 291: ‘Urbijn, toen hy verlieft was; Venus deede hem Venus op het schoonst ten toon brengen […] Het geen onmooglijk schijnt kan de liefde uitvoeren, want de geesten zijn wakkerst in verliefde zinnen’. Cf. Lucas de Heere’s admiration for Hugo van der Goes, as cited in Mander Karel van, “Het leven der doorluchtighe Nederlandtsche en Hoogduytsche schilders”, in idem, Het schilderboeck (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604), fols. 203v– 204r. For more examples, see Sluijter E.J., Seductress of Sight: Studies in Dutch Art of the Golden Age (Zwolle: 2000) 141–144. 3 The influence of courtier’s manuals on artistic theory merits additional study. For instance, Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise, which was translated into Dutch partly in 1639 and entire- ly in 1662 and 1675, is referenced in Mander Karel van, “Den grondt der edel-vry schilder- const”, in Het schilderboeck IV 37, fol. 14v; and Junius Franciscus, De schilderkonst der oude (Middelburg, Zacharias Roman: 1641) vi; the painter Samuel van Hoogstraten made a full- fledged translation of a similar courtier’s manual (Den eerlyken jongeling, 1657). 4 De Bie, Cabinet 68 ff, 207: ‘[V]rijster met veel vrijers’. Cf. Sluijter, Seductress of Sight 131–134. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346468_0�0 THE PAINTING LOOKS BACK: RECIPROCAL DESIRE IN THE 17TH CENTURY 265 with her.5 As for their public, they were even more explicitly called the ‘lovers’ of painting or, in Dutch, liefhebbers, guarded ‘jealously’ by their mistress.6 In this essay, I would like to explore to what extent discussions about the lifelikeness of images borrowed from the discourse of love. Early modern art theory often emphasizes the essentially physical reaction to which painting may give rise. The viewer is described as not just losing the ability to speak or move, but even perspiring, crying out, or desiring to embrace the depicted fig- ures.7 This reaction is not dissimilar to the effect of the beloved upon the lover, as described in amorous poetry. To begin with that most explicit story about an artist in love with art: Pygmalion and Galatea [Fig. 8.1]. Giorgio Vasari describes a painting attributed to Bronzino, now in the Uffizi, as ‘Pygmalion praying to Venus in order that his statue, receiving the spirit, becomes alive and made of […] flesh and bones’.8 The picture shows how the sculptor sacrifices an animal to the Goddess of Love, in order to fulfill his desire to turn cold stone into pulsating flesh. The flames in the background rhyme with Ovid’s original description of ‘a fire ignite[d] in [Pygmalion’s] breast for the simulated body’.9 Galatea, however, averts her eyes and looks straight out of the image—at us. This mutual gaze, which calls to mind the triangular relation among artist, artwork, and viewer, merits additional analysis. As the present volume illustrates, early modern philosophy often studied love as a function of sight, and sight as a function of love. This manner of think- ing responded to the basic Neo-Platonic notion that beauty was identical to truth, and that the appreciation of physical bodies could inspire more abstract 5 It is necessary that the painter ‘in de aerdicheden der bevallijke natuur uit te beelden, ver- lieft is’, and ‘op de ziele der konst als verslingert is’, according to Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding 12; conversely, cf. ibid., 302: good paintings make ‘’t gezicht in haere behaeglijkheden […] verlieven’. 6 Van Mander, “Het leven” fol. 143v: ‘De Schilder-const is genoech gelijck een schoon Vrouwe, die over haer Liefhebbers oft naevolgers seer jeloers is’. Cf. Van Hoogstraten, Inleyding 290– 291: the work of art is expected to ‘in het eerste opslach geheel tot zich [te] trekken’, ‘machtig genoeg […] om de konstliefdige geesten tot zich te trekken, uit d’alderafgelegenste gewesten’. 7 Cf. Weststeijn T., The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: 2008) 154–160. 8 Vasari Giorgio, Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori italiani, da Cimabue in- sino a’ tempi nostri (Florence, Giunti: 1568) III 488: ‘[D]ipinse Bronzino Pigmalione, che fa orazione a Venere, perche la sua statua ricevendo lo spirito s’aviva, e divenga […] di carne, e d’ossa’. 9 Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.252–253: ‘[M]iratur et haurit/pectore Pygmalion simulati corpus ignes’..
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