Contra Pposto 2002/2003 Editors Erandi De Silva Sarah Guerin Karen Lloyd

contra pposto 2002/2003 Editors Erandi de Silva Sarah Guerin Karen Lloyd

Advisor Alexander Nagel

Editorial Committee Heather Diack Jane Hutchison Claire Hurtig Nicole Lawrence Annus pauca in verba redactus Jenny Reed The year summarized in a few words Sarah Stanners

With deep gratitude we would like to thank the following groups and individuals: Professor Nagel and the Fine Art Department; the Student Administrative Council; Copywell; our dedicated editorial committee for their perseverance and enthusiasm; and finally all those who submitted their work for consideration, without whom the pages of this journal would remain empty.

Cover Image : Ardhanarisvara (Hermaphroditic Shiva), Tiruvangado, India, c. 11th century. Editors' Note Table of Contents

Contrapposto is an Italian term, frequently used in the figural arts, 7 The Frontispiece from the Akhlaq ai-Muhsini: The Identification and Dating of a Forged Miniature which describes the position assumed by the human body when its weight is Laura Whatley borne on one leg while the other is relaxed. Contrapposto, however, also belongs to a broader discourse. Its Latin root, contrapositum, equivalent to the Greek 23 The Early Patterns of Cosimo de' Medici's Architectural Patronage with Reference to the Monastery of San Marco, antitithemi, or antithesis, derives from the rhetorical arts. Antithesis stresses the Florence importance of composition and the power of contradiction, pairing opposite ideas Jenny Reed and rhythms until the whole is more dynamic. As writers and orators manipulate words and phrases to reach the most striking and pleasing sounds, artists 37 Peter Bruegel the Elder's Land of Cockaigne: A Position of Ambivalence manipulate the elements and principles of design to achieve visual antithesis Adam Lauder through colour, contrast, texture, and line. And so, the term contrapposto stresses the consonance between art and art writing, both of which share the 53 Vasari, Nature, and the Historical Past Nick Herman same vocabulary. This year's edition of Contrapposto, the annual publication of the Fine 63 Anibale Carracci's Self-Portrait on an Easel Art Department, expresses through varied essays the verbalization of visual Alex Hoare impressions. Seen together, each essay's particular topic re-engages the perennial question of the dynamic relationship between word and image: an 91 Seeing is Not Believing: Art, Incredulity, and Caravaggio's Arabic frontispiece in chronological contention with its text, the vernacular Tempting Touch Heather Diack textual sources of Bruegel's work, a verbal exploration of Carracci's non-verbal self-portraits, a problematization of Vasari's seminal discourse on Art History, and 111 A Synthesis of Love and Disgust: An Exploration of Twentieth an anaylsis of one of the twentieth century's most prominent writers on art, Century Scholarship on Degas' Brothel Monotypes Nicole Lawrence Clement Greenberg. Therefore, as our title suggests, the essays selected are composed 125 Narrative Necessities in the Artwriting of Greenberg through contradiction, and achieve harmony through apparent discord. on Pollock Sarah Stanners

Erandi de Silva, Sarah Guerin and Karen Lloyd 141 Constructions of Masculinity in Interior Design: The Bachelor Pad and its Antecedents Claire Hurtig The Frontispiece from the Akhlaq ai-Muhsini: The Identification and Dating of a Forged Miniature

Laura Whatley

The dating of Islamic manuscripts is problematized by complex stylistic analysis and the validation of existing documentation. However, styles can be copied and documentation can be forged. It becomes a necessary methodology to crosscheck certain manuscripts with their contemporaries and in conjunction with a linear stylistic analysis. In the outline from his presentation at the Iranian Studies Conference in Washington, Abolala Soudavar refers to this as the "problem of the semi-fakes."1 He examines three documents that were produced close to the time of the originals, but are, in fact, forgeries. I am only concerned with one of these documents, an opening frontispiece from a copy of the Akhlaq a/-Muhsini [Figure 1] by the Persian author Kashifi. In the catalogue entry for the manuscript, Sotheby's gives an approximate date of A.H. 900/A.D. 1494-5. They state that it is probably the earliest illustrated copy of the manuscript for the patron, Prince Abu'I-Muhsin Kurkan, who was the eldest son of the great Timurid Sultan Husain. That would mean the manuscript was likely completed at Herat, and the miniatures would reflect the Herat style. 2 Soudavar states that this

1 Abolala Soudavar, "The Concepts of 'AI-adamo asahh' and 'Yaqin-e sabeq,' and the Problem of the Semi-Fakes", Paper Presentation at the Iranian Studies Conference (Washington, 1998). 2 Herat (now in modern day Iran) was the court of the Timurid princes, and was home to one of the most productive library-workshops from the end of the 14th century to the end of the 15th century. Akhlaq a/-Muhsini manuscript is likely from the Herat period, but the illustrations stylistically contemporary with the manuscript. What the artist achieved is a were added to the manuscript at a later date. Soudavar stated, "in the 1530s, a blend of the two stylistic sources. There is also a third style, which I believe had painting atelier which at times produced high quality manuscripts, systematically a strong influence on the painting. Soudavar states that the atelier often modified certain Safavid elements to make the manuscript more appealing to the added commercial grade illuminations and miniatures to a cache of non Ottoman buyer. The most obvious modification was made to the headgear worn illustrated manuscripts that had been found."3 He goes on to say that the cache by figures in the paintings, from the Safavid taj-e Heydari with its red baton, to did come from the Herat library-atelier, but that the illustrations were added what was supposed to be Khorasanian headgear.4 This was intended for the years later to aid in the sale of the manuscripts. Illustrated manuscripts have a Ottoman buyer who disliked the taj-e Heydari for its symbolic tie to Safavid higher selling price in addition to a more pleasing aesthetic. Two of the main militancy. 5 While this explanation has merit, the lack of the red baton could also buyers during the mid-1500s were the Safavids and the Ottomans, whom be attributed to the fact that the artist was attempting to make the manuscript Soudavar labels as "unsophisticated" in matters of purchasing manuscripts. In appear Timurid. The taj-e Heydari was an element only found in Safavid other words, a somewhat talented artist could add miniatures to an earlier painting, and it would not have been appropriate to adorn figures in Herat manuscript, which would then pass as originals in the book. Both the Ottomans painting with this headgear. Nonetheless, I believe that it is important to analyze and the Safavids wanted to obtain illustrated manuscripts from the Timurid the styles of all three sources in order to establish a date for the frontispiece. period at Herat, and that is what the atelier led them believe they were The truth will be revealed where one influence ends and another begins. This purchasing. If these buyers were as unsophisticated as Soudavar implies, then painting is therefore most likely an amalgamation of stylistic sources. the atelier would have had much freedom in the creation of the forgeries. They The style of Herat painting had a major impact on the art of the book, would have been able to use a variety of stylistic sources, both contemporary and would serve as a model as the Safavid synthesis began. Under Sultan Husain with and earlier than the fake, along with the addition, alteration and use of Mirza Bayqara, Herat flourished artistically and culturally while remaining one of elements for the sole purpose of appealing to the buyer. It is these same the most important centres of the Timurid world. Sultan Husain ruled the city elements which allow the modern scholar to determine whether or not they are from 1469 until his death in 1506: "Sultan Husain himself was not devoid of dealing with a "semi-fake." literary talent, and his refined taste was influential in the development of The frontispiece from the Akhlaq ai-Muhsini was a new addition to the manuscript. The other illustrations were inserted on pages that were already part painting, architecture, calligraphy and music in late fifteenth-century Herat.'-6 of the existing manuscript. For the frontispiece, the forgers had to split the first Husain was surrounded by the most talented and accomplished artists that the folio to add the dual page illustration. They also used a thicker card stock for the court had to offer. There were numerous intellectual gatherings for the exchange painting, which lies between the shamsa and the opening text page. The of ideas and style, allowed the Timurid style to reach new levels of sophistication frontispiece is an unusual blend of styles deriving from sources spanning and refinement. According to Soudavar, it is during this era of heightened 7 approximately forty years. If the manuscript was illustrated at the Tabrizi atelier cultural activity that manuscript production flourished. Of course, due in part to then the frontispiece would have a date between 1530 and 1540. That would place the manuscript within the Safavid period. Of course, the artist would have been following a style coming from Herat in an attempt to create a painting 4 Soudavar, "Concept" 7. 5 Soudavar, "Concept" 7. 6 Abolala Soudavar, Art of the Persian Courts: Selections from the Art and History Trust Collection (New York: Rizzoli, 1993) 85. 7 Soudavar, Persian Courts 86. 3 Soudavar, "Concept" 7. 8 - 9 The frontispiece is reminiscent of the Herati Khamseh of Nizami dated Sultan Husain's patronage. He commissioned some of the greatest manuscripts 1494-95.9 Many of the miniatures in the Khamseh are attributed to Bihzad, the of the time, enabling a new group of artisans to emerge. Husain also set a new acknowledged master of Persian painting. There are also traceable similarities standard for the quality of manuscript production, through careful planning and between the frontispiece and earlier works of Bihzad and his school, including execution. The paper used was thick and of a high quality; the pigments were miniatures from the Khamseh of Amir Khosrow Dihlavi, the Zafar-Namah, the exotic and expensive, providing a deep and lasting colour. The details of painting Bustan of Sa'di and the Divan of Mir Ali Shir Nawa'i. Although some of these acquired a sophistication that was never equaled. Through this carefully similarities are minor or limited to one or two miniatures from the manuscript, monitored process the artists developed the dexterity, patience and mastery they will be analyzed briefly. A discussion of the Herati style becomes a required for the creation of such precise works. 8 discussion of the style of Bihzad. With Bihzad's work, scholars face the another The Sotheby's catalogue summarizes the style of the frontispiece using common manuscript problem: attribution. Very few works that are attributed to terms that are conventional in describing the Herat style. The stylistic analysis the artist actually bear his signature, and many artists that have aspired to reach states that the arrangement of space, angles and form are complex. The scene the level of Bihzad signed his name to their works. 10 Bihzad's work can be takes place in a garden pavilion, and uses many of the devices common to the divided into three periods: the first includes his early works from 1480-7, the genre. A prince, likely a representation of the patron, is sitting within a pavilion second his later works from 1488-1510 and the third is composed if his works on the right hand side of the miniature. He is brought refreshments by four executed during the Safavid Period between 1510-1535. The works of his second figures that are lined up across the double page. There is a large grouping of period, circa 1494-5, are those that relate to the frontispiece. The artist who figures in the far-left corner, each presumably waiting his turn to give his gift to created the frontispiece was attempting to make the miniature appear the prince. They are counterbalanced by the small group of figures on the right contemporary to the work of Bihzad. During the second half of the fourteenth who have likely already served the prince. The floor of the pavilion is a very century, the Herati school began moving away from architectural perspective in common brick pattern painted a vivid mint green. In the middle-ground, two order to direct attention to the psychologically driven placement of figures, which attendants stand beyond the pavilion within the garden, and there is a gardener made them more significant within the greater story.U Bihzad took this a step walking through an open gate from the garden into the pavilion. The gardener further by adding both grace and harmony to his compositions. seems to serve as a bridge between the two areas. The painting is anchored by Many of the similarities between Bihzad's work and the Akh/aq ai two architectural structures on each side of the pavilion, which contain four Muhsini frontispiece are rudimentary since the same traits were common in both female onlookers placed in the second storey windows. The bodies of these Herati work and Safavid work. It is not simply a discussion of Bihzad's style, but figures are contained within the architecture so that only their upper bodies are rather an analysis of certain elements he often used in his compositions. These visible. The structures are covered in small detailed decoration and arabesques. conventions are not Bihzad's alone, but are part of the Herati look. In the The pavilion is separated from the garden by a red post fence, a common fence Khamseh of Amir Khosrow Dihlavi located in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, type used in such scenes. The garden includes lush vegetation, curvilinear trees and elegant birds. The sky is painted a rich gold, which gives the painting an overall feel of wealth. 9 Sotheby's London (April 27, 1997) 86. 10 I will be assuming that the works attributed to Bihzad by the scholar Ebadollah Bahari in his book, Bihzad: The Master of Persian Painting (London and New York: IB Tauris and Co. Ltd, 1996), are in fact from Bihzad's hand. At present, I am not equipped to deal with the "Bihzad problem." 11 Basil Gray, Persian Painting (Switzerland, 1995) 110. 8 Soudavar, Persian Courts 86. 10 11 ~ exceeds that found in the frontispiece and the variety of figure types is much one can find similarities between the frontispiece and a miniature entitled greater, but the similarities are quite interesting. Execution Before the King. This miniature tells the story of a man who slays his In later works, as Bihzad's style and skill began to expand, new links own brother to become the sole inheritor of the family's assets, and then comes between Herati painting and the frontispiece can be witnessed. The Bustan of face to face with the consequences of his actions. It is part of Bihzad's early Sa'di was illustrated around 1488-9, and of the five miniatures four are clearly oeuvre, from 1485. The scene takes place in a garden pavilion, with the King signed by Bihzad. 13 This manuscript includes a double-page frontispiece called A enthroned and presiding over the action on the right hand side. The King, like Celebration at the Court of Sultan Husain Mirza. The left page of the illustration the Prince in the frontispiece, is separate from the other figures. This makes him represents the inner court while the right side is the garden and pavilion. Again stand out both physically and psychologically. The garden and pavilion are the painting features a gold sky, a rail fence and curvilinear trees, an open separated by a red post fence divided into two sections. The fence is also pierced garden gate, an isolated royal and figures parading across the foreground. In with an open gate leading from the garden to the pavilion. In spite of the added this painting, Bihzad's figures are stretched out to create more elongated bodies. height and a few decorative posts, the fence in this miniature is almost identical to that used in the frontispiece. The two miniatures also feature a gold sky, This figure type closely resembles the type found in the Akhlaq ai-Muhsini which Bihzad used frequently in his early works. Other links between these two frontispiece. The bodies are long and lean, giving them an added grace. The paintings include the curvilinear trees contained in their respective gardens and majority of the figures are wearing long robes and small pointed shoes. Of the basic brick-patterned used for the pavilion. course, the actual type of dress, head covering and robe colouring found in the Akhlaq ai-Muhsinifrontispiece come from a variety of different stylistic sources. In the Zafar-Namah, now housed in the Walters Art Gallery I Baltimore I is a very beautiful miniature described as Timur Receiving the Subject Princes on After the Uzbeks conquered Herat, Bihzad moved to the Safavid court His Accession. The manuscript as a whole is based on the life and career of King where he continued working in the Herat style. The last two examples of Timur. This manuscript is unique because Bihzad's illustrations do not directly Bihzad's work I will discuss come from this period. Neither work has been correlate with the text passages immediately next to them. 12 The miniature in unanimously attributed to Bihzad, but both include his characteristic portrayal of the manuscript is a double-page garden scene: a lively painting in which Bihzad human emotion and posture, along with the composition of the garden used a very broad and rich colour palette. The miniature is inundated with background. The first comes from the Bustan of Sa'di from the Metropolitan figures bringing a variety of gifts to the King who is, once again, slightly apart Museum of Art. It is simply called An Interior Reception and is given a date from the rest of the figures. As in the frontispiece, the figures on the left page between 1515-20. The grouping of figures, their expressive postures, as well as are set up in rows and seem to wait to approach the King, and then move across the chenar tree with the autumn foliage, paired with the fine illumination, all 14 the margin into the right page. There are also figures entering through a garden point to the work of the Bihzad. What I would like to discuss from this gate, which is found in the frontispiece with the gardener. Both paintings miniature is the lack of the Safavid headdress with the red baton know as the represent the grass as a dark, thick green carpet speckled with a medley of flora. taj-e Heydari. Ebadollah Bahari states that the Safavid red batons on the turbans 15 Once again we find the simple gold sky and curvilinear trees running across the were erased after the manuscript passed into the Ottoman treasury. This is an backdrop. The complexity of the figural arrangement in this miniature far

13 Bahari 101. 14 Bahari 195. 15 Bahari 196. The Ottomans took control of the Safavids and temporarily occupied Tabriz 12 Bahari 69. in 1514, during which they had access to the treasures and craftsmen of the Tabriz court. 12 ... 13 in Khurasan. 16 After his military successes, Ismail Safavi proclaimed himself Shah important statement in regards to the dating of the frontispiece, which I have and continued his campaign by leading revolts against the Ottoman Sultan already hypothesized was illuminated during the Safavid period and is also Bayezid. In 1514, the Ottomans and the Safavids engaged in a battle, which missing the red baton. The second miniature comes from the Divan of Mir Ali ended in disaster for the Safavids, ending Shah Ismail's control over eastern Shir NawaJ located in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and is dated 1524. One Anatolia. The Safavid leader never fought in battle again and retreated to a life new link between this illustration and the Akhlaq ai-Muhsini frontispiece is the of royal pleasures including hunting, drinking and feasting. 17 According to Sheila small birds seen in flight and perched on the branches of the trees in the garden. There is also a similar treatment of architecture in both compositions. Although it Canby, the manuscripts from the early Safavid period are similar in style to 18 is depicted in a strange and somewhat awkward perspective, the architecture is Turkman manuscripts with the simple addition of the red taj. After the 1514 large and anchors the composition. defeat, Ismail had to resort to other, more traditional means of legitimizing his Having exposed both the characteristics of Bihzadian painting ar.d reign. He established a royal library-workshop for the production of illustrated Herati painting, now the characteristics coming from different stylistic sources manuscripts in Tabriz, and brought some of the greatest painters, calligraphers may be revealed. It is these elements that help expose the frontispiece as a and illuminators to live and work at his court in Tabriz. 'fake' and will work to establish the true date of the miniature. If the frontispiece Shah Ismail's greatest joy was perhaps the birth of his first son, was completed at the Tabrizi atelier, which was operating between 1530-1540, Tahmasp. At the young age of two, Tahmasp was declared the governor of then it would have a firm date within the Safavid period. The painting features Herat, which was more symbolic than functional. In the city of Herat, the Timurid many different elements characteristic of the Safavid style. The frontispiece is influence and refinement could still be felt, and Tahmasp was raised and trained also reminiscent of the Ottoman and Turkman styles, as there were interactions among artists such as Bihzad. From an early age Tahmasp showed an interest in between them and the Safavids. Early Safavid painting is a synthesis of .the painting and calligraphy, predilections which led to the next blossoming of 19 Herati style, Ottoman style and Turkman style. With the growing influence of Persian painting. Herat manuscripts with their broad muted colour palette, divergence of figure types and poses, refined architecture and psychological royal patronage, Safavid painting was able to grow and change into something unique while continuing the traditions of these earlier influences. arrangements, surrounded Tahmasp. Meanwhile, his father was inundated with the Turkman style of painting at the court of Ya'qub Beg. 20 The Turkman style is After the death of Sultan Husain, Iran was faced with a brief period of comprised of a brighter, more jewel-like colour palette with active poses and unrest as loyalties shifted among the Turkmans, and the Uzbeks took control of figure types. It is my feeling that the works in the Herat style have a refined and Herat. It was under the control of the young Ismail Safavi that the Safavid court polished appearance as opposed to the more turbulent works coming from the was born. He gathered an army known as the Qizilbash, which is translated as Turkman and Ottoman courts. It is at the Royal Library-Atelier that these 'red head' for the red baton of their turbans. Ismail avenged the wrongful death different styles came together, which Soudavar calls the synthesis of east and of his father by defeating the Aqqoyunlu Turkmans in 1501, then, within the next decade, conquered the former Turk controlled lands of western Persia and eastern Anatolia, including Baghdad, then turned east and defeated the Uzbeks 16 Sheila R. Canby, Princes/ Poets & Paladins: Islamic and Indian Paintings from the Collection of Prince and Princess Fadruddin Aga Khan (London: British Museum Press 1998) 43. ' 17 Canby, Princes, Poets & Paladins43. 18 Canby, Princes/ Poets & Paladins43. 19 Sheila R. Canby, Persian Painting (London: British Museum, 1993) 77. 20 Sheila R. Canby, Persian Painting??. 14 15 T west. 21 Just before his death, Shah Ismail commissioned a royal copy of the type emblematic of Sultan Muhammad. He features a long neck, slender body Shahnameh. Artists and calligraphers from the Tabrizi school and the Herati and slightly raised eyebrows. 25 These elements are also identifiable on the school were brought together to complete the manuscript. After Shah Ismail's figures of the frontispiece. They have long and lean bodies set with an elongated death, Tahmasp succeeded him as Shah, and took over as the patron for the neck and soft face including slightly raised eyebrows. Owlad is also wearing a manuscript's creation. Shah Tahmasp was not pleased with the illustrations fully embroidered costume, which is similar to the costumes worn by over half of already completed for the manuscript, and around the year 1522 restarted the the figures In the frontispiece. Other similarities include a heightening of the illumination and illustration of the manuscript at the Tabrizi atelier under his own white turban and the way in which certain figures wear their clothing, with the influence and likely that of Bihzad who had come to Tabriz in the 1520s.22 ends brought up and looped through their belts. The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp was no small undertaking. The One miniature from Shah Tahmasp's Shahnameh, entitled The 26 manuscript is composed of 258 illustrations and 380 folios, which required a Nightmare of Zahhakby the artist Mir Musavvir, helps to establish a precedent sizeable staff of painters, calligraphers, illuminators, guilders, binders and for the architecture from the Akhlaq a/-Muhsini frontispiece. The exteriors of helpers. 23 Several different prominent artists in Tabriz were given control of the buildings have a long tradition of patterned decorations in the form of scrolling project, each giving their own unique stamp to the miniatures. It is the hands of arabesques or the repetition of simple geometric shapes. What appears to be a these collective artists that in part created the consolidated Safavid style. new feature is the decoration of the interior space revealed through open doors Completed in the ten years before the proposed date of the Akhlaq a/-Muhsini and windows, which is often seen behind a figure. These designs have a simple frontispiece, the miniatures from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh and its function in that they represent interior space and its decoration. In earlier styles contemporaries provide a stylistic guide for the period between 1520 and 1530. of painting this interior space was often left blank, or represented with a white or One miniature from a Shahnameh entitled Rustam Kills the White Div dark gray wash. Circa 1520, artists started paying closer attention to the details has been attributed to the court artist Sultan Muhammad. 24 This miniature has contained within and around the windows and doors. The idea of filling every not been linked to a particular manuscript because it was later removed and inch of a miniature with decoration was certainly at play during the Safavid mounted on an album, but it is related to the miniatures from Shah Tahmasp's period. Another feature was the decorative cutting of the window frame, which Shahnameh. The main characteristic of Sultan Muhammad's work is the wit and was a technique used in the frontispiece. The frontispiece features scrolling floral humor he injects in his paintings, which is revealed through the figures in the arabesques behind each window in a light colour scheme. The design creates an scene. Stylistically this miniature is a combination of old and new innovations. It aesthetic backdrop for the figures and gives the illusion of space beyond the contains both the subtle middle tones of the Herati School and the vibrant jewel window frame. The treatment of the windows does not provide us with an exact tones of the Turkman School. Sultan Muhammad also continued the use of the date for the frontispiece because they continue throughout the Safavid period. gold sky. The figure in this miniature that I would like to focus on is Owlad, who They do, however, help solidify the hypothesis that the miniature was not is tied to a tree on right hand side of the miniature. Owlad represents a figure created prior to the 1520s. In the catalogue from the April 24, 1996 sale, Sotheby's featured a double-page miniature with many similarities to the Akh/aq ai-Muhsini

21 Soudavar, Persian Courts 159. 22 Canby, Princes, Poets & Paladins43. 23 Sheila R. Canby, Persian Painting 82. 25 Soudavar, Persian Courts 162. 24 Sultan Muhammad was the first director of the project, he was a native of Tabriz and 26 Oleg Grabar, Mostly Miniatures (New Jersey: Princeton, 2000) 32. Grabar includes a schooled in the Turkman royal style of painting. question mark after the artist's name not giving him definitive credit for the miniature. 16 17 connected through gesture, although the bodies appear stiff and frozen in time. frontispiece both in style and provenance. The miniature came from a Persian It is difficult to determine what their next movement will be. The miniature copy of the Haft Awrang of the Sufi poet Jami. The manuscript is attributed to features a melange of characters including musicians, courtiers, a groomsman, Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Yusuf ai-Jami, and the work is attributed to a Herati gardeners, second-story onlookers and a figure making an offering to the Prince. artist, dated A.D. 1494. The twenty miniatures, however, are attributed to Tabriz The frontispiece is limited to those making offerings, a gardener and the second artists c.1530-1540.27 With this information it can be deduced that the miniatures story observers. The number of figures seems proportional to the composition were created at the same Tabrizi Library-Atelier as the frontispiece. This and changed as the Safavid period continued. Within the next fifteen to twenty particular copy of the Haft Awrang was written and illuminated between March years, Safavid compositions exploded with colour, activity, figures and life. Many and May of 1494 shortly after the death of Jami, and at the earliest stages was scholars refer to the style of the later manuscripts as the 'deluxe Safavid style'. not intended to be illustrated. 28 It was fifty years later at the Tabriz court that The characteristics of this style include a bright, broad palette of jewel tone eighteen blank pages between two of the stories were filled with double-page colours, fluid, rhythmic lines, large-scale compositions, an overflow into the illustrations. It is likely that the illustrations were added to raise the value and margins, modeling of forms, expansive landscapes and architecture, elegant aesthetic appeal of the manuscript for sale. So, like the Akh/aq a/-Muhsin~ this 29 manuscript combines fine Timurid illumination and calligraphy with Safavid style figures, diverse flora and fauna, and intricate ornamental patterns. We can see painting. the beginnings of this style manifested in the Akhlaq a/-Muhsinifrontispiece. Stylistically and historically the two miniatures have a lot in common. The dating of manuscripts is not impossible, but the complexity of the Both double-page miniatures feature a garden, a Prince seated in a pavilion, matter increased with the discovery of forgeries such as the Akh/aq ai-Muhsini court members across the foreground, second-story observers (mostly women), frontispiece. They blur the linear development of miniature painting, and require the analysis of both major and minor illustrated manuscripts. In the case of the figures standing in a garden and a small post fence separating the garden from Akhlaq ai-Muhsini manuscript, the frontispiece stands alone stylistically because the pavilion. The basic composition is quite similar with the Prince seated in the the other miniatures in the manuscript follow a different style of painting. There middle ground of the right page and the elongated architectural structure is also the hurdle of publication; many illustrations from botti major and minor anchoring the left illustration. This structure alone propels the argument that the manuscripts remain unpublished. It becomes necessary to pay close attention to two works were completed at the same atelier. Except for a few minor both the largest elements and smallest details when looking for connections alterations, including the widening of the windows in the Haft Awrang and the between particular miniatures. What is true of most miniature paintings is the addition of a third window, the two structures are almost identical. Both large range of stylistic influences. It is impossible to simply determine a set of structures feature a carved-out lower story window with the scrolling floral characteristics for one location, time, school or artist. This is certainly the case arabesque design showing through the window, an upper story window also with the frontispiece, which is given yet another layer of complexity by the carved-out with the second-story observer and a small protruding balcony. deception of the forger. Therefore, it is likely that the frontispiece was completed The figure types and poses are also similar in both miniatures. The at the Tabriz atelier between 1530 and 1540. The styje of the frontispiece figures are rendered in the traditional sixteenth-century style with elongated continues the elements of the period just prior to 1530 without surpassing the proportions particularly in the arms and neck. The individual characters are

29 Mari~nna Shreve Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza's ''Haft Awrang": a Princely Manuscript 27 Sotheby's London (April 24, 1996) 48-49. from Stxteenth-Century Iran (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 28 Sotheby's London (April 24, 1996) 48. 18 ... 19 'deluxe Safavid style' of the 1550s. The forger at the Tabrizi atelier had to simultaneously work in three different styles of painting bridging a large time span. The frontispiece brings together a group of styles that is rare, making the forgery both unique and important.

Figure 1: Akhlaq ai-Muhsini, Artist(s) Unknown, c.1530-1540.

20 21 v The Early Patterns of Cosimo de' Medici's Architectural Patronage with Reference to the Monastery of San Marco, florence

Jenny Reed

"Why do you think there was such a great number of capable men in the past, if not because they were well treated and honoured by princes?111 -Filarete, Trattato di Architettura

Early Medici architectural patronage in Renaissance Florence provides a fascinating and complex entree into the historical persona of Cosima de' Medici (1389-1464) and the impact of his political, financial, and spiritual presence within Florentine society. However, to formalize a definitive characterization of the motives and social themes that informed Cosima's architectural patronage is no simple task. Ernst Gombrich's monumental essay, "The Early Medici as Patrons of Art," continues to colour our interpretation of Medici patronage, and to Gombrich's analysis we must add the thematic programs of modern scholars. Michael Baxandall suggests a broad structure to Medici patronage based on "the pleasure of possession, an active piety, civic consciousness, self-commemoration and perhaps self-advertisement, the rich man's necessary virtue and pleasure of reparation, a taste for pictures."2 Peter Burke reduces the issue of patronage to

1 Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, in Peter Burke, Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, 2"d ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) 89. 2 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 3. three essential elements: piety, prestige, and pleasure, 3 and provides for us a the masterful manipulation of political supporters, opponents, dissidents, and the manageable working model upon which to elaborate. The scholars John Paoletti electoral system. Cosimo infused the elected government offices with supporters 11 and Crispin Robinson argue that within Burke's tripartite construction of and friends and banished his enemies from Florence. He was a skillful patronage issues arise concerning the impact of corporate versus individual statesman who purposefully assumed the persona of an "old-fashioned merchant 12 13 patronage, the location of commissioned churches and altars, and the process of with simple tastes" and never personally held any key public offices. As we appropriation involved in artistic commissions. 4 It is our task to meld the shall see, Cosimo's architectural patronage was intimately linked to his unofficial patronage themes into a single cohesive picture. Only then may we begin to program of political supremacy; however, in his architectural patronage Cosimo appreciate Cosimo's novel, holistic approach to architectural patronage, tended to contrast his self-constructed image of humility with political bravado specifically his involvement in the monastery of San Marco, and his relationship when he commissioned building programs that significantly contributed to the with Florentine society. From the outset we must recognize that Cosimo's public, social, political, and religious framework of Florentine society. Patrons, such as Cosimo's father Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, professional identity is in no way exclusive from his identity as a patron of the traditionally participated in architectural commissions through corporate, arts, 5 and that Cosimo refined Renaissance patronage to exploit the "propaganda collective ventures where individual recognition was subsumed within the larger value of architecture and sculpture. "6 identity of the committee. 14 Cosimo's initial involvement in collective architectural In 1433, Cosimo and his family were banished from Florence by the patronage began as a member of the Arte del Cambio committee that Albizzi family, and the Medicis sojourned in Padua and Venice during their exile. commissioned Lorenzo Ghiberti (c.1378-1455) to sculpt St. Matthew for the There Cosimo was "received like an honoured visitor rather than a fugitive."7 It is 15 following his return to Florence in 1434 that we witness the parallel development Arte's niche at Orsanmichele in 1419. We should note that although Cosimo of Cosimo's architectural patronage and his political ascendancy towards was credited as the primus inter pares of the committee due to his significant unilateral domination of the Florentine state. 8 In his political guise, Cosimo financial contribution to the project, his presence remains invisible within the 16 "typified the rational and calculating entrepreneur, the shrewd, tough-minded collective identity of the committee. Cosimo was also active with the 14 36 realist who had banished passion and emotion from politics.'19 As a puppet Committee of Eight, struck to prepare and plan a report for the construction of master, Cosimo exercised his "talent for working behind the scenes"10 through the lantern atop the Duomo's cupola, and the 1446 Operaio of the Palazzo di Signoria. 17 Cosimo's continued participation in collective architectural projects,

3 Burke 98. 4 John T. Paoletti, "Strategies and Structures of Medici Artistic Patronage in the 15th 11 Brucker 159. Ce~tu~,'' Early Medici and their Artists, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (London: Birkbeck College, 12 Brucker 121. Umvers1ty of London, 1995) 19-36. Crispin Robinson, "Cosima de' Medici and Architecture," 13 Early Medici and their Artists, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (London: Birkbeck College, University Hessert 1025. Cosima highly valued his burgher status and financial superiority within of London, 1995) 51-70. Florentine so~iety, acting as the prior of his guild in 1415 and 1417, and as the Florentine 5 ambassador to Milan (1420), Luca (1423), and Bologna (1424). Hessert 1026. E. H. Gombrich, "The Early Medici as Patrons of Art," Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. 14 F. Jacob (London: Faber and Faber, 1960) 280. Paoletti 20. We must also remember the issue of fraternal patronage, specifically in 6 Marlis Von Hessert, "Cosima de' Medici," Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance and regards the Cosima's architectural patronage. Paoletti stresses that in the early projects Mannerist Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove's Dictionaries, 2000) 1024. Cosima was working in partnership with his brother Lorenzo. He sites the commission of 7 Hessert 1025. Ghiberti's Reliquary of Sts. Protus, Hyacinthus, and Nemesius (c.1425-1428) and the early stages of the San Marco renovations as examples of their joint involvement. Paoletti 25. : Hessert 1025. Cosima w~s the virtual ruler of Florence until his death in 1464. 15 Paoletti 20. Gene A. Brucker, Rena1ssance Florence (Berkeley: University of California Press 1983) 16 121. I Paoletti 20. 17 10 Brucker 121. Paoletti 21. 24 ,.,. 25 program was the introduction in 1434 of the annual civic procession of the Sei specifically those involving Florence's Duomo and Signoria, served to build his della Mercanzia from their palace to the church of San Tommaso on the feast public persona of civic and religious dedication to the community. 18 5 22 day of San Tommaso on December 21 t. The Medicis, led by Cosimo, Such an analysis is sympathetic to Burke's 'prestige motive' for purposefully encroached upon the territory of the leading Florentine families and patronage. The notion of prestige is also crucial to our understanding of the consolidated Medici power on a city-wide scale. 23 place of the individual or private patron within Renaissance society. Following his While Cosimo exercised "brilliant strategies of medium, placement, early collective ventures, Cosimo was increasingly involved in private acts of [and] displacement,"24 our conception of Cosimo the banker and politician is architectural patronage in which he shifted from a silent presence to a dominant inseparable from Cosimo the patron. As a successful and wealthy banker, Cosima propagator of the image of the Medici within Florence. Leon Battista Alberti held a precarious social position that bore directly upon his collective and (1404-72), who asserted that private patronage was an admirable virtue, stated: individual involvement in public building initiatives. Wealth was Cosima's "Achilles 25 When you erect a wall or portico of great elegance ... good citizens heal in theological terms," and his situation was in no way unique. We see a approve and express joy for their own sake, as well as for yours, parallel situation with the banker Enrico Scrovegni, who commissioned Giotto di because they realize that you have used your wealth to increase Bondone (c.1276-1337) to decorate his Arena Chapel in Padua (c.1305) as greatly, not only your own honour and glory, but also that of your restitution for the sin of usury. Much as Giotto depicted Scrovegni humbly 19 family, your descendents and the whole city. offering a model of his chapel to a host of angels, Vespasiano da Bisticci later insisted that Cosimo donated money to the monastery of San Marco in order to It is this cultural appreciation of self-aggrandizement that greatly informs our "atone for the canonical sin of usury."26 According to Vespasiano: interpretation of Cosima's patronage. However, the singular concept of prestige

must be expanded upon in order to reveal the intelligent and shrewd political It appeared to [Cosima] that he had some money ... which he had not program underlying much of Cosima's architectural patronage. come by quite cleanly. Desirous of lifting this weight from his We cannot help but appreciate Cosima's finesse in imposing his shoulders, he conferred with his Holiness Pope Eugene IV who told 27 presence on sites of strategic spiritual and political importance in an attempt to him ... to spend ten thousand florins on building. extend the Medici sphere of influence within Florence. In 1439, Cosima dedicated a chapel for the novices of Santa Croce - a district traditionally dominated by the In an unpublished letter to his son Piero, Cosima said, "only have patience with 28 powerful Castellani, Peruzzi, and Baroncelli families. 2° Cosima later installed a me, my Lord, and I shall return it all to you;" we can interpret Cosima's life new rector in the family chapel at San Tommaso in the Mercato Vecchio; and long commitment to building projects (amounting to a total expenditure of Susan McKillop asserts that by 1459, Cosima had amassed five altars under his influence throughout Florence. 21 In connection with the installment of the altars, 22 Paoletti 34. Cosima instituted a program of civic ritual and pageantry. One element of this 23 Paoletti 30. Cosima also gave generously to churches outside of Florence; churches dedicated to Sts. Cosmas and Damian in Pisa and in Rome received alms from Cosima, and the Observant Franciscan church of S. Girolamo in Volterra received financial help, Robinson 62. 24 Paoletti 36. 18 Paoletti 21. 25 Robinson 63. 19 Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria. Quoted in Robinson 63-64. 26 Robinson 63. 20 Paoletti 30. The three families had chapels within the large church of Santa Croce. 27 Gombrich 283. 21 Paoletti 31, 33. Old Sacristy (1433), S Marco (1440), S Lorenzo (1442), Badia Fiesolana, 28 Gombrich 284. and S. Tommasso (1459). 26 ,... 27 century trend of religious reform occasioned an increasing drive among lay 663,755 florins29) as his attempt to escape the "stigma of usury."3° Cosima's 35 patrons to support the Franciscan and Dominican Observant orders. Cosima huge financial contribution to Florence, and specifically to the monastery of San Marco, displays his sense of civic and religious responsibility to give back to the had a history of supporting the Dominican order; he was involved with the Dominican Bosco ai Frati and the Badia of Fiesole. 36 Robinson suggests that community, echoing Cicero's belief that: cosimo was expressing his thanks to the Venetians for hospitable treatment

There is nothing more honourable and noble than to be indifferent to during his exile from Florence from 1433 to 1434 by supporting a monastery 37 money if one does not possess it, and to devote it to beneficence and dedicated to the patron saint of Venice. However, our analysis must also take generosity if one does possess it.31 into account the geographical location of San Marco within the nexus of Medici power. 38 A trained and dedicated humanist, Cosima would likely have been as aware of By becoming the patron of his neighbourhood monastery, Cosima 39 the ancient writers' moral guidance as of contemporary Christianity's insistence consciously promoted "the spiritual interests of the wider neighbourhood" and on restitution and forgiveness. Within the specific context of the monastery of enhanced the Medici's image "as patrons of friends, neighbours, and fellow San Marco, Cosima's patronage combined both a pious desire for atonement with Christians."40 The political value gained by showing a dedicated local financial a keen awareness of the political and social power resident in the public and spiritual interest within his community would not have been lost on Cosima, association with the religious institution. and again we see Cosima shrewdly benefiting politically from a religious act of Cosima's patronage of the Observant Dominicans at San Marco is the pious patronage. first known Medici contact with the Order and may be seen as the product of a Of the original seventeen friars who were brought from the parent "spiritual contract"32 between Cosima and Pope Eugenius IV. When in 1427 the house of San Domenico at Fiesole to the recently converted Dominican Arte della Seta (the Silk Guild) became the official protector of the Silvestrine monastery of San Marco, two figures stand out for their significant contributions monastery of San Marco, Cosima and the Pope agreed that should Cosima pay to our understanding of San Marco. Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (c.1395-1400-1455), for the necessary renovations, Eugenius IV would transfer the monastery to the beloved as Fra Angelico, was responsible for the pictorial program of the entire Observant Dominican order. 33 The establishment of a Dominican order was monastery, including the monumental San Marco Altarpiece (1443) [Figure 1] for favourable to the Pope: only the Observant orders vowed obedience directly to the high altar. Fra Angelico's frescoes throughout the dormitory cells and the Pope, the official papal theologian was traditionally a Dominican, and the communal facilities, as well as the high altar pal/a, are finely attuned to Cosima's Papacy had already kindled an association with the Florentine Dominicans at subtle presence within all aspects of the monastery: the San Marco Altarpiece is Santa Maria Novella. 34 However, the reasons for Cosima's financial and spiritual noticeable for its "panoply of Medici saints"41 in the foreground and for its subtle interest in San Marco are less forthcoming. Dale Kent argues that the fifteenth-

35 Kent 173. 36 29 Kent 173. Gombrich 284. 37 30 Robinson 58. Gombrich 284. 38 31 Robinson 58. San Marco is situated at the top of the Via Larga, the street on which the Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society Medici Palace is located. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978) 288. 39 32 Cosima Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: the Patron's Oeuvre Kent 173. Dale Kent, De' (New 4 Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 172. ° Kent 173. 41 Robinson 59. The altarpiece was dedicated on Epiphany in 1443, in the presence of the 33 Kent 173. 34 Kent 173. Pope. 28 ,., 29 allusion to the city's magnificent Procession of the Magi. The frontal position of church of San Marco creates a "typology of power."47 Cosimo legally controlled the Christ Child, who extends a welcoming gesture, and the two kneeling saints, the choir and apse of the church, and this sacred heart of the church is likened 48 Cosmas and Damian (the Medici patron saints), to either side of the central axis to the head of "an anthropomorphical structure." In Paul's first Epistle to the of the painting in the foreground extend "the picture's psychological field Corinthians, the church, "just as a human body, though it is made of many parts, 49 outwards to embrace those processing towards its image."42 The Confraternity of is a single unit because all these parts, though many, make one body." Cosimo, the Magi had its headquarters at San Marco, and the pomp and ceremony of the therefore, controlled the most sacred, essential part of the church-as-body, procession were appropriated as "something of a Medici family right"43 from securing a Medici presence within the religious composition of San Marco itself. Cosimo's day through to the time of his grandson Lorenzo. The inclusion of the The second key figure involved in the early days of San Marco was the Medici patron saints within the altarpiece, combined with the theory that the Friar Antoninus. Prior of San Marco (1436-1444) and Archbishop of Florence procession of the Magi culminated in front of the painting, displays the degree of (from 1446), Antoninus was the "city's leading practical moralist and 50 influence Cosimo enjoyed at San Marco. theologian/ and it is through him that we appreciate the underlying tension, Particular iconographic attention was also paid to the mural decoration even paradox, in Florentine society between lay devotion and the church's 51 of Cosimo's private cell (Cell 39) that depicts the Adoration of the Magi. Painted dependency on commercial profits. Kent suggests that Anton in us was writing c.1450 by Fra Angelico's chief assistant Benozzo Gozzoli (c.1421-1497), the about San Marco in his Summa Theologica (c.1450) when he questioned what lunette scene is the focal point of the private chapel used by Cosimo while in Saint Dominic would think of the "houses and cells enlarged, vaulted, raised to residence at San Marco. 44 The fresco is striking not only for the gorgeous and the sky, and most frivolously adorned with superfluous sculpture and 52 exuberantly coloured figures by Gozzoli, figures who represent his "charming paintings." The specific iconographic program of the San Marco Altarpiece and surrender to the luxuriousness of colour/"15 but for the inclusion at the bottom of the decoration of Cell 39 both appear to convey not-so-hidden references to the painting of a Corpus Domini and a sacrament tabernacle within the room Cosimo and the Medicis within their pictorial religious narratives, and Antoninus itself. William Hood eloquently summarizes the significance of the combination of was likely objecting to the intrusion of the patron into the work of art and the liturgical objects and decoration when he states, "the conjunction of the Three overall spiritual program of the monastery. However, Antoninus was progressive Magi and the Corpus Domini, which in this context must be seen as cultic rather in terms of his acceptance of the changing nature of his monastery, and even than liturgical, were totems of Cosimo's politicallegitimization."46 went so far as to state that the monastery should be built "not according to the 53 Cosimo's special status within the monastery, dramatized through his state of the friars, but the state of the city." Unlike the Franciscans, the privileged use of a private chapel and tabernacle, is also evident in the religious Dominicans had not made a vow of holy poverty. Dominican constitutional nature of the monastery itself. When Cosimo agreed to fund the monastery's restrictions on church architecture and decoration proscribed the avoidance of renovations, the church was rededicated to include Saints Cosmas and Damian as well as Saint Mark. Also, as Robinson argues, Cosimo's patronage of the

47 Robinson 33. 48 Robinson 33. 42 William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) 251. 49 Corinthians 1:12:12-26, Robinson 34. 43 Hood 252. 5°Kent 174. 44 Hood 251-252. 51 Kent 174. 45 Hood 250. 52 Kent 174. 46 Hood 252. 53 Kent 174. 30 31 Cosima received in repayment of a loan to Niccoli in 1437.61 Through his choice "curiosities and extravagances.''54 However, Cosima seems to have been of texts and sources for the library we appreciate Cosima's diverse knowledge of sensitive to the reformed spiritual needs of Antoninus and the Dominican order·I spiritual, philosophical, and moral subjects, his cultivation of a circle of Fra Angelico's decorative program, while certainly making unveiled references to intellectuals and friends, and his unfailing love of books. Cosima's foundation of the Medicis, remains an enlightened vehicle for spiritual contemplation, while the library was a unique gesture; rightfully considered the first 'public library' of Bartolemeo Michelozzo's (1396-1472) architecture respects the simplified the Renaissance, 62 the library was open to all laymen of Florence. We can "modesty"55 of the religious personality and physical manifestation of the therefore place the library of San Marco, a significant public gift, within Cosima's monastery. patronage pattern of currying public appreciation, religious atonement, and One of the most innovative and significant parts of the monastery of political presence. San Marco is the library, designed by Michelozzo and completed in 1444. While In closing, we must briefly touch upon the magnificent Medici Palace on early writers attributed the library plan to Phillipo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), the Via Larg, which was designed by Michelozzo (c.1444); The exterior Michelozzo carried out the final design in an architectural vocabulary sympathetic appearance of strength, graceful detailing, and architectural control, in to the reform-ethics of the Dominicans. The harmonious, "cool, classical, and combination with the sumptuous luxury of the interior, inform our perception of graceful"56 library, the first purpose-built library of the Renaissance, 57 occupied the political face - fa<;ade - of the Medicis as a political powerhouse in Florence. the upper floor of the wing that faced the northern cloister. The internal layout of the library is fitting to a religious institution; the ecclesiastical tripartite division The architecture of the Medici Palace provided an undeniably public assertion of of the space follows church layouts (a central nave flanked by adjoining side the stability of Cosima's rule. However, an awareness of the political agenda inherent in Cosima's architectural patronage must be tempered by Burke's final aisles), and the traditional layout of monastic dormitories, such as that at Santa Maria Novella. 58 Slender Ionic columns that support a central barrel vault and motive, pleasure. Despite the apparent political and religious motivations to commission grand works of architecture, as a true architectural connoisseur groin vaults to either side articulate the divisions of space. The library is well lit Cosima loved the clean, rational building aesthetic that he helped to establish in by recessed windows at eye level, providing sufficient light to view texts at the early Renaissance architecture. It was Cosima's passion for architecture that side reading desks. rounded-out and softened the aggressive political undertone that was The library of San Marco tells us a great deal about Cosima as a patron characteristic of his collective and individual building programs. I believe it was of the arts and of the monastery. The collection of approximately four hundred this delight in architecture that created the most lasting impact on later volumes59 includes both spiritual and ancient texts. According to Vespasiano da generations of Medici patrons. Bisticci, Cosima had two hundred books from all over the world copied in a period of two years. 60 The other significant addition to Cosima's library was the inclusion of the humanist Niccolo Niccoli's famous collection .of books, which

54 Robinson 59. 55 Robinson 59. 56 Kent 175. 57 Francesco. Quinterio, "Michelozzo di Bartolomeo," Encyclopedia of Italian Renaissance and Mannenst Art; ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove's Dictionaries 2000) 1081. 58 Quinterio 1081. ' 61 Quinterio 1081. 59 Kent 175. 62 Kent 175. 60 Quinterio 1081. 32 33 '9' figure 1: San Marco Altarpiece, Fra Angelico, 1443.

34 ,.,. 35 Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Land of Cockaigne : A Position of Ambivalence

Adam Lauder

This paper will discuss Pieter Bruegel the Elder's (?-1569) Land of Cockaigne [Figure 1] (1567), in terms of the ambivalent mechanism of the mediaeval 'festival of inversion', a figure that informed various aspects of sixteenth-century Netherlandish culture. We will analyze the traditional satirical trope of the 'topsy-turvy world' in relation to Bruegel's painting. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how Bruegel's Cockaigne functions differently from the didactic priority motivating the painter's representations of follies and sins, as in the painting the Netherlandish Proverbs, but principally in his prints. Finally, we will propose parallels between the ambivalent mechanism of Bruegel's painting and the compensatory function of sixteenth-century celebrations of Carnival, with reference to contemporary representations of these celebrations, in particular the artist's Battle Between Carnival and Lent(1559). What is immediately striking about Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne is the singularity of its subject within the artist's corpus of work. Indeed, it represents the only instance where the artist has chosen to represent a theme from popular folklore to the exclusion of other subjects. The obvious exception to this claim would be Dl!lle Griet(1562), although we would argue that this canvas is in fact dominated by a conventional 'Boschian' representation of Hell, whereas the exceptional nature of Cockaigne lies precisely in the artist's avoidance of this sort of conventional painting 'type' or model. Thus, while other paintings by Bruegel may incorporate elements from folkloric sources, Cockaigne is the only work to reject the topoi of parable, peasant picture, mythological narrative, Biblical which we know Bruegel frequently drew elements for his own paintings)4 the subject, and landscape as organizational structures, within which the artist formal disparities between Cockaigne and the work of Bosch would appear to typically 'frames' folklore-derived elements in his works. Although Bruegel contradict this hypothesis. Moreover, while such a precedent for Cockaigne may seasons his painting with representations of parables (i.e. leave one egg in the 1 have provided a source for Bruegel's imagery, although this is doubtful, it would nest, horse dung is not figs, the pigs are running wild in the corn, etc. ), these are not the subject of Cockaigne, but only rhetorical interjections. not elucidate its function as a painted image. Since it is a doubtful proposition to attempt to define the artist's intentions - this is particularly problematic in the Bruegel's choice of subject is not only unique within his own production, case of a figure like Bruegel, for whom we have so little biographical material - it is also singularly situated within the context of later sixteenth-century we will therefore limit our inquiry to a definition of how Cockaigne functioned as Netherlandish painting generally. This is not, however, to suggest that the a painted image, with respect to our understanding of contemporary pictorial singular status of Cockaigne as a painting reflects an absence of existing models expectations and conventions. for Bruegel's image in other media. Rather, an abundance of material related to As we have seen, the precedent for Bruegel's painting is probably Peter Bruegel's Cockaigne is to be found in non-painterly media such as the Baltens' print of the same subject. However, this fact in no way establishes a contemporary satirical print. Indeed, Bruegel's treatment of the Cockaigne theme convincing causal relationship between the former and the latter images; it does is heavily indebted to an earlier print by the artist's elder colleague Peter Baltens not explain why Bruegel would have chosen to represent the essentially (1527-1584). 2 Moreover, it is important to bear in mind the persistent legacy of humorous subject of Cockaigne in the medium of oil, which was usually reserved an earlier tradition of Netherlandish painting, exemplified by the phantasmagoric for more 'serious', didactic or moralizing subjects. Nor does the precedent of paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516), to which Bruegel's contemporaries Baltens' print clearly elucidate how Bruegel's image functioned as a painting. We frequently considered him to be heir. 3 Unlike the classically-inspired, Italianate shall attempt to answer these questions by analyzing precisely how Bruegel's paradigm of Bruegel's contemporaries, Bosch's art frequently depicted themes treatment of the Cockaigne theme differs from Baltens'. drawn from popular and folkloric sources (i.e. The Haywain, and the Ship of Baltens' print is undated: however, historians have usually dated it to the 1540s, Fools). some scholars speculating that Bruegel may have encountered Baltens' work These considerations lead us to a discussion of the significance of during his documented collaboration with the older artist on an altarpiece in Bruegel's representation of Cockaigne as a painted image in the context of late Malines in 1551. 5 Unlike Bruegel's later painting, Baltens' print is hastily executed sixteenth-century trends in Netherlandish painting: why would Bruegel choose in a graphic style that points to its immediate source in the contemporary culture (or be commissioned) to paint a representation of a folkloric theme when no clear precedent for such an image occurred in the work of either his of humorous prints and woodcuts depicting sundry satirical themes. Although Baltens employs the contemporaries, Frans Floris (1519-1570) and Peter Aertsen (1508-1575), or his same radial composition retained by Bruegel, and, moreover, many of the details in Baltens' print are repeated in the later painting immediate predecessor Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-1550)? Although there is (including the sausage-link fence and the cottage represented in the upper left the possibility that Cockaigne harkens back to the older tradition of Bosch (from quadrant of the painting), Baltens' formulation of the Cockaigne theme is essentially inchoate and general, while Bruegel's reinterpretation of the same

1 Ross H. Frank, "An Interpretation of Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Breugel ~he Elder," S~xteenth Century Journa/XXII (1991): 317. 4 Gibson 49. ~alterS. Gibson, Bruegei(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978) 180. 5 3 G1bson 12. Frank 305. 38 39 v subject, on the other hand, is methodical and specific.6 Whereas Baltens deploys Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne differs from Baltens' print in terms of its a sprawling and indiscriminate group of figures at the base of the pivotal tree articulation of a society under collapse. By this we do not mean to propose a trunk, positioned at the centre of both artists' compositions, without specifying strict correspondence between the 'upside-down' logic of the fool's tract and the social distinctions of class or profession, Bruegel reduces the number of figures representation of class in Bruegel's Cockaigne. Strictly speaking, Bruegel does to three, enlarging them and taking particular care to distinguish their respective not align his representatives of the three estates with the conventional paradigm class and professional identities. Thus, Bruegel literally foregrounds the issue of of the fool's tract. Such a correspondence would presuppose the designation of class identity in his treatment of Cockaigne, while Baltens' treatment is more the lowest member of society in Bruegel's painting, the proverbial 'fool', as 'king.' general: his figures are simply rogues, their social standing unclear, with the However, this is not the case. Bruegel does not present us with a vision of notable exception of the soldier on the upper left. The explicit foregrounding of society that is strictly 'upside-down'. In other words, his strongly specific class in Bruegel's painting establishes a completely different structural paradigm from Baltens' unspecific satire of uncouth manners. symbolic representation of the three estates does not signal a reversal of the Baltens' print comfortably falls into the tradition of sixteenth-century existing social order, but rather the collapse of social order altogether. Thus satirical prints, which frequently depicted scenes of gluttony and other forms of Bruegel's world obeys a more radical imperative than the mere structural socially undesirable behaviour in a narrowly condemnatory manner. A frequent reversal employed in the traditional fool's tract. In order to fully grasp the logic topos employed in this category of print was the 'fool's tract'. These humorous of Bruegel's structural mechanism it is necessary to briefly review other instances texts employed an ironic strategy of negative inclusion to 'solicit' the in the artist's reuvre where the same recumbent gesture of the figure is 'membership' of the reader/viewer into a company of fools. Fool's tracts employed to different ends. promoted conventional codes of normalcy through an essentially didactic use of An emphatically supine position of the body is common to all three satire. While the 'members' portrayed in fool's tracts could belong to any class/ figures in Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne. This radically horizontal posture is not the subject of criticism in Baltens' print is evidently broader in character. Baltens exceptional in representations of the body in sixteenth century painting from the criticizes the wastrel, the drunk, the idler, the glutton. Personifications of these Netherlands. However, as we shall see, Bruegel employs this gesture in an explicitly unconventional manner. Representations of the body that display a disorders are reduced by Baltens' hand to mere 'types' that fail to levy criticism strongly horizontal posture are frequently identified during this period with at any specific group. Thus, Baltens' conception of Cockaigne is representative of representations of so-called 'foundational' figures: metaphorical representations the topos of the 'topsy-turvy world' only in so far as the artist portrays a land in of the social 'pillars' or 'supports' of a nation.8 Foundational figures are frequently which conventionally abhorrent behaviours are apparently rewarded in a manner identified with representations of peasants in sixteenth-century art. It was a recalling the satirical strategy of the 'fool's tract'. It is significant to note that common belief in the later sixteenth-century that agriculture formed the basis of Baltens does not portray a world in which the social order is reversed, but only the social mechanism. 9 Thus, representations of peasant types, transformed in behavioural norms. the guise of the archetypal river god of antiquity (conventionally portrayed in a

6 Gibson 180. 7 A frequent satirical strategy was that of the 'the topsy-turvy,' or 'upside-down' world, !n which either elite members of society were depicted engaged in con.ventlonally unacceptable behaviour, or else the 'scum' of society were praised for 8 Ethan Matt Kavaler (Lecture, FAH 428H1, Pieter Bruegel: September 17, 2002). their folly. Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne (New York: Columbia University 9 ~D~~~ , Kavaler (Lecture, September 17, 2002). 40 ., 41 recumbent position), abound in symbolic representations of contemporary conditions associated with the fabled Land of Cockaigne. Pre-roasted poultry and society. 10 pork defenselessly roam the balmy countryside, pies simply slide into ready An example of the conventional foundational figure can be found in mouths, and a plentiful supply of wine lies in wait for the expansive gut. All the Bruegel's painting Wheat Harvest (1565), from the cycle of the Months (1565). traditional representations of the bounty of Cockaigne, for which its inhabitants Strategically positioned in the central foreground of this painting, a recumbent need not burden themselves with exertion of any kind in order to consume, are peasant stretches out beneath a prominent tree, apparently enjoying a moment's present in Bruegel's painting. 11 To fully explore this point we shall now turn to a rest during the heavy toil of harvesting wheat. Bruegel places this figure directly discussion of the literary tradition of Cockaigne in order to better situate at the root of the central tree, his torso resting on the trunk, with his legs Bruegel's effective reversal of the foundational trope in his treatment of this sprawled at an expansive angle. The allegorical function of this figure is theme. obviously meant to call attention to the foundational character of the peasant as Although Bruegel's treatment of a folkloric theme was practically unique the figurative 'roots' of society. Bruegel's association between the peasant and in the medium of painting during the sixteenth century, with the exception of the metaphorical 'roots' of the social apparatus is typical of sixteenth- century Bosch and his imitators, in the realm of literature and the printed word the representations of the peasantry, especially when they are portrayed in the guise situation was markedly different. Possibly as part of a growing nationalist of the 'foundational figure'. tendency in Netherlandish society, anthologies of vernacular folklore began to It is now possible for us to see how the recumbent posture of the three appear in the sixteenth century, along with collections of proverbs and volumes 12 foreground figures in Cockaigne clearly signals a radically different mode of dedicated to the documentation of traditional garb. Bruegel's Cockaigne, while representation from that of the conventional 'foundational figure'. While heavily indebted to the pictorial precedent of Baltens' print, clearly relies on the Bruegel's Wheat Harvest employs the trope of the recumbent peasant to literary example of a prose text describing the fabled Land of Cockaigne, dating represent the peasantry in a positive light, the horizontal posture of the figures in from 1546.13 Cockaigne signals a different attitude. Although temporarily inactive, the In his seminal study of the anthropological phenomenon of the recumbent peasant in Wheat Harvest has evidently been engaged in toil until Cockaigne myth, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Mediaeval Fantasies of the Good Life, very recently; the fruits of his labour are in evidence all around him: harvested the Dutch scholar Herman Pleij discusses the oral heritage of the 1546 prose wheat is neatly sheaved and stacked in the distance, while other peasants text, as well as the slightly earlier rhyming versions of the same material. Pleij continue to reap on the left. Thus, the central figure in Wheat Harvest functions dates the origins of the Cockaigne myth to roughly the years between 1000 and more like a representation of fatigue than of rest, with all possible intimations of 1300. Although the exact origins of the myth are unknown, by the fourteenth idleness emphatically absent from this panegyric to agriculture. In stark contrast and fifteenth centuries written documentation of the myth can be found in a to the foundational aspect of the central peasant figure in Wheat Harvest, the number of languages, including French, English and Dutch. This attests to the three foreground figures in Land of Cockaigne clearly function as representations widespread appeal of the fabled land of plenty in the late mediaeval world. By of idleness or sloth. Not only are the overt indications of recent toil visible in the fifteenth century, however, probably in response to changing attitudes in Wheat Harvest glaringly absent from Cockaigne, the figures in the latter painting are, moreover, surrounded by traditional signifiers of the absurdly luxurious

11 Pleij 3. 12 Kavaler (Lecture, October 1, 2002). 1°Kavaler (Lecture, October 1, 2002). 13 Pleij 406. 42 - 43 society. 14 Whereas the earliest of the extant rhyming texts does not bracket its profession and class of these figures functions to alert the viewer that Cockaigne description of the tantalizing pleasures of Cockaigne with any didactic statement, is not only a land where the physical appetites of its inhabitants will be sated, both the later rhyming version and the subsequent prose text take pains to but also, as the 1546 text suggests, their pocketbooks. Bruegel's inclusion of explicitly state their satirical purpose. 15 The self-consciously didactic character of figures from the upper echelons of society effectively aligns this painting with the later texts on Cockaigne intimates a shift in late mediaeval perceptions of this new paradigm: Cockaigne is no longer framed simply as an allegory for the Cockaigne. Pleij argues that in early mediaeval societies, myths of Cockaigne dangerous consequences of unlicensed physical appetites; the consequences of probably functioned as compensations for the miserable conditions of day-to-day idleness to the new urban, capitalist economy are also stressed. Through the life for the vast majority of people. By the mid sixteenth century, when the prose logic of the 'upside-down' world, frequently applied in satires of the sixteenth version was probably written, the myth of Cockaigne had likely ceased to century Netherlands, Bruegel effectively captures the didactic message of the function exclusively as a mental escape from daily life. 16 By the sixteenth 1546 text regarding the financial perils of idleness to the new urban middle class. century, Pleij argues, literary representations of Cockaigne were gradually However, the mechanism of Bruegel's painting is not exculsively satirical beginning to function as a didactic method for transmitting the disastrous in function. As we have previously stated, Bruegel does not simply apply the consequences of gluttony and sloth to the newly urban societies of northern upside- down logic of the traditional fool's tract to his representation of Europe. 17 Indeed, the 1546 prose text indicates another important shift away Cockaigne. The structure of his painting is more complex. Had the artist simply from the content of the earlier rhyming versions. This text abounds with inverted the traditional representation of the peasant/foundation figure, the references to the dangers of idle behaviour specific to the concern of the new mechanism of this painting might have been less complicated. However, by urban middle class: lack of initiative, lack of social graces, lack of productivity, combining representations of various classes in Land of Cockaigne, Bruegel lack of efficiency, etc. 18 Moreover, the 1546 version includes promises of financial signals a shift to a more ambivalent structure. remuneration to those who embark for Cockaigne, something that is totally By including the figures of the clerk and the knight in Land of absent from earlier accounts, which stress the purely physical pleasures to be Cockaigne, and by portraying them in the traditional posture of the had in Cockaigne. peasant/foundational figure, Bruegel has introduced an element of ambivalence Bruegel's painting is clearly indebted to the 1546 Cockaigne text. 19 into his representation of Cockaigne. Bruegel does not portray a typical 'topsy Bruegel's conspicuous inclusion of a clerk and a knight in his representation of turvy' world, but rather, a world in which social structure itself has collapsed. Cockaigne, along with the predictable figure of the peasant, typically the most Thus, in Bruegel's painting, the hierarchy of sixteenth-century Netherlands is not base representative of society, and therefore more likely to be portrayed merely inverted, it is, in a sense, voided. All three classes, peasant, merchant, engaging in lewd or unseemly behaviour, signals an awareness of the shift in and noble, are effectively 'leveled'. They are all portrayed in the same sixteenth-century perceptions of Cockaigne apparent in the 1546 text. 'foundational' posture. However, in the context of the symbolic setting into which Furthermore, the scrupulous attention Bruegel pays in distinguishing the precise the artist places them, the idle and gluttonous fantasy realm of Cockaigne, these figures are not 'elevated' by their surroundings, in the usual way foundational figures tend to be elevated by symbolic representations of labour (like the 14 Pleij 58-59. 15 Pleij 357. peasant figure in Wheat Harvest). Rather, the signs of gluttonous excess and idle 16 Pleij 100, 340. 17 Pleij 424. waste that surround the figures in Cockaigne point to a different meaning. Here 18 Pleij 368. all three figures are degraded by their sinful indulgence, the foundational posture 19 Gibson 178. 44 - 45 the drunken peasants who gorge themselves in the Peasant Wedding Feast they assume merely heightens the satirical implication that such behaviour (1567-8) or the Peasant Kermis (1567-8). threatens the very foundations of society. Like the central figure in Wheat How are we to view Bruegel's representation of Cockaigne if not Harvest, the three figures in Cockaigne are portrayed as though representing the through the lens of didactic condemnation? I would here like to propose a 'roots' of the pivotal tree, again placed squarely in the center of the composition. parallel between the ambivalent representation of pleasure and sin in Bruegel's However, in Cockaigne Bruegel amputates the stately crown of the proud and Land of Cockaigne and another of the artist's paintings, Battle Between Carnival healthy tree in Wheat Harvest, replacing it with a kind of ad hoc counter, onto and Lent In his comprehensive text on Cockaigne, Herman Pleij describes the which the artist places an assortment of victuals which are poised so as to simply mechanism of Carnival celebrations: fall into the insatiable mouths of the figures sprawling underneath. Thus, from a structural point of view, in this painting Bruegel has transformed the traditional During Carnival celebrations, the existing world in idealized form was significance of the foundational figure from the roots of society into the roots of turned upside-down, and the opposite of desirable behaviour and the gluttony and sloth. virtues normally aspired to were loudly extolled. An early example of However, in Cockaigne Bruegel has not simply produced a traditional this is Bishop Adalbero of U1on in the eleventh century, who didactic tableau condemning the evils of some particular vice or other. It should attempted, during the course of such festivities, to explain the be obvious that Cockaigne is structured along different lines than the traditional tripartite model of society based on three estates. Humankind had didactic representation of some particular sin or folly. A comparison between failed, he said, in fulfilling class-bound tasks, and the world was Cockaigne and Bruegel's earlier didactic representations of the sins of gluttony certainly doomed now that peasants walked around with crowns on and sloth reveals fundamental disparities between the structural mechanisms of their heads, kings did nothing but pray, and bishops trudged along behind the plough. 20 the two. In his earlier prints, Gluttony (1558) and Sloth (1558), engraved by Pieter van der Hayden (1530-1575), Bruegel transforms the figures that populate Pleij discusses the relevance of the 'topsy-turvy' logic of Carnival these highly symbolic images into grotesque reminders of what awaits sinners in celebrations to mediaeval perceptions of the Cockaigne myth, stating, Hell. Recalling the manner of Bosch, these images leave no doubt as to the undesirable consequences of gluttony and sloth. By contrast, Cockaigne, while The presentation of a topsy-turvy world, whether or not depicted not exactly glorifying the bloated stupor of the inhabitants of that fabled land, alongside the ideal world, was very popular in Middle Dutch literature. also retreats from the wholly condemnatory stance of the earlier prints. Indeed, The objective was invariably to point a stern finger at those thought even the swollen bellies and blissfully inebriated faces of the figures in Cockaigne responsible for the deterioration of everyday life. 21 do not really distinguish them from such positive representations of the body as the recumbent peasant in Wheat Harvest Like the figures in Cockaigne, the Pleij goes on to discuss the function of mediaeval tropes of inversion in peasant in Wheat Harvest is graced with a corpulent belly, and his features are relation to representations of the so-called 'Guild of the Blue Barge,' which is equally coarse and vacant. Indeed, the figures in Cockaigne, far from being the portrayed in Bruegel's Battle Between Carnival and Lent Although ultimately Pleij grotesque targets of satire, closely resemble the figures that populate the associates representations of the Blue Barge with fool's tracts and other popular majority of Bruegel's paintings. Surely the inebriated glance of the clerk in Cockaigne betrays no greater burden of guilt than the equally myopic stares of 20 Pleij 356. 21 Pleij 357. 46 • 47 sixteenth-century genres that employ mechanisms of negative inclusion for of immoderate behaviour as an expression of mediaeval ideas of moral allegory, didactic purposes, elsewhere he intimates the possibility of greater moral in which everyday norms are temporarily suspended in a state of ambivalence, ambivalence in the interpretation of such representations, in terms of the rituals so too is the viewer of Bruegel's painting positioned, as if in moral abeyance, to of mediaeval festivals of inversion. In such festivals, citizens were permitted to view Cockaigne as both compensatory fantasy and didactic allegory. indulge in ordinarily unacceptable forms of behaviours as a form of Thus, in its ambivalence, Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne resembles the compensation for their obedience to the law at other times. He states: Battle Between Carnival and Lent Both pictures feature elements typical of mediaeval tropes of inversion, yet both pictures ultimately undermine the

In the topsy-turvy world of Carnival, however, excessive eating and didactic intent typical of such strategies, effectively permitting the viewer to drinking were of paramount importance, and it was precisely these enact their own compensatory fantasies of indulgence. Thus, just as the Battle ritual celebrations that provided the occasion for the wild festivities Between Carnival and Lent ultimately fails as moral dialectic, but succeeds as a that were a frequent feature of life in the city. Here as well site of radical ambivalence, so too is Cockaigne constructed as a site where compensation for the frugality practiced during the rest of the year desire and didacticism are permitted to hold equal sway. The radical 'leveling' of exists side by side with blatant moralizing. 22 the three estates, signaled by the recumbent positioning of the bodies in the foreground space, does not allude to contemporary developments in sixteenth Clearly, the paradigm of Carnival, as outlined by Pleij, proposes an century Netherlandish society, but rather articulates a condition of ambivalence alternative possibility for interpreting Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne. In in which the social order itself is temporarily suspended for the viewer. contradistinction to the didactic mechanism of the topsy-turvy model of inversion, Cockaigne articulates an ambivalence resembling the suspension of norms characteristic of mediaeval celebrations of Carnival. Just as Carnival-goers were permitted to indulge their desires for a brief period preceding the long fast of Lent, so too are the viewers of Bruegel's Cockaigne invited to suspend their moral rectitude (if only in their imaginations), and enter the fantasy realm of Cockaigne. This is not to say that the moral prohibition against gluttony and sloth have vanished from Bruegel's representation of Cockaigne any more than these imperatives would have been absent from a typical celebration of Carnival. Indeed, as we have already seen, Bruegel explicitly declares the inhabitants of his Cockaigne to be both gluttonous and slothful. However, what remains at question here is whether or not the mechanism of Bruegel's painting is didactic, according to the paradigm of the contemporary fool's tract, or whether some other operation is at work in this painting. We contend that, just as it would have been permissible during celebrations of Carnival for participants to indulge in acts

22 Pleij 375. 48 ,., 49 figure 1: Land of Cockaigne, Bruegel the Elder, 1567.

50 51 'Ill" Vasari, Nature, and the Historical Past

Nick Herman

History can be interpreted as the product of circumstances acting upon individuals, who, influenced by these external causes, find their place in the unfolding story of the world. It is this approach that Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) takes in his work, The Lives of the Artists (1550). While to the modern reader it may appear odd to dissect history in terms of the contributions of a long series of individuals, the format of Vasari's work is firmly rooted in the classical tradition, inspired by the works of ancient historians, namely Plutarch and Pliny. For history writing, a genre which usually stresses a series of consequent actions, this approach may seem fragmented and disconnected. Art history, however, as opposed to history in a wider sense, has the benefit of broad, easily accessible visual trends which, while influenced by individual identities along the way, carry forward in a predominantly logical, cumulative progression. In this period, it is essentially the artist's job to study the best innovations which have preceded him, and infuse them with new insight or skill. These advancements, in turn, go on to influence subsequent artists and thus, stylistic evolution is born. This causal chain is usually quite readily identifiable. The origins of artistic innovation itself, that is to say the original contributions of artists, are much more difficult to assess. According to Vasari, greatness in the arts can be achieved through pure ingenuity, but also "through hard work, by others through study, by others through imitation, and by still others through a knowledge of all than it would be in almost any other historical field. Art, much more than politics 1 the sciences which assist these arts." These manifold ways of becoming or war-making, relies on a constructive approach to present situations, as well as artistically accomplished are also dependent on the period in which the artist an understanding of the cumulative achievements of the past. The actions of lives; indeed the significance of the artist is contingent upon his own period and generals and civic leaders are much more firmly rooted in contemporary its proper circumstances. The greatest debt of the artists, Vasari argues, is owed circumstance than in a synthesis of the achievements of their predecessors. An to nature, which, being a manifestation of the divine creator is the essential examination of the works cited in the Lives of the Artists, and of Renaissance art foundation of all art. Rather than the antiquated conventions of the Byzantine . eneral reveals an enormous degree of advancement, usually chronological, Jn g I world serving as a model for art, Vasari looks again to nature. A simple reliance in terms of skill, technique, and illusionism. Such advancement is the product of on the models of the natural world, however, is eventually seen to be insufficient artists having a tremendous awareness of their own respective fields of work, in in order to achieve a higher level of greatness in the arts. Rules and theories order that they may build upon the achievements of their predecessors. In such as perspective, foreshortening, atmospheric and lighting effects must be highlighting links between pupil and master, and the diligent study of much older extrapolated from both the real and theoretical realms and applied to art in order works by artists such as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), Vasari stresses to grant it a higher degree of excellence. Ultimately, however, all earthly the interconnectedness of the story of art. attempts at perfect art are insufficient. Innovation and inference from the natural But what is this visual progression that legitimises Vasari's cumulative world have yielded all they can to the arts, and in Vasari's own period this view of art history? While it is tempting to suggest that Vasari's Lives are simply becomes plainly evident. A certain divinely inspired grace is needed in order to a record-book of advancements in naturalism, there are clearly other forces at achieve perfection in the arts, and according to Vasari, this perfection is finally work in his writing. The Neoplatonic idea that man can have access to thought achieved in his own lifetime. forms through art is prevalent throughout Vasari's Lives. The tripartite structure Vasari's view of art historical advancement is therefore a teleological of the Lives gives some clue as to Vasari's reasoning on this topic. While one. Being inherently stylistically cumulative, it is thus inferred that art seems to historical reality is not so conveniently delineated, this approach is consistent be progressing toward some sort of ultimate goal. would not be sufficient to It with vasari's attempt to impose greater order upon the chaotic and seemingly recount the lives of artists in a disconnected and fragmentary manner. Rather, unconnected biographies of men. To a certain extent, all history divides the each artist's achievements and personality contribute to a larger epic of a grand seamless continuity of time into arbitrary periods, and Vasari's Lives is no design, a sort of overarching typology of art history. Vasari's world, therefore, is exception. More than a mere retelling of facts and events, the history of art is caught halfway between the determinism of divine artistic providence and the presented as a meaningful, intelligent, and self-aware process. This meaningful contributions of individuals through time. Despite the fundamental compartmentalization of periods into cohesive but interacting units, much problems of accuracy and objectivity associated with such an approach to the criticized by recent scholarship, would go on to have a profound influence on the historical past, Vasari is nonetheless able to present his case in a convincing future study of Renaissance art. Michael Baxandall, in particular, grapples with manner. This imposition of a larger design over the lives of individuals played out vasari's notions of a three-part story of Renaissance art.Z The three divisions over three hundred years is perhaps more feasible given Vasari's subject matter used by vasari, however, are still to a certain extent related to the visual and

1 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. and ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and 2 Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 48. the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1300-1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 54 55 ..... technical accomplishments of the artists examined; they are not merely the these artists are able to achieve complete perfection, they nevertheless herald extrapolation of a meaningless typology from the complex story of art. the way for the inspired accomplishments of the third period. Artists such as

Vasari's first period, with its emphasis on using nature as a model for Jacopo della Quercia (1367-1438) moved "even closer to Nature,"7 and began to artistic advancement, fits into our most basic understanding of what figurative show the possibility of being able to more than equal the world around them. art should be: a recreation of objects that exist in the natural world. While Interestingly, much of the progress shown in the second period seems to rely on Giovanni Cimabue (c. 1240-1302) is the very first herald of this new dawn,3 the a total renouncement of the trecento manner; Masaccio (1401-1428) "completely

Lives begins in earnest with Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267-1337), the first true abandoned the style of Giotto. "8 The works before Masaccio were described imitator of nature and "an example to those who strive always to do their best by "merely as paintings," while those executed by him are "lifelike, true, and

4 selecting her best and most beautiful parts." From the very outset, Giotto's natural.'19 Regardless of the praise given to Giotto's drinking man, so lifelike that novel approach to using nature as a living model is stressed. Not only does his "it almost seems as if he is a real person,"10 and on the more general use of his career originate from "his natural inclination towards the art of drawing," work as a continuous and fundamental example to all subsequent art, 11 the style expressed even as a boy without any sort of formal artistic training, but he is of the previous century is rejected outright. also said to be the first to introduce "good drawing from live natural models" The vigour of the fifteenth century, while admirable, is finite in its which had apparently not been done for some two hundred years. 5 The possibilities. The limits of this second period are alluded to when Vasari describes seemingly arbitrary assertion that life drawing had disappeared since the Ghiberti's great bronze doors (1425-52) for the baptistery of San Giovanni in eleventh century demonstrates a lack of concern for history prior to Cimabue, a Florence, "carved with the greatest perfection that art allows in the imitation of frequent criticism of Vasari. Nevertheless, the theme of the artist showing natural Nature. "12 Here Vasari sets a limit on the usefulness of nature in achieving talent for imitation from a very young age is prevalent throughout Vasari's Lives, artistic perfection. It is as though the adherence to imitation of the natural world stressing the importance of nature and creativity as fundamental precepts for constrains the artists of this period. These men, while making great progress in good art. Such precocious activity is used as an explanation for the artistic terms of technique and skill, are held back by an inability to· work beyond the development of men such as Cimabue, Giotto, Luca della Robbia (c. 1400-1482), rules they have established, lacking the freedom displayed by the artists of the Lorenzo Ghiberti (c.1378-1455), and Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506), among others. third period. The notion that nature can only afford a certain allowance of perfection, elaborated more clearly in the third part of the Lives, appears to The second period of the Lives emphasizes the role of theory and rules contradict what is written elsewhere in this section. Masaccio, for example, the in good art, but also the limitations imposed by nature. It is stated in the preface first painter described in the second part, is said to have "realized that painting is that "these artists attempted to produce what they saw in Nature and no more. "6 nothing other than the art of imitating all the living things of Nature ... just as The ability of the artist to excel technically is emphasized, and while none of

7 Vasari 59. 8 Vasari 57. 3 Vasari 7. 9 Vasari 102. 4 Vasari 15. 10 Vasari 19. 5 Vasari 16. 11 Vasari 15. 6 Vasari 57. 12 Vasari 95. 56 57 Nature produced them, so that anyone who fully follows Nature should be Vasari's vision of pure artistic perfection, therefore, is one that specifically precludes a simple adherence to the natural world. In this final considered a splendid artisan."13 The seemingly incongruent statement could be period, the first half of the sixteenth century, the artist had "achieved everything accounted for in various ways. Firstly, Masaccio's realization is presented not as a which could possibly be permitted to an imitator of Nature."15 Vasari is implicitly value judgment, as is the case with the description of Ghiberti's work, but rather questioning the role of the sixteenth-century artist as a simple follower of nature. as a conclusion reached by an artist. It is therefore not entirely clear whether or Evidence of this movement beyond the confines of the natural world is evident in not Vasari has espoused the idea or if it is instead put forward as a simplistic but the preface to the third part of the Lives. Here, Vasari discusses the ability of erroneous tenet to which only Masaccio adhered. Alternatively, Vasari may agree artists to reproduce the graceful forms of women and children "by design and that a steady pursuit of nature in painting may produce a "splendid artisan" 16 indeed, but not a perfect one. Here, the varying degrees of praise Vasari uses to good judgment rather than by the awkward example of real bodies." This laud artists of all three periods must be noted. It is stated quite plainly in the "grace that goes beyond proportion"17 can be equated with Mannerism, a style preface to the-second part that, while exceptional in their abilities, "these artists exemplified by the later works of Michelangelo, one that Vasari was known to

did not reach the perfection of those in the third."14 Thus, as Masaccio's style is admire. At this point nature clearly has been more than equalled. Art has not explicitly described as being "perfect," Vasari's consistency holds. The reached a sort of paralysis, or at least a culmination of naturally inspired notions conveyed in each preface should be given special importance in innovation. Indeed, in Vasari's mind "there is more reason to fear its decline than interpreting the Lives of the Artists, as it is in these where Vasari appears most to expect further advances."18 The artists of Vasari's third phase, specifically cogent. At some instances in the individual lives, the author is clearly overtaken Michelangelo, have moved beyond mere simulacrum into the field of divinely by enthusiasm at the expense of objectivity. While he cannot be rightly blamed inspired pictorial representation. Nevertheless, Vasari is still quite able to for these moments of unbounded praise, it is in his prefaces that he takes appreciate that art, which, in his opinion, is imperfect and rooted in a mere unusual care to clearly elaborate the underlying themes and meanings of his imitation of the natural world. Lives, presumably in a well thought-out way. In fact, the prefaces are often used And while in Vasari's mind "it is impossible not to speak well of [these

to account for apparent inconsistencies or troublesome assertions within the older artists] and to attribute them a bit of glory,"19 he admits that were they individual lives. This use of exposition serves to demonstrate just how novel practicing artists in his own time, they would most certainly not enjoy the stature Vasari's writing really was, by virtue of it having to be explained at length to its they possessed in their own periods. 20 Nonetheless, Vasari's ability to objectively contemporary audience. Of course, the last option for interpreting these praise artists for being significant contributors in their own lifetimes is discrepancies remains that of an oversight on Vasari's behalf. While this is remarkably informed. Having anticipated his audience's lack of ability to fully possible given the nature of Vasari's often questionable conclusions, it seems understand and appreciate the art of times past, Vasari takes ample effort to unlikely when compared with the otherwise consistent emphasis placed on this issue throughout the work. 15 Vasari 49. 16 Vasari 278. 17 Vasari 278. 18 Vasari 49. 19 Vasari 49. 13 Vasari 101. 20 Vasari 509. 14 Vasari 56. 58 ... 59 as Vasari's are, they are still deeply and unmistakably rooted in the textual explain his reasoning. He does not wish to give praise "simple-mindedly but... Lives conventions of the time. with respect for places, times, and other circumstances."21 He does not hesitate Nevertheless, the admonitions Vasari inserts into his work do signify a to say that, despite all their apparent genius and good judgment, "the men of certain departure from the historiographic norm of the time. Struggling both with [the sixteenth] century, which had reached the peak of perfection, would not the need to work within the rigid narrative template of his contemporaries and have attained the heights they have reached if those who came before had not the daunting task of textualizing a largely scattered, oral art historical tradition, been as they were. "22 It is a sort of codification of a common Florentine notion of Vasari is able to elucidate his vision with remarkable success. His trio of proto awareness of one's role in a long and evolving tradition. This sense of historical Renaissance, early Renaissance and high Renaissance is one which still serves to objectivity was expressed in political terms by the humanists who, rather delineate these periods in art history today. The perennially of these ideas is erroneously, saw themselves as renewers of a distinguished republican t~adition such that they cannot be totally invalid. Appreciating art of the early that dated back to ancient times. In terms of the literary arts, this long tradition Renaissance, especially the trecento, are ideas with which many still grapple with dates back to the work of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giovanni Bocaccio in our period. It is the imitation of nature, though insufficient in so far as (1313-1375), who showed themselves to be keenly aware of the achievements achieving total perfection in the arts, that is responsible for the innovations of of Cimabue and Giotto. Later, painters such as Ghirlandaio (1449-94) were Vasari's first two periods. Imperfect as they may be, these earlier periods still known to have appreciated the works of past generations, not just as models to merit the acclaim of the mid-sixteenth-century audience. 24 An appreciation and be improved upon, but as patrimonial monuments of a distinguished past. Vasari understanding of the past is shown to form a critical part of artistic crystallizes this tradition in his Lives. His appreciation of past Italian artists is advancement. Ultimately, however, artists must look to the abstracted forms of important, but must not be confused with a broader sense of historical heaven to achieve a complete perfection that goes beyond the awkward confines appreciation on the part of Vasari. His first preface makes it abundantly clear of painted reality. Not surprisingly, this approach implies stylisation, a departure that the most ancient examples of painting and sculpture seem to originate from from strict and observed realism, which is one of the hallmarks of Vasari's own his native Tuscany, and not in fact from Egypt or Greece as it was more Mannerist style. That Vasari uses nothing but the standards of his own period to commonly thought. Furthermore, his negligence of Northern Gothic art and the judge the past is overly simplistic; it ignores the attempts made throughout the Byzantine style, both of which had a profound impact on Italian Renaissance artI Lives to highlight the importance of historical placement and context. This indicates that his historical objectivity is a merely regional one, confined to a awareness of each individual's position within the greater unfolding of art history time period which reaches only as far back as Cimabue. Indeed, men such as is in many ways Vasari's most modern trait. Despite the problematic assertions Fillipo Brunelleschi (1420-61) and Giotto are said to deserve "even greater and difficult modern reading of the Lives, Vasari deserves for his hindsight and praise" for being able to flourish at a time when "the German style was precocity at least a small amount of our praise. venerated throughout Italy."23 But again, here we see the transposition of a long standing historiographic tradition, one that is notoriously regionalistic. As novel

21 Vasari 509. 22 Vasari 510. 24 Vasari 509. 23 Vasari 16, 146. 60 ,.. 61 Annibale Carracd's Self-Portrait on an Easel

Alex Hoare

Annibale Carracci's Self-Portrait on an Easel (c. 1604, Hermitage, St. Petersburg) [Figure 1] has a unique place amongst late Renaissance self portraiture. In the painting Annibale presents himself as an artwork, a portrait resting against an easel. The emphasis placed upon the "work of art" in this image has largely been interpreted by art historians as commenting upon the topic of the artist's profession and the process of artistic creation. Annibale's foregrounding of a painting, in particular, has been seen as indicative of a concern with issues of illusionism and representation. What scholars have not discussed is the resonance of Annibale's self-portrait with a common perception of the period: namely, that the work of art, particularly the painted portrait, could act as a substitute for the real person or object depicted. Linked to this idea was the understanding that a conflation existed between the artist himself and his work. The present paper aims to provide an introductory examination of these ideas, heretofore overlooked, and to argue for the possibility that they are demonstrated palpably by Annibale's self-portrait.

The interpretation proposed by a number of scholars, that the Self Portrait on an Easel has as its central concern a commentary on the profession of the artist and the act of painting itself, is convincing and warrants consideration. In presenting himself as an artwork, Annibale foregrounds the process of picture-making as his subject - he paints a picture of his art. The 7 rather rough and painterly quality of the surface of the painting draws the the painting. Also in keeping with earlier conventions of self-portraiture is viewer's attention to the process inherent in the work's creation. 1 The easel and Annibale's exclusion of his hands, instruments so integrally associated with 8 unframed canvas, the palette with wet paint,2 the studio space, 3 and the statue "artisanallabour." It is as though Annibale has chosen to paint a self-portrait in or "herm"4 in the background all contribute to the image's apparent emphasis on the customary manner, appealing to early Renaissance traditions which the professional life of the artist. Joanna Woods-Marsden considers Annibale's deliberately avoid any reference to the artist's craft, and then, by placing that portrait on an easel in a studio, thrusts it into the sphere of the artisan, almost to self-portrait to be in line with a long tradition of self-portraits, from the late exaggerate a point. The notion that Annibale was concerned with conveying fifteenth century onward, which were created with the intention of raising the himself as an artist finds further support in another fairly securely attributed self status of the artist himself. 5 A few scholars have directly compared Annibale's portrait, the Self-portrait with Other Figures (c. 1580), which likely depicts self-portrait to Titian's late Self-Portrait of 1565-70 in which Titian presents members of the Carracci family and academy. In this painting Annibale, perhaps himself as an artist, holding a paintbrush - an image considered to make a bold more clearly than in the Self-Portrait on an Easel, expresses an interest in statement about the artist's status. 6 It is noteworthy that the self-portrait within depicting the process of painting and the artist's craft.9 Annibale's painting - the canvas which Annibale has placed upon the easel - is Annibale may well have been concerned with the acknowledgement and itself in keeping with the more conventional compositions of Renaissance self elevation of the artist as craftsman, although his biographers are eager to portraits: it is an isolated bust whose form consumes the majority of the picture present him as a man interested in the deglamorization of his profession. space, and the figure's eyes look out toward the viewer. Moreover, upon close According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Annibale was not inspection, the Self-Portrait on an Easel reveals underpainting which indicates that Annibale originally intended a large head to take up most of the surface of concerned with the traditional "exhibitionism" and "display" seen in contemporary self-portraits which make the elevation of the artist their central concern. 10 Particularly noteworthy in his self-portrait is Annibale's rather disheveled appearance, especially his hair and collar. Annibale's Self-Portrait in a

1 A. Boschloo, "Perceptions of the Status of Painting: The Self-Portrait in the Art of the Italian Renaissance," Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance, ed. Karl Enenkel et al. (Georgia: Editions Rodopi, 1998) 51. 7 2 Boschloo, "Perceptions" 51-52. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: 3 M. Winner, "Annibale Carracci's Self-Portraits and the Paragone Debate," World Cambridge University Press, 1997) 13. A handful of self-portraits have been attributed to Art:Themes of Unity in Diversity. Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History Annibale, many of which have the more conventional "bust" format of only the head and of Artvol. II, ed. I. Lavin (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989) shoulders, although only three are generally agreed upon as attributable (K. Ganz, 510. "Annibale's Rome: Art and Life in the Eternal City," The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, ed. 4 The identity of the figure in the background is unclear, but art historians seem to agree Daniele Benat[ et al. (Washington, National Gallery, 1999) 274). 8 that it is a statue or herm figure (D. Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 102. 9 Italian Painting around 1S90 (New York: Phaidon, 1971) 22). Winner interprets the figure A. Boschloo,"Perceptions" 66. Winner notes that the palette is given equal prominence in as a "terminus" with symbolic overtones. the Self-Portrait with Other Figures as it is in the Self-Portrait on an Easel (Winner 509). An 5 J. Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and important distinction between the two paintings should be noted, though: in the earlier the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) 1; K. image, while Annibale is prominent, he gives a significant role to the workshop and the Brown, The Painter's Reflection: Self-portraiture in Renaissance Venice 14S8-162S (New collective and collaborative nature of artistic production. 10 York: LeoS. Olschki Editore, 2000) 127. G. P. Bellori, The Lives of Annibale and Agostino Carracci, trans. C. Enggass (University 6 Brown, 127; Boschloo, "Perceptions" 61; Wetenhall, "Self-Portrait on an Easel: Annibale Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968) 58; A. Summerscale, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci and the Artist in Self-Portraiture" Art International24 (1984): 52. Carracci(Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) 255-265. 64 ... 65 advancement and through the creation of a grand social visage, Annibale Hat {1593) similarly avoids the "sartorial signs of social prestige.''11 One need foregrounded himself as his art - it is the art which matters, he seems to say, only compare Annibale's self-images to Agostino Carracci's attributed Self-Portrait and not the man. in which he depicts himself as the smartly-dressed courtier, gesturing with By equating himself with his artwork, Annibale may have intended to "rhetorical flourish."12 comment upon the objectification inherent in the process of self-portraiture. With Annibale's Self-Portrait on an Easel seems to state boldly that it is from the use of the mirror, an instrument integral to self-depiction, the artist treats an artist's work alone that he should be judged, rather than by his theoretical himself as both subject and object and the result is a fluctuation between a pronouncements or physical appearance. 13 This notion may gain support from 17 the famous episode, recounted by both Bellori and Malvasia, in which Annibale subjective and objective view of the self. Indeed, a number of scholars have 18 represents the Laocoon more skillfully with a drawing than his brother Agostino noted the rather "removed" and "distanced" quality of Annibale's self-portrait, does with words. This anecdote, whereupon Annibale reputedly states that their interpretations largely based upon the reduction of the self-portrait to a "poets paint with words; painters speak with works,"14 is often cited together portrait within another painting. Annibale presents himself in the "third-person," with descriptions of his character to present Annibale as disinterested in the again, not unlike Titian in his late self-portrait in which, turning his gaze to one 19 affectations of the genteel society of Rome. 15 While the story should perhaps be side, he gives the impression of having been painted by someone else. Yet, regarded as biographical invention intended for effect, Annibale did elsewhere despite the distance suggested by Annibale's Self-Portrait, one could make an 20 admit his own inability to articulate his thoughts eloquently: describing his equally strong argument for an implied intimacy and closeness. Although admiration for Correggio, he writes: "Other painters picture men as they might Annibale has removed his physical self from the image, by emphasizing his be: he, as they are. I am unable to explain myself or to make myself understood, physical absence, his psychological presence becomes all the more potent. His but I know what I mean." Agostino, he suggested, would be more capable to painting shares the third-personhood of Titian's self-portrait, but unlike Titian, "make sketches of these pictures and to discourse of them in his own fashion."16 Annibale looks out at us, his gaze spanning the void between himself and his viewer. What is more, he effectively identifies himself with the viewer by placing While other artists had begun to promote their profession through their social his implied physical self - the artist painting his self-portrait - in the viewer's actual space.

11 Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 244. 12 Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 66. 13 Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 253. 14 Summerscale 285-286; Bellori 16. Bellori further notes that Annibale taught his students "not so much with words as with examples and demonstrations" (Bellori 61). 17 D. Knafo, Egan Schiele: A Self in Creation. A Psychoanalytic Study of the Artist's Self 15 The story of Annibale and his proclamation for the "visual over the verbal" is like so Portraits (London: Associated University Presses Inc 1993) 29 m_any _of_ the sto:ies in biographies, likely an invention, resonating 18 I "I • cont~mporary u~cannily Brown 127; Wetenhall 52-53; A. Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna: Visible Reality in w1th s1mllar _stones fro~ ~~t1quity (C. Goldstein, Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the CarracCJ and the Crittctsm, Theory, and Practice ofArt in Renaissance and Baroque Italy Art after the Council of Trent (Netherlands: the Hague, 1974) 35; C. Robertson, "The (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 46). Carracci as Draughtsmen," Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections, ed. C. 16 R. Goldwater and M. Treves, Artists on Art: From the 14" to the 2dh Century (London: ~obertson et al. (London.: Ashmolea~ Mus~um, 1996) 149; Posner 22. J. Cranston, The Poettcs of Portraiture m the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge John ~urray, 1978) 124. I do not wish to present Annibale as uninterested in theory - the University Press, 2000) 98. quest1on of the extent and character of Annibale's approach to art theory is controversial 20 and complex, and there is ample evidence of his involvement in intellectual pursuits. Brown 135-136. 66 .... 67 three of the Carracci. 29 He proposes that the preparatory sketch indicates Annibale elsewhere exhibited a concern with establishing a connection "various 'levels of unreality"': the mirror in the background of the upper portion between the viewer and the work of art through the employment of illusionistic reflects the sitter, and this motif is then translated below. In the lower section a techniques. 21 The fictive architecture on the ceiling of the Farnese Gallery is a window replaces the mirror above, and someone seems to be looking in. The fitting example. 22 The easel painting which Annibale has painted within his self man painted on the canvas upon the easel, and the man in the window, both portrait is, in its mimetic nature, not entirely unlike the illusionistic easel look towards the viewer. 30 The unexplained figure in the preparatory sketch, paintings which appear "pasted" to the ceiling of the Gallery. 23 Annibale's Self located to the right of the two vertically-composed self-portrait drawings, would Portrait on an Easel has, in fact, been interpreted as commenting upon issues of seem to be nothing more than a drawing of an antique bust, intended in no way illusionism, imitation and representation. The preparatory sketch for the self to relate to the drawings on the left. Although, Victor Stoichita considers the portrait (c. 1604) [Figure 2] reveals such concerns, which, in turn, have been manner in which this figure "looks" at the sketches for the self-portrait to be translated into the final painting. 24 For example, in the background of the upper conspicuous: the figure is perhaps representative of the viewer - the portion of the sketch Annibale includes what appears to be a round mirror. Aside "anonymous spectator" - who acts as yet another signal of the commentary on from its standard use in carrying out self-portraiture/5 the mirror had long been considered a paradigm of mimesis and was often used in paintings to refer to the representation and illusionism inherent in the sketches he "observes." Above this issue of representation itself. 26 John Wetenhall notes that the "mirror" in the figure is possibly another mirror, although in this mirror nothing is reflected - it 31 background of Annibale's sketch reflects the side of the sitter which is usually is, Stoichita proposes, a "pure sign of the specular/speculative work."

hidden to the viewer, suggesting that Annibale was concerned "with expanding Matthias Winner provides an interesting interpretation of both the normal limits of portraiture, about viewing a figure from more than one side, Annibale's Self-Portrait on an Easel and Self-Portrait with Other Figures as and about illusion."27 Anton Boschloo likewise considers Annibale's Self-Portrait exemplary of the artist's interest in issues of painted illusionism. He considers the on an Easel as a "game of illusion,"28 not unlike the visual games played by all paintings in terms of the Renaissance paragone between painting and sculpture and the question of their respective illusory capabilities: in the Self-Portrait on an Easel Annibale contrasts the painted easel on the canvas with the sculpted herm 21 Posner 38; W. D. Alt, Development in the Art of Annibale Carracci (Cambridge: Harvard University, Dissertation 1983) 17. in the background, intending to show that the painting's mimetic qualities are 22 Alt 130. 32 23 more effective than the sculpture's. Woods-Marsden provides a similar reading: R. Wittkower, .Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 64. Bellon comments on the way in which Annibale's paintings on the ceiling of the she considers that the preparatory drawing for the Self-Portrait on an Easel, with Fa.rnese Gallery appear "framed" as if they are easel pictures stuck to the walls (Bellori 12). W1nne.r sees a connection between the elusive "herm" figure in the background of the self the small "mirror" on the wall in the upper section of the drawing, recalls "the port~alt and the herms painted on the ceiling of the Farnese Gallery which support fictive architecture, and proposes the possibility that Annibale deliberately chose to include a interest of early cinquecento Venetians in using reflective surfaces to obtain herm in the self-portrait as a part of his commentary on pictorial illusion (Winner 511). 24 Wetenhall 49. 25 Brown 135; Stoichita 217. 26 Stoic.hita 185-195. Leonardo had considered the mirror as an exemplary painter whom 29 Robertson 30. the artist himself should imitate because of its ability to duplicate everything it reflects 30 Boschloo, "Perceptions" 68. (Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 31). 31 Stoichita 215. 27 Wetenhall 49. 32 Winner 510-512. 28 Boschloo, "Perceptions" 66-68. 68 69 y and suggests that its appearance is connected to the "self-consciousness about many different views of the central figure in order to weight the paragone the character of the medium of painting" which was emerging in the Baroque between sculpture and painting in favour of the latter. "33 era. 36 Arthur Danto writes, "representations within representations" only became Michael Fried provides another reading of Annibale's Self-Portrait with possible when artists became "self-conscious about representation... Until Other Figures as an exploration of illusionism. He first notes that Annibale has depicted himself as "mirror-reversed," holding his brush in his left hand.34 More reflection took its rise in philosophical self-consciousness, men did not know that 37 importantly, though, Annibale has conspicuously cut-off the majority of the figure they represented. They merely represented." Carrier summarizes: "Pictures who appears from the right behind the canvas. Fried suggests that this act of within pictures reveal a self-consciousness about the characteristics of elision "may be viewed as linked with and expressive of the powers of painting representation. They make explicit that representational pictures, though they depict an aspect of the world, are themselves merely additional objects in the as distinct from the automatic and in a sense all-inclusive process of mirror world."38 reflection - a process with which, in a brilliant, nominally self-effacing conceit, Annibale on this interpretation associated his portrayal of his own image." He These readings of Annibale's Self-Portrait are not devoid of merit, and 39 suggests that Annibale's Self-portrait with Other Figures "implies a distinction they warrant further exploration. But one first needs to look more closely for

between mirroring and painting... [privileging] painting, whose faculty of evidence of whether Annibale intended his work to be understood in this

selective exclusion ... enables it to engage the mind and the emotions in a way no manner. It may be said with all certainty that Annibale was interested in the

merely mechanical process could ever hope to do."35 question of imitation, a vital concern for all artists of his day. The Carracci 40 Yet another level of illusionism within Annibale's Self-Portrait is its academy was itself largely engaged in the theory and practice of imitation. 41 status as a painting within a painting. David Carrier notes that the phenomenon Although, Annibale, as Bellori has noted, did not copy slavishly: "Like every 42 of the "picture within a picture" became common in the seventeenth century, great artist, [he created] something entirely new from his models." In fact, invention was a skill Annibale would seem to have admired in ~ther painters - he

33 Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 250. 34 M. Fried, "Thoughts on Caravaggio," Critical Inquiry24 (1997): 34. 35 Fried 37-39. The pictorial games which the Carracci dabbled in may also be read in this 36 light, as they "depend for their effect on a schematic form of elision ... they belong to the D. Carrier, "On the Depiction of Figurative Representational Pictures within Pictures," Leonardo 12 (1979): 197. Carracci's systematic exploration of pictorial illusionism and its capacity for saying more 37 than can be shown." One could speculate on whether the easel painting within Annibale's Carrier 199. 38 Carrier 197-199. Self-Portrait on an Easel is likewise intended to act rather like a "mirror" itself - to signify a 39 commentary upon the relative "imitative" capabilities of mirrors and. paintings. When an I wish to further acknowledge the significant gaps in many of the topics here presented - future research will expand upon the issues discussed in what is a rather cursory a~ist ~reates a self-portrait with a mirror, the result is twice-removed from reality: the introduction to the extensive and complex issues of imitation and portrait-surrogacy in the m1rror IS the first removal, and the painting is the second. By placing his self-portrait within Renaissance and Baroque era. another painting, Annibale highlights this process of "double removal." In the top section of 40 the preparatory sketch, Annibale makes a correlation between his real body and the D. DeGrazia, "The Inventive Genius of Annibale Carracci," The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, ed. D. Benati et al. (Washington: The National Gallery of Art, 1999) 21-22. refle.ct~d self in the mirror, and this idea may have translated into the final painting (Sto1ch1ta 215-216). Perhaps as a further conceit referring to issues of figural Malvasia notes the countless copies the Carracci made of other artists works (Summerscale representation in particular, Annibale has chosen to represent himself as an easel painting, 265). 41 Bellori 8. a form which came to fruition largely in connection with portraiture (J. Alazard The 42 Florentine Portrait (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 51-58; L. M. Sleptzoff, Men or Wittkower, Art 59-60; Posner 15. Posner notes that, unlike the usual Mannerist practice, Supermen? The Italian Portrait in the Fifteenth Century(Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, Annibale didn't "quote" his sources but used them "as raw material to feed his imagination, The Magnes Press, 1978) 136). and he made no effort to preserve the integrity of the original images." 70 .... 71 though, are notoriously unreliable as sources of his own ideas. Citing Denis praised Correggio's skills of invention over Parmigianino's manner of copying from other artists. 43 Mahon, Goldstein writes, "the idealist theory featuring Annibale so prominently was a purely literary invention of his well-meaning admirers, a retrospective Understanding Annibale's approach to the question of imitation is rather complex, particularly since we have so little first-hand evidence of his theory. interpretation of his art that should not be confused with a principle animating it."48 One of the Carracci pastille, attributed to Annibale, reads: "The ignorant Vasari Annibale's theory of imitation was surely more complex than a simple doesn't realize that the good ancient masters based their works on life, and he "siding" with either naturalism or idealism. Daniele Benati notes that in the works would have it rather that it is better to draw things at one remove, which of the Carracci, "the boundary between imitation and invention seems very antiquities are, than it is the first and most fundamental things, which are living, ffuid."49 Goldstein likewise proposes, convincingly, that Annibale's theory of and which one must always imitate. "44 From this comment it has been assumed imitation encompassed both idealism and naturalism. He suggests, though, that that Annibale privileged the imitation of nature over the skill of invention.45 Annibale's approach to art theory was more in line with that of the High Though, as Carl Goldstein has pointed out, basing an interpretation of an artist's Renaissance which favoured the visual and 'practice', as contrasted with comprehensive theoretical outlook on one statement - indeed, one which was Agostino's approach which was akin to that of the Early Renaissance, likely never intended to be published in the first place46 - is problematic. The characterized by an intense focus on the verbal and the theoretical. 50 In light of notion that art should imitate nature directly was deeply rooted in Renaissance the lack of writing on the subject from Annibale himself, we are forced to turn to theory and may, in Annibale's utterance, simply be a standard topos. There was his artworks as the only source for an understanding of his art theory, and here indeed a motion back and forth between two theories of imitation in the there is ample evidence of his reference to both the natural and the ideal. 51 If Renaissance: the naturalist theory which privileged the direct imitation of nature I Annibale did indeed regard the question of imitation as important enough to and the idealist theory which claimed that the artist should improve upon nature accuse the venerable Vasari of being ignorant of it, then he likely voiced his using his own invention and imagination. 47 By Annibale's day the idealist theory was the most "unanimously endorsed" of the two. Lucio Faberio, Giovanni opinion on other occasions just as assuredly, no less in his artwork as in his Battista Agucchi, Giulio Mancini, and Bellori present Annibale as in favour of the writing. idealist theory of imitation. Many of the statements of Annibale's biographers, The fact that Annibale is considered to have expressed a pointed interest in the theory of imitation is an important consideration because the related issues of illusionism, imitation, and representation are fundamental to the

43 .Gol.dwater and Treves 124; G. Perini, Gli Scritti dei Carracci (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Ed1tonale, 1990) 150-151. 44 A. W~s~on-Lewis, "Annibale Carracci and the Antique," Master Drawings 30:3 (1992):

287; Penm 16. 48 45 Goldstein 33-35. Weston-Lewis 287. 49 46 Goldstein 35; Boschloo Annibale Carracci44-45 D. ~enati, "Ann!bale Carracci's Beginnings in Bologna: Between Nature and History," The 47 . ' • Drawmgs of Annibale Carracci, ed. D. Benati et al. (Washington: The National Gallery of E. ~ns and 0. Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Art, 1999) 43. ~xpe:'m';nt (New ~aven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) 43; M. Roskill, Dolce's 50 'Aretmo and Venettan Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Goldstein 37-46. 51 Goldstein 165. The Carracci's figure-drawings in particular reveal a simultaneous interest 2000) 97; G. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 1, trans. G. c. d~ Vere (New York and Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1996) 20. in imitation and invention. 72 73 y that his beautiful statue be made real was granted. 57 Both Plato and Apollodorus Renaissance conception of the painted surrogate. By exploiting and referring to refer to the deceptive skills of the sculptor Daedalus whose works were the illusionism inherent in pictorial depiction, Annibale encourages a dialogue "endowed not just with movement, but even with speech." Daedalus's statues between himself and his viewer, an exchange which invests the portrait-image

52 were considered so lifelike that they "had to be fastened down, to prevent them with agency and with capabilities on par with those of the person depicted - from walking away."58 hence the aphorism of the "speaking likeness." Images have long been Writers in the Renaissance revived these antique stories of trompe l'oeil, considered to have representational power: the iconoclastic movements are emphasizing the manner in which a painting or sculpture could supplement the perhaps the most poignant demonstration of this phenomenon. David Freedberg 59 60 discusses at length the history of the "power of images" and notes the various object or person depicted. The notion became a literary convention. Painted manifestations of the "presence" within the image of the thing which it portraits in particular were considered to be surrogates for the original person 61 represents - the way that the "sign" becomes the "living embodiment of what it depicted, particularly when the person was absent or deceased. Portraits could signifies," the effectiveness and success of that image depending on that very

53 conflation. He emphasizes the feelings of empathy this conflation encourages 57 Ovid, Metamorphosis, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986) 232- 234. , between the viewer and the image - the way that we identify and substitute 58 Kris and Kurz 66-68. 59 r.n his Lives, Vasari repeatedly refers to and praises the "lifelike" qualities of works by ourselves for what is depicted: "They are like us, we are like them."54 The notion vanous masters: Raphael's portrait of Julius II was "so wonderfully lifelike and true that it inspired fear as if it were alive" L. Partridge and R. Starn, A Renaissance Likeness: Art and of the painted image as the substitute for the original begins in antiquity, in the Culture in Raphael's Julius !!(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) 1· Vasari val. classical tales of the mastery of pictorial illusion - most famously with Pliny's 1, 722. Bronzino's portraits "were so natural... that they appeared to be really aliv~ and only lacked breath" (Vasari, val. 2, 869, 875). A number of Renaissance writers recount account of the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. 55 A similar tale involves that Titian's P?rtrait of Pope Paul III, upon being placed in a window to dry, was mistaken fa~ ~he man h1mself by passers-by. A commonplace in the sixteenth century, the story was Apelles's painting of a horse, created in order to prove his talents to his rivals. 56 ongmally told by Vasari to Benedetto Varchi in a letter of 1547 (M. Barasch, "Character and Physiognomy: Bo~chi on Donatello's St. George- A Renaissance Text on Expression in Art," Equally renowned is Ovid's tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, whose prayer to Venus Journ~l of the H~story of Ideas 36:3 (1975): 415n9). Pietro Bembo stated that Raphael's portra1t of Antomo Tebaldeo was so natural that "Tebaldeo does not resemble himself as closely as [the portrait] resembles him" (Shearman 116). 60 J. Shearman, "Portraits and Poets," Only Connect... :Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) 113. Some scholars have argued that there was a greater tendency in the Renaissance to conflate a depiction with the thing it represented. Creighton Gilbert argues that paintings in the Renaissance were employed as "a versatile and active tool of living" (C. Gilbert, Italian Art 1400-1500: 52 Cranston 1. 53 So~rces"an_d Documents (New Jersey: Prentice-~all, Inc., 1980) 122). As Rupert Shepherd D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response wntes, w1th our current concern for theoretical and socio-historical interpretations of (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) 28-32. Renaissance art, we have become blase about precisely those issues of lifelikeness and 54 Freedberg 191. 55 illusion which most exercised the Renaissance producers and viewers of images" (R. Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, trans. J. F. Healy (London: Penguin Books Shepherd, "Art and life in Renaissance Italy: A Blurring of Identities?" Fashioning Identities Ltd., ~991) 330 (Book 35, 65). Zeuxis produced "so successful a representation of grapes in Renaissance Art, ed. M. Rogers (London: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2000) 64). Woods that b1rds flew up to the stage-buildings where it was hung." Parrhasius then painted "such Marsden agrees, noting that "the Renaissance audience differentiated much less than we a successful trompe l'oeil of a curtain that Zeuxis, puffed up with pride at the judgement of ?o between art and life, and... they would read figures in images much as they did the birds, asked that the curtain be drawn aside and the picture revealed. When he Individual demeanor in reality" (J. Woods-Marsden, "Introduction: Collective Identity/ realized his mistake, with an unaffected modesty he conceded the prize, saying that Individual Identity," Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, ed. M. Rogers (London: whereas he had deceived birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist." Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2000) 13). 56 Pliny 333-334 (Book 35, 95). Upon showing his own painting along with those of his 61 J. D. Breckenridge, Likeness: A Conceptual History of Ancient Portraiture (Illinois: to "some horses he had brought in," the animals neighed only at Apelles' ~ompetitors Northwestern University Press, 1968) 8. •mage. 74 .., 75 hoax Cardinal Farnese and Annibale played on the painters of Rome. 65 Malvasia "preserve" the real person who no longer remained, and project them into the also makes ample use of the antique formula when he recounts a number of future. 62 The notion of the "speaking likeness" implied that portraits could be so Annibale's games of "illusion.'1(j6 In one story, Annibale paints a trompe l'oeil lifelike as to have the power of speech. The portrait's ability to speak lent it an cover for a mirror to fool one of his patrons who fancied looking at himself in the imitative power akin to that of poetry. And here one is here reminded of the mirror in Annibale's studio rather than at the painting Annibale was at work on paragone, which pitted painting, and poetry against each other, painting for him.67 To teach a young painter a lesson who liked to shoot birds with his considered increasingly to be as much a liberal art as and equally as capable of imitation as poetry. 63 crossbow, Annibale laid the stick of the crossbow against the wall and painted the string of the toy on the wall itself. 68 Annibale also apparently painted a Annibale's early biographers have variously noted the illusionistic skills "simulated" oil lamp on a wall and proceeded to ask his pupils to get it from the of their subject, appealing to the Plinian examples. The trickery inherent in pictorial illusion is behind Pliny's account that Apelles "used to hide behind the wall for him. Malvasia specifically appeals to the Plinian trope of the tricked pictures" he exhibited in a gallery for passers-by to see in order to listen to the animals - and perhaps to Christoph Scheurl's story of Durer's dog - when he "faults" they found, considering the general public to be "more perceptive critics writes of the cat who was fooled by the painted meat in the Carracci studio, and 69 than he was himself.'164 The story resonates through Malvasia's account of the the dog who attempted to run up a set of painted stairs. It is evident, then, that the tropes of pictorial illusion so rampant in the early Renaissance were alive and well in Annibale's time, making it at least plausible that he would have applied them himself, and perhaps to his own 62 Shearman 198-109. Alberti had written in his Treatise on Painting of 1436 "painting works. Moreover, biographical "tales" of trompe-l'oeil trickery aside, there is contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present... but moreo'ver makes the dead seem almost alive" (L. B. Alberti, On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer (London: evidence that Annibale was himself interested in the he was fooled by a painted Routl~dge and Kegan Paul, 1956) 63). Vasari followed suit when he stated that paintings funct1on to help recall and remember the dead (Kris and Kurz, Legend 76). In 1495, a book in the studio of Jacopo Bassano?0 While this anecdote was likely employed correspondent of Isabella d'Este's wrote that she would place her portrait across the table from h~r w~en she ate "so that as I look at it I seem to be at table with you" (Shearman 114). L1kew1se, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the Duke of Milan, in 1471 requested that a portrait o~ ~ors~ d'Este be returned to him after his passing "because it has been done in a most 65 Summerscale 279-280. In response to the Romans' envious and scornful remarks on the ~~:tmgwshed ~anner, so that, when we look at him thus painted, we seem to see the hv1ng man, as 1f nothing but his soul were missing" (L. Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: Carracci brothers' paintings, the Cardinal conspired to have a trunk of anonymous works European Portrait Painting in the J.fh, 1st" and Jdh Centuries (New Haven and London: presented to the painters, prepared in secret by Agostino and Annibale. At the unveiling of Yale University Press, 1990) 220). the paintings, the Roman painters exclaimed their praises of the works only to discover 63 F. Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven and they had been painted by the Carracci who were themselves revealed from behind a Londo~: Yale. University Press, 2000) 163-166. The Greek epigram tradition closely linked curtain. 66 portr~1ture w1th poetry, the verses of the poems either praising the artist's skill to portray One cannot know for certain if the tales have any factual basis - they are likely tools the s1tter so well that he seems to speak, or lamenting the inability of the painter to employed for the presentation of the naturalistic skills of the artist. 67 Summerscale represe~t the ~oul (Crans~o.n 2-3). Two of Petrarch's sonnets from his Rime sparse discuss 274-275. 68 Summerscale a portr~!t b~ S1mone ~ar:m1, and are clearly influenced by ancient epigrams on portraits (C. 276. 69 Summerscale 277-278. There is an exhaustive use of the antique trope of pictorial Pace, . ~;hneated Lives : themes and variations in seventeenth-century poems about portraits, Word and Image 2:1 (1986): 1-3). Jodi Cranston notes that Renaissance writers illusion in Annibale's biographies. In his Libel/us de /audibus Germaniae et ducum Saxoniae of 1508, Christoph Scheurl noted that Durer's pet dog mistook his master's Self-Portrait painters and viewers conceived of painting in analogous literary terms: "Renaissanc~ (1500) for the man himself, licking it and nudging it with his muzzle (J. L. Koerner, The culture pe~ceiv~d and received portraiture as a kind of dialogue, as parallel to language" - Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art(Chicago: The University of Chicago the ~ortra1t wh1ch represents a person is thus made capable of "eliciting responses from Press, 1993) 163). the ~1ewer that he or she would have in the company of the actual person" (Cranston 4-8). 70 64 Phny 332 (Book 35, 84). Perini 163. 76 ... 77 in order to refute Vasari's derision of Bassano's talents, it is nonetheless affirming the realism of the image," as "the witness made visible by being revealing as evidence of Annibale's interest in the conflation between reality and relocated in the portrait, reacting to the image within the image and asserting a 74 illusion. Annibale elsewhere reveals his interest in the surrogate nature of triumph of Art." Likewise, Annibale in his portrait and his dog and cat below, whether or not it was the artist's intention, acknowledge the viewer and connect painting, for example in a letter to Ludovico Carracci of 1580, in which Annibale our space to that of the studio in which the easel stands. notes that "Correggio's little putt/breathe, live and laugh with a grace and reality It is Annibale's presentation of his self-portrait on an easel, though, that one is compelled to laugh and be happy with them."71 which is perhaps the boldest statement for the surrogacy of his portrait. More Although it is perhaps impossible to claim with certainty that Annibale's than this, Annibale's small canvas specifically equates the artist with his art, Self-Portrait on an Easel was intended to be read as emblematic of the trope of seeming to state boldly that the artist may be understood through his work. It is the painted person as a surrogate for the original, this reading is not without a complicated question to ask: does the work of art reveal its creator? Rudolf basis: Annibale's inclusion of a dog and a cat in his painting is particularly curious and Margot Wittkower note that "every work of art bears ... the personal stamp of in this context, especially in light of the previously mentioned tales of the dog its maker," meaning a particular style rather like a person's handwriting.75 But and cat in the Carracci studio.72 The dog in Annibale's preparatory sketch looks can the work of art tell us more about the person himself? Can we consider, as it directly at the painting on the easel, and has been interpreted as a reference to is often tempting to do, artworks as "autobiographical"? Writers in the the conceit of animals mistaking painted self-portraits for their masters. 73 Renaissance believed so: Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz note that in Renaissance Importantly, though, the dog in the painting looks out at the viewer. Perhaps the biographies of artists the reader "repeatedly encounter[s] attempts to link the dog in the painting retains its value as an indicator of illusionism, only in a character of the artist with that of his works, and to infer the nature of the man slightly different way: John Shearman notes the way that dogs in paintings can from his works."76 act to symbolize the viewer's presence itself. Dogs who accompany their owners It is significant that portraits in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth in their portraits, and who look out at the viewer as if to acknowledge we are centuries begin to demand an insight into the character of the person as well as there, provide "a coordinate for our position." These dogs act as "a hyperbole the depiction of a good physical likeness. 77 Dolce's "Aretino", for example, pronounced: "One may properly say that although the painter cannot depict those things which stand subject to touch... or to taste ... , he depicts, 71 ~· Levey, The Soul of the Eye: An Anthology of Painters and Painting (London: William Collins Sons and Co., Ltd., 1990) 30; Perini 151. Levey notes that the authenticity of this letter'sn attribution may be in question. . Wetenhall 54n2. The dog and cat are rarely found together in the same image. One 74 Shearman 140-147. other self-portrait which includes a dog and cat is Johannes Gumpp's Self-Portrait of 1646 75 R. and M. Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A ~Woods-Ma~sden, Self-Portraiture 248). Before attempting to "read" any symbolic meaning mto the ammals in Annibale's painting, it is important to note that dogs and cats were Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963) 281. It is worth noting, though, that there can even be a conflation comr:nonly fou~d in artist's and scho~ars studios (Winner 513n24) and may simply be between the artist's style and his person or character: for example, one may speak of a co~s1dered attn~utes of such professions. Dog symbolism is diverse, and amongst the "Titianesque" style of painting, as if to imply, on some level, that the man himself is vanety of poss1ble interpretations it is worth noting the animal's association with reflected in his manner of painting. ~ela~cholia. This is most poignantly displayed in Durer's engraving of Melancholia (1514) 76 Kris and Kurz, Legend119-120. 1n wh1ch the dog shares the listless, contemplative posture of his master (P. Reutersward 77 J. Woods-Marsden, "'Ritratto al Naturale': Questions of Realism and Idealism in Early "The Dog in the Humanist's Study," Konsthistorisk tidskrift50:2 (1981): 63-65). ' Renaissance Portraits," Art Journa146 (Fall1987): 209-214. 73 Brown 127. 78 • 79 nonetheless, the thoughts and feelings of the spirit."78 Benedetto Varchi Albert· their "nature." Lomazzo's contemporaries had been interested in exploring the I I, and Leonardo also noted and praised the ability of painters to reveal character as "nature" of the artist, but more in terms of the artist's creativity. Lomazzo was well as appearance. 79 Physiognomical study and caricature, the latter of which is unique in that he set out to describe and interpret "the particular character of largely considered to be an invention of the Carracci and possibly Annibale different artistic types" - and he reconstructed an artist's "personality" or "type" 85 himself,80 were linked to these early attempts to reconcile character with from what he could infer from his artworks. appearance. In the fifteenth century, an aphorism on the phenomenon of

The increasing interest in the depiction of the inner psychology of the automimesis, "ogni pittore dipinge sf§," or "every painter paints himself," was 86 sitter in portraiture translated into self-portraiture and was connected to the variously attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Girolamo Savonarola, Cosima il 87 88 notion that the artist's soul or character was reflected in his works. This idea Vecchio, Angelo Poliziano, and Michelangelo. Part of "the changing attitude 89 actually became a conscious and deliberate pursuit in the seventeenth century,Bl towards the value of personal expression in artistic creation," the phrase but its use extends back to antiquity. L M. Sleptzoff writes, "at the beginning of indicated that it was considered that artists often painted themselves "into" their the Christian era, Philo, returning to a much older Stoic idea, wrote that works of works, either literally - by repeatedly reproducing their own features or gestures 90 art reveal their creator and that every beholder, in looking at statues or pictures, in those of their figures - or in a more abstract manner, projecting their own immediately forms an image of the sculptor or painter."82 Pliny had considered feelings, personalities, and "selves" (for lack of a contemporaneous term) into that the unfinished works of certain painters were better than their finished their works. The aphorism had derogatory overtones in its early use, and 91 counterparts because they showed "the workings of the artist's mind."83 In the referred to some "inevitable compulsion in the human character." Leonardo

Renaissance, supporting the notion that the artist should identify himself with the used it in this manner, and considered the painter's use of himself as a model to 92 subject of his work, Fra Angelico reputedly stated that "he who wishes to paint be a defect of painting. But from the sixteenth century onward, the idea had a

Christ's story must live with Christ."84 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, in his Idea of

1590, linked an artist's personality with his work in an "allegorical temple" in 85 M. Barasch, Theories of Art 1: From Plato to Winckelmann. (London and New York: which each column, symbolizing the seven parts of painting, was given a Routledge, 1985) 287-290. 86 "Ogni pittore dipinge se' is considered a Tuscan proverb, found first in the late fifteenth different representative artist. Moshe Barasch considers Lomazzo to have created century in literature from between 1477 and 1479 (F. Zollner, "'Ogni Pittore Dipinge Se': an early "psychology of art," relating artists to planets in an attempt to describe Leonardo da Vinci and 'Automimesis'," Der KOnstler Ober sich in seinem Werk: Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rom 1989, ed. M. Winner (Deutschland: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1992) 138). 87 Brown 69n3. 88 M. Kemp, ":ogni Dipintore Dipinge Se': A Neoplatonic Echo in Leonardo's Art Theory?" 78 Roskill 97. Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller 79 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1976) 312. M. Barasch, "Character" 417; Alberti 77-78; Vasari, vol. 1, 19; Alazard 55. 89 80 Summerscal 121. Zollner 138. 90 81 Stoichita 200. Ames-Lewis 210-211; Zollner 140-141. 91 82 Sleptzoff 128n105. Zollner 138-139. 92 83 Barasch, "Character" 289-290. Kemp, "'Ogni"' 311-312. It is interesting to note, though, that Leonardo himself may 84 have been guilty of depicting himself in his paintings: Gaspare Visconti, a poet at the Court G. Bycho~ski, "Fro':~ Catharsis to ,work ,of Art: The Making of an Artist," Psychoanalysis and Culture. Essays m Honor of Geza Roheim, ed. G. B. Wilbur and w. Muensterberger of Milan, wrote a sonnet which seems to accuse Leonardo directly of automimesis (Zollner (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1951) 401. 146-147). 80 81 v portrait, resting on the easel, reads rather like a "witness"-self-portrait or a kind much more positive connotation. Vasari, in his life of Michelangelo, and Filippo of signature. Baldinucci, in his life of Caravaggio, both emphasized that "artists have their own There are few other works which so boldly display the conflation way and that even eccentric features of an artist's character which can be found between self and work as does Annibale's Self-Portrait on an Easel Stoichita in his works of art should be accepted."93 Marsilio Ficino, in his Theologia notes that Annibale's Self-Portrait, "if it still succeeds in telling us something ... Platonica of 1576, considered the more "abstract" quality of the self which an this something directly involves the absence of the painter and the presence of artist projects into his work: "In paintings and buildings the wisdom and skill of his being solely as an image."99 While we have no direct statement from Annibale the artist shines forth. Moreover, we can see in them the attitude and the image, on the matter, his early biographers may have made an equation between as it were, of his mind; for in these works the mind expresses and reflects itself Annibale and his artwork: the story of Annibale "hiding" behind his work like not otherwise than a mirror reflects the face of a man who looks in it. "94 Apelles effectively links the artist irrevocably to his creation - Annibale, like Artists could project both their physical and psychological "selves" into Apelles, in standing behind his work "is both in the painting ... and behind it."100 their works in a number of ways. In the early Renaissance artists inserted themselves physically into their works as a signification of their authorship of the Although his manner of presentation was truly innovative, Annibale was not alone in portraying himself as his "work" and highlighting the issues of pictorial work.95 This type of self-portrait has been called a "witness-" or "participant-" process and representation. It has been suggested that Annibale's Self-Portrait self-portrait, in that the artist includes himself in his work as a witness to the on an Easel may have been influenced by Sofonisba Anguissola's Self-Portrait (c. (often religious) scene taking place, possibly for the dual purpose of self in which she depicts herself in the process of being painted by her teacher promotion and the attainment of salvation.96 Artists could also project 1559) Bernardino Campi. Both Sofonisba's and Annibale's images equate the subject themselves into their works in the guise of another person, often a religious

97 and object - both make the painted image the supplement for the artists figure. The artist's signature provided yet another locus for the artist's physical themselves and, in turn, emphasize the act of picture-making. 101 Sofonisba presence in his art. 98 It is not entirely implausible to suggest that Annibale's self- creates a "distance," similar to Annibale, although in her case with the insertion

93 Zollner 137-139. 94 ~ittkower, Born 93. Rudo~f and. Margot Wit~kower note that this concept "was ultimately d~nved f~om. the Neoplatomc behef, permeatmg Renaissance thought, that man's soul is ~1rrored 1n h1s body and, as a co~ollary, the artist's soul in his work." Br~wn 20. Th1s understanding of the artist's physical presence in his works is process of its creation" (L. C. Matthew, "The Painter's Presence: Signatures in Venetian complicated by the fact that so many of these "witness" self-portraits including Boticelli's Renaissance Pictures," Art Bul!etin 80:4 (Dec 1998): 616-642). are not certifiable as self-portraits. ' ' 99 Stoichita 213-215. 96 Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 43-48. 100 Stoichita 199. ~/reedman, Titian's Independent Self-Portraits (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1990) 101 Brown 127-128. Citing Whitney Chadwick, Mary Garrard interprets the manner in which 98 Sofonisba has "collapsed" the subject-object relationship from a feminist standpoint P. P. Fehl, "Durer's Literal Presence in his Pictures: Reflections on his Signatures in the claimin~ that in doing so the artist "points to the peculiar conflation of subject and object Small Woodcut Passion," Der KOnstler Ober sich in seinem Werk: Internationales that umqu~ly befell ':'omen artists in the Renaissance" (M. D. Garrard, "Here's Looking at Sympo~ium der Bibliotheca Hertz1ana, Rom M. Winner (Deutschland: VCH, Acta 1989, ed. Me: Sofomsba AngUissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist," Renaissance Quarterly Hu.m~mo~a, 1992) ~91-194. As Louisa ~atthew notes, "the placing of a signature on a 47:3. (Autum.n 1994) 556). Annibale did not have the same motivation for his self-portrait pa1nt1ng 1s a con~c1ous act by the pamter that establishes his or her presence. That as d1d Sofomsba, but the aesthetic issues of objectification and of playing with illusion and presen~e communicates outward to the viewer, but it also communicates information about reality inherent in Sofonisba's painting are pertinent to Annibale's work as well. the pamter's relationship inward, to the painting itself: its form, subject, and even the 82 83 T psychoanalytic interpretation to art can provide interesting and potentially of a third figure (in the form of Campi) between herself as "artist/subject" and revealing insights into the otherwise intangible world of the soul and the "self," it herself as "model/object."102 If it is true that Annibale considered the visual to speak more loudly remains controversial in Renaissance studies, primarily due to an inherent 106 than the verbal, perhaps he did take the opportunity to express himself in his anachronism. But we do not need to dismiss the psychological approach altogether. One of the observations commonly made by scholars in their artworks. He certainly exhibited an interest in conveying the character of others I particularly in his portrait drawings and caricatures, 103 and this interest may have psychoanalytic interpretations of Annibale's self-portrait - its "sombre" or been equally self-reflective. Psychoanalytical and psychobiographical readings of "melancholic" overtones - is one which Renaissance "psychologists" would also many artists' self-portraits have delighted in interpreting these works as have made; it is with the concept of the "melancholic" that modern indicative of their authors' psyches, and Annibale's Self-Portrait on an Easel is no psychoanalysis and Renaissance psychology cross paths. "Melancholia" is of exception. Various elements in the painting have been "psychoanalytically" course one of the four humours, the elements integral to early modern psychological interpretation. 107 It is here that we may extrapolate back to a interpreted by scholars in light of the personality presented in the early contemporary "psychoanalytic" reading of Annibale's self-portrait and perhaps biographies, as well as in relation to events in Annibale's life contemporaneous find a more soundly contextual basis for reading the man into his art. Melancholy with the painting - specifically the shameful remuneration he received from Cardinal Farnese for the painting of the Gallery, the recent death of his brother could be symbolized in artworks with a number of symbols and motifs: a purse Agostino, 104 and Annibale's own illness. 105 Although the application of and keys, a drooping head, a clenched fist, and, most importantly for our purposes, a black face concealed in shadow. 108 Linked by Marsilio Ficino with

102 Garrard 558. Winston Drew Alt notes a connection between Annibale's character and his artwork. He. proposes ~hat A~nibale worked in a "mimetic mode" in which he closely connected h1mself to h1s subJect matter, and considers that he "was able to give his punctures the darkness on the left offering "a glimmer of hope" (Woods-Marsden Self- spontaneous, personal experience expression in his art" (Ait ix & 3). For example, in Portraiture 252). ' Annibale's Crucifixion with Saints of 1583, "in the treatment of the St. Francis ... Annibale's 105 Bel.lori notes. that Annibale's poor mental and physical state was "hastened by amorous deep penetration into his emotional fabric suggests a communion between the artist and maladies of wh1ch he had not told his doctors" (Bellori 63). Ganz notes that this was a his subject: only through his own psychological participation could feelings like those of St. common reference to syphilis (Ganz 205). Malvasia notes an attack of "apoplexy" Francis be engendered" (Ait 18-19). The "expressive power" of Annibale's Pieta of c. 1600 (Summerscale 224). is "partly a function of this palpable presence of the artist in the image" (Ait 112). The 106 Psychobiography considers artists to reveal their most "truthful" autobiographical viewer benefits from Annibale's own connection with his subjects: Alt writes, "in Annibale's statements in their artworks - the work of art is regarded as a "chapter" in the artist's life art the relationship between the viewer and the image echoes the relationship between the which together with other works adds up to a "creative biography" (Adams 258-259): artist and his image" (Ait 130-131). Psychoanalysis likewise considers artworks to be one of the keys to understanding the 103 Boschloo, Annibale Carracci32-33. artist's personality. A psychoanalytic premise is that the artwork acts as a form of catharsis 104 Winne~ provides a complex analysis of the elusive "herm" figure in the background, and a way to release tensions and "purge" the soul, a concept which actually begins with suggest~ 1t may be interpreted in terms of the vanitas tradition as a sculpted "terminus" Aristotle (Kris 45). The application of modern psychoanalytic theory to Renaissance artists figure (like those to be found on the Farnese Gallery ceiling), which is symbolic of both and their worl

109 Klibansky, Panofsky, Saxl 255. 11°Klibansky, Panofsky, Saxl 23. 111 J. F. Moffitt, "Painters 'Born Under Saturn': The Physiological Explanation," Art History 11: 2 (June 1988): 207. 112 Bellori 55-56; Summerscale 222. 113 Boschl~o, "Perceptions" 72. The purpose of Annibale's painted self-portrait is curious. Self-p~rt~a1ts were n~t sold in the Renaissance, although they were occasionally comm1ss1oned from art1sts by wealthy patrons or for collections of self-portraits. Thus, the Annibale may simply have executed these self-portraits for his own enjoyment, and that he status of Anmbale's self-portrait as a painting with a preparatory sketch forces one to considered portraiture "a pleasurable studio exercise, an extension of his studies of wonder about his intentions for its use. Woods-Marsden notes that the small scale of the everyday life" (Woods-Marsden, Self-Portraiture 247). 114 R. Brilliant, Portraiture(London: Reaktion Books, 1991) 15-16. P~rma self-portrait (24 x 20cm) indicates that it may have been painted as a gift for a 115 fnend. The Self-Portrait on an Easel is equally rather small. She also points out that Alt 132. 86 ... 87 Figure 1: Self-Portrait on an Easel, Annibale Carracci, c.1604.

~~Figure 2: Preparatory Sketch for the Self-Portrait, Annibale Carracci, c. 1604.~~

~~88 89 "' Seeing is Not Believing: Art, Incredulity, and Caravaggio's Tempting Touch~~

~~Heather Diack~~

"Look, but don't touch" is the mantra-like reproach that the modern museum directs at viewers. Ironically, however, the artistic principle of mimesis deliberately threatens and tempts the viewer's self-restraint. Considering that art's solicitation of the impulse to touch has been seen as a measure of its success, the designation of such sensual desires to a state of perpetual limbo in the modern museum hints at the tense relation between seeing and believing that lurks in the understanding of 'art'. Sight itself is merely the most obvious sense implicit in the visual arts; it never stands alone. Mining the paintings of Caravaggio for evidence, I will demonstrate in this paper how the context of Renaissance/Baroque Italy's intense preoccupation with the battle between the human senses and their capacity to inform both faith and knowledge affected tangible repercussions on the very concept of art. Howard Hibbard calls Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) "the most arresting European painter of the years around 1600."1 The choice of the word "arresting" seems here to serve a double task: firstly, to accurately describe the effects Caravaggio was able to capture and produce with his work, holding the viewer's attention/ and secondly to off-handedly comment on

1 Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, 2"d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) 7. 2 Even such casual rhetorical devices as "holding" attention reflect how deeply embedded a sense of touch is to human perception and understanding. Caravaggio was criticized for depending too heavily on his eyes. In the Caravaggio's renown as the "most arrested" European painter of his time as cinquecento, the prevailing trend "in both art and theory, was to exalt 'perfected well. 3 Contemporary biographers through to historians today have been nature' rather than the mere imitation of what the eye sees.'-s An investigation of fascinated with linking Caravaggio's tempestuous psychological character and his artistic works. The infamous characterization perpetuated of Caravaggio is one of vision and visuality was extremely critical to the world of Caravaggio and his a dangerous and unpredictable man. Details such as the striking abundance of contemporaries. Sight was, and remains, a contentious site of investigation. An decapitation scenes in his work are cited as proof of his fascination with violent Italian contemporary of Caravaggio, the revolutionary Tuscan scientist Galileo circumstances. Here, I am primarily interested in the self-reflexive aspects of Galilee (1564-1642), was also working at this time, discovering optical devices Caravaggio's work, the 'self' that I am looking for is not Caravaggio's personal such as the telescope with the far reaching effects of displacing man as the self (as in other biographical interpretations), but rather his paintings' self. center of the universe. As Galileo's story demonstrates, challenging conventions of perception was a dangerous game. Philosophical thought at the time was Agreeing that Caravaggio was cunning and daring has led me to look for moments when his paintings confess their awareness of being paintings. Thus, intimately bound with theology; knowledge and religion were inseparable. Galilee an understanding of the central expectations of 'art' in Caravaggio's day will be was persecuted for disproving the order of things in the humanist world. Similarly, Caravaggio would antagonize the norms of the art world. of strategic import to understanding the possible tropes that compose and are By appealing to the basest of the senses, touch, through the most embedded in painting itself. privileged of the senses, sight, Caravaggio's works seem to bear witness to the If the prescribed rules of what is 'good' art can be articulated, then its fact that these senses are only diametrically opposed when based on cultural counterpoint of what is 'bad' art can be deduced. During the Renaissance there notions of the hierarchy of the senses. In reality, as Caravaggio's approach was a revival of antique texts that discussed the tenets of admirable art. indicates, sight and touch are intrinsically related, and even contentiously one Measured against such writings, Caravaggio was renowned as "an iconoclast in and the same. Others such as Descartes also likened seeing to touching? Such the eyes of his contemporaries because he refused to subscribe to the idealistic analogies are not without consequence. theories of the Renaissance. "4 These idealistic theories were based on and A conception of human existence based on dialectic oppositions, such derived from an accretion of stories and attitudes surrounding 'art,' beginning as sight versus touch, was formative to life in the seventeenth century. For while with Aristotle and continuing into the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth it is true that the word "baroque" was not applied to the visual arts before the centuries. Caravaggio's documented position within this artistic tradition should end of the eighteenth century, its fundamental opposition to a classical style was be discerned as both a result of historians' efforts to categorize painters and of Caravaggio's own artistic practice. Caravaggio's real rebellion was that he refused to follow the model of painting that advocated that an artist begin with disegnO' rather than nature.

6 Hibbard 46. 7 3 Caravaggio was a "notorious painter-assassin": he killed a man in 1606 (Hibbard 46). Ancient notions of "extramission" (the belief that optical rays that issued forth from the 4 Hibbard 46. eyes were thought to touch the object seen) from medieval Byzantium, continued into the 5 f!isegn~ he:e refers to preparatory drawings and designs (conceptual as well as formal). Renaissance. Vision was haptic as well as optic, tactile as well as visual. Disparate sources also suggest that Byzantines regarded vision as performative, in the sense that looking was Dtsegno 1_s ~1scussed and defined by Giorgio Vasari in his 1568 edition of Le vite de' piu' e~ce/~entt pttt?n, _scultori e ~rchitettori as the intermediary between nature and painting; doing. See Robert S. Nelson, "To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium," G1org1o Vasan, Lwes of Arttsts vol. 1 & 2, ed. George Bull (New York: Penguin Classics Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge: 1987). ' Cambridge University Press, 2000) 143-168. 92 ,., 93 important example is Cicero's De Inventione that describes Zeuxis' picture of nevertheless manifest due to that culture's "attempt to define itself with respect Helen, formed from a combination of the most beautiful features of many to the tension it so acutely felt between the demands of reason and feeling.''8 models. Because men of the Renaissance believed that antique artists had made The reification of the senses that links sight with reason and relegates this type of selection, they also thought that ancient art was more worthy of touch with feeling further problematizes this situation. Perpetual tension is emulation than nature itself. 13 Bellori criticized Caravaggio on such standards. paramount. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam (1508) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel sustains this logic. For while this piece, which is absolutely foundational [He] recognized no other master than the model, without selecting to the modern conception of Western art, shows life being activated finger to from the best forms of nature - and what is incredible, it seems that he finger, from the divine to man, it only insinuates touch: "These hands do not imitated art without art [pare che senz'arte emulasse l'arte] .. .despising 19 touch; they nearly touch. ' By implication the act of creation is envisioned as the superb statuary of antiquity and the famous paintings of Raphael, tactile in origin. The daring Caravaggio breaches the space in between, he considered nature to be the only subject fit for his brush. As a simultaneously exacerbating and satisfying this primary desire to touch. result, when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), writing before Caravaggio's time, was Glykon in order that he might use them as models, his only answer responsible for the Renaissance revival of Platonism. 10 In his commentary on was to point toward a crowd of people, saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters. 14 Plato's Symposium he expounded on how touch was the lowest of the senses 1 stating that: "Nature has placed no sense farther from intelligence than touch."11 An ancient precedent for Caravaggio's reaction here could have been Pliny's Similarly, another Platonist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) also description of the painter Eupompos in his Natural History, who, when "asked described in his Oratio (1486) the precarious danger of bodily attraction as it which of his predecessors he followed, pointed to a crowd of men,15 and said resided in the hands, ruminating on how touch would be responsible for hurling the soul not up, but down the ladder of ascent. 12 Amidst this environment that denigrated the explicit nature of touch, Caravaggio's sensuousness would 13 Hibbard 46-47. certainly be viewed as rebellious. 14 . Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de'Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Moderni (Rome, 1672) Significantly, the idealistic theories of art that were emphasized during ~1bbard 201-202 (my emphasis). Whether Bellori's anecdote is true or not is in many ways Irrelevant. For even if it is false, such fictions certainly add to a richer reading of the Renaissance were often predicated on earlier stories from Cicero and Pliny. Caravaggio's paintings. Vasari for example is not always consistent and his is certainly an embellished chronology of art, inflected with anecdotes, but the significance of his Lives Looking back to these texts, Caravaggio's contemporaries grasped stories to should not be underestimated. Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey have noted in their exemplify and rationalize their own artistic endeavours and mandates. An article on the "State of Research in Italian Painting of the Seventeenth Century" that to analyze seventeenth-century works out of context from the rhetoric that surrounds them deprives history of its fascinating complexity. Furthermore, that "seventeenth-century Italian art is [itself] rhetorical does not seem an especially revolutionary perception" (Cropper and Dempsey 495). 15 8 Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, "The State of Research in Italian Painting of the The responsive gesture Caravaggio makes in Bellori's anecdote resonates with our argument. "Pointing to the fact" is not a haphazard gesture. The instinctual reaction of Seventeenth Century," The Art Bulletin LXIX A (December 1987): 494. 9 pointing/reaching outward from the self is an elementary and natural way to show Renee Weber, "A Philosophical Perspective on Touch," Touch: The Foundation of ~vidence. "Look here," the admonitori in so many religious paintings throughout history Experience, ed. Kathryn E. Barnard and T. Berry Brazelton (Connecticut: International mdicate. In that this gesture again binds sight to tactile demonstration, it illustrates the Universities Press, 1990) 16. interrelationship between eyes looking and manual showing. The gesture of pointing 10 . Mar]one . . O'R our ke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from guides the narrative in many Caravaggio paintings. Examples include Abraham and Isaac Mtchelangelo to Calvin (Leiden: Brill, 1998) 4. (1601-02) in which the angel intervenes not simply by grasping Abraham's hand but more 11 Marsilio Ficino, "De vita," trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clarke, Medieval and importantly by pointedly giving instruction; in the Calling of St. Matthew (1599) three levels Renaissance Texts and Studies 57 (1989): 124. of pointing operate, stretching from the figure of Jesus and echoed all the way to the 12 Boyle 5. 94 95 "'V towards it. Notably, Fra Girolama Savonarola, in a sermon of 1496,21 argues that one ought to imitate nature itself, and not another artist."16 The pointing against the 'success' of Zeuxis' art, claiming that such deception would work only reaction, the reaching demonstrative gesture, is revealing. With the assistance of on birds, not on men with good eyes. Savonarola extends this assertion to make such tales, Caravaggio's intimate relationship to nature above idealism has been a comparison between the inability of human eyes to be fooled by such tactics cemented in the history of art as his greatest fault. and how men with good spiritual eyes can distinguish what is and is not God's By accounting for details in Caravaggio's work in relation to written work. texts such as Pliny's, an argument can be developed that Caravaggio's paintings In the lesser mentioned second phase of Pliny's anecdote, Zeuxis' similarly function as rhetoric, that is revealing of, and critically engaged with, visual style itself. 17 Caravaggio was after all "viewed from the start as a polemical competitor, Parrhasius, answers with a similar rebuttal. Parrhasius presented a master of naturalistic effects."18 As veritable analogs to Cicero's most exalted curtain, and Zeuxis urged Parrhasius to draw it aside, to let him see the forms of rhetoric, Caravaggio's hands themselves were designed for the art of competing painting. Zeuxis then reaches for the curtain to pull it back, only to persuasion. realize to his dismay that it is a trompe l'oeil painting, and that, being so fooled, Persuasion itself, as a rhetorical skill, is often aligned with the ability to he must admit that he has lost. Parrhasius' success is revealed when Zeuxis deceive by verisimilitude. A seminal text that stages this as the criterion of touches the painting. The crucial point in this instance is that a man was fooled, successful, or 'good,' art is Pliny the Elder's Natural History. Creighton E. Gilbert or even more impressively, another artist, overcoming the Savonarolan objection calls Pliny the Elder's written description of the competition between Zeuxis and that only less intelligent creatures would be victims to such visual illusions. Parrhasius (Natural History 35, 66)19 the most famous trompe roeil 20 Trompe The feat of fooling another artist as a measure of artistic prowess is l'oeil in its usual function seeks to please by first deceiving and then by inducing pervasive in the history of art. Stories of other artists identifying with the fooled admiration for the maker's skill. The story is organized in three phases, but Zeuxis abound in the Rennaissance. Annibale Carracci related trying to pick up a interestingly, only the first is quoted in most common references. In this first book while visiting the studio of the admired Sassano, only to find it was painted 22 phase, Zeuxis exhibits a painting of grapes that is so successful that birds fly paper. And long before the Carracci, "Filarete around 1460 report[ed] himself fooled by painted fruit, in the studio of an artist in Venice, who, [arguably], was Marco Zoppo."23 Art historians have similarly held a higher respect for the perceptions of artists. Even Hibbard, writing in 1983, says of Caravaggio's biographer Baglione, whose Lives were published in 1642, that since Baglione questioning hand of Matthew; this kind of movement is reiterated in the Supper at Emmaus was himself a painter in Rome during this entire period, "we have to take all his (1600), where the composition is supported primarily by the triangular tension of significant, and eye catching, arm gestures, beginning with the disciple on Jesus' right statements seriously."24 hand side who is fixated the moment, before movement in a state of shock 1 to Jesus' uplifted hand as he blesses the meal, and ending in the emphatic gesture of the disciple on his left side whose both arms are outstretched in exclamation. 16 According to Hibbard, the citation of Eupompos was a cliche in the Renaissance (Hibbard 48). 17 " ... rhetorical being [essentially] a system for stylistic analysis and practice", Creighton E. Gilbert, "Grapes, Curtains, Human Beings: The Theory of Missed Mimesis/' Pictorial Mimesis 21 Fra Girolamo Savonarola,"Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria [di] Girolamo Savonarola " Before and After 1500, Kunstlerischer Austausch (Berlin: Akademie, 1993) 415. 18 The history of Western "Art" has been dramatized as a competition with its inevitable L'arte del quatrrocento nelle testimonianze coeve, ed. Paolo Ghiglieri (Rome: A. Belardetti series of winners versus losers, (ie. the visible and the invisible) in th~ art world. We still mu~ ' 22 Gilbert 414. feel and feed the effects of such models. Gilbert 415. 23 19 Gilbert 414. Gilbert 415. 24 20 Gilbert 413. Hibbard 8. 96 ,.. 97 great competitor. 28 If any work can be said to reconstitute the third phase of In the often occluded third phase of Pliny the Elder's account, Zeuxis zeuxis' and Parrhasius' competition, it would be Caravaggio's early painting of a tries again, 25 this time offering a painting of a boy carrying grapes. Again birds Boy Carrying a Basket of Fruit (1593-94). Caravaggio's cine pure still life, Basket flew towards it, and Zeuxis again understood that he had lost, for the birds were of Fruit (1593), from about the same year could be understood as an attempt to undeceived by the boy and not afraid to fly towards his painting. Yet, based on recreate Zeuxis' first try. 29 The manner in which the Basket of Fruit exceeds the this logic, Parrhasius did not win either: because the real test evidently would be table's surface, sticking out over the edge, emphasizes the invitation to touch to create a human figure that produced the same results as Zeuxis' grapes or that Caravaggio has cleverly embedded in this work. The basket balances Parrhasius' curtain. That Parrhasius' work was a play on the expectations of that precariously on the edge, suggesting the tentative relationship between art and particular moment and setting is also significant. It needed to be staged in order the viewer's reality. to function. Among assertions regarding what composes 'good' art, the most Strikingly, the theatre also implicitly assumes a relationship between famous is surely Giorgio Vasari's (1511-1574) three-part history of The Lives of sight and knowledge: "The theatre, as has often been remarked, shares the the Artists (1550, 2nd ed. 1568) and his description of art's qualitative progress. same root as the word theory, theoria, which meant to look at attentively, to His measure of the improvement of the second period over the first was a work's behold."26 As a related aside, "behold" is another word that implies tangibility, closeness to nature, which could therefore be verified against the 'real' thing. and attests to the integral relationship between sight and touch, vision and The third period is defined as the height of perfection by Vasari, which logically sensuousness. The temptation to touch is evoked most often by the sight of leads one to assume that art in this period was completely identical to nature. desire. Other words, such as apprehension (or apprehandsion) are also linked to However, this is not the case. Arriving at the third phase, the criterion of knowledge and comprehension (or comprehandsion). 27 Again, the deep dialectic naturalism fades away, and instead Leonardo and the others are praised for between sight and touch is linguistically and significantly embedded at the base technical qualities such as grace and mobility, or for rivaling classical antiquity. of Western aesthetics. Sometimes they are said to surpass nature, which is not the same thing as That Pliny's text was well known in his culture, and could possibly have identifying with it: "Here as in Pliny's three-part story perfect illusion seems to be served as an inspiration, is shown by the citation of it by Annibale Carracci, his stated at first as the goal, but it is not where we arrive; [paradoxically] at the moment it seemed to be complete, other concerns supervene. "30 The desire for perfect mimesis is perpetually subverted, and yet, perhaps precisely because of 25 Norn:an Bryson in his book Vision and Painting: the Logic of the Gaze (1983), relies its unattainability, mimesis remains the single agreed test of good art.31 em~hat1cally on the argument that mimesis endures as the most basic litmus test of good art m the Western tradition of art, yet amazingly he reports only the first two phases of Caravaggio's work was revolutionary in relation to the traditions both of Pliny's s~o~. ~e overwhelmingly exclusion of Pliny's third phase from scholarship is perhaps 1nd1cat1ve of the complicated issues such scenarios engender. art and nature, the twin foundations for reformist criticism and the revival of the 26 _J~y 23. For a history of the word, see David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: arts. In his painting, he was able to closely reflect the reigning, and competing, Nihiltsm and the Postmodern Situation (New York: Routledge Press, 1987) 99. 26 A s_ense of the tangible is embedded in both comprehension and apprehension. Accordmg to the Oxford English Dictionary "to comprehend" is defined as to seize, grasp, lay hold of, catch, entrap. On the other hand, "to apprehend" shares much the same connotations and denotations, being defined as to lay hold upon seize to arrest take 28 Gilbert 415. possession or embrace either physically or mentally. also Intellectu~lly, a~prehensio~ 29 Gilbert elaborates on how Caravaggio exalted still life to the status of high art in Italy suggests recognition and understanding, and potentially fearful anticipation of what one is with this picture. Gilbert 415. becoming conscious of by the senses; http://dictionary.oed.com. 30 Gilbert 417. 31 Gilbert 418. 98 ,. 99 tenets of artistic epistemology in the early modern period. His was a "self-aware a scene vividly encapsulates a central truth surrounding the Italian Baroque: it image.'m was a period where everything was coded, ripe for intrigue and suspicion. While paintings of still-life subjects may not have been particularly caravaggio, his person and his art, accord perfectly to such tensions. Cropper fashionable in Rome in the early seventeenth century, such pictures were and Dempsey have asserted that, "Caravaggio explicitly gives the lie to the popular in antiquity. Pliny the Elder's descriptions of Zeuxis' paintings are but one traditions of art (to which he was certainly not indifferent) by representing its example. Considering that men of the Renaissance raked Pliny for details on the fictions or visions of the supernatural according to the non-historical accidents of 38 lost art of antiquity, it seems predictable that still-life representations would be particular and everyday experience." Their choice of the word "lie" is another revived in Italy. 33 Making these "stills" appear alive was intrinsic to 'good' art. 34 revealing commentary on Caravaggio's artfulness, as synonyms for 'artful' The Boy Carrying a Basket of Fruit illustrates that Caravaggio's realism include not simply skillful and adept but also cunning and disingenuous. It seems was itself highly selective. Scholars remain uneasy regarding how to resolve the that Caravaggio's style leads him to be suspected of insincerity. discrepancy in his rendering of the boy "which betray[s] a crude technique and There is a soliciting aspect to the Boy Carrying a Basket of Fruit that has 39 fumbling knowledge of the body"35 in contrast to the extreme realism of the fruit. been commented on by many writers. The viewer is temptingly invited to touch According to Hibbard, in some of Caravaggio's paintings such conflicts in the both the boy and the fruit. The boy's look to the viewer is one of provocative work are so great "as to make us think that he is satirizing Renaissance art."36 daring. I would argue that the soliciting aspect that appears so obviously here Surely the explanation is more complex than satire; irony and deliberate appears again in most, if not all, of Caravaggio's paintings. Sensuous solicitation ambiguity are definitely aspects of Caravaggio's masterpieces. is integral to Caravaggio's art. The poorly painted boy being could be read as a visual example of Representations of the theme of touch recur abundantly in Caravaggio's Cicero's "sprezzatura' or "careful negligence,"37 as a kind of calculated paintings. One memorable example is Boy Bitten by Lizard (1593-94) [Figure 40 carelessness on Caravaggio's part that deceptively appears uncalculated. 1]. It is with this work that an exploration of startling, momentary action and Castiglione's The Courtier (1528), probably one of the most read books of the still-life first become fused. Hibbard also cites the origins of Caravaggio's famous Renaissance, also discusses such provocative games. Section 13 of Castiglione's (or infamous) chiaroscuro technique in the Boy with a Basket, drawing attention book describes rhetorical competitions that use the technique of "sprezzare," to the "strong diagonal shadow cast by light apparently entering the room from 41 fittingly staging situations amidst a courtly setting replete with ambiguities. Such above, [and calling this] the beginning of Caravaggio's 'cellar light'." Caravaggio's technique of exaggerated light-dark contrasts is also further developed here, and will continue to increase as his oeuvre progresses. Viewing 32 Victor Stoichita, "Introduction; Pictorial Mimesis Before and After 1500," The Self-Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 409-412. However, it is important to recognize that thE) "self-aware image" 38 was not exclusive to Caravaggio or the 17th c. An example of a striking precedent is Cropper and Dempsey 498 (my emphasis). 39 Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror(1524), which highlights specifically not only For example, Howard Hibbard discusses this and Donald Posner uses such elements to Parmigianino's virtuosity as an artist but, moreover, his acute awareness of being just that. develop his homoerotic interpretation of Caravaggio (Hibbard 17). 40 33 Hibbard 17-18. Both Baglione (the biographer closest to Caravaggio) and Mancini mention the Boy Bitten 34 Ludovico Dolce compliments Protogenes' art in his Dialogue in these terms; Ludovico by Lizard as one of Caravaggio's earliest works. Giovanni Baglione, Vite de' pittori, scultori Dolce, "Dialogo della pittura intitolato I'Aretino" (Venice, 1557), Dolce's "Aretina" and ed architetti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII dei1S72 fino a' tempi di Papa Urbano VIII nel Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, trans. M. Roskill (New York: New York University 1642 (Rome, 1964); translated as "Life of Caravaggio" in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio Press, 1968) 153. (New York: Haper & Row, 1984) appendix 351-356; and Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni 35 Hibbard 17. sulfa pittura (c.1617-1621), trans. H. Hibbard, Caravaggio (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) 36 Hibbard 49. appendix 346-351. 41 37 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore (London: Harvard University Press, 1996) 78. Hibbard 19. 100 101 w the boy's alarmed reaction as the result of the lizard hiding in the jasmine and 519· ht, but also on the dangerous desire to touch incited through vision. The roses, further suggests the possibility that there exists more than meets the eye, Narcissus myth highlights self-discovery while complicating the interdependence Touch here produces a startled reaction; pain and shock are between sight and touch, deception and revelation. expressively dramatized by the boy's face and his recoiling hand, the delicacy of It is possible that when Caravaggio painted Narcissus he could have which contrasts effectively with the look of sheer disgust that he makes. The been thinking of Alberti's words: figure's "awkward protruding shoulder"42 is present again, as in the Boy Carrying a Basket of Fruit The exposed shoulder as a device to solicit touch is Narcis, who changed into a flower, was the one who invented painting. For what else do you imagine that painting does if not reflecting overwhelmingly recurrent in Caravaggio's work. The bare, highlighted shoulder is appearance through art as the surface of water reflected his face7 46 similarly offered to the viewer in Bacchus (1597), and Sick Bacchus (1593-94). These shoulders are sensuous invitations for the viewer to touch, not chiefly crediting Narcissus with the genesis of painting may have been contentious for because they are shoulders, but because they are depicted in such an extremely caravaggio, inspiring him to play with the complicated levels of representation realistic style, enticing our desire to test them and verify their realness; thereby involved in the story. The myth of Narcissus functions also as a lesson about enacting Pliny's story of mimesis. 'safe distances' for looking. Furthermore, it seems to me that the emblematic Tellingly, the mythical themes that Caravaggio chose to depict were value of this painting lies not only in the chosen theme as in the way it was particularly those that expressed "a certain anxiety about vision's malevolent 43 treated. Here Narcissus is suspended in the moment before the touch. Choosing power," most notably that of Medusa (1598) and Narcissus (1597). The story of to capture this particular moment is again reminiscent of Michelangelo's artful Narcissus ties in beautifully with a discussion of the link between sight and strategy in his conception of The Creation. Both narratives hinge on the touch, for while it is Narcissus' sight of himself that captivates him initially, it is in anticipation of a simultaneously uncertain and yet highly predictable conclusion, fact his desire to touch his own image that proves fatal. 44 It is the actual with touch as the focal catalyst. With this painting Caravaggio vividly stages the satisfaction of optical desire through touch that is lethal. This reading would "fundamental conflicts of mimetic representation," by portraying and containing seem to validate the Platonic order of the senses. When Narcissus eventually an image that is not simply duplicated within its frame but also, to a certain touches his own reflection, in order to verify its truth, he becomes transformed point, reversible. 47 His arms form a circle encompassing both his original self and into a flower, forever fixated on observing himself in the water. While touch, in his reflection and work effectively as a meditation on representation and its contrast to sight, has been slandered for being "based on the immediate, limits. 48 discontinuous, unrelational contact with ... objects it can grasp in the here and 45 now," the contradiction of making perpetual fixation the result of touch in the Narcissus story gives touch another identity altogether. Touch becomes the vehicle for permanence. This myth itself is thus not simply a commentary on

46 The Narcissus myth is yet another instance in which the attempt t? ~est th~ veracity ~~ the image is pivotal. Narcissus' integral role in the theoriza~io~ of ~amtln~ dunng the 15 century emphasizes how duplications, reflections, and conv1ncmg s1mulat1o~s of the ~orld 42 Hibbard 43. were formulated as an artistic ideal. Leon Battista Alberti, II trattato della plttura e I cmque 43 Jay 28. ordinl architettonici, ed. G. Papini (Lanciano: Carabba, 1934). 44 47 Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Michael Simpson (Amhearst: University of Stoichita 410. Massachusetts, 2001) 407. 45 Jay 22. 48 Stoichita 410. 102 .... 103 53 Two paintings by Caravaggio that further investigate and depict the from the young man's hand without being noticed. Her victim is only able to be fallibility of sight are the Cardsharps(1594) and the Fortuneteller(1598-99).49 In victimized because he is drawn to her, misled, through his sight. He is infatuated each instance the narrative instructs that the hand is quicker that the eye, and by what he sees, which dulls his tactile sense that he is being robbed. that the human ability to grasp knowledge solely through the eyes is weak. Both Furthermore, Caravaggio's deployment of the character of the fortuneteller display the need to trick in order to prosper. 50 These works are instances of comments again on the profound interrelationship between sight and touch: the Caravaggio's revolutionary use of everyday subjects as models and everyday fortuneteller sees into the future through the hand. In this instance it is arguable activities, without idealization, as scenes. Alike in style and content, the that sight, not touch, interprets the hand. However, the fortuneteller's holding of Cardsharps and the Fortunete!ler feature closely framed, three-quarter length the young man's had is vital. Both senses are required and inseparable to the figures. 51 In the Cardsharps, the deceitful youth who hides the Five of Hearts fortuneteller's art. behind his back is visible to the viewer. Caravaggio lets us into to his secret. The Hands figuratively embody and signal the "touchable quality of the 54 cards themselves evoke Narcissus' mirror again, with the youth to the left Baroque." Probably the most startling use of the hand in Caravaggio's work is 55 accordingly self-absorbed. 52 Meanwhile the third gambling figure in the his Doubting Thomas(1602-03) [Figure 2). Perhaps more than any other work, background motions vividly with his fingers, signing to his accomplice across the this painting powerfully addresses the unstable relationship between sight and table which cards his opponent holds. Tellingly, this cheater also wears gloves touch. Christ's imperative response to Thomas' request to see his wound is for with holes ripped into the ends of the fingers, allowing dexterity and sensual Thomas to do far more than look-he must more viscerally touch.56 While the access to the markings on the cards. Touch is both the means to access the subject of the Doubting Thomas, a scene of confrontation between Christ and his card's identity and the means to cheat; in other words, touch allows for the truth disciple after the Resurrection, was popular well before Caravaggio's painting of that makes deception possible. This complex game is one of sense perception, a it, his depiction of the scene was decisively different from those that had gone competition enacted through sight and touch. before. It was "Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who at the end of the 57 The theme of a young man being duped is central to both images. In sixteenth century pressed the sense of touch to experiential realism." His the Fortuneteller the gypsy's visible seductiveness allows her to steal the ring unusual choice of the three-quarter length format for this crucial narrative of faith was unprecedented.58 Showing the figures cropped, "has the immediate

53 Guilio Mancini writes "he shows the Gypsy's slyness with a false smile as she takes the ring of the young man, who shows his naivete and the effects of his amorous response to 49 There are of course two versions of the Fortuneteller. Here I am interested solely in the the beauty of the little Gypsy who tells his fortune and steals his ring" (Hibbard 350). 54 earlier version, c. 1594-5, (115 x 150 em), housed at the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome. Bal188. 55 However, a discussion of the comparative development of Caravaggio's artifice between Also known as the Incredulity of St. Thomas, (107 x 146 em), in Stiftung Schlosser und these two versions would be interesting to explore in another paper. Garten, Sanssouci, Potsdam. 56 50 Similarly, Carel Van Mander (1604) commenting on Caravaggio's innovative style, "The pericopes, [the scriptural counterparts of Magdalen and Thomas], unique to the describes it as a means of survival for Caravaggio: "Lady Luck will rarely come to those gospel of John, were successive in it so that exegetes could not fail to remark the contrast" who do not help themselves, and usually we must seek her out and prod her on." (Boyle 187). Mary Magdalen also desires to touch Christ's body, but in opposition to (Hibbard 344). Thomas, her request is denied. Christ's response to Mary Magdalen is the famous "noli me 51 A cropping device Caravaggio uses stunningly in many works to heighten the viewer's tangere." That the Magdalen story is a foil to Thomas is accentuated by the fact that these participation in the scene, a narrative formula known to Caravaggio from Lombard and incidents follow one another in the Bible. 57 Venetian examples. Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon, 1998) 74-75. Boyle 190. 58 52 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art Preposterous History (Chicago: Albrecht Durer (1471-1510) was similarly fascinated by the tactile and manual motif in University of Chicago Press, 1999) 77. this Biblical story, and therefore employed the iconography of Christ grasping Thomas' 104 105 effect of reducing the distance between painted image and spectator," forcing us A contemporary example that testifies to the emblematic importance, "voyeuristically, to witness the gruesome detail of Thomas's probing finger (an importance that reaches well beyond its Christian significance to comment on parting Christ's flesh."59 There a forcibility and agency on the part of Christ in 'art' and aesthetics), that the pericope of the Doubting Thomas continues to Caravaggio's image as there is in no other. solicit is a photograph by the contemporary German photographer Thomas 64 Thomas' hand verifies, for his eyes, the truth of Christ's identity. Again, Struth. His body of work consists primarily of photographs taken in museums to the hand is the site of confirmation. For Thomas, the dictum "to-see-is-to capture the relationship between viewers and works of art. This returns the believe" is insufficient; "the fault of Thomas, the doubter and experimenter, was discussion to the "look, don't touch" exigent set out at the beginning. Struth's that he had the plain evidence of the sense of sight yet demanded the added version of the Doubting Thomas at The National Gallery in London (which does testimony of touch."60 As the story goes: Blessed are those who believe without not feature a painting by Caravaggio's hand but is nevertheless demonstrative of having seen. 61 Thomas demonstrated that faith was, for him, bound to the the affects such a narrative contains) shows a rope protecting the painting, senses. The troublesome sin of idolatry, an issue of contemporary religious preventing the touch. And yet the photographer here seizes a moment where a viewer re-enacts Thomas' impulse to touch, and rebelliously breaches the proper debate, manifested itself literally in this way: the desire to touch the divine. Caravaggio's extreme reliance on heightened naturalism aims at distance between image and viewer in the museum. The intensity of emotion convincing his viewers in a similarly bodily way. 'Good' paintings Uust as in and startling effects of Caravaggio's works elicit such reactions from the viewer. Pliny's story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius) thus are like reincarnated corpses; they Aligning Caravaggio with St. Thomas seems a natural elision, considering how induce the "proof-according-to-St.-Thomas-seeking-to-touch-the-resurrected paradoxically Caravaggio "more than any other Renaissance artist[,] professed to 65 Christ."62 Perfect mimesis would be something like this, at once horrific63 and believe only in what he saw." awe inspiring. Because of Caravaggio's realistic style it is as if we, the viewers, The tear in Thomas' shirt is structurally the same as Christ's wound; are witness to a resurrection at every viewing. there is a visual rhyme between the wound and the tear. The tear is offered to the viewer in much the same way that Christ's wound is volunteered to Thomas. With this echo, this syntactic relationship, there is a shift and the viewer is wrist that dated back to the thirteenth-century church of St. Thomas in Strasbourg and was invited to draw an equation between Thomas and themselves - the implication explored by northern artists. Caravaggio was the first Italian artist to do the same. Walter Friedlander discusses how Caravaggio "followed Durer's lead in showing Christ helping being that they are in the position of the unfaithful disciple, and in this instance Thomas to touch his wound." Walter Friedlander, Caravaggio Studies, Revised Edition (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 162. "Helping" sounds here like a grave it is Caravaggio's cut that solicits our fingers. Reminiscences of this seminal "cut" understatement: "No longer aloof and authoritative, but intimate and involved, [Jesus] reappear over and over again in Caravaggio's work. 66 gazes down intently at the hand exploring his wound" (Boyle 191). Boyle elaborates here on how the practice of poking fingers into sacred or solemn places as a test of truth has been historically important to Italian culture, citing the famous Mouth of Truth, in the portico of the Church of Santa Maria, as an example. This round stone. was believed to bite off the fingers of "artful" liars or perjurers. 59 Puglisi 216. 64 60 Boyle 193. Though Bal claims that Caravaggio's Incredulity of Saint Thomas is emblematic of her 61 "Jesus said afterward, 'Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they own project of drawing connections between Caravaggio's work and contemporary art, she who never saw me and yet have found faith'" (John 20:24). surprisingly omits Struth's work. 64 62 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard Hibbard 168. 65 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 80. Hibbard 168. 63 "The surgical detail of the picture is unbearable - or would be, were it not for the 66 Examples of Caravaggio's obsessive "cut" include: the head of Medusa, the Burial of St. counterbalancing composition. Caravaggio placed four heads in a concentrated diamond in Lucy, David with head of Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, Salome with head of St. John the the center of a canvas that is artfully planned and plotted, which is to say that it is Baptist, and the Beheading of St. John. Bodies that are living in Caravaggio can also be unnatural" (Hibbard 167-68). read as dismembered by the technique of chiaroscuro; for example, the Sacrifice of Isaac, 106 .... 107 In the story of the Doubting Thomas the finger stands in for the eye; it is a metaphor for the eye. Those who need to see or touch are aligned with incredulity. But Caravaggio's paintings deny tactile reassurance primarily because they cannot be read by the finger, or the eye, due to his intense chiaroscuro, which compromises clear figural contours, emphasizing the tension between touch and sight. What we expect to see in full light is shadowed: Christ's face. We are forbidden from using our fingers to read his features. 67 Caravaggio invites the viewer's touch only to confound it by showing that it cannot be sustained. Nevertheless, the temptation to touch is hard to resist. The human senses during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were caught in a paradox of valuational understanding. Art was one theatre in which this polemic was played out. Art itself was deliberating between a contemplative ideal (signified by sight) and active reality (signified by touch). The work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio embodies this tension. By affectively paralleling the model of St. Thomas, Caravaggio's art solicits sensual judgment. The desire for tangible faith that was so prevalent in Caravaggio's day is figure 1: Boy Bitten By Lizard, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1593-4. reiterated and problematized provocatively in his paintings. Louis Marin was certainly not the first to blame Caravaggio's artistic rebelliousness for destroying the art of painting.68 Baglione writes explicitly in 1642 that "some people thought he had destroyed the art of painting."69 I would argue that he did nothing of the sort; rather, by returning to an interrogation of the historic interrelation of the senses that informed the epistemology of painting, he provoked renewed interest in art. With his finger on the pulse of 'the' essential tensions in Italy (both aesthetic and religious), Caravaggio represents a wave of realism that "refreshed tired styles and reawakened interesf0 in an art that had strayed too far from life in the pursuit of an ideal. "71

St. John the Baptist, and Sleeping Cupid, in which shadows literally undercut the viewer's ability to perfectly see figural contours. 67 Reading with fingers here harkens back to the gambler in the Cardsharps once more. The implicit question seems to be two-fold: whether or not we trust the image, and whether or not the image can trust us. 68 Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). figure 2: Doubting Thomas, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1602-3. 69 Giovanni Baglione, trans. Hibbard 355. 70 Many artists after him followed his example, forming the school of the Caravaggisti. 71 Hibbard 49. 108 ...., 109 A Synthesis of love and Disgust: An Exploration of Twentieth-Century Scholarship on Degas' Brothel Monotypes

~~Nicole Lawrence~~

~~"When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself." -Oscar Wilde, The Picture ofDorian Gray~~

In the late 1870s, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) made more than fifty small monotype prints of brothel interiors. 1 While most twentieth-century scholarship on Degas has considered them to be a harmonious series, 2 Linda Nochlin argues that "they are far from unified."3 The subjects of the monotypes include representations of relaxed congeniality among women, women waiting for a male client, awkward or intimate moments with a male client, and women enjoying either their own bodies or the bodies of other women. However, because critics insist on discussing the series of brothel monotypes as consistent in subject matter and in terms of expression, there is no consensus of opinion on them. Critics have tended to make blanket assumptions about the intent of the

1 The key catalogue of the brothel monotypes provides this essential information. Eugenia Parry Janis, Degas Monotypes (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1968) xix. However, Jean Adhemar and Francoise Cachin argue that between 1874 and 1884, and again from 1890-92, Degas made perhaps 250 monotypes; Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs and Monotypes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 8. 2 See Carol Armstrong, Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hollis Clayson, Eugenia Parry Janis, Eunice Lipton and Richard Thomson. 3 Linda Nochlin, "A House is Not a Home: Degas and the Subversion of the Family," Representing Women (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999) 176-77. series, rather than recognizing the multiple and complex readings of the aggressive and non-seductive gestures in images such as Relaxation [Figure 1]. monotypes. In these various readings there are a cornucopia of contrasting He also believes that the middle-class costume of the client in the image The opinions on Degas' moral stance on prostitution, his views on class and social Serious Client indicates that Degas was, in fact, depicting a maison de quartier, a standing, and his sexuality and his personal relationships with women. In this bourgeois establishment, a fact supported by the standard mirrors and long essay I will bring together a wide range of criticism that discusses Degas' political divans seen in monotypes such as Relaxation and The Madame's Name Day 8 and personal opinions of prostitution as depicted in his brothel monotypes. [Figure 2]. Although some scholars have considered Degas' brothel monotypes

~~The modernization of Paris that was initiated during the rule of to be a direct representation of a maison de luxe while others have proposed~~

Napoleon III (r.1852-70), but implemented by Georges Haussmann, permanently that these images reflect a maison de quartier, both types of houses were part of changed the practice and structure of brothel prostitution.4 Many of the working the state-regulated maison close. class areas where the brothels would have operated were destroyed during the Many twentieth-century scholars have stressed the prominent role of urban renewal process, displacing not only their inhabitants, but also their prostitution in late nineteenth-century Paris/ and it is clear from Norma Braude's study on Degas and nineteenth-century French feminism that the issue of the businesses. Therefore, during the last half of the century, the number of licensed state-regulated maison close was a major topic of public debate and political or tolerated houses decreased steadily. 5 As the second-rate brothels 10 disappeared, they were superseded by a different category of brothels, created controversy . Degas' unique depictions of government-controlled brothels, with for the newly prosperous grand boulevards: the maison de luxe or grande their stylized blurriness and lack of definition, have brought some critics to the 11 tolerance. These were deluxe houses that occupied the pinnacle of the social, conclusion that Degas created them with a specific political agenda. Richard economic, and erotic hierarchy of the tolerated brothels in Paris. 6 According to Thomson and Hollis Clayson both suggest that by depicting these establishments

Hollis Clayson and Roy McMullen, the costumes of the prostitutes and the setting as "hardly a stimulant to the sexual appetite," Degas was implicitly supporting a of Degas' brothel monotypes are typical of this new deluxe house of prostitution regulationist position, because regulationists only condoned brothel activity if it 12 of the late 1870s, which were designed to cater to the expensive and did not facilitate "sexual stimulation and arousal." For the Paris bourgeoisie, sophisticated tastes of the upper-class client.7 Richard Thomson debates this point, observing that Degas' brothels are "not necessarily a maison de luxe'

8 because of the vulgar and low-class character of the filles, suggested by the Thomson 101. 9 See Carol Armstrong, Charles Bernheimer, T.J. Clark, Hollis Clayson, Eunice Lipton, and Richard Thomson. 10 Norma Broude, "Edgar Degas and French Feminism, ca. 1880: 'The Young Spartans,' The Brothel Monotypes, and the Bathers Revisited," The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and 4 Hollis Clayson, Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era: Painted Love (New Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary G. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row Publishers Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991) 28. 1992) 277-279. , 11 5 In 1840 there were 300 licensed brothel, in 1855 there were 204, about 190 in 1860, in Most earlier nineteenth-century images of prositution have dealt with the topic in a far 1869 there were 152, 128 in 1878 and by 1886 there were 70, and in 1888 only 69 more glamorous manner such as, Edouard Manet's Nana from 1877 and Henri Gervex's remained. Clayson, Prostitution 28. Richard Thomson, Degas: The Nude (London: Thames Rolla from 1878. 12 and Hudson, 1988) 100. Thomson 101. Hollis Clayson, "Avant-Garde and Pompier Images of 19th Century French 6 Clayson, Prostitution 28. Prostiution: The Matter of Modernism, Modernity and Social Ideology," Modernism and 7 Clayson, Prostitution 28-33. Roy McMullen, Degas: His Life, Times, and Work (London: Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed. Benjamin Buchloh et al., (Halifax: The Seeker & Warburg) 271-273. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983) 60. 112 ... 113 stricter government controls on prostitution, including regulations on the nature Degas' brothel monotypes. Reff believes that images such as Relaxation display of brothel activity, meant an increase in public health and security due to the same vulgar proportions and depraved postures that were described in 19 limitations on the number of prostitutes allowed to operate, the services they Huysmans' novel. Not all critics see such a specific connection between the literature of the time and Degas' monotypes. Both Eugeneia Parry Janis and Jean were allowed to perform, and where they were allowed to work.B However, for the women of the brothels, rigid legislation meant less money, the loss of sutherland Boggs see the tragic naturalism of Huysmans' Marthe as inconsistent with the monotypes, although it is only Boggs who vehemently denies any autonomy, and less work. 14 Operating on her own, a fille insoumise (unregistered 20 prostitute) could work when she liked, choose her clients, pocket her earnings relationship between literature and the brothel monotypes. Boggs is clearly in and enjoy greater liberty - all benefits that a registered prostitute would have to the minority, and, although there is no consensus of opinion over which specific surrender. 15 Therefore, in contrast to Thomson and Clayson, Norma Braude sees novel inspired Degas to produce the brothel series, the majority of critics see a Degas' harsh depictions of the maisons closes as feminist in nature, decrying link between Degas' brothel monotypes and contemporary literature, suggesting calls for increased state-regulated and sanctioned prostitution .16 Due to this that Degas was certainly aware of the social and political issues about prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris, even if he was not consciously disagreement among critics, it is impossible to know what side, if any, Degas allied with in the debate over state-regulated prostitution. However, the issue of contributing to the debate himself. controlled prostitution was an important topic of debate in Parisian society, and it Some scholars have also made analogies between Degas' brothel is likely that the prevalence of the issue contributed to Degas' interest in the monotypes and contemporary medical data on hysteria. James H. Rubin explicitly subject. describes some of the images as "awkward experiments," paralleling the "bizarre

The issue of prostitution was a popular subject in contemporary novels, poses" in images such as Relaxation with illustrations in Jean-Martin Charcot and 21 which many critics have seen as an influence on Degas' brothel monotypes. For Paul Richer's contemporary psychiatric treatises on hysteria. Hysteria was example, Richard Kendall regards Edmond Goncourt's La Fille Elisa, from 1877, believed to be a female illness caused by gynaecological disorders and as an inspiration for the monotypes, due to the fact that its title was inscribed in suppressed sexuality, and was therefore considered to be common among Degas' note-book drawings. 17 Hollis Clayson has agreed with Kendall's findings, prostitutes. Like Rubin, Richard Thomson has also made connections between and also notes parallels between Degas' brothel images like The Madame's Name the unconventional poses of some of Degas' women and contemporary medical 22 Day and Guy de Maupassant's fiction; a connection that has also been observed illustrations of hysterics having contortions. However, while Rubin avoids drawing conclusions as to why Degas may have been referring to these medical by Linda Nochlin. 18 Theodore Reff suggests that Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel about a prostitute, entitled Marthe, published in 1876, was a direct influence on

19 Theodore Reff, Degas: The Artist's Mind (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1976) 181. , 20 13 Thomson 98. Janis xix-xxi. Instead, Jean Sutherland Boggs suggests that Degas' brothel series is 14 Braude, "Edgar Degas" 279. based on the masters of the first half of the century, such as Guys and Gavarni, and on 15 Thomson 100. Japanese printmaking. Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., eds., Degas (Ottawa: National Gallery 16 of Canada, 1988) 296. Braude, "Edgar Degas" 277-281. 21 17 James H. Rubins, Impressionism (London: Phaidon Press, 1999) 209. Richard Kendall, Degas: Images of Women (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 1990) 44. 22 18 Nochlin 172. Thomson 102. 114 .... 115 29 findings, Thomson felt that Degas was clearly alluding to the view that Degas thought of these women as threatening social deviants." However, prostitutes were unstable and should be confined to the brothel, 23 again Callen and Clayson have also suggested that, by phy?ically stereotyping the suggesting that Degas was making a political statement through his monotypes. prostitutes, Degas was making a misogynostic statement, a theory that Richard Some critics believe that Degas' monotypes attribute negative Kendall refuses to accept, asserting that Degas depicted both men and women characteristics to the prostitutes not only through their suggestive hysterical with negative physiognomic traits, and therefore Degas was concerned more with the issues of class than of gender. 30 postures, but also through their sheer physical appearance. Almost thirty-five years ago, Eugenia Parry Janis called attention to what she called "vulgar facial Critics such as Jean Sutherland Boggs and Theodore Reff have argued characteristics" in Degas' brothel prints: 24 an observation that has taken on great that the images were based directly on first-hand experience, rather than on 31 significance in light of the more recent studies by Anthea Callen, Douglas Druick second-hand sources such as literature, medical treatises, or public opinion. and Peter Zegers on the influence of nineteenth-century physiognomy in Degas' Roy McMullen and Hollis Clayson also agree that Degas' monotypes convey a art.25 Physiognomy investigated how a person's "inner moral character" "raw, unvarnished, objective truth," attainable only through first hand manifested itself physically. 26 For instance, physiognomists believed that the experience, through which the essential facts of the brothel are accurately 32 morally inferior nature of the criminal underclass or the ignorant was visible in described. Some critics, like Jean Adhemar and Francoise Cachin, dispute the their facial features, in their jutting jaw, prominent cheekbones and low receding scientific accuracy of the prints. While acquiescing that the monotypes certainly

foreheads. Some critics believe that Degas supported this belief by depicting the have "an air of reality" and a quality of "absolute immediacy," these critics refuse prostitutes with these features, clearly seen in the two women standing in the to classify the images as objective social documents. As Adhemar and Cachin monotype The Madame's Name Day. Anthea Callen believed this visual have pointed out, a monotype has to be executed in a studio, due to the classification of character types "fulfilled an urgent social need"27 for required equipment, and therefore the act of creation occurs away from the distinguishing class, and Degas' employment of the theory of physiognomy in his subject, and is filtered through the subjective realm of memory and the artist's art served that very purpose. As Richard Thomson has declared: "Degas' images imagination. Richard Thomson supports this claim, proposing that the brothel 33 of prostitutes were strongly shaped and determined by the conventional monotypes were not "a systematic attempt to represent an urban institution."

~~preconceptions and prejudices of a man of his class and upbringing."28 Hollis He believed that Degas did not scientifically and objectively record the facts of~~

~~Clayson confirms both Anthea Callen and Richard Thomson's statements, writing, the state-regulated brothel in minute detail. Therefore, while some critics see~~

~~"the appearance of the stereotyped faces in the brothel monotypes suggests that Degas' monotypes as scientific and objective records of brothel life, other critics~~

23 Thomson 102. 24 Janis xx. 29 25 Clayson, Prostitution 48. Rubin 200. 3 26 Anthea Callen, "Anatomy and Physiognomy: Degas' Little Dancer of Fourteen Years," ° Kendall47. 31 Boggs 296. Reff 264. Degas: Images of Women, ed. Richard Kendall (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 1990) 10. 32 27 McMullen 270-271. Clayson, Prostitution 40. Callen 10. 33 28 Thomson 117. Thomson 101. 116 117 .... Due to the possibility that these images were only of a personal nature, have seen them as illusory conceptions that were partially based on recollection I some critics have opted for a more biographical reading of Degas' brothel and were affected by subjective manipulation. monotypes, where the artist's sexuality, latent or lived, is considered in relation If the monotypes were created as social documents or political to his brothel prints. James H. Rubin has suggested that the numerous images of statements, then the issue of where they were displayed comes to the fore. Both "frontal nudity, onanistic gestures and grotesque postures" naturally raise Jean Sutherland Boggs and Richard Kendall have asserted that a few select 38 monotypes may have been exhibited in the 1877 Impressionist Exhibition, 34 but questions about Degas' sexuality. The artist Vincent van Gogh attributed the realistic style of the monotypes to Degas' sexual inadequacy. 39 In the summer of this is by no means a consensus, and lack of detailed catalogues of these exhibits make it impossible to prove one way or the other. The only proven 1888, while in Aries, van Gogh sent a letter to his brother, in which he mentions public display of the monotypes occurs in a 1934 edition of. Guys de the monotypes. He wrote: "[Degas] looks on while the human animals, stronger

Maupassant's story La Maison Tellier, in which images such as The Madame's than himself, get excited and fuck... he paints them well, exactly because he 40 Birthday and The Customer were included. 35 However, this book was published doesn't have the pretension to get excited himself." The artist Pablo Picasso, after Degas' death, and it is therefore presumptuous to conclude that these who owned several of Degas' monotypes, also viewed Degas' voyeur status as a monotypes were reproduced with Degas' permission. Due to the fact that there reflection of his sexual dysfunction. This is exemplified in one of the forty is a good chance that these monotypes were never publicly exhibited, Hollis etchings based on Degas' monotypes that Picasso made, entitled March 16, Clayson and Richard Thomson have stressed that the brothel monotypes were 1971. In this image Picassio depicts Degas as an outsider in the brothel, not political documents at all, but rather private images, shown only to Degas' watching, but not participating. Roy McMullen, Jean Adhemar and Francoise close friends. 36 Eunice Lipton agrees, proposing that Degas' brothel monotypes Cachin have similarly interpreted Degas as a voyeur, often identifying the male 41 served a more personal function, as preliminary sketches for Degas' publicly customer in the brothel monotypes as the artist himself. Therefore, in the exhibited images of women bathing or at their toilette.37 Jean Sutherland Boggs opinion of Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh, as well as Roy McMullen, Jean and Richard Kendall's assertion that Degas was making a public statement Adhemar and Francoise Cachin, the brothel monotypes functioned as a kind of through these monotypes is highly contested by Clayson, Thomson and Upton, substitute for the performance itself. Richard Thomson supports this reading by citing that, by 1890, gossip was already circulating within the Parisian art world who all agree that these images were more private, personal studies that Degas about Degas' inadequacies as a lover. However, Thomson claims that Degas showed only to a few friends, possibly using them as studies for more deliberately public pieces.

38 Rubin 209. 39 James H. Rubin suggests that Degas may have been celibate. Rubin, 209. Jean ~utherland Boggs has quoted Roy McMullen as speculatively concluding that Degas was Impotent. Boggs 296. While, B. Nicholson proposes that Degas was a homosexual. B. 34 Nicholson, "Degas as a Human Being, "Burlington Magazine vol. 5 no. 723 (June 1963)· Boggs 296. Kendall 6-9. 239, I ' 35 Kendall 6-9. 40 36 Quoted in: Clayson, Prostitution 164. Thomson 117. Clayson, Prostitution 35. 41 37 McMullen 279-83. Jean Adhemar and Francoise Cachin, Degas: The Complete Etchings, Eunice Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life Lithographs and Monotypes(London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 84. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 168-171. 118 119 v was, in fact, not merely an observer at the brothel, but that he relied on brothels scholars, such as Jean Sutherland Boggs and Benedict Nicolson, attempted to re as a comfortable outlet for his "fragile sexuality."42 Whether Degas experienced examine Degas' view of women. However, the feminist critic Norma Broude feels sex at the brothels directly, or merely vicariously through his drawings, the that these studies lacked conviction, sincerity, and persuasion, and this is why brothels appear to have served as an outlet for Degas' rumored sexual the argument that maintained Degas' misogyny prevailed in the 1970s. inadequacies. Norma Broude's 1982 study on Degas' alleged misogyny marks a pivotal Another popular issue in scholarship regarding Degas' brothel point in the history of this debate. In her essay, Broude revealed that not all of monotypes has been the influence of his alleged misogyny in his art. The notion Degas' contemporaries felt that Degas hated women, yet their comments have been largely ignored in the twentieth century.47 Broude also suggested that of Degas' misogyny was first put forth in the late nineteenth-century by writers Degas' depictions of women, which had for so long been considered cruel and like Joris-Karl Huysmans,43 and became widely accepted and rarely disputed. In the late 1940s and 1950s, studies by scholars such as Denis Rouart and Camille unflattering, were actually active challenges to the period's artificial codes and "cherished myths" regarding the role and position of women in society.48 Mouclair emphasized the beast-like qualities of Degas' prostitutes and saw them Similarly, Lillian Schacher! states that, by depicting women of the brothel without as evidence of Degas' supposed misogyny.44 Before Norma Broude's study on flattery, Degas was stripping away stifling, stereotyped, and idealized Degas' misogyny in the early 1980s, most critics agreed with these claims, conventions. She believes that, by showing women with swollen thick bodies and accepting Degas' alleged hatred of women as an established fact. Few critics drooping breasts, Degas was directly challenging the smooth, proportional nudes expressed discomfort with this assertion, nor did they thoroughly evaluate its source or validity. This belief is particularly evident in the work of Theodore Reff, of the academic Salon, favouring a more realistic, but by no means disparaging, 49 who, in 1976, wrote, "Degas' monotypes of houses of prostitution ... express a depiction of women. Eunice Lipton also notes a feminist quality to the monotypes that she considers unique to the nineteenth century. She reads the profoundly cynical attitude towards women."45 We can see modern examples of this school of thought in the writings of Richard Thomson, published as recently images of women lying "indolently" on couches and masturbating, such as as 1988, in which Thomson maintains that Degas' brothel monotypes "convey Relaxation, not as misogynistic, but rather as positive images of women 50 disgust, as if the artist wanted to distance himself from the unappealing "experiencing intense physical pleasure." Linda Nochlin similarly sees women."46 This school of thought began to change in the early 1960s, as some monotypes, such as The Madame's Name Day, as positive depictions of homes full of warmth and intimacy, a stark contrast to some of Degas' other works, such as The Bellelli Family which feature a lack of interaction and affection 42 Thomson 101. 43 In riposte to a series of nudes exhibited by Degas at the 8th Impressionist Exhibition in 1886, the contemporary novelist and critic Joris-Karl Huysmans maintained that Degas had personally intended to depict the women with "attentive cruelty and a patient hatred." If 47 Huysmans saw these images as debased and humiliated, we can only imagine what his For example, Georges Riviere wrote: "Degas enjoyed the company of women! He, who reaction would have been to Degas' brothel monotypes. Carol M. Armstrong, Odd Man Out: often depicted them with real cruelty, derived great pleasure from being with them Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: Chicago University Press enjoyed their conversation and produced pleasing praises for them." Quoted in Broude: 1991), I Degas' Misogyny 226. 48 44 Quoted in: Janis xx. Broude, Degas' Misogyny230-45. 49 45 Reff 180-83. lillian Schacher!, Edgar Degas: Dancer and Nudes(Munich: Prestel, 1997) 74-78. 50 46 Thomson 117. Lipton 178. 120 ... 121 among the family members. 51 Therefore, despite the fact that Degas' monotypes depict a house of scandal and debasement, some critics have seen these images as more positive reflections of women, featuring a tender, warm, and decidedly feminist perspective, rather than the misogynistic attitude so often prescribed to Degas. The scholarship on Degas' brothel monotypes covers a wide spectrum of beliefs. There are opposing and irreconcilable differences in opinion on whether the drawings are pro- or anti-regulationist, political or personal, displayed or withheld, influenced or original, objective or subjective, latently or blatantly sexual, and misogynist or feminist. In the midst of all this controversy remains one solid, and unchanging fact: Degas' brothel monotypes, while nebulous in meaning and intent, are fascinating and provocative images, portraying the underbelly of Degas' contemporary society. Whether the portrayal figure 1: Relaxation, Edgar Degas, c.1876-85. is supportive, critical, or purely aesthetic is unclear, but it is clear that these images have incited thought and debate in critics for well over a century, and, as long as they are observed and addressed, they will remain provocative, elusive, and stimulating.

~~figure 2: The Madame's Name Day, Edgar Degas, c.1879-80. 51 Nochlin 172. 122 123 " Narrative Necessities in the Artwriting of Greenberg on Pollock~~

~~Sarah St:anners~~

It is by now considered common knowledge, at least for those who have a basic understanding of art history, that Clement Greenberg championed Jackson Pollock and was thus a fundamental factor in Pollock's recognition and appreciation. What is most interesting about this particular story within the history of art is that Greenberg's writings on Pollock not only articulate a greatness about the artist but also speak volumes about the significance of Greenberg as an artwriter. 1 The works of both Pollock and Greenberg have now taken on mythic proportions. Without Greenberg we would not value Pollock as we do today. How could such abstract art be 'explained', and with such success? To represent in artwriting that which is not actually representing is a difficult task indeed. Greenberg's success in this problematic aspect of artwriting is what helped to form the consensus, held as an art historical truth, that Pollock is worth valuing as a pivotal artist in the history of art. In a 1962 article entitled "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name," Greenberg is eager to point out the intrinsic broken-telephone effect in the practice of artwriting:

~~The widening of the gap between art and discourse solicits, as such widenings will, perversions and abortions of discourse: pseudo-~~

1 The term 'artwriting' was coined by David Carrier and will be used in its various forms throughout this essay to emphasize my indebtedness to many of the notions put forth in his publication, Artwriting (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1987). description, pseudo-narrative, pseudo-exposition, pseudo-history, praise contemporary artists as being significant for their break with the past and pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology, and - worst of all - pseudo- for possessing inherent genius that was rarely indebted to anyone that came poetry.2 before them. 7 As Greenberg felt this tactic to be repetitious, it is not surprising that he approached a representation of Pollock's art by placing the artist within An examination of the mechanics of Greenberg's artwriting reveals his own an art historical narrative - reinforced and visually footnoted by comparison with mastery of some of these 'perversions'. David Carrier, a philosopher turned art early modern and old master predecessors. The building of this Greenbergian critic and historian, has extensively analyzed the nature of artwriting and often narrative cannot be grasped by any single, albeit effective, piece of artwriting on makes obvious the very basic necessities of this brand of writing, pointing out Pollock. Taking into account the broad spectrum of Greenberg's art critiques, how its requirements inevitably affect one's strategies in an art historical or essays, and later historical commentaries on Pollock, I will show that Greenberg critical argument. Carrier concludes, in his Principles of Art History Writing, that was always dedicated to the effectiveness of his medium, artwriting, and was the act of painting is analogous to art historical writing in the way that the thus able to put forth an effective argument for valuing this artist. When looking 3 practitioner, whether artist or art historian, approaches representation. The at a range of Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock, it is important to consider the similarity lies in the fact that "ultimately both histories come to the self-conscious fact that time has played a significant role in the development of Greenberg's 4 recognition that they are systems of representation." Both the artist and praise of Pollock into the general acceptance of Pollock. artwriter are essentially representing. Thus, as Greenberg praised the "self Greenberg's astounding critical debut was made with essays like "Avant 5 criticism" of modernist art, Greenberg himself was self-consciously representing Garde and Kitsch" (1939) and "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940). In Pollock in his artwriting. subsequent works three distinct phases in Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock can A careful and consecutive reading of Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock be discerned. First, there are the reviews from his time as an art critic for The 6 reveals that the narratives of Greenberg were constructed to explicate an art. Nation, spanning the years 1943 to 1950. Second, Greenberg's artwriting on Greenberg was frustrated by the tendency in the "art writing" of his time to Pollock expanded into essay form and entered publications such as the Partisan Review. Finally, and most apparent after Pollock's death in 1956 and Greenberg's publication of Art and Culture in 1961, Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock began 2 Clement Greenberg, "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name," Encounter, XIX:6 (December to appear in more popular magazines such as Vogue and the Saturday Evening 1962): 71. 3 David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State Post However, this late artwriting on Pollock also began to take on more 'art University Press, 1994) 240. 4 David Carrier, Principles ofArt History Writing 238. historical' characteristics. 5 Clement Greenberg, "After Abstract Expressionism," Art International VI: 8 (October 25, Faced with an artist that impressed him, Greenberg, as an art critic, was 1962): 35. 6 For this essay, John O'Brian's four volumes, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays obliged to justify the art that he so praised. This requirement in the and Criticism, provided an invaluable bibliography. Referring to the entries within these volumes, the original publications that featured Greenberg's writing were then sought out representations of art criticism is what we might call Greenberg's interest in his in order to read them within their original textual context, which was, at times, found to be artwriting on Pollock for The Nation. The rhetoric of an art critic is entirely illustrated. The only examples of Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock that could not be found within their original context include the articles that were published in: Horizon (October different from that of an art historian because the aesthetic value of most 1947), A Retrospective Show of the Paintings ofJackson Pollock (Bennington College, Nov Dec 1952), Art Digest (15 September 1953), Art Digest (1 January 1954), Art Digest (1 November 1954), and The New Leader(12 December 1955). These articles constitute only a fraction of the total of Greenberg's published accounts on Pollock and were still read 7 within John O'Brian's reprinting of them in, Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Clement Greenberg, "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name," Encounter, XIX:6 (December Criticism, vol. 1-4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 and 1993). 1962): 70. 126 ... 127 contemporary works of art have yet to be established.8 The mechanics of art valuing Pollock's art by suggesting that Pollock's modernist work shared a lineage 11 criticism involve entirely different artwriting methods than those of art history with the art of the old masters. Carrier calls this strategy "Greenberg's 12 because of the critic's vested interest in justifying their celebration of the artist. genealogies. " During these first years of Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock, there was no By the late forties, Greenberg's rhetoric increasingly links Pollock with consensus that Pollock was invaluable, or even valuable at all. Greenberg was the old masters of the past. In a 1949 review, Greenberg explains Pollock's therefore obliged to account for his espousal of Pollock's work. Let us consider Number One (1948) painting by referring to it as "this huge baroque scrawl" and the difficulty in trying to express how wonderful an orange tastes to someone that "as a whole it is as well contained in its canvas as anything by a Quattrocento 13 who has never seen or tasted an orange before. Naturally, one might mention master." Though Greenberg often attributed bravery to Pollock, one cannot help that the orange tastes like a tangerine, therefore invoking the recognition of this but note the bravery of this artwriter's confidence in aligning Pollock with Baroque new fruit as tasting just as good as the fruit that they may have already been and Renaissance masters. Greenberg's narrative had to be convincing for us to familiar with. Though it seems unfair to compare oranges and abstracts, place Pollock's art on par with canonical masterpieces. Bringing the techniques of Greenberg was faced with this very same dilemma and dealt with it in a similar the old masters to mind whilst describing Pollock's painting is a tactic geared at manner. persuading the reader to equate the talents of these artists. Thus, we can see The natural device for Greenberg was to establish Pollock's value in the how the required persuasiveness in art criticism necessarily influenced minds of his readers by relating him to the already recognized artists and Greenberg's textual representations of Pollock. movements in art history. One of Greenberg's earliest reviews of Pollock explains It should be noted that Greenberg's very declarative style of art that: criticism also aided in the acceptance of his placement of Pollock such a distinguished lineage. In his many reviews of Pollock during the forties,

Pollock has gone through the influences of Mir6, Picasso, Mexican Greenberg does not hesitate to announce that Pollock is of a superior rank as an painting, and what not, and has come out on the other side at the age artist. Pollock is first ranked by Greenberg through the strength of his art, as he 9 of thirty-one, painting mostly with his own brush. writes, "[Conflict and Wounded Anima!J ... are among the strongest abstract paintings I have yet seen by an American."14 Later, Pollock is said to be "the Although Greenberg gives us a frame of reference to understand Pollock in this strongest painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest one to appear since critique, he is equally careful to assert Pollock's own individual value. A more Mir6."15 In the years that followed, Greenberg frequently reiterates that Pollock is extreme example of Greenberg's validation of Pollock through comparison to the greatest painter since Mir6. By 1949, Greenberg does not hesitate to profess already established artists is found in 1947 when he writes, "if Jackson Pollock that "Pollock is one of the major painters of our time."16 One comes across these has been able to profit by Picasso, it is because he has diluted him with Mir6 and assertive rankings so frequently in Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock that they Kandinsky."10 This Pollock recipe made up of familiar ingredients was essentially are best recognized as narrative devices, presented as a result of Greenberg's required by Greenberg's artwriting as all of his critiques for The Nation were printed without the benefit of images. Thus, Greenberg provided grounds for 11 David Carrier, Artwriting 40. 12 David Carrier, Artwriting 36. 13 Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 168: 9 (February 19, 1949): 221. 14 8 Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 157: 22 (November 27, 1943): 621. David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts, 1987) 9. 15 9 Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 160: 14 (April 7, 1945): 397. Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 157: 22 (November 27, 1943): 621. 16 1°Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 164: 20 (May 17, 1947): 579. Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 168: 9 (February 19, 1949): 221. 128 129 "' With statements such as this, Greenberg continued his tradition of emphasizing obligation to justify Pollock. Again, in reviewing Pollock's painting Number One, Pollock's modernist heritage and superior status. Greenberg declares that it has: However, what is most striking about Greenberg's essays of the late 1940s and 1950s is their nationalistic tone. Having established Pollock as quieted any doubts this reviewer may have felt - and he does not in all honesty remember having felt many - as to the justness of the deserving of his placement within this art historical narrative, Greenberg then superlatives with which he has praised Pollock's art in the past. 17 fulfills his early prophecies by presenting Pollock as the saviour of the state of American painting. 20 Though Pollock's avant-garde art was, in Greenberg's This confidence put forth by Greenberg in his reviews adds to the persuasiveness words, "riskier," "rougher and more brutal," it was also represented as expressly of his artwriting and thus contributes to what later builds to be a consensus on American for the very same reasons. 21 After 1948, Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock's greatness as an artist. Such declarations act to justify Greenberg's Pollock coincided with American nationalist feelings, spilling over from the years establishment of the genealogies of Pollock, which place this artist in the position of World War II, and a new ideology that was being shaped by the Cold War. 22 of the inevitable 'next step' after Cubism. Thus, as Greenberg places Pollock at In his book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Serge Guilbaut asserts the culmination of a logical sequence of major artists in order to form an art that this new American ideology "not only made room for the avant-garde historical evolutionary chart that starts with the old masters and ends with dissidence but accorded to such dissidence a position of paramount Pollock, there is a "narrative necessity" about Greenberg's artwriting.18 importance."23 Though always presenting Pollock's art as being superior to We may understand Greenberg's early artwriting on Pollock for The French painting, at this point Greenberg was also eager to represent Pollock's Nation as constituting the development of a protagonist for his story of world as the New York version of Paris' pre-World War II bohemian quarters. modernist art. In the second phase of Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock, we find Greenberg paints a rather romantic picture when he writes that "the fate of that he has expanded on his initial reviews of the artist and has entered into the American art is being decided- by young people, few of them over forty, who genre of the essay. The first time in which Greenberg mentions Pollock in an live in cold-water flats and exist from hand to mouth."24 It was this alienating essay is in a 1947 issue of Horizon, which introduces Pollock in a rather grand urban context of America, according to Greenberg, that allowed artists like manner, as he writes: Pollock to retain a sense of the modern age in their art - a sense that Parisian artists could no longer hope to accomplish with the acceptance of their avant the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one garde art. 25 Greenberg's observations on the fall of Paris and the rise of New who promises to be a major one is a Gothic, morbid and extreme disciple of Picasso's cubism and Mira's post-cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and Surrealist inspiration. His name is Jackson Pollock. 19 20 David Carrier, Artwriting; pages 16 and 35 first brought this notion of Greenberg as prophet and Pollock as saviour to my attention. 21 Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 164: 5 (February 1, 1947): 139. 22 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983) 2-3. 23 Serge Guilbaut, How New York 3. 17 Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation, 168: 9 (February 19, 1949): 221. 24 Clement Greenberg, "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture," 18 David Carrier, Artwriting 23. Horizon (October 1947), Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. 19 Clement Greenberg, "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture," John O'Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986) 169. Horizon (October 1947), Clement Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. 25 Serge Guilbaut, How New York 170. John O'Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986) 166. 130 ... 131 things that Picasso had not brought beyond a state of promise" we are made to York as the center of the art world are clearly captured in his 1948 essay "The understand that Pollock, and his "American-type" painting, deserves the same Decline of Cubism", as he concludes: appreciation as the modern art that was so readily celebrated abroad. 28 In concluding this essay, Greenberg directly expresses this desire when he writes, Enough of them have abandoned Paris to permit us to abandon our chronic, and hitherto justified, pessimism about the prospects of "what I hope for is a just appreciation abroad... Only then, I suspect, will 29 American art, and hope for much more than we dared hope for in the American collectors begin to take it [American art] seriously." It is perhaps past. It is not beyond possibility that the Cubist tradition may enjoy a because this statement revealed Greenberg's interests that he chose to edit it, new efflorescence in this country. 26 and many other statements, out of the Art and Culture printing of this essay. 30 Greenberg offers an explanation for these revisions in the preface to Art and It is clear that emphasizing the importance of America in the international art Culture when he says, "I see no reason why all the haste and waste involved in world was essential to Greenberg's narrative, as it held that Pollock, the my self-education should be preserved in a book."31 quintessential American, was the next heir apparent in the patriarchal line of the Greenberg, however, may have edited these nationalistic aspirations art historical canon. While it cannot be said that Greenberg was interested in from "American-Type' Painting" for another reason. By 1961, when Art and promoting American superiority in general, it can, however, be argued that Culture was published, Pollock had become appreciated by many - that he was promoting this superiority was necessary for the effectiveness of Greenberg's an invaluable artist had become the consensus - and including these hopes for narrative, which held that Pollock was internationally important. The importance his acceptance were therefore no longer relevant. This consensus on Pollock's of America in the art world emphasized the importance of Pollock. In a 1949 value is marked by the fact that Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock began to enter article in the Magazine ofArt, Greenberg writes: popular magazines like Vogue and The New York Times Magazine. 32 With this final phase in Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock, after the death of the artist in There is, in my opinion, a definitely American trend in contemporary 1956 but most obvious after 1959, this artwriter was increasingly regarded as art, one that promises to become an original contribution to the being equally important as the subjects of his discussion. In Artwriting, David mainstream and not merely a local inflection of something developed Carrier comments on this when he observes that "Greenberg gained a great abroadY reputation in part because his theory of modernism was elegant, but also because his value judgments became generally accepted.'r33 After 1960, many of Greenberg could better convince us of Pollock's significant status if he placed him in an equally significant location for art. We might understand this thrust in Greenberg's artwriting as the establishment of a convincing setting for his 28 Clement Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting," Partisan Review XXII: 2 (Spring 1955): narrative. 186. 29 Later, in 1955, Greenberg continues his association of Pollock with Clement Greenberg, '"American-Type' Painting," Partisan Review XXII: 2: (Spring 1955): 196. 'Americaness' in his "'American-Type' Painting" essay, which appeared in the 3° Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) 228- 229. Partisan Review. By stating that Pollock's art "can be taken as a fulfillment of 31 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) vii. 32 Clement Greenberg, "The Jackson Pollock Market Soars," The New York Times Magazine (April 16, 1961): 42-43, 132 and 135; Clement Greenberg, "Jackson Pollock: 'Inspiration, Vision, Intuitive Decision'," Vogue 149: 7 (April!, 1967): 158-161; and Clement Greenberg,

26 "Where is the Avant-Garde?" Vogue 149: 10 (June 1967): 112-113 and 167. Clement Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism," Partisan Review XV: 3 (March 1948): 369. 33 David Carrier, Artwriting 35. 27 Clement Greenberg, The Magazine ofArt42: 3 (March 1949): 92. 132 133 "' Greenberg's writings include a brief biography of Greenberg on the first page of appears as a blue-jean bohemian poised on the brink of what promises to be a the article, therefore serving to highlight the importance of the author, and great artistic thought. Rosalind Krauss argues that the "hunkered down" action in consequently his arguments as well. 34 One article entitled "The Case for Abstract photographs such as this contributed to the 'sublimation' of Pollock, as she says Art," boasts a full page photograph of Greenberg in the typical hand-on-head that: tight shot that attempts to portray an image of genius that is similar to the many The photographs had placed him on the road, like Kerouac, clenching photographs of Picasso from this time. 35 Greenberg, having held both a personal his face into the tight fist of beat refusal, making an art of violence, and professional relationship with Pollock and his peers, was a living part of this of 'howl'. Clem's mission was to lift him above those pictures, just as moment of art history that had begun to command the respect of the public and it was to lift the paintings Pollock made from off the ground where the art market. As a result, Greenberg's opinions of Pollock, or representations in he'd made them, and onto the wall. Because it was only on the wall artwriting, had become the authority. This is a classic example of his story that they joined themselves to tradition, to culture, to convention.39 becoming history. With the passage of time - Pollock becoming a part of history and the Krauss' observation of Greenberg's "mission" is keen, but even though Greenberg rise of artistic movements like Pop art - Abstract Expressionism began to be sought to raise Pollock up from these pictures, as Krauss suggests, there is also spoken of in the past tense and the artwriting of Greenberg on Pollock clearly truth in suggesting that Greenberg supported such pictures as they began to take on a different nature. One of Greenberg's first pieces of artwriting complimented his narrative strategy. This image of the "hunkered down" artist in on Pollock after the artist's death appears in the Evergreen Reviews third issue isolation that appeared on the cover of the Evergreen Review does correspond of 1957.36 Quite straight forward in content, this article is simply a biography of with Greenberg's early artwriting on Pollock, which romanticized the struggling Pollock and the lack of the usual Greenbergian enthusiasm makes it read like a and isolated avant-garde artist of America. It is also interesting that this eulogy. What is notable about this particular piece of artwriting is that four photograph appeared with one of Greenberg's first examples of artwriting on photographs of Pollock by Hans Namuth immediately follow itY In the first Pollock after his death, since this slim, clean-shaven Pollock was far from the photo, one can almost hear Namuth asking Pollock to place his hand to his head scruffy overweight Pollock that died drunk at the wheel. The greatness of Pollock for the shot. The reader can imagine the intellectual side of Pollock whilst having was perhaps thought by Greenberg to be better perpetuated through a romantic a look at his hands - the artist's primary tools. The other photographs include a photograph from the glory days of Pollock's life than by an honest representation typical shot of the artist's messy studio, the ever-popular Pollock action shot, and of his lackluster appearance just before his death. This photograph acted to finally a relatively candid shot of the artist posed in front of a finished canvas. preserve the vitality of Pollock's mid-career years; it contributed to the The most evocative photograph of Pollock in this issue of the Evergreen Review idealization of Pollock - no longer the contemporary artist, but now the art appears on the cover [Figure 1].38 Set against an old American Ford, Pollock historical legend. Greenberg's 1959 ARTnews article entitled "New York Painting Only Yesterday" is perhaps the first essay in which this artwriter includes personal 34 Clement Greenberg, "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name," EncounterXIX:6 (December 1962): 67. 35 Clement Greenberg, "The Case for Abstract Art," Saturday Evening Post (August 1, 1959):19. 36 Clement Greenberg, "Jackson Pollock," Evergreen Review!: 3 (1957): 95. 39 37 Hans Namuth, "Four Photographs of Jackson Pollock," Evergreen Review 1: 3 (1957): 96. Rosalind Krauss, "Greenberg on Pollock," Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2"d 38 Hans Namuth, Photograph of Jackson Pollock, Evergreen Review 1: 3 (1957): cover. Edition, ed. Francis Frascina (London: Routledge, 2000) 362. 134 135 '1111' for his modernist art narrative. In order to represent Pollock's work within the anecdotes within his narrative. 40 Looking back, and accounting for the rise of minds of readers who had likely never seen his art before, Greenberg was American art within the international art world, Greenberg constructs an art obliged to relate Pollock's art to that of more well-known artists. This device in historical narrative that relies largely on his personal experience of the New York Greenberg's narrative proved helpful in the challenge of representing the art scene. In a 1961 article entitled "The Jackson Pollock Market Soars," abstract art of Pollock, which does not lend itself easily to traditional ekphrasis. Greenberg relies on his personal experiences with Pollock to dispel the many These sorts of artistic analogies strengthened Greenberg's definition of myths that had begun to build up after Pollock's unfortunately stereotypical Modernism. With the second phase of Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock, his brief celebrity death. 41 Yet is this approach in Greenberg's artwriting anything new? critical reviews gave way to lengthier essays. Having already developed his lead Were not all of Greenberg's Pollock-narratives founded on his own personal take character, these essays of the late 1940s and 1950s sought to develop Pollock's of the artist? Although Greenberg shows much more candour in his later role within Greenberg's narrative. Running parallel to these essays, and artwriting on Pollock, his narratives are fundamentally couched on his perception of Pollock as a great artist. Greenberg's narrative constructions were strategized consequently adding importance to Greenberg's theories on American art, was the growth of a new American ideology that encouraged a 'free' art to support to best represent Pollock in the way that he saw the artist - as the greatest painter since Mir6. Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock during the 1960s provided a the American image within Cold War politics. With the ideologies of Abstract much more exhaustive analysis of Pollock's work than ever before, and it is Expressionism coinciding with America's new ideologies, Greenberg's Word soon perhaps because Greenberg felt a greater freedom to include his value became the authority and eventually the consensus. By the 1960s, Greenberg's judgments as facts since his opinion had become the consensus. 42 By the late artwriting on Pollock appeared more historical and began to enter into 1960s, Greenberg had instilled, in every person interested in twentieth-century mainstream publications like Vogue. During this third phase of Greenberg's art, a basic Greenbergian modernist vocabulary. By this time, Greenberg's artwriting, he also takes the time to analyze Pollock's art more extensively than observations on Pollock had essentially become the Word. ever before, which is rare, as he is known for his brevity. Personal anecdotes This overview of Greenberg's artwriting on Pollock has shown that also enter his artwriting as his life amounts to historical evidence due to his close personal ties with the New York art scene. 43 Greenberg promoted Pollock's art as representing a self-consciousness of its In a 1967 issue of Attforum Greenberg wrote, in an appropriately titled place within an art historical lineage, and that this artwriter was equally aware of article "Complaints of an Art Critic," that: the narrative systems within his own masterful representations in text. Faced with the challenge of representing the non-representational in his critical Of all the imputations to which this art critic has been exposed, the artwriting, Greenberg shaped his narrative in accordance with that which best one he minds most is that esthetic judgments go according to a facilitated his modernist stance. His early artwriting on Pollock, within his reviews position or "line"... But there is also a general reluctance, or even for The Nation, may be understood as Greenberg's development of a protagonist inability, to read closely, and an equally general tendency to assign mot~ves. 44

4° Clement Greenberg, "New York Painting Only Yesterday," ARTnews. 57: 9 (January 1959): 26-29. ' 41 Cl~ment Greenberg, "The Jackson Pollock Market Soars," The New York Times Magazine (Apnl 16, 1961): 42-43, 132 and 135. 42 Compare Cleme~t Greenberg, "Jackson Pollock: 'Inspiration, Vision, Intuitive Decision'," Vog~e 149: 7 (Apnl 1, 1967): 158-161 to Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation 162: 15 43 David Carrier, Artwriting 35. (Apnl 1946): 444-445, which admits, "it is precisely because I am, in general, still learning 44 Clement Greenberg, "Complaints of an Art Critic," Artforum (October 1967): 38. from Pollock that I hesitate to attempt a more thorough analysis of his art" (445). 136 137 v Perhaps the word 'motive' is too assuming. Yet there is no doubt that Greenberg was faced with narrative necessities. His artwriting on Pollock demanded a narrative that was relevant and convincing in terms of his espousal of the artist as well as his ideas on Modernism. Thus, Greenberg's need to produce a sound piece of artwriting, which would best explicate the art that he admired, is what has in turn benefited the reputation of Jackson Pollock and informed our acceptance of him.

~~Figure 1: Jackson Pollock, Hans Namuth, 1957.~~

~~138 .... 139 Constructions of Masculinity in Interior Design: The Bachelor Pad and its Antecedents~~

~~Claire Hurtig~~

Traditionally Identified with the public realm of work, the male is less typically discussed as a consumer in the context of interior design and decoration, a role usually designated to females or men seen as effeminate and/or homosexual. The "bachelor pad" of the fifties and sixties is one place where the conscious construction of an overtly masculine space is readily apparent. The bachelor apartment is initially informed by the "masculine" rooms of the house identifiable in the middle-class homes of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, spaces which embody the notion of the home as a sanctified refuge created by the wife in order to succor the weary male after his daily immersion in the world of work. In the mid-twentieth century, the inhabitant transforms into an unmarried man intent on displaying his virility, personality, and individuality as extensions of his territory. In concert with this, the interior design of the bachelor apartment comes to incorporate myriad technological components and the tendency towards a minimum of ornamentation reaches its apex with the use of modernistic furnishings and decor. Playboy magazine's plans of idealized bachelor apartments as well as depictions of the bachelor pad in feature films, such as that of the Casanova Brad Allen in the film Pillow Talk (1959), illustrate the era's vision of the ideal masculine interior. In these later examples, the space occupied by the male is transformed from a cozy cloister into a rationalized den of seduction and a stage for the self-conscious performance of ideal masculinity. then be especially her business to add beauty to the order which she During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the home, traditionally has created?5 associated with the female, was idealized as a healthy and welcoming refuge from the external, male-identified world of work. The increasing toll of the Falke here reiterates the notion that the domestic space occupied by the male stresses of the workplace in modern capitalist society was apparent by the end of was required to be a calm and restful place. the nineteenth century in the diagnosis of many hommes d'affaires, as well as The domestic spaces usually designated for men in the late nineteenth some women, with neurasthenia, a medical condition tantamount to complete century middle class home were those rooms which were perceived as being nervous exhaustion, first classified in the 1860s. 1 This illness was seen as allied with ideas of "the masculine," most commonly the library or study and the particularly affecting middle- and upper-class "brain workers" and businessmen; dining room. Contemporary home decoration guides offer information as to the its possible remedies included hydrotherapy and trips to the country, and female form of masculinity ideally projected by these rooms: in his household furnishing sufferers were advised to restrict themselves to the calm of their domestic world. guide of 1839, J. C. Loudon suggests "severe" colours for the library and "grave" What was recommended above all, however, was that the businessman's home colours for the dining room, 6 Arrowsmith's The Paper Hanger's and Upholsterer's be transformed into a "restful domestic environment within the city.''2 The Guide (1854) asserts that in the dining room "few ornaments [are] requisite."7 In bourgeois businessman needed a retreat from the stresses of the office, a his A Gentleman's Town House of 1864 Kerr advises that furnishings in the private place where he could relax and regain his strength in order to re-emerge dining room be "massive and simple" and convey a "masculine importance"8 and the next day to successfully fulfill his role as a producer of money and provider that the library be arranged and decorated in a "lofty and serious manner."9 for his family. This oasis of calm would not, however, be constructed by the Typical materials used in the dining room included dark mahogany as the husband himself but by his faithful housewife, an "angel of the house"3 whose preferred wood, black marble for the chimney piece, heavy cloth curtains, and a role it was to ensure that the home provide a serenity which would allow her Persian carpet. 10 The more restrained image preferred for the male interior is husband to forget his worldly cares, and thereby facilitate his mental also evident in the suggestion made by Lady Barker in Bedroom and Boudoir rehabilitation. 4 This idea is supported by Jacob von Falke in his Art in the House (1878) that a boy's room should contain merely "bare boards with only a rug to of 1879, in which he states that when the husband: stand on at the bedside and fireplace," while a girl should be encouraged to collect "tasteful little odds and ends of ornamental work."11 As late as 1948 Emily returns home tired with work and in need of recreation, he longs for quiet enjoyment, and takes pleasure in the home which his wife has Post states in her The Personality of a House that "every normal man should be made comfortable and attractive ... She is the mistress of the house in repelled by any suggestion of effeminacy [in his interior decoration]" and uses which she rules, and which she orders like a queen. Should it not the metaphor of "the display room of a cement company" to represent the worst

5 Jacob von Falke, Art in the House (1879). Quoted in Robinson 102. 6 Juliet Kinchin, "The Drawing Room", The Scottish Home, ed. Annette Carruthers (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 199_6) 1?5. . . . 7 1 Joyce Henri Robinson, '"Hi Honey, I'm Home': Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and Joanna Banham, Sally MacDonald, and Julia Porter, Vtctonan Intenor Des1gn (London. the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic," Not At Home, ed. Christopher Reed Cassell, 1991) 36. 8 Banham, Macdonald, and Porter 35. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996) 100. 9 2 Banham, Macdonald, and Porter 37. . Robinson 101. 10 3 John Ruskin, "Of Queen's Gardens," Sesame and Lilies(New York: 1887) 99-100. Quoted Ian Gow, "The Dining Room," The Scottish Home, ed. Annette Carruthers (Edmburgh: in Robinson 102. National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 1996) 140. 11 4 Robinson 102. Lady Barker, The Bedroom and Boudoir(London: MacMillan and Co., 1878) 13-14. 142 .... 143 With My Fair Lady, the viewer sees into the home of Henry Higgins, a extreme of anti-decorativeness to which a male's interior decoration might linguist and "confirmed old bachelor ... [who is] likely to remain [single]."16 The strayY majority of the film takes place in the study of his London town house, where The persistent awareness of such spaces as being characteristically Higgins does his work but where he also seems to engage in leisure activities, as inhabited by men is evident in films from the 1950s and 1960s. Two such is indicated by the presence of a piano and two couches. When he claims that he examples are Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959) and George Cukor's My Fair "prefers to spend his evenings in the quiet of his room,"17 it can be assumed that Lady (1964). Both of these films, with lead characters as bachelors, present a he means this space, for we never see him relaxing anywhere else, nor are we typical view of the single man's domain. In Some Like it Ho~ Joe (Tony Curtis) ever shown his bedroom. masquerades as a rich millionaire in order to seduce Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), a musician. Joe borrows the yacht of a rich bachelor and uses this as the place The entire room is composed of dark wooden furniture such as Higgins' where he will seduce Sugar. She is immediately impressed by the main sitting large, prominent desk, and a winding wooden staircase gives access to a second room; Joe replies that "it's all right for a bachelor."13 With its dark wood paneling floor composed of a seemingly endless wall of wooden shelves brimming with and furniture and its vast display of sports trophies, it fits into the typical mold of leatherbound volumes. Other walls are covered by wood paneling and a dark the 'masculine' interior. The large, mounted fish which dominates one wall and wallpaper with a leaf design. The chairs and sofas are made of wood and which Sugar notices at once refers to the male's leisure activities and more leather, and the brass gramophones and other complicated, seemingly basically to the well-known theme of 'man the hunter', which underscores his technologically-advanced objects which Higgins uses in his work are scattered active role and refers back to his role as an ensnarer of women. Sugar's about the room. Heavy curtains adorn the large windows and brass implements rest by the fireplace; the artwork includes a dark, gilt-framed portrait of a man seduction is facilitated by the use of the bar situated beneath the mounted fish I which is always at the ready with glasses and various bottles of alcohol displayed and a nighttime river landscape as well as a painting of a duck, which is prominently. Joe uses a shining carving knife to serve meat that has already reminiscent of the dead fish in the bachelor's room in Some Like it Hot and can been prepared, an action which reiterates his active role as pursuer and therefore be seen, in addition to the leather on the chairs and books, as hearkens back to the role of the male in the similarly-decorated dining room of representing Higgins' 'hunter' aspect. past eras. This, in addition, recalls the opinion of Mrs. Loftie, who suggests that This 'masculine' type of decoration is continued in the entranceway and hallway of the house, the only other parts of Higgins' home that we see. The "the best ornament for a dining room is a well-cooked dinner"14 and that of furnishing of this space, with its extensive wood paneling and wooden staircase, Edward Gregory, who comments that "the whole arrangement [of the dining wooden doors with brass fittings, brown and mustard-coloured wallpaper, and room] smacks of sirloin of beef, Yorkshire pudding, cabbage, potato and wooden grandfather clock, follows the colour scheme and decor of Higgins' dumpling."15 study. These decorative choices, unified throughout Higgins' home, clearly express the "lofty and serious manner" required of such "room[s] of much consequence... [which must be] grave rather than gay" according to

12 George Wagner, "The Lair of the Bachelor," Architecture and Feminism, ed. Debra Coleman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) 196. 13 Some Like it Hot Dir. Billy Wilder. MGM Films, 1959. 16 My Fair Lady. Dir. George Cukor. Paramount Films, 1964. ~: W.J. Loftie, The Dining Room (London: 1878). Quoted in Gow 125. 17 My Fair Lady 1964. Edward Gregory, The Art and Craft of Home-Making (London: H. Jenkins Ltd., 1925) 16. 144 145 v Arrowsmith, 18 and follow the directives offered for the furnishing of male spaces nursery, dreamed up by women, for women and as if males did not exist as males. 20 mentioned earlier. In direct opposition to these interiors lay 'feminine' decoration, usually Wylie is clearly referring to the 'masculine' spaces of Higgins' era. This sense of evident in drawing rooms of the era and typified by that of Higgins' mother, emasculation to which he refers is addressed, in the 1950s and 1960s, by the pictured briefly near the conclusion of the film. It is completely white, very airy, creation of spaces devoted specifically to males. Though the male was and still is and uses a light blue as the accenting colour instead of the greens or mustards to a certain extent identified with the public and the outdoors, Playboy magazine, which offset the dark wood in Higgins' own home. The white and light blue established in 1953, situated him in the setting of the domestic interior from the furnishings are soft-looking and plush instead of leather-covered and sturdy, and beginning. Its first issue made this clear with a forthright proclamation: they contain more curved lines in their design, which marks them as 'feminine'. One reason for which Higgins wishes to remain a bachelor is that his Most of today's magazines for men spend all their time out-of-doors private and 'masculine' space is very dear to him. He proclaims in song that if thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing about in fast-flowing you streams. We'll be out there too, occasionally, but we don't mind telling you in advance- we plan [on] spending most of our time inside. Let a woman in your life ... your serenity is through She71 redecorate your home from the cellar to the dome We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors Then go on to the enthralling fun of overhauling yo1P d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, This comment indicates Higgins' awareness of the marginalization of men in sex. 21 terms of their contribution to the arrangement of the domestic interior, an issue which continues to be central when examining the bachelor pad of the 1950s Playboys positioning of the male within the home was a clear reaction to the and 1960s. This concept is illustrated in an article which appeared in Playboy perceived appropriation of domestic spaces from men by women highlighted in magazine dramatically entitled "The Womanization of America" in which author Wylie's article. Phillip Wylie complains of the conversion of "normal homes" into "she-warrens" This dissatisfaction with the dominance of women as the primary and the lack of domestic space uniquely devoted to the male's interests. Wylie decision-makers in terms of the home's arrangement and aesthetics is addressed argues that in "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment", a 1956 article accompanied by extensive plans and illustrations [Figure 1]. Described in the introduction as "a man's world Where once man had had a den, maybe a library, a cellar poolroom, which fits your moods and desires... a tasteful, gracious setting for an urbane his own dressing room, he now found himself in a split level pastel creation ... All he knew was that the beloved old place now looked like a candy box without even an attic for his skis, his humidor or hunting prints ... the American home, in short, is becoming a boudoir-kitchen-

18 Arrowsmith, The Paper Hanger's and Upholsterer's Guide (1854). Quoted in Banham et 20 al. 37. Wagner 195. 19 My Fair Lady 1964. 21 Wagner 198. 146 .... 147 personality,"22 the apartment provides one image of a candidate for a 1950s This emphasis on advanced technology continues in the kitchen, where 27 male's fantasy apartment. there is an "ultrasonic dishwasher" which provides "ultraviolet sterilization" as 28 The open plan of the Playboy apartment, derived from Modernist well as a "touch-cool induction heating stove" and a glass-domed oven with an prototypes such as Gerrit Rietveld's Schroeder House of 1924, divorces the adjustable grill which "will roast, broil, or barbecue with the luscious viands in 29 bachelor apartment from the traditional domestic context of the suburban home, tantalizing view." The display of the meat is part of the expository nature of the one of Wylie's "split level pastel creation[s]," which was typically divided into kitchen, which can be made open to the living room so that the bachelor may self-contained rooms devoted to specific uses. 23 The open plan allows the rooms cook in the presence of his guests and can "perform for an admiring audience 130 to be used for various purposes and, significantly, permits the bachelor to initiate while sharing in conversation.' It also hints at the underlying conception of the and/or continue his seduction of a female guest no matter where he is in the male as hunter, a theme brought up in the paintings which cover one wall of his apartment. Other elements of the apartment facilitate this goal, such as the bathroom which are said to be "reminiscent of the prehistoric drawings in the 131 "unusual flip-flop couch by M. Singer & Sons"24 as well as the myriad caves of Lascaux.' These images recall those of the mounted fish in the technologically advanced components, present in every room and repeatedly apartment in Some Like it Hot and the painting of the duck in My Fair Lady and referred to in the article. In the cabinet in the living room, which conveniently link the inhabitant to his prehistoric counterpart and bastion of masculinity, that contains a bar, there is also an on-off switch for the telephone in order to avoid well-established archetype of 'man the hunter'. Also designating the penthouse the "shatter[ing] of the spell being woven" on a woman by the interruption of "a as masculine are the furnishings, made primarily of wood or metal, such as the chatty call from the date of the night before.''25 Noguchi rocking stools of metal and hardwood, or the "rugged" kitchen stool constructed from a tractor seat. 32

More complex is the bachelor's bed, which contains within its These themes appear again in the Playboy Weekend Hideaway of 1959, headboard silent mercury switches and a rheostat that control every which also makes use of the Lascaux-esque mural and a control panel at the light in the place and can subtly dim the bedroom lighting to just the bedside table,33 and in the Duplex Penthouse of 1970, where "panels that open right romantic level ... switches which control the circuits for front door by remote control...reveal the latest in video and audio equipage."34 Finally, and window terrace locks .... push buttons to draw the continuous, Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion of the late 1950s, featured in a 1959 issue of heavy, pure-linen, lined draperies on sail track .... built-in speakers fed Playboy, includes large rooms with heavy beams and dark paneling, which recall by the remotely-controlled hi-fi and radio ... telephone, with on-off early 'masculine'-room prototypes, and his bedroom decor focuses on his huge, switch for the bell, and miscellaneous bed-time items. 26 round, vibrating bed which has various controls. 35

27 22 "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment, A High Handsome Haven for the Bachelor in Town," "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 62. 28 Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Sanders (New York: Princeton Architectural "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 62. Press, 1996) 54-67. 29 "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 60. 30 23 Steven Cohan, "So Functional for its Purposes: Rock Hudson's Bachelor Apartment in "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 62. 31 Pillow Talk," Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Sanders (New York: Princeton "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 57 & 67. Architectural Press, 1996) 30. 32 "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 60. 33 24 "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 59. Wagner 204-205. 34 25 "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 62. Wagner 210. 35 26 "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 65. Sanders 32. 148 , 149 Another significant feature of the Playboy apartment is that it "brings magazine, the Bachelor's Town House, also features an exposed fieldstone 41 back the dining room - done away with in many another modern apartment"36 wall, and the Penthouse Apartment contains a brick wall as well as a stone thereby distancing itself from other contemporary spaces and reintroducing a hearth. A noticeable winding metal staircase which leads up to his bedroom historically "masculine" room back into the domestic interior. In addition, the reminds us of the presence of this intimate space even though we do not see it Playboy apartment's study typifies masculinity just as much as its late when downstairs. The walls of the apartment are coated in understated colours nineteenth-century counterparts did; described as the "sanctum sanctorum, such as grey and brown, and one wall prominently features a long bare wooden where women are seldom invited,"37 this exclusively male-occupied room shelving unit full of books. There are metal lamps, and dark, mainly abstract features floor-to-ceiling bookcases, an "imposing ... man-size desk," and a "lord paintings adorn two of the walls. Grey curtains hang by the windows, and a tray of-the-domain chair reserved for [the bachelor] alone."38 The exclusivity of with alcoholic beverages and glasses, the usual tool of seduction, as in Some access to this room recalls the library of the Victorian house, which was the Like it Hot and "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment", is always at the ready by the man's "private chapel."39 Finally, sitting on the desk of the study, a globe of the couch. world, lit from within, symbolizes the male's link to the outside world as well as Dominating half of the main room is the piano where Brad does his his preference for the latest in technological toys. 40 work of songwriting and, incidentally, his work of seduction, as each day and The film Pillow Talk (1959) presents a masculine interior akin to that night he sings different dates the same song with their particular name inserted. depicted in Playboy magazine in that it also serves as a tool in the seduction of His bedroom is again grey and contains a large bed on which he lays to seduce women. Its inhabitant is Brad Allen (Rock Hudson), a musician with a robust Jan over the phone. We never actually see his kitchen; indeed, it is as if it does appetite for female companionship. His home is replete with mechanical not even exist. gadgetry: Brad can lock the door, dim the lights, and put on a record of romantic Important differences can be seen when comparing Brad's flat to Jan's music all with the flick of one switch. Another switch opens his sofa up into a apartment, which is brightly painted in pinks and yellows, with large windows bed, a more advanced version of the convertible sofa in the Playboy penthouse. letting in a lot of light. She has chairs which resemble the curvilinear "tous-les His telephone, through which he shares a party line with Jan Morrow (Doris LouiS' style seen in the chiefly female space of the late nineteenth-century Day), and with whom he eventually falls in love, is his main tool of seduction, drawing room, and a figurative painting of fruit is visible. Unlike Brad, Jan spends and his constant occupation of the telephone line, flirting with women, is the a significant amount of time in her brightly-lit kitchen, which features a bright source of much aggravation for Jan. pink countertop, and she works outside the home, so her apartment functions as 42 The decoration of the apartment also serves to underscore Brad's a primarily domestic space. There is a large shelving unit which serves as a masculinity. One wall is made of exposed brick, its rough materials a reference to room divider between the living and dining rooms, but it is mainly transparent the exterior world and the supposed "coarseness" of masculinity,. as in Emily and instead of books it contains vases and other decorative items. The furniture Post's allusion to a cement company display room. A later design by Playboy is lightly coloured and plush, as in her white couch and her white bed with pale yellow blankets.

36 Sanders 62. 37 Sanders 67. 38 Sanders 67. 41 Wagner 207. 39 Quoted in Geoffrey Beard, The English House Interior(London: 1991) 245. 42 Cohan 36. 40 "Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 67. 150 151 y something 'abnormal' about the inhabitant. Such 'feminine' details may have The differences between these two interiors clearly reflect opposing identified him as homosexual, a quality seen as diametrically opposed to perceptions of 'maleness' and 'femaleness'. The use of dark colours, colder masculinity and therefore associated with the feminine. details reminiscent of the public world, such as the exposed brick and metal, and The homophobia characteristic of American society at this time was one the emphasis on work, as in Brad's piano and his collection of books, draw on of the agents propelling the self-conscious displays of masculinity evident in the previous elements of male interiors and express traditionally 'male' values. New male interior. This is exemplified in the technological gadgetry and the open to this interior and that of the Playboy interiors is an emphasis on sexuality, plans of the Pillow Talk apartment and Playboys bachelor pads, which showcase broadening the male's identification as hunter to that of a seducer of members of the opposite sex. Spaces such as Brad's offer an arena in which the inhabitant the constant display of the single male's seductive (and other) talents as well as 46 can display his virility - something very significant for an unmarried man who, evoking the themes of power and control. Interestingly, this theme also during that era, had to constantly reassert his heterosexuality in order to be seen extends to the personal life of Rock Hudson, the actor who plays Brad in Pillow as normal.43 Jan's characterization of Brad's apartment as a "spider's web" is Talk, who was himself a closeted homosexual and whose brief marriage to indeed appropriate. actress Phyllis Gates was an attempt to hide this from the public. In a 1954 Jan's interior decoration is mostly up to date, as in her open plan article detailing the lifestyle of this well-known Hollywood bachelor, pains are kitchen-living-dining room and streamlined food preparation area, but details taken to describe Hudson's own technologically-advanced home: such as her decorative items, her patterned curtains, her cushioned furniture, and her antique-style chairs align her feminine taste with less advanced Push a button in Rock's house and strange things happen - stoves cook, coffee perks, garbage dispenses, glass walls slide, garage doors conventions. The male domain of the playboy, in contrast, is minimalistic, uses open, hidden lights come on, and music floods all the rooms. 47 bare materials such as wood, stone, and metal, and overflows with sophisticated technological devices. This emphasis on basic materials and streamlined design Another article of 1955 states that the "usually voluble" Hudson "clams up [when derives from movements such as Design Reform and the British Arts and Crafts I asked] about dates, [and] switches conversation to his new house!"48 These real which stressed simplicity and truth to materials, and the later Modernists' life parallels clearly illustrate the extent to which a man might use such identification of good design with the machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier and conspicuous and technologically-advanced gadgetry to guard against suspicions others, who idealized the home as "a machine for living in.'A<~ These movements regarding his sexuality and, therefore, his normalcy and social acceptability. all saw good design as being inherently masculine and were clearly opposed to It is clear that the bachelor apartments represented in films such as the perceived tendency of females to employ too much ornament or to put an Pillow Talk, Some Like It Hot, and My Fair Lady as well as Playboy magazine's unmanageable amount of furniture into rooms, as in the classic crowded late idealized projections of the bachelor pad offer indications of the type of nineteenth-century drawing room. Indeed, the conclusion of the Playboy masculinity being constructed by the arrangement and decoration of these magazine article celebrates the "complete absence of bric-a-brac, patterned spaces. The emphasis on technology, which is linked to masculinity and fabrics, pleats and ruffles,"45 unacceptable design elements which were seen as characteristically feminine and the presence of which may have indicated 46 Sanders 15. 47 Liza Wilson, "How a Hollywood Bachelor Lives," American Week/y(May 23, 1954) 13. 43 Quoted in Cohan, So Functional for its Purposes40. Cohan 29-30. 48 44 Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris: Les Editions 1927) 42. Pauline Swanson Townsend, "Bachelor Daze", Photop!ay(May 1955) 53. Quoted in 45 So Functional for its Purposes40. " Playboy's Penthouse Apartment" 67. ' Cohan, 152 • 153 underscores the theme of male control and dominance, as well as the spare, modernistic style of the layout and decoration and the materials and design of the components, reveal a masculine identity concerned very much with showmanship and the self-conscious projection of his individuality and masculinity. Because of this need, these spaces were above all designed in the service of the seduction and ensnarement of women. The bachelor pad evolved beyond the compartmentalized pockets of masculinity within the female-oriented realm of the home and altered the function of the man's private space from one of rest and recuperation to one which combined work, play, and interaction with the opposite sex. Its design and decoration embody stereotypically masculine ideals and reveal the single male's priority of making his personality and sexuality clear by means of expressing it symbolically within the domestic interior.

~~Figure 1: Bedroom Detail of the Playboy Penthouse Apartment, 1956.~~

~~154 .... 155~~