This is Chapter Three of NORMAN BRYSON's : Word and Image, French Painting of the Ancien Regime. (1983). Text in Yellow are quotes from the author, Text in Orange are quotes from others.
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Watteau; The Embarkation for Cythera (detail), 1717
WATTEAU and REVERIE
Poussin, Ecstasy of St. Paul, 1649-50
LeBrun's committment to the discursive image always tended towards extremism. In his Discourse on Poussin 's Saint Paul in Ecstasy, we find him converting into allegory a painting that does not seem allegorical at all. Of the three angels who appear with the Saint, the first, LeBrun claims, is to be read as effective or total grace, the second as aiding or intervening grace, and the third as elective grace; the sinking leg of the saint represents his sin, while the green robe he wears signifies his hope of raising himself above sin through works, and his red mantle signifies his ardent charity.
This painting may not seem allegorical, but it does feel literary. This is not Paul of Taurus, the Jewish tentmaker who traveled throughout the eastern Mediterranean preaching the gospel. This is the St. Paul who wrote books of scripture and lives on within their pages -- and this painting might serve as an illumination for one of them. Regretfully, (or more like shamefully) the Louvre has decided not to offer high resolution images on its website - so not much can be said about this work.
Such adventurous exegesis was not without its critics. Already within the Academie, the Conference sur L''Expression met with some resistance: LeBrun was accused of having plagiarised his ideas from medicine - 'on a pretendu qu'il avait tire les idees de l'illustre M. de la Chambre'; at the Discourse on Saint Paul , there were 'des personnes . .. qui parlerent de cet ouvrage diversement'; and even Felibien, the spokesman for the earliest ideals of the Academie, rejecting LeBrun's complex systematisations, wrote that 'for the movements of the body engendered by the passions of the Soul, the painter can learn of them in no better way than by consulting nature'. Actual assault on the discursive image comes from dangerous opponents: from Pierre Mignard, LeBrun's lifelong rival, who rather than take second place to LeBrun refused to join the Academie at all, and who became its Director in 1693 once LeBrun had fallen from political favour; and from Roger de Piles, leader of the ascendant rubeniste party, and spokesman for a new and rapidly developing anti-academic tas te. J Mignard's first objection was that pursuit of the discursive image had led LeBrun into impersonality: since LeBrun's work was literary and not painterly, it was natural that he should wish to delegate the execution of his paintings to assistants; but then they were no longer by LeBrun (the contrast here was with Mignard 's own enormous but never delegated project of decoration in the cupola at Saint-Cloud). Mignard next objected that LeBrun's allegories were both tedious and obscure: 'Having carefully read your pamphlets,' Mignard writes, 'one finds nothing in your work corresponding to what is written. '
Pierre Mignard, "Christ and the Woman of Samaria" , 1681
Mignard, cupola of Val-de-Grace, 1663
It's interesting that one academician of that time would accuse another of "work that was literary and not painterly". I wish that Bryson had shared the exact quote. It's an especially fascinating critique since Mignard's work appears no less literary than LeBrun's . He creates stages with actors, not paintings with a painterly life of their own. -- even if he was less concerned with allegorical figures.
The charge of obscurity is repeated by Roger de Piles: in his account of LeBrun he complains that 'his pictures were like so many enigmas, which the spectator would not give himself the trouble to unriddle'. Roger de Piles adds to this the charge of dogmatism- there are several ways, he maintains, and not just one way, of representing a particular passion; and the charge of artificiality - '[LeBrun] studied the passions with extraordinary application, as appears by the curious treatise he composed on them, which he adorned with demonstrative figures; nevertheless, even in this, he seems to have but one idea, and to be always the same, degenerating into habitude, or what we call manner. '
These quite reasonable objections from that time lead me to wonder whether LeBrun's system of expressions was used only by him - and whether his approach was marginal to the academy even if politics had placed him at the top.
The most effective theoretical attack on LeBrun's project arrives, however, obliquely, through the quarrel between rubenistes and poussinistes (which the rubenistes were eventually to win). The quarrel itself is too vast a subject to examine in detail here, and there is an important sense in which the quarrel is in any case irrelevant to the issue of the discursivity or figurality of the image. Even in his most vigorously rubeniste polemics, de Piles insists on the importance to painting of the parameter of expression. Evaluating the 'expressivity-level' of the Masters, he awarded LeBrun a score (he was a great believer in scores) that is just below Rubens and Raphael, and rather higher than Poussin. It is vital to his argument that Rubens be seen to succeed in expressions as in every other aspect of painting, and there is no question that expression is to be downgraded as a parameter, only that colour is to be upgraded. With respect to colour, Poussin's score is shockingly low. Yet obviously, if Rubens is to be elevated to equality with Raphael, success in colour must count for at least as much as success in expression, and this entails a reorganisation of priorities in which expression is effectively downgraded. The priorities of the Academie in 1667 can be tabulated, from the Discourses delivered by LeBrun, Bourdon and Philippe de Champaigne, as follows:
LeBrun
1 Disposition
2 Design and proportion
3 Expression of the passions
4 Perspective
Bourdon
1 Light
2 Composition
3 Proportion
4 Expressions
5 Colour
6 Harmony
Philippe de Champaigne
1 Composition
2 Grouping
3 Expression
4 color and chiaroscuro
Noting that none them list drawing, anatomy, or anything like innovation.
Also noting that none of these criteria could be called spiritual - and don't seem to relate to either Classical or Christian ideals. This was apparently the kind of art school that focused on a harmonious composition and figurative expression. Surprisingly, only one includes perspective.
For LeBrun, colour is not a consideration at all; but for those who do admit its importance, colour and expression are adjacent priorities, so that if rubeniste taste gains a following, expression will be demoted. The triumph of the rubenistes entails an immediate adjustment within the figural and discursoive components of the painterly sign, with the discursive in full retreat.
Yet the attack is wider than this, for it threatens the whole metaphysical foundation of the painterly sign as LeBrun had conceived it. 'Reason tells us that the figure is in the objects; only a vague sentiment tells us that it is coloured.' That is Descartes' position on colour, and LeBrun gives it the usual support he grants to Cartesian thinking. He sees colour as a parasitic quality: 'if the merit of something is the greater, the less it depends on another thing foreign to it; it follows that the merit of design (dessin) is infinitely above that of colour'. LeBrun's argument is that design must be a logically superior category, since there can be design without colour, but there cannot be colour without design. Whether this is true is of course, debatable; certainly de Piles disagreed, insisting that in nature colour and light are inseparable. LeBrun's determined philosophical tone is significant. It tells us that the issue of colour directly concerns his policy of Cartesian painting. Colour is not a quality of mind or reason, and is in fact unnecessary to reason's perception of the world, which operates quite efficiently in monochrome. Even loftier is this:
It must be considered that colour in painting cannot produce any hue or tint that does not derive from the actual material which supports the colour, for one would not know how to make green with a red pigment, nor blue with a yellow. For this reason it must be said that colour depends entirely on matter, and, as a result, is less noble than design, which comes directly from the spirit. '
Yes - specific mineral or biological pigments are necessary for color - but aren't the properties of paint, brush, and canvas necessary for design ? (evidentially not for LeBrun who, like the conceptual artists of today, hired others to execute his paintings)
Colour is degrading to the image because of its materiality, and painting ought to transcend its material base - its ignobly non-spiritual signifier. The rubeniste challenge threatens the whole Cartesian conception of the painterly sign. LeBrun's dependence on Descartes has naturally been the subject of much discussion .. , It is rare to find so close a connection between painting and philosophy, and for once the connections the art historian can make between the two do not have to be mysterious or 'epistemic'. LeBrun could hardly be more obvious in his reliance on Descartes' work: whole sections of the Traite sur les passions de l 'a me are transcribed almost verbatim into the Conference sur ['expression, and it is to Descartes that we owe not only LeBrun's classification of the passions, but in some instances the actual signs by which the passions are to be recognised. Yet the whole idea of a Cartesian painting is strange, because strictly speaking it cannot exist. In dualism, the self is no longer resident in the physical universe; yet all that painting can represent is the world of extension where the self precisely no longer resides. The ego, like the deity, cannot be represented; only at the pineal does the ego penetrate the physical world, and LeBrun's fascination with dissections of the brain proves that he was well aware of this reduction of the painter's scope .
The rationalization of spirituality is an ongoing project in the modern secular world - to be either dutifully joined or passionately rejected. It's not especially rational or spiritual -- and Descartes' pineal gland was an especially kooky notion.
But in another sense Cartesian dualism very obligingly serves LeBrun's idea of the mission of the Academie to reform painting in France. One of the axioms of the reform is that in the grand style, the physical surface presented by the universe must be transcended: to copy that surface is servility, the province of the little masters, mere metier. LeBrun and Felibien took from Poussin the vision of a French painting that would discard the outward encumbrance of matter, and rise beyond it into a province exclusively de l'esprit. In perfect form, this painting would not be physical at all, but the communication of ideas from one consciousness to another across an image that is altogether transparent; the image as a channel of transmission with minimal redundancy or 'noise', much like the Word as understood by the Grammar of Port Royal. In the absence of such a utopian possibility, the channel must descend to physical signs, but in so far as these directly correspond to ideas, pure transmission is still maintained.
LeBrun's dream to "discard the outward encumbrance of matter" would eventually be realized in the proliferation of conceptual art by the art academies of today.
LeBrun's insistence on the image that fully yields up its discursive content entails a certain theology of the sign: as mind is to extension, so signified is to signifier. And for this reason Roger de Piles could not have chosen a more precise target-point through which to attack LeBrun's project than colour; for colour is the aspect of painting least susceptible to confiscation by the signified. As LeBrun's pronouncements show, colour is precisely the parameter where the image ceases to be discursive, spiritual, transcendent, and falls into a degraded materiality which it had been the ambition of LeBrun to overcome. Moreover, de Piles fully understood the rhetoric of the Academie, which, despite its theoretical and intellectual flavour, was then, and long remained, committed to a way of speaking about painting that relied heavily on the use of exemplary figures as the principal counters in debate.
We've been shown whose color Roger de Piles preferred, but we've not been given any of his explanations regarding specific paintings.
Renoir, Two Sisters (detail), 1881
Here's a painting in our local museum, and the first thing that I will ever say about it is "Wow - the color!" And it seems to have been painted to draw just that kind of reaction. I didn't really notice that it depicts 'two sisters' until today. Is that attention-grabbing effect what de Piles had in mind ?
Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827
It is hard for us to reconstruct this rhetoric, though the task is quite essential, if only because without reconstructing the Acadernie's mode of discourse we shall never discover why the Apotheosis of Homer is so central in the work of Ingres, or what is meant by its very precise and very enigmatic placement of Raphael, Pindar, Racine, Shakespeare, Moliere, Longinus, Poussin, and the rest (Rubens is the great absentee). The nearest contemporary analogy would be a coded diplomatic or political language, like that of Pravda (or Pravda in a certain Western myth), where abstract issues are not directly addressed, but by working out the implications of a hierarchy of figures, and by following who has been elevated and who denounced, one can reconstruct an ideology which it is the exact purpose of such a language to obscure. In Rubens, de Piles found precisely the counter through which to issue the challenge of the subversive signifier. And without Rubens, it is possible that the signifier might have long continued as the vital but unmentionable component of the painterly sign. Certainly the early colour-debates, which lacked this central counter, were quickly recuperated: in 1671, during - significantly - a three-month absence from the Academie of LeBrun, Blanchard delivered a defence of colour which, despite its revolutionary potential, soon sank without trace; the official historian of the Academie writes of 'discourteous visitors to the public debates' who spread 'Lombardic maxims' (pro-colourist ideas); they were soon silenced. But with 'Rubens' in the balance against 'Poussin', the assault of the signifter on the signified could proceed apace, and the main issues - recomposition of the sign, redefinition of the relation of the image to the world and to the text - could be conveniently concealed beneath the acceptable disguise of a work of canonisation. After the theory of the subversive signifier, the practice: Watteau.
"Subversive signifiers" can be found before, during, and after the career of Charles LeBrun.
School of Fontainebleau, "Diana the Huntress", 1550
The origins of Watteau might better be sought
in empathy for the School of Fontainebleau
rather than opposition to the academy of Charles LeBrun.
Watteau 's painting has always, from the beginning, enjoyed a special relationship to text. Already in 1719, the first biography, in Italian, had appeared. Watteau's friends during his lifetime tended to become devotees, and after his death, biographers. Antoine de la Roque, the influential editor of the Mercure de France, wrote his detailed obituary notice in 1721, Jean de Jullienne his personal memoir in 1726; Edme Gersaint added another memoir in 1744, e and in 1748 the Comte de Caylus, another personal friend, delivered a lengthy discourse on Watteau to the Academie. These documents between them compose a remarkably detailed record, and in them is visible a tendency with a promising future- people who have not written on art before may write on Watteau: Watteau catalyses writing. The beginnings of what is almost a minor literary genre, with its own specialised rules, are to be found in two lyrical and hyperbolic poems of 1736 by the Abbe de la Marre, 'L'Art et la Nature Reunis par Watteau' and 'La Mort de W atteau, ou la Mort de la Peinture'. For a century the genre is fairly dormant, during a rapid decline in Watteau's reputation; but in three articles by Paul Hedouin in the 1830's a new flowering begins. The articles have very little to do with Watteau and nothing at all to do with painting, but they unveil what is to become the characteristic form of Watteau writing, in which the paintings are used as the pretexts for verbal extravaganza. Baudelaire is a major contributor to the genre; and Watteau is taken up by Banville, Gautier, Nerval and the other members of the rue de Doyenne group, who turn him into a cult.
No ! -- those articles have everything to do with Watteau and painting. It was Watteau's paintings, and possibly only Watteau's paintings, that provoked the enthusiasm to write them. (eventually Bryson will say something to the same effect).
I looked for a long time through the gate. It was a park in Watteau's taste; Slender elms, black yews, green bower, Paths combed and drawn with a line, I went away with a sad and delighted soul; Looking at it I understood that; That I was close to the dream of my life. That my happiness was locked away... Theophile Gautier, 1838
A poetry as unique as it is delightful, the poetry of sumptuous ease, of the colloquies and songs of youth, of pastoral recreations and leisurely pastimes, a poetry of peace and tranquility amid which the movements even of a garden swing die faintly away, the ropes dragging in the sand ... it is a smiling Arcady, a tender Decameron, a sentimental meditation, a dreamily distracted courtship; words that soothe the spirit, a Platonic gallantry, a leisure given over to things of the heart, a youthful indolence; a court of amorous pre-occupations, the tender teasing courtesy of newly-weds, leaning towards each other over their linked arms; eyes without hunger, embraces without impatience; desire without lust, pleasure without desire; a boldness of gesture orchestrated like a ballet for the occasion; feminine ripostes, of the same nature, tranquil and disdainful of haste in their assurance . .. Goncourt brothers: French 18th Century Painting (1859-1879)
Visible, fictional, there they are before us. In the mirror of their false presence, those symmetrical faces, of 'never' and 'always', recognise each other and reconcile themselves to each other. Doubtless they have always been like this; doubtless they have never existed. Are they alive? In the streams, seemingly immobile, one sees the imperceptible current flow, which carries everything away ... Already they are leaving us; they [Watteau's figures] abandon us; tender and distant, unaware of our presence, they gently pivot and, step by step, depart. ... Rene Huyghe, 1950
Note that both Gautier and Huyghe express the sadness of loss. They must return to their daily lives - they cannot live in Watteau's imaginary world forever. BTW - I'm not sure that Gautier was writing about a Watteau painting except as a reference to an actual gated park that he had been walking past. There were no Watteaus in the art museums where I grew up, but I had a similar feeling for the paintings by Corot. He really milked a dreamy longing for Arcadia that is especially attractive to a young life filled with anxiety, uncertainty, and confusion. They feel so deep, profound, ancient, timeless.
Corot, "Festival of Pan",1855-60, Taft Museum, Cincinnati
Even now my heart longs for this painting.
Claude de Lorrain, "Apollo and the Muses", 1652
Here's a similar piece contemporary with LeBrun.
Watteau, Pierrot ( or Gilles ), 1718-19
Bryson then compiles what he calls the 'myths' about Watteau, drawing from many more written responses like the three quoted above. In a melancholy variation, "Watteau, permanently dying, tries to draw vitality from his figures by osmosis. He is the fool, whose comedy barely conceals a sadness that is profound, though not bitter. He is Pierrot, he is Pagliacci, above all he is the portrait of Gilles"
I would like to read some more original commentaries along with whatever analysis Bryson would append to them. But I have no interest in Bryson's compilations put into his own words - primarily to demean them: "Painful though it always is to dissect the habitual discourses that serve to stabilize our view of the art of the past, in this case the pain is greater because genuine insight is entangled in the general confusion.....observations of value are mingled promiscuously with the banality of stereotypes"
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By way of a very long digression,
here is what Elie Faure (1873-1937)
had to say in his History of Art.
Note: all of the Watteau paintings embedded in this section were included in Faure’s book. The works by other artists like Goujon and Poussin were chosen by me.
Jean Goujon, Fountain of the Nymphs, 1550
The Rationalist Passion
The sun which rose from the depth of Lorrain’s canvas, amid their severe architecture, was Watteau. An autumn sun lighting up russet foliage. A profound sigh of nature, delivered from a corset of iron, and at the same time dying from having been so long compressed, and giving herself up to the desires of the poet with the concentrated and fiery heat of a flame which is burning out. In reality they are still there, the severe architectures ; the fate of the regency installs itself in the great palaces. Saint Simon and Montesquieu, iconoclasts, both belong by birth and by activity to the castes which guarded and cared for the icons; and the teaching of the school, until the end of the century, and beyond it, will reign officially. Its aspects are controlled by the mind.
For better or worse, Faure casts a wider net into the French civilization of that time. Bryson has yet to mention Claude Lorrain at all - but Faure puts his name right into the first sentence of his essay about Watteau. And it does seem to belong there. Whether Watteau had ever seen his paintings or not, the arcadian world depicted by Lorrain is brought to life by Watteau, and it distinguishes him from his teacher, Gillot.
Poussin, Echo and Narcissus, 1627
When Poussin gave order to his ideas and his images, he could not purge his flesh of the memory of the forms and the nymphs whom Jean Goujon and Ronsard encountered in the woods. When Watteau came forth from the alleys to explore these woods, full of forms and of shadow, the will of Poussin and the harmony of Racine penetrated there with him. He arrived, with the freedom of the senses and with a thirst for mystery, in a world which had swept mystery from all its avenues and had forbidden the senses to go beyond the limits of reason. He accepted the exterior of this world, so as to keep intact his whole strength and his melancholy, and overturn their spiritual intimacy in order to send blood coursing through the marble of the statues, bathe the trees of the gardens with mist and light, and wring ardor and tears from the costumed personages who, for fifty years, had been crossing the stage, refusing to lend to it their spiritual intimacy in order to send blood coursing through the marble of the statues, bathe the trees of the gardens with mist and light, and wring ardor and tears from the dissimulated passion, and to borrow its well-schooled tremors. He still wears the wig, but he will have no more to do with pensions and offices. · Instead, his lot is wretched poverty, a life of wandering, consumption, and the tenacious presentiment of death. That was enough to make him seek the shelter of the leaves, listen to music as it circled round, and surprise, in words overheard by chance and fleeting forms, the illusion of love and the flight of the hours. What a mystery is a great artist! Whether Watteau wished it or not, his sentimental comedy in the eternity of nature is the image of existence of us all, seen by an ardent nature across his bitter destiny. Here is the confronting, without respite and with admirable love, of life, too short, and of the infinite desired. Trembling soul, adoring soul, the burned out pinks and the pale blues quiver like his poor soul. he feels that he is going to die. Between two flutters of an eyelid which mark the awakening of consciousness and the repose which comes too soon, he expresses the happy appearances and the poignant realities of the adventure to which he is condemned.
This is indeed myth making with rather florid prose - though that is how Faure writes about other artists as well. I agree that it is annoying to have a writer pretend to tell you something about the artist when he is only telling you about his reaction to that artist’s work.
The Italian Comedy, 1716
The resigned pessimism of the Italian farce, the cruel reality which prowls through the masquerade and masks it self with black velvet, came at their destined hour to afford distraction to a dying aristocracy and to the profound man who hides this death struggle under flowers. The whole century will feel it, Tiepolo, Cimarosa, Guadi, and Longhi will reply, later on , to Watteau, from the center of the the fete; and from Spain herself, somber, ruined, and seeming almost dead, comes the bantering laugh of Goya. But with Watteau, it is the prelude, intimate, delicate, drunk with tenderness, wildly desirous of making the illusion endure. He listens to the wind. He wanders and chats with the comedians. Like them he embroiders upon any canvas. Never did subject have less importance in itself. It is always the same, like the relationship of man and woman with love and with death. Since that is so, how monotonous! The ·groups posed on the moss, like leaves torn dying from the trees, or like ephemeral butterflies, will be carried away by the breeze which hurries them on to the abyss, with the forgetfulness and the phantoms, the plaint of the violoncellos, the sigh of the flutes, the perfumes, and the sound from the jets of water. When one isolates from its frame the talk of all these charming creatures, dressed in satin, powdered, rouged, having nothing in life to do but make love and music, everything expresses the joy of the instant seized on the wing. Here is nothing but prattle, rockets, and cascades of laughter, and an intricate cross-fire of gallantries and confessions. The round dance turns, the innocent games are organized and, when the concert begins, the flute and the mandolin scarcely cause voices to be lowered. Why does the ensemble give that sensation so near to sadness? The spirit of the poet is present. Slow steps and swayings, scattered words, necks that turn aside to seize a phrase of gallantry, throats bending to escape or to offer themselves, inclined and laughing faces resembling flowers only half open, all will pass, all will pass! How quickly a society appears and disappears under the trees a hundred years old, which, themselves, will die one day! Nothing is eternal but the sky, from which the clouds will disappear.
I would have preferred a discussion of how this street theatre differed from the Roman poets whose mythology inspired earlier generations of secular art.
Watteau, Fete Champetre
Several other paintings have the same title
but none of them are consistently as sharply drawn as the "Embarkation"
I fear that this theme was so popular back then
that Watteau and his imitators quickly turned out quite a few
to cash in on the opportunity.
The Art Institute of Chicago has one,
and genuine or not,
I have never cared for it
The costumed comedy reveals a terrible ennui with life; it is only the song of the sonorous instruments which can cradle the despair of those who have nothing to do but amuse themselves. Not one of us will arrest the impalpable instant when love transfixed him, and he who comes to tell of it with tones which penetrate one another and lines which continue one another, still burns with a desire that he will never satisfy.
This seems more like a modern disparagement of the French aristocracy than a discussion of either paintings or theatre.
To tell all this, he had therefore placed that which is most fugitive amid that which is most durable among the things seen by our eyes-space and the great woods. He died at Nogent, under the fog and the trees, quite near the water. He had brought back from his Flemish country, and from a visit· he had made to England, the love of moist landscapes where the colors, in the multiplied prism of the tiny suspended drops, take on their real depth and their splendor. Music and trees, the whole of him is in them. The sonorous wave, rising from tense strings, itself belongs to the life of the air, with the light vapor which sets its azure haze around the scattered branches, the slender trunks which space themselves or assemble in clusters near the edge of the deep forests, and the luminous glades away toward the distance and the sky. The sound does not interrupt the silence, but rather increases it. Barely, if at all, a whispered echo reaches us from it. We do indeed see the fingers wandering upon the strings; the laughter and the phrases exchanged are to be guessed from busts leaning over or thrown back, and from fans that tap on hands- the actors in the charming drama are at a distance from their painter, and scattered to the depth of the clearings which flee toward the horizon, whose blue grows deeper, little by little. And the genius of painting resolves into visual harmonies the sound of the instruments which hovers above the murmurs of the voices. The green, the red, or the orange of the costumes of comedy or of parade, and the dark and silky spots made by the groups of people conversing, are mingled with the diffused silver which trembles and unites the tips of the near-by leaves with the sunny spaces which stretch away among the dark trunks.
I would have preferred a discussion of the effects of a specific painting - the qualities are so uneven amongst them.
Watteau, Woman with right arm raised, Louvre, 1717-8
Watteau's great life drawing suggests that his mind worked very quickly, incorporating observed detail into building a pictorial space with flair and power.
This effect plays quite well, for me,
against the sentimentality
that Faure and others have noted so well.
One suspects that he remained chaste, among these assemblies of lover·s whom he sees only from afar. One guesses it from his statues of nude women, from his nude women themselves, from his groups of actresses and prattling ladies of high birth who have no other concern than love and talk of love. His ardent adoration of them always keeps him at a distance. He fears to hurt them, to penetrate their mystery, to know them from too near by, to tear the aerial veil which trembles between them and him. He caresses them only with his wandering harmonies, stolen here and there -as would some been from the north, living in the damp forests, or under the lights of the fete-with the powdered gold of the hair, with the rose of the bodices, with blued and milky haze, with the flowered moss on which rest skirts and mantles of satin, with the nocturnal phosphorescence given to jewels and velvets by the gleam of the moon and of waving torches. It is the irised air which models the marble, which quivers when it touches breasts or necks, and which carries the same poignant agitation to the sprightly faces, to the fingers picking at the guitars, and to the delicate, pure legs under the stockings of transparent silk. But he never approaches; he is steeped in the breath of nature, and its ardor consume:·s him, but the vision of nature which issues from him is as distant as an old dream. Observe it in its detail. The vast structure of the forms, solid, turning, and substantial, makes them appear to be·on the plane of man; he builds his little personages as great as his desire; he paints with the breadth, the fire, and the freedom of Veronese, of Rubens, of Velasquez, or of Rembrandt. Move away from the picture. The harmony moves away also; man and the woods are no more than a passionate memory for this being who dies of phthisis, alone in his room, embittered, in pain, hating every one who approaches him, but loving from afar everything he has seen along his path, forgiving all for the pettiness of their minds because of the power of their instincts, and because of the splendor of the earth, peopled with leaves and waters.
Again - I wish he didn’t make up details of the artist’s personal life. It’s demeaning to all concerned.
This man who had sent forth over the world swarms of Amors to scatter roses through the· azured mist that is touched with gold, who had seized in flight, from perfumes and from smiles, all that is subtlest and most secret in the confessions of low voices, and stolen all the transparent stones of rings and necklaces, to mingle them with the blood of the skin and the light of the eyes, had remained immersed through all his senses in the earthiest of existences. One divines in him the wandering poet of the street who spends an hour watching boxes nailed up, amuses himself at shop entrances with the coming and going of buyers, or, covered with mud, goes on to the near-by storehouse, to see a nag unharnessed there, soup being prepared, and straw being unloaded from carts, or a troop of soldiers, dripping with mud and water.· The nature he paints is by no means "opera scenery." From the roots of the tree to the clouds in the sky, it trembles with the life which runs through it.
It does indeed feel like opera scenery to me,
even if it has been elegantly painted.
Watteau, Collation
Hopefully the actual painting is much better than this reproduction
which resembles a decorative plate.
Not much sadness, longing, or intoxication
that I can feel.
No one had ever breathed with such intoxication the strong odor of the damp woods, listened with so much surprise to the murmur of words in the silence of the great trees, (how about Ruysdael ?) or discovered with so much enchantment the gay spots formed by lovers, and people chatting among the dark trunks, and under the green shadow of the leaves.
There is something quite sculptural about these volumes in space. Watteau draws heads, not faces.
The " opera scenery " is only a pretext calculated to bring about the acceptance of the man who comes to break it down. In reality, he reacts against everything which, at the time when he came into the world, brought about the success of the preachers, the style of the artists, and the fortune of the shopmen.
But aren't these the people whom he is entertaining ?
The titles of these scenes are inter-changeable, and apparently at the discretion of whoever hangs it. This appears to be one of the better ones in both figurative detail and overall design. Note the two long steps that serve as a proscenium in front of the arboreal background that is something like a stage curtain. This is indeed an opera theatre.
The muzzled aristocracy which, in the preceding century, had consented to discipline its original roughness, in order to give to the state that facade, straight and bare, behind which politics and thought expressed their desire to imprison the soul of France, had matured rapidly in luxury, intrigue, and the exercises of the mind. Feeling itself about to die, it unchained its instincts. And immediately, at the instant when it was about to reach the height of an expansion of grace and of intelligence on the other slope of which its decline was forecast, it found, to represent it, a great artist who preferred to die in a charity hospital rather than live with it, but who found it adorable from afar. The clear vision of La Rochefoucauld, the pain of Pascal, and the bitterness of Moliere excused in it two centuries of hypocrisy and of baseness for the sake of that second when a man of their race breathed its purest fragrance. And Montaigne recognized the aptitude of France to unite, in the same artistic expression, the most intimate despair and the loftiest elegance of the mind.
That conflation of "intimate despair" with "loftiest elegance of the mind" does seem to be more French than German, English, Italian, or Spanish. And it does seem to especially apply to the carefree love in Watteau's outdoor scenes.
Bryson was addressing his profession, and he may have underestimated their ability to make aesthetic distinctions - like that between the 12th century and the 19th century windows at Canterbury.
Faure was addressing his fellow art lovers, and he may have underestimated our interest in distinguishing historical fact from sentimental fiction. I am too curious about the actual circumstances of Watteau's life to accept a romantic fantasy about it.
********
Eventually, Bryson gets around to offering his own interpretation of Watteau's body of work:
"Although from a purist viewpoint the Watteau myth is an accidental misfortune visited upon innocent work, its underlying format is apt - an accurate reflection of the Watteau sign. Where LeBrun produces images consumed by discourse the figural and the discursive exactly fitting each other- Watteau 's strategy is to release enough discourse for the viewer to begin to verbalise the image, but not enough in quantity or in specificity for the image to be exhausted. Instead of setting up in competition against the image, text seeks an identity with the image. LeBrun's discursive form is the catechistic question and answer, 'Why are the eyes raised towards the forehead?: Because that signifies ecstasy'; Watteau's form is the koan - the question without closure. With LeBrun discourse stands to the image in a relation of power: it tells the eye where to look, what to find, and not to linger. With Watteau, discourse provides a way of triggering a powerful subjective reaction in the viewer - he hears unplayed music, imagines a consumptive body at the moment of seeing only healthy ones, describes the absence of explicit meaning as 'melancholy' and 'depth', and tries to fill the semantic vacuum set up by the painting with an inrush of verbal reverie. If there is a mistake in the Watteau literature, it lies in not suspecting that the heightened verbal reaction has in fact been required . When we examine Watteau's discursive strategy, we find this wayward and seemingly irrelevant genre of writing is exactly apposite.
Don’t you feel that same tinge of sadness when viewing Botticelli’s Primavera ? As beautiful, hopeful, and amazing as it is - that blossoming of the Renaissance in Florence only lasted a moment - and the feeling needed to create it will never return. I feel a semantic vacuum in all rapturous paintings- and so I like to read and write about them.
In Watteau's master, Gillot, we find a late variant on the LeBrun pattern: the Scene of the Two Carriages exactly corresponds to a text, in this case a pantomime first _performed by the Italian players in 1695. The image claims to be nothing more than illustration and can be fully explained by consulting the theatrical script: it lacks the resonance of excess.
Wrong.
The above image claims that this show is wacky and fun - a kind of claim that LeBrun would never try to make. It does so by being wacky and fun itself.
Watteau: Les Comediens Francais, 1720
Placed beside it, Watteau 's painting ofLes Comediens Fran[ais is sheer enigma .When we consult the script of the play the scene supposedly illustrates - Moliere's Le Depit Amoureux - little correspondence is discovered; the painting blurs and elides together dramatically separate and indeed incompatible moments of the play. The meaning of the scene, even when we are familiar with the Moliere, remains uncertain: the painting both demands and disappoints our reading. And if we do not know the Moliere, we cannot even decide whether the scene is from tragedy or comedy. The woman weeping at the left seems tragic enough - but the Weeping Woman is also a stock character from period comedy. The 'heroine' who raises her right arm in extravagant gesture may be acting a tragedy, but equally well she may be an actress parodying tragedy; nor can we be sure, if parody is involved, whether it comes from the actress's own performance, or from Watteau's caricature of a performance meant as straight tragedy. The cavalier seems, in his oversumptuous costume, to be part of an obscure satire; but the costume is also, in certain details, beautiful, and its beauty partly justifies the painting. To record so faithfully, and with such delicacy,_ the exact folds of material and its transitions of colour is not easily compatible with the intention to make the costume seem funny (for instance, so as to send up French stage conventions and to promote Italian ones). The gentleman behind the cavalier turns away from us and his hand-gesture is unclear; such rotation from the viewer is a favourite de-stabilising device with Watteau, and in this case it serves to obscure from us whether he is comically quizzing the figure who enters from the stairs - and how is this compatible with the woman who weeps? - or whether he is concealing a state of extreme emotion. The entering figure raises unanswerable dramatic questions: will he bring a solution to the problem resulting from the letter (bottom left)? It seems quite possible: his left arm signals assurance and executive competence. Or is he responsible for the problem? His hat, both comic and sinister, signals 'intriguer'.
Watteau's piece seems to either promise or recall the pleasure of viewing a show. It
invites us to share some light-hearted drama in the lives of handsome, elegant, well-furnished young aristocrats. It's a bit more sumptuous and mysterious than the frontispiece to the show’s printed text shown above. That doesn't really appeal to me - but then I was not the target audience for this production. As a fan of Mr. Bean and the Three Stooges, I would prefer the slapstick that Gillot was promoting.
(BTW - the Met website declares that this painting does not represent any specific play- though the frontispiece above would suggest otherwise)
Gillot: Le Tombeau de Maitre Andre
In this early work, Watteau is already insisting that we read: hence the theatrical space, where bodies at once become signalling systems; and in this he is close to Gillot, whose scenes from drama and in particular from the Italian Comedy always refer us to the reading conventions of the stage. But whereas Gillot remains close to the original spectacle, Watteau insists on departure, partly through the scrambling of the original text, and partly through the uneasy relation he introduces between the theatrical frame and the frame of the 'picture. For this there is no counterpart in his master. A theatre frame makes everything inside it semantic, from gesture to coiffure to spatial disposition; the picture-frame does not normally do this, but when the two are so closely interrelated as here - the stage backdrop, with its fountain, trees, and sky, explicitly puns on the background of a painting- we cannot be sure which frame-system to follow: the always semantic theatre-frame, or the semantically neutral picture-frame. If the pun means 'painting is like theatre', it encourages us to find within the picture-frame all the meaningfulness we find on stage - only to disappoint us; if the pun means 'painting is unlike theatre, despite the superficial resemblance', it asks us to suspend our expectation of meaningfulness from the image but with so much enigma around, such suspension is almost impossible to achieve.
This detail is a bit too visually compelling to be called strictly semantic. I wonder whether Gillot inspired Giorgio de Chirico.
Watteau : Italian Comedians, 1720
The customary companion-piece to Les Comediens Francais is Les Comediens Italiens and one can see why the Italian theatre is so central to Watteau's work. Unlike the French drama, it does not accord pride of place to the script. Its characters are fixed - Pantalone the merchant; his friend the Doctor; Isabella and Orazio, the noble lovers; Arlecchino the servant, Scapino or Mezzetino the musician, Pedrolino the comic butt. But the situations and dialogue are fluid and unpredictable, with much stress on improvisation. French drama in Watteau's eyes is word-bound, like the art of LeBrun (it is possible that Les Comediens Francais also satirises the art of Versailles). In the acting codes of the French classical theatre, bodily movement is always the servant of speech: 'In the theatre, before breaking the silence, one should prepare one's speech by some gesture, and the beginning of this gesture must always precede the speech by a longer or a shorter time, according to the circumstances'; 'the gesture on stage must always precede the word'. Gesture functions only as herald of the recit, announcing its arrival, accompanying it with movements of only supportive function, and marking its closure with a flourish.
I must have seen this painting many times in Washington, but can’t recall ever doing so. It does seem that, as Bryson says, Watteau preferred Italian comedy to French. It also seems, however, that each figure presents the standard body and facial expression expected of its character. Contrary to Bryson’s later suggestion, they have not stepped out of character. In this conventional curtain call, there is no improvisation, only what Bryson calls discursive gesture. Yet the painting itself has a lively, vibrant quality - with deft resolution of detail in all the figures. Those qualities are absent in so many of the pieces attributed to Watteau.
Watteau, "The Concert"
Watteau hugely exploits the space around the curtain. ........... In the Concert at Berlin, the landscape is both the non-semantic, unframed space of a park; and a backdrop, the very substance of the theatrical frame, which turns the sub-legible bodies of persons into the hyperlegible bodies of players. The foreground shows a group that is at the same time fully theatrical (in costume, and their instruments are those of professional performance) and non-theatrical (no performance is taking place) . Watteau's transitions are meticulous: the distant group on the right is clearly within a painting, though the handling is close enough to that of the main group on the left to make us uncertain; the sylvan bust similarly belongs to both worlds; the floor is ambiguously flagstone and stage-boarding; while in the most daring area of the canvas, where a girl is seen against a cello, Watteau risks the astonishing effect of painting the instrument in a high-finish, 'Dutch' manner, with invisible brushwork and emphasised texture and reflection, while the figure of the girl is painted in broad, dry strokes that by contrast with the instrument seem elliptical, as though a painting of the girl stood next to a real cello (some of this effect is unfortunately lost in reproduction).
This is one strange painting! The drawing of the figures is much weaker than the "Italian Comedians" or the "Embarkation" - yet the overall composition is just as lively. There is another variation, and I've compared the cello girls below:
The cello girl from the painting shown by Bryson is on the right. The shoulders are more awkward. Overall, however, it does not appear to be any worse a painting. I'm guessing that both of these are copies of an original now lost. Or, shudder the thought, perhaps this sweet, sensitive poet farmed out his designs to be completed by others. He was running a business.
Bryson's comments about "the space around the curtain" might just as well apply to the theatre's scenic designers as to Watteau. Wasn't it their job to make the transition from stage to background curtain feel seamless?
And here is yet another variation.
BTW - it does indeed feel like the painting presents a theorbo performance-- it's just that we viewers are the intended audience, not the other characters on stage.
The result of this stage/life ambiguity is both to coax and to disappoint the interpretative glance, a double movement further developed in the magnificent Meeting in a Park. Whereas in LeBrun's battle scenes, the figures tended to turn towards the spectator and to display with exaggerated visibility their legible surfaces, here more than half the total number of figures emphatically turn their backs - perhaps Watteau's strongest 'illegibilising' device.
Doesn't subject matter better account for that difference ?
Martial prowess versus recreational leisure.
This is not an art that that might accompany imperial ambition.
The situation is still presented as a narrative one, and the couple on the right are signalling to us and to each other with extreme explicitness; which not only sets in motion our voyeuristic curiosity, but establishes that explicit and legible gestures are attainable in this world. When legibility is elsewhere unforthcoming, we know that we are being refused information.
It is amusing how the elegant lady staring into the distance on the left appears completely unconcerned with the mock date rape being attempted, and thwarted, to her right.
Bryson suggests that turning this lady and her beau away from the viewer is a "discursive strategy" to "refuse information" - "Watteau's strongest 'illegibilising' device." But that is to ignore the information that is being offered. More than just information - it’s Watteau's way of inviting the viewer into the park in the wake of their entrance.
The characteristic Watteau long-shot itself works against facial emphasis - the faces are simply too small for us to follow their expressions - and probably this is the reason the longshot is so often used. But from another point of view, Watteau is a master of the repertoire of gestures of attention. We may not be able to read the faces, but we see very clearly the exact inclination and mutual tilt of the heads: in this respect Watteau's only rival is Degas. Interest in recording with absolute precision the angle of the head is responsible for many of the simplifications and exaggerations he introduces into physiognomy, for 'tilting' can only be clearly established by emphasizing certain details, notably the lines of the eyebrows and eyelids, the ears, and the hairline; it is also aided by defining the nose as a line ending in a point- all the 'triangulations' Watteau typically stresses
Degas
Degas
Sargent
Anders Zorn
Bernardo Strozzi
As it turned out,
it was not easy finding
good drawings of tilted heads.
Most of the above are seen from above and the side
Only a few are tilted to left or right.
Watteau, "Mezzatin"
In Watteau, the eyes behave as though in this theatrical representation of 'high passion' - an extreme case is the three- sided gaze of the Mezzetin, the Turk ,and the female dancer in the Fetes venitiennes. But the body does not support this 'passion' - on the contrary, a stately dance is in progress, and the Mezzetin seems preoccupied with his music-making. What emerges is a disparity between the non-signalling bodies, engaged in their physical activity, and the eyes which, within the theatrical convention, signify intense feeling through their attentive inter-crossing. The two sets of signals are contradictory, and to reconcile their opposition the viewer creates an array of meanings which are not themselves directly represented - restraint, extreme depth of emotion, tact, respect for the privacy of the other, introversion.
Bryson reads the signals from the face and body language but not from the design of the painting. Could that be called 'design-blindness'? It's been evident in his response to almost every work he has mentioned so far. As with the Medieval windows in Chapter One, once he has read the discourse, "the image has no further purpose to serve"
Watteau, "Les Champs Elysees"
The allusions to theatre force us to read, and whether the figures are actors who have been transported from the stage into the park, or whether they are non-actors masquerading in the costumes of the theatre, we cannot avoid interpreting gesture, posture, and expression as we would if we were watching a play. But the unreadable bodies, turning their backs on us or huddling so close together that we cannot quite see their expressions, refuse to yield the meanings that a stage performance would supply. Hence the repeated ploy of so linking two figures that they seem a single compositional unit- and it is almost Watteau 's only unit: the compositional management of more than two or at the most three figures can cause him endless difficulty*
*Watteau's difficulties with the compositional management of groups emerges clearly in the Wallace Collection's "Les Champs Elysees", where the uncertainty of ground plan, uneven massing, and reliance on filling intervening spaces with a crude grass notation recall the rudimentary solutions of naive painting.
Or perhaps these clumsy "grass notations" resemble naïve painting because they were executed by one of the naïve artisans hired, perhaps by Watteau, to execute this piece. The overall design feels magnificent, but all of the faces and figures feel small and clumsy. At best, they belong on collector plates.
It is almost impossible to resist Watteau 's call to interpret. In the Meeting in a Park , there is a clear parallelism between the two women who turn their backs, one accompanied and able if she chose to turn towards the group, the other alone and facing a void. As with Eisenstein's 'third sense', the juxtaposition alone - and not any visible mark- starts to generate meaning and to involve the viewer in elaborate textual commentary. An attempt is being conducted, by a small group of highly civilized people, to take the greedy, raw material of eros and transform it into a principle of social harmony; the attempt may succeed- the primitive advance and recoil of the couple on the right are eventually fulfilled in the fruitful intimacy of the couple on the left; but the attempt may also fail, and if it does the individual is thrown back into a deep solitude, as with the distant female near the lake
Or -- once again -- it might be the chosen subject which has set the tone for these paintings. Apparently Watteau was more familiar with theatre people than Bryson. They are more inclined than us solid citizens to believe that "All the world's a stage" - so they take things, especially romance, less seriously and are more fun to hang out with. In this painting, as well as many others, Watteau invites you to join them . Their gestures are not serious enough to demand interpretation.
The ability to provoke an intricate reaction such as this is not the only way the Meeting in a Park behaves like a text. By juxtaposing those three areas of the painting- the flirting couple, just beginning to separate from the gregarious society into the unit of the couple; the intimate couple; and the distant solitary woman- Watteau hints that his three subjects may be three stages in the development of a single relationship, a successive progress of love viewed in the simultaneous time of the image, like a strip- cartoon (at a sublime level). An interesting precedent here is Poussin: the Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert similarly juxtaposes within the same image scenes of misery from the time before the manna was found, with scenes of youthful enthusiasm and elderly hesitation from the time after its discovery by the Israelites. This temporal dislocation was in fact a source of criticism at the 1667 debate on the painting at the Academie, and LeBrun produced a characteristically pro-discursive defense:
The historian communicates by an arrangement of words, by a succession of discourse which builds up the image of what he has to say, and he is free to represent events in any order he likes. The painter, having only an instant for his communication .... sometimes finds it necessary also to unite several moments from different times, to render his scene intelligible.
The Poussin is as crackling with tension as the Watteau is carefree. Poussin offers religious instruction - Watteau offers diversion. Poussin presents Divine intervention - Watteau invites you into a place that no longer needs it. Poussin carries his refined disturbance into every figurative detail - but Watteau loses elegance when he goes small.
And I have no idea why the politically correct, officious commentary of LeBrun needs to be revisited yet again. If Watteau was invited to join the Academy , obviously LeBrun was no longer taken seriously, if he ever was. (Below, Bryson will counter that Watteau was accepted due to his "invocation of high discursive principle" - but I think he was referring to the academy of the late 20th century rather than the early 18th. )
Denied the information available to the figures, but still asked by the image to go on interpreting, the viewer pursues the only option left open to him - reverie. The image sets in motion a boundless semantic expansion, a kind of centrifugal rippling of meaning that knows no boundary. The Watteau image, unlike the image in LeBrun, is entirely open - no scenario or exegesis could ever satisfy our discursive hunger and reverie is a form of thought, and of language, which respects this infinity of possible implications; a machine for the infinite expansion of the signified.
I'm guessing that Bryson takes pleasure in pursuing an "infinity of possible implications". That is his rather intellectual kind of "reverie". As I have suggested, however, we do have "information available to the figures" and Bryson has shared it: they are theatre people enjoying a sunny afternoon in an elegant park - complete with well-groomed lawns, statuary, and tall, elegant trees. A more likely reverie could come from imagining that you have joined them.
Rubens, "Garden of Love", 1630-35
The Meeting in a Park, where the distant woman and the woman in the intimate couple seem to resolve, like the pageboys in LeBrun's equestrian portrait of Chancellor Seguiet, into a single figure, is a fairly extreme example, but the principle is also present in the Pilgrimage to Cythera, which collapses a 'before' into an 'after' - the beginning of the day of love, as the pilgrims make their way to the island, and the end of the day of love, as they prepare to leave. Although Watteau is unlikely to have taken the principle either from Poussin or from LeBrun's Discourses, the miraculous ease with which the Pilgrimage was accepted by the Academie may to some extent be due to its invocation of high discursive principle, a loyalty to text over image, which harmonised with the doctrines of the ancient Academie; it would have appealed to the old guard, routed by the rubenistes, but still not without influence. But a more congenial precedent is Rubens himself, who in the Garden of Love shows a couple entering the painting from the left, pushed into it by a forceful cupid, and seemingly at the beginning of their courtship; and a second couple descending the steps on the right, who are at a later stage of love. The detail which is especially close to Watteau is that in each case, the cavalier is wearing the same kind of hat. But in the juxtaposition of the two female backs in the Meeting in a Park, Watteau goes much further than Rubens towards stating that his different groups represent phases in the progress of love-relationships; and the implications- that love decays before its time, that desire produces melancholy are of course quite alien to Rubens' 'robust' optimism. If the cavaliers in Rubens' garden are interchangeable, it is because love is not as individuated there as Watteau believes it can be and for Watteau, interchangeability marks a failure of the personalization of love, and of the project of its conversion from crude biological drive into social harmony.
I do wish that Bryson had used ‘Meeting in the Park’ to help explicate ‘Cythera’ rather than the other way around - but due to its "infinity of possible implications", Bryson does probably think that "Meeting in the Park" is the greater painting.
He made a good point about the interchangability of figures in the Rubens piece. It's as if there were a factory in Antwerp that turned out identical putti and plump women. I can't imagine anyone hanging such forced frivolity above their conjugal bed - but apparently that's exactly what King Philip IV did.
In "Meeting in a Park" the people are ornaments to a place -- in "Garden of Love" it's the reverse. The most important interactions are between the great masses of trees and the luminous sky behind them.
By the way, here's another depiction of sexual frivolity in a park-like setting. Like the "Garden of Love", it also appears to be advancing in time from left to right:
The boys start drinking
they pour wine for the girls
boy dances with girl
Thoroughly drunk, a girl pulls off her clothing and is ready for sex
(while an infant boy pees on her foot)
Obviously, this version was made before Europeans got way
too serious about religion in the 17th Century.
The meanings in Watteau, having no signifier to pin them down, are experienced mysteriously, as moods, or atmospheres. The literary form of the reverie, which tries to articulate these vague and haunting emanations, always seems to its producers to be creative and never descriptive - 'all their own work', and at times a kind of self-display that uses Watteau as little more than pretext. The tragedy is that for every page of the Watteau literature, one finds perhaps a line on the paintings themselves. Even quite rudimentary figural questions, such as the means by which Watteau transforms the precedent of Rubens to suit his scale and his personal subject-matter, remain neglected. Watteau is preferred as a Pirandellesque metteur-en-scene or as a Symbolist poet, and his work in paint is consistently overshadowed by his subtle discursivity. In the next phase of its development, French painting will learn how to assert more strongly the independent claim of the figural image
To restate the first sentence: the meanings of paintings as paintings have no signifier to pin them down. It's the non-discursive visual organization, the form, that evokes whatever painterly meaning a viewer may comprehend. It's not the enthusiastic authors whom Bryson has quoted who ignore the "work in paint" - it's form-blind Bryson himself.
And those painterly meanings - being non discursive - are necessarily mysterious and inexplicable. That's why there will be no end to the writing devoted to great artists. We talkative viewers just can't help ourselves.
Regarding Watteau, I admit that this perusal of reproductions has been a big disappointment. He appears to have been one of those artists who only made things as good as they needed to be to satisfy a buyer. So the Embarkation (shown above), his reception piece to the Academy, was a masterpiece. But almost every other fete galante is awkward in detail - as if done by a lesser hand.
I hope that someday I'll come across a text that does him justice.
