This is Chapter Two 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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Charles LeBrun , self portrait 1668
The Legible Body : LeBrun
Chapter One introduced us to Bryson's semiotic approach. Chapter Two introduces us to the history of 18th Century French painting. His narrative begins with Charles LeBrun, founding member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1648). LeBrun was 28 years old at the time - while Louis XIV, who signed the founding documents, was nine. The academy would soon break the exclusive authority of the Guild of St. Luke and eventually dominate French and European painting and sculpture up through the end of the 19th Century.
Simon Vouet, Rape of Europa, 1640
I am somewhat conflicted in my own allegiances here. As the son of an artist, I can appreciate what it means to grow up in a world centered on making art. That's how the profession advances from generation to generation in a guild system. Simon Vouet was a good example: the son of a painter who became leader of the Guild of St. Luke as well as a great painter. But on the other hand --- there was Nicolas Poussin who rose to the top of his profession by shear determination and ability. Locking him out of his profession would have been criminal.
LeBrun is the site of convergence of two great forces: bureaucracy, and text. Almost before he is a painter, he is a bureaucrat, and the profile of his career ('career' is the operative word) is that of the eminent civil servant. He was never without an immediate state patron - Seguier, Fouquet, Colbert; and only at the death of Colbert in 1683 did he finally fall from favour. His endurance is that of a government ministry. And this bureaucrat is a man of the Word. At once he claimed for the centralised Academie a power which had hitherto been exerted only by the Church and the Crown: the right to dictate to the painters the texts which their work was to illustrate. ln 1663, he instituted the Annual Prize, using as text 'the heroic exploits of the King'; in 1666, the Prix de Rome, where the subject of the competition is chosen from Scripture. This right not only determined the paranoid competitiveness which was to distinguish French painting for the next two centuries, but ensured the supremacy of a certain kind of painting - discursive; and the insertion of the discursive into the figural parallels both the insertion of the monarch into the community of painters through the delegation of Colbert and LeBrun, and the personal dictatorship of LeBrun within the Academie. The shape of the state and of the institutional structure of painting determine the shape of the painterly sign.
The atmosphere of the Academie after 1663 becomes fiercely linguistic. In 1648, while history painting dominated over the 'lower' genres in terms of personnel, the Academie was still basically a cenacle, and it had its material problems: whereas the guilds collected dues from their members, the secessionists relied on the modest payments of pupils, and on their own intermittent contributions. The structure was amateur in the sense that no official policies prevailed. But after 1663 , not only does painting start to emanate - for the first time on any scale in a secular context- from empowered texts: the act of painting is surrounded by a verbal mystique. In 1666, at the instigation of Colbert, LeBrun introduced the practice of the Discourse: every month a work from the royal collection was to be discussed before the public by the Academie assembled as a whole. Whereas the guilds had transmitted instruction by practical example, now instruction takes the form of codex, and an official stenographer is employed to transcribe and later to publish the proceedings of the debates. In terms of his own work, LeBrun insists for the first time on the Livret: his manifesto work for Louis XIV was accompanied by a lengthy treatise and description by Felibien, later the Academie's chief scribe. In 1673, the series of his paintings known as the Battles was displayed before the public with a complex explanatory pamphlet; and it was to be the same with the general iconography of Versailles, and with LeBrun's series of paintings for the Grande Galerie.
Bryson's historical narrative feels so insightful and sharply written that I'm inclined to believe it - except for its exclusive focus on the discursive in the French academy - which is somewhat challenged by the following episode that he relates:
Poussin, Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, 1648
The Discourses not only, through verbal description of the works in the royal collection, focus the word on the image with an intensity that is without precedent; they reveal a bias in favour of the discursive that is at times bizarre. In 1667, LeBrun delivered a major address on Poussin's painting entitled Eliezer and Rebecca. When the debate was thrown open . he was confronted by a strange objection: it was noted that Poussin had omitted the animals which, in the scriptural account, had attended the scene; the Biblical camels feature nowhere in the image; surely this constituted a breach of decorum. Had LeBrun argued that Poussin was free to omit these creatures, a dangerous precedent might be set, and hallowed by the Academie, for present and future painters to depart from the authority of the text; and since the second of LeBrun's great political advances on behalf of discursive painting, the Prix de Rome, was still in its infancy, such a tendency had to be nipped in the bud at once. On the other hand, Poussin could not be discredited: alone among the painters chosen for debate he represented France - the rest were Italians; and the right of the Academie to class his work with that of Titian and Raphael was part of its general chauvinist mission. What is significant about the debate is that the issue of bureaucratic control of the painter and textual control of the image have fused into near-identity. LeBrun at first hedges the question: he argues that the famous beasts have been omitted in favour of the work's unity.
Poussin, Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, 1660-1665
By the way -- here's another version that Poussin painted
two decades later. Note the camel to the left.
and only one girl is noticing what's happening to Rebecca.
Now it might seem that in taking this line, LaBrun is placing a 'compositional' requirement over a discursive one; but instead of the term 'composition', with its 20th century abstractionist connotations of pure formalism and asemantic figurality, we should stay with the word LeBrun in fact uses, a word that shows the proximity to his theory of painting of classical rhetoric: disposition. Whereas compositional unity ~ is an affair ofbalancing forms, dispositional unity concerns the balancing of messages; and it is this sense, as a rhetorical dispositio or distribution of information, that we should understand LeBrun's defence. The camels would offend, not through their intrinsic oddness, their suggestion of the monstrous or the absurd, but because if included they would become a dispositional distraction: a secondary text would be generated and might come to rival the primary one. And it is on these lines that one should understand LeBrun's hostility to genre-painting. Of course, it is at the same time an institutional posture: the triumph of history painting over genre is the triumph of the Academie over the Maitrise. Genre-painting is, after all, pre-eminently textual: it is devoted to the anecdote and the generation of superabundant discourse from the image. But though textual, genre-painting does not transmit its narrative messages in any order of priority: its humility of content is matched by a democracy of messages all on the same level, with no one amongst them subordinating the rest. In other words, genre does not understand language as a form of power over the image- and it is precisely the power-aspect of the discursive which interests LeBrun. The textuality of LeBrun is cybernetic, a form of authority which is lost amongst the proliferating and equivalent messages of the anecdotal. The unity of dispositio is discursive, not figural, and this centralising power of the text is defended because it precisely corresponds to the power of the Academie over the community of painters; to challenge that centralising authority is to challenge the Academie itself.
Because so much more was implied than the pulchritude of camels, the debate was resumed. Those painters who resented either the hegemony of the Academie within the professional structure, or the omnipotence within the Academie of LeBrun, or both, demanded a second hearing; not before the Academie had mobilised its hierarchical resources, and passed resolutions condemning 'the confusion that attends the public sessions' (the Academie debates had become minor manifestations), and had required that non-academicians seat themselves on benches remote from the arena of debate, as passive witnesses. LeBrun delivers a second defence of Poussin which reveals all the faith of the official in his memorandum. In Scripture, he declares, the famous camels are nowhere mentioned as in the Israelite camp itself, or as near the Israelites themselves; Poussin's exclusion of them does not therefore break with the letter of the Old Testament. His answer is Byzantine; certainly it failed to satisfy the opposition. In the end Colbert personally intervened - and his presence as arbiter reveals the urgency of the debate - to bring the meeting to a close, and to guarantee that LeBrun's answer be the last word on the subject. In LeBrun's appeal to the voice of the centralized state to bring to rule the dissidence of both the figural image and the community of painters, one can see the depth of complicity between textuality and power. To question the supremacy of the discursive, before the double presence of both LeBrun and Colbert, is both artistic heresy and political treason.
Guido Reni, Virgin Sewing with her Companions , 1642
According to Poussin's contemporary biographer, Andre Felibien, the piece was commissioned by a wealthy silk merchant, Jean Pointel, who asked for something like Guido Reni's “La Vierge cousant avec ses compagnes” that might also portray “several women, in which you can see different beauties”.
Which is to say, Pointel wanted to look at pretty girls rather than receive religious instruction - as would many of us - and apparently that's exactly what Poussin gave him under the guise of a sacred text.
Not only did Poussin mangle a sacred discourse on behalf of the figurative - but Charles LeBrun and his patron, Colbert, defended that sacrilege in an official meeting of the academy. The discursive is given lip service - but not real authority over a greatness that is aesthetic.
The same might be said for the piece by Guido Reni. I can’t find any other depictions of the Virgin surrounded by anyone other than angels, putti, or her parents, and it has nothing to do with holy writ. Perhaps Guido painted it for men who wanted to see pretty young women but would have been embarrassed to adorn their their walls with naked nymphs in that pious age.
By the way, LeBrun's principal adversary in this debate was Philippe de Champaigne whom I would consider a much greater painter.
Philippe de Champaigne , Moses Presenting the Law, 1648
This is one of my favorite paintings at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
(there's another copy at the Hermitage)
Philippe seems to have been a pious fellow, possibly a Jansenist, whose objection to Poussin's transformation of a biblical text into a girlie picture quite likely conflicted with his religious sensitivities rather than his discursive theory of art.
I find the areas of detail more engaging than Poussin's painting as whole
which feels too much like a perfunctory stage design for an an opera.
Charles LeBrun: Franche-Comte Taken for the Second Time, 1681-1684
Regarding LeBrun's work, Bryson introduces it with the above piece, and surprisingly offers an aesthetic judgment. (art historians usually avoid them)
In LeBrun's most ambitious and extensive work, the series of eleven full-scale and eighteen minor paintings devoted ad maiorem gloriam Ludovici at Versailles, we meet with the following constellation: Allegory, Conquest, Monarchy. The painting of Franche-Comte Conquered for the Second Time is at the centre of LeBrun's career, as the Apotheosis of Homer is at the centre of Ingres, and the Oath of the Horatii of David.
Nicholas Largilliere, portrait of Charles LeBrun, (1683-1686)
When Largilliere came to paint the portrait through which LeBrun was to be carried forward into posterity, it was this work which he chose to place on LeBrun's easel. It is an image which translates effortlessly, and with minimal figural residue, into narrative. Louis had already conquered the province in 1678, and returned it to Spain at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. When Spain declared a second war, the province was reconquered within three months. In the image, Mars leads Franche-Comte and its villages to the King as suppliant maidens. The river Soux, alarmed at the sight of Victory attaching trophies to a palm-tree, holds on to the King's coat. Behind Louis stands the figure of Hercules, or heroic virtue. The fawning lion represents Spain, and the rock the citadel of Besancon. Germany has offered the province vain support: an eagle on a dry tree. The three months of the siege belonged to winter: there are three zodiacal signs. And Fame appears with double trumpets: the province has been twice conquered (these details are sadly obscured in the present reproduction). With its sombre, drab coloration and thick-set, graceless figures, the work points to central deficiencies in LeBrun as a painter: lack of imagination, lack of figural involvement. But examined at the rhetorical level at which it was pitched, the image reveals a striking symmetry of intellectual design. The painting exploits a duplicity in the word 'history': in history, event and scripture fuse, for the historical is not only that which has occurred, but that which has recurred as writing. Between the figures of allegory and the historical figure of Louis, there is therefore no ontological disjunction. In conquest, event is Scripture even as it happens: the battle is already narrative at the moment it takes place, so that when Homer or Tolstoy or Stendhal describe their battles, narrative is not super-added to a scene which lacks discursive intelligibility, but is instead the repetition of a discourse which is preexistent. War is perhaps the most ancient, and certainly one of the most powerful, of rhetorical topoi.
The above judgment exemplifies Bryson's separation of the rhetorical from the formal. He gives low marks to the formal (sombre, drab coloration and thick-set, graceless figures) and high marks to the rhetorical ( a striking symmetry of intellectual design). As misguided as such a separation seems to me, it is characteristic of our age that celebrates a practice known as "conceptual art". Whether or not that "striking symmetry" of history and allegory is a notable achievement, however, is questionable - and Bryson's declaration that "event is scripture" is easily disproven by the competing narratives for the very first historical account of military conflict in ancient history: the Battle of Kadesh (1274 BC)
Ramses II at the battle of Kadesh
Just like Louis XIV, Ramses II, the conquering God/King/Hero is much larger than his puny opponents, and is surrounded by magical signs appropriate to his cosmic status. The conflation of military history with mythology goes back to its very beginning.
One might also note that there are two conflicting accounts of this battle. According to the Egyptians it was a glorious victory for their Pharoah who personally cut his way through enemy lines. According to the Hittites, it was a successful defense of Kadesh, an important commercial center which was the target of the Egyptian invasion.
The battle itself was not a pre-existent discourse -- it was interpreted by discourses - and yet, for whatever reason, Bryson continues with a verbose digression. Contemporary art talk does have a taste for prose that is equally assertive and counter-intuitive - but why is Bryson writing about the historiography of warfare?
The epics of world literature, from the Iliad to the Upanishads, witness to an affinity between war and narrative which can be said to emanate from an inherent similarity: in war, events acquire a dimension that has already all the intelligibility, visibility, and recountability of the narrative act. It is the same at the lowest, childhood level of historiography, which consists almost exclusively in a listing of battles, and where the work of history as an interpretative discipline is at a minimum: so far from shaping event into meaning, all the historian there has to do is to repeat the writing that emanates spontaneously from history itself. In the battle, human action consolidates into a united purposiveness that is patent and visible at all points; in this it differs from guerrilla warfare and from terrorism, which rely on invisibility and concealment. These other forms of aggression are perhaps the more terrifying because they lack the consolidation of open intelligibility which the battle provides (in this sense, it is hard to image an allegory of guerrilla war). But battle possesses a spectacularity that is heraldic: each side blazons its identity with a clarity that is not at all exhausted by strategic need. And in the descriptions of battle one sees a marked tendency towards a signification that is highly abstract: the model here is the war-room, with its maps and pointers, markers and counters. Although only a simulacrum of the battlefield, the war-room is also its real theatre: in the conversion from the mud and chaos of the field to the hygienic spread of the diagram, nothing essential is lost. On the contrary, the essence of the battle is revealed in the schema. Military planning requires a glance at the body which is altogether indifferent to its materiality; the martial body is enciphered, made into a statistical entity, a vortex of abstract force. The militaristic use of the body may be heavily physical: carefully clothed and tended, trained to a pitch of physical excellence, the superbia of the material body borders on an eroticism which must never, however, announce itself as such. But always that priority is overtaken by signification, not only in the decoration of the body with insignia, but in a final purpose for that body which is, of course, a complete betrayal of its right to physical existence.
Louis, the God/king/hero
Overall, this painting is a collection of parts that do not come together with any graphic force. In that way it disparages its primary subject, allowing him to be seen as a goofy, effete, self obsessed dreamer rather than a bold, effective leader. The above trumpeting angel, however, is quite charming
And here are some of my favorite depictions of historical battles:
Night Attack on the Sanjo Palace, Japan, second half of 13th Century
I fell in love with this battle scene more than 40 years ago when I first saw it in the MFA Boston. It’s breath taking.
Ucello, Battle of San Romano, 1436-40
A charming, fantastical rendition of a real battle. Presumably no one was injured
There were some fatalities here, however - including Ibrahim Lodi,
the rather incompetent Sultan of Delhi
First Battle of Patipat (April 21, 1526) , Mughal, Late 16th Century
The formal qualities of the prolific Mughal school are thrilling - and it specialized in bloody battle scenes just like this one. If I had the time, I would love to create a blog about only this genre.
Rubens, Triumph of Henry IV, 1630
All of the drive and dynamic figuration that is missing in LeBrun.
Velasquez, Surrender of Breda, 1634-5
The pinnacle of historical battle representation in European painting. Compared to it, everything else feels like a pompous joke.
Charles LeBrun, Battle of Arbela
Battle of Arbela - the tapestry
It is, therefore, no accident that LeBrun, with his commitment to the textuality of the image over its figurality, should also have expended such colossal effort on images of military conflict. In his Battle of Arbela one can see a sadism which, if it had not been so bureaucratically constrained, might have moved far closer than it did to Delacroix, who is a proleptic presence in all these scenes . It is a sadism which cannot, however, be thought morbid, since it lacks the quest for privacy which marks authentic perversion. Quite the opposite: what is sought is absolute publicity, for the battle is a form of aggression that takes place without guile, deceit, or any aspect of the clandestine. In the swordplay of the duel, there is room for the artistry of fencing, which is full of feints and misdirections: but in the swordplay of battle, intention and action are far more co-extensive. It is this legibility of the body which above all interests LeBrun. In his arrangement of battle scenes there is hardly a head which does not turn in some way towards the viewer, to display fully its readable surface; not surprisingly, many of the embattled figures are taken directly from LeBrun's work on the expression of the passions . The ethic is Carnelian, and concerns a word sacred to Corneille, to France, and to LeBrun: gloire; neither merit nor excellence by themselves, but these qualities caught in a double movement of display and recognition. Corneille's warriors in his play Horace exhibit a sadism that extends, as we know, to the most brutal sororicide, and the murderous brother is incapable of the inwardness of shame; absolutely unrepentant at the death of his sister, the brother is concerned only with the possibility of a stain on glory. The heroic act is so extraverted, so insistently spectacular, that for Polyeucte martyrdom is pursued not as an abnegation of the self before God, but as a final and resplendent display of . personal glory before both God and man. Gloire cannot exist without its spectators; it is also indifferent to the rights of the flesh, which it seeks constantly to transcend through the will. Its culmination is therefore in public violence, a violence that is always observed; not just the battle, but the battle that is fully displayed and intelligible.
As a full size cartoon for a wall size tapestry, it appears that both textuality and figurality have been superseded by décor. The flat wall behind it is more important than any discourse or painterly effect. The designer is working with flat patterns rather than line, luminosity, and suggested volumes in pictorial space. None of the figures depicted can escape the wall to confront the viewer.
This sketch of an expressive face was cut and pasted into the composition - much as a cartoonist might do
The Alexander Mosaic, House of the Faun, Pompeii, 100-120 BC
Here is another decorative piece depicting the same, or nearly the same, historical battle. Its textuality doesn't really tell you much about the clash between the Macedonian and Persian armies - but then the battle is not "fully displayed and intelligible" in LeBrun's version either.
The mosaic's details, however, do offer a lot more visual punch and excitement -- what Bryson calls "figurality".
you feel the expressiveness of every colored chip. It's alive and electric.
Polloaiulo, "Battle of the Naked Men", 1465-75
But for the shear graphic and horrific power of battle,
nothing beats this famous engraving.
And you might even call it "gloire", while noting
that unlike the Lebrun piece, none of the faces are turned completely away.
LeBrun's paintings for the Grande Galerie, which together form a continuous narrative of the conquests of the King, exploit to the full this collaborative relation between warfare and narrativity. Allegory is the artistic form appropriate to conquest because for both conqueror and allegorist, detail is of no importance. What the heroic invader requires from a province is not its substance or booty, but the signs of its surrender; the synecdoche of the lion for Spain, the hunched eagle for Germany, are like the exalted and manically generalised form the world assumes when Antony addresses Cleopatra as Egypt, or like the allegorical reduction of the world which Chaplin used in the Great Dictator, to define megalomania: alone in his study, the dictator plays with the globe as though it were a balloon. Yet these works of LeBrun, alongside war and allegory, include always a third term, which completes their specific constellation: the body of the King. Let us for a moment return to an earlier comment on the word 'history ': history is a fusion of event with writing. The historical is not only that which has occurred, but that which has occurred as writing.
Bryson writes about history and history paintings as if his subject were universal - but his comments mostly just apply to the France of Louis XIV. There is nothing allegorical, for example , about "The Surrender of Breda", and the body of the Spanish king cannot be found in any of the many paintings commissioned to celebrate the victories of his army.
With the painting of the Franche-Compte, once the eagle, the lion, the rock, the keys, the urns, and the figures have released their discharge of the signified, lacking any further purpose, they linger on in desolate drained dispersal. Nothing but the signified holds this disarray of objects together, and once it is taken away, they take on the life of husks...... With the glass at Canterbury, if we prolong our inspection beyond it’s designated links, the image dissolves into pure light and color: the same is true of the frescoes of Tiepolo. But here, because the signifier has been so degraded, as the Word fades it, leaves only ash behind.
As we read earlier, Bryson does not allow the formal qualities of the Canterbury windows to affect what they signify - and apparently he feels the same way about Tiepolo. Ouch! But I certainly agree with him regarding LeBrun’s Franche-Compte: "as the word fades, it leaves only ash behind". Well put!
In general, it does seem that visuality is diminished proportionally to the emphasis which the painter gives to allegorical symbols. And this would even apply to a very great artist like Vermeer:
Vermeer, Allegory of the Catholic Faith, 1670-72
I find the details of this piece far more compelling than its whole.
Sebastian Stoskopff, The Great Vanity, 1642
This painting, however, seems to manage both detail and whole with equal spirit - despite the many allegorical symbols being shown. No dry ashes here.
Sebastian Stoskopff, 1620's
Yet this earlier piece by the same artist is even better. The sea shell and wooden box don't seem to have specific allegorical meanings as much as the contrast between their surfaces and shapes provokes thoughts about the universe that contains them both.
Charles LeBrun, "Desire"
Dissertation sur un Traité de Charles Lebrun concernant le
Rapport de la Physionomie Humaine avec Celle des Animaux
.....Since human self-expression involves parameters of moving gesture and of supporting speech which at every point clarify the emotion, and since painting lacks those parameters, the image of emotion must supply other markers to take their place. While the problem of emotional expression is permanent, in the case of LeBrun there are particular historical pressures which made its solution imperative. The hierarchical elevation of history painting and of the Academie required the linguistic saturation of the image; both the allegorical style of the art of Versailles, and the role played by the interpretation of signs in the life of its Court, reinforced the need for a further advance of the Word into substance. Yet the advance was blocked by an aesthetic of reticence which demanded of the courtly body a rigorous reduction of expressivity: decorum, in the sense of a igilant monitoring and screening of the body's informational potential, creates an inscrutability that menaces the central colonisation of the body by the Word. Expressive gesture is withdrawn from the body to the head; and in LeBrun's first excursion into this terrain, the approach is exclusively physiognomic. The only notable work on the subject of physiognomy remained Giovanni Baptista della Porta's Della Fisionomia dell 'Uomo, translated into French in 1665. This curious treatise, written at the close of the sixteenth century, is a late flower of Paracelsan thought, and exhibits a kind of reasoning which by the epoch of LeBrun was entirely antiquated. At its root is a belief in Creation as a Text from God:
The first and highest book of medicine is called Sapientia. Without this book no one will achieve anything fruitful . . . for this book is God himself .. . The second book of medicine is the firmament ... for it is possible to write down all medicine in the letters of one book .. . and the firmament is such a book containing all virtues and all propositions .. . the stars in heaven must be taken together in order that we may read the sentence in the firmament. It is like a letter that has been sent to us from a hundred miles off, and in which the writer's mind speaks to us.
Giovanni Baptista Della Porta
Knowledge is a matter of right reading of the text of creation, and a bountiful God has made this possible by repeating the sentences of the firmament, by which Paracelsus means astrology, in the signatures of the natural world. To take an example which also, despite its reasoning, had some success: syphilis bears the signature of the market place; the planet Mercury has signed the market place; the metal mercury, which is also signed by the planet, is therefore the cure for syphilis. In his Fisionomia, della Porta elaborated this Paracelsan doctrine: since there are distant species of plant whose leaves resemble the legs of the scorpion, those plants come under the sign of Scorpio and Scorpio's planet Mars; with physiognomy, a similar logic is at work in what della Porta is pleased to call the 'physiognomic syllogism'. All parrots are talkers, all men with noses of a certain shape are like parrots, therefore all such men are talkers. The visual result of the theory took the form of images in which the human face is variously distorted to reveal, as far as ingenuity will permit, hidden resemblances to specific beasts
Charles LeBrun, Expressions
Those contemporary artists who disparage the old reactionary French Academy might be surprised to learn that its first director was basically a cartoonist and semiotician. His pedagogical system, captured in the drawings and prints that survived, are far more useful for drawing a cartoon strip than for making a painterly painting. Bryson connects his physionomic studies to nascent natural sciences that were emerging in the Renaissance. As he puts it, LeBrun " reduces the face to a combinatory schema which permutates a few basic semaphoric units .. the system operates at the precise frontier of the signifier and the signified". If a story calls for the depiction of someone who is angry - the artist can refer to the drawing that expresses "anger" in a man or perhaps a snarling tiger. LeBrun would fit quite well into a contemporary school of art. Given his enthusiasm for science-like queries, extensive bureaucratic experience, and eagerness to please his superiors, he might soon become its director.
frontispiece to Roger de Piles
"History and Life of the Famous European Painters", 1710
As Bryson puts it, "LeBrun's project of colonizing the body with signs is not unique to him: Dufresnoy and even Roger de Piles, the great figuralist, insist on the importance within painting of the legible body"
The tortured mess that is the frontispiece shown above would serve as a good example of this approach. De Piles ranked dozens of famous European painters regarding composition, drawing, color, and expression. LeBrun ranked very high on everything except color (Titian, Rubens, and Gorgione scored the highest on color) Poor Caravaggio fared poorly - getting a goose-egg on "expression" - possibly because his characters expressed attitudes that De Piles found objectionable.
Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, Allegory of Faith, 1660
DuFresnoy was a friend of De Piles and also known for his art theory. No need for me to critique the tiresome "discursiveness" of this work.... those who appreciate it will probably not be reading this blog.
Bryson demonstrates that Descartes was acknowledged as the authority on how emotions are expressed by the body. Quotes by the painter, Nicolas Mignard and the sculptor, Gerard van Opstal, closely follow the words of the great philosopher as they address the Academy.
The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander
Applications of the doctrines of the Conference appears with greatest success in The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander painted by LeBrun at Fontainebleau for the King at the beginning of his reign in 1662. It has all the qualities of a manifesto piece, and at once Felibien (court historian) published a commentary on if of unprecedented length; not until the Poussin debates do we encounter such intensity of verbal focus on any single French painting.
The compassion he has for the princesses visibly appears, both in his looks and in his behavior; his opened hand shews his clemency, and perfectly expresses the favor he has for all that court; his other hand which he lalys on Ephestion, plainly shows that he is his favorite; and his left leg which he draws backward, is a token of the civility which he pays to these princesses.
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Bryson offers many more discursive details - like the differences in clothing and jewelry that distinguish Alexander from the other Greek standing beside him.
The expressions above do seem to have been lifted from LeBrun’s catalog - though that catalog may have been compiled after 1662
Felibien 's commentary is a salutary reminder that with a painting such as this, a whole lexical dimension lies concealed from normal viewing; and especially the normal viewing ot the Twentieth century, with its natural bias towards a figural appreciation of the art of the past. Yet unless we attend to this dimension, the image fuses into a ponderous mass, and it is probably the sheer weight of pomp which alienates the spectator who is unaware that the image is not merely to be seen, but read. As discourse penetrates this ankylosed mass its components begin to separate, and the image regains a lightness, an allegrezza which one might not have suspected it capable of sustaining.
I’m afraid that this painting remains ponderous for me — except in an historical context that connects these self-aggrandizing fantasies and their pseudo-erudition with the emergence of a powerful, centralized, bureaucratic state. Bryson frequently connects to that context - and that is the value of his chapter about LeBrun.
BTW: I love Bryson's use of the phrase: "ankylosed mass", after the dictionary told me that it referred to a rather serious and unpleasant medical condition: the fusion of bones at the joints. Ouch!
The kind of discursivity to which LeBrun submits his painting is entirely conscious, and is nothing to do with naturalism. Before LeBrun, since no lexicon of the body exists to be consulted, except the virtually useless treatise by della Porta, the significance of the body seems to have no source, and in the absence of source there develops an effect of the real, as with the Masaccio earlier discussed. When I cannot consult the text of the passions, I cannot clearly place the articulation of its meanings, and since the signified seems without origin in the image and on the plane of signifiers, I invent a space of depth, 'outside ' the image, to house it; the depth of perspective becomes identified with this imaginary deep exteriority. Since signification exists, but I cannot clearly attach the production of the signified to any specific pictorial signifier, I must create another realm for the meanings I 'find", away from the picture plane; and perspective, pretending to supply a space 'behind' the signifiers, and coinciding with this need for another realm, meets it, and invites the signified to step with it behind the signifying plane. LeBrun, by bringing the articulation of the physiognomic and pathognomic codes into full visibility, counteracts this occultation; meanings do not emanate from his canvases mysteriously, but in the full awareness of a coded practice. In this sense the image in LeBrun possesses a frankness and publicity of intention that make it incompatible with what we know of the image in realism. And in the next generations, as the fully discursive image falls out of favour, the reaction against discourse moves painting once again towards that effacement of the means of signification which is an essential part of the realist project.
Thank goodness Bryson uses the first person singular in the above rumination : "when I cannot consult the text of the passions, I cannot clearly place the articulation of its meanings, and since the signified seems without origin in the image and on the plane of signifiers, I invent a space of depth, 'outside ' the image, to house it" ---- because that is nothing like my experience as a viewer.
Whether or not the "articulation of meanings" feels definitive or elusive - I try to let the piece itself be the final authority on how it appears, rather than my own interpretation or mental reconstructions of it. The only "signifier" that I seek is the entire piece itself - and the only "signified" is my temporary and inadequate comprehension of it. Signification - or the effacement thereof - does not seem to affect the inner life of the form - if there is any. I try to connect to that life and let it pull me beneath the marks and signs on the surface to the questing soul of the artist and the civilization from which she emerged.
LeBrun's paintings are like commercial and political art. They try not to distract the viewer from the important message they need to deliver - so formally they are lifeless. I cannot consider him much of an artist - though I do recognize him as a successful illustrator, theorist, administrator, decorator, and modern secular man.
Bryson repeatedly opposes "discursive" against "figural" because for him, the one often precludes the other. But it need not do so.
Charles LeBrun
Chancellor Séguier at the Entry of Louis XIV into Paris in 1660, 1660
As an afterword, let us conclude with the painting by which, thanks to a certain hanging policy at the Louvre in this century, LeBrun is best known: the equestrian portrait of Chancellor Seguier. Early, thoroughly uncharacteristic of his output, and hardly mentioned by LeBrun or by his contemporaries, it shows what kind of a painter LeBrun might have become if he had not lent his brush to the hegemonising word, and the centralising state. It speaks to us today so directly because it comes so close to being surreal. Its theme, an entirely figural one, is cloning: not one parasol, but two,_ not one golden tassle but many, ribbons which irrationally twin, and everywhere these replicating, stately and square-toed slippers. The page-boys, whose hair, as it alternates from auburn to chestnut, does nothing to conceal an identity of countenance, resolve from plurality into impossible unity, and so far from forming an entourage, seem a single figure rotating in space and frozen at successive paces. The parasols, which combine an instantly available quality of the picturesque with a certain occidental dream of the Asiatic, accord to Seguier the full status of mandarin, and , with the opulent shimmer of the fabrics, invest in him all the connotational magic of the word, Cathay. Although so resolutely figural, it might be taken as the emblem of the forces that between them define the moment of LeBrun: the image perfectly married to the triumphant state: a radiant and transfigured bureaucracy.
This painting does feel quite different from the "Queens of Persia" painted only two years later. Evidentially, Séguier, the patron for whom it was painted, demanded more aesthetic pleasure than Louis XIV did. I like the pleasant, solemn, rhythmic dance of the elegant young dudes encircling their magnificent master. Was Seguier gay ? It speaks to Bryson because it feels like Surrealism to him -- presumably of the pleasantly odd variety of Magritte. He calls it "resolutely figural" -- I would call it "possibly formal" (depending on how it felt in person - the internet reproductions feel inadequate)
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