This is Chapter Four 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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TRANSFORMATIONS IN ROCOCO SPACE
BEFORE WE CAN begin to describe the revolutionary modification of discursive and figural relations that occurs during the period we associate with the word 'rococo', a modest hygienic assault must first be conducted on two widespread~ and authoritatively reinforced beliefs about space in European painting. The first is a prejudice 'of the right'- that perspectival space is objectively superior to other systems of spatial representation and marks an irreversible advance towards the ancient dream of the Essential Copy - the grapes of Zeuxis. The second is a prejudice 'of the left' and concerns a mythical continuity: that 'Quattrocento' space reigns unchallenged from Giotto until Cezanne.
Giotto, Lamentation, 1304
For Bryson, perspective is a "rhetorical device" to convince viewers that what is being presented is real. As such, some kind of psychological or sociological study would be required to prove its success. He refers us back to chapter one for further discussion- but I prefer to discuss perspective only within the context of specific paintings.
He does, however, also wish to address the question of whether "'Quattrocento' space reigns unchallenged from Giotto until Cezanne." -- and I would question whether single point perspective ever went unchallenged (or ignored) during that period -- beginning with Giotto himself. It was challenged technically every time the rule of proportional regression was broken as composition or expression may have required. It was challenged visually every time some object in the distance appeared, for one reason or another, to snap back to the surface of the picture plane. The Albertian box , as built by Raphael in "School of Athens", may prevent that by incrementally measuring back into the entire pictorial space. But otherwise, some or all of the parts are pulled forward to the surface.
Simon Vouet, Rape of Europa, 1640
Here is a typical example of that collapse. Even if we know there must be many miles between the hooves of the bull in the foreground and the white clouds in the far distance, the surface holds all parts to within a few inches of each other -- just as in a sculptural relief. The wispy white clouds are no further from the viewer than the putti whom they echo.
To understand the space of French rococo painting it is essential to realize the extent of its erotic focus. The erotic body is not a place of meanings and the erotic gaze does not attend to signification; on the contrary - within the sexuality of rococo painting, the image can speak to desire so directly precisely because it is no longer distracted and exhausted by signaling work.
For its erotic content to be fully yielded up, the body must be presented to the viewer as though uniquely made to gratify and to be consumed in the moment of the glance. All signs that the body has other purposes, another history, are to be suppressed; it cannot even have a setting of its own. The immediate result is the removal, within rococo painting, of the body from any space that might be construed as interference with the main aim of providing a setting for the spectacle. It cannot any longer reside in a reproduced spatiality of the world, but must be transported to another space that is as close as possible to that inhabited by the viewer. Now, for the viewer, the space that is uniquely his is the picture-plane. This is most evidently the case in those rococo works designed as panels to be inset into the walls of private apartments: the wall is an actual physical part of the viewer's surroundings and in respecting a continuity between wall and painting, the erotic image can be brought into direct contact with the viewer's Umwelt. The 'Quattrocento' concept of 'window' would 'take the image away'.
By "erotic content" that "speaks to desire directly",
Bryson must mean something like raw sexual instinct - because "the erotic body is not a place of meanings". That's what I would call pornographic, either explicit or suggestive. You know it because when you see it, you get sexually aroused. It whets the appetite - much like a commercially enhanced photograph of a big juicy hamburger overflowing with garnishes and melted cheese.
Here's one Rococo painting that does arouse me.
I would certainly like to join her on the cushions.
.. and I'm just a bit uncomfortable that I can't.
This piece, however, is more like an attractive place - a place where everyone is young , happy, healthy, and carefree. I would like to believe that such a place could exist- though I'm no more aroused than I would be by a vase of beautiful flowers.
Fragonard, The Swing, 1767
While this piece is more like a humorous fantasy. The subject matter is sexual desire, but it doesn't really provoke mine at all. I just like to share in its elite 17th Century silliness.
So I can't really accept Bryson's attempt to narrow the "erotic content" of Rococo paintings down to an instinctive physical response to human flesh.
And if we go back to one of the most iconic erotic paintings in European civilization, one might acknowledge that its full erotic content ( physical, psychological, cultural) is not diminished at all by the careful construction of a deep pictorial space behind the immanently available reclining nude.
Bryson's discussion of the erotic in rococo painting may be smart, counter-intuitive, and semiotic. But it is also severely reductive and ahistorical.
'Perspective is nothing else than seeing a place or objects behind a pane of glass, quite transparent, on the surface of which the objects behind that glass are drawn' (Leonardo) : and precisely because perspective means distance from the viewer, recession and separation, its existence is denied within rococo.
There certainly are plenty of wispy, puffy, nebulous areas in rococo paintings - but some distinct objects are sharply depicted, and the pictorial space, though shallow, does allow some objects to be in front of others. If the artist really wanted "nothing else to interfere with the main aim of providing a setting", why not just have the attractive body by itself , floating in space? That would present the body as what "the erotic gaze most desires: simply, posture". Instead, the human body in rococo painting is one more fluffy pillow on the bed.
As a fairly characteristic specimen, the Boucher Venus and Vulcan in the Wallace Collection : no architectural reference within the image challenges the architecture of the viewer with an independent claim; no straight perspective lines to locate the image in a space behind the wall, and indeed scant possibility of straight lines of any kind. Venus is not placed in a context which might set up in rivalry against the setting where the image is to be consumed.
Yet we do see earth below, sky above, and an assortment of objects in between that includes a piece of armor, a sword, an anvil, rope, and some steps (drawn in perspective) on which Vulcan is seated.
The space is filled, but not with substances that come from the world- hardly with substance at all. In Boucher a mysterious filler, which looks like cloud but behaves like cushioning, occupies the zone around the figures; if it is not cloud, it is water, as in The Setting of the Sun, but again water that behaves as a solid. These substances have been invented primarily to impersonate a spatial setting, without risking the creation of a space that would threaten to exclude the spectator, for the aim of the image is appropriation by the viewer, with the least possible resistance.
There is enough dark turbulent drama in this scene to remind me of Tintoretto:
Tintoretto, Apollo Crowning a Poet (perhaps) , 1570-1579
And here the nebulous pictorial space is even more confusing.
Is the viewer flat on his back and looking upward ?
There is a further concession which the rococo image makes ( to the space of the viewer: to eroticize the plane of the signifiers. This is already facilitated by the overall spatial illegibility, so that the image closes in on and is embraced by the viewer's own spatial zone. But it is also supported by a psychoanalytic consideration.
Within a 'heterosexual' optic where specialized functions are assigned to each sex, pleasure in looking is broken between active(= male) and passive(= female). Thus in both Venus and Mars surprised by Vulcan and Venus and Vulcan the females lower their lids to conceal the eye, the males raise their pupils to reveal the eye. Semantically, the lowering returns to the female the meaning of 'modesty' which her general appearance enormously contradicts, to a degree which threatens the gender-division whereby sexuality is thought to be with the male. But from another aspect it clearly announces the_division of roles: Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look. In Boucher the male is only admitted as visual adorer, his uplifted eyes coinciding neatly with the LeBrun root of' ecstasy' (eyes raised towards the pineal); he is rarely allowed as object of adoration himself. Within this structure, the gaze of the male is phallic, and in this the male within the painting acts as surrogate for the male viewer, to whose sexuality the image is exclusively addressed.
Perhaps the clearest instance of this is Fragonard's Swing : the viewer cannot from his angle of vision glimpse the area between the female's legs, and this gaze is passed to the transfixed male on the left. There might, indeed, be a risk of excluding the viewer too far from the scene, if the eyes of the painted male figure were clearly established as competent, absorbing fully the impact of what is seen and not simply the place of a relayed glance. If the visual area of the painted male were understood as fully potent, the desired glimpse could stay with him, and might not pass out to the spectator. To counteract this tendency, Fragonard reduces the eyes of both male and female to what is, in his work, a characteristic formula: little slots. Because the spectator within the scene has such comically reduced visual apparatus, the glance of the viewer has no serious rival. But the emphasis on the look as phallic poses' a problem, for the disrobed female signifies something the look continually disavows- explicit genitality, with its threat of 'distaste'; an end to the visual pleasure. The economy of the erotic image, within this division of labour, sets the male up as bearer of the look, but the look is probing for something which if found will unsettle the act of looking itself- it will no longer carry the visual pleasure of art. Yet the threat posed by the body of the female can be defused by disavowing actual genital difference through the substitution of a fetish object: in this case, the shoe which flies from the foot of the female towards the gazing male. The Swing is only an extreme statement of the rococo tendency to find acceptable substitutes, and of course in this instance it fails, by deliberate comedy (the use of the comic also defuses the anxiety latent in the scene): the shoe is too obviously a displacement and the sign of disavowal; it is as inadequate for this task as it is, in the Fragonard, as a shoe (it is too small for the foot).
I like these observations about the narrow eyes and the tiny fetish-like shoe --- but hasn't Bryson moved away from an erotic content that "speaks to desire directly" ?
Bryson's analysis seems to apply to the "The Swing", but not especially to this scene. The young lady's eyes are wide open as she stares at the offered rose. Architectural detail returns us to the quattrocento picture window world of perspective.
There is a certain magnificence to these paintings - perhaps best experienced when surrounded by them in the bedroom as an intimate kind of theatre. I like the idea of the bedroom as a special and safe place for role play and fantasy.
With 'Quattrocento' space, plenty of scope for the development of the window as theme: the Ghirlandaio Old Man with Child in the Louvre, the Titian Isabella of Portugal, the Durer Self-Portrait in the Prado, are all obvious cases of a fascination with the idea of the painting as pane of glass giving on to a scene outside, behind the plane of the signifiers. But with rococo, a whole code of social and psychological censorship forbids the idea of the displayed body as 'realty' existing behind the signifiers (perhaps not until Manet's Olympia does this autonomous existence of the displayed female become fully possible). In the enforced absence of that autonomy, as of the sexual facts, the rococo image constantly euphemises and the plane of signifiers clouds over, acquiring an opacity in which it is the stroke of the brush on canvas which carries the sexual frisson.
A window behind the figure opens upon a landscape in all three of Bryson's examples. Obviously that part of the painting is a pane of glass. But what about the foreground figures in those paintings ? Don't many old master portraits seem to make their subjects enter the space of the gallery?
Does it really require "a whole code of social and psychological censorship" to "forbid the idea of the displayed body as 'realty' existing behind the signifiers" ? These rococo paintings were made to decorate the walls of bedrooms - and who really wants to feel that a bunch of naked strangers are actually in there with them ?
Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Gaspard de Gueidan
This characteristic insistence upon adjustment of the image to the picture plane, so visible in the erotic rococo image, carries over to other genres where we would less expect to find it. Even portraiture is affected, and in a forgotten climax of the rococo portrait- Hyacinthe Rigaud's Gaspard de Gueidan en joueur de Musette, at Aix-en-Provence - one of the most breathtaking paintings of the French eighteenth century, and for me one of the four or five radically undervalued masterworks of France- we can see how older artists tried to adjust their technique to the new planarity.
In the 1720s Rigaud's art is an anachronism; yet from another point of view the peculiar features which distinguish Rigaud's portraiture had always been anachronistic: the carved, unyielding but highly dynamic drapery looks back to Italy and to statuary - to Bernini, not to the new discursive painting of LeBrun, where drapery as a priority is rather low on the scale. Rigaud's idiosyncratic use of such drapery persists throughout his career , and accompanying it is a distinctive compositional technique for balancing the head in relation to the hands, which in its extreme stability and endless variability suggests a formula on which Rigaud could always rely: the head and hands are linked in triangular immobility, but the drapery is charged and unstable, and the tension between immobility and instability is the feature Rigaud exploits to the full.
Even without a high-resolution image this piece is breathtaking. I had never expected Bryson to share so much aesthetic enthusiasm for a painting. The colorful, tempestuous fabrics are off the chart - and as Bryson notes, they contrast quite nicely with the more static, delicate face and hands.
Yet despite his public hostility to Boucher, in the final phase of his career Rigaud gives the formula a new rococo twist. Instead of a drapery made of sombre materials which are secondary . to the stable hands, it now grows brilliant; and instead of inhabiting the space defined within the painting by the body, it seeks to escape outwards and to meet the picture plane. The folds of brocade and satin turn towards the viewer with no concessions to naturalism; the material displays itself, like the Boucher nude, for exclusive contemplation from the spectator's point of view, and a direct transfer takes place whereby the richness of the fabric is shifted on to the surface paint, and the picture-plane becomes the place where opulence of fabric can be better displayed than in the virtual depth of the space behind it.
I'm sure they exist - but I can't think of any precedents for such a glorious display of clothing - unless maybe it's Japanese :
Chobuson Eishi (1756-1829)
It's the Japanese painting shown above which holds everything to the picture plane. Rigaud gives his drapery volume - and volume creates a surrounding space -- even if it's not very deep.
Here’s an earlier portrait by the same artist of the same man - This time in his official role as président à mortier - the highest appellate judge in the province. The more flamboyant portrait shown earlier depicts him as Celadon - the shepherd hero of a 17th century romantic novel that was then still quite popular among the French aristocracy. It’s a fascinating connection that probably reflects the judge’s social ambition for recognition as an honnête homme. It also reflects the feminine values that were cultivated by both men and women in France before the Revolution - back when male aristocrats dressed like peacocks. Perhaps Bryson should be applauded for ignoring those dominant, politically correct academic discourses that relate to class and gender. Yet in this painting, they seem so much more relevant and illuminating than his ongoing focus on disruptions of pictorial space.
Nicholas Largillierre, 1727
Here’s a portrait by one of Rigaud’s competitors. It's also exquisite in attention to detail - but lacks Rigaud's inner dynamic and engaging facial character. It has the virtues and faults of a gift shop doll.
Rigaud is probably best known outside France for his state portrait of Louis XIV, which in its sombre opulence and authoritative distance seems to belong exclusively to the period of LeBrun.
Though less colorful, this drapery is just as dynamic. It's not surprising that Rigaud's father worked with cloth in liturgical settings. I love Rigaud! It's too bad I may never see his work unless it travels here for a special exhibit.
Since they were originally intended for the tomb of a notable person -- and they were never installed -- we might conclude that at one point, the artist did not consider these as finished. But later on - did he look at them and decide that they still might exemplify whatever he was trying to express ? I have yet to read that he said anything about it.
Has any other non-conceptual artist written something like: "I am trying to leave something unfinished so that viewers will be able to finish it in their own minds" ?
We might also consider that, as many artists have learned to their sorrow - the final determination of finished/not-finished is often made by somebody else. It seems unlikely that Michelangelo's Slaves would have been considered finished by whomever commissioned them. But even if Michelangelo was not a prince, he achieved something like artist-prince status - so a discussion of non-finito as a positive effect begins with him or the other artist-prince of his time, Leonardo.
The doctrine of an ideal presence, half-transmitted by the art-work but requiring for its full existence the imaginative participation of reader or viewer, begins here to elide with the emotionalism of the phase that succeeds rococo- with sensibilite. Yet the hallucinations of Partridge, Diderot and Garcin are only the culmination of the belief which so insists upon the value of animation in the art-work (Bouhours, Andre, Lambert, Spence) that a corollary is that art must not be complete in itself, but acquire completion in the receiver's mind, and this cultivated insufficiency is at the heart of the rococo image, and its concept of space. Prom one point of view it induces the fa presto of Fragonard, most garishly visible in- The Abbe de Saint-Non as an Actor , 'done in an hour'. Precisely because the image has been prematurely abandoned, is only a calligraphic trace of a possible image which the viewer is left, in the phrase of de Piles, 'to complete according to his taste', it remains flat on the picture plane. We see the work of the painterly trace and are encouraged, because it has quit the image long before closure, to take up its effort at the point of abandonment, and to prolong its life within a separate mental space. In this, the Fragonard rapidissimo harmonises with the taste for the work of art that is not self-sufficient in itself, but calls into play for its full realisation the active co-operation of the viewer's imagination, as in those slightly unbelievable accounts of the 'hallucinability' of Vergil, Homer, ~ and Richardson. Strictly speaking, the hi-dimensionality of Fragonard's oil sketch might not to be considered in itself, since its incompletion is there to call into play a supplementary space in which the participating imagination can flesh the image out into three dimensions. But in itself the image insists on its place on the plane of signifiers, and on the work of the signifier in conjuring forth a signified which the viewer's active collaboration then extends. We may eventually dissolve the brushwork in imaginary space, once the co-operative labour of our own imagination gets underway; but certainly as we approach the image initially, the plane of the signifiers is what we see, and what impresses us.
When a representation feels "half transmitted", is it because the artist wanted the viewer to complete it - or is it the result of the artist's expressiveness that could not be achieved by any other means? Or is it because the viewer's sense of what might be "fully transmitted" is different from the artist's ?
That last option might account for my reaction to Fragonard's portrait of the Abbe. I love Fragonard's expressive brushwork in other pieces -- but this one just feels too quickly pulled together.
This piece predates the writers quoted by Bryson. It might exemplify an approach to painting in which calligraphic effects are intended to be expressive of the subject --- rather than require completion in the mind of the viewer.
Same thing with the calligraphic effects in this other piece by Fragonard. I prefer this piece to the sketchier portrait of Abbe de Saint-Non -- but must note that Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non, Fragonard, and Hubert Robert were something like a clique of young French artists in Rome in the 1760's. Jean-Claude made prints from their paintings. Fragonard's portrait of him might have been like a manifesto of the art ideals that they shared - or maybe just a personal memento of their friendship.
Similarly, in the Fete at Saint-Cloud, the figures are entirely elliptical and laconic, requiring much imaginative work on the painterly signifier if the human , figures are not to remain as uncertainly animated as the marionettes; and by so stressing the marionettes, Fragonard makes us aware of the whole issue of the power of the imagination to animate the dead matter of art. The presence of a stage in a park may remind us of Watteau, fete champetre. In Watteau, we are always given enough information about the figures to make us feel intrigued; but here the figures are so robbed of information that the work we have to do is more primary, not yet the subtle work of interpretation and of following the implications ('reading between the strokes'), but the much cruder task of filling out the rudimentary figures so that they can become acceptable as depictions of living human beings in the first place. The Watteau long shot, hiding faces and expressions, is extended to such distance that the difficulty lies in making the most basic perceptual sense of the scene. The Fete at Saint Cloud as a visual idea is all about dwarfing human beings so that they approach a point of non-recognisability. Usually this is recuperated as a proto-Romantic effect - 'humanity seen as puny beside the forces of nature'.
Watteau - Fragonard
Recognizability is more important than expression so far as Bryson is concerned. It has been a key issue for him beginning with the very first paragraph of his introduction. It is the interface between image (what's on the canvas) and word (what we name it).
But as exemplified above -- Fragonard's small human figures are no less recognizable as such than those of Watteau. What is different is the individuated character of them. Watteau seems to have presented real people whom you might like to meet if you stepped into one of his paintings. In Fragonard's scenes, the figures are part of a dream-like fantasy of a world that never existed.
Hubert Robert, Le Pont Ancien, 1760
But while it is undoubtedly true that distortions of scale are an essential feature of French Romantic painting, and absolutely central for example in Gros, there is no need here to go so far outside the period or to invoke a new aesthetic climate, precociously anticipated. In his play with the thresholds of re cognition, Fragonard is far closer to his friend Hubert Robert than to the Romantic movement; and the exploration of the possibilities of that threshold of recognition focusses much of our attention on the signifying plane, which is what Hubert Robert wants from us .
To take a modernist comparison: the sculpture of Giacometti is intensely interested in the moment at which an advancing shape becomes recognizable as a human being, and in that other moment when at a closer distance we are able to recognize in the advancing figure an individual face; the sculpture expands out of those liminal moments when its own material, clay, comes to acquire the charge of the signified.
I've posted Bresson's photo of Giacometti to suggest that his sculptures are as instantly identifiable as human as the body of the artist himself. Threshold of recognizability is not so much the issue as psychological expression.
Fragonard and Hubert Robert are similarly interested in the moment when a painted trace becomes a recognizable human form; and their spatial handling, especially the long shot with tiny figures, centers on recognition-thresholds similar to those that fascinated Giacometti. '
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