[This text was written May/June 2002 -- I retrieved it from an old disc this evening. It's relation to the problem of interpretation of Poussin's paintings is obvious]
In the later 17th century there is a divergence in the theory of painting. On one
hand André Félibien was engaged in translating literary theory into the terms of the
theory of painting. His attention was focussed on the appropriate mise-en-scène and
the narrative content. The models were ancient painting, Raphael and Poussin. On the
other hand Roger De Piles especially valued chiaroscuro and colouring. It did not
matter how rich in narrative content a painting might be, it must have a rich natural
effect.
Roger de Piles' Cours de Peinture par Principes. 1708 begins with a
definition of painting as the imitation of visible objects by the means and the form of
colours. He remarks on how certain paintings, because richly endowed with
representational force, seem to call to the beholder.
True painting then is that which calls to us [so to speak], taking us by
surprise: and it is only because of the force of the effect that it produces that we
cannot prevent ourselves from approaching it, as if it had something to say to us. [My
translation. New Gallimard edition, 1989, p.8]
I have another sense of artworks calling to me, not based on life-like effect,
but on some unforeseen attraction. They appear to have something to say to me. Like
memory, moments of insight into works of art are rarely produced at will, but rather
by unexpected turns of thought, or by what seem to be such accidental encounters.
Descriptions do not come out of the blue, but from some preoccupying
interest, a situation, a cluster of thoughts. Here is an instance, not of a Poussin, but of
a sculpture by Canova. I was in Paris, on a brief visit, though at something of a loose
end. I went to the Museé du Louvre with no particular purpose in mind. I had seen
several posters near the Louvre advertising their current exhibition of drawings. I set
out to find the exhibition, which was on an upper floor. Passing through the ground
floor, I stopped for some time at the foot of a staircase, my attention caught for no
particular reason by Canova's Cupid and Psyche.
The next day I was to leave Paris by train from the Gare du Nord. The train
was not ready for boarding. I had half an hour to wait. I had somehow lost my last ten
franc piece on my way out of the hotel. I did not have any money to buy a newspaper
to pass the time. I watched a woman, with a heap of luggage belonging to her and her
companion – who had gone somewhere or other – counting through coins in her hand
in what must have been unfamiliar currency. She was looking down at her hand in a
way that reminded me at once of the two figures in the Canova sculpture, who look
down intently at the butterfly on the palm of Cupid's hand. I took out my notebook
and began writing, boarded the train, continued writing, and only stopped when the
train began to move, the vibrations making writing impossible.
In the Louvre I came upon the Canova
sculpture of Cupid and Psyche on my way to
see XVI and XVIIe century drawings by artists
from Verona. It called to me, as Roger de
Piles would have said, appealing to my taste
for expression of delicate and intimate
relations that hover between the body
and its desires as rendered in what is
not body, but, as in this case – or to
be less clinical on this occasion – marble.
The drilling rasping and bruising blows of
the chisel go unfelt by the personages
that appear as a result of these actions.
The resistance to the doubled perception is
hard to maintain as much for the sculptor
as for the spectator who witnesses
only the effect after the work is concluded.
The poignancy of the unfinished may be due
In part to the visibility of the further work
that is needed to complete the image of
the personage. The process which for Michelangelo
was thought of as releasing the figure from
the stone, as if it were already there in
a prison, or [illegible], as if it had been
seized while alive and immersed in concrete.
With Canova, the fingers of the hands are
not entirely severed from one another or
from that which they touch. Although
he takes care that from a certain distance
these connections, necessary to avoid
breakages of such delicate parts, are not
immediately visible. A painful crack
in Cupid's big toe is, sadly, apparent.
The figures are not entirely liberated from
the undifferentiated mass.
Inevitably Pygmalionism is faced with
its failure to transform fully, which is
also necessary to the ironic reading of
all representation or imitation, that which
prompts, precisely, the return from reverie, from
illusion, the withdrawal from the image, the
recognition of the expenditure, the investment
in it and the loss.
Canova, like Gainsborough and Fragonard,
to put him in some interesting company, is
a dealer in intimate and erotic moments.
This one has this image of a lovely young girl
who is accompanied by an equally lovely smaller
and probably younger boy. All the action
centres on a butterfly, its wings, thick as
thin-sliced sandwich bread, incised with a
design are held delicately upright by the girl.
She holds it so that its head is turned away from
us. Its feelers would have been a problem for
the carver, their absence would no doubt
have been noticed. Its little fat body
protrudes towards us instead. As she holds it
by its wings so that it cannot get away,
having taken it, one presumes, immediately
after its emergence from the cocoon before its
wings have dried, before it has taken its
first flight, she's taken the hand forearm of the little
boy and places her treasure in his palm.
What is, at this point, so cute, is that
he looking at it leans his face against her
and his body against her naked shoulder.
From the front one sees the line of her
shoulder interrupted by his hand that
rests there. All this as he gazes at
the butterfly. The delicacy of finish
is enough to propose the softness of the
flesh, not polished but finely rasped
until it is smooth. The intersection
of the two bodies is, crucially, refined,
not sharply incised, but smoothly joined
in a delicate unobtrusive plane, an effect
in painting that a blender would give.
Sure, butterflies are code for the soul
emergent from its dormant, death-like
state in the cocoon, but the imagination
here is demanded for something else, and
all to do with the delicacies of touch,
the gentlest, one might say an imagination
of an innocence, which no doubt
the connoisseur of art no longer shares.
If the boy is shown intent on the butterfly
not on the girl, that is enough to divert
the judgement of his erotic desires for
her as object, while the pressure of
his body on hers proposes what in
imagination for the spectator will no
doubt be pleasurable. She too intent
on the butterfly does not move away from
his touch, no withdrawal, no coquetry.
In the exhibition of drawings, I
was troubled by my eyesight and the
Some of the circumstances of the writing are alluded to briefly. I retained
them, thinking of Philostratus, who frames his descriptions with a specific time and
place and situation – or André Félibien, who makes use of the narrative setting for his
dialogues, in the Entretiens, or René Descartes, who uses a faming circumstance in
most of his philosophical writings. I recall also Robert Creeley's description of a
painting by Poussin, in Presences, in which the painting proves to be not a painting
but a postcard received by him, bearing a reproduction of the painting on the front.
This is a fact kept outside the text of the writing long enough to create a surprise when
it is revealed. A radio is playing in the room in which the writer is situated, and
although it is strictly not within the frame of the picture, what it says might seem
coincidentally to be commenting on it. The picture and the scene of the writing both
contain a poet. Poussin's Epic Poet is looking up as if to see the source of the voice of
his inspiration, while the obverse of the card bears a message wishing the poet in the
room a continuing and sustained inspiration.
My text is rough – insisting perhaps too much on the words delicate, delicately
and delicacy, and the phrase no doubt. Nonetheless, as sometimes happens with a
sketch, improvisation has lent it a certain momentum, which gets lost in attempts to
translate it into something more finished. I have preserved in print the narrow margins
of my notebook manuscript, maintaining the literal boundaries of the writing, which
are responsible for such rhythm that it has.
The text does not always explain itself as well as, in retrospect, I would like. I
had become so habituated to this kind of thought, that the language had become
compressed and elliptical. Instead of reworking the text, I am adding a few notes at
those points where it is least clear.
In an ekphrasis, there are , as usual, four other shadowy implicit figures in the
writing, beside the explicit figures of Psyche and Cupid in the sculpture. Two of these
implicit figures are literary figures, as in any text, the writer and the reader. The other
two implicit figures are the artist and the beholder. The latter are the equivalents in a
painting or sculpture of the writer and the reader in a text.
In my text there is an early 19th century connoisseur, who is far from being an
innocent observer of the seemingly innocent Psyche and Cupid. This particular figure
of a beholder is made from the writer's own desire, stirred up by the image in the
sculpture of the lovely figure of the adolescent girl. This is an image of a girl seen
without knowing she is being seen, who can be looked at lingeringly without a
challenging return gaze. It may be that the young boy is also designed to attract the
desires of connoisseurs.
The figure of the artist is there too: someone who has imagined what the
desires of connoisseurs might be. These desires are the perfectly rounded, the
perfectly smooth, as it were, air-brushed forms of figures without body hair, without
body fluids, without body odour and without colour. They are represented according
to the social codes that the artist shares with the beholders. They are not therefore
simply to be identified as an expression of the artist's own desires. The artist's desires
may be understood better as whatever it is in his personal life that is prompting him in
his relation with making the figures, designing them, executing them in stone, and on
a more mercenary level in relation to his career, in his relation with a possible public.
The figure of the writer is there, as it happens, always a stranger to the artwork
to be described, a foreigner to its context. The writer seeks for clues to the whole
desiring order of the sculpted figures of the sculpture, sculpture as craft, as process,
sculpture also a social process of artist with beholders. What is sought is this process,
from which emerged not only the design of the figures, but also the finely wrought
surfaces and the finely cut features. These figures in the sculpture are so gentle and
smooth that the physical assault on the marble with chisels and abrasives that made
them so is no longer easily apparent. It is almost hidden from view, but certain details
betray to an attentive eye the physicality of the medium. The figures in the sculpture
are, as in all figural art, are doubled in perception. On the one hand, these figures are
inert pieces of painted or sculpted design, silent, motionless, the colour of marble, not
of flesh. They are arrived at by a process which inevitably leaves its marks. On the
other hand, they are ready to be filled out as images, given imaginary life, by their
beholders.
There has been much philosophical debate about the theory of representation. I
am not going to try to adjudicate among the various contentions. My aim is not to
explicate and compare the many interesting theoretical texts, but to account for some
of the particular effects in figural artworks that have interested me. However, it has
appeared to me for many years that there is a serious need to notice that there is a
complexity to seeing artworks that responds to Richard Wollheim's notion of
'twoness'. In my own experience and thinking about art, I have found it necessary to
suppose that it is useful to think of a particular doubleness. There is it seems to me
always a doubled seeing of figural artworks, a seeing of both the crafted material and
the resulting personages, imaginary presences coming into existence, for the artist as
he works the marble and for the attentive observer after the work is finished. There is,
I notice, a widespread tendency to separate this double-seeing, to assign meaning to
one or the other, either to the figural presences and the narrative and symbol they
offer, or to the form as a species of meaningful order without regard to content. There
is in most current art history of figural art an insistence on content, on the significance
that may be attached to the figures as actions and feelings. There is a corresponding
disdain for form. Unfortunately this has brought about a disregard for the significance
of the fact that the figures are formed within the physical nature of their media, and
consequently there has been little attention to how this may be meaningful.
The process of inquiry about artworks makes it difficult to retain the
doubleness of art. It is impossible to ask two questions simultaneously. The
significance of the figures answers the question "what is represented?" and the further
question: "what does this representation signify?" But there is another question: "how
is the representation formed?" There is a further question to this too: "what does it
signify to form things this way in this particular instance?" These questions,
separated from one another, one regarding content, the other regarding "form", are
inadequate as means for understanding an artist's art. A fuller and more complete
questioning would begin by asking a more complex and more complete question: "by
what means is this particular presence-filled image arrived at?" and continuing to the
further question that comes from this: "what does this whole process signify?". The
answers to this last question will inevitably consider the conditions of reception as
well as those of the creation of the work. Then the shadowy implicit figures of writer
and reader, of artist and beholder, come into play.
As I mention in the ekphrasis of the Cupid and Psyche, there is always a
distance between the figures of art and their referents. Pygmalion's sculpted creation
will always lack the actualities of living beings. The sculptor works within the
peculiar limitations of the materials. There are several examples of this in the text: the
stone is subject to damage; Cupid's cracked toe; the sculptor's precautions with the
finely cut fingers, so that they will be less likely to break. The crucial one: the
butterfly's wings are represented by stone that cannot be thinned any further and it
remains as thick as thin-sliced sandwich bread. The butterfly's feelers are not
represented at all. It was therefore convenient to turn the head of the butterfly away
from the beholder, so that the absence of feelers will not be so obvious. Perhaps a
bronze butterfly would have solved these problems of representation, but then it
would have created new problems, because it would have stood out from the
homogeneity of the white stone of the rest of the sculpture.
In Canova's sculpture, it is important not to forget that on the one hand the
figures are marble that he has designed to be cut and rasped, but on the other there are
two human figures. For the sculptor, or his assistants, making the figures, the blows
and the scraping applied to the marble can barely be disassociated from these tender
young soft smooth persons. The junction of the figures is softened, even blurred,
where they touch one another most tenderly, where his head rests against her
shoulder. The connoisseur might dearly love that touch, but the two figures seem
unaware of its erotic possibility.
Like Canova's sculpture, Poussin's paintings are, from the mid-1630s to the
mid-1650s, so finished that their pictorial physicality is usually ignored. Nonetheless,
as with all painting, the marks remain visible. However, at he level of the mark or
trace there is often not a lot to say. It is at the level of the organised marks as forms or
figures that the physicality of Poussin's painting is interesting and little noticed. This
physical painting is what makes the figures and their content visible. Without it they
do not exist, except as images in the mind. The difference between images in the
mind, which we all have, and a painter's images, is the execution of them in paint, as
Philostratus notices in his life of Apollonius of Tyana. To understand Poussin's
narrative, the philosophical and symbolic that his pictures represent, the "what"
without the "how", is not to understand his art, in the sense that Wollheim regards
painting 'as an art' . It is necessary to take account of Poussin's actual physical
painting of his pictures, to consider the limits of his painting and his strategies as he
confronts those limits. Perhaps it will the n be possible to take further Wollheim's
project of seeing how the literary content is not simply separate from but enters into
the pictures.
Canova
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