Peter Wagner. Icons, Texts, Iconotexts. Essays Onf Ekphrasis and Intermediality PDF

Icons — Texts — Iconotexts
Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality
wDE
G
European Cultures
Studies in Literature and the Arts
Edited by
Walter Pape
Köln
Editorial Board:
Philip Brady, London · Keith Bullivant, Gainesville
Frederick Burwick, Los Angeles · Mark Galliker, Heidelberg
Joachim Gessinger, Potsdam · Marian Hobson, London
Günter Jerouschek, Halle • François Lecercle, Lyon
Carlo Ossola, Torino · Terence James Reed, Oxford
Elinor S. Shaffer, Norwich · Barbara Stafford, Chicago
Volume 6
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

1996
Icons — Texts — Iconotexts
Essays on Ekphrasis
and Intermediality
Edited by
Peter Wagner
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

1996
© Printed on acid-free paper
which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure
permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Icons, texts, iconotexts : essays on ekphrasis and intermediality /

edited by Peter Wagner.
(European cultures : v. 6)
English and French
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-014291-0 (alk. paper)
1. Ekphrasis. 2. European literature — History and criticism.
3. Art and literature. 4. Description (Rhetoric) 5. Words in art.
I. Wagner, Peter, 1949- . II. Series
PN56.E45I2 1995
809'.922 - dc20 95-16355
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Icons — texts — iconotexts : essays on ekphrasis and

intermediality / ed. by Peter Wagner. —Berlin ; New York : de
Gruyter, 1996
(European cultures ; Vol. 6)
ISBN 3-11-014291-0
NE: Wagner, Peter [Hrsg.]; GT
© Copyright 1996 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin.

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Printed in Germany
Typesetting: Greiner & Reichel, Köln
Printing: Gerike GmbH, Berlin
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin
Cover design: Rudolf Hübler, Berlin
Cover illustration: Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863). Paris, Musée d'Orsay
Acknowledgments
The essays collected in this volume were originally read at the international
conference which took place in Eichstätt in May 1993. I was the fortunate
and delighted host of a unique and sprighdy group of scholars from the
United States, Canada, France, England, and Germany. The aim of the meet-
ing was, on the one hand, a critical survey pf the present state of ekphrasis in
its various forms, and, on the other hand, the presentation of new ideas on
what some colleagues term "interart studies" and what I prefer to call the
study of intermediality, i.e., of texts or pictures distinguished by the co-pres-
ence of words and images (in a concrete sense and by way of allusion).
I am grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for its generous
support that enabled us to enjoy three memorable days of scholarly exchange
and discussion in the Altmühltal. Thanks also go to the Chancellor of the
Universität Eichstätt for a financial contribudon. Special thanks are due to
Walter Pape, the editor of European Cultures, who offered us a haven for this
collection in his distinguished series published by de Gruyter. This book
could not have been published without the financial support of the Stifter-
verband, Landesbank Rheinland-Pfalz: I am particularly grateful for its contri-
bution. I could never have organized the meeting without the help of Odile,
Anne-Claude, Marie-Laure, and Roland - they all contributed in their ways to
make it a successful enterprise.
Koblenz-Landau, August 1995 Peter Wagner

Contents
Acknowledgments ν
PETER W A G N E R
Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality
- the State(s) of the Art(s) 1
Ekphrasis and Theories of Reading Visual Representations
JEAN-PIERRE DUBOST
Iconolâtrie de iconoclastie de l'écriture libertine 43
BERNADETTE FORT
Ekphrasis as Art Criticism: Diderot and Fragonard's
"Coresus and Callirhoe" 58
FREDERICK BURWICK
Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Crisis of Romanticism 78
ALAIN MONTANDON
Ecritures de l'image chez Théophile Gautier 105
Iconotexts: The Eighteenth Century
CATHERINE CUSSET
Watteau: The Aesthetics of Pleasure 121
FRÉDÉRIC O G É E
Sterne and Fragonard: The Escapades of Death 136
R O N A L D PAULSON
The Harlot, Her Father, and the Parson:
Representing and Interpreting Hogarth in the Eighteenth Century . . 149
viii Contents
OTTMAR ETTE
La mise en scène de la table de travail: poétologie et épistémologie
immanentes chez Guillaume-Thomas Raynal et Alexander
von Humboldt 175
Iconotexts: The Nineteenth Century
PETER SABOR
The Strategie Withdrawal from Ekphrasis in Jane Austen's Novels . . . 213

W O L F G A N G LOTTES
Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860-1890 236
J A M E S HEFFERNAN
Entering the Museum of Words: Browning's "My Last Duchess"
and Twentieth-Century Ekphrasis 262
PETER W A G N E R
Oscar Wilde's "Impression du matin" - an Intermedial Reading . . . . 281
Iconotexts: Caricature
DAVID BINDMAN
Text as Design in Gillray's Caricature 309
W A L T E R PAPE
The Batde of the Signs: Robert Crumb's Visual Reading
of James Boswell's "London Journal" 324
Bibliography 347
Primary Sources 347
Secondary Sources 353
List of Illustrations 383
Notes on Contributors 388
Index 392
Colour Plates after 406
PETER W A G N E R
Introduction:
Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality -
the State(s) of the Art(s)
Butt-head: "Is this art?"

Beavis: "This means something."
Beavis and Butt-head watching an especially
atmospheric video by U2.
If a narrative is created in words, that's where it should stay.

Peter Greenaway, on being asked by LITERARY REVIEW
which book he would like to make into a movie.
The fact that a spatial work of art doesn't speak can be inter-
preted in two ways. On the one hand, there is the idea of its ab-
solute mutism, the idea that it is completely foreign or hetero-
geneous to words [...]. But on the other hand [...] we can always
receive them, read them, or interpret them as potential discourse.
That is to say, these silent works are in fact already talkative, full
of virtual discourses.
Jacques Derrida, in Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds.:
Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (1994), pp. 12-13.
It's more reassuring to regard paintings as sardine tins

that don't look back.
Michael Ann Holly: "Past Looking,"
Critical Inquiry 16 (1990), p. 394.
More often than not, books are the children of discontent or dissent. The
idea for the essays in this book (and the conference where they were first de-
livered) was engendered by my personal dissatisfaction with the state of visual
poetics and the research in word-image relations. In the late 1980s, while at-
tending international meetings and the annual ASECS conferences in the
United States and acquainting myself with the rhetoric of experts in narratol-
ogy, art history, philosophy, and literary theory, I began to realize that the
2 Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality - the State(s) o f the Art(s)
fields of ekphrasis and intermediality (whose changing boundaries I will try to

outline below) had apparendy seen litde progress or change. Since I was and
continue to be personally concerned, in a manner of speaking, in a study of
the intertextual and intermedial relations in Hogarth's graphic art, I deemed it
high time in the early '90s for a meeting that would deal with the problems at
hand and, if possible, get us ahead.
The critical and ekphrastic malaises I had diagnosed were the following.
Structuralist and poststructuralist theoreticians - from Bakhtin, Barthes and
Kristeva, to Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida - had published a series of studies
that should have shaken the foundations of a number of disciplines, including
humanist art history and literary criticism, and put into question such cher-
ished beliefs as the "mutual illumination o f the arts." To be sure, "French
theory," as it came to be called in the 1980s 1 , did have an international effect.
Roland Barthes, for instance, taught the world that everything from painting
to objects, to practices, and to people, can be studied as "texts." Barthes,
Kristeva and, in their wake, Umberto Eco made us see what semiology can
do for the understanding o f cultures and social practices and their expression
in images. Foucault and Althusser opened our eyes to the social production of
meaning and its inscription through power. And the Lacanian psycho-analysis
demonstrated how the human subject is formed in the play o f gender differ-
ence. Finally, Jacques Derrida's still hotly contested, and frequently misunder-
stood, statement "il n'y a pas the hors texte," is, if we remain clear-headed,
rather conventional by modern philosophical standards; but what it does tell
us, ruthlessly and honestly (which is the real reason why it has found so much
objection), is that there is no Archimedean point outside of language from
which the truth claims of language itself can be verified. Where, I had to ask
myself in the early '90s, are the studies in ekphrasis or visual poetics that en-
gage with or profit from Derrida's concepts of the "supplement" and the
"différance" or his claim that in art it is "the represented and not the représ-
enter, the expressed and not the expression" which matters? One had to look
very hard and for a long time to find such critical works.2
1 See, for instance, the collection o f essays (including pieces by Barthes, Genette, Riffaterre et
al.) edited by Todorov: French Literary Theory Today.
2 My very brief survey here is indebted to Michael Ann Holly' s article on "Art Theory."
Groden and Kreiswirth, eds.: The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory <& Criticism,
pp. 4 8 - 5 3 ; and to the introductions to Modernism and Postmodernism in Harrison and
Wood, eds.: Art in Theory. 1900-1990, pp. 7 9 7 - 8 0 2 ; 9 1 8 - 8 5 . The quotation is from Derri-
da's Of Grammatology, p. 210. - There are now surveys galore o f poststructuralist theory. A
good introduction, with excerpts from many original essays, is Davis and Schleifer: Contem-
porary Literary Criticism: see especially the texts by Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, Foucault, La-
can, and Elaine Showalter.
Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality - the State(s) o f the Art(s) 3
One of them saw the light o f day in 1988, when Norman Bryson pub-
lished a collection entitled Calligram, which assembled important essays in
"the New Art History from France" (including articles by Kristeva, Baudril-
lard, Marin, Foucault, and Barthes). Bryson intended to contrast the Anglo-
American approach in art history, and notably the continuing "Perceptualist
procedure" as represented by Gombrich (in his Art and Illusion), with the
French insistence on the sign, its social production and formation, and the
problems of power and control. I f Bryson's ultimate aim was to prove, like
the Sternian traveller in A Sentimental Journey, that they "order this matter ...
better in France," he was honest enough to concede that "as elsewhere, in
France too a conservative art history dominates the major institutions" which
tend to "consolidate the most positivistic aspects of art historical writing."
Excepting some challenging contributions from absolute outsiders like Régis
Debray or members of the Grandes Ecoles, this still holds true today.3
Apart from Calligram, Bryson has produced a number of interesting stud-
ies suggesting new ways in visual poetics. Like Mieke Bal, another important
theoretician, Bryson orginally comes from what he terms the "Literary Field";
and it seems to me that it is precisely the crossing o f disciplinary borders
(Bryson from English Literature to art history; and Bal from narratology to
visual rhetoric) which makes their works innovative. Bal's Reading 'Rembrandt'
is, in my opinion, the most advanced and sustained attempt to date to get us
beyond the word-image opposition. It is precisely because she has a feminist
axe to grind and thus reflects on ideology, gendering and vision within the
more immediate art historical and rhetorical concerns o f the book, that her
approach is both persuasive and timely, given the preceding decades of gen-
der-biased criticism. Bal may not really deliver what she promises in the sub-
title of her leviathan monograph; and yet Reading 'Rembrandt' (the inverted
commas serve to deconstruct the author concept) remains a powerful state-
ment that urges us to consider pictures as rhetoric or encoded signs that must
and can be 'read' with the tools provided by narratology and poststructural
theories, including feminism.4
3 See the recent monographs by Debray: Vie et mort de l'image; Damisch: L'origine de la perspec-
tive-, and Didi-Huberman: Devant l'image. In addition, see Duve: Au Nom de l'art: Pour une
archéologie de la modernité-, and Pictorial Nominalism. — Bryson's introduction, however, is more
than a survey o f the state o f art history and ekphrasis: he also sketches the possible future
o f a new art history (in Britain and the United States) drawing on French theory.
4 See also Bal's recent "Light in Painting: Dis-Seminating Art." Brunette and Wills, eds.: De-
construction and the Visual Arts, pp. 4 9 - 6 5 , where she "does Derrida" (i.e., explores dissem-
ination) in an intertextual and feminist reading o f paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. In
addition, see Bryson's Vision and Painting, Visual Theory-, and Looking at the Overlooked.
4 Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality — the State(s) of the Art(s)
But the voices of Bryson, Bal, and Barbara Stafford 5 , vociferous as they
may be, remain those of enlightened singers or prophets in the desert - art
history in America and Britain has yet to respond to their challenges.6
In many ways the missing echo is comparable to the lacking response in
art history and literary criticism to the poststructuralist re-thinking of the au-
thor concept and of authorial intention. Beginning in the late 1960s, theoreti-
cians as diverse as Lacan, Althusser, Barthes and Foucault all questioned the
status of the homogeneous, independent, individual that was now being de-
scribed as an ideological construct. The concept of the author was one of the
first casualties of this attack. The advantage of the new view (sometimes
ridiculed as the denial of the existence of biological individuals) is that the hu-
Bryson and Bal seem to have learned a great deal from French theoreticians. - Important
recent feminist criticism in what Michael Ann Holly terms 'Art Theory' includes Pollock:
Vision and Difference·, and Broude and Garrard, eds.: Feminism and Art History. See also Holly:
"Art Theory." Groden and Kreiswirth, eds.: The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and
Criticism, pp. 51—2.
5 Stafford has extended the inquiry of art history into those fascinating border areas where
art (and illustration) meets science, scientific discourse, and literature. See her Voyage into
Substance·, the superb Body Criticism; the article "Conjuring: How the Virtuoso Romantic
Learned from the Enlightened Charlatan"; and her recent, richly documented, monograph,
Artful Science. Stafford too is a critic who looks beyond the national border, reading and
quoting critical literature from several European countries. I have discussed and used some
of her work in my Reading Iconotexts.
6 See Donald Preziosi's critique of the teleological and exegetical functions of art history in
"The Question of Art History." Specifically, Preziosi argues that one of the primary func-
tions "of art history, from the time of its founding as an academic discipline, has been that
of the restoration of the past into the present so that the past can itself function and work
in and on the present; so that the present may be framed as itself the product of the past"
(p. 378). - In Germany too, poststructuralist theory has so far made litde impact on art his-
torical writing. It is hardly surprising (for me), for instance, to find a pregnant silence about
recent theoretical models (e.g., discourse analysis, deconstruction, feminism, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis) in what claims to be a comprehensive survey of "die Positionen der Kunst-
theorie in der Gegenwart" (the contemporary positions/approaches in the theory of art) [p.
9] in Henrich and Iser, eds.: Theorien der Kunst. Similarly, introductions to 'Kunstgeschichte'
ignore or reject recent theory (e.g., relevant works by Lacan, Derrida or Foucault): see, for
instance, Belting, Dilly, Kemp et al., eds.: Kunstgeschichte: Eine Einführung, in which decon-
struction is not even mentioned and Foucault is dismissed with a disparaging remark (p.
317). This lacking response is reflected in practical studies. Werner Busch 's latest work, for
instance, Das sentimentalische Bild, is a useful and detailed (iconological) assessment along
traditional lines that will have no truck with poststructuralist tools. An exciting exception in
this barren landscape of German criticism is the work of W Kemp (see, for instance, Der
Text des Bildes), who applies with great profit some ideas borrowed from reader response
and reception theories. Also see Kemp, ed. : Der Betrachter ist im Bilde.
Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality — the State(s) of the Art(s) 5
man being, including the former "genial" (god-like) author 7 , is now located
within a system of conventions, practices, norms and so forth, in short: of
discourses that actually articulate him/her - the author comes into being as
someone "spoken." This is the important notion behind what is often called
"the death of the author." 8
For both art history and literary criticism, one could have imagined far-
reaching and fruitful consequences of such challenging of traditionally cher-
ished hermeneutic concepts. But even the most superficial survey will show
that critics in both fields continue, unperturbed, inquiring into the possible in-
tention of say Hogarth or Swift.9
My last point in this brief litany of complaints about the lacking response to
recent theory is the discussion of one of the darling concepts in the relations
between words and images. This is "utpictura poesis," which in art criticism and
history has led to what is often termed the "correspondences of the arts" or
"the sister arts" or even "the mutual illumination of the arts." It is a notion that
has seeped over into the practice of ekphrasis. Indeed, Horace's famous dic-
tum, which can be translated in several, and to my mind different, ways (e.g.,
"as is painting so is poetry," or "as in painting so in poetry"), has cast its long
shadow over the Western tradition. The simile, however interpreted 10 , asserted
7 On the creation of the notion of the genius for artists and writers during the eighteenth
century and the need of such a notion during the nineteenth century in what is essentially a
secularization of the Christian view of the Creator, see Mason: "Thinking About Genius in
the Eighteenth Century."
8 Its advantages (the possibility of listening to other voices, once the author concept disap-
pears as the sole purpose of "listening") are perhaps best explained in Michel Foucault's
article quoted in my essay on Oscar Wilde's poem below. It has been reprinted in excerpts
in Davis and Schleifer, eds.: Contemporary Literary Criticism, pp. 341—54; and in Harrison and
Wood, eds.: Art in Theory, pp. 923—28. See also the introductions to the essay in both vol-
umes.
9 For a critique of hermeneutics in Hogarth studies, with some suggestions for the applica-
tion of poststructuralist approaches, see my article, "How to (Mis)Read Hogarth or
Ekphrasis Galore." - The field of Swift studies is, in this respect, also in dire straights. To
my knowledge, with the exception of studies by Louise Barnett and Laura Brown (even
though Brown is also very much concerned with Swift as author), no critic has approached
the Dean's œuvre from a perspective that considers the 'author' as written ("spoken") by
the discourse of his time. Clive Probyn attempts a deconstructive reading of Swiftean texts
(without deconstructing the notion of the author) in his contribution to Rodino and Real,
eds.: Reading Swift, pp. 25^-5. See my review of the entire volume, with some remarks on
the need of poststructuralist readings, in Anglia 113:2 (1995): 267—71. I have drawn with
great profit on Louise Barnett's deconstructionist reading of Gulliver's Travels in my article,
"Swift's Great Palimpsest."
10 See, for instance, the differing translations in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Po-
etics and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. My discussion here partly draws on the article,
6 Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality - the State(s) of the Art(s)
the likeness, if not the identity, of painting and poetry, engendering an extensive
body of aesthetic speculation. In the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, it
brought about the beginning of a theory of art and art history. Lessing's objec-
tions in his Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (1766) were
concerned less with the wish to do away with the Horation assumption (or de-
mand) than with the purity and delimitation of the arts, which in itself reflects
neoclassical and bourgeois aesthetic preoccupations. His insistence on the spa-
tiality of visual art and the temporality of verbal art does not, however, produce
a clash in the postmodern sense; paradoxically, it puts into practice yet another
détente between the arts, a friendly alliance which, as Tom Mitchell has demon-
strated, masks Lessing's fundamental fear of the irrational power embodied in
images and icons.11 Vestiges of the Laokoon mark the literature of the sister arts,
from the most historical of accounts (R. Lee, Hagstrum) to the most theoret-
ical (Krieger, Steiner, Bryson); and one must indeed conclude with Scott that
"the great devide between painting and poetry — at least in critical circles - re-
mains as formidable today as it was in the eighteenth century."12 It seems that
s.v. "Ut pictura poesis," in the encyclopedia quoted above and Bann: The True Vine, pp.
28—33. Also see the standard books on the topic, Lee's, Ut pictura poesis; and Hagstrum's The
Sister Arts. For a recent interesting contribution, see Lottes: "Shaftesbury und die Ut Pictura
/WÁr-Tradition."
11 See Scott: "The Rhetoric of Dilation," p. 307; and Mitchell: Iconology, chapter 4. In his essay,
"Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory," Mitchell demolishes age-old as-
sumptions about the notions of literary and verbal space, arguing that literature is embo-
died in a rhetorical field that is the meeting ground of time and space.
12 Bann: The True Vine, pp. 28-9; Scott: "The Rhetoric of Dilation," p. 308. In addition to the
studies of ekphrasis quoted above, Scott refers to Steiner's The Colors of Rhetoric, and
Bryson's essay, "Intertextuality and Visual Poetics," where Bryson posits an essential differ-
ence between pigment on canvas and text (in a book). Bryson argues, rather unconvincing-
ly, that literature or writing lacks "embodiment;" he thus privileges texts over images. — A
history of the critical writing on the relations between art and literature would need to take
into account the seminal essay (1917) by Oskar Walzel, later published in book form, and
the relief of the burgeoning art history in the early twentieth century to be able to forget
disturbing Romantic and Victorian notions of symbiosis (as advanced by A.W. Schlegel).
For a survey of critical writings on the subject (from the perspective of the "sister arts ap-
proach") see the introduction in Weisstein, ed.: Literatur und Bildende Kunst, pp. 11—31. Sig-
nificantly, Weisstein refuses to consider contemporary theories derived from literatary criti-
cism: see p. 18 n.26. — For recent examples of studies working with the assumption that
correspondence between the arts exists and can be traced, see Farmer: Poets and the Visual
Arts in Renaissance England, and Roston: Changing Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts
1650—1820. The latest critical works on the relationship between the arts and literature are
listed, and briefly introduced, in Tanji, "Crossing Boundaries": see especially the studies by
Braider: Refiguring the Real (1993); Brewer: The Discourse of Enlightenment (1993); Gutwirth:
The Twilight of the Goddesses (1992); and Stewart: Engraven Desire (1992).
Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality - the State(s) of the Art(s) 7
these critical circles are not afraid of "the risky presumption that the visual
work of art can be translated into the terms of verbal discourse without remain-
der."13
The ineradicable belief in a correspondence appears to be suspiciously neat
and fitting. Is there no room in ekphrasis, we may ask with Stephen Bann, "for
the modern conviction (deeply rooted at least since the time of Baudelaire)
that a good proportion of what is experienced in looking at a work of art sim-
ply cannot be expressed in verbal terms?"14 If poststructuralism has taught us
anything it is the knowledge that making meaning depends on the fickle na-
ture of the sign, which is subject to personal and social determinants. When,
it may be asked, will this undeniable fact be recognized and considered by our
more reluctant confrères who are writing on visual poetics and the relation of
verbal and visual art?
These, in a few words, were the reasons that persuaded me to organize a
symposium on ekphrasis and intermediality and to publish the proceedings in
Walter Pape's distinguished series.
Let me now turn to this book. As the reader will notice immediately, it
cannot serve as a remedy for the malaise described above - nor was it de-
signed as such. The main target is a survey and description of the status quo in
the writing about art and the relations between texts and images. This is in
itself a first important move before one approaches new shores. But a large
part of this pioneering work of adventurous discovery and (as discoveries go)
appropriation is still to be done. We, the contributors to this volume, are glad
to provide bases from which departures are possible in many postmodern dir-
ections. If the collection also gets us a few steps ahead, it is all the better for
all concerned, even if that progress is only minimal.
I was lucky to find contributors from several countries, and I think this is
important (not merely because of what the traveller says at the opening of
Sterne's Λ Sentimental Journey)·, the reader will be able to recognize different
approaches here; to some extent, these differences are due to national out-
looks, but overall they reflect more of the personal critical interests of the
contributors. I have also insisted on the possibility that we can publish in two
languages, which guarantees "freedom of enunciation" (at least for the greater
part of the contributors), for anyone writing or publishing in a foreign lan-
guage knows how hard it is to find "le mot juste."
From the very beginning, I wanted to limit the period under survey to the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because a number of studies and pro-
13 Bann: The True Vine, p. 28 (italics in the original).

14 Ibid., p. 29.
ceedings of conferences have already been published on the twentieth century

or the entire modern period, and because even more critical literature is avail-
able on the time before 1600.15 With the exception of Walter Pape's contribu-
tion (which does return, by way of Crumb's images, to the eighteenth century
too), the essays in this book focus on the Enlightenment and the nineteenth
century. My aim was to unite art historians, philosophers, literary scholars
(from French, German, and English departments), and comparatists. This
aim has been largely achieved, although we would have welcomed more col-
leagues from art history if they had they been available (Norman Bryson, Bar-
bara Stafford, Klaus Herding, and Werner Busch were, unfortunately, busy
elsewhere).
The book is in four parts. The essays in the first section deal with the
theory of reading and describing visual representation, including the works of
such arch-ekphrastics as Diderot and Gautier. Part II is concerned with
theory and practice in the eighteenth century, as we are introduced to discus-
sions of the readings of works by Watteau, Fragonard, Hogarth, and visual
representations of Raynal and Humboldt. Part III presents analyses of icono-
texts from the nineteenth century, and a special, final, section deals with the
popular genre of caricature.
Since so far I have not even explained how I define and understand the
key terms in the title of this book (ekphrasis, iconotexts, and intermediality), I
must ask the reader to forgive me while reminding her, however, that one of
my favourite authors, Laurence Sterne, practices the same procedure in his
Tristram Shandy. Whereas Sterne delivers as it were only in Chapter 20 of vol-
ume III, I feel obliged to satisfy the reader's curiosity forthwith. In the fol-
lowing sections of the introduction I will address three issues. Firstly, the def-
inition and discussion of the important terms and concepts in their various
15 For a brief and enlightening history of the "dialogue between picture and text," with useful
references to critical literature, see Dirscherl: "Elemente einer Geschichte des Dialogs von
Bild und Text." Dirscherl, ed: Bild und Text im Dialog, pp. 15-26, which covers the period
from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. Also see Willems: Anschaulichkeit. -
Medievalists and Renaissance experts, too, have published a great number of works on the
text-image relation in books and manuscripts published before 1500. See, for instance, the
volume edited by Meier and Ruberg: Text und Bild, Unger: Text und Bild im Mittelalter,; the
contributions by Wenzel, Ott, and Weigel in Dirscherl, ed.: Bild und Text im Dialog, the
equally useful and perceptive articles in the first two sections of Text und Bild — Bild und
Text, a leviathan volume of conference proceedings edited by W. Harms (pp. 9-241 : see also
the bibliography listing a great number of other important works published before 1990);
Stevens: "The Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama;" Bath: Speaking Pictures·,
Camille: Image on the Edge·, and Warncke: Sprechende Bilder - sichtbare Worte. Camille and
Warncke come closest to the concerns of the present volume.
ramifications; secondly, a brief presentation of the articles in this book; and fi-
nally, some suggestions for new approaches in intermediality.
1. Definitions and Concepts
In Herman Melville's mighty Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851), art and artists
constantly interfere in the text — and so do the fictional readers or observers
of art works. A great concern with the production and understanding of
painting as a visual text to be decoded seems to lie at the heart of the novel,
constituting as it does one particular form of a general epistemological ques-
tioning. From Chapter I, where "an artist [...] desires to paint you the
dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all
the valley of the Saco" (p. 4), to Chapter 118, in which the Pequod's three
masts are compared to (visual representations of) "the three Horatii pirouett-
ing on one sufficient steed" (p. 545), the text repeatedly turns to ambiguous
paintings and art objects placed in front of helpless observers - and the
readers of Melville's novel. One of the more intriguing examples occurs
when, in Chapter 36, Ahab first nails the golden doubloon to the mast, and
then, as the English of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan revenge tragedy
blends with the powerful prose of the Bible and Milton's lofty verse (and
many other pre-texts), forces his crew to unite in an "indissoluble league."
Ahab calls out to his harpooneers:
"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch
the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances
at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them;
meanwhile, glancing intendy from Starbuck to Stubb; f r o m Stubb to Flask. It
seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked
them into the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own
magnetic life. 1 6
The scene is obviously inspired by two major pretexts (or subtexts), one ver-
bal and the other visual: Shakespeare's Hamlet and Jacques Louis David's Le
serment des Horaces (colour plate I). David's painting — and its highly ambiguous,
contradictory, socio-political implications - are integrated into Melville's text.
The dramatic scene relies for its meaning on the reading of David's canvas
and all the sources behind it, including the classical story of the Horatius fam-
16 My text is the latest critical edition of the novel containing the definite text. See the Pen-
guin edition (1992), p. 180.
ily. Understanding Melville's text thus becomes an intertextual or (as I shall ar-
gue below) intermedial venture that should take into account the indetermin-
acy of the painting.
It seems to me that such appropriations of images by texts need to be re-
assessed in the light of recent theory which rejects essential assumptions of
the sister-arts approach (e.g., the translatability, the correspondence, and the
unity of text and image 17 ). In an analysis of John Braine's use of Edouard
Manet's Olympia in the novel Room at the Top (colour plate II) I have shown that
fiction can be as iconotextual as, say, an engraving: Braine misreads (i. e., limits
the meaning of) Manet's painting while subjecting it to the strategic aim of
portraying the change of his hero's male gaze. Trying to understand Braine's
novel and its appropriation of a picture means trying to understand, firsdy,
Manet's Olympia and, secondly, the particular way in which the text re-
presents the image in what amounts to a misrepresentation.18 Melville's and
Braine's use of or implicit references to David's The Oath of the Horatii and
Manet's Olympia are examples of ekphrasis, although they could of course also
be considered and studied as allusions, as important knots in the large fabric
established by such intertextual/intermedial weaving of the textual fabric.19
The latest definition of ekphrasis seems to accomodate my reading. Tom
Mitchell, Grant F. Scott, and James Heffernan, for instance, define the term
as "the verbal representation of visual representation."20 But do they mean
the same thing as David Carrier who also describes ekphrasis as "verbal re-cre-
17 See, for instance, Meyers: Painting and the Novel·, and the studies by Gysin, Tintner, and
Mandelker quoted and discussed below.
18 See my "Learning to Read the Female Body." For studies concerned with art in nineteenth-
century fiction, see Gysin: "Paintings in the House of Fiction;" and Mandelker: "A Painted
Lady." Also see Tintner: Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes, which focuses on James's ap-
propriation (in various novels and stories) of works of art by Hogarth, Thomas Couture,
Gérôme, Giovanni Bellini, Hans Holbein, Vermeer, and others. Unfortunately, Tintner's
adoration of the genial James (the author concept criticized by Foucault) gets in the way of
what could have been a pioneering study of the function of art in fiction.
19 For a perceptive study of the function of intertextuality in the novel, with particular consid-
eration of allusions, see Hebel: Romanarchäologie als Textinterpretation, especially pp. 30—55.
Although mainly concerned with Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, the first part of this dis-
sertation provides a useful survey of the entire field of intertextuality and may serve as a
guideline for other studies.
20 See Scott: "The Rhetoric of Dilation," p. 301, n.2., where he quotes W.J.T. Mitchell; and
Heffernan: Museum of Words, p. 3. In the introduction to his latest study, Heffernan draws
on his article, "Ekphrasis and Representation," where he defines the term as "the verbal
representation of graphic representation" (p. 299). Also see Mitchell: Picture Theory (his
chapter on "Ekphrasis and the Other"), pp. 151-52.
ations of the visual artwork" but then associates it with what he terms "Re-
naissance artwriting," though he concedes later on in his study that ekphrasis
can be "considered a kind of interpretation"? 21 Obviously, as one of the most
distinguished specialists on the subject has recendy argued, "a study that par-
ades under the name ekphrasis can be many things."22 It seems that what we
need at present is a clarification of extant concepts. We may begin, in the
good old German philological fashion, with the origin and development of
the word and the concepts it has designated.
If critics agree at all about ekphrasis, they stress the fact that it has been
variously defined and variously used and that the definition ultimately de-
pends on the particular argument to be deployed.23 Ekphrasis is/was a poet-
ical and rhetorical device and a literary genre, and if we can trust Raymond
A. Macdonald it has quite recendy contrived to become "a charismatic
panjandrum of literary critics and art historians," a popular new star in the
21 See Carrier: Principles ofArt History Writing, pp. 8 and 104. Carrier contradicts himself when
he states, on the one hand, that ekphrasis and interpretation differ only by degree, if at all,
but that, on the other hand, he intends to mark "a difference in kind where another histor-
ian [...] might find a difference of degree" (p. 104 n.5). My point, argued more closely be-
low, is that while there may be various forms of 'verbal representation' (e.g., a poem, an art
historical commentary, an extended use of a picture in a novel), their common denominator
is the verbal ground, i.e., rhetoric. It is another question whether we should establish liter-
ary modes for ekphrasis: such distinctions may be useful, but they can also prove blind
windows of the kind described by Gérard Genette in his critique of artificial genres: see
Genette: Introduction à l'architexte, p. 49.
22 Krieger: Ekphrasis, 1992, p. 3. Bann, in his The True Vine, notes (p. 266 n.7) that the tradi-
tion of "ekphrasis has largely been confined, in the recent period, to the writing of 'poems
about pictures', and it is not inappropriate to think of the original texts pardy in this way."
More often than not, the tacit assumption in defining ekphrasis as "verbal representation of
visual representation" seems to be that verbal means poetic or literary; and it is this aspect
of ekphrasis (for instance, poetry about paintings) which has found a great deal of critical
attention. See, for instance, such recent studies as Heffernan: Museum of Words, Hirschber-
ger: Dichtung und Malerei im Dialog, Corse: "The Ekphrastic Tradition;" and Kranz: Das
Bildgedicht (vol. 1-3); Deutsche Bildwerke im deutschen Gedicht; Meisterwerke in Bildgedichten. Also
see the survey in Buch: Utpicturapoesis.
23 See Heffernan: Museum of Words, p. 191 n.2; Scott: "The Rhetoric of Dilation," p. 301 n.l;
and Krieger: Ekphrasis, pp. 1—31. My discussion has been inspired by these works and the
entries, s.v. 'ekphrasis,' in the Oxford English Dictionary and the New Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics. Also see R. A. Macdonald's discussion of the development of the term as a
rhetorical device in his review of Krieger's monograph, in Word <& Image 9 (1993): espe-
cially pp. 84—86. Unfortunately, Professor Krieger's name is misspelled "Kreiger" through-
out the review. - The most perceptive treatments of ekphrasis in its rhetorical and ideo-
logical ramifications can be found in the articles by Grant Scott (1991) and Bryan Wolf
(1990) discussed below.
poetic and art historical firmament.24 Consisting of the prefix 'ek' (or 'ec' and
even 'ex') meaning 'from' or 'out of,' and the root term 'phrasis,' a synonym
for the Greek lexis or hermeneia, as well as for the Latin dictio and elocutio
(the verb phraêin denotes 'to tell, declare, pronounce"), ekphrasis originally
meant "a full or vivid description." It first appears in rhetorical writings at-
tributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus and then became a school exercise in
rhetoric.
It seems that in the fifth century A. D., there was a tendency to limit the
basically rhetorical term to (poetic or literary) descriptions of works of art,
and in this limited sense ekphrasis has had a long and complex history that
stretches from the description of Achilles' shield in Homer's Iliad, to the
ekphrases of the tapestries of Minerva and Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses,
and down to Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian
Urn," W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," William Carlos Williams's Pic-
tures from Brueghel, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's When I Look at Pictures (1990).
This poetic description of works of art (mostly paintings) in a literary mode is
the subject of James Heffernan's recent perceptive survey of a body of literat-
ure (from Homer to Ashbery) that evinces the paragonai struggle between
word and image.25 Some of these works of art engendering ekphrastic de-
scription are of course not real (e.g., the painting and the urn in the texts of
Shakespeare and Keats). John Hollander therefore proposes to call the texts
based on them "notional" ekphrases, but I think WJ.T. Mitchell has a point
when he argues that "all ekphrasis is notional, and seeks to create a specific
image that is to be found only in the text as its 'resident alien'."26
Looking at the development and use of the word in the English language,
one is immediately struck by what Grant F. Scott has aptly termed "the split
personality" of ekphrasis.27 The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary
dates from 1715, when it is defined as a specifically rhetorical term, "a plain
declaration or interpretation of a thing"; whereas the second entry (1814) as-
sociates it with "florid effeminacies of style." The implications (in terms of
24 Macdonald: Review of Krieger: Ekphrasis, p. 85.

25 Heffernan: Museum of Words. This is a thoughtful and vastly inspiring study of ekphrasis as
a literary genre, i.e., writing (mosdy poetry) about art. As the subtitle explains, Heffernan
casts his net wide, discussing ekphrastic texts from Homer to Ashbery, the writers under
survey including Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Renaissance writers in England, the major Romantic
poets, and, in the modern period, Browning, Auden, Williams, and Ashbery. Lawrence Fer-
linghetti's When I Look at Pictures (1990), a collection of ekphrastic poems par excellence on
art works from Goya to Motherwell, was published too late to be considered by Heffernan.
26 See Hollander: "The Poetics of Ekphrasis," and Mitchell: Picture Theory, p. 157 n. 19.
27 Scott: "The Rhetoric of Dilation," p. 303.
semantics, ideology, and gender) are, o f course, myriad and fertile.28 Ekphra-
sis, then, has a Janus face: as a form of mimesis 29 , it stages a paradoxical per-
formance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while at-
tempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing
it. 30 In the final part of the introduction, I shall return to this central paradox
o f the ekphrastic enterprise, a paradox that is closely linked with the verbal,
rhetorical, nature of writing (whether it is literary or critical) and the assump-
tion that there is an essential difference between image and text.
Ekphrasis, then, originated in the field of rhetoric and has been appropri-
ated by literary critics and art historians. Whether this development is a recent
phenomenon, as Raymond A. Macdonald argues, remains to be determined;
but it is true that the present use o f the term as "coterminal with the descrip-
tion o f the subject-matter of an art object" disencumbers it o f its rhetorical
restriction.31 Beginning with Svetlana Alpers's seminal article on "Ekphrasis
and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives" (1960), the term has taken on a new
conception. While this is a normal process in criticism, there is a danger that
is perhaps best exemplified in Murray Krieger's latest claim that "by removing
the italics," he "has brought 'ekphrasis' into the language."32 The danger is
precisely that the term is now treated not as a neologism but, in Macdonald's
words, one o f "antique usage with an extended pedigree" which thus falsifies
the rhetorical and poetical bases of classical criticism of the visual arts.33
What Bernadette Fort distinguishes in her contribution as "critical ekphra-
sis" extends the meaning and usage o f the term into criticism and art history.
This form of ekphrasis has been with us at least since the time o f Diderot,
Heinze, and Goethe. 34
28 James Heffernan discusses some of these aspects, including the struggle between word
and image, and the gendered contest, "the expression o f a duel between male and female
gazes, the voice o f male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and
threatening" {Museum of Words, p. 1).
29 For some explorations in this direction, including the relation between representation, illu-
sion, imitation, and fiction, see the introduction and the contributions in Burwick and Pape,
eds.: Aesthetic Illusion·, and the penetrating monograph by Walton: Mimesis as Make-Believe.
30 On this process see Scott: " T h e Rhetoric o f Dilation;" Wolf: "Confessions o f a Closet
Ekphrastic;" and Mitchell: Iconology, pp. 4 2 - 7 .
31 Macdonald: Review o f Krieger: Ekphrasis, p. 85.
32 Krieger: Ekphrasis, p. 8 n . l l .
33 Macdonald: Review o f Krieger: Ekphrasis, p. 85.
34 In addition to Fort's article, see the studies by Dieterle: Erzählte Bilder, Kohle: Utpictura
poesis non erit, and Osterkamp: Im Buchstabenbilde. The latest collection o f critical articles on
ekphrasis (in the sense o f writing about art) is Boehm and Pfotenhauer, eds.: Beschrei-
bungskunst, which assembles a few essays published prior to this book (e.g., pieces by Alpers
and Krieger) and many new contributions.
Surveying what the contributors to this book have said about it, I should
like to suggest that we extend the use of ekphrasis (as a poetic, literary, mode)
to encompass "verbal representation" in its widest sense, including critical
writing. David Carrier and James Heffernan have both argued that ekphrasis
may and should open itself to the vast body of writing about pictures "which
is commonly known as art criticism."35 We should drop, once and for all, the
tacit assumption that the verbal representation of an image must be "literary"
to qualify as ekphrasis - in our age of the arbitrary sign it has become ex-
tremely difficult to distinguish between a "literary" and a "critical" text.36 If
ekphrasis is "the verbal representation of visual representation," a definition
most experts now seem to accept, the first part of that definition can only
mean: all verbal commentary/writing (poems, critical asssessments, art historical
accounts) on images. All such writing is essentially ekphrastic: the difference
between the critical and the literary versions is one of degree, not one of
mode or kind.
Another extension of the term that seems urgent at the moment concerns
the public (non-specialist) reaction to pictures. Ekphrasis has been and contin-
ues to be the province of specialists who, like art historians generally, com-
partmentalize out those who do not respond in the way they do: "madmen,
women, children, and less educated people generally (especially the primitive
and the illiterate)." David Freedberg's description of the art historical control
of response to pictures has also been true for ekphrastic writing - what re-
mains to be (re)discovered is what Wolfgang Kemp terms "the ars conversatio-
nis" of the eightenth century, i.e., the public discussion (in coffee houses and
taverns) of art works and the mentalités that informed it.37 Tom Mitchell's
35 Heffernan: "Ekphrasis and Representation," p. 304; Carrier: Principles, p. 104. Both authors
cite further voices in support of this use of the term, e.g., Baxandall: Patterns of Intention, pp.
1—11; and Alpers: "Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes."
36 This is the essential problem in the demarcation of poetical and critical ekphrasis. All com-
mentators on the subject have had to grapple with it, and few have found satisfactory, com-
prehensive, solutions. At the opening of his recent Museum of Words, James Heffernan limits
ekphrasis to "the literary [my italics] representation of visual art" (p. 1) but then, after
sharply dissociating himself from Krieger's notion of the term, defines it as "the verbal rep-
resentation of visual representation," which seems to, but actually does not, go beyond lit-
erary works (p. 3). For discussions of demarcations and limitations see Heffernan: Museum
of Words, pp. 1-8 (and n. 23); Carrier, who seems to have had a slight change of mind be-
tween the publication of his article, "Ekphrasis and Interpretation" (in which he distin-
guishes between the two), and his book, Principles, which argues for an inclusive use of the
term; and Krieger: Ekphrasis, chapter 1.
37 See Freedberg: The Power of Images·, and Kemp's fascinating suggestions for retrieving such
public ekphrasis of art, in "Die Kunst des Schweigens." Also see Preziosi: "Modernity
thoughtful analysis of "pictures and the public sphere," conducted in the light
of Habermas's notion of a "democratic public," is a timely and most useful
step in the right direction. 38
Let us now leave ekphrasis for a while and turn to the second provocative
term, iconotext, which I applied to the implicit allusion to David's Le serment des
Horaces in Chapter 36 of Moby-Dick.39 By iconotext I mean the use of (by way of
reference or allusion, in an explicit or implicit way) an image in a text or vice
versa. I have borrowed the term from Michael Nerlich, who introduced it to
designate a work of art made up of visual and verbal signs, such as Evelyne Sin-
nasamy's novel with photographs, La femme se découvre, in which text and image
form a whole (or union) that cannot be dissolved. Alain Montandon then
adopted the expression in his publications to define works of art in which writ-
ing and the plastic element present themselves in an inseparable totality.40
Again: The Museum as Trompe l'œil." Brunette and Wills, eds.: Deconstruction and the Visual
Arts, pp. 141-51. Preziosi is concerned with the museum as a restricdve and oppressive
frame that has substantially shaped the discourse of art history. In a similar context, Peter
Brooks calls for a "more public language than that most often spoken in the academy." See
Brooks: "Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?" p. 522. This is one of the
few points on which I find myself in agreement with Brooks's attacks on New Historicism
and what he terms the ideologization of the aesthetic.
38 See Mitchell: Picture Theory, pp. 371—417. Mitchell provides lucid critiques of American TV
(CNN's coverage of the Gulf War) and of Hollywood movies (Stone's JFK and Lee's Do the
Right Thing). I find his discussion persuasive precisely because it dares take a stand, unpopu-
lar though as it may be, both ideologically and politically.
39 Although, strictly speaking, Melville's novel contains no (reproductions of) paintings or en-
gravings as such, the text integrates works by Turner, Piranesi, and David, to name only
three important sources of art, into the signifying process. Moby-Dick is, for me, iconotex-
tual in that as a reader it urges me to consider the meaning(s) of art works (called up by way
of more or less obvious allusions) within or vis-à-vis the verbal text. The study of the role
of art works in Melville's novel is, as can be expected, still at the "correspondences of the
arts" stage, with most critical works exploring text and paintings (evoked in the text) apart.
See, for instance, Sten: Savage Eye\ and Wallace: Melville and Turner, which are, alas, no ex-
ception to the rule. It is high time to apply to fiction the concepts developed by Gisbert
Kranz in his analyses of "Bildgedichte." Such poetic ekphrases are, he argues, transposition,
supplement, association, interpretation, provocation, playing, and making concrete - often
simultaneously (Kranz: Das Bildgedicht, vol. 1). The study of visual representations in fiction
has been suffering from a virtual neglect of most of these categories as the critics go in
search of correspondence and analogy while suppressing both internal and external warfare
(in a medium and between the media). On this issue, see Miller: Illustration, p. 95.
40 See Nerlich: "Qu'est-ce qu'un iconotexte?"; and Montandon: Iconotextes, p. 268 ("une
œuvre dans laquelle l'écriture et l'élément plastique se donnent comme une totalité in-
sécable"). Also see Montandon: Signe, texte, image. Also see Lüsebrink: "Icontextes: Uber
Bilder und Metaphernnetze in den Schrifttexten Michel Foucaults." Dirscherl, ed.: Bild und
Text im Dialog, pp. 467—87.
While Nerlich and Montandon apply the expression to modern and post-
modern works of art, I have extended iconotext both chronologically and se-
mantically. Chronologically, in that in my various publications on Hogarth's
use of writing as a visual constituent of his engravings (e.g., the Bible, news-
papers, pamphlets, ballads), I have repeatedly referred to such prints as icono-
texts (Nerlich and Montandon would prefer to restrict it to twentieth-century
collages and montages). Like some of Gillray's caricatures discussed by David
Bindman, Hogarth's engravings showing some form of eighteenth-century
discourse in writing are iconotextual precisely because they integrate the se-
mantic (denotative and connotative) meaning of the written texts that are
iconically depicted, urging the 'reader' to make sense with both verbal and
iconic signs in one artifact.41 In this sense, Hogarth's prints can be compared
to the traditional emblems of the Renaissance (on which Hogarth also drew),
a classical example of iconotexts which are, however, pre-determined in that
the reader was expected to recognize and accept commonplace assumptions.
However, Hogarth's graphic art also subverts and burlesques this tradition.42 I
have extended the term semantically by applying it not only to works which
really show the interpénétration of words and images in a concrete sense (e.g.,
in Hogarth's Beer Street, or Gillray's French Liberty. British Slavery) but also to
such art works in which one medium is only implied (e.g., the reference to a
painting in a fictional text). Unlike 'iconicism,' a term coined by Richard Wen-
dorf to designate iconic biography and iconic portraits in a descriptive system
that maintains the separation between spatial and temporal forms, iconotext
refers to an artifact in which the verbal and the visual signs mingle to produce
rhetoric that depends on the co-presence of words and images.43 In his latest
discussion of verbal-visual relations, Tom Mitchell refers to such works as im-
agetext, distinguishing between such composite works and "'image/text' as a
problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation," and 'image-text' as
designating relations of the visual and verbal.44 It seems to me that iconotext,
in the sense defined above, is an appropriate and less cumbersome term we
41 See my articles on Hogarth listed in the bibliography.

42 For a penetrating study of emblems in the light of recent theoretical models, see Bath:
Speaking Pictures, especially chapters 1—2 and 10.
43 See Wendorf: The Elements of Life, pp. 19-20. At first glance, Wendorf seems to be rather
close to my definition of iconotexts when he describes the formal characteristics of iconi-
cism: "when the structures of one medium are literally or metaphorically incorporated into
the other: this is what I call iconicism" (p. 19). But he then distinguishes between spatial
and temporal forms (painting and writing), thus ignoring the common rhetorical ground
which forms the basis of my definition of word-image constructs.
44 Mitchell: Picture Theory, p. 89 n. 9.
can apply to pictures showing words or writing, but also to texts that work
with images. Ottmar Ette, in his essay in this collection, employs iconotext in
this sense.45 Some of the contributors to this volume seem to like the term,
and if what I have said about it is convincing it will perhaps gain greater cur-
rency in the future.
Finally, I must say a few words about the second neologism in the tide of
the introduction. What is intermediality? A short answer would be: a sadly neg-
lected but vasdy important subdivision of intertextuality. In a perceptive art-
icle on intertextuality and visual poetics, Norman Bryson has broached the
question whether, from an intertextual point of view that takes into consid-
eration the work of Barthes and Derrida, images can be 'read' like texts. He
concedes that one may think of paintings as mutually interpenetrating (his
term for my intermediality), that, in other words, there is mobile intertextuali-
ty in the realm of the image too; but he finally shies away from treating texts
and images alike (in intertextual terms): Bryson claims that paintings, unlike
texts, "possess embodiment," a concept which in his view deconstructs the
opposition between matter and information and which finally accounts for
the fact that paintings offer a resistance to intertextuality.46 Even though this
is a vastly helpful essay, Bryson is mistaken in assuming an essential difference
between texts and images when it comes to semantic and rhetorical relations
in the intertextual field 47 Arguing that since images, like texts, are rhetorical
and must use signs to express meaning (signs, however, that are verbal, iconic
or both at the same time), I will return to this issue too in the final part of the
introduction.
Suffice it to say here that it may be useful to revive that obsolete word, in-
termedial, which the Oxford English Dictionary lists as a synonym for "intermedi-
ate." The passage from Moby-Dick quoted above is a prime example of inter-
mediality, of the "intertextual" use of a medium (painting) in another medium
(prose fiction). While intertextual studies are at present the rage in English
departments (at least in Europe 48 ), the use of pictorial works as an essential
45 See also my discussion of the frontispieces of Swift's Gulliver's Travels which I consider as
iconotexts: "Swift's Great Palimpsest."
46 Bryson: "Intertextuality and Visual Poetics," pp. 187 and 192.
47 I agree with Tom Mitchell that "there is, semantically speaking (that is, in the pragmatics of
communication, symbolic behavior, expression, signification) no essential difference be-
tween texts and images [his italics]." See Mitchell: Picture Theory, p. 161.
48 The latest catalogue published by Lang Verlag, for instance, lists at least six doctoral disser-
tations concerned with some issue of intertextuality. It has taken more than twenty years
for the Continental English departments to react to the challenging work of Roland
Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and, more recently, Jacques Derrida. In Germany, deconstruction —
constituent in a text is a field where much remains to be done. The main rea-
son for the absence of studies in intermediality is, of course, the reluctance of
many scholars to work in what they still consider to be alien territory. Three
years ago, when I gave a lecture at the Universität Tübingen on intermediality
in Victorian poetry, one of the colleagues in the local English department
thanked me afterwards for what he termed a fascinating paper "moving close
to the border of art history." The wording is telling. We need more studies,
then, in both visual poetics and ekphrasis to explore those fascinating works
that combine visual art and prose fiction (or music and fiction49), urging the
reader not to give preference to one medium but to consider both.50 Mieke
Bal has made a great step forward in this direction with her admittedly radical
Reading 'Rembrandt'. But if we are to overcome the "correspondence-of-the-
arts approach" that assumes a "mutual illumination" (which still rules the
fields of both literary criticism and art history51) in the study of iconotexts
while turning a blind eye to the warfare involving difference and différance in
each medium and between the media, we should move from the theoretical
ground prepared by Bal, Bryson, Hansen-Löve, Zander, Reader, Plett, and
Fowler, to practical interpretations that take into account the intermedial na-
ture of iconotexts. I propose a name or tag for such enterprises - let us call
them studies in intermediality,52
frowned upon and still rejected as "anti-hermeneutic" - has had an extremely bad press
from the very beginning and, excepting the occasional young wild woman's desperate use of
it, continues to be ignored and/or despised. — For an interesting change of mind, in this re-
spect, by a member of the older generation of German scholars, see the introduction in
Lubbers: Born for the Shade.
49 Two exemplary studies of music in art deserve to be mentioned: see Leppert: Music and Im-
age·, and Leppert and McClary, eds. : Music and Society. In his recent The Sight of Sound, Leppert
goes one step ahead in an intermedial study of music, rhetoric, and body language. - For
some pioneering steps in a new field he terms "phonotextuality" see Ette, "Dimensiones
del texto: iconotextualidad, fonotextualidad, intermedialidad."
50 On the problem of such critical enterprises which, unfortunately, often end in the victory
of the verbal over the other media, see especially Mitchell: Iconology·, and Gilman: "Interart
Studies and the 'Imperialism of Language'."
51 The latest, disappoindng, example published in German is Ulrich Weisstein's Literatur und
Bildende Kunst, which brazenly declares that recent theoretical models in art history (bor-
rowed from literary theory) cannot be considered (p. 18 n.26). The volume of essays edited
by K.J. Höltgen, Word and Visual Imagination, also champions the belief in the correspond-
ences of the arts and proves a barren ground for postmodern theories.
52 See Hansen-Löve: "Intermedialität und Intertextualität"; Zander: "Intertextualität und Me-
dienwechsel;" Reader: "Literature/Cinema/ Television;" Plett: Intertextualiät, and Fowler:
"Periodizarion and Interart Analogies." Fowler argues that "the notion of a universally valid
systematic correspondence between the arts must be regarded as a chimera" (p. 99); and
Plett suggests substituting "interart studies" with intermediality: he distinguishes themes, mo-
2. The Essays
In the section concerned with theories o f reading visual representations, Jean-

Pierre Dubost opens the batting with an assessment o f iconolatry and icono-
clasm in the French Enlightenment, the age of eloquence (l'âge de l'élo-
quence) that saw the meeting, confrontation, and mingling of religious rhet-
oric and libertine discourse. For a book inquiring into verbal and visual
representation, i.e., into rhetoric in all its forms, there could be no better
starting point than the libertine discourse on love. Dubost is a specialist in
this field. He has written one o f the most perceptive and intelligent post-doc-
toral studies on "literature and libertinism" in the Enlightenment. 53 In the
present article, he marshals the forces o f poststructuralist theory and philoso-
phy to tackle the aporias o f a discourse that has come to be recognized as a
hallmark o f the French eighteenth century. Tracing this form o f "écriture"
back to earlier religious and rhetorical models, Dubost argues that libertine
writing (an apposite term indeed, for it is not confined to literature but ab-
sorbs different discursive forms, from the confession to the autobiography
and the novel) can be distinguished from other modes o f erotic expression,
and that it can be understood both in the context o f the century but also in
terms o f the history o f hypotyposis and ekphrasis. What is important, however,
is not analogy over the ages, but the mimetic status o f libertine writing as
such.
The article contains two major contentions. Firstly, that the rhetorical
strategies o f libertine writing were based on a conscious, and frequently even
a deliberate, de-finalization o f sacred icons, broadly conceived; secondly, that
these strategies are not a mere reversal o f positive images/pictures (in the
widest sense o f the term) but that they constitute and foreground the great
tifs, scenes or even moods o f a pretext which take shape in a different medium, adding that
it "seems justifiable to call this kind o f intertexuality intermediality [his italics]" (p.20). - I
should like to single out as pioneering studies (informed by reader response and reception
theories) the works o f W. Kemp: Der Anteil des Betrachters; Der Betrachter ist im Bilde·, and
Der Text des Bildes; and, informed by deconstruction, Dölvers, "Rivalisierende Diskurse in
Text und Bild." - Manfred Pfister, in his contribution to Dirscherl, ed., Text und Bild im
Dialog, uses the expression "interpictorial" (p. 335), and T o m Mitchell, quoting Leo Stein-
berg, argues that "all art is infested by other art" (Mitchell: Picture Theory, p. 36). But the
point is that visual art works rely not only on other art works but also on texts in an endless
series that demonstrates Derrida's notion o f différance.
53 Are you listening, American university presses? Written in German and earning him the
postdoctoral title o f "Privatdozent," this study is still awaiting a translation into English:
Eros und Vernunft. Literatur und Libertinage (1988).
potential of ambiguity and ambivalence contained in the images to be sub-

verted. This logic of exhaustion (of representation) is carried to an extreme
point by the Marquis de Sade. It is in his libertine writings that one finds, ac-
cording to Dubost, a permanent hypotyposis (one of Dubost's key terms) of
evil which prevents, once and for all, the pictorial control of evil (i.e., the
body) through the text.
But this reckless "emptying," radical though it may be, also creates the
possibility of thinking without images. Despite all appearances, this thinking
(in its discursive form) is surprisingly close to Kant's iconoclastic aesthetics.
In fact, one could maintain that the total disillusionment through images/pic-
tures is the blind illustration as it were of aesthetic ideas, an illustration that is
both necessary and impossible.
Exploring the semantic, linguistic, and philosophical relations between
forms of representation that only seem to be different at first glance, Dubost
takes us straight into the heart of our business: representing in words and im-
ages, and the representation of images in words. His key term, hypotyposis,
also used by other contributors (see, for instance, Bernadette Fort's article),
can be translated as a "vivid description of a scene, event, or situation, bring-
ing it, as it were, before the eyes of the hearer or reader"; to this definition in
terms of rhetoric listed in the Oxford English Dicitionary we may add signific-
ant additions as recorded in Webster's New Twentieth-Century Dictionary·, hypo-
typosis has general, rhetorical and scientific denotations; it also means "word-
picturing," while scientists use it in the sense of "a concise outline of a sub-
ject."
As Bernadette Fort shows, it is only a short step from hypotyposis, a per-
formative strategy, to what she defines as "critical ekphrasis," the cradle and
fountain of modern art criticism. Trying to answer the question whether
ekphrasis and interpretation are two incommensurable modes of writing
(David Carrier's contention pronounced in 1987), Fort explores the ways in
which Diderot, in his famous commentary on Fragonard's Le Grand-prêtre
Corésus s'immole pour sauver Callirhoe (written for the Salon of 1765), reworked
the conventions and codes of ekphrasis. In a closely argued and wholly per-
suasive contribution, she demonstrates how Denis Diderot once again moves
to the forefront of literary and critical innovation by drawing on a literary
mode and subordinating it systematically to the reconstruction of representa-
tional strategies that are at work in Fragonard's grand history painting. Di-
derot's ekphrasis, then, manages to be several things at the same time: a poetic
piece in its own right, and a seminal example of interpretive art criticism.
What makes Fort's article a daring and innovative enterprise is the fact
that she uncovers not merely Diderot's sophisticated rhetorical and critical
manoeuvres. In a most impressive manner she demonstrates what research on

ekphrasis can do for us and the culture of the past: on the one hand, ekphras-
tic texts reveal crucial insights about the art of their time (insights, to be sure,
we may want to modify and adapt to our "eyes"), and, on the other hand,
they also unveil strategies of writing, the powerlines of critical discourse and
aesthetic response. Together with Bernard Dieterle's recent monograph on
"narrated pictures" and Osterkamp's postdoctoral study of Goethe's ekphras-
tic criticism (which, as can be expected, pardy draws on Diderot), Fort's essay
does a power of good to our understanding of ekphrasis as practiced in the
age of Enlightenment.54
Frederick Burwick takes us from the ekphrastic enterprise of the Enlight-
enment into that of the early nineteenth century, investigating as he does the
mimetic crisis of Romanticism. Like Dubost, Burwick pursues the less obvi-
ous, subterranean, connections between mimesis, ekphrasis, and aesthetic illu-
sion.55 Burwick starts with the recognition of a crisis in representation, a crisis
that seems to have affected the Romantic writers as they strove to abandon
the ruins of imitation and began to worship at the shrine of subjectivism. At
this point of disjuncture, Burwick shows how they made a virtue of necessity,
developing a number of strategies for coming to terms with what was indeed
a crisis of representation. Focusing mainly on texts by De Quincey, with in-
sightful brief excursions to writings by Coleridge, Wordsworth and other Ro-
mantics, Burwick sketches the manner(s) in which confession is metamorph-
osed into ekphrasis as the self becomes the major preoccupation of the
writers. Burwick demonstrates how the province and techniques of mimesis
were being redefined in Romantic literature, a process that involved a great
concern with perception and the reliability of mimesis in the representation
of reality. Following contemporary critical emphasis on metonymy and differ-
ence, he looks at the aesthetics of skepticism and incredulity as an alternative
to illusionism and "willing suspension of disbelief." In such ekphrastic poems
as Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas" the
competing verbal and visual challenges of representation or, in Bloom's ter-
54 See Dieterle: Erzählte Bilder, and Osterkamp: Im Buchstabenbilde. Kohle: Utpictura poesis not
erit, is concerned with Diderot's notion and description of art. Osterkamp's monograph is a
German "Habiliationsschrift," i.e., a postdoctoral study. As such, it offers the scholarly
work of more than a decade of research and writing. I find it most regrettable that such
works (like the similar French "habiliadons" or dissertations written for the "doctorat
d'Etat") are usually ignored in the Anglo-American world - the main reason being the fact
that they are not written in English ...
55 See also the volume of essays on Aesthetic Illusion, ed. by Frederick Burwick and Walter
Pape.
minology, misprision56, involve the same self-reflexive strategies that inform

Coleridge's poems about writing (or not writing) poems, or Blake's pictures
about pictures, and books about books. Burwick's valuable contribution delin-
eates in great detail how the skeptical repudiation of the mimetic and
ekphrastic endeavour is not the break-down but the breaking-out-of the re-
flexive entrapment as art imitates art that imitates art.
After Frederick Burwick's "archeological" inquiry into the epistemological
and ekphrastic backgrounds of representation in the English Romantic
period, Alain Montandon presents his critical account of a French approach,
a few decades later, in the writings of Théophile Gautier, surely one of the
most influential figures of his time (as I have demonstrated in my contribu-
tion on Oscar Wilde's poem, "Impression du Matin"). Montandon argues
persuasively that Gautier's effort as an ekphrastic has been vastly underestim-
ated. A specialist in what may be termed the "transposition of art," Gautier
developed a kind of narrative discourse which helps unmask the "dispositif li-
bidinal," which is Lyotard's coinage for an erotic-libidinous dimension of the
work of art.57 As Montandon proves, Gautier develops a new ekphrastic per-
spective that is postmodern avant la lettre, moving as it does from the ideas of
correspondence and transposition to a more radical insistence on the act of
creation. In one of his last works, Spirite, Gautier even puts into question the
power of language when it is faced with the indescribable (art); he thus re-
stores both the importance of the image as representation and its connotative
realm beyond denotation.
In paying particular attention to Gautier's repeated concern with two spe-
cial iconotextual forms - the hieroglyph and the arabesque - Montandon ex-
plains the particular fascination these codes of drawing in writing (and vice
versa) held for a writer who was attracted by the paradox of describing and
thus catching the inexpressable, seductive, aspect of art. Montandon finds the
same aesthetic principle at work when Gautier engages in ekphrases of paint-
ings by Rubens and Leonardo da Vinci or more classical examples (fictive
works of art described in prose) in Mile de Maupin. For Gautier, describing a
painting becomes a kind of intimate archeology that must uncover and re-
cover the process of creation and the mystery of artistic attraction. Seduction
is one of the key words in this ekphrastic enterprise, and it turns up time and
again in Gautier's prose which probes the limits of verbal representation even
as it seeks refuge in it. For Gautier, the essence of real beauty, which always
56 Bloom: A Map of Misreading.

57 See Lyotard's essay, first delivered as a paper in 1972, "La peinture come dispositif libidi-
nal," in Les dispositifs pulsionnels, pp. 227-68.
evokes a feeling of both strangeness and familiarity, remains something mys-

terious and inaccessible.
Part II assembles four contributions on particular iconotexts and their
verbal representation in literary and critical discourse. The survey starts with
Watteau, an enigmatic painter at the beginning of the century. His person and
his paintings have generated a true critical industry, and his work continues to
be the focal point of ekphrastic attempts investigating what is invariably de-
scribed as the charm, the mystery, and the pleasure of his canvases. Catherine
Cusset focuses on the two versions of Watteau's Pilgrimage to the Island of
Cythera, which are arguably his best known paintings. Considering the texts
which surround them, she examines the relation of images to narrative and
meaning as depicted in the paintings themselves. Cusset diagnoses narrative
inconsistency in the paintings and establishes a useful link between Montan-
done discussion of the "arabesque" and Derrida's exploration of the parer-
gon: they both have particular significance for Watteau's rococo treatment of
pleasure depicted in what postmodern scholarship has described as a semant-
ic vacuum. Foregrounding the changes made for the Berlin version, Cusset
penetrates to the very heart of Watteau's highly ironical representation of
pleasure in the framed space of "nothingness." Watteau, it seems, stages the
experience of aesthetic pleasure even while opening a space of reflection that,
ultimately, defies both definiton and delimitation.
From Watteau it is only a short step to Fragonard and his contemporary,
Sterne. Both tried to describe or transcribe the intensity of those "sentiment-
al" (in French: "sensibles") moments which constitute the flesh of human re-
lationships. In his analysis of the analogies in the two artists' use of eroticism
- an investigation that happily steers clear of the "correspondences-of-the-
arts-approach" (see Ogée's note 5) - Frédéric Ogée goes to the deep struc-
tures of verbal and visual representation in Fragonard's Les débuts du modèle
(The New Model), painted soon after the publication of Sterne's A Sentimental
Journey (1768). Ogée argues that Fragonard comes close in spirit to the novel-
ist. Like Sterne's narrator, Yorick, when he tries to capture the magic of the
"exquisite" moments spent with the "fair fille de chambre," Fragonard seems
to delight in the representation of the ecstasy of restraint, of the suspended
moment. The still untouched, blank, canvas ("toile vierge" is perhaps a better,
more ambiguous, term in French) in the middle of the artist's studio is Frago-
nard's ironic and erotic comment on the flourish of the artist's cane delicately
lifting the model's petticoat. Ogée reads the painting as a remarkable celebra-
tion of that "sentimental commerce" which, in the same period, Sterne was
trying to evoke in his "quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of Nature." Ogée
is thus concerned with the deep currents running between ekphrasis and ec-
stasy, between representation (in words and pictures) and eroticism. His thesis
is that Fragonard and Sterne employed the depiction of eroticism as a way of
suspending time and of frustating the reader's or beholder's narrative urge.
Far from being limited to mere sexual/textual teasing, as critics have often
dismissed it, this eroticism can be seen as an invitation to join in its essential
suspension, an invitation to "sympathize" with the vibrations it provokes, and
to enjoy the shimmering quality of its transcience.
Laurence Sterne seems to have been the great mediator between painterly
and fictional representation — and the ekphrastic attempts to describe and
dominate both. In Tristram Shandy, he was himself very much concerned with
the possibilities of representation as such, constantly exploring its epistemo-
logica! and semantic limits. Ronald Paulson sees him as an influential source
for Lichtenberg whose ekphrasis of Hogarth's graphic art, Paulson argues,
was shaped in decisive ways by the German's reading of Sterne. In his essay
on the critical reception of Hogarth's engraved works in the eighteenth cen-
tury, Ronald Paulson has selected three important Enlightenment ekphrastics
whose works reflect the special concerns of the age. Like Bernadette Fort in
the first section, Paulson lays bare the power-lines of ekphrastic discourse and
the ways they shaped the contemporary understanding of Hogarth's œuvre.
Paulson's candidates for this archeological search are three important com-
mentators on Hogarth: the Reverend John Trusler, the Swiss-born Jean An-
dré Rouquet, and the German "Universalgenie," Georg Christoph Lichten-
berg. While the first two wrote with Hogarth's (and Jane Hogarth's) approval,
Lichtenberg, the first semiotician, developed a new kind of ekphrasis which,
according to Paulson, must be seen in the light of Sterne' influence. What is
interesting here is the fact that the three commentators wrote for English,
French, and German audiences and with essentially different aims. To explain
the iconotextual character and the palimpsest nature of the Hogarthian prints,
they had recourse to other discursive models and literary genres - which were
also Hogarth's 'architextes' in the Genettian sense (e.g., the novel, the drama,
the "progress") — thus anticipating Rodolphe Toepffer's apposite comparison,
pronounced in the nineteenth century, that Hogarth's engravings are "littéra-
ture en estampes" whose richness in detail could scarcely be matched even by
two novels from the pen of Samuel Richardson.58 One of the many interest-
ing points that emerges from Paulson's perceptive study of the critical, ex-
planatory, commentary on Hogarth's prints is the impression that ekphrasis
(drawing as it does on contemporary discursive patterns and mentalités) in-
scribes itself in the visual representation - to the point of domesticating if not
58 See Toeppffer's Essai dephysiognomonie (1845), p. 6.

disfiguring the image itself. Paulson's close reading of his predecessors (for his
analysis could be extended to his own stupendous work on Hogarth 59 ) dem-
onstrates that we are in dire need of a 'Critical Heritage' volume on the verbal
response to Hogarth's engraved iconotexts. For the recent critical debate on
"reading Hogarth," an ekphrasis that has been rekindled by the publication of
Paulson's catalogue raisonné and the revised three volumes entitled Hogarth,60
has proved Hogarth's graphic works to be highly complicated and deeply am-
biguous iconotexts - the very opposite of what the Reverend Trusler consid-
ered them to be.
Ottmar Ette's contribution takes us from the ekphrasis of the Hogarthian
iconotexts to a fascinating reading of the images accompanying the works of
Raynal and Humboldt. Ette's inquiry into the semantics of the portraits of
Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and Alexander von Humboldt, as they appear in
various texts of these writers published in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, proves, once and for all, the rhetorical nature of "graven images" and
their proximity to both inscription and description. Made up of linguistic and
iconic elements, the engraved portraits of Raynal as well as the engraved and
painted pictures of Humboldt are prime examples of intermedial iconotexts
that claim presence, authority, and, ultimately, reality for what in essence is
fictive representation. What links the iconotextual depictions of the two writ-
ers is, according to Ette, the representation of the authorial gaze suggesting
the great thinker. This visual and rhetorical manoeuvre was, of course, partly
desired and intended by the represented themselves. Ette manages to tease
out of the iconography of the portraits the ideas and concepts that shaped
contemporary scientific writing ("écriture") and portraiture. The act of writ-
ing is caught in another iconic pregnant moment, staging the place (e.g., the
work table) where writing apparently takes shape and urging the observer to
consider the great authors, their painters or engravers, and the visual narra-
tion of all these elements. Ette's valuable reading of important iconotexts
from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should take an important place
59 For a first step in this direction see my "How to (Mis)Read Hogarth."

60 See my review of Paulson's Hogarth's Graphic Works (1989) in Eighteenth-Century Studies 26:3
(1993): 499-503; and the forthcoming review of the three volumes on Hogarth (in
1650-1850. Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Period 3, 1995), where I indicate
why and where I part company with Paulson in his reading of Hogarth. Also see the long
exchange, partly conducted ad hominem, that ensued between Paulson and Richard Dor-
ment (after the latter's hostile review of Paulson's Hogarth in the New York Review, May 27,
1993) in the New York Review between June and October 1993; and John Barrel's guarded
assessment of Paulson's approach in the three volumes concerned with Hogarth (in London
Review of Books, April 7, 1994).
26 Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality - the State(s).of the Art(s)
in the research on the rhetoric of the body which has been underway for
some time.61
Chapter III is entirely devoted to the nineteenth century. Selecting Jane
Austen's novels straddling the turn of the century as his hunting ground, Pe-
ter Sabor assesses Austen's handling of ekphrasis. As the Austen buff knows,
each of her six completed novels, as well as several of her early writings and
Sanditon, which remained unfinished at Austen's death in 1817, contains at least
one scene in which pictures play an important part. Sabor is concerned not
with the theory of ekphrasis in these cases, but with the narcological and se-
mantic functions of images described or discussed in words. Far from serving
merely decorative purposes, these pictures, Sabor argues, are used to reveal
psychological nuances in the novels' characters and to explore the dynamics
of their relationships. Austen's fictive images — such as the portrait of Darcy
in Pride and Prejudice or the print of a boat in Persuasion - are interesting less
for their representational value than for the fact that they create debates
about their subjects. Sabor shows that in this respect the pictures function in
the same endlessly engaging and provocative manner as the texts of which
they are a part. Austen's invented images are, in Sabor's terms, "speaking pic-
tures," discussed within the novels by the characters and designed to be dis-
cussed outside her fiction by her readers.
Sabor's exemplary investigation of the function of pictures in novels can
serve as a starting point for what is surely one of the most underdeveloped
fields of research. We may pursue Sabor's line of inquiry (extending it, for in-
stance, to the sophisticated handling of fictive images in Emily Bronte's Jane
Eyre), or we may venture into the discussion of "real" pictures (e.g., well
known paintings) in fiction. Both directions of research should try to lay bare
not the "correspondences of the arts" but the paragonai juxtaposition, con-
flation and/or confrontation of the rhetoric of the image and the rhetoric of
the text incorporating the image.
61 See, for instance, the insightful discussion of representations o f the human figure in early
modern English culture (e.g., portraits o f Queen Elizabeth I) in Gent and Llewellyn, eds.:
Renaissance Bodies. — The critical literature on representations of the body in art and literature
has now reached Gargantuan dimensions, not least because "the body and..." has been the
favourite subject à ία mode over the last years. For a survey o f important works up to the
early 1990s, see Roberts and Porter, eds.: Literature and Medicine, pp. 1-21, especially n. 24
(p. 19). Recent important contributions whose insights may be applied with great profit to a
new visual poetics include Schmitt: La raison des gestes-, Stafford: Body Criticism·, Bronfen:
Over Her Dead Body; and Körte: Körpersprache in der Literatur. Also see McNeill: Hand and
Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought.
Wolfgang Lottes returns to the area o f ekphrasis Bernadette Fort has tilled
in the opening section: his subject is what some critics now term "art writ-
ing," and his focus is on the Victorian English reception of Botdcelli. Lottes's
survey of that variety of ekphrasis stretches from Joseph Archer Crowe and
Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle ("the new Vasari") to Swinburne, Pater, Ruskin,
Symonds, and the Pre-Raphaelites. Lottes shows how each of these critics ap-
propriates Botticelli, adapting the quattrocento painter's work to prevalent
English aesthetic principles while reacting both to the original paintings and
the discourse about them that had already been established. Swinburne, Pater,
and Ruskin in particular practically made Botticelli the artistic star o f the fin-
de-siècle cult of beauty and ennui. It seems that Botticelli's paintings are suffi-
ciently ambiguous (in the sense of Eco's "open work" of art) to allow such
appropriation or - in Lottes's terms - usurpation by ekphrastics o f the most
heterogeneous dispositions. Lottes's detailed survey is a case study of the ver-
bal reaction to and, indeed, usurpation o f paintings in the very act of ekphra-
sis. He also comments on the role the mentalité and taste of the ekphrastic
(the personal disposition) play in this process marked by interference, dis-
placement, and différance.
James Heffernan examines another traditional department of ekphrasis:
the poetic representation (which is always, as in the cases studied by Lottes,
both an appropriation and misprision) of pictures. These works of art can be
imagined, as in Browning's poem, or real. One of Heffernan's arguments is
that a transition in ekphrasis took place from one to the other, as the museum
became the place where the experience of art is regulated. Beginning with a
close reading of Browning's "My Last Duchess," Heffernan first addresses
the powerfully gendered rivalry between word and image. Browning, he main-
tains, pursues a double strategy in this ekphrastic poem: on the one hand, the
verbal representation of a fictive image shows that no pictorial work of art
can ever be wholly mastered by the authority of the word; on the other hand,
in representing the Duke of Ferrara as the prototype of the museum curator,
Browning prefigures the way that twentieth-century ekphrasis enters the mu-
seum and salutes the power of its words. Typifying this move, W. H. Auden's
"Musée des Beaux Arts" verbally reconstructs Breughel's Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus, a painting whose meaning is initially determined - for all who see
it in the Brussels museum — by the words of the title affixed to it there. It is
Heffernan's contention that by viewing Breughel's picture in light of these
words, and of the various texts that stand behind Breughel's paintings, Auden
remakes Icarus in words as a museum-class specimen of how the Old Masters
could represent suffering. Always attentive to the paragonai aspect of ekphra-
sis, to the conflict and competition it stages while pursuing its own rhetorical
and artistic aims, Heffernan's essay is a thoughtful close reading of important

canonical texts.
In my "explication d'iconotexte," which follows Heffernan's analysis, I
also provide a close reading of a poem which is made up of allusions to ver-
bal and visual texts. My aim is to test the theories of intertextuality and dis-
course analysis (as advanced by Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, and, to some ex-
tent, Derrida) in a practical, "archeological," case study uncovering the dis-
cursive field of late nineteenth-century art and poetry as re- and deflected
(i.e., represented) in a single poem by Oscar Wilde. It is my contention that
such intertextual or intermedial readings have more to offer than author-
oriented approaches, precisely because they consider the author as part, per-
haps even as a victim, of the discursive field of his/her age. The intermedial
approach also yields an evaluation of the iconotext discussed in that one can
determine to what extent an author or artist was able to recognize and deal
with the mentalités that dominated contemporary perception and thinking.
The final section of the book unites two articles concerned with carica-
ture, providing examples of iconotexts par excellence. David Bindman focuses
on text as part of the visual image in the caricature of James Gillray. Such
text-image constructs need more critical attention. There is, to begin with, a
great variety of iconotexts, reaching from book illustrations to individual en-
gravings (with titles or words inscribed) and social and political caricature.62
John Dixon Hunt has recendy opened a new avenue in the discussion of
book illustrations by examining what happens when images appear in differ-
ent textual surroundings. He finds that the imagery is indeed subdy changed
by its altered verbal context.63 David Bindman does a similarly important job
in exploring the functions of text within some visual images produced by
James Gillray. If Hogarth reduced the amount of words in his paintings and
engravings as he matured as an artist, his sucessor Gillray relied on text either
as an integral part of the image or (more often) as what Genette would term
the "seuil" (paratext) of the entire construct: the space beneath the image that
constitutes an access to (and an ekphrasis of) the "main" text and its mean-
ing.64 Bindman demonstrates that Gillray's caricatures without text inside the
62 For receent perceptive studies of the word-image relations in eighteenth and early nine-
teenth-century political caricatures, see Carretta: The Snarling Muse; and Coerge III and the
Satirists from Hogarth to Byron·, and Patten: George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art.
63 Hunt: "Making Vergil Look English." Heusser, ed.: Word and Image Interactions, pp. 97-107.
See also my discussion of the frontispieces in travel reports in the context of Swift's Gul-
liver's Travels, in Reading Iconotexts, part II.
64 See Genette: Palimpsestes, p. 9; and Seuils, passim.
image are ironically concerned with "High Art" in an intertextual and inter-
medial game with Royal Academicians and their values. Printed text (or
"speech-text" as Bindman prefers to call it) as part of the central image usu-
ally appears only in specifically political caricatures which are studded with al-
lusions to verbal and visual pretexts. What emerges from Bindman's discus-
sion is that in the case of Gillray's caricatures, "les mots dans la peinture" (to
use Michel Butor's apposite phrase from his book tide) assume not only a sta-
tus as visual facts in themselves, they also go beyond their verbal meaning and
create a space inhabited by word and image. Together, they establish a rhet-
oric whose shared verbal and iconic dimensions deserve more of our attention.
Walter Pape brings up the rear with an examination of the paragone of
signs in Robert Crumb's visual reading of a famous Boswellian text, the Lon-
don Journal. Crumb's "abbreviations" (a favourite term of Lichtenberg's in his
characterization of Hogarthian iconotexts) may be considered as iconic
ekphrasis (which paintings, based on texts, are too): instead of words trying to
contain and re-create images, we are faced with images "reading" (in the
sense of interpreting) words, with a visual rendering offering a specific inter-
pretation of an eighteenth-century text. This article too provides new per-
spectives on the research in text-image relations, and I can only hope that
Pape finds successors in the exploration of a fascinating variety of ekphrasis. 65
3. Perspectives
O n e of the many paradoxes surrounding the image in Western culture is the

fact that, from the very beginning, it has had a bad press precisely because
commentators (ekphrastics, for instance, or philosophers) have felt its great
irrational power. In his recent fascinating study of "the life and death of the
image," Régis Debray links the genesis of pictures with death, and more pre-
cisely with the human wish to overcome the fear of nothingness (le néant)
and to preserve what must necessarily decay while domesticating the basic
horror presented by the idea of the void. Images, Debray argues, have been
powerful and attractive all along because they create the illusion that the vis-
ible is also readable, accessible, and — present. 66 Victorian writers and artists,
65 An earlier, more traditional, example (traditional in the sense that it examines the comic
strip as a genre) is David Kunzle's fine study, History of the Comic Strip.
66 Debray: Vie et mort de l'image·, see especially part I, "Genèse de l'image," pp. 15-43. 1 am
less persuaded by the other parts of the book in which Debray takes us into the video cul-
ture of the twentieth century via Byzantine and Renaissance art. This is a mighty enterprise,
particularly the Pre-Raphaelites, exploited this potential of the image in rep-

resentations of women that combine necrophilia with the wish to overcome
the male fear of the femme fatale·, women are invariably depicted as conflations
of saints and sinners or as powerless sleeping or dead beauties. 67 Apparently,
we have to live with the dilemma that we hold images in high regard but can-
not really grasp them. Wim Wenders's movie Bis ans Ende der Welt is a won-
derful artistic comment on the state and future of a world terrorized by pic-
tures, of images that are helpless and render their human observers as help-
less as Narcissus, whose story could serve as a motto for the movie. Another
example that comes to mind are the truly marvellous and pregnant "scenic
images" in Robert Wilson's plays relying on the charm and power of pictures.
Always dividing the audience, they are both fascinating and difficult precisely
because they demand a decoding of their rich, arcane, rhetoric that replaces
the words in traditional plays. 68
Summing up and echoing more than three decades of research on the
paradoxical nature o f pictures, Umberto E c o argued in 1993 that the image
possesses an irresitable force. It produces an effect of reality, even when it is false.

It cannot say by itself that it does not exist or that it is false, whereas the text can
do that. Without text, the image lies or gives way to a multitude of interpretations.
with special consideration of the development of the gaze which fails in part because De-
bray disregards a great body of critical literature published in English (e.g., works by
Bryson).
67 On this aspect of the Victorian representation o f (preferably dead) female bodies see Bron-
fen: Over Her Dead Body, Reynolds and Humble: Victorian Heroines·, Pearce: "Pre-Raphaelite
Painting and the Female Spectator"; Christ: "Painting the Dead: Portraiture and Necro-
philia in Victorian Art and Poetry." Also see the very helpful introduction by Bronfen and
Goodwin in Goodwin and Bronfen, eds.: Death and Representation, pp. 3—29; and Barreca:
Sex and Death in Victorian Literature; Daly: Pre-RaphaeÌites in Love·, and the visual evidence
collected in Dijkstra: Idols of Perversity, and Marsh: Pre-Raphaelite Women.
68 See, for instance, Wilson's The Forest and his latest "play," based on the fairy tales of the
brothers Grimm, Der Mond im Gras. Attending some of Wilson's productions, I have been
as fascinated by his demanding imagery as by the mixed reaction of the audience. A great
majority o f the spectators were unwilling to abandon traditional attitudes of reception,
whistling and shouting impatiendy when they could not make sense with Wilson's admit-
tedly difficult imagery. Having worked with handicapped, autistic, children, Wilson still be-
lieves both in the power and the rhetoric of the image. He works at what I consider an im-
portant rhetorical front: the use and re-discovery of images without ekphrasis, o f pictures
that address their observers immediately without the interference of (explanatory or disfig-
uring) words. His problem is, however, that he faces the entire Western history of looking
at pictures, a history which (as the large majority o f the audience prove) cannot apparently
do without the spoken or written word. On Wilson's art, see Graf: Das Geheimnis der Ober-
fläche.
Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes had expressed the same opinion many
years earlier.69 The image, then, is both powerful and helpless in the sense
that, as Wittgenstein wrote, it cannot represent its form of representation but
merely contains it as a trace that is frequently overlooked by the observer. 70
To a reader, it will initially always be more attractive than a text; and yet in or-
der to mean something it needs mendacious and/or distorting words: a tide,
an epigraph, a signature, an ekphrasis. 71
Given the undeniable power of visual representations, it should be no sur-
prise to learn that Western culture has sought to limit that power through an
exegetical and, indeed, ekphrastic tradition which translates the pictorial into
the readable, thus controlling and encircling it with words. 72 The human ter-
ror or fear in front of and of the image has found expression, on the one
hand, in the ekphrastic fear cast in words 73 and, on the other hand, in both
philosophical discourse and the response of iconoclastic observers destroying
or disfiguring what they consider dangerous visual representations. Plato ex-
tends his distrust of artists to the use of colour in general, whether it is paint
on canvas or the use of colour in rhetoric or make-up: cosmetics, rhetoric and
paint(ing) are potentially dangerous (because they serve as means of seduc-
tion) and must be held in check. Jacqueline Lichtenstein has shown how this
attitude, something one could also term a mentalité, informed Western writing
about rhetoric and painting into the seventeenth century and beyond. 74 And
in his study of the history and theory of response to images, David Freedberg
has explored the psychodynamics behind the power of images, the reasons
why they arouse us religiously or sexually, and why we want to adore or des-
troy them. 75
69 See Eco's interview with Jean Daniel in Le Nouvel Observateur, No. 1504: 2 - 8 September
1993, p. 45 (my translation). Also see Foucault: The Order of Things, p. 9; and Barthes: Image-
Music-Text.
70 Wittgenstein: Tractatus logico-philosophicus,ao.2.\12.
71 In his insightful article "How Far Can You Go? Manet's Use of Tides," Ed Lilley argues
that although we have recognized that tides (of paintings) act as generators of meaning, "in-
vestigation into the relationship between works of art and their tides is at a very early stage"
(p. 163).
72 See Mitchell: Iconology·, and Wolf: "Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic," p. 182.
73 This is one of Mitchell's persuasive arguments in "Ekphrasis and the Other," reprinted in
Picture Theory, pp. 151-83.
74 Lichtenstein: La couleur éloquente, pp. 9-129. Also see her article, "Making Up Representa-
tion: The Risks of Femininity."
75 Freedberg: The Power of Images. Also see Besançon: L'Image interdite; and Mitchell: Picture
Theory, chapter V ("Pictures and the Public Sphere").
Since this seems to be well known and documented, I should now like to
return to a couple of threads I left dangling while weaving the first section
above. They concern the nature (or concept) and paradoxical work of ekphra-
sis itself, a performance that promises to make the silent image speak even
while silencing the unspoken (and, perhaps, unspeakable) or imposing verbal
rhetoric (a kind of painting, in Plato's view) upon the image. There is no de-
nying the fact that ekphrasis continues to be a thoroughly paradoxical ven-
ture. But I think there is a way out of the present dilemma. A part of that way
has been sketched by Bryan Wolfs seminal contribution on what he mock-
ingly terms the "unnatural relations" between literature and painting. 76 If we
marshal forces, supplementing Wolfs suggestions with some important ideas
provided by Mitchell, Bryson and Derrida, the present stalemate can be over-
come. I shall begin with Mitchell, move on to Bryson and then join Wolf to
find the way out of the cave.
Tom Mitchell describes Western culture as one that can be characterised
by its woven fabric of signs in which the dialectic of word and image seems to
have been a constant. 77 Although Mitchell is very much concerned with the
struggle between verbal and visual representation (the paragone), arguing con-
vincingly that the image has always been policed by the word, he makes a
point that does not warrant his eventual pessimism. Mitchell is of the opinion
that "there is no essential difference [his italics] between poetry and painting,
no difference, that is, that is given for all time by the inherent natures of the
media, the objects they represent, or the laws of the human mind." 78 What
Mitchell says here is that art and literature (and writing as such) cohabit
within the same representational space; he then goes on to stress, and study,
the paragone, the fight for supremacy, between what he terms "two kinds of
signs." But instead of stressing the difference, as indeed we have done since
Lessing, we can also look at the representational space as a rhetorical field in
which, though a struggle may be going on, sign systems are at work. What is
important, then - and this constitutes the escape route - is the fact that rep-
resentation (in its visual and verbal varieties) has two common denominators:
rhetoric and the sign. We may regret, with Mitchell and other critics who have
written in his wake, the marginalization and suppression of the visual 79 , and
76 I am referring to the sub-title of his article, "Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic."

77 Mitchell: Iconology, p. 43.
78 Ibid., p. 49. Cf. also his more recent Picture Theory, pp. 160-61.
79 See, for instance, Barbara Stafford's conclusion in her Bodj Criticism, and the equally appo-
site remarks about the erasure of images as positive forces, in Artful Science, pp. 8, 129, and
311.
Wagner: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality — the State(s) of the Art(s) 33
that we "have not gone far enough in our exploration of text-image rela-
tions."80 But if images are rhetorical and "impure," if they always incorporate
texts in one way or another, 81 we simply cannot sustain the assumption that
there is a line separating the visible from the readable. Derrida has recently ar-
gued that the demarcation does not run between painting and words — it tra-
verses both the pictorial and the lexical field in "the labyrinthine way of an id-
iom."82 Nor is the cherished distinction between the 'spatial arts' and writing
a useful concept when we consider Derrida's lucid observations on spacing as
shared by texts and images and on the problems of mastering space by the
look/gaze.83 We may and should therefore move on to an exploration of the
common ground shared by the image and the word, e.g., rhetoric, spacing,
'inhabitation,' and the partisan re-presentation of mentalities.84
It is at this point that the poststructuralist critical studies of the rhetoricity
and semiotics of the visual arts (works published by Bryson, Moxey, and Mer-
moz 85 , to name just three examples) come in handy. Both Mieke Bal and
Bryan Wolf (and, more reluctandy, Tom Mitchell) have recendy argued that
the visual is as rhetorical as the verbal. Our great mistake is to be seen in the
fact that we have "committed an act of historical suppression" by considering
80 See Mitchell's essay in Heffernan, ed.: Space, Time, Image, Sign, p. 2; and his Iconology, p. 155.
81 In Picture Theory, Tom Mitchell argues that "all arts are 'composite' arts (both text and im-
age); all media are mixed media" (pp. 94—95).
82 Derrida: Psyché: Inventions de l'autre, p. 106: "Ce partage entre le visible et le lisible je n'en
suis pas sûr, je crois pas à la rigueur de ces limites, ni surtout qu'il passe entre la peinture et
les mots. D'abord il traverse chacun des corps sans doute, le pictural et le lexical, selon la
ligne — unique chaque fois mais labyrinthique — d'un idiome." Also see Derrida's valuable
observations on the relations between art and its verbal explanation, and the important role
of perception in this process, in Mémoires d'aveugle. In a recent interview with Peter Brunette
and David Wills, Derrida comments persuasively on what he terms the 'mutism' (as op-
posed to taciturnity) of the spatial work of art and the paradoxical fact that it is "already
talkative, full of virtual discourses." See Brunette and Wills: "The Spatial Arts: An Inter-
view with Jacques Derrida," pp. 12—13.
83 Brunette and Wills: "The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida," p. 24. For a
previous persuasive critique of this notion see Mitchell: "Spatial Form in Literature."
84 On the notions of inhabitation and spacing (with implications for all the arts, including ar-
chitecture), see Melville: "Color Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction,"
p. 35; and Wigley: "The Domestication of the House: Deconstruction After Architecture,"
p. 226.
85 See especially Bryson's introduction in Calligram, pp. xxv-xxix; Moxey: "Semiotics and the
Social History of Art;" and Mermoz: "Rhetoric and Episteme." Also useful are Titzmann:
"Theoretisch-methodologische Probleme einer Semiotik der Text-Bild-Relationen;" Clüver:
"On Intersemiotic Transposition;" Cook: Dimensions of the Sign in Art, Kemal and Gaskell:
"Art History and Language: Some Issues," pp. 1-11; Muckenhaupt: Text und Bild, and Var-
ga: "Criteria for Describing Word and Image Relations."
visual art as silent and surrounded by an aura of nonverbal immediacy. We

should, therefore, begin to read images, that is to study, not words in paintings
(the province of investigations by Svetlana Alpers and Michel Butor86) but
their semiotic and rhetorical structure.87 Art historians and critics from re-
lated fields seem to be agreed that, so far, almost all attempts to establish a
new "visual poetics" (a term suggested by Mieke Bai in 1988) have failed.88
The reason is certainly to be found in the continuing assumption of the d i f f e r -
ence between what are essentially sign systems. In the wake of a new and prom-
ising interest in the socio-political aspect of art, of its cultural setting and
background89, what is needed at the moment is, in Bryson's words, "a form
86 See Alpers: The Art of Describing, pp. xvii—xxvii; and 169—221; Butor: Les mots dans la pein-
ture-, and the articles concerned with the representation of words and writing in painting, in
Schulze: Leselust. Also see Miller: Illustration, p. 75, and the useful introduction to poststruc-
turalist discussions of paintings (texts by Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva) in Payne: "Reading
Paintings," pp. 212-14.
87 See Wolf: "Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic," pp. 184—86; and Bal: Reading 'Rembrandt'
pp. 1—54. — What is to be avoided, of course, is a purely linguistic model for art that would
again assert the dominance of language over pictures. In this context, see Tom Mitchell's
reservations about the semiotic models for reading images proposed by Bryson and Bai, in
Picture Theory, pp. 87 and 99. Also see Stafford's apposite critique of these interpretive strat-
egies: Artful Science, p. 287; and Bal's dangerous manoeuvering in linguistic fields when she
insists on the textual character of intertextual allusions in paintings, arguing that "images are
also texts precisely because they constitute a network of discursive practices, albeit visually
shaped" (Bal: "Light in Painting: Dis-Seminating Art History," p. 52 n. 8). If she replaced
the term "textual" with "rhetorical," I could accept her argument. For a discussion of the
problems posed by such models see especially Martin Heusser's introduction to his superb
collection of essays, Word <& Image Interaction, especially pp. 13—17; and Robinson: "Reading
Victorian Paintings," pp. 211—226. Robinson points out that we can apparently not avoid
using linguistic models in the critical analysis of art. The solution, I would suggest, lies in
the exploration of the common ground shared by image and text. In this respect, Marshall
Blonsky suggests to "crack [semiotics] out of its present uses," while Umberto Eco (in the
volume edited by Blonsky) outlines some rather interesting escape routes from the dilemma
of a linguistics-based semiotics. See Blonsky, ed., On Signs, pp. 1 and 157-84.
88 See Bal's introduction to the special number of Style 22 (1988) where she proposes a new
field she wishes to call "visual poetics" (p. 177); and the conclusion that the effort (includ-
ing Bryson's essay on "Intertextuality and Visual Poetics" in that number of Style) has failed:
Macdonald's review essay in Word & Image 9 (1993); p. 83; his "The Laocoon Group, the
Poetics of Painting and the Reconstruction of Art History," and Scott: "The Rhetoric of
Dilation," p. 308.
89 Among the recent studies distinguished by what has come to be termed the "politics of
culture" (Barrell: Painting and the Politics of Culture, p. 1), see especially Barrell: Painting, Ke-
mal and Gas kell, eds.: Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts', Pears: The Discovery of Painting,
Solkin: Painting for Money, and the articles on the consumption of art (especially those by
Mukerji, Schama, Schaffer, and Styles) in Brewer and Porter, eds.: Consumption and the World
of analysis in art history dialectical enough, and subtle enough, to compre-

hend as interaction the relationship among discursive, economic, and political
practices."90 Inspired by semiotics and discourse analysis, a new ekphrasis will
have to consider the visual image as sign, as discursive work that comes from
and returns into society. Writing about art, then, will involve the consideration
within poststructuralist perspectives of what Bryson calls the "archival"
method (tracing the work of art back to its original context of production);
and it will reconsider the hermeneutics of interpretation, which is an act of
recognition, reception, and "reading" (hence Bal's title, Reading 'Rembrandt).
In such an approach that combines the best of what poststructuralism has to
offer us (from semiotics to, yes - why not! - deconstruction91) a visual work
of art ceases to be treated as a "homogeneous site of ideological and semio-
logical coherence, and becomes a space of dispersion and sedimentation in
which conflicting possibilities work in parallel with - or, in certain cases,
against - authorial cl/aims and objectives."92
I agree with Bryan Wolf that "all art, whether verbal or visual, must be an-
chored within a historical semiotics"93 that explores a poem or a piece of can-
vas with pigment as what they are: signifiying systems and rhetorical con-
structs that we try to appropriate.94 Insisting on the unity of the sister arts,
of Goods, pp. 439-555. - This interest in the way visual representation has been subject to
cultural pressures has also led to a reconsideration of imagery by historians: see especially
Gaskell: "History of Images," pp. 168-93; Haskell: History and Its Images; and my discus-
sion of the issue in Reading Iconotexts. Also see the exemplary exploration of stereotypes in
texts and pictures as cultural products, in Lubbers: Born for the Shade. See especially Lub-
bers's confession, p. 9, about the way New Historicism and poststructuralist theories have
transformed his interest in American Studies.
90 Bryson: Calligram, p. xxv.
91 See Niklas Luhmann's courageous and, indeed, constructive suggestions for a practical use
of deconstruction and the possibilities of cross-fertilization this implies for various discip-
lines. At a time when hermeneutics has become "a method of creating circularity and of
putting meaning into a text in order to be able to find it there" (p. 765), Luhmann argues,
deconstruction remains the "most pertinent description of the self-description of modern
society" (p. 780). See "Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing." For a fascinating and
ground-breaking collection of case studies from a deconstructive perspective, including an
interview with Derrida on "reading art," see Brunette and Wills, eds.: Deconstruction and the
Visual Arts.
92 Mermoz: "Rhetoric and Episteme," p. 502.
93 Also see Moxey: "Semiotics and the Social History of Art," where he outlines the future of
a new art history drawing on semiotics; and Bryson: "Semiology and Visual Interpreta-
tion," pp. 61-74. Poststructuralist ideas also inform the "visions" (of a new art history) of
Holly: "Visions and Revisions," and Phillipson: Painting, landscape, and Modernity.
94 See Wolf: "Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic," pp. 188-91.
and not on their difference, we can study their common rhetorical structure.95
In this new approach, history becomes rhetoric, and art (in its verbal and
visual varieties) a system of representation working with signs, codes, and
frames that are neither "natural" (as Krieger would have it96) nor silent or in-
accessible. The need, then, is for what Wolf terms "cultural ekphrasis," a re-
unification of writing and painting under "the common banner of representa-
tion,"97 and for an intermedial exploration of the working of both linguistic
and pictorial signs in one medium.98 Intertextuality in art thus becomes a pos-
sibility in research, not in the Brysonian, exclusive, way that again attributes a
special status to paintings ("embodiment"), but in a more extensive variety of
ekphrasis, broadly understood, which considers visual art as a space serving as
both meeting ground and battle ground for encoded, rhetorical, sign systems
that refer to texts and images.99
95 This is Christopher Braider's aim in Refiguring the Real. Arguing that "our culture, by its in-
veterate habit of subjugating the carnal visibility of images to the spiritual discipline of
texts, has systematically misrepresented the nature of images [and] obscured the nature of
literature [his italics]," (p. 13) he attempts both a re-evaluation of texts in the light of the
available images and the texts behind paintings. This is indeed a promising new critical ap-
proach. It is hampered, however, by Braider's obvious dislike of recent semiotic studies and
the simultaneous uncritical adoption of theoretical frameworks (as championed in the
works of Gombrich or, to a lesser extent, Wollheim: Painting as an Art) that define art as
work-immanent and universal. The advantage of Braider's monograph is its implicit exten-
sion of ekphrasis to non-poetic texts. Cf., for instance, his discussion of Breughel's Land-
scape with the Fall of Icarus (pp. 71—99) and Heffernan's assessment in Museum of Words (pp.
146-69).
96 In what he terms a "postscript" to his monograph Ekphrasis (1992), Krieger defends the
notion and use of aesthetics informing his book. But this notion is based on the belief that
"aesthetics" is somewhere out there or in the verbal and visual artefact rather than a prod-
uct of personal or institutional reception. See his article, "The Anthropological Persistence
of the Aesthetic."
97 Wolf: "Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic," pp. 195-99.
98 For a case study that pays close attention to recent theory in an exploration of the appro-
priation of images by nineteenth-century French poetic texts, see Scott: Pictorialiêd Poetics.
Also see Scott's article "Pour une prosodie de l'espace." Christin, ed.: Ecritures li, and the
essays assembled in this volume (by Christin) which are mostly concerned with writing and
painting as representations. In addition, see B. Korte's assessment of the visuality of poetry,
with perspective serving as key term for both word and image: "Perspective in Landscape Po-
etry." Another valuable recent study encompassing visual images and linguistic texts is
Sonesson: Pictorial Concepts (see, however, the guarded review of this monograph by F. Ede-
line, in Word & Image 10: 1994, pp. 190-92).
99 In his essay, "Intertextuality and Visual Poetics," Bryson first clears the way for an intertex-
tual reading of art in the manner of texts, but then sees art as "specific," containing "signs
that are never sheer information, but in their embodiment are part of material practice" (p.
192) — which is the reason why in Bryson's view paintings offer a resistance to intertextuali-
But the introduction and application of intermediality is not all that re-
mains to be done in ekphrasis and visual poetics. There are other untilled
fields awaiting courageous visitors (non-specialists) from neighbouring areas.
For instance, the study of images as distorted re-activations of collective
memories, of what some scholars call mentalités. Together with the oral tradi-
tion100, texts and rites, images thematise and preserve what is virtually present
in the (subconsciousness and memory of people, precisely because visual art
(of the painted or engraved varieties) is also rhetorical and thus embodies un-
spoken attitudes. Images throw light on a "latent" memory that is always in
danger of being obscured, hidden and displaced. Recently, Pierre Bourdieu
has argued that we tend to overlook the large invisible basis that informs the
history of ideas ("l'immense socle invisible des grandes pensées"), mainly be-
cause the varieties of "habitus" or doxa they display were so self-evident for
the contemporaries that they never bothered to record them in documents. I
would add that images can serve as what Bourdieu (quoting Satie) terms
"memories of an amnesiac" ("mémoires d'un amnésiaque") - for those who
care to look and resist the temptation of reading for reality, they display the
silent codes much more obviously than writing.101 Extending my suggestions
above, I hold that pictures can be studied meaningfully in an approach com-
bining a historical semiotics with discourse analysis and a shot of deconstruc-
tion. They can be decoded, not as the product of the genial artist (whose in-
tention must be unveiled) but as partisan representations of discursive and
pictorial traditions and mentalités.102
ty. This is indeed a tweedy compromise (Bryson's own term, p. 193); one must agree with
Grant F. Scott that Bryson "eventually falls back into that peculiar scepticism over aesthetic
reciprocity that has dogged every generation of critics since Lessing" ("The Rhetoric of Di-
lation," p. 308). However, Bryson shows more optimism in his latest essay on the subject:
"Semiology and Visual Interpretation." - Beginning with the Prague school, semiology has
made important contributions to our understanding of visual representation that include
Eco's study of the cultural value and evaluation of colour and Louis Marin's essays demon-
strating "cultural semiotics" at its best. See Matejka and Titunik, eds.: Semiotics of Art-, Eco:
"How Culture Conditions the Colours We See," pp. 157-76; and Marin's various works
listed in the bibliography.
100 On the importance of the commonplace tradition and "what in one way or another is al-
ready known [and] part and parcel of the ancient oral world," see Ong: "Commonplace
Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwingler and Shakespeare," pp. 91-126 (quotation from p. 94).
101 See Liisebrink: "Les tambours de la mémoire," p. 186; Le Goff: Histoire et mémoire, p. 162;
Assmann and Hölscher, eds.: Kultur und Gedächtnis, pp. 9-19; and Bourdieu: Les règles de
l'art, p. 423.
102 For recent, useful, discussions of the issue of intention, see the articles by, and the lively ex-
change between, David Summers: "Intentions in the History of Art," pp. 305-321; and
One cannot, however, do such a step and then stop walking. For the pur-
suit of the power lines of discourse in intermedial representations will eventu-
ally cast doubt on other concepts involved in such an enterprise. One of
them, my final point in this survey, is the role of the observer/reader. Al-
though we have already come a long way in our understanding of the role of
the reader (of texts and pictures), a way marked by the allegedly "open" con-
cepts (the implied reader) developed and introduced by Iser and Eco 103 , the
notion of a predetermined art work that must be re-established by the "re-
ceiver" still prevails. Umberto Eco's seminal The Open Work (Cambridge,
1989) at long last suggests a participating reading agent who actively formu-
lates the meaning of a work - not necessarily that intended by the author. As
Eco writes, the open fictional text or the painting is a "work to be com-
pleted," offering a field of interpretive possibilities, a configuration of sub-
stantially indeterminate stimuli which the recipient employs for his "read-
Steven Levine: "Moxey's Moxie and the Summers of '84," pp. 323-31; and Summers's re-
ply, pp. 333-44; all in New Literary History 17 (1986). Summers makes a good case for the
arthistorical use of what we know about an artist's intention while Levine, partly relying on
publications by Keith Moxey, points out the interpretive and hermeneutic disadvantages of
such approaches (the arbitrary limitation of meaning and reading; the art work as a closed
system etc.). Also see Roskill: The Interpretation of Pictures, p. 73, and the chapter on "Inde-
terminacy and the Institutions of Art History." Roskill provides a critique of the circular
logic in the use of "intention" in art history. His suggestion for an escape route is the self-
conscious reflection of one's procedure and the application of intertextual models. He con-
dnues the exploration of the issues of meaning and evaluation in "Explanation and Value:
What Makes the Visual Arts so Different, so Appealing?" Kemal and Gaskell, eds.: Expla-
nation and Value in the Arts, pp. 94—109. This volume contains a number of challenging es-
says that incorporate and apply recent theoretical models: see especially Alpers: "Is Art
History?" (pp. 109-27); Horowitz: "Objectivity and Valuation in Contemporary Art His-
tory" (pp. 127—46); and the introductory essay, by Kemal and Gaskell: "Interests, Values,
and Explanadons" (pp. 1—43). — The debate on intention in art and literature has just flared
up again: see the contributions, and the debates between, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., John R. Searle,
and Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, in New Literary History 25 (1994), pp.
549—681. Searle, I think, makes a good case for the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the
work of art from the point of view of speech acts.
103 See especially Iser: The Implied Reader, and The Act of Reading, and Eco: The Role of the
Reader. The trouble with these concepts is that while they do allocate a more important role
to the reader in establishing meaning in a work of art, the implication remains that it is the
author who has somehow devised a machinery in which the receiver is not more than a
cog. Eco occasionally goes further than Iser, however, arguing that the meaning of an art
work is principally open and to be determined by the participating reader.
104 Eco: The Open Work, pp. 4 and 15; see especially the chapter on "The Open Work in the
Visual Arts". In The Limits of Interpretation, he takes a slightly more conservative stance.
In his recent devastating attack on the "pure" eye of the beholder and the
implied (educated) reader (often a mask of the educated critic), Pierre Bour-
dieu suggests substituting such concepts of the cultivated reader in
hermeneutics and art history (as advanced, for instance, by Gadamer, Panof-
sky, and Iser) with a social history of the observer. For the eye of the be-
holder is not a given constant; it is the product of institutional settings and
social forces constituting what Bourdieu labels the "habitus." 105 It is by his-
toricizing the categories of thinking and perceiving in the observer's experi-
ence, not by dehistoricizing them in the construction of a transhistorical
("pure") eye 106 , that we can arrive at an adequate understanding of under-
standing ("comprendre le comprendre" 107 ), which must of course include
ekphrasis: Bernadette Fort's article in this collection is in part a giant, and
timely, step in this exploration of the conditions of writing about art. Unlike
Bourdieu, I do not think that only sociology or social history can achieve this
aim. 108 For behind the eye there is always a he or she: vision and looking is
gendered and subject to both social and biological influence. There is, admit-
tedly, a male gaze, but we must be careful with this concept in criticism lest it
105 Bourdieu: "La genèse sociale de l'œil," in Les règles de l'art, pp. 431-41. This comes rather
close to Fish's contention that critical judgements are determined by disciplinary settings;
see Fish: "Why Literary Criticism is Like Virtue," p. 12.
106 This (the existence of aesthetics per se in culture) is the implicit assumption in Peter
Brooks's attack on recent poststructuralist 'systems' within academic criticism. Brooks re-
jects what he considers to be the postmodern "ideologization of the aesthetic" (p. 513) as
well as the demasking of ideology (p. 517) by New Historicists, arguing that "culture, in-
cluding the aesthetic, is a constituted realm that cannot be reduced to ideology" (p. 519).
Together with New Historicists and deconstructionists I oppose such a view in which the
critic "needs to surrender [...] to culture" (p. 520). Instead, I suggest that we ask who con-
stitutes that realm, and for whom; what criteria are being used in this process, and who
speaks for whom. What Brooks says about the constitution of the (reading) canon is also
true for aesthetics: it is "a historically contingent cultural formation based on readings, in-
terpretations, and discriminations performed by people and cultural institutions in historical
time" (p. 521). See Brooks: "Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics?," pp.
509-23.
107 Ibid., pp. 393^148. Also see Stanley Fish's persuasive critique of Iser's concepts based on
the notion of "pure perception": "Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang Iser." Fish: Doing
What Comes Naturally, pp. 68—87. Specifically, Fish rejects Iser's The Act of Reading (1978) be-
cause it is "a piece of literature that satisfies Iser's own critera for an 'aesthetic object'" (p.
85).
108 See Bourdieu: Les règles de l'art, pp. 418 and 429. To indicate only two possibilities, one
could imagine an intermedial effort in reception theory as begun by Wolfgang Kemp in
Germany (see Kemp's studies listed in the bibliography); and one could also take into con-
sideration recent research in the psychology of visual perception (including neurophysiolo-
gy) : see, for instance, Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis, part 1.
become what Edward Snow apdy terms "a fixed and almost entirely negative
term." The critical analysis of looking and of visual representation has be-
come a difficult business: as Michael Ann Holly reminds us, "representational
practices encoded in works of art continue to be encoded in their comment-
aries." Traditional (humanist) scholars may find it hard to accept the fact that
both vision and 'reality' do not exist per se — we always produce vision, and
realism (that of a photograph or a painting) is just one function of this pro-
cess. While we have much to learn from feminist (film) criticism about the
tyranny of the (male) gaze, we must not underestimate the equally powerful
attraction of art objects, especially if they represent women. 109 What we need
is less disciplining by traditional fields and more interdisciplinary analysis. I
can only hope that this need will provide the subject of another conference -
and, perhaps, another book.
109 See Snow: "Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems", p. 30; and Holly: "Past Looking,"
pp. 385 and 395 ("looking is power, but so, too, is the ability to make someone look"). Also
see Snyder: "Picturing Vision." - For recent, important, studies of the gendered and gen-
dering gaze in art and literature see Rose: Sexuality in the Field of Vision·, Certeau: Heterologies;
and the interesting contribution to the psychology of visual response in reading by Esrock:
The Reader's Eye.
Ekphrasis and Theories of
Reading Visual Representations
JEAN-PIERRE DUBOST
Universität Stuttgart
Iconolâtrie et iconoclastie de l'écriture libertine

Abstract: Libertine literature as it developed in eighteenth-century France can be
understood both in the context of that century and in comparison with earlier
models from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What is important for both
approaches, however, is not the thematic analogy of libertine literature over the
ages but the very nature of its mimetic status that separates it from other forms of
erotic expression. This article contains two theses: first, that the strategies of liber-
tine writing are based on a conscious and deliberate de-finalization of sacred icons;
and second, that these strategies are not a reversal into the negative of positive pic-
tures/representations but that they constitute and foreground the potential force
of ambivalence contained in the icons to be subverted. This logic of exhaustion is
carried to an extreme point by de Sade. In an irreversible manner, the constant hy-
potyposis of evil presents the possibility of a pictorial control by the text of evil
itself - i.e., the body. But this radical emptying as it were also creates the possibility
of thinking without pictures which, despite all appearances, is rather close to the
iconoclasm of Kant's aesthetics. One could therefore argue that the total disillu-
sionment through pictures is the blind illustration of aesthetic ideas, an illustration
that is both necessary and impossible.
Soit, choisi parmi tant d'autres du même genre, un recueil de traités édifiants
intitulé Divers traités de morale et d'éloquence — l'opuscule paraît en 1 6 6 2 - et,
dans ce recueil, une dissertation sur le thème "Si l'empire de l'éloquence est
plus grand que celui de l'amour." Le sujet en est à la fois banal et paradigma-
tique. Car comment l'exposer si ce n'est par le recours à l'éloquence, sujet
donc et moyen du discours. Ou l'éloquence aboutira à démontrer que l'em-
pire de l'amour est moins grand que celui de l'éloquence, et elle aura dé-
montré sa supériorité, ou bien elle aboutit à démontrer l'inverse, mais cela re-
viendra au même, puisqu'elle ne pourra nier son empire qu'en assurant par el-
le-même sa défaite.
En cette époque que Marc Fumaroli n'a pas sans raisons baptisée "âge de
l'éloquence," 1 rien ne pourrait mieux illustrer l'aporie dans laquelle se trouve
1 Fumaroli: L'âge de l'éloquence.

44 Ekphrasis and Theories of Reading Visual Representations
la rhétorique religieuse quand il s'agit pour elle de s'avancer sur le terrain de

l'éros.
C'est à dessein que j'emploie ici le terme d'éros, dans lequel on pourra en-
tendre résonner à la fois, en amont, tout ce qui, depuis le Banquet de Platon
aura délimité d'avance l'ambivalence essentielle de ses définitions possibles et
les conséquences de cette ambivalence (de Platon à Héliodore, Longus, Achil-
le Tatius et tant d'autres) et, en aval, ce qui est en train de basculer, en cet âge
d'éloquence, de la logique dialectisable platonicienne en un nouveau savoir —
en érotologie.
Il y aurait tellement à dire sur ce passage que je ne peux que dire ma re-
connaissance à Peter Wagner2 d'avoir circonscrit d'avance notre discours. En
ce qui concerne mon sujet, je ne vois pas de point d'attaque plus efficace.
Je n'en voudrais justement pour preuve que ce petit texte sans importance,
mais qui a le mérite, comme tant de textes insignifiants, de permettre un rac-
courci théorique. Je prends donc pour commencer comme pièce à conviction
quelques lignes de cet opuscule par lesquelles notre rhéteur choisit l'ekphrasis
elle-même comme charnière argumentative, le but étant en l'occurence de
démontrer que la beauté du corps est inférieure à celle de l'âme:
Lucien, dans le dialogue des portraits, introduit deux amis qui conjointe-
ment font le portrait d'une princesse, l'un dépeint le corps et l'autre l'esprit;
mais ce dernier devenu idolâtre de sa peinture dit qu'elle sera plus durable que
toutes celles qui restent de l'antiquité, parce qu'elle a pour fondement le sa-
voir, et le mérite qui n'a non plus d'empire que sur les immortelles beautés
des muses. Aussi Messieurs, puisqu'un portrait ne peut triompher de la ri-
gueur des années, s'il n'est recommandable que par la seule beauté du corps,
disons tout de même que pour emporter un cœur et le retenir toujours, ce
n'est pas d'étaler les charmes d'un beau visage, il faut que l'esprit se montre,
et qu'il découvre les grâces divines qui ne passent jamais.3
Rien de nouveau en apparence: rien ne dure si ce n'est la représentation, à
condition qu'elle repose sur le savoir et qu'elle soit in intellectu — ou, pour
être plus exact, qu'elle soit comme telle l'hypotypose même de l'esprit. Rien de
nouveau en apparence, si ce n'est qu'il y a ici en fait un tour de plus, et qu'il
nous faut donc dire: "L'image la plus puissante, celle sur laquelle le temps n'a
pas d'empire, c'est l'éloquence du tableau [...] de l'éloquence." Nous sommes
infiniment loin de Platon: on maintient le transcendantalisme mais on arrête
2 Wagner: Eros Revived, surtout chap. VIII, "Pictorial erotica"; "Eroticism in Graphic Art:
The Case of William Hogarth"; "Satirical Functions o f the Bible in Hogarth's Graphic
Art"; "Learning to Read the Female Body."
3 Divers traités de morale et d'éloquence, p. 127.
Dubost: Iconolâtrie et iconoclastie de l'écriture libertine 45
d'avance le mouvement de spirale dialectique. Les signes semblent inchangés

(la puissance de la beauté n'est en fait que la manifestation du désir de la for-
me comme messagère du vrai), mais il y a une barre nette, et l'objet du dis-
cours est cloué d'avance - c'est là le prix à payer pour une victoire assurée
d'avance. Et pourtant la logique est encore sophiste. Mais cette "sophistique
religieuse" est une pure surface sans profondeur aucune. La platitude de l'ar-
gument rejoint parfaitement la planitude et du logos et de l'éros. 4
Ces quelques remarques vont me suffire pour entrer en matière. Mais pour
cela il va me falloir prendre pas mal de recul. Pour éviter que l'on s'y perde, je
mets les cartes sur table. Mon propos va évoluer entre deux espaces. Le pre-
mier est rhétorique d'abord, religieux ensuite. Il s'agit de la logique de l'hypo-
typose et de l'ekphrasis (c'est l'aspect rhétorique), puis de leur devenir reli-
gieux - ignacien, puis jésuite. Le second est existentiel. Il s'agit de l'éros et de
son devenir moderne, par et dans la tradition libertine. L'un et l'autre sont
liés, et c'est la rhétorique qui fait la charnière, essentiellement sous l'aspect de
l'ekphrasis, de l'evidentia et de l'hypotypose. Et ce que cette dialectique tra-
vaille et expose, c'est dans toute la tradition libertine cette planitude, ce désen-
chantement moderne, dont je dis que la sophistique religieuse a, disons ... fait
le lit. Reste à savoir comment.
* * *
Premier acte donc: l'appropriation religieuse moderne des puissances de l'hy-

potypose et de l'ekphrasis - sans oublier la question de leur rapport mutuel,
qui va me préoccuper jusqu'à la fin de ma démonstration, c'est-à-dire jusqu'à
la question du rapport entre l'hypotypose sadienne (apogée et retournement
de tout le dispositif libertin du rapport de l'image au discours) et à sa ré-
flexion contemporaine chez Kant, notamment dans la Critique dujugement.
Je pars pour ce faire du chapitre IV de la Rhetorica ad Herennium en rap-
pelant que ce texte écrit en 86 avant J.C. aura été tout au long du moyen-âge
traité d'égal à égal avec le De oratore et le De inventione de Cicéron (il lui était
d'ailleurs attribué). C'est dans le chapitre IV qu'il y est donc question de la fi-
gure de rhétorique appelée demonstratio ou evidentia, les deux dénominations
correspondant à l ' h y p o t y p o s i s grecque. Lausberg en donne la définition suivan-
te: "Die evidentia ist die lebhaft-detaillierte Schilderung eines rahmenmäßigen
Gesamtgegenstandes durch Aufzählung sinnfälliger Einheiten," 5 c'est-à-dire:
4 Cf. Dubost: Eros und Vernunft, pp. 182-227.

5 Lausberg: Handbuch der Rhetorik, p. 339. Il y aurait bien-sûr beaucoup à dire sur le cadre
comme condition minimale du sens, mais d'un sens suspendu dans sa potentialité pure, tel
"la desciption vivante et détaillée d'un sujet délimité par un cadre et complet
par accumulation de détails sensibles et frappants." Certains éléments de la
définition renvoient ici explicitement à Quintilien (Inst. Or. 8,3,70 : "totum;"
9,2,40: "res universa," d'où le terme ici de "Gesamtgegenstand"). Chez He-
rennius la définition sera: "Demonstratio est cum ita verbis res exprimitur ut
geri negotium et res ante oculos esse videatur" c'est-à-dire: "la demonstration a
lieu quand la chose est exprimée en tels termes que l'affaire semble produite
(performed, aufgeführt) comme si le sujet en était à voir devant nos yeux." La
définition est ontologiquement parlant plus forte que la formule voisine de
Quintilien (9,2,40: "res [...] ut sit gesta ostenditur"), mais surtout la Rhétori-
que à Herennius dit l'essentiel: ante oculos esse videatur. Car ce qui importe dans
l'hypotypose (dont l'ekphrasis est une modalité), c'est cette double condition:
que la chose représentée soit virtuelle, qu'elle soit un comme si (ut res ante ocu-
los esse videatur [...] ut sit ostenditur [...]) et que cette virtualité ait un rap-
port au visible. L'hypotyposis relève de l'opsis, et en tant que telle elle s'éloi-
gne pour autant du logos. Qu'il s'agisse de narration ou de description, hypo-
typose et ekphrasis ont en commun d'être en dehors de la définition aris-
totélicienne du mythos, du récit comme "systasis ton pragmaton" — puisque
tout ce qui relève de l'opsis n'est pour lui qu'ingrédient. Et ce n'est pas un ha-
sard si en ce temps de "seconde sophistique," en cet âge donc où rhétorique
et invention romanesque vont de pair, l'envers du dispositif aristotélicien (où
c'est le logos qui est "donné à voir") devient la base rhétorique et narrative du
logos erotikos donc du roman (grec). Rien de plus significatif à cet égard que la
grandiose ouverture des Ethiopiques dans sa dimension quasiment holywoo-
dienne. Ici c'est bien l'hypotypose qui est le moteur du récit, ou, pour parler
grec, c'est l'opsis qui génère le mythos. Ce retournement de valeurs est la condi-
tion sine qua non du libre essor de l'imagination romanesque, car pour passer
de l'anamnèse tragique à l'exposition romanesque des passions il faut renver-
ser le rapport de la forme à l'affect. L'anamnèse tragique exige en effet un
rapport (et une béance) entre ce rapport du mythos au logos (de l'ordre de la
forme) et les instances de l'affect comme effet de la forme — eleos, phobos et
catharsis. Jamais la forme n'apparaîtra sans lien avec l'affect (sans être en quel-
que sorte la "forme des passions"), mais jamais non plus la mimesis des pas-
sions et les effets de la forme tragique ne pourront chez Aristote s'apaiser
dans l'immobilité d'une image ou d'un schème. Aucune chance pour l'œil ici.
que J. Derrida nous invite à le penser comme parergon dans La vérité en peinture. Pour une
approche différente des rapports entre fiction, memoria et mise en cadre cf. Jean-Pierre
Dubost: Einführung in den letzen Text, pp. 59sqq., et Loyola & Co: Einige Bemerkungen %ur je-
suitischen Mediengesellschaft, pp. 214—219.
Dans la Poétique d'Aristote, le pro ommaton (donc Vante oculos latin), c'est la
pré-vision du mythos, la construction de la représentation ante rem.6 L'exposi-
tion romanesque des passions réhabilite elle par contre d'emblée l'hypotypose
et l'ekphrasis comme part intégrante du récit, elle en abuse même. C'est
précisément ce qui l'éloigné à la fois de la dialectique platonicienne de l'éros
et de l'anamnèse tragique, mais c'est aussi ce qui lui permet de jouer avec ce
qui l'en éloigne. Il y aurait ici beaucoup à dire, mais je ne fais que poser des ja-
lons pour arpenter un problème.
Premier acte, scène II: Il existe dans la Rhétorique à Herennius un lien con-
substantiel entre l'hypotypose, l'ekphrasis et la memoria. Là encore on s'en-
gage sur un continent et je me contenterai de quelques remarques qui vont
me permettre de passer à l'acte suivant, à savoir à l'appropriation religieuse -
ou pour mieux dire le détournement jésuite - de l'hypotypose.
La Rhétorique à Herennius traite donc dans le chapitre III de la mnémo-
technique. La technique proposée consiste à placer mentalement des "objets"
dont nous voulons nous souvenir (des objets de mémoire, notamment de na-
ture discursive) dans un espace imaginé, faisant fonction de support — une
sorte de disque dur imaginaire ante oculos mentis: un palais par exemple, un
grand bâtiment. La dispositio et l'hypotyposis sont ici détournées de leur va-
leur rhétorique discursive. La disposition mentale des données de la mémoire
dans un espace virtuel "ante oculos mentis" fait de l'espace imaginé ou d'un
élément quelconque (formae quaedem et notae et simulacra: des formes, des
marques, des portraits) un support mnémotechnique visuel et mental. Plus
tard la mémoire pourra en quelque sorte rappeler ces données en réactivant
mentalement le support spatial imaginaire, car comme le dit le texte "les ima-
ges comme les lettres disparaissent quand nous n'en faisons pas usage, tandis
que les lieux doivent se maintenir comme des tablettes de cire."
On peut à partir de là passer au statut de l'image ignacienne et l'on pourra
alors mieux appréhender ensuite le lieu d'intervention de l'écriture libertine. Il
faut d'abord rappeler que les techniques de la memoria restent vivantes jus-
qu'à la Renaissance7 et que l'enseignement de la Rhétorique à Herennius est
encore un élément des cours de rhétorique qu'Ignace de Loyola reçoit au
Collège Sainte Barbe à Paris. De fait tout le dispositif des Exercices spirituels est
une gigantesque machinerie persuasive - et même hallucinatoire - reposant
6 "Pour composer des histoires et par l'expression leur donner leur forme achevée, il faut se
mettre au maximum la scène sous les yeux, car ainsi celui qui voit comme s'il assistait aux
actions elles-mêmes saurait avec le plus d'efficacité découvrir ce qui est à propos sans lais-
ser passer aucune contradiction interne" (Aristote: Poétique, p. 83).
7 Je renvoie à l'admirable livre de Yates: The Art of Memory.
essentiellement sur l'hypotypose, l'ekphrasis et la memoria, redistribuant à des

fins religieuses la totalité des rapports que je viens d'évoquer. La composición
siendo el lugar qui inaugure chacune des méditations de l'exercitant est à la fois
baroque et disciplinante. La narration christique, seule et unique parole, seul
et unique récit, est l'objet d'une dislocation narrative, puisque les objets à
méditer (objets visuels mentaux à valeur spirituelle absolue) n'apparaissent
plus comme moment du mythos mais comme fragments sacrés, dont le sens
et la valeur dépend essentiellement de l'effet de présentification que leur
garantira un usage rigoureusement baroque, démesuré, de l'hypotypose et de
l'ekphrasis, l'acte hallucinatoire venant à se confondre en fin de compte to-
talement avec la valeur iconique du fragment représenté. Le but escompté est
d'une part comparable à ce que permet l'art de la memoria: réactiver ce que
l'oubli risque de distraire; mais il en est d'autre part le contraire même, puis-
que comme le disait Roland Barthes dans Sade, Fourier, Loyola, "l'exercitant
[...] ne disparaît pas mais se déplace dans la chose, comme le fumeur de
haschich tout entier ramassé dans la fumée de sa pipe et qui se fume." 8
Le théâtre mental des Exercices spirituels est donc un état-limite de l'usage
de l'hypotypose et de l'ekphrasis. Il s'inscrit d'une part dans la tradition des
techniques de la memoria et en tant que tel représente une anti-poétique radi-
cale, car il ne connaît qu'un seul mythos : la narration christique. Non seule-
ment celle-ci n'est pas à produire mais à remémorer, mais de plus tout le dis-
positif consiste à transformer totalement le mythos en opsis. Mais il est aussi
de manière non moins absolue un contre-roman, puisque le logos erotikos mo-
derne semble déjà d'avance être ce qu'il lui faut contre-carrer, en conformité
avec la devise ignacienne "agere contra." D e fait les jésuites comprendront
bientôt parfaitement que l'essor de l'imagination romanesque est un de leurs
concurrents majeurs, comme le montre parfaitement, du Père Daniel Huet à
l'Abbé Jacquin en passant par Bougeant, Irhail etc. ... leur vocation à la "poli-
ce des romans." 9
8 Barthes: Sade, Fourier, hoyola, p. 69.

9 Par "police des romans" j'entends bien-sûr régulation ("Polii^"). Celle-ci va de l'opposition
bûtée (par exemple Irhail) au plus subtil encerclement, comme par exemple avec De l'usage
des romans de Lenglet-Dufresnoy. L'histoire des stratégies mises en ceuvre dans cet "agere
contra" reste encore très largement à faire. G. Sheridan, dans sa très érudite étude Nicolas
Lenglet-Dufresnoy, pp. 141 ff, donne une image à mon avis tronquée de ce texte essentiel, en le
présentant à partir du point de vue de l'époque comme "unorthodox, not to say scanda-
lous" (p. 145). Mais replacé dans le contexte des stratégies de forclusion de la séduction ro-
manesque il apparaît beaucoup plus dans la logique jésuite du détournement des passions
que comme simple prise de parti en faveur du roman, même si ses contemporains, et en
premier lieu un jésuite comme l'Abbé Jacquin l'ont perçu tout autrement.
Je reviens donc à mon point de départ et je clos ce premier acte en

concluant qu'à partir de ce moment là, le rapport du savoir à la beauté (point
de départ de la dialectique platonicienne de l'éros et substrat discursif du ro-
man grec et, avec lui, du rapport de l'icone au désir) atteint avec l'appropria-
tion ignacienne des puissances de l'hypotypose sa limite. La saturation totale
de l'âme et la vidange absolue qu'elle suppose sont en effet l'extrême de la
dispersion et de la concentration; et l'usage démesuré qui est fait ici de l'hypo-
typose multiplie les puissances de l'imagination iconique à mesure même de
l'effacement phantasmatique qu'elle demande à l'âme.
La citation dont je suis parti confirme cette ambivalence toüt en présen-
tant l'envers inévitable du dispositif — à savoir l'exigence d'une hypotypose
spirituelle pure ("pour emporter un cœur et le retenir toujours ce n'est pas
d'étaler les charmes d'un beau visage, il faut que l'esprit se montre et découvre les
grâces divines qui ne passent jamais"). Curieuse injonction, puisqu'elle exige
la présentation de l'imprésentable sans vouloir pour autant renoncer à la force
persuasive d'une belle hypotypose. S'il faut parler de dispositif "platonico-
chrétien" au sens nietzschéen du terme, il faudra dire, contre le malentendu
auquel le terme peut induire, que cette ambivalence (dont précisément Nietz-
sche a besoin pour mener sa croisade contre le transcendantalisme "platoni-
co-chrétien") est au cœur même du statut religieux baroque et sophiste de l'i-
cone - Bataille ne l'oubliera pas. On pourra dire que c'est tout le statut de la
peinture religieuse chrétienne occidentale qui est en cause ici, mais il faudra
encore ajouter que cette ambivalence est le point de basculement du disposi-
tif, comme le prouve précisément le statut de la représentation libertine.
Deuxième acte donc: le lieu de l'intervention libertine. Là encore je ne fais
que dégager une logique interne, à moins de vouloir l'impossible - à savoir
résumer 250 ans de tradition libertine - de l'œuvre de Pietro Aretino à celle
du Marquis de Sade.
Première constatation: le libertinage prétend lui aussi présenter la vérité.
En sa phase première — dans les Dialogues de l'Arétin (les Ragionamenti), la
posture est comparable à l'écriture rabelaisienne. Ce point d'attaque est im-
portant, mais il ne suffit pas à lui seul pour définir la stratégie de l'écriture li-
bertine. En revanche, dans les dialogues qui quelque cent ans plus tard en
réactivent la forme et les thèmes (c'est-à-dire au XVIIème L'Ecole des filles,
Vénus dans le cloître et surtout le Meursius français ou Académie des dames), les en-
jeux sont plus transparents et l'on comprend mieux la position spécifique de
l'écriture libertine dans son rapport avec le transcendantalisme (iconoclaste
par définition) et l'iconolâtrie baroque. En effet: par rapport au cartésianisme
la vérité libertine est bien une vérité pervertie. La manifestation de la vérité
(l'hypotypose érotisée du corps dans sa pure naturalité) participe d'une vérité
matérielle et physiologique qui signifie, à mi-chemin entre le discours libertin

de nature non spécifiquement érotique — donc le courant rationaliste libertin
du XVIème et XVIIème siècle - et le matérialisme des lumières, un moment
charnière particulièrement symptomatique.10 Car si d'une part l'érotisation de
l'hypotypose et de l'ekphrasis construit délibérément une contre-image philo-
sophique (l'évident c'est l'inné corporel pur et immédiat, et avec lui l'universa-
lité des sens et des sensations), d'autre part cette vérité que l'hypotypose liber-
tine ne cesse de donner à voir et qu'une ekphrasis exacerbée présente comme
tout ce qu'il y a de plus palpable, cette vérité sensuelle est en même temps
l'envers de l'iconolâtrie ignacienne.
En effet ces dialogues - et tout particulièrement Y Académie des dames - se
présentent explicitement comme des exercices, l'envers exact des Exercices spi-
rituels. L'érotologie se veut d'emblée pratique, sa prétention n'en n'est pas
moins absolue, sa méthode pas moins rigoureuse, et sa finalité est l'envers
parfait de celle des Exercices spirituels. C'est que les puissances de l'hypotypose
sont mises maintenant au service d'une substitution en tous points symétri-
que. Ils exigent la même didactique, la même discipline, substituent à l'image
hallucinatoire des hypotyposes spirituelles celle non moins hallucinatoire des
manifestations du corps, demandent la dispersion, le jeu et la dissipation là où
celles-ci demandaient la concentration des puissances de l'âme, exigent la con-
centration exclusive sur ce qu'il s'agissait de dissiper; invitent à remémoriser
ce qu'il s'agissait d'oublier, remplacent l'exclusive narration christique par le
récit mutuel de la découverte des idées innées de l'éros et du chemin indivi-
duel qu'elles prennent dans la chair, etc. Le dispositif est donc point par point
entièrement symétrique et il le restera jusqu'à Sade. Ceci implique que le rap-
port du texte à l'icone reste constant - ce qui est le cas et que l'on pourrait
exposer parfaitement cas par cas - si l'on en avait le temps.
Deuxième constatation: de par sa logique interne, la rhétorique érotisée
laisse entrevoir, dès les premiers textes du XVIIème, l'horizon catastrophique
et de son écriture et de son ontologie. En effet jamais la représentation du
corps libertin ne pourra s'apaiser dans la révélation ultime de sa présence.
"Ceci est mon corps" ne sera jamais dicible, puisque l'ostensible est d'emblée
pris dans une spirale qui tient à la logique même de l'éros, telle que Platon
déjà l'avait exposée dans son Banquet. Mais comme ici le platonisme, bien
avant que Nietzsche l'exige, est déjà renversé, la volonté libertine - volonté de
puissance et volonté de savoir — fragilise d'avance le statut du savoir et celui
des images. La nature même de l'hypotypose ignacienne et en général de la
"sophistique religieuse" à l'âge classique opérait bien un détournement chré-
10 Cf. sur ce point Dubost: Eros und Vernunft, pp. 31-67.

tien du transcendantalisme platonicien sous le masque de sa reconduction,

puisqu'il s'agissait d'éviter à tout prix, par tous les moyens de la rhétorique et
en particulier pour les jésuites de l'hypotypose et de l'ekphrasis, l'irruption de
la chose dans le discours. Que l'on pense en revanche à ce que représente
dans le Banquet la scène de l'arrivée tapageuse d'Alcibiade au milieu du cercle
des discoureurs! Or c'est bien là que le texte libertin lui-même opère sa pro-
pre irruption dans le dispositif en déclenchant par là le processus catastrophi-
que dont je parle et que l'œuvre de Sade épuisera au double sens du terme (el-
le en montrera l'essouflement et elle en poursuivra la logique jusqu'à son
point d'irréversibilité létale).
La contradiction insurmontable, l'aporie textuelle et ontologique de l'écri-
ture libertine, on pourrait la résumer en quelques formules. J e disais à l'instant
que l'écriture libertine "fragilise" d'avance le statut du savoir et celui des ima-
ges. E n effet, si "le désir du savoir du désir" (ce serait la formule platonicien-
ne) se propose d'exiger maintenant son objet non plus à la manière platoni-
cienne (iconoclaste et réaliste à la fois), mais à la manière ignacienne, si donc
l'hypotypose ou l'ekphrasis se substituent au concept et le remplacent dé-
libérément par des "quasi-images-comme-quasi-concepts" afin de présenter à
la fois la vérité de l'éros (donc: sa raison) et sa dynamique, alors c'est d'emblée
de l'impossible qu'il s'agit. E n d'autres termes: ou l'éros est dicible, mais à
condition d'être présent dans le discours comme symptôme de ce qui le met
en fuite - et c'est bien là la base platonicienne du roman grec antique — ou
bien il est présentable à la manière chrétienne et ignacienne, donc ostensible,
mais ostensible comme icone de son sens pur et vrai, "Ceci est mon corps"
devenant simplement "Ceci est notre corps" (le mien, le tien, le vôtre), et dans
ce cas l'icone désirable comme icone du désir sera indissociable d'une com-
pulsion de répétition rhétorique: le "désir du savoir du désir" (appelons le éro-
tologiè) ne se distinguera plus en rien de son inscription (appelons la érotogra-
phie).
Or, cette inscription passe largement par la description, et dans certains
textes celle-ci atteint le statut maniaque que l'on connaît che2 Sade. Mais tout
est une question de degrés, et pour schématiser je crois que l'on pourrait
déterminer trois degrés-types.
Je situerais justement à l'un des extrêmes ces pages que l'on connaît si
bien chez Sade et qui prennent l'allure d'un inventaire maniaque. C'est un hy-
perréalisme vertigineux qui d'une part s'inscrit dans toute une tradition qui re-
monte au X V I è m e siècle (des Blasons du X V I è m e aux interminables descrip-
tions des romans libertins du XVIIIème), mais qui aboutit chez Sade à tout
autre chose comme nous allons le voir. A l'autre extrême je situerais ces textes
pour lesquels les jeux de l'équivoque, de l'allusion et de la dissimulation défi-
nissent la dynamique de l'écriture (le type le plus connu en est l'œuvre de

Crébillon-fils). Je pourrais prendre pour exemple un texte jusqu'à aujourd'hui
non réédité et dont je prépare actuellement l'édition, 11 intitulé Histoire du Prin-
ce Apprius — qui n'est bien sûr que l'histoire du Prince Priapus - et qui repose
sur le principe inverse: ce qui est à montrer est à la fois entièrement masqué
par le jeu de la dissimulation et entièrement dévoilé dès qu'on en décode le
principe. Le roman héroïque masque ici la description érotique; celle-ci serait
pure pornographie si celle-là n'était pas un masque, et inversement ce roman
héroïque serait infiniment ennuyeux et plat s'il n'était pas ce jeu de masques.
Prenons par exemple un morceau de choix, à savoir le portrait du Prince:
Le portrait le plus vif rendrait mal ses couleurs, l'imagination en peindrait mieux
l'effet que le mélange. Ses cheveux étaient d'un noir éclatant, rien n'en déguisait sa
couleur naturelle, ils frisaient sans art, ils étaient à lui [...] Ennemi du faste, son ha-
billement était simple; il ne consistait que dans un manteau satin gris blanc doublé
d'un tafetas couleur de rose, rattaché par un petit nœud de ruban couleur de feu. Il
s'ajustait de façon que dans les jours d'action ou de cérémonie il ne l'empêchât pas
de combattre, ni de faire paraître l'élégance de sa taille. 12
Si comme ici l'ekphrasis est à la fois accusée et évitée par le jeu de double re-
gistre sur lequel repose le texte, il suffit de disposer de la règle du jeu pour se
rendre compte que la séduction et le pur désenchantement s'ajoutent et se
neutralisent à la fois. Même chose dans des textes anonymes comme Descrip-
tion topographique, historique et nouvelle du pays et des environs de la forêt noire (1776)
ou encore Lyndamine ou l'optimisme des pays chauds (inutile de dire ce que peu-
vent être ces "pays chauds" et cette "forêt noire"). Là encore, l'évitement et la
nomination la plus crue sont un seul et même mouvement.
Entre l'extrême sadien - ou la description libertine prend des allures d'in-
ventaire — et ces textes jouant à cache-cache avec ce qu'ils s'obstinent à dévoi-
ler (et dont j'ai souligné le caractère "d'évidence ontologique"), tous les de-
grés et toutes les combinaisons sont envisageables. Mais comme le montre
l'exemple sadien et ceux que je viens d'évoquer très rapidement, les extrêmes
se touchent vraiment, et ce qui caractérise de fait l'ekphrasis libertine - des
textes du XVIIème reprenant les dialogues de l'Arétin aux pamphlets révolu-
tionnaires écrits dans la continuité du genre,13 c'est l'exposition d'une vérité
du corps, contre-image délibérée de la pensée dualiste.
11 A paraître dans le premier volume à'Erotiques et libertins, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la

Pléiade.
12 Histoire du prime Apprius, p. 17.
13 Cf. Dubost: Vertu révolutionnaire et terreur libertine: Les pamphlets libertins sous la Révolution
française-, cf. aussi Fort: Fictions of the French Revolution, et Thomas: La reine scélérate.
Dubost: Iconolâtrie et iconoclastìe de l'écriture libertine 53
Faute d'avoir encore le temps de pouvoir exposer les raisons qui ont con-
duit l'écriture libertine au cours du XVIIIème à s'éloigner de plus en plus de
l'ambivalence de son origine, je dirais seulement que cette histoire est la
même que celle de l'économie politique, mais c'est ici pénétrer tout un conti-
nent. Il me reste donc pour finir à exposer en quelques phrases le point d'im-
pact de l'écriture sadienne et les enjeux du retournement ultime et irréversible
qu'elle opère. Dernier acte donc - non seulement dernier mais ultime: "La
Vérité" selon Sade.
En 1787 Sade écrit un poème intitulé IM Vérité. Il nous permet de com-
prendre parfaitement le retournement dont je parle. Ce poème philosophique
est au premier abord le document d'une révolte contre Dieu:
Quelle est cette chimère impuissante et stérile,

Cette divinité que prêche à l'imbécile
Un ramas odieux de prêtres imposteurs?
Veulent-ils me placer parmi leurs sectateurs?
A h ! jamais, je le jure, et je tiendrai parole,
Jamais cette bizarre et dégoûtante idole,
Cet enfant de délire et de dérision
Ne fera sur mon cœur la moindre impression.
Content et glorieux de mon épicurisme,
Je prétends expirer au sein de l'athéisme.
Et que l'infâme dieu dont on veut m'alarmer
Ne soit conçu par moi que pour le blasphémer.
Oui, vaine illusion, mon âme te déteste,
Et pour t'en mieux convaincre ici je le proteste,
Je voudrais qu'un moment tu puisses exister
Pour jouir du plaisir de te mieux insulter.
Etc. 1 4
Dès les premiers mots, La Vérité comme on le voit définit le statut ontologi-
que de la divinité ainsi que de ses très peu flatteurs attributs: elle est une
chimère (chimère "impuissante et stérile"), une idole ("bizarre et dégoûtante ido-
le"), une illusion (vaine illusion) - plus loin elle sera encore apostrophée com-
me "fantôme" (exécrable), etc. La non-vérité de Dieu tient donc à sa nature
phantasmatique. Les substantifs et les adjectifs se complètent comme autant
de synonymes du mensonge: Dieu est exécrable parce que fantôme, impuisant
et stérile parce que chimère, bizarre et dégoûtant parce ^'idole etc. Tout cela est
parfaitement conforme à l'athéisme radical de Sade et à la philosophie de ses
libertins. Le pouvoir de Dieu est indissociable de sa nature iconique,15 Ceci dit,
14 Œuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, vol. 14, p. 81.

15 Cf. Dubost: Eros und Vernunft.
on m'accordera sans peine que la nature lyrique du texte est, pour parler en
termes aristotéliciens, de l'ordre du matériau seulement, et tout comme
Empédocle disait en vers le savoir de la nature, ici cette tirade rhétorique est
en vers comme une chaise peut être en métal ou en bois. Le Marquis, élève
des jésuites et non moins soucieux de rhétorique que son lointain cousin Mi-
rabeau, le Marquis qui s'enthousiasme au donjon de Vincennes à la lecture de
sermons, n'accepte les idoles qu'à certaines conditions. Il veut bien d'une reli-
gion républicaine, comme le montre clairement Français, encore un e f f o r t si vous
voule^ être républicains, et ce n'est pas un hasard si dans les vers qu'il écrit pour
le buste de Marat il célèbre en Marat "l'idole unique":
D u vrai républicain unique et chère idole

De ta perte, Marat, ton image console.
Qui chérit un grand homme adopte ses vertus:
Les cendres de Scévole ont fait naître Brutus. 1 6
Pourquoi l'idole divine serait-elle bizarre et dégoûtante parce qu'idole tandis

que l'image de Marat, "unique et chère idole," serait consolatrice? La réponse
la plus simple consisterait à dire qu'il ne s'agit que d'un renversement: l'idole
divine est fausse tandis que l'image de Marat, en tant qu'icône de la souverai-
neté républicaine, serait la "vraie" idole, la volonté de la liberté ne supportant
pas d'autre image que la froide allégorie, l'image pure et simple de la terreur
comme "vertu en action."
Mais ce n'est pas si simple. Ce serait en effet oublier la dynamique même
de l'écriture sadienne. Car contrairement à ces vers de circonstance révolu-
tionnaire, le poème La Vérité ne se comprend que par les raisons de son auto-
engendrement - qui est aussi son auto-dévoration, et qui n'est pas de la même
nature que celle de l'auto-engendrement de la liberté dont l'idole de Marat
devrait rappeler la froide et pure vérité. Mais inversement cet auto-engendre-
ment fait que ce poème n'est pas la simple contre-image de la rhétorique reli-
gieuse. En effet, celle-ci est d'emblée éliminée, et ce dès les trois vers suivants
("Quel est-il en effet ce fantôme exécrable / Ce jean-foutre de Dieu, cet être
épouvantable / Que rien n'offre aux regards ni ne montre à l'esprit"). Ce n'est pas
donc seulement d'un remplacement de souveraineté qu'il s'agit, mais d'une
révolution rhétorique, d'un renversement radical du statut de l'hypotypose re-
ligieuse. Le premier pas, c'est celui que je viens de citer: Dieu n'est pas crédi-
ble parce que son hypotypose ne l'est pas. Et celle-ci ne l'est pas parce que le rapport
de la force à la forme (la forme de la passion et la passion de la forme) a été per-
verti et qu'il faut le rétablir. En effet, l'idole divine ne doit sa pseudo-existence
16 "Vers pour le buste de Marat." Œuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, vol. 11, p. 123.
qu'à des passions passives (des "forces passives" au sens nietzschéen): Dieu
est, comme il est dit plus loin, "produit par la frayeur, enfanté par l'espoir."
En tant que tel son essence est donc instable et entièrement tributaire de
mouvements plus originaires:
Devenant tour à tour, aux mains de qui l'érigé

Un objet de terreur, de joie ou de vertige.
Or une vérité instable et contingente ne peut être représentée par une image
stable, ou, en termes freudiens cette fois, un "processus primaire" ne peut
donner lieu à un symbole stable que sous les conditions de la névrose. Et Sa-
de ne reconnaît qu'une seule vérité — celle de la nature et de ses mouvements
premiers — cruels, imprévisibles, inhumains, gratuits, en dehors donc de toute
téléologie. 17 Le seul statut que la raison peut donc reconnaître à la forme, une
fois l'hypothèse d'une vérité transcendante écartée, c'est d'être le symbole de
l'humain. Non pas au sens d'un "Symbol der Sittlichkeit" kantien, mais au
sens sadien, puisqu'il y a pour lui tant d'inhumain dans l'homme, dans cet
homme dont il se fait et nous donne une image si peu présentable, aussi peu
présentable que peut l'être la cruelle sublimité dynamique de la nature chez
Kant.
On voit comme en tous points la position sadienne est non pas la contrei-
mage, mais l'envers cruel de la critique kantienne. Il suffit de supposer com-
me Kant un mal radical et comme lui aussi que la nature, dans sa violence ori-
ginaire et aveugle, est un défi non seulement à l'esthétique du beau mais aussi
à tout espoir d'en effectuer l'hypotypose. Il ne suffit plus alors pour Sade de
rappeler l'injonction biblique ("Tu ne te feras pas d'image de la divinité"),
mais il faut que l'écriture soit comme si elle était la nature - qu'elle ne soit
plus la fiction de la nature présentée et en même temps occultée comme telle
17 Dans XHistoire de Juliette la Delbène expose longuement ses conceptions philosophiques

quant à l'iconicité et développe une théorie de l'illusion religieuse sur la base d'un solide
matérialisme fortement teinté de spinozisme. Rien de plus courant que la confusion entre
phénomènes réels et perceptions. Toutes nos perceptions ne sont que des modifications de
notre être, et bien que s'en distinguant comme représentations elles sont inséparables des
modalités de notre être changeant, indissociables elles-mêmes du processus de changement.
Or nous confondons des changements d'être avec les représentations d'êtres séparés de ces
changements, qui en deviennent alors la cause. " C o m m e ces êtres excitent en nous au
moins une image confuse d'être, d'action, de réaction, de changement" conclut la Delbène,
"l'habitude de s'en servir a fait croire que l'on en avait une image nette et distincte, et l'on
en est venu enfin à imaginer qu'il pouvait exister une cause qui ne fût pas un être ou un
corps, une cause qui fût réellement distincte de tout corps et qui, sans mouvement et sans
action, pût produire tous les effets imaginables," (Œuvres du Marquis de Sade, vol. 8, pp.
42ff).
par l'hypotypose de la vérité de la contre-image libertine, mais qu'elle indique

en elle-même son statut d'écriture comme quasi-nature. Si l'on cherche alors à
savoir pourquoi, alors que la quasi-totalité des textes libertins prétendaient à
l'hypotypose du principe de plaisir et de sa raison économique, le texte sadien
représente une telle compulsion de cruauté représentative, l'explication patho-
logique ne tient pas. C'est que le mouvement de l'écriture sadienne n'opère
pas un seul retournement, mais au moins deux. Le premier est bien une subs-
titution de souveraineté, mais en deux temps et bien avant Nietzsche et Ba-
taille: la vraie souveraineté, c'est l'acceptation de celle de la nature. C'est très
exactement l'inverse de la sublimité kantienne: la présupposition que l'idée
d'une destination supérieure suffirait à relever la terreur devant le spectacle du
sublime dynamique ne fonctionne plus — par manque de conviction. A fortio-
ri, la présupposition libertine d'une évidence érotologique et donc de sa possi-
ble hypotypose, de son evidentia heureuse, ne sera plus crédible. Que resterat-
il aux puissances de l'hypotypose - de l'hypotypose de l'idée de l'humanité,
pensée comme une "idée esthétique" au sens kantien, si ces deux assurances
s'effondrent? Le poème La Vérité laisse entendre la réponse: la haine de la
fausse idole semble à premier abord réhabiliter la nature dans son absolu.
Mais dans la mesure où le plus fort du texte sadien — à savoir les récits et
les romans — ne se borne pas à exposer rhétoriquement le statut paradoxal de
son opération fictive (ce que précisément le poème philosophique intitulé La
Vérité effectue), mais qu'il opère cruellement dans ses œuvres de fiction sur le
rapport du désir à l'icone du Bien, du Beau et du Vrai — avec toutes les qua-
lités hallucinatoires qui lui sont propres et sa manière d'être aussi totalitaire,
baroque et monumental que les Exercices spirituels dont on a bien vu le rôle es-
sentiel dans toute cette affaire —, dans la fiction sadienne donc la scène de la
vérité se dédouble. Dans La Vérité une voix rhétorique apostrophe, dénigre,
invente et met à mort l'icone divine usurpatrice. Mais dans l'œuvre de fiction
un personnage — le libertin sadien, symbole repoussant de l'inhumain dans
l'homme —, met à mort les beaux corps pieux voués à l'adoration des fausses
idoles. C'est assez pour laisser entendre, dans ce passage à la limite que la ra-
tionalité fait par l'imagination, que la fonction euphorique et rhétorique de la
littérature est désormais refusée et que, conformément à ce que va bientôt
proclamer le romantisme allemand dans sa prétention à mettre en œuvre
comme texte l'infini de la réflexion, la littérature est désormais au-delà de tou-
te crédibilité rhétorique chrétienne ou paienne (jésuite ou hédoniste), et que la
confiance en l'empire rhétorique comme soutien sensible du vrai est perdue.
Reste le reste infini que la Loi laisse à l'écriture, lequel ne pourra être abso-
lu qu'à la mesure de la démesure du mal. Cet impossible-là et l'anamnèse qu'il
représente, est-il vraiment si loin de la poétique aristotélicienne et de la criti-
que kantienne? Je dis que dans les deux cas il n'en est pas l'envers, mais le re-
vers — tout à la fois l'absolue confirmation et l'absolue perversion. L'absolue
perversion, puisqu'il semblerait ruiner toute confiance, toute sérénité — c'est
son aspect proprement insupportable. Mais aussi et surtout l'absolue confir-
mation, car il faut bien que la phrase "il faut se souvenir de la Loi," pour être
audible, visible, concevable et représentable, le soit sous le mode du rejet ab-
solu de son hypotypose: la (re)présentation du mal fait alors de la représenta-
tion même un mal. D'où cette nouvelle injonction: "Tu ne te feras pas de re-
présentation pieuse de l'homme." Et sa variante sadienne unique, épuisant
une fois pour toute la logique que je me suis proposé de déployer (car on ne
répète pas Sade, en quelque sorte on n'en a "pas le droit"), ce sera bien: Tu ne
te feras que des images de l'inhumain. Dans cette memoria traumatique le
cercle se clôt, absolument. Mais le champ de cette clôture ouvre à la littératu-
re au-delà de la rhétorique (chez Sade: à travers elle). C'est précisément cet in-
fini que les romantiques allemands vont bientôt vouloir proclamer et qui tra-
vaille d'une cassure à l'autre le mouvement hôlderlinien. Ce qui impliquerait
donc qu' Hoelderlin aussi permetttrait de mieux comprendre Sade ... et vi-
ce(s)-versa. Mais accordez-moi qu'il faudrait encore beaucoup de temps pour
le dire.
BERNADETTE FORT
Northwestern University
Ekphrasis as Art Criticism:

Diderot and Fragonard's "Coresus and Calürhoe"1
Abstract: Are ekphrasis and interpretation two 'incommensurable modes of writing,'

as David Carrier suggested in a recent article? This paper explores the ways in
which Diderot, in his famous commentary of Fragonard's painting in the Salon of
1765 reworked the conventions and codes of ekphrasis, a literary mode, and subor-
dinated them systematically to the reconstruction and interpretation of the repres-
entational strategies, goals, and effects at work in Fragonard's grand history paint-
ing.
Ekphrasis has a suspect status in the theory of representation. Participating in

and mediating between two different semiotic systems, the verbal evocation
of a visual representation compounds the philosophical and critical conun-
drums with which each has been linked since Plato associated the painter and
the poet as producers of simulacra in The Republic. To attempt to represent an
art object for a reader as vividly as that object speaks to a beholder requires
from the writer a virtuosity which borders on trickery, or is seen as a sleight
of hand. It is not coincidental that ekphrasis was developed by Sophists as a
rhetorical exercise, for it is primarily an art of make-believe and it fosters illu-
sion both at the semiotic and at the representational level. It pretends that the
signs with which language operates, namely instituted and arbitrary signs, can
easily substitute for the "natural" signs of visual art. And it pretends that this
substitution can produce on the mind's eye as powerful and vivid an impres-
sion as is produced on the retina of the real eye by the impression of the art
object itself. In the words of a recent exponent of ekphrastic theory, "to look
into ekphrasis is to look into the illusionary representation of the unrepres-
1 This article is dedicated to my esteemed friend and former colleague at Northwestern Uni-
versity, Jean H. Hagstrum, w h o blazed the trail for the study of sister arts and to whom I
am endebted for judicious comments on this essay. I would like to thank Peter Wagner for
his careful and intelligent editing as well as for stimulating conversations on ekphrasis and
iconotexts.
Fort: Ekphrasis as Art Criticism: Diderot and Fragonard's "Coresus and Callirhoe" 59
entable, even while that representation is allowed to masquerade as a natural

sign, as if it could be an adequate substitute for its object."2
One may well wonder, then, whether, in this mirror gallery òf make-be-
lieve, there is any place for a more positive function of ekphrasis, whether
ekphrasis can serve the purposes of art criticism and inform reliably not only
about the subject matter of a work of art, but its aesthetic conception and
technical execution. The consensus used to be that it could not. Being by na-
ture viewer- and not object-oriented, ekphrasis, critics argued, offers the be-
holder's intimate response to the work of art, not a critical analysis of its
iconography, sources, or formal qualities. Ekphrasis, furthermore, is a highly
codified literary mode and thus obeys first and foremost the laws and con-
ventions of its genre, selecting in the visual representation those features
which can be most aptly glossed upon in the critic's prevalent literary system.
For that reason, ekphrases in a given period or by the same author may ap-
pear formulaic and repetitive.3 Another problem is that ekphrasis transforms
vision into language, and that language, as Michael Baxandall observes, "is not
very well equipped to offer a notation of a particular picture. It is a generaliz-
ing tool." Its "repertory of concepts" for describing shapes and colors is
"rather crude and remote."4 Worst of all, the sequentiality of the verbal me-
dium, well observed by eighteenth-century sister arts theorists such as Les-
sing, tends to sweep and assimilate the static object into the flow of narrative.
Finally, because of its anxiety to restore the visual presence of the represented
object, ekphrasis treats as if it were real, thereby erasing all the marks and
traces of the artist's craft.5 As Svetlana Alpers and others have noted, ekphra-
sis assumes the artist's technical ability, it does not seek to prove or discuss it.6
Thus, while ekphrasis remains an art of great interest to literary critics and
theorists, its importance for the interpretation of pictures has been largely dis-
counted.
The review of Fragonard's Le Grand-prêtre Corésus s'immole pour sauver Cal-
lirhoë, which Diderot wrote for the Salon of 1765, is a case in point.7 This
twelve-page commentary of Fragonard's grand history painting has been in-
2 Krieger: Ekphrasis: p. xv. See also Dubost: "Iconolâtrie et iconoclastie" in this volume.
3 See, for example, Land: "Ekphrasis and Imagination," p. 207. For a refutation of the so-
called limitations of ekphrasis, see also Land: "Titian's Martydom of St Peter Martyr" pp.
295-297.
4 Baxandall: Patterns of Intention, p. 3.
5 See, for example, the fourth-century ekphrasis by Libanius cited by Baxandall: Patterns of In-
tention, p. 2.
6 Alpers: "Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives" p. 198.
7 Salon de 1765, pp. 253-264.
terpreted by Diderot critics as a stunning piece of literature with only a loose

connection to its pictorial model. Fragonard's subject was an unusual and sen-
sationalistic one, mixing together themes of heathen religion, sexual desire,
and suicidal passion. Fragonard focused his picture on the moment when the
high priest of Bacchus, whose love had been rejected by the Calydonian virgin
Callirhoe, performs the punitive sacrifice exacted by his god. However, in-
stead of slaying the intended victim, the unhappy lover, in a frenzy of frus-
trated love and passionate exaltation, turns the sacrificial knife away from her,
and plunges it into his own breast, to the unspeakable astonishment and hor-
ror of the bystanders in the temple (colour plate III).
Where Fragonard displayed a dramatic visual spectacle organized around
the "pregnant moment" of Coresus's self-immolation, Diderot diffused this
moment over several pages and presented his readers with an elaborate doub-
le-framed narration, itself embedded in a fictive dialogue with his friend Mel-
chior Grimm, the editor of the Salons. This double frame, or parergon, operates
a first decentering.8 It also introduces a trick, which the art critic plays on his
public. Pleading that he has been unable to view Fragonard's painting at the
Salon, he proceeds instead to narrate for his friend a dream he reports to
have had after a day spent at the exhibition and an evening reading some of
Plato's dialogues. In this dream, he describes himself transported to Plato's
cave. There, along with other prisoners, he sat watching a sequence of pic-
tures projected on a very large screen at the back of the cave. As he describes
in full detail the last of these doubly "moving" pictures, the fictive Grimm
points to the striking similarities between Diderot's "dream" and Fragonard's
painting, and the writer's "vision" is said to coincide exactly with the painter's
representation: "C'est le même temple, la même ordonnance, les mêmes per-
sonnages, la même action, les mêmes caractères, le même intérêt général, les
mêmes qualités, les mêmes défauts."
Diderot's review is a bravoura ekphrasis if there ever was one in eight-
eenth-century art criticism. All the distinctive traits of the genre are present,
from the foregrounding of the viewer-speaker and his affective response to
the transformation of the painter's climactic and frozen moment into a con-
voluted narrative, and a self-conscious play with various figures and levels of
illusionistic representation. But how good is this ekphrasis at making the dis-
tant reader see the painting, which, after all, was the immediate aim of the Sa-
lons, and how good is it as performing their declared goal of art criticism?
Diderot critics have consistently ranked his review of Coresus in the cat-
egory of the "poetic" Salon reviews. The term, coined by Else Marie Buk-
8 On the parergon, see Derrida: La Vérité en peinture, pp. 21-168.

dahl, refers to those reviews o f Diderot, such as the "Promenade Vernet" (Sa-
lon of 1767), whose imaginative and literary prowess seems to surpass, if it does
not indeed eclipse, their critical purpose. Bukdahl viewed the Coresus com-
mentary as inspired by Diderot's desire to "faire œuvre littéraire en décrivant
une peinture d'histoire." Roland Virolle interpreted it as dictated by Diderot's
"besoin personnel d'en faire un grand roman pictural." Jacques Chouillet read
it as a projection o f Diderot's private phantasms and maintained that "sous
prétexte de décrire un tableau, Diderot donne libre cours à son imagination."
Jean Starobinski, too, observed that "le rêve de Diderot est une pure con-
struction littéraire." 9 The consensus, among literary critics at least, is that, in
this review as in other such Salons, paintings act as mere "pretexts" for the
deployment o f the writer's literary genius, but "very, very little is art criti-
cism." 1 0
And yet, prominent art historians, including Michael Fried, Mary Sheriff,
and Barbara Stafford, have in recent years drawn extensively on Diderot's
commentary for their interpretations o f Fragonard's painting.11 Have critical
attitudes towards ekphrasis changed? Could it be that, contrary to what David
Carrier maintained a few years ago, ekphrasis and interpretation are not "in-
commensurable modes o f writing"? 12 Recent studies o f ekphrases from late
antiquity, from the Byzantine tradition and the Italian Renaissance suggest as
much. They suggest that once the literary topoi familiar to ekphrasis in a cer-
tain culture and literary system are decoded, these texts can reveal crucial in-
sights about the art o f their time. So far, however, these insights still point
predominantly to the reconstruction o f aesthetic response. For example,
Michael Conan holds that Philostratus's ekphrases o f landscape paintings can
"help us to discover how the Romans looked at nature and the countryside
when the way in which these are represented in landscape painting is not clear
9 Bukdahl: Diderot, critique d'art, p. 317. Virolle: "Diderot: la critique d'art comme création
romanesque," p. 164. Chouillet: Diderot, poète de l'énergie, p. 215. Starobinski: "Diderot de-
scripteur," p. 83; Lojkine:"L'Antre de Platon."
10 Topazio: "Diderot's Art Criticism," p. 6. See May's eloquent refutation: " I n Defense o f
Diderot's Art Criticism," pp. 1 1 - 2 1 .
11 Fried: Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 1 4 1 - 1 4 5 . Sheriff: Fragonard: Art and Eroticism, pp.
3 0 - 5 7 . Stafford: Body Criticism, pp. 3 8 5 - 3 9 0 .
12 Carrier: "Ekphrasis and Interpretation," p. 25. Carrier underlines the inability o f ekphrasis
to enter into a critical assessment o f pictures: " A n ekphrasis tells the story represented,
only incidentally describing pictorial composition. An interpretation gives a systematic
analysis o f composition [...] An ekphrasis only selectively indicates details. An interpreta-
tion treats the picture as an image, and so tells both what is represented and how it is rep-
resented," p. 21.
to our eyes." 13 Similarly, Liz James and Ruth Webb have shown that Byzantine
ekphrases represent a rich trove of aesthetic attitudes and "a living response
to works of art, one which is perceptual rather than objectively descriptive." 14
Although Diderot's Coresus can be read productively as documentary evidence
on aesthetic response, I believe that the critic was attempting in this review to
push ekphrasis beyond the threshold of reception criticism. Diderot, I will ar-
gue, consciously reworked the main conventions of literary ekphrasis in order
to subordinate them specifically to the reconstruction and interpretation of
the painter's representational strategies, goals, and effects.
What we are looking at in Coresus is a hybrid type of art criticism, best
called perhaps "critical ekphrasis," in which the literary devices of ekphrasis
are used at the same time to call up a visual image and to offer a means of
disclosing, not just the effect of the painting on the viewer, but the artistic
principles underlying the production of these effects. This view requires that
we question the notion of painting as a natural-sign art as much as contem-
porary French artists were in fact questioning it. Although abbé Dubos had
argued that "it is Nature itself that Painting presents to the eye," to the practi-
tioner of painting in eighteenth-century France, there was nothing "natural"
about the choice of a certain color, or grouping, or position, or accessory, in a
history painting. 15 Painting responded, as much as literature did, to a set of
conventions, to a vocabulary of attitudes, a grammar of facial expressions, a
rhetoric of place, a narrative syntax, a morphology of light and shade. 16 If
pictorial signs were just as conventional and instituted as those of verbal lan-
guage, it was possible for a "critical ekphrasis" to reveal the pictorial system
or code at work in a given picture. This, I think, is what Diderot was after in
his review of Fragonard's Corésus. I shall now focus on four textual conven-
tions of ekphrastic literature, subjectivity, affect, narrative, and illusionism,
and explore how Diderot made these conventions ancillary to a critical inter-
pretation of the painting's strategies of representation.
13 Conan: "The Images of Philostratus," p. 164.

14 James and Webb: '"To Understand Ultimate Things'," P· 3.
15 Dubos: Réflexions critiques, vol.1, p. 415.
16 See, for example, Dandré-Bardon's Traité de Peinture. The debate about the natural vs con-
ventional signs of painting still goes on today. See Gombrich: Art and Illusion and WJ.T.
Mitchell's attack on Gombrich in Iconologp, pp. 75-94.
Subjectivity: the I/Eye of the Beholder
One of the main reasons why Diderot's Coresus has been discounted as ser-
ious art criticism lies in the author's initial move, his conspicuous (and some-
what cavalier) device of substituting himself, his gaze, his emotions, for the
painting that it was his job to describe fully, faithfully, and critically. Diderot's
review starts, as we noted, with a praetentio and an ellipsis: the critic an-
nounces that he is not going to talk about Fragonard's Coresus because he
missed it at the Salon. In lieu of the painting, thus defdy erased as textual and
visual referent, the author of the review speaks of himself and moves to cen-
ter stage. This subterfuge allows Diderot to expand on the first-person con-
vention which controls most ekphrases by casting himself in a triple first-per-
son role, that of narrator, of dreamer, and of beholder in the dream. While
this triple foregrounding of the critic seems intended to focus interest in the
subject performing the ekphrasis, it is, in fact, masterfully designed to draw
attention to the specific spectatorial aesthetic of the very painting which the
critic pretends not to have seen.
Developed in Renaissance Italy and still operative in eighteenth-century
French painting, this aesthetic emphasized the role of the beholder by specif-
ically advising the painter to inscribe in his work one or several vicarious
spectators who, mediating between the world of the picture and that of the
real beholder, cued the latter to the response expected by the painter. 17 Eager
to display his mastery of academic rules in his morceau d'agrément for the Royal
Academy, Fragonard chose to construct and articulate his whole painting
around the idea of a spectacle whose tragic horror, exciting both pity and
fear, was communicated to the viewer, as Giotto and Poussin had done,
through the intermediation of choric figures.18 This principle informed the
composition of his painting in every detail. While the focal point is thrust on
the figure of the high priest, the scene is apprehended visually by a host of
represented spectators, and numberless gazes are suggested peering through
the temple's darkness, all converging on Coresus. Fragonard's aesthetics of the
17 Baxandall relates the presence of a vicarious spectator in Renaissance painting to the

choric figure of quattrocento Florentine drama called the festaiulo, "who remained on stage
during the action of the play as a mediator between the beholder and the events por-
trayed." Painting and Experience, pp. 71-76. On the use of the choric figure in painting, see
Gombrich: "Action and Expression in Western Art," pp. 89-90. On the "Gesture of
Demonstration," in quattrocento painting, see also Gandelmann: Reading Pictures, Viewing
Texts, pp. 14—35.
18 For a penetrating discussion of Fragonard's Coresus as implementation of the academic
ideal, see Sheriff: Fragonard, pp. 30-57.
64 Ekphrasis and Theories o f Reading Visual Representations
gaze is further enhanced by his expert embedding o f spectators in three dis-

crete frames: the three acolytes, who observe the drama at close quarters,
framed by the two columns; the people in the temple, whose eyes are riveted
on the double spectacle o f Coresus and Callirhoe and their transfixed attend-
ants; and finally, the genius and cupid hovering above Coresus, who embrace
the whole scene from a panoramic angle.
Diderot's text deploys a variety o f mimetic strategies to cue the reader to
this intricate spectatorial composition. T h e device o f the dream, which
heightens sight above all other sensory perceptions, is a concerted ekphrastic
strategy o f visualization. 19 T h e embedding, in the fiction o f the dream, o f a
second fiction o f visual absorption, that o f the prisoners in Plato's cave, who,
"able to look forward only, and prevented by fetters from turning their
heads" (.Republic V I I , 514b), are watching a spectacle o f shadows, duplicates
on the textual level the visual mise-en-abyme in Fragonard's picture. T h e cave
image, like the metaphor o f the dream, thus magnifies sight in a paroxistic
way, a way which echoes the self-oblivious, tension-laden, magnetized look
and postures o f Fragonard's spectators. For Fragonard does not just represent
seventeen figures glaring at the same action, but, through a controlled pictor-
ial rhetoric o f attitudes and postures, such as the expressive outstretching o f
the acolyte's neck at the left, he emphasizes the spectators' total absorption o f
mind and body in the act o f looking. Diderot's double ekphrastic posture
matches the strenuousness o f this intense gazing. As a dreamer under the
sway o f his visions, he is immobilized and dispossessed o f himself. As a pris-
oner in Plato's cave, he is, like the other inmates, subjected to a complex con-
traption o f chains and blinders which keep his gaze riveted on the screen. In
both cases his self is concentrated in his eye.
Critics have objected that ekphrasis selects details arbitrarily and that those
details often reflect the viewer's own preferences more than the decisive ele-
ments in the picture. Diderot, however, uses ekphrasis here to emulate the
painter's own technique o f selectively highlighting certain figures. For exam-
ple, by illuminating prominently the face o f the old man at the left, Fragonard
asked the viewer to absorb the tragedy as reverberated by the petrified look o f
19 There are numerous precedents in the art literature for the evocation or discussion o f art
works in the context o f a dream. See, for example, Francesco Colonna: Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili (1499), Félibien: Le Songe de Philomathe (1683), and the anonymous Songe d'Ariste, à
Philandre, sur les différentes opinions concernant la peinture (1678). Obviously, the dream's iconic
mode o f representation is ideally suited for the evocation o f visual art. But by using the
dream device ekphrastic writers also appropriated the notion, formulated by Plato and
Leonardo among others, that artistic inspiration is connected with dreaming. In the Sophist,
Plato refers to painting as "a man-made dream for those who are awake" (266c).
its most conspicuous inscribed spectator (fig. 1). This pictorial strategy is re-
vealed by Diderot's use of an homologous rhetorical strategy, hjpotyposis, the
figure which Bernard Lamy described as bringing vividly a spectacle to the
mind's eye: "je crois le voir encore, la lumière du brasier l'éclairant, et ses bras
étendus au-dessus de l'autel: je vois ses yeux, je vois sa bouche, je le vois
s'élancer, j'entends ses cris."20 Hjpotyposis, as eighteenth-century rhetorical
theory stressed, is not a confessional, but a performative strategy. Its user pre-
tends to see so as to make the reader see. Standing outside the border of the
picture as the old man does outside the central scene, and acting vicariously
for the reader who stands outside the narrative frame, Diderot's dreamer-nar-
rator thus prolongs the chain of gazes which originates in the picture and ex-
tends it, through the language of vision, first to his immediate addressee,
Grimm, and, beyond him, to the ever-widening circle of his readers.
Ekphrasis and Affect
Watching the story of Coresus unfold on the "toile immense" at the back of
Plato's cave, Diderot's dreamer/narrator reports on the multiplicity of feelings
with which his soul was assailed during the spectacle. He tells how his "heart
was oppressed," how he uttered "a cry" of surprise and dread, "wiped away
some tears," melted into compassion for the protagonist and shuddered at his
self-sacrifice. Critics have tended to view Diderot's conspicuous display of
rollercoaster emotions in this and other such reviews as particularly detrimen-
tal to art-critical interpretation. Reading this high emotionality as a manifesta-
tion of the rise of sensibility in the 1760s, they have missed its function as a
self-conscious strategy of critical ekphrasis. By casting his response in height-
ened affective terms, Diderot was responding to the first rule of ekphrastic
communication, which urged the speaker to communicate freely the sensa-
tions or feelings generated by the contemplation of the represented scene.21
20 Diderot, "Coresus." Lamy: "L'Hypotypose est une espèce d'enthousiasme qui fait qu'on
s'imagine voir ce qui n'est point présent, et qu'on le représente si vivement devant les yeux de
ceux qui écoutent qu'il leur semble voir ce qu'on leur dit." La Rhétorique ou l'art de parler, vol. 2,
pp. 121-122. Fontanieri definition, based o n Dumarsais' Traité des tropes, emphasizes the pic-
torial effect of hypotyposis·. "L'Hypotypose peint les choses d'une manière si vive et si énergique,
qu'elle les met en quelque sorte sous les yeux, et fait d'un récit ou d'une description, une im-
age, un tableau, ou une scène vivante": Les Figures du discours, p. 390. For a discussion of hypo-
typosis within the classical rhetorical framework, see Zoberman: "Voir, savoir, parler," pp.
409-428. See also Dubost's incisive analysis in this volume: "Iconolâtrie et iconoclastie."
21 For example, Philostratus prides himself o n communicating "the fragrance of the apples"
in the painting of an orchard "along with [his] description." Imagines, p. 21.
1. Jean-f I onore Fragonard: Le G ra nd-pré tre C.orésits s'immole pour scuinr (.¡iHirhoe. Detail
Salon o f 1765. Paris. Musée du Louvre. Copyright photo R . M . N .
2. Charles Le Brun: Tête d'expression: L'Effroj. Paris. Musée du Louvre. Copyright photo R . M . N .
Such uninhibited display functioned as the indicator of the effectiveness of

the painting and thus constituted a critical reaction in itself. By the early eight-
eenth century, the idea of gauging the excellence of a painting by the degree
of emotional reaction that it produced in the spectator had become an undis-
puted article of aesthetic theory. Believing with Dubos that "les poëmes et les
tableaux ne sont de bons ouvrages qu'à proportion qu'ils nous émeuvent et
qu'ils nous attachent," Diderot offered here the intensity of his own emo-
tional reaction as an objective measure of the success of the painting's ex-
pressive strategies. 22
Diderot also drew attention to the emotional states of the vicarious be-
holders in the painting. This was a considered art-critical strategy keyed to the
painting's own affective rhetoric. Consider for instance this passage, describ-
ing the high priest's three attendants:
L'acolyte qui est au pied du candélabre a la bouche entrouverte et regarde avec effroi·,
celui qui soutient la victime retourne la tête et regarde avec effroi-, celui qui tient le
bassin funeste relève ses jeux effrayés-, le visage et les bras tendus de celui qui me
parut si beau montrent toute sa douleur et son e f f r o i . (My italics).
It would be easy to view these repetitions as mere stylistic infelicities and to

miss the critical process at work in them. In rhetorical theory, the repetition
of a string of words at the same place in a series of juxtaposed clauses (here,
at the end, the device was called épiphore), was used to "communicate the
force and energy of passion." 23 Diderot's syntax of repetition was in fact
called upon to reveal an important feature of Fragonard's own pictorial rhet-
oric. French academic theory advised the history painter to construct his
scene around a central emotion that would be displayed strongly in a number
of protagonists. As Mary Sheriff underlines, Fragonard's teacher at the Acad-
emy, Michel Dandré-Bardon, "wrote that elegant repetition of gestures and
movements worked to produce marvelous effects." 24 Diderot's conspicuous
repetitions and parallelisms in this descriptive passage are thus designed to
praise the elegant repetition of the dominant emotion, fright - l'effroi - in the
looks of the three attendants. They are intended to make us recognize in their
facial expression, as well as in that of the old man, a softened version of the
physiognomic signs of e f f r o i codified by the Academy under Le Brun: "le
sourcil élevé en arrière et abattu sur le nez, les yeux extrêmement ouverts, la
paupière cachée sous le sourcil, les muscles et les veines enflés et fort agités,
22 Dubos: Réflexions critiques, vol.2, p. 339.

23 Fontanier: Les Figures du discours, p. 329.
24 Sheriff: Fragonard, p. 42.
l'œil en feu, la prunelle égarée, la bouche ouverte et les coins tirés" (fig. 2).25
Effroi is also the passion inscribed in the body of the woman at the left. She
shows the paradigmatic "corps qui se panche [sic] vivement en arrière" which
the academicians Testelin and Dandré-Bardon prescribed to their pupils as
the attitude denoting a strong revulsion.26 Diderot's rhetoric of repetition is
thus keyed to the painter's own rhetoric of the body. Similarly, when Diderot
writes of the two old priests whose heads are seen peering behind the left col-
umn that they could not "se refuser à la douleur, à la commisération, à l'ef-
froi, ils plaignent le malheureux, ils souffrent, ils sont effrayés," he is not
"reading in" his own interpretation of their varied feelings. He is praising
Fragonard for implementing yet another rule of pictorial rhetoric, which con-
sisted in varying and mixing a dominant passion with several other contigu-
ous emotions.27
Ekphrasis and Narrative
Critics have viewed Diderot's transformation of Fragonard's static painting

into narrative as the most conspicuous distortion caused by his literary bias.
Diderot, indeed, shifts back to the beginning of the story of Coresus and Cal-
lirhoe and narrates several episodes of that story prior to the scene depicted
by Fragonard, highlighting, in chronological order, the high priests's libations
with the Bacchants, his passionate courtship of the virgin and her refusal, and
the Calydonians' incestuous frenzy as a result of Bacchus's revenge. This nar-
rative gesture, which today, according to Starobinski, is viewed as "hazardous
and impure," constituted, however, a standard ekphrastic practice.28 For ex-
ample, before going into the description of a painting on Scamander, Philostra-
tus asks his pupil to "turn [his] eyes away from the painting itself so as to
look only at the events on which it is based."29 Like Philostratus's retelling of
those events from the Iliad, Diderot's narrative, based on Pausanias's story,
helps to contextualize the represented scene for an audience that was no
longer familiar with its source. But Diderot's use of narrative in his review of
25 Testelin: "Sur l'expression générale et particulière." Conférences de l'Académie Royale de Pein-

ture et de Sculpture, pp. 163-164. See also the important discussion of Le Brun's semiotics of
the body by Norman Bryson: Word and Image, pp. 29-57.
26 Dandré-Bardon: Traité de peinture, vol. 1, p. 77.
27 On the theory of mixed emotions, see Sheriff: Fragonard, pp. 34—38.
28 Starobinski: "Diderot descripteur," p. 85.
29 Philostratus: Imagines, p. 7.
Coresus answers a much more complex nexus of semiotic and art-critical con-
siderations.
Narrative seems to be consubstantial with ekphrasis, if not with verbal
representation. "From Homer's time to our own," James Heffernan writes in
a recent article, "ekphrastic literature reveals again and again this narrative re-
sponse to pictorial stasis, this storytelling impulse that language by its very na-
ture seems to release and stimulate." 30 This "narrative impulse," however, is
not as spontaneous and arbitrary as it seems, and many motivations can be
proposed, some of them historical, some of them semiotic, some of them
philosophical, to account for it.
In the eighteenth-century, the choice of narrative appeared as a logical
consequence of the ut pictura poesis doctrine. A commonplace of eighteenth-
century sister arts theory, from de Piles and Dubos to Richardson and Les-
sing, was that whereas painting is a spatial art which must constrict its repre-
sentation into a single instant, the writer spreads out his representation over a
temporal sequence. In de Piles' formulation, "la Peinture se développe, et
nous éclaire en se faisant voir tout d'un coup: la Poesie ne va à son but, et ne
produit son effet qu'en faisant succeder [sic] une chose à une autre." 31 In his
art-theoretical writings, Diderot repeatedly insisted on this semiotic distinc-
tion between the two arts. Having to account for a static art work with words,
Diderot thus used the mode proper to his medium, narrative.32 Like his con-
temporary Lessing, Diderot also valued narrative as a way o f eschewing the
pitfalls of description. According to Lessing, description causes "das Coex-
30 Heffernan: "Ekphrasis and Representation," p. 301.

31 D e Piles: Cours de peinture, p. 449. See also Dubos: "le tableau qui représente une action, ne
nous fait voir qu'un instant de sa durée... Au contraire la Poesie nous décrit tous les incid-
ents remarquables de l'action qu'elle traite." Réflexions critiques, vol. 1, p. 87. Similarly, Les-
sing argues that painting is concerned with the representation o f figures and colors in
space. [It is] "a visible arrested action, the different parts o f which develop side by side in
space," whereas poetry is "a visible continuous action, the different parts o f which occur
step by step in succession o f time." Laocoon, English, ed. Nisbet, pp. 9 8 - 9 9 .
32 Diderot: " L'unité de temps est encore plus rigoureuse pour le peintre que pour le poète;
celui-là n'a qu'un instant presque indivisible... Les instants se succèdent dans la description
du poète, elle fournirait à une longue galerie de peinture." "Pensées détachées sur la pein-
ture." Œuvres esthétiques, p. 774. See also Diderot's Essais sur la peinture, ibid., pp. 712,
714—15, and the article "Composition" in the Encyclopédie. On Diderot's use o f "narrative
scenarios", see Vouilloux: " L a description du tableau," p. 39. The critical literature on the
sister arts is extensive. See, among others, Bryson: Word and Image-, Hagstrum: The Sister
Arts; Lee: "Ut pictura poesis"·, Lichtenstein: La Couleur éloquente; Mitchell: Iconology and
"Ekphrasis and the Other"; Montandon, ed.: lconotextes\ Montandon, ed.: Signe/Texte/Im-
age-, Saisselin: " U t pictura poesis"; Steiner: The Colors of Rhetoric, Wagner: Reading Iconotexts.
istierende des Körpers mit dem Consecutiven der Rede [...] in Collision [zu
kommen]" ("the co-existence of the physical object [to come] into collision
with the consecutiveness of speech").33 The concern with the purity of the
medium, which was Lessing's prime concern, led Diderot here, I believe, to
exploit to the full a strategy which Lessing praised in Homer's dynamic
ekphrases of Achilles's shield, or Pandarus' bow. Homer, Lessing argued, had
shown these objects in the process of being made, put on, or used: "(Homer) wird
dieses Bild in eine Art von Geschichte des Gegenstandes verstreuen, um die
Teile desselben, die wir in der Natur neben einander sehen, in seinem
Gemälde eben so natürlich auf einander folgen, und mit dem Flusse der Rede
gleichsam Schritt halten zu lassen" ("[Homer] will distribute this picture in a
sort of story of the object in order to let its parts, which we see side by side in
Nature, follow in his painting after each other and as it were keep step with
the flow of the narrative").34 By reconstructing the story of Coresus instead
of merely describing the figures as juxtaposed on the painting's canvas,
Diderot's narrativization of Fragonard's frozen scene thus effected what Less-
ing called the supreme "Homerischen Kunstgriff, das Coexistierende [...] in
ein wirkliches Successives zu verwandeln" ("Homeric artifice of changing the
Co-existing into an actual Successive").35
But narrative also engaged in a very direct way the pictorial genre to which
Fragonard's painting belonged. Coresus was a history painting, and as such,
endebted to an Aristotelian conception that taught the painter to extend the
spatial, one-moment scene in time by subdy incorporating into it "traces of
the preceding moments and forebodings of the future." 36 Sheriff has shown
how Fragonard implied temporality through the use of certain "mechanisms,"
such as Callirhoe's faintness, which foreshadows her own suicide, and the al-
legorical figure above Coresus's head, to signal the anger which had led to the
sacrifice.37 We must also recall that Fragonard's painting was an ekphrasis to
begin with. It took its source, as history paintings do, in a story, told by Pau-
sanias in his Guide To Greece (VII, 21—1) à propos of a statue of Bacchus Caly-
donius. Diderot's narrative thus established an homology between the writer's
mode of representation and the painter's source and genre. It referred the
reader back to the painter's original source, the story of Coresus and the vir-
gin from Calydon, and thus brought the intermedial operation to a state of
harmonious closure.
33 Lessing: "Laokoon." Werke, vol. 5, p. 127. English, ed. Nisbet, p. 105.

34 "Laokoon," p. 122. Ed. Nisbet, p. 102.
35 "Laokoon," p. 106. German ed., p. 128.
36 Diderot: "Pensées détachées," p. 776.
Finally, retracing the sequence of events which precede the moment

chosen by Fragonard for his representation of Coresus allows Diderot to re-
trace the process of the artist's imagination and, beyond the visual representa-
tion, to capture the modele idéal which preexisted to the picture's conception.
Among the most powerful examples of this kind of hermeneutic work in
modern times is Freud's painstaking reconstruction of the idea presiding over
the puzzling gesture (a seemingly incongruous, playful fingering of the beard)
of the formidable Moses in Michelangelo's famous sculpture (fig. 3).38 In
Diderot's account as well as in Freud's, the fictional narrative reconstructed by
the critic seeks to retrieve and disclose principles that are crucial both to the
artist's conception of the work and to its execution. Freud infers that the
puzzling presence of Moses' fingers in his beard is the result of a reflex
movement to save the Tables of the Law from slipping to the ground as,
seized with fury, the prophet beholds the spectacle of his people adoring the
Golden Calf. Read in this context, the gesture no longer seems incongruous:
it becomes a powerful index of the restrained anger and controlled energy
which the artist has striven to infuse in the statue of the prophet.
Diderot's text enacts a similar interpretive strategy. Like Freud, he shifts
time backwards, postulating an action or series of actions, which, though un-
recorded by the official legend in which the work is grounded, discloses in
emblematic fashion the quality of the artist's imagination. Diderot's recon-
structive narrative, for example, dwells on Coresus's orgy with the Bacchants:
"Il s'enivrait avec elles, elles s'enivraient avec lui, et quand ils étaient ivres, ils
se levaient et se mettaient à courir les rues en poussant des cris mêlés de
fureur et de joie." It lingers on the description of the Calydonians rolling over
on the ground, a prey to lubricity and incestuous deeds.39 These passages of
apocryphal mythology have seemed to twentieth-century critics a gratuitous
interpolation of Diderot's own sexual phantasms.40 However, read in the
semiotic framework which was Diderot's own, they have a precise hermeneu-
tic function. They are supposed to reference, indeed to make visible and to
highlight, the deeply sexual, transgressive, and morbid nature of Iragonards
pictorial drama. Contemporaries responded to the uncanny sexuality of the
38 Freud: "The Moses of Michelangelo."

39 Diderot: "Les pères se précipitaient sur leurs filles qui avaient perdu tout sentiment de
pudeur, les mères sur leurs fils qui les méconnaissaient, les enfants de différents sexes
mêlés, confondus, se roulaient à terre; c'était un spectacle de joie extravagante, de licence
effrénée, d'une ivresse et d'une fureur inconcevable."
40 On Diderot's projection of his own libidinous phantasms in the review, see Chouillet: "La
poétique du rêve," pp. 249-250.
Fort: Ekphrasis as A r t Criticism: D i d e r o t and Fragonard's " C o r e s u s and Callirhoe" 73
3, Michelangelo: Moses. T o m b of |ulius II. Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.

P h o t o by author.
scene by commenting on the sexual ambivalence of the high priest's beardless,

smooth, white face, underscored by a "drapperie bouffante sur la poitrine,"
and on his hermaphroditical acolytes.41 Other sexual signifiers in the painting
include the display within two phallic columns of Callirhoe's bare-breasted
figure with limp arms, reclining head, and upper body propped up close to
the extended thigh of her lover, not to mention the orgasmic expression on
Coresus' dying face, reminiscent of Bernini's St. Theresa.42 Diderot discusses
some of these signifiers of sexual ambiguity in his later exchange with
Grimm. But the orgiastic scenes with which he opens his narrative are de-
signed from the start to signpost the artist's conception of the story as a dis-
turbing outbreak of sexual passion and religious excess. Narrative, then, in
Diderot's text, is hardly the impulsive reflex of an inveterate conteur, but a
highly controlled strategy geared to disclose the aesthetics of the painting and
of its artistic transposition.
"Plato's Cave"
I would like in conclusion to call attention briefly to Diderot's provocative tide

for his review, "Plato's Cave."43 Of all devices employed by the critic to evoke the
underlying aesthetic and technical principles of Fragonard's picture, the choice
of the cave metaphor is ekphrasdcally as well as critically the most refined.
Ekphrasis, it has been argued, cannot convey pictorial effects such as the
distribution of light and shade, or the nuances of color, or the handling of
paint, which are the painter's distinctive means of expression. Diderot, how-
ever, attempted to overcome these restrictions of the verbal mode by harness-
ing the image of the cave to various reconstructive and critical purposes. First,
as critics have noted, the cave allowed him to characterize the dark setting of
Fragonard's picture, its enclosed, gloomy space.44 But the cave was also
41 For example, the Mercure de France noted "l'équivoque que jette dans la représentation du
sujet, le caractère efféminé de la tête de Corésus. Equivoque qu'entretient encore la forme
des habillements de ce grand Prêtre, dont la drapperie bouffante sur la poitrine, empêche la
taille d'indiquer la distinction d'âge et de sexe qui conviendrait entre un grand Prêtre de
Bacchus, et la jeune et belle Princesse qu'il se disposoit à immoler." Octobre 1765, p. 166. See
also Journal encyclopédique, 15 novembre 1765, pp. 83-84, and Mémoires secrets, 28 août 1765,
p. 227.
42 See Sheriff: Fragonard, p. 43.
43 I developed this section in an unpublished paper cited and discussed by Sheriff: Fragonard,
p. 54.
44 Diderot's cave metaphor played on yet another register. Representing a priest who is com-
mitting suicide out of frustrated sexual desire, surrounded by a crowd of electrified voyeurs,
Diderot's major device for conveying the painter's most striking technical
achievement, one for which he was praised by artists and critics alike, namely
his superior handling of chiaroscuro,45 Originating outside the picture at the
back on the left, a powerful shaft of blond, natural, light cuts diagonally
across the temple's clouded darkness, striking the principal group laterally, and
illuminating most of the spectators from the back. Diderot evoked this daring
separation of light and shade by reference to an image which was well en-
trenched in the literary knowledge of his cultivated readers, that of the sharp
ray of light which, emanating from the fire outside the cave, penetrates it di-
agonally in Plato's allegory.46
Chiaroscuro, the expert distribution and mixing of light, color, and shade
over a painting's surface, was regarded in contemporary aesthetic theory as a
preeminent way of producing the illusion of truth, a "magie." 47 Diderot could
not point to the most fundamental principle of the painting's conception and
technique with a better image than that with which Plato had staged the ex-
posure of illusion. Although Plato's allegory in Republic VII is about the illu-
sions to which men are prone in the world of appearances, Diderot rewrote it
as an allegory of pictorial representation in general, and of Fragonard's illu-
sionistic scene in particular. He evoked Fragonard's uniquely immaterial treat-
ment of phantom-like figures by reference to the shadows cast on the wall of
the cave in Plato's myth. As Michael Fried has shown, this device, combined
with the dream, enhanced what we would call today the "cinematic" quality
in a dark and closed space, with an irate genius wrapped in "black vapor" hovering over the
scene, Fragonard's picture evinced, as we noted earlier, a heavily sexualized, obsessive di-
mension. For the public who had read Diderot's Eloge de Richardson in the same journal
three years earlier, the metaphor of the cave could connote that sinister cave of the soul,
the locus of libidinous impulses, hidden desires, and awsome transgressions which Diderot
had praised the English novelist for daring to illumine. Through the play of intertextual res-
onances, the cave in Diderot's text could now be reworked to illumine the nature of Frago-
nard's lurid psycho-sexual drama.
45 See, for example, Charles-Nicolas Cochin's letters to the Marquis de Marigny of 1 April and
8 August, 1765. Nouvelles archives de l'art français, vol. 20 (1904), pp. 10-11, 28.
46 Plato: Republic, VII, 514b.
47 See de Piles: Cours de peinture, pp. 361-368, and the entry "Magie" in Pernéty: Dictionnaire
portatif. "Terme employé par métaphore dans la peinture, pour exprimer le grand art à
représenter les objects avec tant de vérité, qu'ils fassent illusion, au point de pouvoir dire,
par exemple, des carnations, ce bras, ce corps est bien de chair. [...] Cette magie ne dépend
pas des couleurs prises en elles-mêmes, mais de leur distribution, suivant l'intelligence de
l'artiste dans le clair-obscur." Diderot devoted an important chapter of his Essais sur la pein-
ture to clair-obscur (Œuvres esthétiques, pp. 681-96), and cited Fragonard's Coresus as the
epitome of the chiaroscuresque painting, pp. 681-82.
of Fragonard's spectacle. 48 Diderot also extrapolated from Plato's myth the

notion that the objects manipulated by the puppeteers to cast shadows on the
cave wall are artifacts ("statues of men and other animals wrought from
stone, wood, and every kind of material"). 49 In Diderot's version, these be-
come "painted, colored shapes" ["petites figures transparentes et colorées ...
si bien faites, si bien peintes"] that is, the instruments o f the painter's trade,
the means with which the artist can conjure up a whole world o f appearances
and produce the illusion of truth. The constant play on the words phantoms
and simulacra in Diderot's text underscores the Platonic idea that painting in
general and Fragonard's picture in particular are concerned with the produc-
tion o f illusion. Diderot even makes his fictive Grimm stress this point:
"Dans la caverne, vous n'avez vu que les simulacres des êtres, et Fragonard
sur sa toile ne vous en aurait montré non plus que les simulacres."
In his ekphrasis Diderot thus underwrote the Platonic theory which views
art as a trick, the painter as a trickster and "magician," and his productions as
"copies of copies." He did not, however, condone the anathema cast by the
Greek philosopher on the mimetic arts in Republic III and X. 5 0 The produc-
tion of pleasing illusion had long been rehabilitated by artists such as Leonar-
do as one of the most difficult achievements of art. Fragonard's painting be-
longed to an aesthetic of illusion which favored what Marian Hobson has
called a "soft" conception of illusion. According to this conception, the artist
used a number of strategies to raise the viewer's awareness o f the illusion
which he produced.51 The deliberate and highly self-conscious way with
which Fragonard played in his painting with chiaroscuro was precisely one such
strategy. Another was the much remarked-upon "theatricality" of the scene.52
48 Fried: Absorption and Theatricality, p. 143. Fried also judiciously relates the device o f the
dream to Fragonard's chiaroscuro.
49 Plato: The Republic, p. 193.
50 This is why I depart from Barbara Stafford's interpretation, which views the production o f
these illusions and phantasmagorias as something evil, condemned by Diderot. Body Criti-
cism, p. 389. Diderot, on the contrary, claims for himself the positive role o f an agent o f illu-
sion in his ekphrasis.
51 Hobson: The Object of Art, pp. 5 0 - 5 6 . My interpretation o f Diderot's Coresus, however, de-
parts from Hobson's on p. 61. I view Diderot's representational stance in this review as
similar to the "flickering" between illusion and awareness which Hobson analyses in the
"Promenade Vernet" o f the 1767 Salon.
52 See Bukdahl: Diderot, critique d'art vol. 1, pp. 3 1 9 - 3 2 0 ; Sahut and Voile: Diderot et l'art de
Boucher à David, p. 212; and Wright, "New (Stage) Light on Fragonard's Corésus" pp. 54—59.
These critics suggest that Fragonard may have derived his inspiration from the 1703 tra-
gedy Corésus et Callirhoë by Antoine de La Fosse or its remake in a five-act opera by A.C.
Destouches and P.C. Roy in 1712 (revived in 1731 and 1743). Given the time lag, however,
this seems rather improbable.
With its boxed-in quality, its slight "di sotto" perspective which presents the
sacrificial scene raised on a proscenium enhanced by a red carpet, its dramatic
grouping of actors cast in stylized attitudes suggestive of extreme states of
passion, its staging of Coresus' self-sacrifice as a spectacle performed in front
of a tense audience, Fragonard's painting points to itself as a staged and illu-
sionistic, not a natural spectacle.
Diderot immediately identified "le théâtral" and illusionism as central
strategies of representation in this painting, and cued his readers to these ef-
fects directly by words such as "le prestige de cet apprêt" or pointers such as
"Voilà le théâtre d'une des plus terribles et des plus touchantes représentations
qui se soient exécutées sur la toile de la caverne pendant ma vision" (my italics).
But he did more. In his interpretive ekphrasis, he matched this theatrical aes-
thetic with corresponding textual strategies. I am not so much alluding here
to his distribution of the narrative in five discrete dramatic scenes or tableaux,
although this aspect of his ekphrasis also exhibits a self-conscious play with
theatrical illusion. I am referring to his subtle interweaving of reality and fic-
tion in his own text. As he plunges the reader into the fiction of the cave at
the beginning of his review, he also takes care to inscribe in his tale a figure of
awareness, namely the few prisoners who, in his dream, guessing at the hoax,
turn their heads towards its origin, and are intent on disclosing the subterfuge
to their fellow prisoners. The tension between the production of illusion in
the double fiction of the dream and the cave, and the disclosure of illusion in
the dialogue with Grimm is maintained for most of the review. But Diderot's
own initial hoax, the fiction of the absence of the painting from the Salon, is
revealed in the end to be a convenient device for the production of ekphrasis.
Thus, all textual strategies unite to re-produce and cue the reader to the typ-
ical flickering of awareness and illusion at work in the painting. With this aes-
thetic, Diderot claims his place as ekphrastic writer next to the producer of
pictorial illusion, Fragonard. In doing this, he also claims authority for a new
type of art criticism. Like a "hidden picture" which a flicker of the eye can
bring to consciousness because it was always present in the image, the two
components of Diderot's critical ekphrasis coexist and can at will be brought
to consciousness. One is a poetic piece in its own right, in which the writer ri-
vals the painter's art, the other, an ambitious piece of interpretive art criticism
revealing the deep mechanisms of the art work which it takes as its object.
FREDERICK B U R W I C K
University of California, Los Angeles
Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Crisis of Romanticism
Abstract: This contribution focusses on the discussion of the nature and function of
mimesis in the nineteenth century, and on the ways its provinces and techniques
were being redefined. It follows contemporary critical emphasis on metonymy, dif-
ference, and the meontic mode, while looking at the aesthetics of skepticism and
incredulity as an alternative to the emphasis on illusionism and "willing suspension
of disbelief." In such ekphrastic poems as Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or
Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas" the competing verbal and visual challenges of
mis-/re-/presentation involve the same self-reflexive strategies that inform Co-
leridge's poems about writing (or not writing) poems, or Blake's pictures about pic-
tures. The skeptical repudiation of the mimetic and ekphrastic endeavor is not the
break-down but the breaking-out-of the reflexive entrapment (art imitating art im-
itating art).
The defense of mimesis, ekphrasis, and aesthetic illusion is something like the
defense of a benign dictator. The good that they do may well be purchased,
just as their opponents have argued, at too dear a price. Even as instruments
of the dominant ideology, the mimetic strategies of aesthetic illusion often
bear the marks of authorial resistence or submission. In most literary genres
such countercurrents may be revealed only through careful attention to the
semiotics of the occluded and subverted reference. In the genre of confession,
however, explicit admission of violating the orthodoxy receives a degree of
orthodox sanction. The themes of trespass and reconciliation in the confes-
sional genre provided the apology of having put aside former errors as a justi-
fication for elaborating both defiance and capitulation. Thomas De Quincey,
who established his reputation in the "Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater" (1821) and spent many subsequent years of his career writing for the
politically conservative Blackwood's Magazine, continued to infuse virtually all
of his writings with disrupting confessions of trespass.
That a dire price was to be paid for the magnificent visions he obtained
through "The Pleasures of Opium," De Quincey candidly acknowledged in
Burwick: Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Crisis o f Romanticism 79
describing "The Pains of Opium." 1 How his personal crisis also reflected a
national state o f affairs is evident in his account of " T h e English Mail-Coach"
(1849) as mighty organ of the nation: in its "Glory of Motion" the mail-coach
could "trample upon humanity" (XIII: 281) and become the instrument of
"Sudden Death." Ekphrasis for De Quincey was not simply an occasion to
display a certain mastery of rhetorical enargeia in attempting to conjure a
visual work o f art;2 he used ekphrasis, rather, for a particular confessional
purpose. Although he was willing to accept the basic terms of the ekphrastic
principle as the literary description of a visual artifact, he recognized an insur-
mountable crux in Lessing's critique of two classical examples o f ekphrasis:
Homer's description o f the shield of Achilles and Virgil's description o f the
shield of Aeneis. Lessing grants the laurel to Homer rather than to Virgil be-
cause the poet of the Iliad succeeded in liberating the "frozen moment" o f art
by narrating the process of its creation (XI: 211—12). D e Quincey, however,
was suspicious of the claims for a liberating language, for the capacity o f po-
etic ekphrasis to reanimate the "imitation of human action," presumably
"frozen" in the visual artifact. Ekphrasis is but an illusion, and all mimetic il-
lusions o f language are entrapped in the stasis of a literary text. Precisely for
this reason, ekphrasis became for De Quincey a personal trope, an apt rhet-
orical figure for representing his own opium experience.
De Quincey thus readily admitted both deceit and personal agony in his
very pretense o f bringing language to challenge the representations o f art. In
the ekphrasis o f the culminating "Dream Fugue," the statue of the Dying
Trumpeter winds a stony trumpet (XIII: 324—25). It is the statue who acts,
while the helpless opium-eater remains in the bondage of his dream; it is the
statue whose dreadful blast proclaims from the field of battle the human sac-
rifice to the gods of war and empire. The poetic exposé of the conflict, aes-
thetic and ideological, is neither a skeptical break-down of the poetic endea-
vor nor an ironic breaking-out-of the reflexivity of art imitating art imitating
art; it is, rather, the painful confession o f its deadly entrapment.
The poet's confrontation with artistic entrapment, WJ.T. Mitchell has de-
scribed as "ekphrastic fear." Poetic ekphrasis commences in "indifference,"
1 The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 3, pp. 379ff, 412ff. With the exception o f
transcriptions from manuscript drafts o f " T h e English Mail Coach" as noted below, refer-
ences to D e Quincey will be cited from this edition and documented parenthetically in the
text. Full transcriptions from the manuscripts will be available in the new edition o f The
Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. by Grevel Lindop, Edmund Baxter, Frederick Burwick, Ro-
bert Morrison, and Barry Symonds (London: Pickering & Chatto).
2 De Quincey shifts between what Krieger has indentified as the descriptive and empathie
modes o f enargeia; see Ekphrasis, pp. 6 7 - 9 0 and 9 3 - 1 1 2 .
the simple recognition that a painting or sculpture cannot possibly be repres-

ented in language. Yet as the poet undertakes that impossible task, there fol-
lows an "ekphrastic hope" that the power of metaphor to stimulate the visual
imagination might actually succeed in overcoming the differences between ver-
bal and visual modes of representation. This hope, Mitchell argues, quickly
gives way to an "ekphrastic fear" born of anticipating the consequences of
conjuring visual stasis.3 Should language succeed in generating the "frozen mo-
ment" of art, it would lose the power and dynamism of temporal movement.
The fear no less than the hope of ekphrastic endeavor attributes to art a
permanence. The "frozen moment" endures.4 That it may thus transcend the
transitory condition of mortality makes art much like death. The notion that
one can "die into art" soothes the stark opposition in Horace's phrase, "ars
longa, vita brevis." The mortal doom that casts its shadow even upon the joy-
ous celebration of his marriage, Spenser can claim to transcend in his "Epi-
thalamion" by offering "To short time an endless monument." While the
"endless monument" of art may thus preserve its subject, it is also evident
that preservation is achieved only through embalmment. The artifact is for-
ever petrified.
Not the embalmment of the artifact but the embalmment of its author is
what seemed so terrifying to those romantic writers who perceived their work
as somehow identical with the activity of mind. In the works of Coleridge and
De Quincey, who experienced something akin to self-embalmment in the
thrall of opium, passages recur in which they record the peculiar alterations in
their own temporal perception. In its initial effects, the drug exhilerates men-
tal activity even while the body succumbs in torpor; then, in its subsequent
phase, consciousness lapses into lethargy, while the muscles begin to suffer
nervous agitation. Precisely such alternating acceleration and retardation are
among the themes which Alethea Hayter described as characteristic of the ef-
fects of opium on the romantic imagination.
Opium, De Quincey declares in his "Confessions of an English Opium-
Eater," wrought upon his mind and body "mighty antagonisms; infinite act-
ivities, infinite repose" (III: 395). This statement is directly followed by a
3 Mitchell: "Ekphrasis and the Other."

4 Krieger: "Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry." Heffernan, in "Ekphrasis and Rep-
resentation," argues against the conception of ekphrasis as a "frozen moment": "From Ho-
mer's time to our own, ekphrastic literature reveals again and again this narrative response
to pictorial stasis, this storytelling impulse that language by its very nature seems to reíase
and stimulate. That is why I must disagree with Krieger when he treats ekphrasis as a way
of freezing time in space," p. 301. See also Heffernan, "Entering the Museum of Words,"
in this volume.
Burwick: Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Crisis of Romanticism 81
grand tribute to opium, a swelling crescendo that commences with the words,
"O just, subde, and all-conquering opium!" The irony of this passage is im-
mediately accessible to readers who recognize that De Quincey has echoed
the Sir Walter Raleigh's apostrophe to "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death!" 5
Opium, as De Quincey went on to recount in the section of the confessions
devoted to its "Pains," gradually assumed a more debilitating hold on his
body so that the drug became a Medusa, and he the hapless witness whom
she turns to stone.
It is not surprising that in De Quincey's prose the verbal appropriation of
the visual artifact is aligned with the same "mighty antagonisms" which he at-
tributes to opium. The Medusa-moment is the paralysis engendered at its
negative pole; at the positive pole is the animating power of the Pygmalion-
moment. Although De Quincey, as he reveals in his "Confessions," had re-
cognized by 1821 how this polarity operates in his opium-induced dreams, it
is not until 1827, when he left the London Magazine and returned to Edin-
burgh to work on Blackwood's Magazine, that he came explicitly to terms with
the problem of temporality in art. Among his first contributions were the
essay on Lessing and the annotated translation from the Laocoon.
Like many a critic who has since explored the temporal and spatial pre-
sumptions of the verbal and visual arts, De Quincey was not convinced by
Lessing's discrimination. One of his lengthier notes to Lessing's text concerns
the argument about the sort of temporal movement that might be effectively
halted in the "frozen moment" of art. This was intimately relevant to the dif-
ficulty, with which he had already grappled in the "Confessions," of repres-
enting how time seemed to accelerate or decelerate as opium rang its changes
upon his body and his mind.
Lessing, as De Quincey describes him in the essay introductory to his
translation of the Laocoon, is not only an accomplished playwright and critic,
he has personally brought about that Pygmalion-moment of giving vitality not
only to German letters but to the German people. To him goes the credit for
"awakening the frozen activities of the German mind" (XI: 157). De
Quincey's annotations to the Laocoon reveal his effort to relate Lessing's crit-
ical thought to his own. In his well-known distinction between the Literature
of Knowledge and the Literature of Power, De Quincey revises Horace's "aut
5 Raleigh: The History of the World, p. 669: "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none
could advise, thou hast perswaded; what none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all
the world hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawn to-
gether all the far stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and cov-
ered it all over with these two narrow words, Hie jacet."
prodesse, aut delectare." While the purpose o f the Literature o f Knowledge is

to teach, the function o f the Literature o f Power is not to delight but, as in
Quintilian's definition o f rhetoric, to move. D e Quincey means "to move" in
the manifold sense o f arousing the reason as well as the passions. While Les-
sing commanded such power in "awakening the frozen activities o f the Ger-
man mind," his declaration that "the object o f the fine arts is pleasure"
prompted D e Quincey to insist that "not pleasure, but the sense of power
and the illimitable incarnated as it were in pleasure, is the true object o f the
Fine Arts" (XI: 172-73). When Lessing goes on to confirm the other half o f
the Horadan formula, that the function o f art is to teach, D e Quincey is
prompted to append a "Postscript on Didactic Poetry" (XI: 215-21) elaborat-
ing his contention that the essential attribute o f poetry was the power to
move the mind.
The power to move, which D e Quincey insists is the object o f art, de-
pends in turn on the capacity o f art to reveal that power in process. I f art is to
move it must appear dynamic rather than static. As Lessing seeks to establish
the regulative principles which govern the artistic endeavor to express "the
acme or transcendent point o f action," D e Quincey inserts no contrary notes.
Lessing, o f course, is also concerned with how mimesis in visual art is to
overcome the bondage o f its physical condition, "its punctual restriction to a
single instant of time" (XI: 177). To resolve this problem o f temporal restric-
tion, the artist must show the "arrested movement"; the artist must create,
that is, the illusion o f a continuity o f movement in the single instant which
the work o f art depicts. Once that continuity is perceived, it can be reanim-
ated in the active mind o f the beholder:
if it be granted o f the artist generally that o f all this moving series he can arrest as
it were but so much as fills one instant o f time, and, with regard to the painter in
particular, that even this insulated moment he can exhibit only under one single
aspect or phasis, it then become evident that, in the selection o f this single aspect,
too much care cannot be taken that each shall be in the highest possible degree
pregnant in its meaning, - that is, shall yield the utmost range to the activities o f
the imagination. (XI: 177)
The "pregnant" moment is not the ultimate moment o f crisis, Lessing argues,
but in the movement leading toward that crisis. Thus the artist should repres-
ent the moment before the action rises to its extremity o f passion:
to present the last extremity to the eye is in effect to put fetters on the fancy, and,
by denying it all possibility o f rising above the sensible impression o f the picture
or statue, to throw its activities forcibly upon the weaker images which lie below
that impression. (XI: 178)
De Quincey is in complete accord with Lessing's contention that the tempo-

ral moment of art must appear continuous, and that the imagination of the
beholder must be stimulated to reanimate the action. Crucial to this argument
is Lessing's descrimination of two modes of temporal movement.
At this point, De Quincey finds it necessary to insert another lengthy
note, not to disagree with Lessing but to elucidate further the two modes of
temporal movement. One mode involves an homogenous movement, which
reveals a continuous, self-repeating, enduring action; the other an hetero-
genous movement, which, as he translates Lessing's phrase, is "essentially
evanescent." The artist must represent the former, not the latter. Although
De Quincey agrees with Lessing, he explains the problem in terms which are
more particularly relevant to his own grappling with temporal perception:
it is in the very antagonism between the transitory reality and the non-transitory
image of it reproduced by Painting or Sculpture that one main attraction of those
arts is concealed. The shows of Nature, which we feel and know to be moving,
unstable, and transitory, are by these arts arrested in a single moment of their pas-
sage, and frozen as it were into a motionless immortality. (XI: 178)
Lessing's principle of representing events that progress through self-repeating

rather than self-effacing action, De Quincey declares, "has been admirably
drawn into light, and finely illustrated, by Mr. Wordsworth in a sonnet on the
Art of Landscape-Painting."
The sonnet, "Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture," 6 in which Words-
worth describes a painting by Sir George Beaumont, provides De Quincey
with a specific example of ekphrasis to elucidate the efficacy of enduring
rather than evanescent movement in the work of art. The poet in the final
couplet identifies "the great secret power" of the painting as its capacity to
bestow upon
One brief moment caught from fleeting time

The appropriate calm of blest Eternity.
Has the sonnet justified the claim of these closing lines? Has the poet actually
shown how the artist has caught the moment from "fleeting time"? De
Quincey acknowledges that the very notion of "fleeting time" might seem at
odds with Lessing's insistance upon durational time; "but all the illustrations
of the sonnet," De Quincey argues, show that Wordsworth has fully grasped
the principle of continuous motion.
6 Wordsworth: Poetical Works, p. 200; subsequent references to this edition of Wordsworth's

poetry are given parenthetically.
In the succession of parts which make up any appearance in nature, either these
parts simply repeat each other (as in the case of a man walking, a river flowing,
&c.), or they unfold themselves through a cycle, in which each step effaces the
preceding (as in the case of a gun exploding, where the flash is swallowed up by
the smoke, the smoke effaced by its own dispersion, &c.). Now, the illustrations in
Mr. Wordsworth's poem are all of the former class: as the party of travellers just
entering the wood, but not permitted, by the good, considerate painter, absolutely
to enter the wood, where they must be eternally hidden from us; so again with re-
gard to the little boat, - if allowed to unmoor and go out a-fishing, it might be ly-
ing hid for hours under the resdess glory of the sun, but now we all see it 'For ev-
er anchored in its rocky bed'; and so on; where the continuous self-repeating na-
ture of the impression, together with the indefinite duration, predisposes the mind
to contemplate it under a form of unity, one mode of which exists in the eternal
Now of the painter and the sculptor. (XI: 178-79)
Because Wordsworth explicitly addresses the phenomomena of the "frozen

moment," his sonnet on Beaumont's landscape provides, for De Quincey's
purpose, a better example of durational time than the description in "Elegiac
Stanzas" (452-53) of Beaumont's painting of Peele Castle.
By contrasting an imagined painting of Peele Castle in a setting of perfect
tranquillity with Beaumont's painting of the Castle lashed by a violent storm,
Wordsworth draws attention to the means by which temporal movement is
represented. In his own imagined painting, where nothing is allowed to dis-
rupt the tranquillity, there is also nothing to mark the passing of time: all ac-
tion, all movement have been suspended in utter passivity. His unpainted
painting would show the Castle with its reflection "sleeping on a glassy sea";
the sunlight that might suggest passing time would be replaced by "The light
that never was, on sea or land,/ The consecration, and the Poet's dream." His
vision of "steadfast peace that might not be betrayed," Wordsworth admits,
was mere self-delusion. The death of his brother John, drowned at sea, has
forced him to recognize human mortality and the ravages of time even in
scenes of nature. "A deep distress," he thus declares, "has humanised my
Soul." To depict such a "humanised" drama Beaumont has painted the im-
pact of "sea in anger" on the mortal struggle of ship and castle:
That Hulk which labours in the deadly swell,

The rueful sky, this pageanrtry of fear!
And this huge Casde, standing here sublime,
I love to see the look with which it braves,
Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,
The lightning, the fierce wind, and trampling waves.
(11. 47-52)
Although De Quincey does not elaborate on other instances of ekphrasis in

Wordsworth's poetry (for example, the statue "Of Newton with his prism and
silent face,/ The marble index of a mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange
seas of Thought alone." 7 ), he does in his commentary on Wordsworth's po-
etry emphasize the poet's acute attention to visual detail. O n such a passage
from the Excursion, De Quincey comments:
who does not acknowledge instantaneously the magical strength of truth in his
saying of a cataract seen from a station two miles off that it was "frozen by dis-
tance"? In all nature there is not an object so essentially at war with the stiffening
of frost as the headlong and desperate life of a cataract; and yet notoriously the ef-
fect of distance is to lock up this frenzy of motion into the most pétrifie column
of stillness. This effect is perceived at once when it is pointed out; but how few are
there that ever would have perceived it for themselves! (XI: 315-16)
"Arrested movement" is not simply an artificial convention of painting: it is a

commonplace phenomenon of perception. Movement too rapid or too dis-
tant for the eye to perceive is blurred into a seemingly stationary object.
Wordsworth, as poet preoccupied with optical illusions, transformed an ex-
perience of the "frozen moment" into a moment of poetic awareness. Fascin-
ated though he was with how optical illusion revealed the workings of the
mind, he had no interest in the altered perception of rapidity and distance
which opium might wreak upon the mind. In Wordsworth's judgment, as De
Quincey well knew, he and Coleridge had revealed only a moral turpitude in
their addiction.
Lessing explains the "essentially evanescent" as "All appearances in nature
which bear the character to our understanding of sudden birth and sudden
extinction, and which by their essence are fluxionary." The "frozen moment"
of art must be durational rather than evanescent. This sort of movement is
unsuitable for representation in painting and sculpture, because it will inevit-
able appear "unnatural when fixed and petrified, as it were, into the unchang-
ing forms of art." If evanescent forms are "frozen," Lessing asserts, they im-
mediately appear unnatural and, even if "otherwise agreeable or terrific,
inevitably become weaker and weaker in the impression the oftener they are
contemplated" (XI: 178-80). De Quincey, however, is not willing to consider
"arrested movement" a mere peculiarity of the work of art. It may, indeed, be
odd, but not for that reason unnatural or unfamiliar. He has himself wit-
nessed such alterations in passing time, experienced the frightening sensation
that time has stopped altogether.
7 Wordsworth: Prelude, III: 61-64.

Depending upon the state of his drug-altered perception, a succession of

events may register themselves in D e Quincey's mind at varying rates. The il-
lusions of time rapidly fleeting or slowly creeping make Lessing's objection to
apparent suddenness less significant and merely subsidiary to his discrimina-
tion of the opposing modes movement. D e Quincey repeats Lessing's objec-
tion to abrupt events, but he goes on to elaborate the importance of revealing
sequential continuity in the "frozen moment." Inappropriate to the visual arts
is that sort of movement, "where the parts are not fluent, as in a line, but an-
gular, as it were, to each other, not homogenous, but heterogenous, not con-
tinuous but abrupt." As evident in his example of the flash and smoke of a
gun, D e Quincey argues against representing the evanescent event less be-
cause of its abruptness than because of the difficulty in revealing a continuity
of process:
b o t h b e c a u s e each part really has, in general, but a m o m e n t a r y existence, and still

m o r e because, all parts being unlike, each is i m p e r f e c t as a representative o f the
whole p r o c e s s ; whereas in trains which repeat each other the whole exists virtually
in each part, and therefore reciprocally each part will b e a perfect representation o f
the whole. (XI: 179)
Parallel to the problem of representing durational rather than evanescent time

in the visual arts, D e Quincey notes that a similar problem exists in language
when it is used not for the circumstantially ephemeral occasion of discourse
but for the purpose of permanent inscription.
The language inscribed upon a monument is subject to the same condi-
tions of temporal continuity as govern visual representation of the "frozen
moment" for it, too, becomes visually fixed and permanent. D e Quincey
again turns to Wordsworth in whose "Essay on Epitaphs" he finds the most
thorough exposition of the principles representation applied to language:
first, that all fanciful thoughts, and secondly all thoughts o f u n s u b d u e d , gloomy, and
u n h o p e f u l grief, are not less severely excluded f r o m the E p i t a p h by just taste than
by Christian feeling. F o r the very nature o f the material in which such inscriptions
are recorded, s t o n e or marble, and the laborious p r o c e s s by which they are chisled
out, b o t h point to a character o f duration with which everything slight, frail, or
evanescent, is o u t o f harmony. N o w , a fanciful thought, however tender, has, by its
very definition, this defect. For, b e i n g o f necessity taken f r o m a partial and oblique
station (since, if it coincided with the central or absolute station o f the reason, it
would cease to b e fanciful), such a thought can, at m o s t , include but a side-glimpse
o f the truth: the mind submits to it for a m o m e n t , but immediately hurries o n to
s o m e other thought, under the feeling that the flash and s u d d e n gleam of
colourable truth, being as frail as the resemblances in clouds, would, like them, un-
mould and 'dislimn' itself (to use a Shakespearian word) under too steady and con-
tinued attention. ( X I : 179)
Although he cites Wordsworth's "Essay on Epitaphs" as resting on the same

general princples which Lessing develops in the essay on the Laocoon, De
Quincey in fact provides counter evidence to the major distinction which
Lessing attempts to draw between the spatiality of art and the temporal flux
of language.
How language communicates alters radically when its use is shifted from
one medium to another, not just from spoken to written, but from spoken in
parliament to spoken in pulpit, from written in a chronicle to written on a
monument. When painting appropriates language, a similar shift takes place.
The words must bear the burden of duration, even as they interact within the
illusion of transitory time. Thus, in Nicholas Poussin's iconotext, the words
"ET IN ARCADIA EGO," which are apdy depicted as inscribed upon a monu-
ment, are also being pointed to, read, and interpreted by the figures within the
painting who thus challenge the viewer of the painting to participate in the
temporal action.8
"In an Epitaph, from its monumental character," De Quincey asserts, "we
look for a feeling which is fitted to be acquiesced in as final." Therefore ex-
tremity of pain or grief are as ill-suited to the language of epitaphs as to the
expression chisled upon the face of the statue of Laocoon: "upon the general
principles of human nature, we know that the turbulence of rebellious grief
cannot be a final, or other than a transitory, state of mind; and, if it were oth-
erwise in any particular case, we should be too much shocked to survey it
with a pleasurable sympathy" (XI: 180). De Quincey readily grants, however,
Lessing's point that the language of the evanescent moment can be of great
use to the dramatic poet, for in the drama such passages "make parts, or
steps, in a natural process the whole of which is given, and are effaced either
by more tranquil sentiments, or by the catastrophe, so that attempt is there
made to give permanence to the evanescent." (XI: 180)
In comparing the representation of Medea in painting and in drama, Les-
sing reasserts the need for the visual arts to select "that point of the action
8 Nicholas Poussin, "et in arcadia ego" (ca. 1630-1635), Louvre; this version was often en-
graved; the earlier version by Poussin (1626-1628) is in Chatsworth, Devonshire. Poussin
adapted the theme from the painting by Guercino (1591-1666) which hangs in the Galleria
Corsino. See: Erwin Panofsky, "Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition."
Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 295-320; Erwin and Gerda Panofsky, "The 'Tomb in Arcady'
at the 'fin-de-siècle,'" 287-304. For definition and discussion of "iconotext," see Montandon,
Wagner, and Ette, in this volume.
which rather suggested than represented its crisis o f extremity." Thus the
praise accorded to Timomachus for his representation o f the intense passion
o f Medea is due to his having captured "that particular form o f expression
for the situation with which the sense o f evanescence was not too powerfully
connected to make use revolt from the prolongation o f it by art." Lessing, o f
course, is relying on verbal accounts o f a painting that had long since per-
ished. Timomachus's rendition may well have been based on a scene from
dramatic performance. Whether or not Lessing presumed that the work o f art
drew specifically upon Sophocles' play, it is evident that his verbal description
o f that visual moment assumes a dramatic enactment. In giving us his ac-
count o f the visual imitation o f the verbal, he involves us in a verbal imitation
o f the visual. Indeed, the aesthetic response to the "frozen moment" o f the
painting is made dependent upon an imaginative reenactment o f the tragedy.
His purpose is to reiterate his criteria for the limits o f evanescence:
The Medea was exhibited, not in the very act of murdering her children, but a few
moments before, whilst the struggle was yet fervent between maternal love and
jealousy. The issue is foreseen; already, by anticipation, we shudder at the image of
the mother mastered by her murderous fury; and our imagination transports us far
beyond any effect that could have been derived from the actual exhibition of this
awful moment. (XI: 181)
Once again citing as his evidence a work o f visual art which survives only in
verbal tradition, Lessing tells o f the failure o f a contemporary o f Timomachus
who commited the grievous error, in attempting "to exhibit Medea in the
very transports o f her murderous frenzy; and thus upon a thing as fugitive as
a delirious dream had conferred a monumental duration, — which is shocking
and revolting to nature." Proof o f the failure is the scorn expressed by the
poet who lays ekphrastic claim to the apparently unabating madness captured
in the painting:
'Ha! Medea, is then thy thirst after thy children's blood unquenchable? Doth there
rise up for ever another Jason and another Creusa, to sting thee into madness? If
so', he adds in indignation, 'cursed be thou, even in the painter's mimicry!'
The aesthetic judgment, endorsed and upheld by Lessing, is more obedient to

tradition and cultural conventions than to any deficieny in temporal dy-
namism which he seeks to grant to language and deny to art. The artists
themselves, fortunately, paid little heed to the limits which Lessing argued
were insurmountable. Sir Joshua Reynolds's well-known painting o f "Sarah
Siddons Contemplating the Tragic Muse," for example, depicts the actress
seated between two ghosdy images o f herself acting out the tragic scenes o f
rage and remorse. With her left hand raised, she summons to the murderous
deed an image of herself bearing a poisonous beaker, her face contorted with
precisely the impassioned fury to which Lessing strenuously objects; parallel
with the angle of the contemplative Sarah's right hand, which declines from
the armrest of her chair, is the bloody knife held by the other image of herself
as the murderess who has just recognized the horror of her atrocity.
Nor should Reynolds reap undue praise for his originality in overcoming
the temporal obstacles of his medium. To introduce into the painting of the
contemplative Sarah Siddons the very object of her contemplation — herself
as tragic heroine before and after she has committed the deadly crime -
Reynolds simply adapted the temporal structure of the triptych, much as
Bosch used it in depicting "The Garden of Earthly Delights" flanked to the
left with a scene from Paradise, to the right with a scene from Hell. Historic-
ally, the visual arts have adapted a wide variety of conventions to express the
passing of narrative time. Hogarth, we remember, used a series of plates to
narrate "The Rake's Progress," "The Harlot's Progress," and the moral dis-
aster of a "Marriage à-la-Mode."9 A narrative sequence of visual scenes, of
course, is as commonplace in traditional Christian iconography as the Stations
of the Cross. Few artists of the Late Middle Ages felt that they were obliged
to represent but one temporal moment in a painting. As the eye moves about
the painting to interpret the visible signs, it becomes involved in the passage
of time no less than it does in reading a printed text. Such stories as "Susan-
nah and the Elders" or "David and Bathsheba" were represented in a series
of scenes in a single painting. Because the eye is not captive, but free to move
from one scene to the next, Lessing's argument against the repugnance gener-
ated by rendering a moment of extreme passion is mitigated by the very sort
of narrative movement which he grants to the verbal arts.
In another lengthy note to his translation, De Quincey sets forth his oft
reiterated principle of idem in alio. Although he makes repeated use of this
principle in later essays (e.g., I: 51; V: 237; X: 368-70), it is first formulated in
this translation of the Laocoon. De Quincey felt compelled to elaborate on
"similitude in dissimulitude" as a crucial attribute of the mimetic arts. The im-
mediate occasion for the note is to augment Lessing's explanation of why
Laocoon is depicted nude rather than in his priestly robes. Drapery, although
also possessing an appropriate beauty, Lessing explained, detracted from the
artistic representation of the human form. De Quincey, here and elsewhere,
9 See Paulson: "The Harlot, Her Father, and the Parson: Representing and Interpreting in
the Eighteenth Century," in this volume.
finds Lessing too preoccupied with the sensuous image. 10 Mimetic desire is
fulfilled only in making the drapery reveal rather than conceal. To render
transparent the opacity o f stone, the sculpted body is enveloped yet exposed
in diaphanously light and clinging garments. Better suited to the representa-
don o f the sensuous image is painting, in which shading and coloring renders
flesh and drapery more excitingly "alive." Sculpture, even that o f "the most
perfect master," reveals not flesh but the human form in stone. While the
painter can meet the challenge o f idem in alio in representing the scene o f Pyg-
malion with the statue comingto life, the same scene remains problematic for
sculpture. " T h e characteristic aim o f painting is reality and life; o f sculpture,
ideality and duration. Painting is sensuous and concrete; sculpture is abstract
and imaginative" (XI: 194-96). 1 1
D e Quincey, to be sure, fully sanctioned Lessing's distinction between
evanescent and durational time. Yet in acknowledging that halting the evanes-
cent moment could produce effects that were revoltingly grotesque, he also
knew how to use effectively the horror o f freezing a moment o f crisis, o f
stopping the forward thrust o f the narrative to rivet the reader's attention to
the moment o f violent passion or destruction. Consider, for example, that
scene in "Murder Considered as One o f the Fine Arts," in which he conjures
the return o f the servant-girl, Mary, to the household in which the fiendish
Williams has just finished slitting the throats o f Mr. and Mrs. Marr, the ap-
prentice boy, and even the infant in its cradle. Mary, in the scene which D e
Quincey elaborates with the excruciating detail o f slowly passing seconds, en-
ters the darkened house where the murderer awaits. When she pauses at the
door o f the bedroom corridor, D e Quincey stops the action for a full page to
ponder the dire predicament: "He, the solitary murderer, is on one side o f the
door; Mary is on the other side" (XI: 88). Will she open the door? Will he?
The extended moment o f suspense, a narrative trick often practiced in the
tale o f terror, may well have its origin, as D e Quincey repeatedly testified, in
10 Although De Quincey is fully aware of the precedents in Athenian, Hellenic, and Roman
art, he also knows that contemporary sculpture has favored draped representations of the
human figure. Yet even in his own time, Canova and Thorwaldsen endeavored to make the
robes appear to disappear. In spite of the moral pretense which demands drapery, "reason,
conscious of an impotence to satisfy its moral need, has recourse to the parergon." Kant:
Kritik der Urteilskraft, §14; Derrida: ha Vérité en peinture, p. 64.
11 This particular formulation of the difference between the sculpturesque and the pictur-
esque owes more to A. W Schlegel's reading of Lessing than to Lessing's own account, and
De Quincey no doubt knew it, as well, from Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare; Schlegel:
Kritische Schriften und Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 86, 101, 104-8; vol. 5, pp. 45, 69-71, 73, 79, 99,
209-10; vol. 6, pp. 28,112-13.
the nightmare experience of being caught in some perilous horror with no

power to flee nor even to fend off the danger. To be paralysed with fear be-
came for De Quincey a recurrent correlative of being physically ennervated
with opium. Knowing that he would be unable to rouse himself to action, he
could not supress the paranoic fear which arose as demonic companion to his
enfeebled condition. Once the opium began to take command of his bio-
chemistry, numbing every muscle, even as it liberated in reverie his rich store
of imagery, each sensation of delight brought with it an associated image of
menacing evil. Thus in that moment in which desire has animated the statue
and Pygmalion seeks to embrace her, she is transformed into the Medusa
who turns him to stone. The emphemeral "roses and Fannies" of the Pyg-
malion-moment, to use the example in "The Glory of Motion," are insepar-
able from the unchanging "crocodiles" of the Medusa-moment.
If, therefore, the crocodile does not change, all things else undeniably do: even the
shadow of the pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in vision of Fanny
and the Bath road makes me too pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the
darkness, if I happen to call back the image of Fanny, up rises suddenly from a
gulf of forty years a rose in June; or, if I think for an instant of the rose in June, up
rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the other, like the antiphonies in the
choral service, rise Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose in June
and Fanny. Then come both together, as in a chorus — roses and Fannies, Fannies
and roses, without end, thick as blossoms in paradise. (XI: 289)
This bliss of paradisical images is disrupted by the inevitable demoniacal in-

trusion: "Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and
gold, with sixteen capes; and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the
box of the Bath mail." De Quincey's account of the associational game thus
played out repetitively and relendessly in his dreams involves a contrariety
even more disturbing than the fearsome crocodile juxtaposed with the beauti-
ful roses and Fannies. It is the contrariety of the "frozen moment." The gal-
loping coach is halted, De Quincey declares, "And suddenly we upon the mail
are pulled up by a mighty dial, sculptured with the hours." The irreality of
time in the nightmare void Coleridge had also, in the poem "Limbo," de-
scribed as "Mark'd but by Flit of Shades — unmeaning they/ As Moonlight on
the Dial of Day." What had seemed dynamic are but captive images, caught
upon a dial where only shadows move, returning again and again to haunt the
dreamer:
once again the roses call up the sweet countenance of Fanny; and she, being the
grandaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host of semi-legendary animals —
griffens, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes - till at length the whole vision of fighting im-
ages crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human char-
ities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with unut-
terable and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair
female hand, with the forefinger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, up-
wards to heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty
o f earth and her children.
This is the ekphrastic moment which provides the paradoxical climax to De

Quincey's celebration of "The Glory of Motion." The galloping mail-coach is
but a sculptured device to point the passing hours upon a sundial, and the
fleeting moments, animating and petrifying, are emblazoned as heraldic em-
blems upon a shield.
In "The English Mail-Coach," not only is the paralysis he describes in
"The Vision of Sudden Death" a direct consequence of the troubled exhilara-
tion he experiences in "The Glory of Motion," both alternate in the imagery
of shipwreck and marble tombs in the "Dream Fugue." The sense exhilarat-
ing motion and the helpless paralysis are relocated in the figure of the woman
doomed to an inescapable cycle of "infinite activities, infinite repose." As a
case study in ekphrastic paralysis, "The English Mail Coach," reveals how De
Quincey's experience of hightened perception accompanied by bodily torpor
gave rise to images of action and stasis. He describes himself in a helpless stu-
por, unable to move or act, seated beside the sleeping driver as the speeding
mail-coach thunders down upon the young lovers who fail to see in time their
impending peril. The frantic gestures of the woman continue to haunt his
dreams, which he subsequently narrates in dream-fugue variations on the mo-
ment of death. Not only is the experience of thrilling motion overwhelmed by
the narrator's paralysis and thus gradually turned into a tale of terror, he con-
cludes by describing himself turned to stone as he witnesses the marble fig-
ures upon the graveyard monuments arise and move.
Although Coleridge in "Kubla Khan" and Keats in "The Fall of Hyper-
ion" depict struggles with lifeless paralysis that are thematically similar to De
Quincey's visions of petrifaction, they do share his peculiar reversal of the
ekphrastic polarity. The paradoxical tension of art vs. life has been frequently
scrutinized in that prime example of ekphrasis in English romanticism,
Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." As other critics have observed, there is
something perverse in the poet's apparent delight over the predicament of the
urn as "unravished bride," the stasis of the "wild ecstasy" of the figures with
which the urn is decorated.12 The unconsummated bliss of the lovers may
12 Spitzer: "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', or Content vs. Metagrammar;" Scott: The Sculpted
Word: Keats and Ekphrasis, pp. 98-108; in addition to his disccusion of the "Ode on a Gre-
well seem a mixed blessing, in spite of the poet's argument that they are thus
liberated from "all breathing human passion [...] / That leaves a heart high-
sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue." The per-
versity has been located in the peculiar ekphrastic domination which the male
poet exercises over the female work of art and the scenes that define its iden-
tity as purely ornamental eroticism. The static condition enables the poet to
mediate and control the ecstatic energy of his subject.
Although he deliberately insists upon its stasis as necessary condition to
its permanence as art, the poet nevertheless posits the very temporal move-
ment that he pretends to deny. The evocations of movement must be con-
jured in order to describe the "mad pursuit" of men and "maidens loth," the
melodist "For ever piping," the lovers ever about to kiss. Yet in declaring the
power of the beautiful "Sylvan historian" to "express/ A flowery tale more
sweetly than our rhyme," he promptly exposes its limitations. For all its power
to "tease us out of thought/ As doth eternity," its Attic beauty remains a
"Cold pastoral!" An exclamation point marks this judgemental declaration of
the deathlike coldness which is neither warmed nor vitalized by the reassur-
ance that the urn is a "friend to man" to whom it communicates the sole es-
sential knowledge that '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty'."
When the narrator in the "Eve of St. Agnes" chides the Beadsman for ig-
noring the figures of "The sculptur'd dead" which "seem to freeze, Em-
prison'd in black purgortorial rails:/ Knights, ladies, praying in dumb
orat'ries," he advocates an aesthetic empathy capable of restoring human feel-
ing to the cold inanimate work of art. By accusing the Beadsman of a "weak
spirit" for failing "To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails," he
implicity invokes the reader to exercise a more sensitive response. An aes-
thetic of animating empathy rather than willful control is also pronounced in
"The Fall of Hyperion." The poet who declared himself "half in love with
easeful death" in "Ode to a Nightingale," who feared that "I may cease to be
/ Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain," commenced "The Fall of
Hyperion" with the morbid prophecy that "When this warm scribe my hand
is in the grave," posterity will decide whether his visions are those of poet or
fanatic. This same movement of "dying into art" is rendered thematic as the
poet manipulates his narrative through the labyrinthine recesses of dream
within dream within dream. Yet with each recapitulation of the basic opposi-
tion between action and stasis, the dreamer is increasingly threatened with the
paralysis of vision.
cian Urn," see also the discrimination between Classical and Romantic ekphrasis in Scott's
Introduction.
The dreamer who awakens belatedly at the site of the edenic banquet of
Milton's Paradise Lost, eats of the abandoned fruit, drinks of the "transparent
juice," and falls into another slumber. In this dream within a dream, he finds
himself enclosed within a huge cathedral-like vault. Traversing the vast archi-
tectural space, he approaches a lofty altar; standing at the foot of the stairs
that ascend its hights, he hears the words of doom: "If thou canst not as-
cend/ These steps, die on that marble where thou art." As he approaches the
altar his entire being is inflicted with cold and numbing pain; he is at the
brink of death when his "iced foot touch'd/ The lowest stair"; then with each
step his vital impulses are restored. Atop the altar he is challenged by Moneta,
high priestess of memory and the mythic past, and their dialogue elaborates
once more what it means "to die and live again." Guided by Moneta, the
dreamer suddenly emerges in the realm of a third dream, "Far sunken from
the healthy breath of morn," where Saturn, great Titan of Time, had fallen
"When he had lost his realms." The frozen immobility of Saturn expresses
precisely the conditions of the ekphrastic fear: to enter into the "endless
monument" of art is to bear the risk of permanent entombment.
While Coleridge, too, inveighs against the paralysis of vision, he blames
the mind itself rather than the artistic endeavor for the enervation of the
"genial spirits." Thus in "Dejection: An Ode," he seeks to dispel the "viper
thoughts that coil around the mind." In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"
Coleridge named his demon "Life-in-Death." When the curse of the slaying
the albatross falls upon the mariner, he and the crew are stranded, "As idle as
a painted ship/ Upon a painted ocean." In the game of dice Death wins the
crew, but Life-in-Death, as apotheosis of his guilt and agent of his apostasy,
claims the Ancient Mariner. His blessing of the water-snakes may restore his
ability to pray, but he is still under her awful shadow as he commences, like
the Wandering Jew, his long trial of penance. Although she first pronounced
her chilling spell over the Mariner years before Coleridge suffered the debilit-
ating enthrallment of opium, when she is later invoked, in "The Pains of
Sleep" and "Epitaph for S.T.C.," she is more intimately identified with his
addiction.
The opium-dream of "Kubla Khan" also describes the antagonism of life
and art, torpor and vitality, edenic fertility and lifeless lassitude. The pleasure
dome and the River Alph seem to arise twin-born within the "walls and tow-
ers" of Xanadu. The River Alph, as the dreamer reveals in opening lines of
his vision, is doomed to descend "Through caverns measureless to man, /
Down to a sunless sea." The dreamer, virtually caught up in its current, is
compelled along the same plummeting course. Alph surged through the
"deep romantic cavern," spent its last tumultuous energies as a "mighty foun-
tain" erupting in "half-intermittant burst" from its underground channel be-

fore it finally "sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean." It is only at this juncture
that the paradox of the lifeless entrapment is revealed. There amidst the
"caves of ice" hovers the image of the pleasure dome. Kubla himself seems to
be one with dreamer as he witnesses this "miracle of rare device," for it is
Kubla, standing amidst the tumult as it subsides into helpless passivity, who
"heard from far/ Ancestral voices prophesying war." Not the pleasure dome
in the creative moment of the decree, not the surging River Alph in its tumul-
tuous descent, but the paradox of "That sunny dome!" within "those caves of
ice!" produces the haunting image of artistic entrapment which the dreamer
desires to recreate in song. Yet even if he should succeed, the vision would be
met with fear and dread as the conjuration of one who "on honey dew hath
f e d / And drunk the milk of paradise."
N o writer of the romantic period dealt more extensively with artistic en-
trapment than D e Quincey. As in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," he often de-
scribed processes of powerful energy in opposition to paralyzed immobility;
the historical sweep of eons may seem to pass as he struggles to rise from his
couch, or mere seconds to swell ponderously and extend into infinity. Among
the dream-visions, where the excruciating attenuation of time is a dominant
motif, one may cite that glimpse of infinitude in the bravura piece, adapted
from Jean Paul, which he appends to the essay on Lord Rosse's Telescope.
Weary of the "persecutions of the Infinite," and seeing no end to the journey,
the traveller begs his angelic guide to let him lie down in his grave.
'End there is none?' the Angel solemnly demanded. 'And is this the sorrow that
kills you?' But no voice answered, that he might answer himself. Then the Angel
threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying, 'End there is none
to the Universe of G o d ? L o ! also THERE IS NO BEGINNING.' (VIII: 34)
Time and space are too vast to be endured by mortal perception. " T h e spirit
of man," the dreamer cries out, "aches under this infinity." Associated with
the agony of limitless time and space is the agony of absolute confinement in
the "frozen moment." The one evokes the other as inexorably as the image
of Fanny of the Bath road calls forth crocodiles and basilisks, as ineluctably as
the galloping mail-coach is transfixed upon a sculptured sundial or among
prophetic emblems upon a shield.
With his description of the shield, De Quincey subihits his own entry
alongside those examples of ekphrasis, the shield of Achilles as described by
Homer and the shield of Aeneis as described by Virgil13, to which Lessing de-
13 See Homer, Iliad, Book XVIII: 478-607; and Vergil, Aeneid, Book VIII: 626-728.
voted special attention in his Laokoon. Lessing's argument is that the ekphrasis
in Homer succeeds, because the description does not interrupt the progres-
sion of narrative time with an exposition of ornamental details that are con-
fined in the fixed space of the unmoving, unchanging artifact. Homer liber-
ates the "frozen moment," by describing "the shield not as a thing finished
and complete, but in the stages of its growth." Homer converts spatial
"Nebeneinander" into temporal "Nacheinander," by showing Vulcan "in the
act and process of making it." Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneis fails,
according to Lessing, because, rather than recounting how the prophetic em-
bellishments were wrought, "prophecy as prophecy," he has required the ac-
tion of the poem to stand still while he interprets those emblems upon the
shield (XI: 211-12).
In his note to this passage in the Laokoon, De Quincey does not attempt
to defend Virgil's ekphrasis. He simply calls attention to the inherent temporal
succession of prophecy: when it is delivered, when it is deciphered, when it is
fulfilled. "By 'prophecy as prophecy'," De Quincey observes, "Lessing means
prophecy in the station of the prophet, not as retrospectively contemplated
by the interpreter" (XI: 212). Like the shield in Homer's Iliad, De Quincey's
shield is wrought before our eyes; like the shield in Virgil's Aeneid, it is embla-
zoned with prophetic emblems. But De Quincey's shield is no palpable arti-
fact, it is an image from a dream; not hammered into being by a divine arti-
san, but embalmed into memory from out of waking experience; and while it
is prophetic, its meaning is manifest in its very appearance. De Quincey need
not pause in his narrative to interpret its paradox as self-fulfilling prophecy.
Zeno created his parodoxes by confounding the measurement of time
with the measurement of space: the arrow in flight does not move, the swift
Achilles can never catch the tortoise. De Quincey, too, as may be seen in the
exquisite scrutiny he brings to the passing moment as measured by the water
drops of a Roman clepsydra, enjoyed the logical subtleties of the temporal-
spatial paradox. Although he plays out the elements of seeming infinitesimal
division in "The Vision of Sudden Death," the narrator knows full well that a
Zenoan paradox cannot forestall the collision of the mail-coach with the little
gig-
In an early draft of this section of "The English Mail-Coach," De
Quincey inserted a parenthetical reminder to himself that he should "notice
to the rjeader] the impossibility] of fixing an absolute] point in things so
varying as a succession of time."14 This recognition of the impossibility of the
14 National Library of Scotland: MS 21239, f62: "Suff[er] me, reader to recai [kit] bef[ore]
your memory Suffer me to converge the elements of the case. T^They were these (or These they
task documents what Mitchell called ekphrastic indifference, yet in subse-

quent drafts De Quincey soon succumbed to the antagonism of ekphrastic
hope and fear. In the manuscript for the version first published in Blackwood's
(December 1849), De Quincey altered his strategy: he now sought to over-
come that impossibilty. More remarkable, his own paralysis in the onrushing
succession of time is duplicated, relocated. One young man sits enthralled in
an opium trance, awed by his dangerous predicament as the coachman sleeps
and the coach races wildly down the wrong side of the dark road. Another
young man sits beside a young woman, his head bent close to hers, oblivious
to the immenent disaster. In the earlier manuscript draft, De Quincey wrote
of that other young man, after he had struggled to wheel the gig out of
harm's way: "that which could be done, [he] had 7" been done." In the sub-
sequent version, describing how he forced himself to shout a warning in spite
of his inability to move, he takes that phrase for himself: "Now then [I had]
/•all had been done [aü] that / by me could be done: more on my part was not pos-
sible." And in the gig, after it has been struck a splintering blow by the pass-
ing coach: "The young man sate like a rock. He stirred not at all. But his was
the steadiness of [frozen] agitation frozen into rest by horror." 15
The temporal movement in De Quincey's narrative is carefully counted
out in Zenoan measures. As in that scene in "Murder Considered as One of
were). From a [deep] brealdess [hush] Shush [aflë /from the peace] of this saintly sum[mer]
night, — from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight dawnlight, dreamlight — (notice
to the r[eader] the impossibility] of fixing an absolute] point in things so varying as a suc-
cession of ume.) - from the tenderness of this manly fluttering - whispering - murmuring
love — suddenly as f m the — f[iel] ds and the w[oo] ds sud[den]'> as from the chambers of the
air, - sud[denly] as f m the g"1 opening at sunset - leaped upon her with the flashing of cat-
aracts - Death the crowned phantom, with all the eq[uipage] of his ter[rors], and with the
[a»] tiger roar of his voice. The young man sat like a rock: that which could be done, [he]
had / been done."
15 National Library of Scodand: MS 4789, f l 9 , ff22-23: "But the Lady - ! Oh heavens will
that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and [fav] sank upon her seat, 7·sank
and rose, [tosoed] /-threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in
the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing? - Figure to yourself, reader, the [unpar] ele-
ments of the case: suffer me to [recai] recai before your mind the circumstances of the un-
paralleled situation. From the [peee] Z 1 silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night,
from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight, - from the man-
ly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love, - suddenly as from the woods
and fields, — suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelations, — suddenly as
from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her with the flashing of cataracts, Death
the crownéd* phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.
The moments were numbered. In the twinkling of an eye our flying horses had carried us
to the terminauon of the umbrageous aisle; at right angles we wheeled into our former dir-
the Fine Arts," where Mary pauses on one side of the door and the murderer
waits on the other, time is not halted, but simply attenuated and minutely ar-
ticulated. According to Lessing's crucial distinction in Laocoon·. " T h e language
of painting consists in lines and colour, which exist in space; the language of
poetry in articulate sounds, which exist in time." For this reason, Lessing as-
serts, "art is obliged to abstain from all images of which the different parts
are in the successional connexion of time" (XI: 207). D e Quincey objects that
"Lessing is too palpably infected by the error which he combats." Although
Lessing intends to make a case for poetic experience, poetic becomes "too
frequently in his meaning nothing more than that which is clothed in a form
of sensuous apprehensibility." Even the purely descriptive, whether repres-
ented by painter or poet, becomes picturesque or poetic only "in and through
the passion which presides" (XI: 206). A scene, D e Quincey argues, must be
transferred from its visual or verbal medium to the subjective experience of
the perceiver. Temporal experience is subjective experience.
Lessing's case for the temporality of the verbal arts, it should be noted,
rests upon the "articulated sounds" of spoken language. What sort of tem-
porality, by this criterion, can be claimed for words printed upon the page?
Certainly not that sort of temporality usually referred to as "narrative time."
A narrator can manipulate time forward or backward, fast or slow. Whatever
the illusions of temporality in narrative, they are seldom, even in dialogue,
regulated by the passing time of "articulated sounds." Indeed, a narrator may
find it easier to recount in a paragraph the passing of a month than the pass-
ing of a minute. Yet precisely the slow-motion illusion of witnessing each sec-
ond as a dramatic event is what D e Quincey endeavors to create from the
first instant that he explicitly anticipates the impending collision.
Explicitly, I say, because implicitly the collision had been anticipated all
along. The entire narrative of " T h e Glory of Motions" prepares for the mo-
ment of crisis in " T h e Vision of Sudden Death." It is anticipated in the semi-
allegorical description of the mail-coach as a mighty instrument of the state,
vehicle of national authority and power. Charged as it is not only with distrib-
uting the mails but also with reporting political and military events, "the
heart-shaking new as of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo," the
mail-coach seems to operate "through the conscious presence of a central in-
tellect." Although D e Quincey celebrates "the mail-coach, as the national or-
ection: the turn o f the road carried the scene out o f my eyes in an instant, and swept it into
my dreams for ever.
* It is important to my rhythmus that this word crowned should be read, and therefore
should be printed, as a disyllable — crownéd."
gan for publishing these mighty events," (XIII: 279) he makes it clear that its
power could be recklessly dangerous. It was privileged with virtual diplomatic
immunity, pausing not to assay the damage or make amends when it forced
other traffic off the road or crashed and shattered its way through a crowded
market-place:
in its difficult wheelings amongst the intricacies of early markets, it would upset an
apple-cart, a cart loaded with eggs, &c. Huge was the afflication and dismay, awful
was the smash. I, as far as possible, endeavoured in such a case to represent the
conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; and, when wildernesses of eggs
were lying poached under our horses' hoofs, then would I stretch forth my hands
in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated at that time from the false echoes of
Marengo), "Ah! wherefore have we not time to weep over you?" [...] If even it
seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I felt, in its discharge of its own more
peremptory duties. (XIII: 280-81)
De Quincey confesses, here, his role as apologist for the mails, yet even in ad-
mitting a degree of hypocrisy (the mock sorrow in repeating "the false echoes
of Marengo"), he staunchly upholds the right of the state "to trample on hu-
manity."
Whether or not De Quincey was ever fully capable of apprising the extent
to which he had been exploited in his career as impoverished journalist, sur-
viving on a meagre £10 for each essay he could produce in support of the
Tory politics of Blackwood's, he was most certainly capable of tinging his de-
fense of the establishment with sarcasm or undermining its self-righteous
confidence with alarmist prophecies of doom. Although he seems to argue
that the mail-coach was above the law and that anyone who dared challenge
its authority was guilty of treason, the actual course of his narrative describes
the horror that the unguided juggernaut has left in its wake. Nevertheless, De
Quincey makes no effort to extricate himself from the charges that might be
levied against the mail-coach. It may be a mighty instrument of state, but De
Quincey is its obedient agent. He excuses the havoc and destruction it causes,
and when it brings the news of bloodshed and slaughter at war, he tells the
lies of patriotism and valor to postpone a mother's grief (XIII: 297-300).
Although De Quincey's frank revelation of ideological entrapment seems
to be an inadvertant subtext, it is inseparably implicated in the spell-binding
tale of his opium paralysis as he sits atop the mail-coach, at the side of the
sleeping coachman, watching aghast and helpless as the unguided horses veer
to the wrong side of the road and race through the night-time darkness. He
hears a sound and is struck "by one flash of horrid simultaneous intuition":
what if another coach should be approaching from the opposite direction?
Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the evil which might be gathering
ahead, ah! what a sullen mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which stole
upon the air, as again the far-off sound of a wheel was heard! A whisper it was - a
whisper from, perhaps, four miles o f f — secretly announcing a ruin that, being
foreseen, was not the less inevitable; that, being known, was not therefore healed.
What could be done - who was it that could do it - to check the storm flight of
these maniacal horses? Could I not seize the reins from the grasp of the slumber-
ing coachman? You, reader, think that it would have been in your power to do so.
And I quarrel not with your estimate of yourself. (XIII: 3 1 2 - 1 3 )
What is at stake, here, is not the reader's power but the narrator's paralysis.
This antagonism of action and stasis is precisely the tension of ekphrasis, and
De Quincey aptly conjures it as an ekphrastic image:
Easy was it? See, then, that bronze equistrian statue. The cruel rider has kept the bit
in his horse's mouth for two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you please, and
wash his mouth with water. Easy was it? Unhorse me, then, that imperial rider;
knock me those marble feet from those marble stirrups of Charlemagne. (XIII: 313)
Powerless to interfere with the headlong rush, De Quincey measures out the
units of time and space between the galloping coach and the point of inevit-
able collision.
At his first calculation, the moment of disaster is four miles, or eighteen
minutes, away. Unchecked by the coachman, the horses are racing at thirteen
miles an hour. The distance narrows. The coach rounds a bend and, there, six
hundred yards down "an avenue straight as an arrow," sheltered by arching
trees on either side that "gave to it the character of a cathedral aisle," idly
rolled "a frail reedy gig." By elaborating in swelling sentences the events of
the passing seconds, De Quincey's prose achieves an effect not unlike that of
slow-motion photography. He continues to mark the time. "Between them
and eternity, to all human calculation, there is but a minute and a-half." After
another one hundred words, the wildy racing thoughts of the immobile narra-
tor in search of some heroic escape from his entrapment, happens to find it
in the Iliad. "Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of the tale might seem laugh-
able, that I should need a suggestion from the Iliad to prompt the soul re-
source that remained. Yet so it was." And that resource? The shout of Achil-
les. Life must imitate art. "But could I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus,
aided by Pallas? No: but then I needed not the shout that should alarm all
Asia militant; such a shout would suffice as might carry terror into the hearts
of two thoughtless young people and one gig horse" (XIII: 314).
His shout is unheard, yet he manages to shout again. Another two hun-
dred words have passed before the driver of the gig at last responds. He has
seventy seconds left to save the young lady and himself, or "stand before the
judgement seat of God." For seven of those seventy seconds he stares upon
the onrushing coach, another five he spends "with eyes upraised, like one
who prayed in sorrow." Unable to move, the narrator silendy, captively pleads
for the gig to move, to turn from the road, to wheel away from danger. An-
other four hundred words delineate the desperate actions of the remaining
fifty-five seconds. The horse has reached the crest of the road, but the rear
wheels of the gig have yet to be cleared from the "inexorable flight" of the
mail-coach: "in that moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud." The
young man sits, as does the narrator himself, fro2en like a rock. "But the lady
— ! Oh, heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams." The frantic
gestures of her horrible fright are described before "the turn of the road car-
ried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for
ever" (XIII: 318).
In the "Dream Fugue," De Quincey recapitulates in the imagery of dream
the circumstances of the collision, of the "agitation frozen into rest by hor-
ror." In the first parts of the fugue, the coach and gig have been transformed
into ships at sea. In the final movement, the dreamer is again upon a gallop-
ing coach, bringing tidings "of a grandeur that measured itself against centu-
ries." The dark forest road that had seemed, in his earlier description, like a
Gothic aisle, now opens before him as the interior of a vast cathedral. Keats's
dreamer too, we may recall, travelled through a vast cathedral and struggled
against numbing paralysis as he approached the altar steps (122-33). The
"eternal domed monument" of Keats's The Fall of Hyperion, however, is delib-
erately contrasted with "The like upon the earth [...] / Of grey cathedrals,
buttress'd walls, rent towers" (66—67). Poetry is the religion that is worshipped
in Keats's cathedral. The cathedral of De Quincey's "Dream Fugue" is insist-
endy Christian in its imagery of death and resurrection. Grand sculptured
tombs sweep by on either side as the coach gallops league after league down
the aisle towards "the aerial gallieries of organ and choir." He recognizes the
cathedral graves as that venerable necropolis, the Campo Santo, "a city of
sepulchres, built within the saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that rested
from their feuds on earth."
De Quincey may well have absorbed these images of the Campo Santo
from conversations with Coleridge. He recorded, we know, that occasion
when he and Coleridge were looking through the folio of Piranesi's engrav-
ings of The Antiquities of Rome, and Coleridge described for him the vast archi-
tecture of Piranesi's Carceri, which he could immediately visualize, De
Quincey said, as the architecture of his own opium dreams (III: 438). Twice
during his stay in Italy in 1805—1806, Coleridge had visited the Campo Santo
of Pisa. The fresco depicting The Triumph of Death impressed him with its
stark and powerful images. Describing the fresco in one of his lectures, Co-
leridge emphasized how it visually dramatized
the effect of the appearance of Death on all men — different groups of men — men
of business - men of pleasure - huntsmen - all flying in different directions while
the dreadful Goddess descending with a kind of air-chilling white with her wings
expanded and the extremities of the wings compressed into talons and the only
group in which there appeared anything like welcoming her was a group of beg-
gars. 16
Although the power he attributes to the fresco may well reside in its invitation
to the beholder to stand among the "different groups of men" who witness
the descent of "the dreadful Goddess," Coleridge here avoids the implication
of ekphrastic entrapment and maintains a position safely out of the reach of
the deadly talons. But he has clearly recognized the threat of entrapment, if
we trust De Quincey's "memory of Coleridge's account," in his discription of
Piranesi imprisoned in his own nightmare dungeons:
Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon this,
groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little farther, and
you perceive them reaching an abrupt termination, without any ballustrade, and al-
lowing no step onwards to him who should reach the extremity, except into the
depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, at least you suppose that
his labours must now in some way terminate. But raise your eyes, and behold a
second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time
standing on the very brink of the abyss. Once again elevate your eye, and a still
more aerial flight of stairs is descried; and there, again, is the delirious Piranesi,
busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and the hope-
less Piranesi are both lost in the upper gloom of the hall. (Ill: 439)
Not only the same vast architecture, De Quincey says, but the same "endless
growth and self-reproduction" were experienced in his own opium dreams.
Unlike Coleridge's aloof description of the fresco at Campo Santo, De
Quincey reproduces its imagery with himself caught in the very midst. In-
deed, entrapment is the explicit and characteristic feature of his ekphrasis: like
Piranesi clambering the dungeon walls, De Quincey has entombed himself
upon the sculptured sundial, among the heraldic emblems of the shield, and
in the final confrontation with the statue of the Dying Trumpeter.
In De Quincey's dream visions, the images of the death and resurrection
interact in much the same way as the Pygmalion-moment and Medusa-mo-
16 Coleridge: Philosophical Lectures, pp. 167-68.

ment of ekphrastic representation. The Dying Trumpeter rising up from the

battlefield is not less ghastly than the talon-winged goddess. The entrance
into the necropolis is measured out, just as in the preceding narrative of
"Sudden Death," in passing minutes. Then, as the dream coach thunders
down "the arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle," he beholds "a fe-
male child, that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers." She is to be "the ran-
som for Waterloo." The tidings of great victory must be paid by her death. At
this thought, he declares, he rose in horror, and in that very moment, mirror-
ing his movement and echoing his thought, "rose one that was sculptured on
a bas-relief - a Dying Trumpeter":
Solemnly from the field of battle he rose to his feet; and, unslinging his stony
trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony lips — sounding once, and yet
once again; proclamation that, in thy ears, oh baby! spoke from the battlements of
death. Immediately deep shadows fell between us, and aboriginal silence. The
choir had ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, the dreadful ratde o f our har-
ness, the groaning of our wheels, alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas-
relief had been unlocked unto life. By horror we, that were so full of life, we men
and our horses, with their fiery fore-legs rising in mid air to their everlasting gal-
lop, were frozen to a bas-relief. (XIII: 324—25)
This is the moment of crisis, not an evanescent but an enduring crisis. The
Pygmalion-moment of the Dying Trumpeter is at once the Medusa-moment
of the dreamer. The bearer of the tidings of empire, the rider of mail-coaches
become a writer of Tory journalism, is held petrified in bondage.
For the readers of Blackwood's De Quincey has provided a "happy end-
ing." With one more blast on his horn the Dying Trumpeter calls forth the
Last Judgment. The dead arise "from the burials of centuries" and within that
mighty cathedral they join in singing to God their jubilation. It is an ending
much like the ending which Goethe gave to Faust, Part Two. Goethe, like
many other poets of that age of rapid and radical change, had thematized the
dangerous seduction of stasis and the status quo. The condition of Faust's
damnation was to say to the moment, "Verweile doch! du bist so schön!"
("Stay! thou art so beautiful!", line 1700). To halt the dynamic process of flux
and change is to surrender to the damnation of entrapment. When Faust ut-
ters the fatal words, "Verweile doch! du bist so schön!", he addresses not sta-
sis but the reclamation he has begun in returning the salt-swamped fladands
to fertility. A jubilant chorus accompanies the salvatation pronounced at the
conclusion: "Gerettet ist das edle Glied" ("Saved is the noble part," line
11934).17
17 Goethe: Faust I and Faust II - Werke vol. 3, pp. 57, 359.

De Quincey's concluding jubilation, however, does not grant uncondi-

tional salvation. The concluding words are that God's angel "might snatch
thee back from ruin, and might emblazon in thy deliverance the endless resur-
rections of His love!" (XIII: 327). In the meantime, the dreamer is not re-
leased from the recurrent nightmares of "dreadful revelations." In De
Quincey's appropriation of the two modes of time defined in the Laokoon,
when the mail-coach galloped past the wreckage of collision, it "carried the
scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams for ever"
(XIII: 318). The evanescent moment has been captured in the enduring time
of memory, and there in dreams the Medusa-moment prevails.
ALAIN MONTANDON
Université Blaise Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand)
Ecritures de l'image chez Théophile Gautier
Abstract: Théophile Gautier occupies an important and very special place in nine-
teenth-century art criticism. The modernity of his approach, which is still not suf-
ficiently recognized and appreciated in critical circles, deserves special attention
from the perspective of ekphrasis and iconotexts. In fact, the "specialist" of what
could be termed "transposition d'art" (translation into another medium) employs a
particular narrative discourse in his works, a discourse that unmasks what Lyotard
terms the dispositif libidinal of art works. This article pays particular attention, on
the one hand, to Gautier's description of Rubens' La Toison d'or and the "tapis-
serie" in Mile de Maupin, and of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa in Spinte, and, on
the other hand, to discussions of statues, music, and poetry.
Théophile Gautier occupe une place particulière et originale dans le concert

de la critique d'art du XIXe siècle. Son approche mérite une attention toute
spéciale dans la perspective de l'ekphrasis et de l'iconotexte.1 Le "spécialiste"
de la transposition d'art2 a en effet dans ses œuvres mis en place un discours
de type narratif qui au fur et à mesure de son évolution démasque ce que
Lyotard appelle le dispositif libidinal de l'œuvre d'art.3 De la correspondance à
la transposition, de la transposition au jeu de la surface et de la profondeur, le
créateur évolue d'une conception allant de l'œuvre à son faire, de la création à
l'acte créateur. Dans une de ses dernières œuvres, comme Spinte, une nouvelle
perspective est ainsi mise en place qui en vient à nier le pouvoir du langage
1 Voir Montandon: Iconotextes-, Signe, texte, image, et "Pour une théorie du verbal et du plasti-
que dans les iconotextes." Le verbal et ses rapports avec le non verbal dans la culture contemporai-
ne, pp. 31-41.
2 Voir Montandon: "Musique et architecture: Le Palais Garnier." Capdevielle et Knabe, eds.:
Les Ecrivains Français et l'Opéra, pp. 111-24; et "Gautier et Watteau". Antoine Watteau, pp.
301-08.
3 Voir Montandon: "La séduction de l'œuvre d'art chez Théophile Gautier." L'Art et l'artiste,
pp. 349-68.
face à l'indescriptible,4 et qui instaure du même coup un nouveau régime de

l'image et de son au-delà.
Dans l'horizon des préoccupations iconotextuelles, Gautier occupe une
place insoupçonnée, complexe et subtile. C'est cette conception de l'image
mentale, de ses tours et détours dans une inscription sans cesse dépassée (au
sens de l'Aufhebung), qui caractérise la philosophie esthétique et iconotex-
tuelle du maître "impeccable."
De la correspondance à la transposition, de la transposition au jeu de la
surface et de la profondeur, le poète évolue d'une conception allant de
l'œuvre à son faire, de la création à l'acte créateur. Le rêve secret de l'artiste
serait pour Gautier de dépasser les conditions matérielles de la réalisation, les
contraintes de divers ordres pour une expression s'épanouissant dans la plus
totale liberté. Lui-même hésitant entre la plume et le pinceau5 est fasciné par
un art total qui unirait l'expression de l'un au signifiant de l'autre. Dans cette
tension vers un objet iconotextuel,6 la quête d'un objet originel, ignorant la
séparation, l'hétérogène, l'autonomie des codes propres à un état de civilisa-
tion avancé et honni, amène Gautier à se déplacer dans le temps et dans
l'espace.
Le rêve d'un art mettant en jeu les correspondances est longtemps caressé
comme un rêve impossible. Gautier y revient régulièrement, dans son expé-
rience du hachich, dans l'évocation d'un rêve ou dans la contemplation d'un
tableau. Ainsi dans l'Orient, il se livre à la description de synesthésies euphori-
ques:
Mon ouïe s'était prodigieusement développée; j'entendais le bruit des couleurs.
Des sons verts, rouges, bleus, jaunes, m'arrivaient par ondes parfaitement distinc-
tes. Un verre renversé, un craquement de fauteuil, un mot prononcé bas, vibraient
et retentissaient en moi comme des roulements de tonnerre; ma propre voix me
semblait si forte que je n'osais parler, de peur de renverser les murailles ou de me
faire éclater comme une bombe; plus de cinq cents pendules me chantaient l'heure
de leurs voix flûtées, cuivrées, argentines. Chaque objet effleuré rendait une note
d'harmonica ou de harpe éolienne. Je nageais dans un océan de sonorité où flot-
taient comme des îlots de lumière quelques motifs de la Lucia ou du Barbier. Ja-
mais béatitude pareille ne m'inonda de ses effluves: j'étais si fondu dans le vague,
si absent de moi-même, si débarrassé du moi, cet odieux témoin qui vous accom-
4 Voir par exemple Montandon: "Les neiges éblouies de Théophile Gautier."

5 "L'artifice de l'écrivain a cette infériorité sur celui de peintre qu'il ne peut montrer les ob-
jets que successivement" {Le Capitaine Fracasse, p. 54)
6 La notion importante d'iconotexte a fait l'objet d'une série d'études mettant au point les di-
vers tensions et fusions des relations texte/image dans le volume Iconotextes. Voir Ottmar
Ette dans le présent volume.
Montandon: Ecritures de l'image chez Théophile Gautier 107
pagnait partout, que j'ai compris pour la première fois quelle pouvait être l'exi-
stence des esprits élémentaires, des anges et des âmes séparées du corps. 7
Plus tard, il reviendra encore à cette expérience, dans Caprices et Zigzags? où il

évoque avec nostalgie le jour où ayant pris du hachich "je fis les rêves les plus
bizarres: j'entendis des fleurs qui chantaient, je vis des phrases de musique
bleues, vertes et rouges, qui sentaient la vanille [...]." Cette expérience sert de
prélude à une apparition érotique: le plafond s'entr'ouvre et laisse passer un
talon de femme! L'art total comme Gesamtkunstwerk est pour lui une expé-
rience amoureuse réussie. Aussi le Beau, comme objet narcissique, est-il né-
cessairement l'expérience d'une plénitude:
Quand je vois quelque chose de beau, je voudrais le toucher de tout moi-même,

partout et en même temps. Je voudrais le chanter et le peindre, le sculpter et l'écri-
re, en être aimé comme je l'aime; je voudrais ce qui ne se peut pas et ce qui ne se
pourra jamais. 9
Je voudrais m'arrêter d'abord sur deux formes d'écriture qui fascinent Gautier
par leur pouvoir iconotextuel, le pouvoir de réunir deux codes autonomes et
conflictuels en une synthèse qui laisse espérer l'accession à la communion
esthétique espérée: l'hiéroglyphe et l'arabesque.
Le dessin/écriture de l'hiéroglyphe est pour Gautier une forme de l'exu-
bérance orientale. L'ancienne Egypte croûle sous l'empire des signes dans une
redondance qui, ainsi que l'a justement remarqué Paolo Tortonese,10 aboutit à
un "collapsus des significations." Cette "hyperactivité des signifiants" est
créatrice d'une opacité fantastique, inquiétante, douloureuse, à la limite même
du cauchemar. Ces hiéroglyphes qui offrent, ainsi qu'il l'écrit dans le Roman de
la momie, "à la sagacité le mystère sacré de leur énigme" 11 sont une écriture de
l'intemporalité, parce que, peinture et écriture simultanées, ils transcendent le
temps et la succession.12 Les hiéroglyphes sont l'image d'un sacré qui, par la
saturation de l'écriture qui s'étale et envahit toutes les surfaces et ayant pour
7 Gautier: "Le hachich." Gautier: L'Orient, vol. 2, p. 52.

8 Caprices et Zigzags, p. 167.
9 Gautier: Mlle de Maupin, p. 192.
10 Tortonese: "La vie," p. 61. Voir également du même auteur "Les hiéroglyphes ou l'écriture
de pierre," pp. 273-281.
11 Le Roman de la momie.
12 On a ainsi le premier vecteur d'un fantastique de la retrospection suscitée par la vision ar-
chitecturale: "Les parois des murs, les fûts des colonnes, l'encorbellement de la corniche
sont couverts de ces longues processions hiéroglyphiques dont la rêverie cherche le sens
mystérieux" {Le Roman de la momie, p. 34).
corollaire l'invisibilité et l'indécidabilité13 échappe à toute saisie. Ils sont en-

fermés dans la tombe et leur art ressemble à "un homme bâillonné tâchant de
faire comprendre son secret." 14 Image même du secret dérobé que ces "et
partout, et toujours, d'interminables hiéroglyphes sculptés et peints racontant
en langage inintelligible des choses que l'on ne sait plus et qui appartiennent
sans doute à des créations disparues." L'écriture figurée est inscription lapidai-
re d'un nevermore mélancolique, celui de la perte irrémédiable d'un sens à ja-
mais disparu.15
Un autre type de forme sémiologique est l'arabesque, dans laquelle Gautier
voit un hiéroglyphe en mouvement. Si l'hiéroglyphe est une écriture de la
masculinité, de la puissance et de l'effroi, l'arabesque est une écriture de la fémi-
nité et de la séduction. Elle nous conduit du caprice au symbolique, car si l'ara-
besque "classique" est une combinaison fantastique, irréelle de logiques pictu-
rales et de modes de représentations différents, l'arabesque romantique est une
véritable émancipation, propre à la symbolique plastique et à l'art religieux. Elle
est le signe même du poétique. En Allemagne un Jean Paul y voit à l'œuvre une
métamorphose spirituelle dont l'image des fleurs donne l'exemple: "wie in
Arabesken Genien aus Blumen keimen." Dans le Titan les fleurs sont décrites
comme des arabesques au trône de Dieu. 16 Renouant avec l'esthétique des
contes de fées et de leurs arabesques rococo, Hoffmann, que Gautier connaît
bien, donne également à l'arabesque un sens sacré, celui de l'infini tout en re-
prenant le jeu de l'illusion/désillusion, de la surface et de la profondeur, des
séductions de la raison par le merveilleux, etc. L'arabesque romantique est un
sésame du merveilleux, la vire-volte qui trace le passage au fantastique et à la
merveille. E t cela est rendu possible par l'autotélisme du geste pictural, à l'auto-
référentialité de cette ligne devenue à elle-même sa propre finalité. Cette auto-
nomie esthétique qui figure la liberté et l'art pour l'art est également propre à
l'écriture littéraire qui appelle souvent la digression du nom d'arabesque. 17 Le
jeu de la ligne pour elle-même, 18 met en avant la forme comme origine et cette
abstraction formelle 19 est signe de spirituel (chez Baudelaire, au sens de non-
13 "Que sert-il de sculpter dans l'ombre d'interminables panneaux d'hiéroglyphes, que nul œil
ne verra, et dont on se réserve la clef?" (article sur Feydeau, pp. 135-136)
14 Le Roman de la momie, p. 47.
15 " O n distingue vaguement sur les chapiteaux des signes mystérieux, des hiéroglyphes byzan-
tins dont le sens est perdu." (Constantinople, p. 309).
16 Jean Paul: Hesperus - Werke vol. 1, p. 680; Titan - Werke vol. 3, p. 284 - les sources sui-
vantes de la littérature allemande d'après Polheim: Die Arabeske.
17 Ainsi Immermann qui appelle son Münchhausen une "Histoire en arabesques."
18 Voir Le Thyrse de Baudelaire: Œuvres complètes, p. 284.
19 L'arabesque est indice d'artificialité chez un Huysmans et dans l'art nouveau.
naturel), d'une imagination sans limite qui s'exprime par la ligne, le mouvement,
indépendamment de toute chose. Pour Friedrich Schlegel l'esprit de l'arabesque
est le plus élevé ("Der arabeske Witz ist der höchste").20
Pour Gautier l'arabesque est un geste désignant l'indéfini et l'inexpri-
mable 21 et c'est dans la simplicité archaïque des peuples barbares de l'Orient
en opposition à la prétendue civilisation moderne européenne que cet art or-
nemental trouve sa primitive et fondamentale expression. 22 "Les barbares
seuls ont le secret de ces orfèvreries merveilleuses, et le sens de l'ornement
semble se perdre, on ne sait pourquoi, à mesure que la civilisation se perfec-
tionne." Gautier ajoute: "Le monde moderne n'a plus la notion juste de la
forme." 23 C'est en Orient qu'il découvre cet art de l'arabesque, qui souvent
fusionne harmonieusement image et écriture.24 Les complications infinies de
l'arabesque, avec ses " bizarres dessins mathématiques"25 offrent au regard
quelque chose de si "original", de si "singulier", de si "attachant", de si "ca-
ractéristique" que "quiconque [...] se déclare désenchanté, celui-là n'est ni un
poète ni un peintre."26 Cet Orient de rêve et d'ivresse, d'arabesques et "des
ramages sans cesse renouvelés" comme des "jeux du kaléidoscope" 27 fait par-
20 Schlegel: Literary Notebooks, p. 56, No. 407.

21 Elle renvoie ce faisant à la constellation sémantique Fantaisie, Caprice, Baroque: "en dehors
des compositions que l'on peut appeler classiques et qui ne traitent en quelque sorte que
des généralités proverbiales, il existe un genre auquel conviendrait assez le nom d'arabesque,
où, sans grand souci de la pureté des lignes, le crayon s'égaye en mille fantaisies baroques."
(Grotesques vol. 2, p. 319).
22 "L'homme le plus brut sent d'une manière instinctive que l'ornement trace une ligne in-
franchissable de démarcation entre lui et l'animal; et, quand il ne peut pas broder ses habits,
il brode sa peau: ce n'est pas la fille du potier Dibutade, traçant sur un mur l'ombre de son
amant, mais le sauvage incrustant une arabesque dans son cuir fauve avec une arête de pois-
son, qui a inventé le dessin." (Constantinople, p. 107).
23 Ibid., p. 285.
24 "Des chiffres enlacés et des suras du Koran tracées avec cette certitude de main que
possèdent à un si haut degré les calligraphes turcs. Ces caractères contournés et fleuris
jouent le rôle le plus heureux dans l'ornementation orientale; ce sont des arabesques autant
que des lettres." (Constantinople, p. 134). "Les versets du Koran circulent aussi autour des
coupoles et des dômes, le long des corniches; motif d'ornementation imité de l'Alhambra,
et auquel se prête admirablement l'écriture arabe avec ses caractères qui ressemblent à des
dessins de chales de Cachemire." (Constantinople, p. 277). "Sur les murs de la quatrième cou-
rent des sentences tracées de la main de Mahmoud, qui était un habile calligraphe, et, com-
me tous les Orientaux, tirait vanité de ce talent, vanité concevable, car cette écriture, com-
pliquée par ses courbes, ses ligatures et ses enlacements, se rapproche beaucoup du dessin."
(Constantinople, p. 282).
25 Voyage en Algérie, p. 140.
26 Ibid.
27 L'Orient, Vol. 2, p. 50.
tie du rêve du dandy-artiste ayant rompu les amarres avec la trivialité d'un
monde aveugle aux charmes des Mille et une nuits et d'un merveilleux cinéti-
que: l'arabesque est nervosité, apparence du sacré, elle inscrit aussi l'art com-
me sublimation, c o m m e réinstauration du pouvoir de l'imaginaire, de l'écritu-
re c o m m e forme serpentine du libre plaisir du jeu, ce qui semble être une ob-
session constante des récits fantastiques de Gautier. Les arabesques de la
fumée du tabac oriental 28 servent de modèle à cette rêverie, interminable,
c o m m e l'arabesque. C'est que ce modèle formel du Beau est étroitement lié à
l'intense érotisation dont l'arabesque fait l'objet. Déjà H o f f m a n n dans son
Vase d'or montrait le poète Anselme recourir à une écriture qui renonçait à la
copie mécanique pour un art de l'hiéroglyphe et de l'arabesque, présenté com-
me écriture, éminemment subjective et libidinale. L a femme aimée elle-même,
serpent vert, était identifiée à un modèle d'écriture, à la ligne serpentine, la
ligne de la beauté dont Hogarth signale dans son Analysis of Beauty (1753)
l'origine aquatique et qui allie un maximum de grâce et de légèreté au mouve-
ment en forme de vague dont on sait qu'elle donne naissance à Venus. 29 Gau-
tier a pu trouver chez son maître H o f f m a n n l'image de l'arabesque généra-
lisée, visuelle, sonore, dans les vagues de l'Elbe, dans le flottement d'un habit
de femme, dans le vacillement des flammes du punch, dans les jeux mimiques
de Lindhorst, sur le Vase d'or, et dans l'écriture elle-même; elles sont les
hiéroglyphes de ce langage mystérieux, figura serpentina. L'arabesque et la
ligne serpentine, étroitement confondus, hiéroglyphes de l'hiéroglyphe, para-
digmes d'une écriture réhabilitée c o m m e vision, pantomime, picturalité, cor-
poralità, gestualità, 30 signifient la volupté dont l'Orient est synonyme. Q u a n d
28 "Rien n'est plus favorable aux poétiques rêveries que [...] cette fumée odorante rafraîchie
par l'eau qu'elle traverse, et qui vous arrive après avoir circulé dans des tuyaux de maroquin
rouge ou vert dont on s'entoure le bras, comme un psyllo du Caire jouant avec des ser-
pents. C'est le sybaritisme du fumage, de la fumerie ou de la fumade - le mot manque [...]
poussé à son plus haut degré de perfection; l'art ne reste pas étranger à cette délicate jouis-
sance; il y a ces narghilehs d'or, d'argent et d'acier ciselés, damasquinés, niellés, guillochés
d'une façon merveilleuse et d'un galbe aussi élégant que celui des plus purs vases antiques;
les grenats, les turquoises, les coraux et d'autres pierres plus précieuses en étoilent souvent
les capricieuses arabesques; vous fumez dans un chef d'œuvre un tabac métamorphosé en
parfum [...]." (Constantinople, p. 112).
29 Hoffmann: " D e r goldene Topf." Sämtliche Werke vol. 2 , 1 , pp. 255-56, and notes pp. 784-85.
30 II faudrait entrer en détail dans le débat sur l'hiéroglyphe auquel Warburton et Herder se
sont livrés. - Chez Novalis on lit: " D a s wird die goldne Zeit seyn, wenn alle Worte - Figu-
renworte — Mythen — und alle Figuren — Sprachfiguren — Hieroglyfen seyn werden — wenn
man Figuren sprechen und schreiben - und Worte vollkommen plastisiren, und Musicieren
lernt. Beyde Künste gehören zusammen, sind unzertrennlich verbunden und werden zu-
gleich vollendet werden." Novalis: Schriften vol. 3, p. 125-26, chez Friedrich Schlegel on lit
Montandon: Ecritures de l'image che2 Théophile Gautier 111
Gautier parle de l'ondulation des collines, le poète constate que "la ligne ser-
pentine qui se déploie sur le torse d'une belle femme couchée, n'a pas une
grâce plus voluptueuse et plus molle."31 L'image du serpent, de la femme ser-
pent s'impose: "Si la beauté vient de la ligne courbe, comme le prétend Ho-
garth, rien ne serait plus gracieux que le reptile, dont la démarche est une sui-
te d'ondulations et de sinuosités harmonieuses."32
Le paradigme artistique a à voir avec Eros: il possède la puissance de "faire
éprouver un plaisir sans nom." Nous allons retrouver dans la description du
tableau ces signes du vertige esthétique qui transcende et désavoue toute ten-
tative descriptive, non pas que Gautier ne consacre de longues analyses de-
scriptives aux tableaux, mais il le fait en soulignant que ce qui en fait le prix, le
sublime, est étranger au langage dont la généralité et les stéréotypes ne peu-
vent servir que d'embrayeur à la rêverie. Mon analyse s'appuiera essentielle-
ment sur la description du tableau de Rubens dans La Toison d'or ainsi que sur
la tapisserie de Mlle de Maupin, et la Joconde de Léonard de Vinci dans Spirite.
Décrire l'œuvre d'art fait problème en ce sens que d'un côté Gautier sou-
tient la théorie d'un art pour l'art, dans laquelle la création de l'artiste obéit à
un modèle qu'il porte au-dedans de lui-même et qui montre bien que le
microcosme subjectif du créateur est éloigné d'une imitation de la nature. L'ar-
tiste "réalise ses rêves" au moyen de matériaux proposés par la nature: "Si le
que "hiéroglyphique absolu suit au fantastique absolu" ("absolut Hieroglyphisches [sich] an

absolut Fantastisches" anschließe) — d'après Polheim: Die Arabeske, p. 33.
Le mouvement onomatopéique du son et du mouvement (rascheln, rieseln, gleiten, wölben,
schütteln, flattern, flüstern, verwehet,i) est mis en scène dans le Vase d'Or ("Erste Viglie") où "le
chaos faisant sens", justement dans cet étourdissement des sens semblable à cet "état de
délire qui précède le sommeil" et où est abolie la frontière somatique-symbolique.
L'explication d'un tel phénomène semble impossible et nous entrons dans le merveilleux,
avec cette fusion son/lumière/ audition/vision, avec en plus une citation de la Flûte enchantée
de Mozart. Anselme est même soumis à un effet galvanique (voir l'influence de l'électro-
magnétisme de Ritter), celui du choc amoureux, coup de foudre dont personne n'ignore l'ori-
gine électrique. La trinité parfum-lumière-son produit un ébranlement dont Anselme ne se
remettra pas - voir H o f f m a n n : " D e r goldene Topf." Sämtliche Werke vol. 2, 1, pp. 233-34.
31 Constantinople, p. 337.
32 Voyage en Egypte, p. 69. Et c'est dans la danse orientale, que Gautier apprécie pleinement,
qu'il découvre l'écriture en arabesque d'un corps en extase ou en transe: "La danse mores-
que consiste en ondulations perpétuelles du corps, en torsions des reins, en balancements
des hanches, en mouvements de bras agitant des mouchoirs; une jeune danseuse se
démenant ainsi à l'air d'une couleuvre debout sur sa queue: cette rotation en spirale serait
impossible au plus souple sujet de l'Opéra; pendant ce temps, la physionomie pâmée, les
yeux noyés ou flamboyants, la narine frémissante, la bouche entrouverte, le sein oppressé, le
col ployé comme une gorge de colombe étouffée d'amour, représentent à s'y tromper le
mystérieux drame de volupté dont toute danse est le symbole." ( Voyage en Algérie, p. 70).
type de la beauté existe dans son esprit à l'état d'idéal, il prend à la nature les
signes dont il a besoin pour les exprimer." 33 Mais l'art ne donne pas la réalité,
il met au contraire en relief l'écart entre l'apparence du réel et le rêve de l'idéal.
" L a femme, la déesse se dégage lentement du bloc. Tout le monde l'admire,
bien qu'elle ait les yeux blancs, des cheveux incolores et s'éloigne de la réalité
de toute la distance de l'idéal au vrai." 34 C'est cet écart entre réalité et rêve de
l'idéal qui confère à l'œuvre son statut d'œuvre d'art. L'œuvre d'art a dans son
ensemble la valeur d'un fantasme sanctifié par la sublimation, elle est la réali-
sation hallucinatoire d'un désir. C'est d'ailleurs en cela qu'elle est ce "bon ob-
jet introjectable", stable et permanent, "qui ne peut être détruit," pour repren-
dre la définition que donne G. Mendel de toute œuvre esthétique.35 Nul plus
que Gautier n'a senti l'œuvre d'art comme allusion à la plénitude artistique
dans son caractère d'inaltérabilité et d'éternité de rêve de pierre.
Mais Gautier dévoile en même temps que l'œuvre ne peut être jugée qu'en
termes de séduction et que par delà la fascination de la belle forme, un char-
me opère qui n'a rien à voir avec le Beau ou le Laid. Dans sa critique et la
description des œuvres, Gautier parle avant tout en termes de séduction, que
ce soit à propos de la Madeleine de Rubens, des vierges de Léonard de Vinci,
de Raphaël, etc.
La tapisserie de haute lisse de Flandres que Mlle de Maupin découvre en
entrant au château du désir est un modèle exemplaire de ce type de séduction
exercée par l'œuvre. Figure emblématique, mettant également en abyme le ro-
man de Gautier, elle est placée au seuil des aventures amoureuses qui vont se
dérouler dans la dernière partie de l'ouvrage. Mlle de Maupin, faut-il le rappe-
ler, est une jeune personne partie à la quête d'une initiation amoureuse: tout
comme d'Albert, elle est à la recherche de l'Amour idéal, de l'accomplisse-
ment absolu du désir, et tout comme chez lui, l'approche de l'amour se fait
par la médiation de l'œuvre artistique. Madeleine est séduite par ce paradigme
de la fiction qu'est la tapisserie.
La description de celle-ci est l'occasion pour l'auteur de préciser ce que se-
rait pour lui une œuvre d'art idéale, de la même manière qu'il s'attache à décri-
re ce que serait un théâtre romantique de l'irréalité. La tapisserie est un sup-
port privilégiée parce qu'elle est faite d'une matière souple, mobile, ondoyante
et ainsi propice à favoriser l'animation de l'œuvre et l'apparition du fantôme
des anciens jours. La tapisserie apparaît également dans la fantaisie rococo
33 Gautier: " D u Beau dans l'Art," p. 891.

34 Ibid., p. 897.
35 Mendel: " D u fantasme au tableau: La spécificité artistique." Mendel: Entretiens sur l'art et la
psychanalyse, p. 318.
qu'est Omphale, où il suffit d'un "furieux coup de vent" pour qu'elle ondule et
qu'Omphale se détache du mur et saute sur le parquet. Elle confirme alors ce
que nous savons, à savoir qu'elle est charmante et séduisante, non parce qu'el-
le est Omphale, mais parce qu'elle est la marquise de T. L'œuvre d'art tient sa
séduction du fait qu'elle renvoie à un modèle réel, qui a existé, et de l'illusion
créée de sa propre réalité. Si le héros a fui le réel par déception, l'œuvre d'art
est pour lui l'occasion de la création d'une autre réalité, plus intense et plus
réelle, dont il attend des preuves d'existence les plus tangibles, tout en main-
tenant l'écart. Cette attitude contradictoire est celle d'un Tiburce dans La Toi-
son d'or. L'image y appelle le réel, tout en maintenant une distance respectueu-
se, nous y reviendrons.
Dans le premier moment de la vision de la tapisserie, l'investissement du
regard dans l'œuvre répond à la quête de cette réalité. Mlle de Maupin, après
avoir laissé errer son regard fasciné par les différentes images et représenta-
tions de la tapisserie, se met à évoquer les fantasmes de son enfance et, ren-
versant la situation, n'hésite pas à faire de la tapisserie le témoin mystérieux
d'une scène primitive. La tapisserie devient alors miroir, elle fascine non par la
plénitude de ses représentations, mais par le creux, le manque, le flou de ses
images que l'imagination doit combler. Elle fascine parce qu'elle est le me-
dium qui renvoie du représentant au représenté. Mais cette médiation exerce
un attrait d'autant plus grand que le signe ne donne pas, mais dérobe, qu'il
n'est pas présence, mais absence, qu'il signifie non pas l'être, mais une réalité
disparue. Tout comme le théâtre romantique rêvé par Gautier, l'œuvre tissée
ici a l'irréalité d'un rêve. C'est dire qu'elle en possède la seconde vie: la quête
de Gautier dans l'œuvre d'art est la quête d'un supplément d'existence.36
Le charme de la tapisserie de Mlle de Maupin réside justement dans son
mystère et l'étrange dématérialisation dont elle est l'objet. L'altération ap-
portée par le temps et la dégradation de l'œuvre mettent en évidence la fragi-
lité matérielle et le caractère éphémère de l'existence matérielle de l'œuvre.
36 Dans La Toison d'or nous voyons Tiburce découvrir Rubens dont le réalisme, comme celui
de la peinture flamande, est un moyen d'accéder à la plénitude du monde, ainsi que le mon-
tre sa critique de la Kermesse. Plus encore que le réalisme proprement dit, l'hyperrréalisme et
la surréalité, l'opulence, la profusion, la richesse exubérante des formes, des couleurs et des
thèmes font naître une rêverie de puissance et de jouissance illimitées. La description du Pa-
lais des Doges et de certains Véronèse en donne un exemple évident. Mais la plénitude ne
séduit qu'un moment, car elle est trop unidimensionnelle, elle n'a pas de profondeur et res-
te trop limitée dans la représentation immédiate. Il faut au regard de Gauder un investisse-
ment imaginaire plus profond que seule l'œuvre qui se dérobe, qui esquisse sans donner,
semble capable d'offrir, puisque l'œuvre donne dans son mystère à la fois la présence et le
sentiment de l'absence.
Cette dégradation cependant, en déformant le support matériel, a l'heureux

effet de faire apparaître l'œuvre elle-même, détachée de son support. Telle est
la magie de la Cène de Léonard de Vinci:
La première impression que fait cette fresque merveilleuse tient du rêve: toute tra-
ce d'art a disparu; elle semble flotter à la surface du mur, qui l'absorbe comme une
vapeur légère. C'est l'ombre d'une peinture, le spectre d'un chef d'œuvre qui re-
vient. L'effet est peut-être plus solennel et plus religieux que si le tableau même
était vivant: le corps a disparu, mais l'âme survit tout entière. 37
Le signe de la matérialité de l'œuvre est un signe inquiétant: pour la sculpture

Gautier relève la froideur des statues, témoin de l'absence de vie du simulacre
mortifère, et pour la peinture, la rugosité même de la pâte. Lorsque Tiburce
porte une main sur l'épaule de la Madeleine de Rubens de la cathédrale d'An-
vers, il est très surpris "au lieu du moelleux satiné d'une épaule de femme, de
ne trouver qu'une surface âpre et rude comme une lime, gaufrée et martelée
en tous sens par l'impétuosité de brosse du fougueux peintre."
L'altération apportée par le temps est le signe d'une dématérialisation de
l'œuvre. La transformation fantastique permet alors à l'idée d'apparaître plus
nettement. Il en est ainsi de tous les vieux portraits qu'une vie fantastique ani-
me. Un exemple de cette transformation est le commentaire fait par Gautier
des Pèlerins d'Emmaüs de Véronèse. Après avoir loué la couleur "tendre, ar-
gentée et d'une séduction irrésistible" du premier plan, le critique constate:
Par un effet de réaction chimique des plus singuliers, le ciel, fait avec un bleu qui
fut un instant à la mode alors, et dont le temps a prouvé le peu de consistance, est
devenu complètement brun. Ce ciel apocalyptique et funèbre, qu'on aperçoit à tra-
vers les colonnes, produit l'effet le plus bizarre et contraste d'une manière étrange
avec la gaieté splendide des premiers plans, aussi frais que s'ils venaient d'être
peints. 38
La transformation des goudrons est souvent grave. Il y a cependant dans cer-

tains tableaux un moment privilégié qui est à la fois disparition de la matière
et persistance de l'idée, son véritable fantôme, en quelque sorte. Une telle
transformation fantastique est à la fois dématérialisation et remontée dans le
temps. La dégradation est aussi signe du passé et invitation à cette nostalgie
37 Dans Spirite, Gautier finit par rejeter l'art lui-même, parce qu'il reste trop matérialiste. Cette
allégorie de l'immatériel condamne le Parthénon, prisonnier de la matière: l'art n'est plus au
regard de l'idée, qu'un balbutiement gauche, entâché de pesanteur matérielle, de même que
les plus belles pierres, diamants, émeraudes, saphirs, topazes, améthystes, ne sont que pier-
reries, vils cailloux, cristaux opaques.
38 Tableaux à la plume, p. 13.
de l'obélisque qui est résurrection du fantôme des anciens jours. Cette poéti-
que de la ruine bien connue chez Gautier est associée au travail de l'imagina-
tion invitée à restaurer l'image disparue, à donner vie, couleur, densité aux
formes effacées par le temps.
Errer dans une ruine, c'est tout l'intérêt des romans d'Anne Radcliffe. Aussi, nous al-
lions le long des couloirs encombrés de gravats, nous regardions avidemment les ap-
partements sans portes, les chambres aux boiseries arrachées ou réduites en charbon,
les salles de conseil, où sur les murailles on reconnaissait encore de vagues traces de
peinture. A travers ce désordre on cherche à remettre chaque chose en place, on es-
saye de restituer la configuration des lieux et d'y ramener le fantôme des anciens
jours. L'imagination restaure déjà ce qui vient d'être abattu et se plaît à ce travail. 39
Décrire un tableau, c'est pour Gautier retrouver le scenario qui a présidé à sa

création, le secret de son mécanisme et de sa vie, ce mystère qui replonge le
spectateur au plus profond de lui-même, dans une archéologie intime. L'évo-
cation du passé et plus précisément du monde de l'enfance, avec ses fantas-
mes, ses terreurs, ses charmes et ses sentiments intenses est ce qui fait la ma-
gie de la peinture en général (exception faite de celle du X I X e siècle). Gautier
est fasciné par les vieux tableaux qui ont la fraîcheur du présent. Le charme
irrésistible provient de cette présence que l'on n'attendait pas d'une œuvre an-
cienne. Le tableau est un palimpseste mettant en œuvre l'imagination restau-
ratrice. La séduction passe par cette forme de réminiscence de sentiments
mystérieux oubliés venant à revivre dans l'œuvre. La tapisserie est pour Made-
leine de Maupin une irruption de sentiments enfantins très ambivalents: la
simple vue de ce monde imaginaire amenant des idées de culpabilité, "de
meurtres, de trahisons, d'adultères infâmes et de monstruosités."
L'œuvre de Léonard de Vinci surtout a une telle intensité dans la re-
présentation ou dans la suggestion que l'idée même du Beau devient accessoi-
re. "Ses ouvrages vous fascinent par une sorte de pouvoir magique; ils vivent
d'une vie profonde et mystérieuse, presque alarmante, quoique depuis long-
temps la carbonisation des couleurs leur ait ôté toute possibilité d'illusion." 40
Le passage du temps contribue à rehausser le mystère de l'œuvre. "Quant au
coloris, si en s'enfumant il a perdu sa valeur propre, il a gardé une harmonie
préférable pour les délicats à la fraîcheur et à l'éclat des nuances. Les tons se
sont amortis dans un rapport si parfait, qu'il en résulte une sorte de teinte
neutre, abstraite, idéale, mystérieuse, qui revêt les formes comme d'un voile
céleste et les éloigne des réalités terrestres." 41
39 Tableaux de siège, p. 328.

40 Critique artistique et littéraire, p. 18.
41 Ibid., p. 24.
Peintre de "la douceur, la sérénité, la grâce fière et tendre," peintre de

l'idéal, de la réminiscence platonicienne, les figures de Léonard
semblent venir des sphères supérieures, se mirer dans une glace ou plutôt dans un
miroir d'acier bruni, où leur reflet reste éternellement fixé par un secret pareil à ce-
lui du daguerréotype. On les a déjà vues, mais ce n'est pas sur cette terre, dans
quelque existence antérieure peut-être, dont elles vous font souvenir vaguement. 42
L'apparidon de Spirite dans le miroir de Venise, qui est un tableau sans cou-
leur ni peinture (et représentation exemplaire de l'œuvre d'art idéale avec son
cadre et sa surface médiatisant l'apparition de l'Idée), tableau dont la surface
est à la fois Pici et l'ailleurs, Spirite est présentée comme étant à la fois "très
près et cependant très loin" et comparée avec une figure de Léonard de Vinci.
Ses cheveux, d'une teinte d'auréole, estompaient comme une fumée d'or le con-
tour de son front. Dans ses yeux à demi baissés nagaient des prunelles d'un bleu
nocturne, d'une douceur infinie, et rappelant ces places du ciel qu'au crépuscule
envahissent les violettes du soir. Son nez fin et mince était d'une idéale délicatesse;
un sourire à la Léonard de Vinci, avec plus de tendresse et moins d'ironie, faisait
prendre aux lèvres des sinuosités adorables [.,.]. 4 3
Enlevant le caractère ambigu et menaçant de Mona Lisa, Gautier restitue à

Spirite (qui est dans la fiction de Gautier la femme idéale entièrement
sublimée) la grâce immatérielle et tout idéale propre à Léonard. Il aurait pu en
faire une figure du Corrège, puisque le Corrège retrouve ce sourire, en lui
donnant plus d'amour. Mais il en ôte le mystère: Corrège est trop réel et ne
possède pas le don de double vue de Léonard.
Le paradigme de la séduction est bien Mona Lisa dont le sourire fait de
séduction et de réticence "raille et attire, refuse et promet, enivre et rend
pensif":
Comment s'expliquer d'une autre manière le charme singulier presque magique

qu'exerce le portrait de Monna [sic] Lisa sur les natures les moins enthousiastes ?
Est-ce sa beauté ? Bien des figures de Raphaël et d'autres peintres sont plus cor-
rectes. Elle n'est même plus très jeune, et son âge doit être l'âge aimé de Balzac,
trente ans; à travers les finesses caressantes du modèle on devine déjà quelque fati-
gue, et le doigt de la vie a laissé son empreinte sur cette joue de pêche mûre. Le
costume, par carbonisation des couleurs, est devenu presque celui d'une veuve: un
crêpe descend avec les cheveux le long du visage, mais le regard sagace, profond,
velouté, plein de promesse, vous attire irrésistiblement et vous enivre, tandis que la
bouche sinueuse, serpentine, retroussée aux coins, sous des pénombres violâtres,
42 Ibid., p. 28.
43 Spirite,-p. 84.
se raille de vous avec tant de douceur, de grâce et de supériorité, qu'on se sent tout
timide comme un écolier devant une duchesse. Aussi cette tête aux ombres violet-
tes, qu'on entrevoit comme à travers une gaze noire, arrête-t-elle pendant des heu-
res la rêverie accoudée aux garde-fous des musées et poursuit-elle le souvenir com-
me un motif de symphonie. Sous la f o r m e exprimée, on sent une pensée vague, in-
finie, inexprimable, comme une idée musicale; on est ému, troublé; des images déjà
vues vous passent devant les yeux, des voix dont on croit reconnaître le timbre
vous chuchotent à l'oreille de langoureuses confidences; les désirs réprimés, les
espérances qui désespéraient s'agitent douloureusement dans une ombre mêlée de
rayons, et vous découvrez que vos mélancolies viennent de ce que la Joconde ac-
cueillit, il y a trois cents ans, l'aveu de votre amour avec ce sourire railleur qu'elle
garde encore aujourd'hui. 44
Léonard est bien ce peintre "qui nous émeut et nous trouble le plus pro-
fondément." 45 L'insistante allusion qui renvoie le poète à un monde fantas-
matique personnel, souvent signalé comme l'espace d'une vie antérieure et
parfois précisée comme étant le monde des souvenirs de l'enfance, inviterait à
une lecture psychanalytique, mais alors l'élucidation laisserait échapper ce
mouvement si particulier de la séduction en tant qu'il est justement refus d'in-
terprétation. Le charme irrésistible du tableau vient de ce "je ne sais quoi" de
la séduction dont Baudrillard dit que le charme est "d'être un objet théorique
non identifié, objet non analytique et qui par là fait échec à la théorie-vérité,
laissant place à la théorie-fiction et au plaisir de son exercice." 46 La séduction
ne peut s'exercer que dans la mesure où elle préserve son secret et que ses si-
gnes ne renvoient qu'à eux-mêmes. Cette autosignification de l'art pour l'art
permet cette stratégie de la séduction qui est de "faire accéder les choses à
l'apparence pure, de les faire rayonner dans l'apparence pure, de les faire
s'épuiser dans l'apparence pure et le jeu de l'apparence." 47 Car la séduction ne
cherche pas l'élucidation, mais la restitution du secret comme secret. Cette
séduction du secret qui est le propre jeu du désir, parade de la parure comme
chez Véronèse, permet ce vertige de l'ellipse, ce scintillement de l'être qui lais-
se entrevoir ce qu'il serait indécent de regarder tout en jouissant de cette éco-
nomie réelle qu'est "la jouissance subtile qu'ont les choses de rester secrètes."
44 Critique artistique et littéraire, p. 29.

45 La séduction exercée par son œuvre (Freud n'a pas manqué de mettre plus tard en évidence
le souvenir-fétiche comme origine de l'attrait) est celle de l'inquiétante étrangeté propre à la
mère/amère, suscitant la nostalgie des désirs interdits.
46 Baudrillad: "Les abîmes superficiels." Baudrillard: La séduction, p. 197. Sur ce même thème
de la séduction on se reportera aux jeux du libertinage présentés dans ce volume par Jean-
Pierre Dubost ainsi que Frédéric Ogée.
47 Ibid., p. 201.
Le goût pour la description bien connu chez Gautier qui avoue lui-même
que la description est pour lui un "refuge" ("je me suis réfugié dans la de-
scription"48), une manière d'ordonner les choses, de stabiliser le réel, de fon-
der la réalité en assurant à l'écrivain une toute-puissance49, trouve cependant
ses limites dans l'accumulation des détails qui dans leur abondance finissent
par créer une surréalité fantastique de l'objet esthétique tout en contribuant à
son animation et à l'apparition de son fantôme. A force de regarder, la vue
opère une métamorphose qui investit la surface d'une inquiétante étran-
geté/familiarité (unheimlich) qui est pour Gautier le signe même du Beau,
dont l'essence est proprement indescriptible.50
48 Cité par Feydeau: Théophile Gautier: Souvenirs intimes, p. 141. "J'entends demeurer, envers et
contre tous un descripteur" (p. 144).
49 Voir à ce sujet David-Weill: Rêve de Pierre: la quête de la femme cheç Théophile Gautier, p. 21.
50 "Comment dire l'indicible? comment peindre ce qui n'a ni forme ni couleur? comment
noter une voix sans timbre et sans paroles?" (Mlle de Maupin, p. 131). — "Tout enfant, je
restais des heures entières devant les tableaux des vieux maîtres, et j'en fopuillais avidement
les noires profondeurs [...] A force de plonger opiniâtrement mes yeux sous le voile de
fumée, épaissi par les siècles, ma vue se troublait, les contours des objets perdaient leur
précision. Mais au lieu de s'animer, de prendre vie, une espèce de vie immobile et morte
animait tous ces pâles fantômes des beautés évanouies." (Capitaine Fracasse, p. 380). - L'ani-
mation de l'inerte qui suscite le fantasme de l'incarnation dans le réel de l'image mentale
esthétique ("on dirait qu'ils pes personnages qui ont pris une vie intense et mystérieuse]
vont sortir du cadre comme ces figures des tableaux vivants") peut également survenir par
un effet de lumière: "A certaines heures, quand l'ombre s'épaissit, et que le soleil ne lance
plus qu'un jet de lumière oblique sous les voûtes et les coupoles, il se produit d'étranges ef-
fets pour l'œil du poète et du visionnaire. De fauves éclairs jaillissent brusquement des
fonds d'or. Les petits cubes de cristal fourmillent par places comme la mer sous le soleil.
Les contours des figures tremblent dans ce réseau scintillant; les silhouettes si nettement
découpées tout à l'heure se troublent et se brouillent à l'œil. Les plis roides des dalmariques
semblent s'assouplir et flotter: une vie mystérieuse se glisse dans ces immobiles personna-
ges byzantins; les yeux fixes remuent, les bras au geste égyptien s'agitent, les pieds scellés se
mettent en marche; les chérubins font la roue sur leurs huit ailes; les anges déploient leurs
longues plumes d'azur et de pourpre clouées au mur par l'implacable mosaïste; l'arbre
généalogique secoue ses feuilles de marbre vert; le lion de Saint-Marc s'édre, bâille, lèche sa
patte griffue; l'aigle aiguise son bec et lustre son plumage; le bœuf se retourne sur sa litière
et rumine en faisant onduler son fanon. Les martyrs se relèvent de leurs grils ou se dé-
tachent de leurs croix. Les prophètes causent avec les évangélistes. Les docteurs font des
observations aux jeunes saintes, qui sourient de leurs lèvres de porphyre; les personnages
des mosaïques deviennent des processions de fantômes qui montent et descendent le long
des murailles, circulent dans les tribunes et passent devant vous en secouant l'or chevelu de
leurs gloires. C'est un éblouissement, un vertige, une hallucination! Le sens véritable de la
cathédrale, sens profond, mystérieux, solennel, semble alors se dégager. On dirait qu'elle est
le temple d'un christianisme antérieur au Christ, une église faite avant la religion. Les siècles
se reculent dans des perspectives infinies." (Italia, pp. 123-24).
Icono texts:
The Eighteenth Century
CATHERINE CUSSET
Yale University
Watteau: The Aesthetics of Pleasure
Abstract: Focussing on the two well-known versions of Antoine Watteau's Pilgrimage

to the Island of Cythera (in Paris and Berlin), this contribution examines the relation
between images and narrative as depicted in the paintings. The two works, and es-
pecially the one showing a circle of putti, are distinguished by narrative inconsist-
ency in that they describe what could be termed a semantic vacuum. Foreground-
ing the differences in the Berlin version, the article examines Watteau's idiosyn-
cratic manner of framing nothingness, a process that defies definition and delim-
itation.
It is n o w traditional to begin an article o n Watteau by recalling that his char-

acter and painting have a peculiar relation to text. W e see it already in the nu-
merous eighteenth-century biographies and commentaries on his art. A l l o f
them leave us the image o f a Watteau "libertin d'esprit, mais sage de mœurs"
("with a licentious imagination, but pure morals"), as if the function o f the
narrative consisted precisely in negating the reality o f the pleasure depicted by
Watteau's paintings. 1
In the nineteenth century numerous lyrical and poetic ekphrases created
the myth o f the melancholic painter. "His silent glances follow the embraces,
and he listens to the lovemaking, listless, indifferent, morose, consumed by
1 The idea that Watteau painted what he did not live is widespread. We find it already soon
after Watteau's death in biographies written by Watteau's former friends, in 1721 by An-
toine de la Roque, the editor of the Mercure de France, in 1726 by Jean de Julienne, in 1744
by Edmé Gersaint, and in 1748 by the Comte de Caylus, to quote only the longest among
the "Vies anciennes de Watteau" republished in 1984 by Pierre Rosenberg. After being for-
gotten in the second half of the eighteenth century during the period of reaction against
Regency and Rococo art which was associated with the mannerism of a decadent aristo-
cracy, Watteau was rediscovered in the nineteenth century and revived by numerous poetic
or critical texts. Articles were written by Paul Hédoin in 1830, by the brothers Goncourt in
1856, and poems were written by Théodore de Banville, Théophile Gauder, Charles Baude-
laire, Gérard de Nerval, and Paul Verlaine. AU these articles and poems strengthen the myth
of the melancholic Watteau by associating the image of death with that of pleasure.
122 Iconotexts: T h e Eighteenth Century
languor, and weary, like a violin at a marriage of the dances it directs, and deaf
to the sound, to the song o f his instrument," the Goncourts wrote in 1856. 2
The formation o f the melancholic myth surrounding Watteau's name has
been analyzed historically by Donald Posner in "Watteau mélancolique,"
structurally by Norman Bryson in Word and Image. French novelist Philippe
Sollers devoted his 1990 novel La Fête à Venise - the title of a fictitious Wat-
teau painting - to vigorously fighting the myth o f a melancholic Watteau: " I
think that he simply lived thousands o f short private dazzling novels. He
painted them, that's all." 3
Although this myth is deconstructed by Posner and Bryson and derided
by Sollers, a couple of images recur and inhabit our imaginary: that o f the
young libertine painter who repented on his deathbed and asked that his li-
centious paintings be burned; 4 that o f a Watteau-Gilles, with a sad and placid
attitude, crucified by the laughter of those who offer him to the public gaze,
sad Pierrot with dangling arms. "Gilles, character of the fair theater, is the oc-
casion for Watteau to confess his melancholy through a figure exposed to de-
rision. [...] Gilles is the image of taciturn naivety and failure," Jean Starobins-
ki writes as late as 1964. 5
The melancholy myth is strong. Why does the image o f a melancholic
Watteau dominate over that of the painter of pleasure? Is it a more attractive
and tempting image for the narrative? Why does a metaphysics of pleasure
systematically substitute the representation of immanent pleasure with sad-
ness and melancholic regret of the past? This question concerns the relation-
ship between word and image in Watteau's work. Although Mieke Bai in Read-
ing 'Rembrandf and J. Hillis Miller in Illustration recently argued for an over-
coming of the word-image opposition, 6 the case of Watteau clearly hints at
2 "L'œil muet, il accompagne les embrassades, écoutant aimer, versant les sérénades, insou-
cieux, indifférent et morose, rongé d'ennui, comme un violon de noces, las des fêtes qu'il
mène, et sourd à son violon qui chante." Goncourt: L'Art du dix-huitième siècle, p. 16 (My
transi.).
3 " J e pense qu'il a simplement vécu des milliers de petits romans privés éblouissants. Il les a
peints, voilà tout." Sollers: La Fête à Venise, p. 120 (my transi.).
4 In his imaginary biography o f Watteau published in 1990, Pierre Michon tried to recreate
this scene. In Michon's narrative, the fictive narrator is the vicar o f the small town, Nogent-
sur-Marne, in which Watteau died in 1721. O n his deathbed, Watteau asks the vicar to des-
troy all the licentious paintings which he kept hidden for years. These paintings are then de-
scribed by the vicar, who is amazed by such a vivid representation o f pleasure. Following
Watteau's will, he destroys them.
5 Starobinski: L'Invention de la liberté, p. 89.
6 Mieke Bal reminds us that "verbality or 'wordness' is indispensable in visual art, just as
visuality or 'imageness' is intrinsic to verbal art" (Reading 'Rembrandt', p. 27), and J. Hillis
Cusset: Watteau: The Aesthetics of Pleasure 123
such an opposition. A close reading of a few Watteau paintings and an analy-

sis of the texts which surround them will allow me to examine the relation of
images to narrative and meaning as it appears in Watteau's paintings.
This study will therefore attempt to articulate the two contradictory di-
mensions which Watteau's paintings contain. On one hand there is melan-
choly, pleasure signifying sadness, the metaphysics of pleasure; on the other
hand, a libertine pleasure without any metaphysical meaning, pleasure which
signifies only itself. The two versions of Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera will
be the object of this analysis.
Three reasons justify this choice. First, these paintings represent pleasure
as their very tide indicates - the only title given when Watteau was alive.
Cythera, in Greek mythology, is the island near which Aphrodite was born
from the sea; a representation of Cythera can thus be considered the allegory
of courdy love or sexual pleasure. Watteau's painting is also linked to theatri-
cal pleasure: Watteau was probably familiar with the plays of the fair theater
{théâtre de foiré) which became so successful in Paris after the exile of the Ital-
ian Comedians in 1697 and, between 1710 and 1715, often depicted pilgrim-
ages to Cythera, as René Démoris, Robert Tomlinson, Thomas Crow and
François Moureau have recalled.7 As James Heffernan demonstrates in his
article when he analyzes the case of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a tide can
strongly influence our interpretation of a painting. Would we still see a repres-
entation of pleasure in Watteau's painting if we did not know the tide and the
meaning of Cythera? The answer is yes. The soft and warm colors of the
landscape, the curved lines, the golden or blue background, the activities of
the characters who are all in couples, the statues of Venus and the hovering
putti can be considered pictorial signs of pleasure (fig. 4).
Second, this is probably the one Watteau painting which generated the
most interpretations by virtue of its ambiguity: is it a departure or a return? Is
the pilgrimage ending, or the feast beginning? The various answers to these
questions are less important than the questioning itself: it reveals that the nar-
rative (the ekphrasis or critical interpretation) tries to resolve the ambiguities
that it describes and cannot be satisfied with a question without answer, with
a suspension of its end.
Miller suggests that signs are always both verbal and visual, so "the two parties" (words and
images) are in fact different forms of the same thing (Miller: Illustration, p. 75).
7 Tomlinson mentions many fair plays such as Fuzelier's Les Pèlerins de Cythère (1713), Letel-
lier's Les Pèlerines de Cythère (1714), Charpentier's Les Aventures de Cythère (1715). He com-
ments: "Un ton railleur est un des apports fondamentaux de la Foire au thème de l'Em-
barquement." (Tomlinson: La Fête galante, p. 120) In his recent study, De Gherardi à Watteau,
François Moureau shows how the Italian Comedians influenced Watteau's work.
124 Iconotexts: The Eighteenth Century
4. Antoine Watteau: L'Embarquement pour l'île de Cythère. 1717. Paris. Musée du Louvre.
Copyright photo R.M.N.
Third, there are two versions of the painting. One, now in Paris, was pre-
sented to the Academy in 1717 as Watteau's morceau de réception, under the tide
Pilgrimage to the Island of Cytberar, the other, now in Berlin and known as Embar-
kation for Cjthera, was probably painted a little later. Between the first and sec-
ond version, Watteau made changes which can be considered as corrections
or refinements. It is therefore possible to argue that Watteau's paintings con-
tain a statement, which is underlined by the changes Watteau introduced in
the second version. It is this pictorial statement that I intend to decipher, in
order to analyze the relation of words and images to pleasure.
1. The narrative inconsistency
What does Watteau paint in Pilgrimage to the Island of Cytherai It is impossible

to define the object of the painting, or to designate its focal point. There are
three focal points: the clear open sky on the left; the white dress of the seated
woman on the right; the standing couple in the center (fig. 4).
The first focal point, the clear sky on the left which contrasts with the
rather dark colors of the rest of the painting, absorbs the gaze like the prom-
ise of a dream, toward which a few putti ascend. Although the recent restora-
tion of the Paris version revealed that the colors used by Watteau were much
brighter and lighter than one thought because of thick and darkening layers of
varnish, there is still a strong contrast between the sky in the upper left side
of the painting, which is almost white in the first version and yellow in the
second, and the rest of the painting. On the other side of the painting, a small
white spot also attracts the eyes; it is the white dress of the seated woman,
which contrasts with the dark colors of the grass and the trees. Listening to a
man on his knees, this woman with downcast eyes seems to be cut off from
the rest of the painting, from the general movement of departure and from
this hazy sky to which she turns her back. The third focal point is the stand-
ing couple in the center of the painting. It dominates the other characters and
stands atop the hill which divides the painting in two distinctive halves - that
of the sky and remote background painted in cold colors, and that of the
earth painted in warm colors.
These three focal points are connected by a sinuous line, a rococo
arabesque which structures the painting.8 The arabesque is a decorative form,
which follows a purely ornamental logic. This would be the moment to recall
that Watteau painted in a time when newly enriched financiers privately com-
missioned small scale paintings to decorate their new Parisian mansions.
There are economical, social and cultural reasons which explain Watteau's use
of the arabesque. It might be unnecessary to look for a sophisticated mean-
ing: is "decoration" not a sufficient justification?
The historical explanation, however, is not contradictory with a semiotic
explanation of "arabesque." In his article "Ecritures de l'image chez
Théophile Gautier," Alain Montandon shows that the Romantics favored
arabesque as the form of arbitrary imagination, and Gautier, more specifically,
as a "writing of femininity and seduction." In eighteenth-century paintings,
Rococo arabesques are not merely decorative and incidental. As Jacques Der-
rida remarkably argues in La Vérité en peinture, the ornament (the parergon:
what is beside the work itself, what is added and unnecessary) determines the
meaning of a work, by revealing the lack of a central meaning.9
8 Arabesques play an important role in Watteau's paintings. Thomas Crow reminds us of the
fact that Watteau was a student of Claude Audran III around 1707. Audran, "concierge" at
the Luxembourg Palace, was a master in arabesques and ornamental forms. See Crow:
Painters and Public Life, p. 59.
9 "Ce qui les constitue en parerga, ce n'est pas simplement leur extériorité de surplus, c'est le
lien structurel interne qui les rive au manque à l'intérieur même de 1 'ergon. Et ce manque
serait constitutif de l'unité même de Yergon." (Derrida: La Vérité, p. 69).
The standing couple atop the arabesque symbolizes the absence of a cent-
ral meaning. It also subverts the magisterial authority of the gaze, and invites
us to "glance" rather than "gaze" at the painting, to use Bryson's distinction
between the gaze and the glance. 10 The man turns his back to us and, with his
arm around the waist of his companion, tries to drag her along in the direc-
tion of the hazy background where other couples are already embarking. The
woman's body is moving in the direction of the walk, but her face is turned
backwards, toward the foreground and the seated woman with the white
dress. The litde dog at the feet of the central couple is a repetition of the dy-
namic in the woman's posture: ready to go forward, but with head turned
backward. This couple indicates the dispersion of the gaze, and, as a conse-
quence, the impossibility of reading the painting in a single sense. It goes at
the same time forward toward the background in the movement of the bod-
ies, and backward toward the foreground in the movement of the gaze. This
couple is the figure of the painting's ambiguity, of the "non-sense," or of what
Donald Posner called Watteau's "narrative inconsistency." 11 We can talk of
narrative inconsistency in the sense that the painting represents at the same
time two contradictory temporal successions. The movement from right to
left invites us to read the painting as a departure. However, the natural move-
ment of reading a painting — at least in the Occident — is from left to right, as
Bernard Lamblin suggests in Peinture et temps. From left to right, the progress-
ive enlargement of the figures invites us to read the painting as an allegorical
representation of the different steps of love or courtly seduction - and this
would be the opposite of a departure. The seated couple on the right, ab-
sorbed in seduction, is the couple closest to the spectator and the most vis-
ible; this couple, however, is completely indifferent to the movement of de-
parture from right to left, and contradicts it. The statue of Venus above them
confirms the allegorical interpretation and the couple's indifference to any-
thing which is not love.
2. Pleasure and interpretation: the role of the narrative
This narrative inconsistency has generated a multiplicity of critical interpreta-

tions. Watteau is, after Van Gogh, the painter who has given rise to the most
10 See Bryson's Vision and Painting, pp. 87-133. Bryson's subtle and important distinction be-
tween the "glance" and the "gaze" is also discussed in Peter Wagner's "Oscar Wilde's 'Im-
pression du matin' (1881): An Intermedial Reading;" and James Heffernan's "Entering the
Museum of Words."
11 Posner: Antoine Watteau, p. 192.
abundant literature. His paintings seem to contain something that elicits dis-
course or narration. In Word and Image, Norman Bryson tried to analyze this
phenomenon and suggested that it comes from a discrepancy between text
and image: "Watteau's strategy is to release enough discourse for the viewer
to begin to verbalize the image, but not enough in quantity or in specificity
for the image to be exhausted." 12 For Bryson, this discrepancy is the very sign
of Watteau's modernity: it is with Watteau, he suggests, that painting starts to
gain its independence from the authority of the written text (historical,
mythological or allegorical) which had characterized classical aesthetics.
However, most critics tried to make sense of Watteau's painting and to fill
what Bryson calls the "semantic vacuum" which he sees at the center of Wat-
teau's enterprise.13 In order to give meaning to Pilgrimage to the Island of
Cythera, critics often insist on the movement of departure which can be seen
from the right to the left of the painting, and which seems, at least, to repres-
ent an "action." In 1961, in an article entided "The Real Theme of Watteau's
Embarkation to Cythera," Michael Levey declared that the second version,
like the first, represented a departure; for pilgrims were leaving the island of
pleasure, the party was over. Levey wrote: "The demand of time is inexorable
[...] Watteau was not painting two bits of stage nonsense, ravishingly beauti-
ful but resistant to any real interpretation." 14 This conclusion reveals what is
at stake here. Critical interpretations attempt to overcome Watteau's resistance
to interpretation by focusing on the idea of departure, of ending, of the in-
exorable demand of time, which allow them to endow the painting with a
metaphysical meaning.
This kind of interpretation started in the nineteenth century, when Ro-
mantic poets and writers gave birth to the myth of a melancholic Watteau
(Posner, "Watteau mélancolique"). This myth paradoxically leads to seeing in
Watteau's painting the absence of the pleasure which he represents. Sadness
thus becomes the signified of the signifier pleasure. The Goncourts' text on
Watteau, first published in 1856 in the review L'Artiste under the revealing ti-
tle "Watteau's Philosophy," is the very example of this reversal. At first, the
Goncourts' text attempts to recreate the painting verbally:
[...] amorous woods, meadows overflowing with music, echoing groves and over-
arching branches hung with baskets o f flowers; solitary places, remote from the
jealous world, touched by the magic brush of a Servandone, refreshed by springs
12 Bryson: Word and Image, p. 74.

13 Ibid., p. 65.
14 Michael Levey, "The Real Theme," p. 185.
and inhabited by marble statues, by naiads dappled with the trembling shadows of
leaves [...] Oh the amiable and pleasant country! 15
The absence of grammatical articulation to connect subject, verb and object,

the juxtaposition of names and adjectives punctuated with exclamation marks,
and the fragmented sentence reflect the dispersion of Watteau's painting and
the impossibility of expressing its inexistant unity. This passage gives us an ex-
ample of ekphrasis as successful as the one Bernadette Fort analyzes in
"Diderot and Fragonard's Coresus and Callirhoë" and seems to indicate a pos-
sible equivalenceof rhetorical means and pictorial strategies. In the Gon-
courts' text, however, a complete sentence little by little forms itself again and
brings back the unity of meaning, as if the narrator could not be satisfied with
fragmented sentences which do not leave him any control over the painting:
[...] Enchanted isles separated by a crystal ribbon from the land, as carefree as
they are unpastored [...]. The Elysian Fields of a master painter! [...] In some for-
tuitous and uncharted spot, there exists, beneath the trees, an eternal indolence.
Sight and thought languish into a vague, vanishing distance [...]. A Lethean stream
spreads silence through this land of forgetfulness.16
Complete sentences which describe Watteau's enchanted island have now

taken the place of fragmented exclamations and give meaning to the specta-
cle. Cythera's meaning can only be its inexistence, its impossibility. These sen-
tences state the impossibility of speaking of Cythera. Described in a sentence
with a subject, a verb and a complement, Cythera has become the Elysian
Fields, that is the paradise which is on the other side of death, on the other
side of the flesh, beyond the river of forgetfulness. In other words, the Gon-
courts' narrative defined the object of Watteau's painting, and this object is
unreality as such, the impossibility, the lack of being.
In order to become the object of a narrative, the image must have a mean-
ing, a "behind" which only discourse can reveal:
Yes, in the recesses of Watteau's art, a kind of slow and vague harmony whispers
behind laughing words; a kind of musical and sofdy contagious sadness is
widespread in these fêtes galantes}1
The Goncourts are looking for what is "behind" the surface of the painting,
for what is behind the scene, for the recesses hidden by the representation in
its apparent immanence. Without this "behind," words could not graft them-
15 Goncourt: L'Art du dix-huitième siècle, p. 3 (my transi).

16 Ibid., p. 6.
17 Ibid., p. 14.
selves on Watteau's painting; they could not endow it with meaning. Cythera,
confounded with the Elysian Fields, exists only against the background of
death.
One could say that such an interpretation is typical of the nineteenth cen-
tury and corresponds to the myth of a melancholic Watteau which has been
analyzed by Posner, Bryson, Shirley Jones and others. In more recent times,
there seems to have been one single attempt to look for a hidden meaning be-
hind the apparent image of pleasure: Michael Levey's article, mentioned above.
Levey's article has been vigorously refuted by many recent articles and essays.
Watteau's "stage nonsense" found many advocates, from Gérard Le Coat to
Hermann Bauer. 18 It is striking, however, that every commentary about Wat-
teau today, including mine, quotes Levey's article, even if only to refute it.
Why is that? I would suggest that Levey's forceful attempt to endow Wat-
teau's painting with a metaphysical meaning gives critics the very axis of
which Watteau's painting deprives them. It is somehow easier to fight the at-
tempt to overcome Watteau's resistance to interpretation than to comment on
Watteau's painting without trying oneself to overcome this resistance.
Through the representation of two contradictory temporal successions (a
departure, a process of seduction), Watteau's painting seems to mock all inter-
pretative attempts. It resists any interpretation which would try to endow it
with a definitive meaning. Today, cautious critics focus their analysis on the
historical referent, instead of looking for what stands behind the appearance
of happy leisure. In a recent study of Watteau's paintings, Mary Vidal points
out the aristocratic notion of "conversation" as the very subject of Watteau's
art. 19 This notion would thus explain the ambiguities of Watteau's paintings,
their lack of narrative consistency and of clear center or object; in a good
conversation held in an aristocratic salon at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, there was no single topic or single speaker monopolizing the atten-
tion. The art of conversation, Vidal suggests, would replace in Watteau's
paintings the action, narration and plot which until then subordinated paint-
ing to the authority of written text. Vidal invites us to read the movement
from right to left in Pilgrimage to Cythera as a departure from intimacy to so-
18 Gérard Le Coat answered Levey's article by stressing the ambiguity of Watteau's painting:
" D o e s the action take place in Cythera or not? Are the mountains we see in the back-
ground located on the island or the condnent? To tell the truth, it is not very important. If
Watteau had thought this was essential, he would have composed his painting differently, or
he would have chosen a less ambiguous title." See Le Coat: " L e Pèlerinage à l'île de
Cythère," p. 22 (my transi.). Hermann Bauer also insists on the fact that the characters'
faces do not express a melancholic mood, but "Aufmerksamkeit." (Rokokomalerei, p. 28).
19 Vidal: Watteau's Painted Conversations.
ciability: "Watteau is concerned with transporting the joyful, civilizing talk of

lovers out into the world." 20
Even if Mary Vidal, contrary to the Goncourts or to Michael Levey, re-
cognizes that Watteau's painting represents a happy feast, her interpretation,
like any cultural and historical interpretation, also attempts to define and tem-
porally limit the pleasure represented by Watteau. She historically situates this
feast in the early eighteenth century, when social and cultural conditions fa-
vored a certain type of aristocratic pleasure, under the terms of "fête galante"
and "conversation." The historic referent allows a definition of the pleasure
represented by Watteau, and, in that sense, a temporal limit. Such a pleasure
no longer exists, and finds its meaning only through historical analysis.
Through the use of a historical referent, the interpretative discourse attempts
to define and control from the outside the pleasure represented by Watteau.
Furthermore, cultural interpretations which focus on the characters' social
activity and the painting's historical referent do not account for the disturbing
sky which seems to justify the Romantic poets' reverie. The yawning chasm of
the sky in Watteau's landscape differentiates his fête galante from the former
representations from which he probably borrowed some elements, like
Rubens' Conversation (also entitled The Garden of Love), or Claude Duflos's en-
graving, The Island of Cythera. It opens the gate to lyric interpretations, dream
and melancholy, and seems to represent an invitation to a journey, an evasion
into a remote dream (fig. 4).
This fairy tale background absorbs the spectator's gaze. However, we
should notice that we are the only spectators of the sky. It is remarkable that
not a single solitary character, not a single gaze in the painting is turned to-
ward the sky. Characters are all in couples; their eyes are all absorbed by the
partner's eyes or turned toward another couple. However, the sky opening is
offered to our eyes: it is opened, not for the characters who do not care
about it, but for us, spectators looking for meaning. The narrative inconsist-
ency also lies in this contrast between the characters' activity, their indiffer-
ence to the sky, and the hazy background of the sky which seems to invite us
to dream and endow the painting with a melancholic meaning. It seems pos-
sible to interpret this contrast as an ironical gesture from Watteau, who
mocks his spectators' metaphysical tendencies. It is this ironical gesture which
is at the heart of Watteau's representation of pleasure. A comparison of the
Pilgrimage with the later version, the Embarkation for Cythera (whose title is
posthumous), will strengthen this hypothesis.
20 Vidal: Watteau's Painted Conversations, p. 32.

5. Antoine Watteau: Einschiffung nach Kytbera / Embarkation for Cythera. Berlin.

Schloß Charlottenburg. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
3. Watteau's irony: pleasure without metaphysics
Watteau's statement about pleasure appears in the changes that he introduces

between the first and the second version of his painting, all of which, I sug-
gest, confirm its resistance to metaphysical interpretation and even to narrat-
ive. For the movement and the whole composition, the second version is very
similar to the first (fig. 5). But a simple glance is enough to see that it is not
the same painting. All critics describe the second version as more joyful and
sensual. Through chromatic changes and the addition of certain elements, the
second version stresses the ambiguity of the painting and the impossibility of
interpreting it.
In the second version, Watteau uses warmer, brighter and more dawn-like
colors. The color of the sky is now yellow. It is impossible to distinguish in
the background the hazy and foggy mountains which we could see in the first
version, and which endow the painting with a more melancholic mood. In the
Embarkation, we notice only the bright light of the sun piercing through
cloudy skies. The luminosity has been increased everywhere in the painting:
the color of the characters' clothes and skin is brighter and clearer, even if the
restoration of the Paris version revealed that the colors originally used by
Watteau were in fact quite light and bright — they had been darkened by the
varnish. In the second version however, unlike in the first, the warm colors
boldly dominate over the cold. The dream changed color. It was blue-green,
the color of dusk and haze; it became golden, the color of sun and wheat. It
now evokes more the presence of the flesh than the unreality of the dream.
The second difference, the addition of elements in the painting, produces
a similar effect. Watteau replaced, on the extreme right, the bust of Venus
with a statue which looks almost alive and whose stone body seems to be-
come flesh as it/she is playing with a putto, and on the extreme left, the boat
with a rigged vessel. The man on the boat evokes Charon, the ferryman of
the dead in Greek mythology, whereas the red sail, in the second version,
erases such a connotation. Between the ship and the statue of love, Watteau
added four couples, two in the left half, two in the right half. The two couples
on the left, embarking on the ship, reinforce the idea of departure. The two
couples on the right, at the foot of the statue, absorbed in acts of love, con-
firm the indifference to the movement of departure. All these changes rein-
force the painting's ambiguity, by stressing at the same time the movement of
departure in the left side and the indifference to departure in the right side.
While the general movement of the painting represents a departure, that is a
temporal dimension, the absorbed couples on the right represent the "mo-
ment" in the sense that Crébillon fils later gave to this important concept,21
that is the physical instant of seduction, or the complete oblivion of a tempo-
ral dimension that would inscribe the moment in a duration which limits it.
This could also be called "vibration," to use the concept defined by Frédéric
Ogée in his article "Sterne and Fragonard: The Escapades of Death," as an
erotic suspension of the narrative.
Finally, the last change introduced by Watteau in the Berlin version con-
cerns the putti. He multiplied the number of putti by four; they are now four-
ty-eight instead of twelve. The putti play a subtle and important role in Wat-
teau's statement about pleasure. On the earth-side, they are mixed with the
seated and embracing couples, of whom they seem to offer a playful and bold
21 "Célie: What is the moment, and how do you define it? Because I must say in all good
honesty that I do not understand you.' The Duke: Ά certain disposition of the senses, as
unforeseen as it is involuntary, that a woman may conceal, but that, should it be perceived
or sensed by someone who has an interest in taking advantage of it, places her in the great-
est danger of being a little more complacent than she believed she either should or could
be.'" See Crébillon fils, La Nuit, p. 195 (my transi.).
Cusset: Watteau: T h e Aesthetics o f Pleasure 133
version in a kind o f ironical mirror. Their naked bottoms, as plump as those

o f Rubens' fleshy Flemish women, seem to comment ironically on any at-
tempt to look for the "behind" o f the scene, to use the Goncourts' word. I f
there is a "behind," it is very visible; it is only that o f the putti, a behind with
dimples deriding the spectator's gaze absorbed by the perspective o f the re-
mote background.
O n the left o f the pole which clearly suggests departure and might refer to
the "inexorable demand o f time," the putti form a circle in the sky (fig. 6).
This circle reminds us o f "Glories," paintings o f luminous skies in which
whirling angels and saints delimit a central point where the divine figure is re-
vealed. In Watteau's painting, there is nothing in the circle formed by the fly-
ing putti. It is not enough to say that there is nothing: the putti encircle and
highlight the nothingness.
As in the first version, none o f the couples is turned toward this encircled
empty sky which attracts our gaze. However, the addition o f the circle o f put-
ti stresses the attraction exerted on us by the sky as a source for reverie and a
ground for meaning and interpretations. T h e sky is not only empty, but also
shown as empty by the circle o f putti. There is not only nothingness, a "se-
mantic vacuum," as Bryson argues; there is the ironical representation o f
nothingness.
Irony functions as a reflection on the notion o f pleasure. It turns into de-
rision the interpretations which attempt to resolve the painting's contradiction
and to make up for the narrative inconsistency. It is because o f this ironical
statement that Watteau's painting resists interpretation. It does not simply
represent pleasure thematically (in the statue o f love and allegorical cupids,
the joyfulness o f the pilgrimage, the physical contacts, the love declarations,
the couples absorbed in seduction), it makes a gesture stating the atemporality
o f pleasure. This gesture consists in representing simultaneously the sky
which contains the threat o f the end, while showing it empty, and the couples
absorbed in the moment, who turn their back to the sky. It is this gesture
which allows the moment o f pleasure to be outside time, outside a narrative
which tries to circumscribe it. It is this gesture which situates Watteau's paint-
ing in an aesthetics o f pleasure: pleasure is at once immanent and reflected. I f
there is a background beyond pleasure, this background does not negate, but,
on the contrary, affirms pleasure. Watteau substituted the psychological or
metaphysical depth with a "fullness" o f ideas. T h e first to acknowledge this
was Vivant Denon, author o f a libertine tale reminiscent o f Watteau's painting
and entitled No Tomorrow (Point de Lendemain), who wrote in 1829: " T h e
aspect o f landscape, the voluptuousness o f nature, the subject which seems
to contain only grace and lightness, everything is treated with a fullness o f
6. Antoine Watteau: Einschiffung nach Kythera / Embarkation for Cytbera. Berlin.

Schloß Charlottenburg. Detail. Bildarchiv F o t o Marburg.
ideas which gives to it the depth and the philosophy of a Poussin composi-
tion." 22
Watteau's representations of Cythera recall leisure practiced as an art by
seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century aristocrats, who used gar-
dens as theatrical settings where they could play, enjoy themselves and con-
verse without paying any real attention to nature. The aristocratic cult of leis-
ure at the end of the seventeenth century can be considered as a reaction to
the aristocrats' eviction from the political scene, and as a resistance against
the rise of bourgeois values of work, effort, saving, production, seriousness,
and deep meaning. 23 Watteau as well resists history, but it is not to defend the
values or the way of living of a class to which he does not belong by birth and
never claimed to belong. 24 If his resistance can be called "aristocratic," it is
only an aristocracy of mind. Watteau resists the idea that there can be no re-
flection on pleasure without negating pleasure. In the two versions of Pilgrim-
age to the Island of Cythera, through the narrative inconsistency, through the con-
trast between the immobility of the moment and the movement of departure,
through the highlighting of the empty background which ironically shows
that there is no "behind the scene," Watteau opens a space of reflection
which is not the depth of meaning. It is this ironical and playful space which
represents the statement of Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, and which should
prevent us from giving any reductive social or historical definition of the
pleasure staged by Watteau.
Watteau represents a pleasure impossible to define, delimit or surround, a
pleasure that rejects any temporal limits and which is for this very reason con-
demned by history, since history tries to historicize, that is to limit pleasure
temporally. In this very act, history (or time) moralizes the notion of pleasure,
since it says in one way or another: pleasure must end. What I wanted to
show in this study was how Watteau's paintings ironically represented the
metaphysical interpretation of pleasure, thus stating a refusal to inscribe pleas-
ure in a temporal and discursive progression that circumscribes and therefore
negates it.
22 Rosenberg: Vies anciennes, p. 126.

23 See Vidal: Watteau's Painted Conversations, passim.
24 Watteau was the son of a roofer, and started his own career as a painter of cheap copies for
a merchant on the bridge Notre Dame. Even when he became successful, he seems to have
refused to settle down. He was invited to stay in the mansion of his rich patron, Pierre
Crozat, but stayed there for a only a year. Caylus, in his biography of Watteau, reproaches
him as psychologically and geographically unstable, constantly changing domicile and not
wise enough to save money in order to buy his own home.
FRÉDÉRIC O G É E
Université de Nanterre (Paris X)
Sterne and Fragonard: "The Escapades of Death"
All comes from thee, great - great SENSORIUM of the world!

which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in
the remotest desert of thy creation. 1
Abstract: Laurence Sterne and Jean-Honoré Fragonard were contemporary artists

who both tried to describe or transcribe the intensity of those "sentimental" mo-
ments that constitute the flesh of human relationships. In his picture Les débuts du
modèle, painted soon after the publication of Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768),
Fragonard is perhaps closest in spirit to the novelist. Like Yorick, the narrator and
main character of the novel, when he tries to capture the magic of the "exquisite"
moments spent with the "fair fille de chambre," Fragonard here seems to delight
in the representation of the ecstasy of restraint, of the suspended moment. The yet
untouched and unspoilt canvas in the middle of the artist's studio is an ironic and
erotic comment by Fragonard on the flourish of the artist's cane delicately lifting
the model's petticoat. This article explores the deeper structures of analogies in the
two artists' use of eroticism in art as a way of suspending time and of frustrating
the reader's or beholder's narrative urge. Far from being limited to mere
sexual/textual teasing, this eroticism must be seen as an invitation to join in its es-
sential suspension, to "sympathize" with the vibrations it provokes, and to enjoy
the shimmering quality of its transcience.
In one of her late works of fiction, "Extract from the Cave of Fancy. A Tale"
(1798), Mary Wollstonecraft had one of her characters give the following def-
inition of sensibility: "It is the result of acute senses, finely fashioned nerves,
which vibrate at the slightest touch, and convey such clear intelligence to the
brain, that it does not require to be arranged by the judgment." 2
1 Sterne: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. by Ian Jack, p. 117. My italics. All
further references to this edition.
2 Wollstonecraft: "Extract". The Works, vol. 1, p. 201.
Ogée: Sterne and Fragonard: "The Escapades of Death" 137
Although not particularly original, this definition, by underlining the es-

sential relationship between the vibration "at the slightest touch" and its
transmission to the brain, well expresses the extent to which sensibility was
then seen as the private form of an empirical experience of the world, the
sentimental corner of that spiderweb which Georges Poulet has so clearly
identified as one of the eighteenth century's central epistemological meta-
phors.3
Yet what to my mind constitutes the most interesting aspect of Woll-
stonecraft's definition of sensibility is that the thrilling vibration and its imme-
diate intelligent translation "[do] not require to be arranged by the judge-
ment." This unambiguous disconnection of the experience of sensibility and
of its interpretation, this clear expression of the necessary transience of the
vibration, which any form of mental harnessing interrupts and destroys,
seems to me to offer the best description of the kind of perceptive experi-
ments which Sterne and Fragonard try to set up in some of their works.
In the rapprochement which I would like to sketch here, I have understood
the notion of intermediality in a fairly loose sense. Aware of the shortcomings
which often attend comparisons between writers and artists, I will not try to
suggest that these two consciously borrowed from, imitated or illustrated
each other's techniques or modes in any way, even though such an attempt
might not in their case prove completely irrelevant when one considers the
fact that their careers overlapped, that Sterne paid two long visits to France
and that their works were discussed in the same Parisian circles.4
What I would like to do here is put side by side two of their most signific-
ant scenes and establish the possible analogies between them.5 The focus of
3 Poulet: Metamorphoses, pp. 54—69.

4 It is actually quite surprising to note that, to my knowledge at least, not one critical work on
Sterne since the eighteenth century actually mentions Fragonard and vice versa.
5 I deliberately do not use the term "correspondence," which one might have felt tempted to
adopt here, in order to emphasise the fact that I do not in any way adhere to the "corres-
pondences of the arts" theory. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and more recently J. Hillis
Miller or Louis Marin (admittedly from different perspectives) have, I find, convincingly
refuted the concept. More specifically, it seems now clear that criticism of the eighteenth
century has too often been misled by the numerous discussions of Horace's "ut pittura
poesis" which occur in the period, and has tended to use its implications blindly, as the ulti-
mate and exclusive critical tool. As I attempt to show in my two forthcoming studies, on
Hogarth's series and on Fielding's handling of aesthetics (both in theory and in practice),
relevant analogies between the works of writers and artists are only to be found at the level
of what I call "deep structures" (a term borrowed from linguistics) - like serial patterns or
the serpendne line, for instance — in which the tiresome and misleading question of a cre-
ator's "awareness" or "deliberateness" in his or her work (of which we can only have vague
notions, anyhow, whatever he or she may have written about it) is salutarily disposed of.
my study will primarily be on the two artists' use of eroticism, both in its rela-
tion to the sentimental vogue of the time and in the use they make of it to ex-
plore new forms of communication between the works they produced and
their receivers. Martin Battestin, in a very stimulating essay, actually prefers to
talk of "communion" rather than communication. 6 I will personally borrow
Wollstonecraft's use of "vibration," not least for its rich history in the literat-
ure of sensibility throughout the century.7 But sentimental, erotic, teasing is
also a way for both of them to explore the limits of artistic representation and
go beyond mere feats of self-conscious artificiality, be they playful — as in
Sterne's Tristram Shandy - or escapist - as is the case with, for instance, Frago-
nard's Progress of Love (New York, Frick Collection). Instead, the vibration of
eroticism provided them with new ways of actually re-presenting, of making
the tangibility of their scenes ever present and actual, of heightening the re-
sponse, whose intensity was still the yardstick with which the "quality" of a
work of art was measured. 8
The two scenes I have chosen are, on the one hand, that between Yorick
and the fair fille de chambre in Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and
Italy (1768) (i.e., the two chapters entitled "The Temptation" and "The Con-
quest") and, on the other, Fragonard's Les débuts du modèle (possibly painted
circa 17699 and known in English under the misleading title of The New
ModeI), which is in the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris.
In Tristram Shandy, Sterne had playfully shown the numerous obstacles to
communication which render the merest verbal exchange problematic. Such
6 "Yorick's progress is from solipsism toward communion, from self-love toward a felt ap-
prehension of the syntax of things". Battestin: " A Sentimental Journey and the Syntax of
Things," p. 225.
7 The Newton-Leibniz controversy over the former's reference to space as the sensorium of
God (in his Opticks ) led to Samuel Clarke's defence of Newton's argument and to Ad-
dison's support of Clarke in the famous Spectator n° 565 (1714), which popularised the
word. From then on, the discussion of man's vibrations to the world, or of his receptivity
to the vibrations of the world, became a favourite topic, as much in the writings of the
"moral sense" philosophers as in those of Hardey (cf. his "vibratiuncles" theory) and
Priesdey, and more generally in the findings of the developing sciences of physiology and
neurology. See Brissenden: Virtue in Distress·, Todd: Sensibility; and Mullan: Sentiment and So-
dability.
8 See, for instance, the first part of Abbé Du Bos's Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la pein-
ture (1715; 1740), in which his detailed presentation of the relative beauty of painting and po-
etry essentially consists in a discussion of the effectual intensity of the works considered.
9 However, in the two recently-published catalogues raisonnés of Fragonard's œuvre (Cuzin: Jean-
Honoré Fragonard\ and Rosenberg: Fragonard), the painting is said to belong either to the
1785-88 period (Cuzin) or to the 1780-83 one (Rosenberg).
awareness is ultimately tragic as it signals the fundamental impossibility of any

other conversation but with oneself, even through a work of art. A Sentimental
Journey is an attempt, not to ignore but to bypass such a difficulty. As Martin
Battestin has shown, the text actually teems with representations of obstacles
of all kinds, 10 but Sterne seems to suggest an alternative route and to endeav-
our, physically more than verbally, to facilitate, not, I think, communication -
which implies logical, rational codes of exchange — but sympathy, in the ety-
mological sense of the word, that is to say the sharing of pathos, the symbi-
osis of pathetic feeling. That is what sentimental travelling is all about: " T i s a
quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of Nature, and those affections which
rise out of her, which make us love each other - and the world, better than
we do."11
I have suggested elsewhere that the enigmatic first sentence of the book -
"They order, said I, this matter better in France"— might aim at underlining
the advantages of travelling "abroad," since such a journey more or less radic-
ally and immediately excludes smooth verbal communication, by reducing it
merely to de-syntaxed key-words (as all embarrassed tourists have experi-
enced), while it encourages the exploration of new forms of contact, the ex-
change of snuff-boxes or the feeling of the pulse, for instance. 12 Moreover, to
encourage the reader to accept what he calls "the novelty of my Vehicle"
(p. 11), Sterne designed his book as a succession of sentimental cameos or
vignettes, in which he made use of a non-verbal form of language, that of the
body, with its complex syntax of caresses, looks and sighs, which escapes ver-
bal rendering:
There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety — where whim, and sense, and
seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose
together could not express them - they are communicated and caught so instant-
aneously, that you can scarce say which party is the infecter, (p. 55).
The scene with the fair fille de chambre is one such vignette, and like the others
in the book, because of this non-verbality - to which I will return later - it
has often been compared to a painting. For instance, R.F. Brissenden writes:
A Sentimental Journey has a visual coherence, a consistent, though muted, pictorial

quality which is one of its unique charms [...] The scenes in A Sentimental Journey
10 "Closed doors and drawn curtains, buttoned pockets and locked portmanteaus, the wretch's
prison and the starling's cage, not to mention the differences in languages, educations, cus-
toms and habits that obstruct us 'in communicating our sensations out of our own
spheres.'" See Battestin: "Syntax of things," p. 236.
11 A SentimentalJourney, p. 84.
12 Ogée: "This matter? Better in France? Laurence Sterne et le voyage sentimental."
have the fresh and limpid quality of water-colour sketches: the details are few but
beautifully placed, and one remembers the clear ambience in which each small
tableau is bathed, and the soft, bright touches o f colour. 13
The scene I have chosen to examine has an undeniably visual quality, not only
in that it is mostly descriptive and centered around a few carefully selected
and delineated objects (the pen, the bureau, the bed, the purse, the strap)14
but also because it is concerned mostly with the motions of emotions (the
blush, the trembling of the hands, the fidgetting with the pen, the holding of
hands, the brushing of the neck, the lifting of the foot). The whole scene is
bathed in a warm glow and even the tide to the chapter, "The Temptation,"
sounds like that of a painting by Fragonard. As the study below tries to sug-
gest, this title also functions as a parergon (to use Derrida's terminology), as a
kind of paratextual "tensor" or teaser.
Most of the attraction of the scene resides in its eroticism. The crimson
colour of the window curtains is also (as Yorick points out in an eye-catching
parenthesis) the colour of the bed's curtains, and the blushes it is apparendy
responsible for in the two characters' cheeks structures the opening of the
scene into a meaningful lozenge of red patches: window curtains, fille de
chambre, bed curtains, Yorick. As Yorick reflects: " 'tis associated" (p. 92), but
he also hastens to add - and we will see later what he means — "But I'll not
describe it." What we have here primarily is the duet of two bodies which re-
act like musical instruments to each other's vibrations. The sexual charge of
their encounter is teasingly displaced by Sterne onto the metaphorical objects
which symbolize them, both in their professional and sexual capacities, Yorick
and his pen, the fille de chambre and her purse. She enters the room to attend
to his "writing," and when he proves too nervous to make use of his pen, she
offers him the ink to dip it into. The minimalist dialogue is, in itself, a master-
piece of double entendre:
" - I have nothing, my dear, said I, to write upon - Write it, said she, simply, upon
any thing. - [ . . . ] If I do, said I, I shall perish - " 1 5
Using his "pen" would lead Yorick to some form of "petite mort." The other
few spoken words are in the same vein.16
13 Brissenden: "Sterne and Painting," pp. 95 and 96.

14 I have elsewhere suggested analogies between Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and the art of
still life painting. See Ogée: "A SentimentalJourney as Vanitas."
15 Journey, p. 92
16 "I'll just shew you, said the fair fille de chambre, the little purse I have been making to-day to
hold your crown. [...] See, said the fille de chambre, holding up her foot." Journey, p. 93
Yorick's handling of the fille de chambrés purse is similarly tense (a tension

made tangible textually by the abundant use of dashes and syntactically by the
ambiguity in the referentiality of the pronoun "it"):
— it was in her right pocket at last — she pulled it out; it was of green taffeta, lined
with a little bit of white quilted satin, and just big enough to hold the crown — she
put it into my hand — it was pretty; and I held it ten minutes with the back of my
hand resting upon her lap — looking sometimes at the purse, sometimes on one
side of it. 17
Martin Battestin has reminded us of the sexual innuendo contained in the

word "purse," which Yorick's shifting gaze from the purse to the young girl's
lap seems to underline.18 The subsequent images of stitching and strap tying
are strongly connoted too and bring in the final climax:
A strap had given way in her walk, and the buckle of her shoe was just falling off -
See, said the fille de chambre , holding up her foot - I could not for my soul but
fasten the buckle in return, and putting in the strap - and lifting up the other foot
with it, when I had done, to see both were right — in doing it too suddenly - it
unavoidably threw the fair fille de chambre off her center - and then - 1 9
As the next chapter, "The Conquest," makes clear, however, the climax is ex-
clusively that of the episode and Yorick concludes this scene, not only by
chastely walking the girl back to the door and giving her an innocent kiss, but
also by "chiding" the reader for his incapacity to resist the urge of (imagining)
consummation. Beyond the fun, this has important theoretical implications in
terms of fictional representation to which I will come back, but what interests
us for the moment is the way the scene establishes contact with the reader
through the erotic tension. I have elsewhere analyzed the erotic charge of the
visual recurrence of the group of words "fair fille de chambre," with its clever
and teasingly suggestive crossing of the French and English "tongues" (un-
derlined by the juxtaposition of Roman and italic typography) in the very
combination of the words, metaphorical, here again, of the other form of
communion at stake.20 Not unlike the leading note in music (which in French
is called "la note sensible"), the vibrations of these two bodies tend towards a
final, harmonious chord, they point to it, but never actually reach it.21 It is the
17 Ibid.
18 Battestin: "Syntax of Things," p. 238.
19 Journey, p. 93.
20 Ogée: "This matter?," p. 13.
21 When asked by the Count de Β**** to explain his opinion of the French, Yorick uses an
elaborate musical metaphor (p. 89). And we know that Sterne was an amateur musician
himself.
tension, not the resolution which matters. Indulging in the satisfaction of the
harmonious chord would be but the reassuring fulfillment of our urge for a
rational, proportional organization of harmonies. But as Yorick makes clear
earlier in the novel, "this is not a work of reasoning" (p. 59). The point of a
passage like this one resides in its essential inconclusiveness, in the transience
of its intensity as much as in the intensity of its transience. As John Mullan
writes, in his remarkable study of what he calls "the language of feeling in the
eighteenth century": "The text entertains the possibility of things going fur-
ther in order to defeat it; true bliss is in the tiny yet suffusing warmth — the
contact of hands — which restraint allows."22
Eroticism is not only the means to send the vibrations, it is also itself the
metaphor of vibration, that is to say something that ends with completion,
and, in this case, becomes pornography when made more explicit. The teas-
ing absence of ending in "the Case of Delicacy" at the end of the book is
most demonstrative in this respect. Which is why — and I will also come back
to that - it is to my mind wrong to see Sterne, in this work at least, as a sort
of pre-modernist leaving some of the creative work to be done by the reader,
as he has so often been presented. On the contrary, Sterne, after devoting
nine volumes of Tristram Shandy to the demonstration that it was impossible
to complete a story, here wants to steer the reader away from his narrative
urge and to encourage him not to reach consummation.
Numerous paintings by Fragonard try to depict the suspended vibration,
or the vibrating suspension. Apart from the famous Swing scene (London,
Wallace Collection), which could almost be seen as a manifesto of the genre,
one can think of those exquisite vignettes, The Souvenir (Wallace Collection) or
The Love Letter (New York, Metropolitan Museum; the French title, Le billet
doux better underlines the tactility of the painting), which all express the same
aesthetics. Incidentally, all these pictures were painted in the late 1760s and
early 1770s, at the same time as the publication of A Sentimental Journey.
Among these, I have decided to focus on Les débuts du modèle (colour plate IV)
because it seems to me the most convincing in the analogies which I want to
suggest with Sterne's work.
Although in many ways different from Sterne's vignette, the scene de-
picted in Fragonard's Les débuts du modèle uses eroticism very much in the
same way and with the same design. The tension is here conveyed in the na-
ture of the contact which is being established before our eyes between the
artist and his model. Visual contact, first, in which, against all expectation -
and contrary to what has sometimes been said about this painting - the em-
22 Mullan: Sentiment and Sociability,^. 195.

barrassment seems more on the artist's face than on the model's. Just as in
Sterne's scene, the traditional patterns of public, social and sexual domination
(Yorick and the nameless fille de chambre / artist and model / male and fe-
male) are subtly reversed by the unexpected interference of the private sphere
of emotions. The second contact is of course that of the evaluative gesture of
the artist's cane. There is no need to dwell on the erotic charge of this central
action nor on the substitutive function of the cane, similar to that of Yorick's
pen. It is actually also a temporary substitute of the artist's other brush, his
professional one, and as Mary Sheriff has pointed out in her recent book on
Fragonard and eroticism:
We can s u p p o s e the palette and b r u s h to have a symbolic value c o n n e c t e d with

their function as tools for applying p i g m e n t to the canvas. T h e y remind the be-
holder o f a later stage in the p r o c e s s o f art m a k i n g w h e n the artist will transfer his
vision o f the m o d e l to the canvas by touching its white expanse, just as he n o w
touches the model. T h e association o f canvas and m o d e l as objects to b e touched
partially explains the extremely white flesh tones she displays. 2 3
I would, however, disagree with Mary Sheriff when she sees the spots of col-
our on the palette as "just what they are, touches of paint, fulfilling the dream
of totally transparent signification." 24 It is true that paint is the raw material
of the artist and does not generate meaning as long as it remains on the
palette. However, this palette is itself within a painting, Fragonard's painting,
and his choice of colours, particularly red, which will soon be applied to the
white canvas at the back of the studio, seems to suggest another form of
blemish, another stain over virginal white.
Specialists of Fragonard agree on the fact that Fragonard's painting was
probably an answer to a painting by Baudouin (now in the National Gallery
of Washington D.C.) of 1767 called The Honest Model, in which, allegedly, the
artist had tried to apply to canvas what Diderot had described, in answer to a
question by Greuze, as a scene in which female nudity could be exhibited
without offending modesty.25 My purpose here is not to compare the two
23 Sheriff: Fragonard, p. 197. Philippe Sollers interprets the artist's cane movement as "a litde
fencing before painting ... Touchée ... Besides, the canvas will remain blank. Frago keeps
telling you that it is inside reality itself that one paints, and with a foil" (My transladon of
"un peu d'escrime avant de peindre [...] Touchée [...] D'ailleurs, la toile va rester vide, Fra-
go passe son temps à vous le dire, c'est dans la réalité même que l'on peint, au fleuret
[...]"). See Sollers: Les Surprises de Fragonard, p. 94.
25 "Greuze me dit, je voudrais bien peindre une femme toute nue, sans blesser la pudeur; et je
lui répons, faites le modèle honnête. Asseiez devant vous une jeune fille toute nue; que sa
paintings. Mary Sheriff and Pierre Rosenberg have done it most thoroughly. It
would in any case only confirm what I see as Fragonard's intention in his ver-
sion. Very much as in Sterne's scene, and very much unlike Baudoin's picture,
I would argue that the whole point of this painting is the very tangible tension
that it presents, not the imaginative completion towards which, according to
some commentators, it would try to lure the beholder. And I must say I dis-
agree on that question with recent interpreters of Fragonard's works - and
for that matter of Sterne's. For instance, Mary Sheriff writes that
A t all levels this work insists on viewer participation; the beholder completes the
forms loosely defined, closes the action begun in the scene (undressing the
model), and adds a second narrative episode. [...] The viewer is prompted to in-
dulge his fantasy, to imagine another scene that can be projected on the canvas be-
hind. 2 6
Sheriff also comments on the sketchiness of the painting as just another invi-
tation to complete. Similarly, Michael Fried, in Absorption and Theatricality,
writes:
Throughout Fragonard's œuvre participation of a sort is further encouraged by a

highly characteristic sketchiness or lack of finish, which may be said to confer
upon the beholder the pleasure of imaginatively completing the paintings and
drawings in question. 27
For various reasons, which I would now like to put forward, I do not think
this is the case. To my mind, both Sterne and Fragonard use eroticism as an
invitation to join in its essential suspension, to sympathize with the vibrations
it provokes, rather than resolve its suspense. The whole quality of the tran-
sient relationship established within the depicted scene and its sympathetic
echoes in the reader's or the beholder's body vanish as soon as he or she
projects over them, or onto the white canvas in the background, his own little
fictions, "ses petites histoires."
pauvre dépouille soit à terre à côté d'elle et indique la misère; qu'elle ait la tête appuyée sur
une de ses mains; que de ses yeux baissés deux larmes coulent le long de ses joues; que son
expression soit celle de l'innocence, de la pudeur et de la modestie; que sa mère soit à côté
d'elle; que de ses mains et d'une des mains de sa fille, elle se couvre le visage; ou qu'elle se
cache le visage de ses mains, et que celle de sa fille soit posée sur son épaule; que le vête-
ment de cette mère annonce aussi l'extrême indigence; et que l'artiste, témoin de cette
scène, attendri, touché, laisse tomber sa palette ou son crayon. Et Greuze dit, je vois mon
tableau." Diderot: Salons, vol. 3 (1767), p. 110.
26 Sheriff: Fragonard, pp. 198 and 199.
27 Fried: Absorption and Theatricality, p. 141.
While he was writing Λ Sentimental Journey, Sterne wrote in a letter to the

Earl of Shelburne (28 November 1768): "If it is not thought a chaste book,
mercy on them that read it, for they must have warm imaginations indeed!,"28
thus, in a way, implicitly invalidating such a preoccupation. Similarly, there is
no reason to think, as Mary Sheriff does, that "Fragonard leads his audience
to fabricate an image that could not be represented without offending mod-
esty."29 However playful or teasing they may be, Sterne and Fragonard do not
use eroticism in a narrative way, as Hogarth had done, for instance, in his Be-
fore and After pictures. Imagining the after of both the scenes with the "fair fille
de chambre" or that with the model, carries with it the weight of a temporality
of experience, of a syntactic rhythm of apprehension — what Mary Woll-
stonecraft meant by the arrangement by the judgment - which goes against
the form of sensibility, of sentimental vibration which the two works try to
extol. As Norman Bryson aptly writes, depth, in this case, "is a function of
the withholding of explanation."30 The eroticism at work here is meant to fig-
ure depth, a kind of transverse axis linking the work and its receiver, rather
than encourage a temporal, left-to-right, beginning-to-end approach. As
Bryson adds:
To understand the space of French rococo painting it is essential to realise the ex-
tent 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 roco-
co painting, the image can speak to desire so directly precisely because it is no
longer distracted or exhausted by signalling work. 3 1
The two scenes I have examined here, far from encouraging further narrative,
suggest a suspension of narrative, because narrativity is syntactic, therefore
time-bound and potentially dead. What Sterne and Fragonard are trying to do
throughout their works is precisely to erase or ignore time in favour of space,
non-vectorial space, to allow what Wallace Stevens, in his "Notes towards a
Supreme Fiction," so movingly and ambiguously calls the "escapades of
death."32
28 The Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. by L. P. Curtis, p. 403.

30 Bryson: Word and Image, p. 73. Admittedly, Bryson writes this à propos of Watteau.
31 Ibid., p. 91.
32 [...] Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have
No need, am happy, forget need's golden hand,

Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,
It has become fashionable in recent years to reject en masse most of the

nineteenth-century's appraisal of the eighteenth century, particularly the writ-
ings of the Goncourts. If it is true that their florid style sometimes feels as
heavy as a Sunday dinner in a Maupassant story and doesn't seem quite ap-
propriate to account for the translucent fineries of French eighteenth-century
painting, they occasionally had very remarkable flashes of hedonistic sym-
pathy with some of the paintings. In particular, I find that they very success-
fully pointed to some of the essential qualities of the art of Fragonard —
whom they call "the Cherubino of erotic painting"33 - particularly the cent-
rali ty of suspense and sketchiness:
His art, even at its most fervent, remains floating, suspended between earth and
heaven. [...] Impurity itself, under his treatment, has nothing indecent, repellent or
shameful about it; the picture is still a luminous inspiration [...] Every audacity in
Fragonard's art takes flight in this way, trembles, half-hidden beneath the modesty
o f his handling. [...] The esquisse is more than the excuse for Fragonard's art, more
than its veil; it is, in a way, its ideal. 34
That sketchiness is in fact essential to the meaning of paintings like Les débuts
du modèle is also underlined by another unpopular nineteenth-century critic of
Fragonard, Baron Roger Portalis, who wrote about the painting: "It may only
be a sketch, but what finished painting could surpass it and how could one
wish to see the termination and the conclusion of these suggestions which
say everything?"35
There is a month, a year, there is a time

In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.
These external regions, what do we fill them with

Except reflections, the escapades of death,
Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?
Wallace Stevens, "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction," p. 126.

33 Edmond et Jules de Goncourt: L'Art du dix-huitième siècle, vol. 3, p. 215. My translation.
34 Edmond et Jules de Goncourt: French Eighteenth-Century Painters, p. 287. The translation of:
"Tout son œuvre, même brûlant, reste flottant, balancé entre ciel et terre. [...] L'impureté
même chez lui n'a ni ordure, ni dégoût, ni honte; le tableau demeure une inspiration lu-
mineuse. [...] Tout chez Fragonard se sauve ainsi, tout s'enfuit, frissonne, se cache à demi,
dans cette pudeur de sa peinture.[...] L'esquisse est plus encore que le voile et que l'excuse
de l'œuvre de Fragonard: elle en fait en quelque sorte l'idéal" (L'Art du dix-huitième siècle,
vol. 3, p. 243).
35 Baron Roger Portalis: Honoré Fragonard: Sa vie et son œuvre, p. 70. My translation of: "Ce
n'est qu'une esquisse peut-être, mais quel tableau achevé la vaudrait et comment oser désir-
er plus terminée ces indications qui disent tout?"
Sterne and Fragonard refuse to give the narrative, or the narrated event,
the prominent, central position from which meaning would radiate. By oblit-
erating both story and realistic detail, they offer a form of sense which is dis-
tinct from its two common synonyms, meaning and direction. This sense em-
anates from the sensual and private conversation or vibration between work
and receiver. As John Mullan has put it:
The text constitutes all w h o read as those w h o 'feel,' those w h o are admitted to a
complicity with the body's spontaneity, and are fitted to translate the vibrations o f
sentiment. [...] The relationship between reader and text works because it can pur-
port to be unique, and unrealizable outside the confines o f the closet in which the
book is read. 36
This vibration escapes description, explanation, narration. It is what remains

once language has exhausted itself.37 Because the representation of reality is
so problematic, because a narrative event is emotionally too complicated and,
as Robert Alter writes, "remains beyond the highly selective reach of language
and narration,"38 Sterne and Fragonard use eroticism as the metaphorical tool
of their encouragement to resist the urge for fictional consummation which
they have shown elsewhere to be either impossible to achieve or only artifi-
cially mimicked.
As we saw, Yorick doesn't know where to write, it is even the suspension
of his writing that actually makes his sentimental encounter possible; similarly
the canvas in Fragonard's painting is white and in the background. In a way,
their works are like so many embarkations for Cythera, nostalgic journeys of
suspended sentimental exchange at a time when the whirl of modern history
was gathering momentum, when economic exchange was becoming the ker-
nel of all social conversation, in this age of commodification of man, of the
body, as discussed by the contributors to John Brewer's and Roy Porter's col-
lected volume Consumption and the World of Goods.19 They try, with a touch of
desperate humour,40 to go against the trend that puts the emphasis on the
36 Mullan: Sentiment and Sociability, p. 192.

37 This "remainder" bears some resemblance with what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has tried to
isolate and study in his The Violence of Language·. "Emodonal meaning may not be con-
scious; its transmission is hardly deliberate. We are closer to obsession or possession. Seen
in this light, the text is the paradoxical utterance of the unutterable" (p. 5). Admittedly, the
emotional "remainder" I am concerned with here is found beyond language, not within it.
38 Alter: Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Consäous Genre, p. 48.
39 See especially the essays assembled in part VI, "Consumption, Objects, and Images" (pp.
439-555).
40 The humour in Sterne's scene is obvious, that in Fragonard's has recendy been pointed out
by Pierre Rosenberg: Fragonard, p. 317.
conclusion of transactions. What they achieve, with the sketch or the vibra-
tion, is to make inconclusiveness the time-proof centre of their scenes. The
two scenes I have discussed belong to an aesthetic of contiguous, isolated
vignettes, an aesthetic that shuns the fake linearity and well-marked bound-
aries of narrative fiction. In all senses of the word, particularly in its relation
to the vibration, these works may be seen as notes — notes, perhaps, towards a
supreme fiction.
R O N A L D PAULSON
The Johns Hopkins University
The Harlot, Her Father, and the Parson:

Representing and Interpreting Hogarth
in the Eighteenth Century
Abstract: This contribution analyses the problems of ekphrasis by focussing on

three interpreters of Hogarth's graphic art: the Reverend Trusler, Jean André Rou-
quet, and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. They wrote for English, French and Ger-
man audiences, and the first two could even be sure of Hogarth's (and Jane Hog-
arth's) approval. Different views emerge (from Trusler's moral stance to the more
Shandean or semiotic oudook of Lichtenberg), as we are introduced to critical
analyses of eighteenth-century ekphrastic attempts to understand the art of
William Hogarth.
My subject is the lengthy commentaries on Hogarth's engraved works that be-

gan in 1768 with John Trusler's Hogarth Moralised and continued in 1791 with
John Ireland's Hogarth Illustrated and in the 1780s and 1790s with G.C. Lich-
tenberg^ Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche. Brief comment-
aries had appeared in 1747 and 1750 by Jean André Rouquet, Hogarth's per-
sonal friend, whose practical purpose was to clarify the local references in the
prints for a French audience. This was also Lichtenberg's pretext, for a Ger-
man audience. On the most practical level, all these commentaries were writ-
ten to accompany sets of Hogarth's prints: Trusler's Hogarth Moralised was an
attempt, with the approval and presumed supervision of the artist's widow, to
make Hogarth's prints respectable and salable some decades after they were
originally published (the commentary was itself accompanied by small cop-
ies).1 By the 1760s the recovery of context had become as necessary for an
English as for a foreign viewer.
1 Trusler's title page reads: "Pointing out the many Beauties that may have hitherto escaped
Notice; and A Comment on their Moral Tendency. Calculated to improve the Minds of
Youth, and, convey Instruction, under the Mask of Entertainment. N o w First Published,
Even Rouquet's commentary had served to remind a viewer that these

prints, which deserved and repayed such close attention, were not ephemera.
At the same time the greater length and elevation of Trusler's discourse in-
evitably invoked the contemporary commentaries on English poems. The rise
in the 1750s of historical-philological research which sought to recover a
native literature of the distant past in all its primitive purity (Shakespeare,
Spenser, and Milton), manifesdy superior to contemporary forms such as the
"novel," may explain why Hogarth in this same period turned away from his
"modern moral subjects" to history, allegory, and a more emphatic figuration
(whether in The Cockpit, Enthusiasm Delineated, The Times, Plate 1, or The Tail-
piece).2
In the year after Hogarth's death the publication of Thomas Percy's
Reliques ofAnaent English Poetry established with an anthology of Old English-
ballads a national tradition of poetry corresponding to (and validating after
the fact) Hogarth's exhibition of signboards of 1762. Both were based on the
principle of primitive purity, showing a collection of authentic English arti-
facts (though in both cases "improved" by the collector) which were intended
to augment if not supplant the classical canon. What Hogarth claimed half-
seriously — or rather symbolically — for English signboards he meant literally
for his own paintings and prints. It was to further the canonization of his
prints that he himself undertook introduction, autobiography, and comment-
ary in the last years of his life; though, as Jane Hogarth realized, it was better
for it to be written by a scholar or a divine and preferably both.3
Thomas Warton's Observations on Spenser's "Faerie Queene", which began as
annotation and grew into commentary, had been published as a separaté vol-
ume in 1754. Annotation usually consisted of enumerating the poem's asso-
ciations, essentially its sources; the models for commentary, however, were
biblical or classical, often printed parallel to the texts, paraphrasing and ex-
With the Approbation of Jane Hogarth, Widow of the late Mr. Hogarth. - and sold, among
other places, by 'Mrs. Hogarth, at her House in Leicester-Fields.'" The small copies were by
Corbauld and Dent. Ireland's commentary was written to accompany Boydell's Hogarth fo-
lios, and Lichtenberg's was accompanied by E. Riepenhausen's engravings after Hogarth's
prints.
2 Hogarth's intendon was not, however, detected by Trusler, who remarks in the "Advertise-
ment," which follows the tide page: "The author of these sheets hopes to stand excused in
his omission of the print of the Times, it being merely a temporary publication, now out of
date; and, of [t]hose of before, and, after, they being of too ludicrous a nature to have a
place in this work."
3 Hogarth's own commentary — though it survives in a very fragmentary form — recalls Rou-
quet's and points toward Trusler's. See "Autobiographical Notes" in Analysis of Beauty, ed.
by Burke.
Paulson: The Harlot, Her Father, and the Parson 151
plaining them on the levels of analogical, anagogical, allegorical, typological,

and other readings. More pertinent perhaps was Joseph Warton's Essay on the
Genius and Writings of Pope, published in 1756, which had combined comment-
ary with criticism and laid down the thesis that the highest poetry was of the
passions, embodied in Shakespeare and Milton, not in Pope and the "ethical
poets." Warton had incidentally criticized Hogarth for attempting to raise his
art into the higher poetry of passion, evoking from Hogarth a response that
showed how sensitive he was on the subject of genre.
What distinguished Trusler was less the desire to moralize Hogarth than
to raise him above the stigmatized category of satirist to at least "ethical poet"
if not "poet of the passions." For Trusler this involved extricating him from
his matrix of the 1720s and 1730s, the subversive opposition satire of Swift,
Pope, and the Craftsman circle. Trusler, coming a generation later, served
Hogarth as (one might say) Bishop Warburton had served Pope, transmuting
his witty impieties into orthodoxy. Moral admonition was one aspect of
Trusler's commentary, as it was of Hogarth's prints — and it carries over into
Trusler's index, with entries such as "Gaming, the folly of it" or "Hypocrisy, a
characteristic of the French and Great." But as he explains his method:
"While I moralised, I studied to explain·, and, while I explained, I studied to mor-
ali.(p. viii).
The Rev. John Trusler has been regarded as the "moralizer" of Hogarth,
but he styled himself both "Dr." of medicine and of letters. His stated aim in
the preface to Hogarth Moralised was "to bring some minute objects to view,
which lay concealed amid a crowd of larger ones; to hold the painter forth in
a moral light, and, convince the age, there is more in his design, than to ridi-
cule and lash the follies of it." The first of these Trusler shared with Lichten-
berg — "to bring some minute objects to view, which lay concealed amid a
crowd of larger ones" - and both echoed Rouquet, who drew attention to the
"thousand small details [mille petites circonstance¿] which escape most specta-
tors."4 This has been the basic assumption and hermeneutical mode of most
subsequent Hogarth commentators.
I will take Trusler's commentary on A Harlot's Progress (1732) as my prim-
ary example (figs. 7-12).In this series, he argues, Hogarth combines the
"minute objects" with the "moral light" by producing "a history full of such
interesting circumstances, as must, certainly, give the unthinking maid, a sense
of her danger, and, alarm her, lest she, also, becomes a prey to man" (my empha-
sis added throughout).
4 Rouquet: Description du tableau [...] Finchley, p. 3.

7. William Hogarth: A Harlot's Progress. Plate 1 (engraving). 1732. Courtesy of the

British Museum, London.
From this distressing story, let me warn my female readers of the lurking danger
that threatens them: as there is no greater Christian virtue than chastity, none
more pleasing to God, or, more agreeable to man, it is the interest of every young
lady, to be, particularly, attentive to it [...] (p. 13).
Trusler warns her against the men who lay snares and her own vanity that is
exploited by men. From pages 13 to 15 he sermonizes on the error of a single
moment in bad male company (his analogue is entering a pesthouse) and the
effect of such a lapse in the "temporal misery on your families" that accompa-
nies the "eternal vengeance ot\ yourselves" (p. 15).
Such words certainly draw on the discourse of sermons, but they also re-
call Samuel Richardson's comment in Pamela (1740):
And the Whole will shew the base Arts of designing Men to gain their wicked
Ends; and how much it behoves the Fair Sex to stand upon their Guard against
their artful Contrivances, especially when Riches and Power conspire against Inno-
cence and a low Estate (p. 90).
Paulson: T h e Harlot, Her Father, and the Parson 153

Richardson had in fact claimed in his "Postscript" to Clarissa that his novel
was a more effective pulpit than the one from which clerics preached the
same message.
One "minute particular" Trusler overlooks in his focus on the vulnerabil-
ity of the girl (whose name we learn in Plate 3 is M[ary? Moll?] Hackabout) is
the detail of the basket and goose addressed "For my Lofing Cosen in Tems
Stret in London," whose failure to meet her has left no apparent alternative
to the bawd who is offering her a different sort of lodging. The inference is
that Hackabout's fall is facilitated by the parallel absences of her London
cousin on the one side and the preoccupied clergyman on the other, who is
engrossed in reading the address of the Bishop of London.
This is a significant omission because Trusler introduces his account of
Plate 1 with the information, which he gleaned from Rouquet's Lettres (he
could not have inferred it from the print), that the girl is the daughter of the
"country curate." (One thing to note about both Trusler and Lichtenberg is
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that they regard Rouquet's Lettres, close as they were to the source, as almost
as scriptural as the prints themselves). For his F r e n c h audience R o u q u e t h a d
explained that:
Priests in England are not celibate, and they take advantage of that privilege; they
all marry and, since the revenue from their benefices do not support many child-
ren, their offspring and above all the girls, after the father's death and too often
during his lifetime, are reduced to strange means of subsistence. This is a com-
monplace [l'opinion commune], though perhaps only based on the lies of some fallen
women who like to give themselves airs by claiming an origin and education the
furthest removed from their present condition. The author, following this com-
monplace, has made his heroine the daughter of the priest whom he introduces in
this print. They arrive together at the wagon stop. 5
5 Rouquet: Lettres, pp. 3-4. My translation.

Paulson: T h e Harlot, Her Father, and the Parson 155
O n the face of it, Rouquet's story is implausible. If the parson is the father of
the girl named Hackabout (we have to imagine a clergyman named Hackabout),
what happens to him after Plate 1? What then is the function or significance
of Hackabout's "lofing cosen in Tems Stret"? (One could as easily infer - as
Lichtenberg seems to - that the "lofing cosen" refers to the bawd.) 6 There is
6 T h e "poor goose [is] almost strangled by the address label round its neck (in a way, like the
poor parson on horseback through his)." He acknowledges that the cousin has not shown
up: "Where now is little Pandemos [his Greek Everyman, for the Harlot] to go? For in
Thames Street, one of the most roaring and crowded thoroughfares in London, live lofing
Cosens by the thousand who are only too willing to accept unlabelled geese with their heart
in their mouth. T h e poor animal is addressed, just like you, my good little Mary, and like
your poor Yorkshire travelling companions in the cart who are going on farther and who
will not lack lofing Cosens, either!" (Lichtenberg: The World of Hogarth, transi. I. and G.
Herdan, p. 15).
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no internal evidence in either this or any of the subsequent plates that the
parson and Hackabout are related by blood. 7
Trusler is plainly aware of the problems involved in such an interpretation.
He writes more about this one detail than about any other in the whole of
Hogarth's œuvre. He explains that the clergyman father is introduced "in or-
der to shew us the amazing frailty of the sex·, that, notwithstanding she might
have been brought up, properly instructed in the paths of virtue, yet, is there such
an inchantment in vice, as to allure the person on, who once gives the least
ear to her persuasions" (p. 2). He is accordingly forced to invent a story about
the parson that bridges Plates 1 and 2:
7 Peter Wagner points out that a semiotic relation could be made: Both Hackabout and the
parson have "letters" addressed to someone in London — to a "lofing cosen" and to the
Bishop of London. This could have been meant to connect them by filiation as well as
thematically. See Wagner: "Der Leser und Lesestoffe im graphischen Werk William
Hogarths," pp. 228-30.
Paulson: T h e Harlot, H e r Father, and the Parson 157
British M u s e u m , L o n d o n .
O n e would, naturally, be led to think, that her father, from the education he must,
necessarily, have had, would have seen through the deceit [by the bawd who is of-
fering her employment], or, at least, would have been more cautious, and, counsel-
ing her otherwise; but, by his supposed consent to her acceptance of the proffered
place, we are to understand, that, there are none so ignorant of the ways of life, as
those, who have, wholly, applied themselves to the knowledge of books: this ignorance
of men and things, led the unthinking father, pleased with this prospect of good fortune,
in finding provision for his daughter, immediately, on his arrival, innocently, to con-
sent to the ruin of his child. Thus, do we, in an unguarded moment, lay the foun-
dation of endless misery; and, thus, commenced that series of disasters, that makes
up the several parts of this story (p. 3).
T h e signs o f Trusler's particular b r a n d o f m o r a l i z i n g are clear: the parson

fails t o p r o t e c t t h e girl b e c a u s e h e is " i g n o r a n t o f t h e ways o f life," " i n n o -
c e n t " a n d " u n t h i n k i n g , " r a t h e r t h a n m e r e l y self-serving.
H e is also " p l e a s e d w i t h this p r o s p e c t o f g o o d f o r t u n e . " A n o t h e r detail is
t h e p a p e r t h e p a r s o n is r e a d i n g a d d r e s s e d t o t h e " B i s h o p o f L o n d o n — ."
Trusler essentially translates Rouquet in his explanation that the parson has
come to London "in search of better fortune." But if Rouquet suggests that
the daughter merely accompanied a father who was seeking his own fortune,
Trusler indicates the parallel: "That this [searching for better fortune], also,
was her father's view, is evident from the letter of recommendation, whose
direction he is reading, addressed to some bishop in town." 8 Then, referring
to the parson's "extreme necessity," he moralizes in parenthesis: "(for such is
the misfortune of the clergy, that want seems attendant on their order)."
Trusler's weight always comes down on "the misfortune of the clergy" at the
hands of their backsliding flock. Hogarth's, on the other hand, always falls on
the self-regarding clergyman who ignores his flock — as seen most egregiously
in the clergyman in Plate 6, who ignores his duty in order to grope under the
skirt of the whore next to him, and summed up in the Anglican bishop in
Plate 2 who rewards Uzzah for saving the Ark of the Covenant with a stab in
the back.9
Lichtenberg (who also follows Rouquet in the identification of the clergy-
man as father) comments in a note on what he takes to be a joke Hogarth
played on Rouquet: "Since Roucquet [sic] knew Hogarth personally and Hog-
arth evidently knew that remark [Bemerkung, it is very probable that the mis-
chievous Englishman wantonly persuaded the credulous Frenchman to be-
lieve it." 10 This suggests how the "remark" about the clergyman as the girl's
8 Cf. Rouquet, Lettres, who mentioned that this ecclesiastic, on a white horse, has come to
seek his fortune in London. "He reads the address of a letter which is a recommendation
to a bishop. The poor condition of his horse, and of his general figure, indicates his pov-
erty" (p. 3).
9 Richardson's remark about his novel as preferable to the sermon preached from a pulpit
(cited above) is also apposite as a key to a way of thinking he shared with Hogarth but
which no longer registered on Trusler: He refers to the "general depravity, when even the
pulpit has lost a great part of its weight, and the clergy are considered as a body of interested
meri'\ it is against this that he employs the form of Pamela and Clarissa ("Postscript" to
Clarissa).
10 The Bemerkung is based on Rouquet's remark (p. 3), "Cet ecclésiastique monté sur un cheval
blanc, comme ils affectent ici de l'être" (this clergyman mounted on a white horse, which
they affect in this country). Lichtenberg assumes that Hogarth, while shading in the horse's
body to gray, told the credulous Rouquet it was white, and so corrects Rouquet's cheval blanc
with the German Schimmel·, "die englischen Geistlichen ritten gewöhnlich Schimmel," add-
ing his own words: "Also Schwär^ und Weiss" (i.e., a black-dressed clergyman on a white
horse). Schimmel is both white horse and mold; therefore a gray horse. If the witticism were
Hogarth's it might also explain the black-white checkerboard of the Bell Tavern sign. But it
is of course Lichtenberg's and perishes in translation. "Gray" is Herdan's translation of
Lichtenberg's Schimmel. Herdan, who evidendy did not check the quotation from Rouquet,
misplaces his quotation marks, suggesting that the second sentence ("Therefore black and
father may have originated. The witticism would have come from Hogarth:
presumably the jest that many prostitutes were (in, for example, Henry Field-
ing's words) "the Offspring of the clergy" or that "the greatest Part of the
London Prostitutes are the Daughters of Parsons." 11 Hogarth may have been
thinking specifically of Fielding's Rape upon Rape, his farce based (like the Har-
lot) on theCharteris case, performed and published in 1730 as Hogarth was
planning A Harlots Progress. Fielding has his heroine Hilaret - whom Justice
Squeezum mistakes for a whore — "humor this old villain" (as she puts it) by
parodying the stereotype of a whore: When she uses the word "neuter"
Squeezum responds, "Do you understand Latin, hussy?" - to which she
replies: "My father was a country parson, and gave all his children a good
education. He taught his daughters to write and read himself." She elaborates
on the stereotype of whore, claiming she has sixteen sisters "and all in the
same way of business." Squeezum concludes that literacy was what made
them all become prostitutes - i.e., learning to write taught them to aspire
above their station. (Trusler's idea was the contrary, that "knowledge of
books" left a clergyman's daughter ignorant of the world, susceptible to se-
duction.) As it happened, Hilaret says, a man of war harbored near their par-
sonage and "my poor sisters were ruined by the officers, and I fell a martyr to
the chaplain." 12
If Hogarth made this joke to Rouquet, he was only reflecting what is quite
clear in the six plates of the Harlot, the dual themes of the clergy's self-inter-
est and the aspiration (by parson, Harlot, her Jewish keeper) to higher social
status. For Hogarth (and his immediate audience) the address of the Bishop
of London specifically invoked Bishop Edmund Gibson, Sir Robert Walpole's
dispenser of ecclesiastical preferment, whose Pastoral better is being used by
the Harlot as a butter dish in Plate 3. Although Trusler might have inferred
that this is her comment on the man who failed to promote her father, in fact
he remarks:
Mr. Hogarth, has, here, taken an opportunity of shewing us the great degeneracy of the
age, in matters of religion, by laying on the table a piece of butter, wrapt up in the title-
page of a Pastoral Letter, which a great prelate, about that time, addressed to his
white") is Rouquet's also. Herdan transi., p. 5n.; Rouquet: Lettres, p. 3; Lichtenberg: Ausführ-
liche Erklärung, ed. Mautner, ρ. 79η.
11 Fielding: Covent-Garden Journal, no. 57, 1 Aug. 1752; and Jacobite's Journal, no. 32, 9July 1748
(see also no. 31).
12 Fielding: Rape upon Rape, act 2, sc. 5. Fielding: Works, ed. by Henley, vol. 9: pp. 100-102.
The detail is also significant for the question of Fielding's attitude toward the clergy prior to
his Champion essays defending them.
diocese [here Trusler inserts a note identifying the prelate as "Dr. Gibson, Bishop
of London"]·, many copies of which, had the misfortune to be sold, as waste paper:
such being the general wickedness of mankind, that every thing religious is held in dises-
teem. If any ludicrous or obscene publication should issue from the press, it is sure
to meet with an immediate and rapid sale; every man, who is master of a shilling,
is, instantly, a purchaser: but, on the contrary, an edition of any piece, tending to
correct the vices or follies of the age, lies in the shop, either unnoticed, or, dis-
regarded.13
Rouquet, with Hogarth at his side, had only noted with quiet irony that these
pastoral letters by a distinguished prelate found their way to grocers rather
than parishioners. Lichtenberg comments, closely following Rouquet: "It is
said that despite the address clearly written on them, they [the Pastoral Letters]
did not reach their destination until the grocers co-opted and undertook the
delivery" (p. 27). But for Trusler, Hogarth must perforce respect the clergy;
and so he reads the disrespect as part of the Harlot's sin — perhaps especially
after his interpretation of Plate 1, in which she repudiates her father/pastor.
Thus her repudiation of all clergymen. Even Lichtenberg finds it impossible
to believe that Hogarth could have ridiculed the clergy. Though describing
the groping clergyman of Plate 6, he acknowledges that Hogarth "has made
attacks on three occasions upon people in parsons' clothes" but never "at-
tacked the profession of clergyman as such" (p. 74).
Truster's most imaginative attempt to explain Rouquet's assertion about
the paternity of Hackabout is to connect hers with that of Tom Rakewell in A
Rake's Progress. While one series is aimed at the woman, the other is aimed at
the man - one is the victim, the other the susceptible corruptor, but the pa-
ternity hypothesis leads Trusler to emphasize both as offspring. He must
therefore distinguish between the good parson-father, whose virtuous training
was not enough to save the girl when a threat arose, and the miser-father,
"who is supposed to have hurt the principles of his son, in depriving him of
the necessary use of some of that gold, he had, with the greatest covetous-
ness, been hoarding, to no kind of purpose, in his coffers" (p. 17).
Hogarth's own coupling of old and young Rakewell in Plate 1 is merely
the materializing of a satiric topos drawn from Pope's Old and Young Cotta
in his Epistle to Batkurst, the family context does not emerge for Hogarth until
Marriage A-la-mode, and I suspect that Trusler is reading back from this series,
as he is also reading back from Richardson's exacdy contemporary novel
Clarissa, which makes the daughter's tragedy depend on her oppressive and
unfeeling family. But if Truster's first need is to find a pious explanation to
13 Trusler: Hogarth Moralised, p. 7.

cover Hogarth's impiety (or at least his contempt for the clergy), another is to
fill in between the scenes, or make what is clearly drama into a narrative, and
for him narrative is based on the central unit of the family that had been es-
tablished by this time in the works of Richardson, Fielding, and Goldsmith.
Thus it is important for the Harlot to have a father. 14
Between Plates 1 and 2 Trusler weaves, besides the story of father and
daughter, a story in which the procuress takes the girl into her house, treats
her as a friend, gradually corrupts her, and then, once she becomes "at last,
hardened in infamy," sells her to the Jew (p. 4). Colonel Charteris remains un-
explained. Although Rouquet had noted that the old lecher in the doorway
was a portrait from life, Trusler was apparently unaware of the Charteris
pamphlets which tell how he employed the bawd to hire young women just
arrived (and alone) in London as maids for his house, where he seduced or
raped them. Hogarth gives no explanation for the transitions from the bawd's
housemaid to Charteris's victim to the rich Jew's mistress in Plate 2. But con-
temporaries would not have read Charteris (as Trusler does) as an alternative
to the bawd, lurking in the shadows in case she is unsuccessful at attracting
the girl, but rather as the bawd's employer, and as himself symbolically a sur-
rogate for his patron Sir Robert Walpole (who had secured him a pardon after
his capital conviction for rape). Indeed, Hogarth and his immediate audience
also knew that there was a harlot named Kate Hackabout who was committed
by Justice Gonson and whose brother Francis was condemned when Char-
teris was condemned but was hanged when Charteris was pardoned. 15
The most striking aspect of Truster's narrativizing of the Harlot is the way
he internalizes the moral admonition in the Harlot's conscience. In Plate 4, in
prison, for example, he imagines that she is reflecting on her past life, her
"tender and affectionate parents," and decides to reform. With "this pious
resolution, her time of confinement expires," she is freed, but (because at the
time there was no Lock Hospital for reformed prostitutes in which she might
have been rehabilitated) she can only return "to her former course" and is
soon "eaten up with want and disease" — and so "she sinks into rottenness,
and, falls a martyr to prostitution" (p. 10).
Hogarth's context for his Harlot was the 1730s, the commodification of
life and culture symbolized by the prostitute, and the particular details and
political context of the Charteris rape trial. Thus Trusler replaces Hogarth's
symbolic figures, his historical referents, with a psychological version of char-
acter, which internalizes moral significance and seeks psychological and nar-
14 See Paulson: "Pilgrimage and Family" in Popular and Polite Art.

15 See Paulson: Hogarth, vo. 1, chap. 8.
rative consistency at the expense of symbolic (or we might say satiric) coher-
ence.
Lichtenberg's Hogarth commentaries were first published between 1784
and 1786 (revised and republished between 1794 and 1799). 16 The conven-
tional distinction between the commentaries of Trusler and Lichtenberg has
been roughly the difference between the moralist and the wit. In fact, Lich-
tenberg's Erklärung derived from a similar tradition of commentary being ap-
plied to the national literature and was the first work in Germany to apply
this commentary to graphic works. But more significant, I believe, was the
fact that Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy had been published between 1759
and 1767, and John Nichols's Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth had ap-
peared in 1781. Accordingly Lichtenberg begins his account of A Harlot's
Progress with the biographical facts of Hogarth's life surrounding the Harlot
and its publication. 17 For him Hogarth is always implicitly the protagonist of
his prints, making jokes or setting the reader puzzles to solve. If Trusler filled
in and elaborated Hogarth's scenes into a narrative, Lichtenberg prefers to
find an anomaly such as the discrepancy between the dresses Hackabout is
wearing in Plates 3 and 4, noting that there would have been no time for her
to change. He worries such details as a dog worries a bone, displaying the in-
tricacies of his own thought processes, expanding Hogarth's metaphors and
adding metaphors of his own.
This brings us to the subject of ekphrasis and its relationship to interpre-
tation. 18 Obviously any act of ekphrasis (whether a rendering of the art ob-
ject or a response to it) involves interpretation. But Hogarth, it is safe to say,
would have regarded rendering as less satisfactory than interpretation because
it would have subordinated the print to its re-creation. Lichtenberg manifestly
straddles these two modes. Although he seems to have had no interest in the
16 Lichtenberg got only as far as the Harlot and Rahe, The Times of the Day, Marriage A-la-mode,
Industry and Idleness, and a few of the single plates. See Burwick "The Hermeneutics of
Lichtenberg's Interpretation of Hogarth." Burwick draws attention to the influence of
David Hardey's associationism on Lichtenberg — which supplements and helps to explain
the influence of Sterne. He also distinguishes between Lichtenberg's Hogarthian discourses
in the version published in the Göttinger Taschenkalender of 1784 and in the Ausführliche Er-
klärung of thel 790s.
17 Gleaned presumably from Nichols's Biographical Anecdotes (from which he also learned the
facts of Col. Charteris and Mother Needham); more frequently, however, he cites John Ire-
land, whose speculative approach is closer to his own approach to Hogarth. For Ireland,
see below, note 37.
18 Cf., e.g., Carrier: "Ekphrasis and Interpretation" and the various studies of ekphrasis dis-
cussed by Wagner in the introduction to this volume.
ekphrastic mode as such, he does begin with the verbal representation — or

verbal equivalent - of Hogarth's prints invented by Sterne and utilizes this
model, applying it back directly to Hogarth's prints: there is no question that
he renders the pictures as he describes and analyses them - or rather renders
them as they appear in the reader's response. If Trusler's transformation of
Hogarth's prints into a narrative mode was a kind of ekphrastic move, Lich-
tenberg - aware of Lessing's distinctions in Laokoon — can be said to have re-
placed linear narrative with the circling spatial pattern made by the pursuing
eye and described in the Analysis·, the Hogarth print, he must have realized
(with the help of Sterne), refuted Lessing's premature burial of utpicturapoesis.
With the identification of the parson as the Harlot's father Lichtenberg
follows the same line as Trusler but prefers Rouquet's explanation for the
York Wagon in which she has arrived — that the prettiest girls came from
Yorkshire (which sounds like another remark of Hogarth's to his French
friend) - rather than Trusler's that Yorkshire was "far distant from the met-
ropolis, and, as such, supposed to be least acquainted with its intrigues."
While Trusler pointed out the analogy between the parson and his horse ("a
sorry broken-kneed and foundered animal, who [not like our high-fed beasts]
is, eagerly, catching at a mouthful of straw, in which some earthen vessels are
packed; and, so full is his master of the business he is upon, as to pay no at-
tention to the damage"), Lichtenberg interprets the "flower pots, dishes and
pans and what-not" being upset by the horse as about to shatter and indicates
the irony that the poor parson, dreaming about the profits derived from his
advancement in the church, will in fact have to pay for the depredations of
his horse (p. 7). While Lichtenberg notices the parallel between the falling
buckets and the "falling" girl, his emphasis is on the parson and his horse:
"here is another use of fragile goods — tumbling down, to the detriment of
the poor devil [the parson], which no bishopric will ever restore" (p. 14). Nei-
ther Trusler nor Lichtenberg - unwilling to recognize Hogarth's anticlerical
bias — notices the parallel between the horse and its rider, based on the self-
interest of both.
But Lichtenberg's elaboration takes off from a minute description of the
parson's clothing and his nag (5—6), which is not only Shandean in tone but
essentially turns the pair into Parson Yorick and his poor nag, described in the
first volume of Tristram Shandy. Following a long digression on wigs (taking
off from the parson's) and apostrophes to the parson and the girl ("Farewell
then, unhappy pair [...]"), Lichtenberg addresses the horse:
And you, faithful grey [.Schimmel], in whose side I discern, just behind your rider's
spur, a little spot of reality which has cost the artist but a slight pressure of his sty-
lus, but has cost you precious blood; believe me, the discovery has made me feel
for you three times more keenly. I was sorry to discover, so shordy before our
parting, this sign of conjunction between you and your master. But be comforted!
The similarity between the two of you is even greater than you imagine: he too all
his life long has carried just such a merciless rider as you have, and it would have
cost the artist more than a single stroke to depict the scars which the poor victim
covers here with the clerical Copri-miseria,19
Lichtenberg is recalling, a m o n g other things, Parson Yorick's metaphorically

battered h e a d ("'tis so bruised and mis-shapen'd w i t h the blows w h i c h *****
and ***** ; a n d s o m e others have so u n h a n d s o m e l y given m e in the dark, that
I m i g h t say with Sancho Pança, that should I recover, a n d 'Mitres thereupon be
suffer'd to rain d o w n f r o m heaven as thick as hail, not one of 'em w o u l d fit
i t ' " [vol. 1, chap. 12; p. 31]). Far f r o m criticizing the parson, in true S h a n d e a n
fashion h e sentimentalizes him.
L i c h t e n b e r g describes the Harlot by contrasting the stolidity of the "slow,
honest, g o o d and clumsy a n i m a l " of Plate 1 w i t h her mercuriality vis à vis her
J e w i s h keeper in Plate 2: "here, t h o u g h seated, is she not the living i m a g e of
mobility?" he asks:
In the whole face no line and no contrasting shadow, and yet how eloquent! 'See,
fellow, not so much do I care for you and your wretched plunder; a fig for it!', and
with a snap of her finger she indicates exacdy how much she thinks of the plun-
der. It is half a finger joint and a litde sound that she brings to his notice. The
right eye has something indescribably scornful. But the fellow has money and that
is an important item which the left eye clearly recognizes. The feint is, I think,
quite unmistakable. On her whole right wing, war is declared, while the left is at
peace, or at least, some admission is made there of guilt. On the right wing the
knee is raised at least a few hands above the line of modesty, and in an ugly way, so
that the tip of the foot is turned inwards; and the arm stretched out so that in the
Quart [a fencing term] she brings the snap of her fingers as close beneath the en-
emy's nose as if it were a pinch of snuff. 20
We could c o m p a r e this w i t h any n u m b e r of descriptions in Tristram Shandy,

but the first that w o u l d c o m e to m i n d is the o n e that H o g a r t h himself illus-
trated — Corporal T r i m reading the S e r m o n o n C o n s c i e n c e in B o o k 2, C h a p -
ter 17. T h e description is a p a g e and a half long, but the central part reads:
He stood, - - for I repeat it, to take the picture of him in at one view, with his
body sway'd, and somewhat bent forwards, - — his right-leg firm under him, sus-
19 Lichtenberg: The World of Hogarth, p. 8.

20 Ibid., pp. 16-18.
taining seven-eights of his whole weight, - - the foot of his left-leg, the defect of
which was no disadvantage to his attitude, advanced a little, - - not laterally, nor
forwards, but in a line betwixt them; — — his knee bent, but that not violently, — —
but so as to fall within the limits of the line of beauty [...] (pp. 121-22).
Of the erotic objects on the Harlot's wall in Plate 3, Trusler had said simply
that they "sufficiently explain themselves, to the more knowing part of man-
kind, which decency will not permit me to make such of my readers ac-
quainted with, as these pages are calculated to improve" (p. 7; though he does
blandly note the arms of the Harlot's profession in 6 as "three spiggots and
fossets," p. 12). Lichtenberg takes on "the broom of education — the birch,"
intended presumably for a customer who wishes to be flaggelated:
We have called it terrible, but merely in accordance with linguistic custom; for
these comets on the firmament of morals do just as little harm to that system as
those in the sky to the system of the physical world. Just as Newton has assumed
that the latter might perhaps with their tails fan an invigorating atmosphere into
the system, so it might not only be supposed but could be geometrically demon-
strated that the former actually sweep a great deal of evil out of the world with
theirs. 21
These sentences introduce a long convoluted digression which both reflects

the Shandean prurience in all matters sexual and implicates the pious
Trusler. 22 Here, Lichtenberg says, we have arrived at "the point where morals
themselves prohibit moralizing, and the most eloquent interpretation grows
dumb or at least pretends to be dumb and makes only signs to the passer-by,
or if it is ultimately compelled to speak, will say nothing more than Ί am
dumb'" (p. 30). Dumbness leads him to introduce a metaphor of eyesight —
of myopic or, referring to the Presbyterian perspective, "presbytopic" sight —
and to ask whether the broomstick/birch may serve as "a pair of spectacles -
for Presbyterians?"
To tell the truth, I am not quite sure myself; I only know this, that if it is such a
thing, it will not be worn on the nose [referring, no doubt, to the Shandean sense
of nose], I think I have done my duty now, in having commented on a ticklish pas-
sage in my author at such length that I do not understand myself any more, and
that is all an honest commentator can do. What, however, this locus lacks in clarifi-
cation, we promise our readers to make good tenfold in other places where it
21 Ibid., pp. 29-30.

22 Wagner would substitute a "semiotic" for a "Shandean" reading of Lichtenberg. See his es-
say, "How to (Mis)Read Hogarth or Ekphrasis Galore," in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and
Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (1994).
might not be half so necessary, and this again is all an honest commentator can
do23
Lichtenberg approaches Plate 4 (where Trusler internalized his moralizing in

the Harlot's psychology) with an elaborate metaphor of life as a slow fermen-
tation, as opposed to the speed with which some degenerate (the earl of
Rochester for example), and he finally concludes:
All this is really meant for you, poor Molly. Your fermentation too is going for-
ward very quickly. Barely twenty, and already nearing the end of the second stage,
whose progress that brewery scullion in the apron beside you there will have diffi-
culty in arresting. 24
The first person singular addresses are to the Harlot, not as a Pamela or Claris-
sa but as a Jenny or Widow Wadman, an Uncle Toby or Walter Shandy. The as-
pect of Hogarth that Lichtenberg builds upon is the wit as the untrammeled
eye moves from one detail to another within the print. He materializes the
thought process which Hogarth defined in The Analysis of Beauty (1753) as the
"pleasure of pursuit" within an "intricate" pattern, but for Lichtenberg medi-
ated by the verbal equivalents invented by Sterne a few years later. The Sternean
familiar address to his reader and his characters, the obsession with minute de-
tail and gesture, showed Lichtenberg how to reproduce in writing the percep-
tion which Hogarth intended for at least one type of reader, when he retro-
spectively aestheticized his earlier "modern moral subjects" in The Analysis?5
This is an epistemology of aposiopesis bordering on what we would now
call indeterminacy — though in the cases of both Hogarth and Sterne inde-
23 Ibid., p. 31. Of the medicine bottle on the window sill (which indicates the harlot's occupa-
tional disease) Lichtenberg is as coy as Trusler, but not in moralistic terms: "Good," he
says, "since it stands there it is our duty to let it stand. It rings a bell already and needs no
further interpretation" (p. 36). He also has fun with the "spiritual" and "worldly" (or grop-
ing) hand of the clergyman in Plate 6 (pp. 75-76) and the spiggot-faucet on the Harlot's fu-
neral escutcheon (p. 78).
24 Lichtenberg: The World of Hogarth, p.41.
25 As G. J. Barker-Benfield has noted of Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination": "the con-
scious target of The Spectator was the uncontrolled experience of pleasure. The authors con-
fronted what they saw as a new historical situation in which many people (above all,
readers) were pursuing pleasure for its own sake and doing so 'transiently,' skipping from
one source of pleasure to the next [...] An unprecedented number of people were extend-
ing their recognition of the potential for pleasure in the mere 'play' of their individual
minds": This is what Addison attempted to organize and hierarchize in "The Pleasures of
the Imagination" and what Hogarth, by eliding the distinctions of Beauty, Greatness, and
Novelty into Beauty, came to advocate in the Analysis. See Barker-Benfield: The Culture of
Sensibility, p. 62.
terminacy is only a pose. Certainly Hogarth's works o f the 1730s still adhered
to the irony o f Swift, Pope, and the early Fielding, and not to the more ex-
pansive "play" advocated in The Analysis and Tristram Shandy in the 1750s.
Irony, like allegory, involves two - not indeterminate - senses, as it implies
two audiences. A historical basis for Hogarth's two audiences existed in the
discourse o f Opposition politics, the exoteric and esoteric doctrines o f the
deists, and the lesser and greater mysteries o f the Freemasons, as well as the
irony o f Swift and Pope and the Renaissance concept o f the "general reader"
and the reader " o f greater penetration" (as expressed, for example, in The
Spectator). Irony was an early-eighteenth century mode, contemporary with
Hogarth but lost to the pious Trusler and complicated by Lichtenberg into
what has been called romantic irony (which replaces true and false meanings
with ambiguity).
As we have seen, far from being an ideal father from which Hackabout
has fallen away, the parson is another inadequate model offered her by society
— along a spectrum which runs from the bawd and Col. Charteris to repres-
entatives o f the judiciary, constabulary, penal system, and clergy. This would
have been quite evident to a contemporary familiar, for example, with Field-
ing's plays o f 1729-1732 or with the Charteris rape trial o f 1730 and with Op-
position politics.
Again, Trusler and Lichtenberg had not read (what Hogarth's original au-
dience would have read) the story o f Mary Muffet, "a woman o f great note in
the hundreds o f Drury, who about a fortnight ago was committed to hard la-
bor in Tothill-fields Bridewell [...] she is now beating hemp in a gown very
richly laced with silver [...] to her no small mortification [...]." 26 Writing o f
Plate 4, Trusler believes the warden's "wife" is stealing the Harlot's handker-
chief and "casting at the same time a wishful look upon her lappets" (p. 8). In
fact, as Lichtenberg sees, the warden's wife is pointing to the Harlot's bow
and lace collar, deriding the impropriety o f her fancy dress. 27 But, after much
witty speculation and elaboration over the question o f why her dress in 4 is
different from the one in 3, he supposes that either 4 shows a second arrest
and imprisonment, or that she has dressed up for her appearance before a
magistrate, hoping to sway his judgment (pp. 42-43). He reads the detail on
the level o f narrative verisimilitude rather than - as Hogarth meant it — of
26 Grub-street Journal, 24 September 1730; Paulson: Hogarth, vol. 1, pp. 2 5 0 - 5 1 .

27 For some reason Trusler interprets the Harlot's servant — the one sympathetic figure in the
series — as bad: he believes it is she who is deriding the Harlot, while in the next plate,
which he reads as criticism o f all the characters except the child, who is sensibly cooking
meat for his supper, he ignores the servant's protective gesture.
symbolism: that the dress symbolizes (or emblematizes) her pretension. In-
stead he displaces the theme to her servant, reading the servant's "fancy
stockings" and "embroidered shoes" as "the acquired property of the woman
who, in order to impress town and Court had, in the appearance of her legs at
least, to try to imitate them" (p. 50) , 28
In short, if we wish to find a more accurate interpretation of Hogarth's
Harlot's Progress - or at least one closer to Hogarth's own intention and the re-
sponse of his original audience - than is offered by Trusler or Lichtenberg (or
even by Hogarth himself twenty years later in the Analysis of Beauty), we must
return to the time before he made and published these prints, to his own
verbal models and sources.
In a discursive context parallel to Trusler's and Lichtenberg's, we could cite
The Tatler and The Spectator, which provided the Harlot with the pathos of pros-
titutes and — an example that illuminates the Harlot — the Rake's Progress with
its particular sense of "rake." 29 While Trusler believes that the Rake is a
"worldling" and Hogarth's object is to attempt his reformation (as with the
young woman who became a whore) by "stopping him, as it were, in his ca-
reer, and, opening to his view, the many doleful calamities awaiting the pro-
secution of his proposed scheme of life" (p. 17), Lichtenberg sees "rake" as
representing a sort of lyrical "good-for-nothingness," by which he means a
passionate temper. He distinguishes "the true Rake" who drinks, gambles,
and whores but may reform, from the "out-and-out good-for-nothing [who]
has no conception of honour at all" (p. 190). Lichtenberg is moving intuit-
ively toward Hogarth's sense of his Rake, but he is still too far from the social
nexus in which Hogarth created him.
Hogarth's own source was probably Richard Steele's Tatler No. 27 (11 June
1709), which he could have read on its first publication but more likely in one
of the collected editions. 30 A rake, Steele argues,
28 Trusler identifies a general theme of affectation in his analysis of Harlot, Plate 6, which he
calls the annex to the tragedy, in "the folly of mankind, in making expensive funerals, par-
ticularly, of those, who cannot afford it; but, such," he adds, "is the general pride of the
world, as to be, always, aiming at something above them; the poor apeing, as it were, the
vanities of the rich" (p. 12). His evidence is one whore viewing another "tricking herself out
before the glass." He generalizes the aping, as is his custom, not as affectation but as bibli-
cal Vanitas.
29 See Hogarth, vol. 1, pp. 238-39. For contemporary senses of "rake," see Barker-Benfield:
The Culture, pp. 38-51.
30 When I wrote Hogarth I put the burden on The Spectator and ignored The Tatler, but it
should be noted that, whether or not he (or his father) read it during the years in the Fleet,
he would have found here the Spectator assumptions a few years earlier - and largely laid out
is a poor unweildy Wretch, that commits Faults out of the Redundance of his
good Qualities. His Pity and Compassion makes him sometimes a Bubble to his
Fellows, let 'em be never so much below him in Understanding. His desires run
away with him through the Strength and force of a lively Imagination, which
hurries him on to unlawful Pleasures, before Reason has Power to come in to his
Rescue (1: 206).
This is, of course, Steele sentimentalizing a figure many of whose qualities he

shared. But if he sympathizes with the rake himself, he turns his satire on the
rake's "Mimicks and Imitators":
How ought Men of Sense to be careful of their Actions, if it were meerly from the
Indignation of seeing themselves ill drawn by such litde Pretenders? Not to say, he
that leads, is guilty of all the Actions of his Followers: And a Rake has Imitators
whom you would never expect should prove so (p. 207).
He goes on to attack "second-hand Vice" and "the Fatality (under which

most Men labour) of desiring to be what they are not," which "makes 'em go
out of a Method in which they might be receiv'd with Applause, and would
certainly excel, into one, wherein they will all their Life have the Air of Stran-
gers to what they aim at." (Hogarth sets up the theatrical metaphor for the
Rake in its subscription ticket, The Laughing [or Pleased] Audience, and the pen-
dant, Southwark Fair)
Steele writes on the general theme of imitation in Tatler No. 63, which,
while dismissing satire as a responsible literary mode, admits that ridicule can
still serve "to bring Pretenders and Imposters in Society to a true Light," if
the central characters are exemplary. Steele puts the literary theory he
presents in the Tatler (essentially dramatic theory) into practice in his comedy
The Conscious Lovers (1722). The secondary characters are "mimicks and imit-
ators": on the bourgeois level Mrs. Sealand trying to act like a lady and
among the servants Tom and Phillis talking like gentle folk. John Gay em-
ploys this sort of comedy in The Beggar's Opera but he moves these figures to
the center (though they remain essentially servant types like Tom and Phillis).
Fielding, in his Champion essay on Hogarth of 10 June 1740, gives the Rake
this reading (he probably knew Steele's essay as well as Hogarth did), and in
his preface to Joseph Andrews (1742) he describes the essence of the ridicu-
lous as affectation, essentially a matter of assuming inappropriate roles,
which complicates even the central characters of Joseph and Adams, though,
by ThornhiU's friend Steele (it is also possible to imagine him directed to read these Tatlers
by Thornhill in the 1720s).
following Steele, it is most blatantly evident in Lady Booby, Slipslop, and the
minor characters. 31
I have read a great deal in the last few years about the discourse of civic
humanism, on which the genre of history painting was supposedly based,
and have noticed that there is never a mention of Hogarth. Recently Linda
Colley, in Britons: Forging the Nation, has claimed that The March to Finchlej is
patriotic propaganda of the Forty-Five ("a profoundly patriotic image"),
though its case would have been more cogent if the print had been pub-
lished in 1745 rather than in 1750, when the king himself took it as an anti-
Hanoverian print. 32
Reynolds, in his third Discourse, placed Hogarth in one of "the various de-
partments of painting, which do not presume to make such high preten-
sions" as history painting — Hogarth is one of the "painters who have ap-
plied themselves more particularly to low and vulgar characters, and who ex-
press with precision the various shades of passion, as they are exhibited by
vulgar minds." 33 The third Discourse was delivered in 1770, just two years af-
ter Truster's Hogarth Moralised. Later, in his mellower fourteenth Discourse
(1788), Reynolds singled out Gainsborough and Hogarth as two painters of
genius in their own ways but in the case of Hogarth committing the error of
attempting history painting without the study and effort he had put into
(Reynolds now calls it) his "new species of dramatick painting, in which
probably he will never be equalled" (p. 254). It is instructive to see Reynolds
praising Hogarth and Gainsborough, who in fact, despite their different
genres, participated in a counter-discourse to the one Reynolds preached in
his annual discourses.
Rouquet had distinguished Hogarth's work from history painting in much
the way Reynolds did, though privileging the new mode over the old, ar-
31 Trusler sees the spectrum of "fashions" exhibited in Rake Plate 2 as a general satire on
fashion - one stage in Rakewell's descent into excess - and not as thematic parallels to his
own fashionable role of rake — and accordingly he singles out the "bravo" as a villain for
hire, as further illustrating a character "who [with such figures around him] indulges himself
in every species of profusion" (p. 22). Although he comments several times on the dra-
matic-novelistic nature of the series, only once does Lichtenberg sense the role-playing that
is everywhere evident in the theatrical metaphor of the Rake's Progress·. Rakewell plunges
into all "the fashionable excesses, and, enters, with spirit, into the character he assumes" (p.
21).
32 See Colley: Britons, pp. 44-^-6; Paulson: Hogarth, vol. 2, p. 368. Rouquet's reading, written
close to Hogarth himself, focused first on the disorderly troops - free Englishmen vs. the
enchained Frenchmen they are preparing to defend their country against - and then on the
handsome grenadier ("de bonne mine") who is the central figure of the main group (p. 3).
33 Reynolds: Discourses, ed. by Wark, p. 51.
guably outmoded one: "The first and greatest fault I find in Mr. Hogarth's
painting," he writes ironically, "is that it is totally new [neuf], and it corres-
ponds too closely to the objects it represents."34 It has the freshness of na-
ture, not the darkness of old master paintings. Trusler, the second comment-
ator, writing for Jane Hogarth, makes no attempt to assimilate him to the
tradition that Reynolds represented, whether we call it civic humanist or sim-
ply academic. At this point in the 1760s these categories did not seem rel-
evant - Trusler was defending Hogarth's works against the charge of impiety
or false wit. But it seems significant that in the first year of the Royal Acad-
emy, that bastion of civic humanism, Trusler reveals none of the sense of
counter-discourse that was evident in Rouquet's commentary - as in Hog-
arth's own programmatic subscription tickets and the contemporary refer-
ences of Fielding, Thornton, Sterne, and others.
One inference I draw is that by the 1760s Hogarth's works were assimil-
ated to a category which, while it originated as a revisionary discourse of
civic humanism and history painting, had come to represent so standard if
not normative a genre that its defenders found no need to contest what in
literary terms was an outmoded discourse which only survived in the writ-
ings of professional painters who wished to appear to be liberal artists.
A symptomatic text (and another of those commentaries I mentioned at
the outset) was Charlotte Lennox's Shakespeare Illustrated of 1753, which was
significantly heralded in its subtitle "by the author of the Female Quixote" (a
novel commended by Fielding). Lennox repeatedly cites as the sources of
Shakespeare's plays "novels and histories."35 Her use of the word "novel" is
itself significant at this time because she uses it to designate narratives in
prose in the context of Shakespeare's poetic and dramatic forms - and be-
cause her tendency is to elevate those at the expense of the poetry and
drama. Though the "novels" she invokes were genetically short romances,
she interprets them as if they were the "novel" of Richardson and Fielding,
stressing the "probable" unfolding of plot and delineation of character.
The other side of the argument was also represented in Shakespeare Illus-
trated - by Samuel Johnson's bizarre dedication, which minimizes Lennox's
critical terms and their significance. This is the result of Johnson's own civic
34 Rouquet: Description du tableau [...] Finchley, p. 2.

35 The Gentleman's Magazine review oí Shakespeare Illustrated (23 [1753]: 250) categorized it un-
der "entertainment" (vs. divinity, morality, history, poetry, etc.), which would have included
novels. I want to thank Jonathan Brody Kramnick for drawing my attention to the example
of Shakespeare Illustrated in his essay "Reading Shakespeare's Novels: Literary History and
Cultural Politics in the Lennox-Johnson Debate." Modern Language Quarterly 55 (1994):
429-53.
humanist position - he refers to "the diminution of the honours of that na-

tion" which will be lost if Shakespeare's plays are reduced to "naked plot or
story," "a story probable, or unlikely," and shows his impatience with Len-
nox's narrowing of Shakespeare to the terms o f narrative and "novel" (cf. his
own Rambler No. 4 of three years before). "Shakespeare's excellence," John-
son concludes, "is not the fiction of a tale, but the representation of life." 36
But Johnson means by "the representation of Life" the absence of narrative
particularity and existential contingencies (those disfiguring accidents he re-
ferred to at the end o f Reynolds's Idler No. 82 on Hogarth).
As the arguments of Lennox and Johnson suggest, there were two views
of the novel: as a feminine and middle-class form, based on the Richardso-
nian novel, and as a masculine form associated with high cultural genres,
centered (as Hogarth clearly indicated in his works) on the models of Milton
and Shakespeare, Pope and Swift, based on the arguments and practice of
Hogarth and Fielding (and including Rouquet's reference to the "new"). The
first is the Trusler mode, the second closer to Lichtenberg's.37 But, as we
have seen, the Lichtenberg discourse draws on another element, which is
closer to Hogarth's schemata in The Analysis of Beauty, centered on aesthetic
considerations, a certain kind of reading, perception, and mental play. What
we note in both cases is the destabilizing effect of the novel form — evident
in Hogarth's own work but also, surprisingly, in Trusler's "moralizing" Hog-
arth and less surprisingly in Lichtenberg's Shandean Hogarth.
In a general way I am suggesting two things: that the most accurate read-
ing of a work by Hogarth may be found in its sources; but also that I take
the above evidence to suggest that while both Trusler and Lichtenberg were
36 Shakespeare Illustrated, pp. vii, xi. Shakespeare, Johnson writes, "lived in an age when the
books o f Chivalry were yet popular, and when therefore the minds o f his auditors were not
accustomed to balance probabiliües, or to examine nicely the proportion between causes and
effects" (pp. viii-ix).
37 J o h n Ireland, writing after Johnson's Shakespeare, sees Hogarth as an artist who " t o o k Na-
ture for his guide, and gained the summit." He starts his account o f the Harlot with the
context o f history painters and, taking his cue from its subscription, sees it as a moderniz-
ing, naturalizing, even "biographizing" o f that genre whose aim "has been to emblazon
some signal exploit o f an exalted and distinguished character" (ed. 1884, p. 60). T h e only
literary source he mentions, however, is George Lillo. And his interpretation is still that the
Harlot's "variety of wretchedness, forms such a picture o f the way in which vice rewards her
votaries, as ought to warn the young and inexperienced from entering this path o f infamy"
(ibid.). - Hackabout now "may possibly be daughter to the poor old clergyman," and Ire-
land explains him as a "good, easy man, unsuspicious as Fielding's parson Adams" (p. 61).
His retelling is at least as novelistic as Trusler's but now along the line o f Fielding's Joseph
Andrews via Amelia.
assimilating Hogarth's dramatic structure to a narrativistic one - indeed, a

novelistic one - Hogarth's own model was closer to the combination of
genres joined in the plays of Steele, Gay, and Fielding.38 Hogarth's contem-
poraries had initially transferred his tableaux back to the stage, and Fielding
noted in a Champion essay of 1740 that Hogarth, "one of the most useful
Satyrists any Age hath produced," has created a sort of play:
In his excellent Works you see the delusive Scene exposed with all the Force of
humour, and, on casting your Eyes on another Picture, you behold the dreadful
and fatal consequence.
I acknowledge the seeming inconsistency that I have argued (in a chapter in

Hogarth, vol. 2, called "Hogarth and the Rise of the Novel") that Hogarth's
Harlot and Rahe projected and contributed to the Richardson-Fielding novels,
while now I argue that these same works are distorted by being novelized by
their commentators of the 1760s-80s: but both statements are true if we dis-
tinguish between what these works meant to Hogarth and to their immediate
audience, which was only partly what they meant to Richardson and Fielding,
and what they meant to Trusler and Lichtenberg after the mediation of the
Richardson-Fielding-Sterne novels of the 1740s and 1750s.39 Basically Hog-
arth remained a "dramatic" artist, to Reynolds as well as to Fielding, and in-
deed to himself (to judge by his final autobiographical writings).40
This conclusion does not necessarily lead us to argue that we must talk
about Hogarth's prints in the discourse of dramatic theory — though it is clear
that Hogarth utilizes the innovatory arguments that had been set forth by
George Farquhar as well those of Steele, Gay, and Fielding. But I do mean to
suggest that one important dimension of Hogarth's work is lost to both
Trusler and Lichtenberg because they are, by the time they write, seeing his
work of the 1730s through the eyes of Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne.41
The latter are of value because they draw our attention to the proto-novelistic
elements, the novelistic potential we might say, of works that were initially
38 To judge by their connections with Don Quixote, however, both Hogarth and Fielding in
their major characters focus on a particular kind of affectation associated with - derived
from — Quixotic reading and self-delusion.
39 See Paulson: Hogarth, vol. 2, Chap. 8.
40 See Autobiographical Notes, pp. 209-11,214-15; and Paulson: Hogarth, vol.3, pp. 418-20.
41 Obviously, as Burwick's research shows, Lichtenberg was seeing Hogarth's work through a
more complicated network of eyes than Sterne's alone; but from the English perspective,
which is that of this essay, Sterne was the one that mattered. As Wagner nodces, Lichten-
berg compares his re-creation in words to a play as well as a novel. See Wagner: "How to
(Mis)Read Hogarth," p.105.
conceived in dramatic terms. The fact that Rouquet wrote in 1747, not in the
1730s - indeed following the publication of Joseph Andrews - is reflected in
the evidence that he was already beginning - or we might say that Hogarth
himself was beginning — the process of novelizing, for example in Marriage A-
la-mode, a work much closer to the mode of Trusler and Lichtenberg. 42 By
"novelizing" we mean that he develops the potential seen by Fielding and ex-
panded in Joseph Andrews, for example the opening of genealogical, filiating,
biographical perspectives, as well as the replacement of emblematic with psy-
chological implications.
But our examples have also shown that there is a great divide between
Hogarth's questioning of social forms read in the context of the 1720s-30s
and read in the context of the second half of the century when these social
forms were relatively assimilated. Indeed, they show that the process of ren-
dering society "polite" begun by Addison (and analyzed and critiqued by his
near-contemporary Hogarth) has now been internalized and Hogarth himself
domesticated in this particular way (which includes but is not limited to
"moralizing"). In contrasting the Trusler-Lichtenberg "readings" with what
can be discerned of Hogarth's own, we have in effect distinguished between
the responses of the spectators at a play and the readers of a novel - between
a situation that is public, dialogical, and oppositional and one that is private,
monological, and internalizing.
42 As Peter Wagner points out, Rouquet, in several instances, compares his explication to a
"roman," which (as in Roman comique or Roman bourgeois) was roughly equivalent to what
Fielding was writing (Wagner: "How to (Mis)Read Hogarth," p. 104).
O T T M A R ETTE
Katholische Universität Eichstätt
La mise en scène de la table de travail:

poétologie et épistémologie immanentes chez
Guillaume-Thomas Raynal et Alexander von Humboldt
Abstract: The major works of Guillaume-Thomas Raynal and Alexander von Hum-
boldt were published with portraits of the authors. Examining some of these
graven and painted images, this article inquires into the nature of visual representa-
tion and its proximity to both inscription and description. Mingling linguistic and
iconic elements, the portraits are prime examples of intermedial iconotexts claim-
ing presence, authority and importance while showing fictive representations. For
both authors, the depiction of the authorial gaze plays an important part in this
process. The iconography of the portraits exhibits ideas and concepts shaping
contemporary scientific writing and portraiture as the act of writing is caught in an
iconic pregnant moment. The place of work, the table, is staged as it were in visual
renderings that involve author and painter/engraver but also the spectator/ reader.
Writing and representing become acts of recognition for the authors and their au-
dience.
L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des européens

dans les deux Indes, publiée par Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713—1796), et
l'œuvre américaniste d'Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) sont les ouvra-
ges européens qui ont certainement formé, précisé et transformé le plus la
conception de l'expansion coloniale de l'ancien monde et la vision qu'on se
faisait du nouveau monde aux XVIIIe et XIX siècles. Si l'ouvrage de Raynal a
remporté un des succès les plus éclatants auprès du public français de la se-
conde moitié du XVIIIe siècle - égalant ceux du Candide de Voltaire et de La
Nouvelle Héloïse de Rousseau1 - , elle fut éclipsée dans le domaine américaniste
par les écrits de Humboldt qui inaugurent la vision moderne du continent
américain qu'on se faisait non seulement en Europe mais aussi en Amérique.
1 Voir sur ce point Lüsebrink: "Die 'Geschichte beider Indien' - ein verdrängter Best-seller,"
in Raynal et Diderot: Die Geschichte beider Indien, ed. Lüsebrink, p. 329.
Les Tableaux de la nature ou le Cosmos de Humboldt tout comme l'Histoire

des deux Indes de Raynal devinrent donc, comme de récents travaux viennent de
le démontrer 2 , des best-sellers non seulement en Europe mais des deux côtés
de l'Atlantique. Si l'œuvre du naturaliste et géographe prussien fera oublier
celle de son illustre prédécesseur, elle sera à son tour éclipsée par l'œuvre et la
pensée darwiniennes, dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle3. Ainsi, les écrits
de Raynal et de Humboldt, après une phase de célébrité, tombèrent auprès du
grand public dans un oubli presque total, évidemment plus long et plus pro-
fond du côté de l'écrivain français. Si certains spécialistes n'ont pas cessé de
fréquenter les écrits publiés par ces deux hommes, on sera forcé néanmoins
de parler de 'redécouverte' en constatant l'intérêt renouvelé pour Alexander
von Humboldt à partir des années 50 et, en partie plus tard encore, pour
l'Histoire des deux Indes de Guillaume-Thomas Raynal. Depuis les travaux de
Hanno Beck, de Kurt-R. Biermann et de Charles Minguet4 d'un côté et de
Hans Wölpe, Herbert Dieckmann et Michèle Duchet 5 de l'autre - pour ne
nommer que quelques-uns des spécialistes pionniers —, nous avons pris con-
naissance d'aspects importants concernant la génèse, le fonctionnement tex-
tuel ou la signification historique des œuvres humboldtiennes et raynaliennes.
Nous en savons peu cependant sur les relations entre les textes des deux au-
teurs et les images ou illustrations qui accompagnent ces œuvres. La présente
étude essayera de mettre en lumière l'importance de ces relations.
Evidemment, il ne s'agira pas d'illustrer, dans le cadre restreint d'une telle
étude, la complexité des relations intermédiales dans les différentes éditions
du Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, des Tableaux de la Na-
2 Cf. Bancarel: "L'Histoire des deux Indes. Un best-seller du Siècle des Lumières," pp.
54—57, et Ventura: "Lectures de Raynal en Amérique latine aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles."
Liisebrink et Tietz, eds.: Lectures de Raynal. U'Histoire des deux Indes' en Europe et en
Amérique au XVIIIe siècle, pp. 341—359. L'immense succès des œuvres humboldtiennes n'est
pas seulement souligné par bon nombres d'études publiées en Amérique latine (et dont
nous nous contenterons ici de ne mentionner que le domaine mexicain: Miranda: Humboldt
y Mexico); de la présence de Humboldt sur le continent américain témoignent aussi les nom-
breux lieux géographiques, rivières, montagnes ou courants maritimes qui portent son nom.
3 Cf. Gould: "Church, Humboldt and Darwin: The Tension and Harmony of Art and Scien-
ce." Kelly et al., eds.: Frederic Edwin Church, pp. 94-107.
4 Voir, par exemple, Beck: Alexander von Humboldt, 2 vols.; Biermann: Alexander von Hum-
boldt, et Minguet: Alexandre de Humboldt. Evidemment, parmi bien d'autres, nous devrions
au moins mentionner encore les essais biographiques de Helmut de Terra ou Adolf Meyer-
Abich.
5 Cf. Wölpe: Raynal et sa machine de guerre-, Dieckmann: "Les contributions de Diderot à la
'Correspondance littéraire' et à l"Histoire des Deux Indes'," et Duchet: Diderot et l'Histoire
des Deux Indes ou lEcriture Fragmentaire.
Ette: La mise en scène de la table de travail: Raynal et Humboldt 177
ture ou des Vues des Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples Indigènes de l'Amérique, ou
d'analyser les illustrations des nombreuses éditions de l'Histoire des deux Indes
dont le chiffre, selon les recherches aussi précieuses que précises de Gilles
Bancarel, surpasse déjà les 150 dans le seul domaine des éditions publiées en
français au cours des cinquante années suivant la première publication. 6 Nous
essaierons plutôt de nous limiter à la représentation de ce que Michel Fou-
cault, dans un petit texte devenu célèbre, a appelé la 'fonction d'auteur'. 7
Nous allons donc focaliser notre étude sur la question de savoir comment
Raynal et Humboldt ont essayé de concrétiser et de transmettre, de façon pa-
ratextuelle, leur propre image pour donner forme à celle que les lecteurs con-
temporains et futurs de leurs textes devaient se faire d'un Guillaume-Thomas
Raynal ou d'un Alexander von Humboldt. Question simple, à première vue,
mais qui nous mènera loin dans l'analyse des relations entre texte scriptural et
texte iconique, entre structures narratives et réalisations iconographiques, et
entre fondements épistémologiques et mise en scène de l'auteur représenté en
plein travail: celui de l'écriture.
* * *
La première édition de l'Histoire des deux Indes, publiée en 1770, ne comportait

pas encore d'illustrations. Imprimée probablement en Hollande et indiquant
une fausse adresse à Amsterdam, elle ne découvrait point le nom de son au-
teur. Etant donné le caractère subversif de bon nombre de passages contenus
dans les six volumes de cette première édition, cela ne pouvait surprendre
personne. Aussi certains contemporains comprenaient-ils fort bien ce jeu de
cache-cache. Ainsi, la correspondance de La Harpe nous signale bien, en 1774
au sujet de cette œuvre publiée sous l'anonymat "qu'il serait encore plus hardi
de l'avouer que de l'avoir fait." 8 En effet, l'ouvrage était devenu la cible de
premières interdictions et persécutions dès 1772, mesures officielles qui — en
attestant (par leur insistance et les citations de l'œuvre présentées dans certai-
nes attaques) 'officiellement' l'esprit subversif de cette œuvre sur l'expansion
coloniale - en augmentaient et renforçaient considérablement la renommée et
l'impact auprès du public français.
Pour ceux qui fréquentaient les salons parisiens ou se tenaient au courant
des informations publiées dans la presse manuscrite de l'époque, c'est-à-dire
6 Cf. Bancarel: '"L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce

des européens dans les deux Indes' de Guillaume-Thomas Raynal et ses multiples éditions."
7 Cf. Foucault: "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?"
8 Cité d'après Bancarel: "L'Histoire des deux Indes," p. 55.
dans les correspondances littéraires ou les 'nouvelles à la main', 9 l'anonymat

était loin d'être absolu. L'abbé Raynal ne cachait guère le fait qu'il était bien
l'auteur de l'ouvrage incriminé. Dans le contexte d'une publicité croissante
accélérée encore par les interdictions officielles, il n'est point surprenant de
trouver non seulement des informations sur l'auteur de Y Histoire des deux Indes
dans la presse manuscrite mais même, dès 1772, dans le Journal littéraire de Ber-
lin qui attribuait l'œuvre à un certain " M . l'Abbé R * * * . " Pour les initiés, l'allu-
sion ne pouvait pas être plus claire dans un périodique "contrôlé par l'A-
cadémie de Prusse" 1 0 dont Raynal était un des membres officiels depuis 1750.
Commence alors un jeu littéraire dont les implications esthétiques ou
poétologiques ouvriront bien des perspectives sur l'ensemble de cette œuvre
fascinante et à facettes multiples. La seconde édition de l'Histoire des deux In-
des, publiée à La Haye en 1774, comportera pour la première fois un certain
nombre de gravures 11 dont la première, en frontispice, nous intéressera tout
particulièrement (fig. 13). Car si la page de titre de cette édition n'indique tou-
jours pas de nom d'auteur, le portrait en frontispice satisfait à la curiosité du
public lecteur. On trouvait là en médaillon un portrait de Raynal vu du profil
droit, une inscription précisant le nom de "G. M C T.MAS RAYNAL" et son appar-
tenance à la "Société Royale de Londres et de l'Académie / des Sciences et
Belles-Lettres de Prusse" - justement cette Académie dont le Journal littéraire
avait signalé cet abbé comme auteur de l'œuvre qui nous occupe. Si l'inscrip-
tion sous le portrait ne mentionne pas sa condition d'abbé, le langage vesti-
mentaire ne laisse subsister nul doute sur ce point: Raynal est bien en cos-
tume ecclésiastique, et il affiche ce que l'on pourrait appeler un "visage apai-
sant empreint de bonhomie." 1 2
L'anonymat (relatif, comme nous l'avons vu) est donc levé sans que le
nom de l'auteur figure sur la page de titre. Ce n'est que le début d'un jeu
complexe entre les différentes parties scripturales et non-scripturales du
9 Cf. les remarques contenues dans la correspondance de La Harpe ainsi que Guénot: " L a
réception de T'Histoire des deux Indes' dans la presse d'expression française (1772-1781)."
Liisebrink et Tietz, eds.: Lectures de Raynal, pp. 67—84.
10 Ibid., p. 72.
11 Dans sa communication lors du colloque international sur Raynal à Passau, en juillet 1992,
Lise Andries a récemment analysé les illustrations dans ΓHistoire des deux Indes. Ce travail
basé sur quelques 15 éditions, échantillon représentatif mais néanmoins limité vu le chiffre
des éditions françaises de cette œuvre, démontre bien l'importance d'une étude approfon-
die des relations qui existent entre le texte et ses 'illustrations'. La publication des actes de
ce congrès, édités par Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink et Anthony Strugnell, est programmé pour
1994 dans la série 'The Voltaire Foundation'.
12 Bancarel: " G . Thomas Raynal. De la séduction à la sévérité," p. 480.
E t t e : La mise en scène de la table de travail: Raynal et H u m b o l d t 179
13. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal: L'Histoire philosophique et politique ...

Frontispice de la seconde édition. 6 volumes in 8°, La Haye, 1774.
paratexte 13 et la structuration sémiotique de l'Histoire des deux Indes. Un jeu

subtil qui implique bien les conventions ¿œnologiques de l'époque: aussi le
dessinateur choisi pour brosser ce portrait comptait-il parmi les artistes les
plus célèbres et recherchés de son temps. Le nom de Charles Nicolas Cochin
(1715-1790), figurant sur le frontispice où se trouvait indiqué aussi le nom du
graveur, était bien capable de souligner l'importance de la personne repré-
sentée. En suivant les conventions relatives au frontispice - parmi lesquelles 14
nous ne mentionnerons ici que la relation identificatrice entre l'image de la
personne représentée et la légende ou inscription qui en indiquent le nom et
(dans ce cas) les titres académiques 15 - , l'entrée de ce livre transférait une plus
grande authenticité et légitimité à l'œuvre entière. Ainsi commence un procès
à'auteurisation que nous allons analyser dans la structuration globale de YHis-
toire des deux Indes.
Ce premier frontispice, datant de 1773, a connu depuis la seconde édition
de l'œuvre publiée à La Haye en 1774, plusieurs variantes basées sur les
dessins de Cochin, présentant le profil droit ou le profil gauche de notre au-
teur. Le regard du personnage dessiné se dirige donc à droite (sur la page de
titre) ou à gauche (voir fig. 14), mais jamais sur le lecteur. Ceci ne changera
qu'avec la troisième édition de l'Histoire des deux Indes, publiée en 1780 à
Genève dans une édition de luxe en quatre volumes in 4 . Et c'est là que nous
trouvons enfin l'auteur dans son cabinet de travail, plume à la main (fig. 15).
Et cet auteur regarde le lecteur. Le lecteur, regardant à son tour T'auteur',
trouvera dans cette gravure bien des différences par rapport au frontispice de
la seconde édition de YHistoire des deux Indes. Evidemment, ce regard du
13 Pour la définition de ce concept, voir Genette: Seuils; nous y reviendrons dans la partie fina-
le de la présente étude.
14 La séparation entre dessinateur et graveur était devenue chose commune au cours du XVII-
Ie siècle; voir à ce sujet Wagner: Lust & Liebe im Rokoko. Lust & Love in the Rococo Period,
p. 12. En Europe, les artistes français comptaient parmi les illustrateurs de livres les plus re-
cherchés au XVIIIe siècle.
15 Dans un contexte plus vaste, il serait possible de parler d'une fonction d'ancrage dans le
sens proposé par Roland Barthes: "le texte dirige le lecteur entre les signifiés de l'image, lui
en fait éviter certains et en recevoir d'autres; à travers un dispatching souvent subtil, il le
téléguide vers un sens choisi à l'avance. Dans tous ces cas d'ancrage, le langage a évidem-
ment une fonction d'élucidation, mais cette élucidation est sélective; il s'agit d'un méta-lan-
gage appliqué non à la totalité du message iconique, mais seulement à certains de ses signes;
le texte est vraiment le droit de regard du créateur (et donc de la société) sur l'image:
L'ancrage est un contrôle, il dédent une responsabilité, face à la puissance projective des fi-
gures, sur l'usage du message; par rapport à la liberté des signifiés de l'image, le texte a une
valeur répressive, et l'on comprend que ce soit à son niveau que s'investissent surtout la mo-
rale et l'idéologie d'une société." Barthes: "Rhétorique de l'image." Barthes: L'obvie et l'ob-
tus, p. 32.
Ette: La mise en scène de la table de travail: Raynal et Humboldt
181

Frontispice de la seconde édition. 3 volumes in 4°, Genève, Libraires Associés, 1775.

Frontispice de la troisième édition. 4 volumes in 4°, Genève, Pellet, 1780.
lecteur ne peut jamais être innocent; il est prédisposé, orienté, sélectif: "Nous
ne regardons pas de la même façon un visage dont on nous dit qu'il a dix ans
ou six cents ans, qu'il était pape, capitaine ou mathématicien; nous l'inter-
rogeons autrement." 16
Si l'air reposé d'un homme du clergé établissait une certaine tension entre
cette image voulue de l'auteur et la véhémence de ses propos, le portrait en
frontispice établira une relation tout à fait différente entre cette image et l'en-
semble de l'œuvre. Contrairement à la réception d'un texte écrit, les yeux du
lecteur scruteront la surface du frontispice non d'une façon linéaire mais
plutôt dans un mouvement sélectif, sautant d'un élément visuel à un autre en
recontextualisant le premier etc., établissant une relation directe entre l'ins-
cription identificatrice et l'homme représenté, intégrant ensuite les différentes
parties de ce frontispice que nous allons analyser. Nous voudrions nous-
mêmes proposer un des parcours possibles d'une telle lecture. Le changement
le plus visible concerne l'aspect du visage de l'auteur, changement évidem-
ment remarqué par les contemporains, tel un Grimm qui en formula un juge-
ment négatif dans sa Correspondance littéraire, appelant le portrait de 1780 "fort
peu ressemblant." 17 Aussi n'a-t-on pas hésité, au X I X e siècle, à définir cette
représentation comme "un faux Raynal, un pastiche de fantaisie qui abusa le
public." 18 L'artiste dessinateur était pourtant le même Cochin: une indication
sur le frontispice, comme pour écarter tout soupçon d'incompétence artis-
tique, le précisait bien: "Dessiné par C.N. Cochin, chevalier de l'ordre du Roi,
secrétaire perpétuel de l'Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture." Im-
possible de soupçonner le graveur d'avoir fait un mauvais travail puisqu'il
s'agissait de Nicolas de Launay (1739-1792), graveur de Fragonard et un des
graveurs les plus renommés de l'époque. 19 Le frontispice précisait bien:
"Gravé par N. de Launay de la même Académie. Membre de celle des Beaux
Arts du Danemark." On avait eu soin de recourir aux artistes les plus recon-
nus pour exécuter ce portrait. Or, en ce qui concerne les estampes intégrées à
YHistoire des deux Indes, l'on peut dire qu'elles étaient particulièrement bien
soignées.
Le frontispice de 1780 dessiné par Cochin était sans aucun doute une
espèce de portrait-robot. L'image n'était pas référentielle; mais si elle ne mon-
trait pas au lecteur le 'vrai Raynal', elle ne nous montre pas non plus un 'faux'
(en dehors de la ressemblance purement physique). L'image de l'auteur avait
16 Butor: Les mots dans la peinture, p. 11.

17 Cité d'après Bancarel: "G. Thomas Raynal. De la séduction à la sévérité," p. 482.
18 Ibid.
19 II excellait surtout dans ce que l'on nommait, au XVIIIe siècle, T'estampe galante'; cf. Wag-
ner: Lust ¿y Liebe im Rokoko, p. 12.
pris maintenant, comme on l'a dit à juste titre, "une valeur de symbole." 20
Mais il y a plus. Tout d'abord, nous pouvons constater que le lien convention-
nel entre portrait et légende avait été tacitement effacé. Cette subversion des
conventions dans le domaine des illustrations de livres est particulièrement
frappante quand on tient compte de la stratégie suivie par les trois éditions
successives de l'Histoire des deux Indes. Si la première édition de 1770 ne com-
portait ni nom d'auteur ni portrait (et par conséquent aucune légende ou in-
scription), la seconde ne donnait pas le nom d'auteur sur la page de titre mais
le précisait bien en légende à un portrait aux dires des contemporains 'res-
semblant'. La troisième édition in 4°, elle, donnait le nom d'auteur et sur la
page de titre et comme légende du portrait, mais cette fois-ci, le portrait ne
ressemblait pas à Raynal. Ce jeu avec l'authenticité de la fonction d'auteur
n'était perceptible qu'aux yeux d'un lecteur qui suivait l'évolution de la présen-
tation (du paratexte) des différentes éditions. Les implications de ce jeu ne
nous seront accessibles cependant qu'après avoir analysé d'autres éléments du
frontispice. Il reste clair que si nous avons parlé d"auteur' en ce qui concerne
les portraits présentés à l'entrée de l'œuvre, nous n'avons utilisé cette expressi-
on qu'au sens figuré: évidemment, il ne s'agit pas à'un auteur ou de /"auteur
tout court mais d'une construction, d'une fiction d'auteur. Si la succession des
différentes éditions témoigne d'une croissante 'auteurisation', (et par là même)
d'une plus grande autorisation de l'Histoire des deux Indes, le jeu subtil et com-
pliqué agit de façon subversive par rapport à ce procès. La conjugaison in-
teractive de structures linguistiques et non-linguistiques (iconiques) instaure
une structuration sémantique qui déjoue la mise en scène d'un auteur concret,
Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, pour opérer une véritable déconstruction de l"au-
teur' ou, plus exactement, de la fonction d'auteur.
Le nom complet de Raynal se trouve inscrit, en lettres majuscules (qui se
terminent par un point après "RAYNAL"21), entre le portrait rectangulaire et
une scène allégorique; celle-ci reçut la forme d'un bas-relief encadré et limité
par deux pilastres, sans arabesques ou ornements exubérants, ce qui souligne
le caractère de sévérité du frontispice entier. C'est au centre de la scène allégo-
rique que trône la Déesse de la Raison qui, ignorant le génie de la Discorde à
sa gauche, éclaire à sa droite la Déesse de la Liberté qui — une pique avec un
bonnet phrygien en main 22 - domine une scène de libération d'esclaves se
20 Bancarel: "Le succès inattendu d'un Rouergat au XVIIIe siècle," p. 221.

21 La structure phrastique est elliptique et serait facile à reconstruire: elle suit le schéma 'ceci
est cela'.
22 Représentation allégorique qu'avait choisie — pour n'en nommer qu'un seul exemple — Jean-
Jacques Rousseau pour l'intégrer à la page de titre de son Discours sur l'origine et les fondemens
de l'inégalité parmi les hommes.
défaisant de leurs chaînes. 23 Sur le socle du bas-relief se trouvent inscrits,

comme écrits à la main, les mots "Au Défenseur de l'Humanité, de la Vérité,
de la Liberté," suivis du nom d'Eliza Draper écrit en lettres majuscules
placées à droite sur un niveau légèrement inférieur.
Il est possible d'interpréter ces mots - ainsi que le fait Lise Andries -
comme l'expression d'une "légitimité" qui inscrirait l'entreprise de Raynal
"dans la droite ligne de la philosophie des Lumières." 24 Car le portrait de
'Raynal' ne nous montre plus un homme en tenue ecclésiastique mais un écri-
vain vêtu de tous les signes conventionels qui dans le langage vestimentaire
désignent l'homme de lettres, le philosophe. Mais nous oublierons ainsi le fait
que ces mots sont attribués, par la forme typographique des inscriptions, à
Eliza Draper. Et il s'agit là d'une citation intratextuelle qui mettra en relief la
complexité des relations intermédiales entre le frontispice et le texte publié
sous le nom de Raynal. Ainsi, nous trouvons au beau milieu du troisième livre
qui s'occupe des "Etablissemens, commerce & conquêtes des Anglois dans
les Indes Orientales" le passage que voici:
Eliza disoit souvent qu'elle n'estimoit personne autant que moi. A présent, je le
puis croire.
Dans ses derniers momens, Eliza s'occupoit de son ami; & je ne puis tracer une
ligne sans avoir sous les yeux le monument qu'elle m'a laissé. Que n'a-t-elle pu
douer aussi ma plume de sa grace & de sa vertu? Il me semble du moins l'enten-
dre. 'Cette muse sévere qui te regarde, me dit-elle, c'est l'Histoire, dont la fonction
auguste est de déterminer l'opinion de la postérité. Cette divinité volage qui plane
sur le globe, c'est la Renommée; qui ne dédaigna pas de nous entretenir un mo-
ment de toi: elle m'apporta tes ouvrages, & prépara notre liaison par l'estime. Vois
ce phénix immortel parmi les flammes: c'est le symbole du génie qui ne meurt
point. Que ces emblèmes t'exhortent sans cesse à te montrer le défenseur de
I'HUMANITÉ, DE LA VÉRITÉ, DE LA LIBERTÉ.' 2 5
Depuis les savantes recherches de Herbert Dieckmann et de Michèle Duchet

dans le Fonds Vandeul, nous pouvons attribuer ce passage comme l'"Eloge
d'Eliza Draper" en général, avec une haute probabilité, à la plume de Denis
Diderot (1713-1784). 26 De plus, cet éloge apparaît pour la première fois dans
23 Voir la communication mentionnée de Lise Andries, typoscript p. 14.

24 Ibid.
25 Nous citons d'après l'édition de Raynal: Histoire philosophique et politique des Etablissements et
du Commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Vol. 2, pp. 7Iff. Nous reviendrons sur le fait
que ce soit à travers l'écoute, à travers l'oreille que le discours d'Eliza se présente au moi de
l'historien philosophe.
26 Voir à ce sujet Duchet: Diderot et l'Histoire des Deux Indes ou l'Ecriture Fragmentaire, p. 69.
la troisième édition dont nous étudions le frontispice, c'est-à-dire dans l'édi-

tion de 1780, publiée deux ans après la mort d'Eliza. Elizabeth Draper
(1744—1778), née en Inde et mariée très jeune avec un officier de YEast India
Company, est un personnage connu dans les lettres anglaises et françaises; Lau-
rence Sterne, tombé follement amoureux de la jeune femme, lui avait dédié
parmi d'autres écrits son Journal to Elitra, tenue en 1767. Si cette œuvre n'appa-
rut qu'au milieu du X I X e siècle, le personnage d'Eliza fut par contre souvent
évoqué dans Λ SentimentalJourney. En plus, sous le titre de Letters from Yorick to
Eliâ, parut un petit livre qui présenta au public, très probablement en 1773,
dix lettres que l'écrivain anglais avait écrites à cette femme. C'est en 1776 que
l'abbé Raynal rencontra Eliza qui venait de quitter Bombay; il est possible que
lui aussi tomba amoureux de celle qui lui fournissait d'abord des informations
sur la situation dans la partie des colonies britanniques qu'elle connaissait. 27
Quoi qu'il en soit, les noms de Sterne, Diderot et Raynal se mêlent autour
d'Eliza, produisant une figure emblématique, celle du philosophe,28
Dans l'éloge d'Eliza par Diderot, les appels pathétiques au lecteur sont
fréquents: "Qu'il me soit permis d'épancher ici ma douleur & mes larmes!
Eliza fut mon amie. O lecteur, qui que tu sois, pardonne-moi ce mouvement
involontaire. Laisse-moi m'occuper d'Eliza." 2 9 La sacralisation de la jeune
femme, morte (selon l'Histoire) à 33 ans 30 comme le fils de Dieu et dont
l'"âme céleste" n'aurait laissé ici-bas que "ses cendres sacrés," 31 et la solidari-
sation avec Laurence Sterne, mènera le moi pathétique non seulement à la
déclaration d'un amour désormais impossible mais aussi à un serment de
fidélité à soi-même: " D u haut des cieux, ta premiere & derniere patrie, Eliza,
reçois mon serment, J E J U R E DE N E PAS É C R I R E UNE L I G N E ; OU L O N N E PUISSE
RECONNOITRE TON A M I . " 3 2
27 Nous devons à Peter Wagner l'information que dans la biographie de Laurence Sterne
(Cash: Laurence Sterne. The Later Years, pp. 345ff), l'abbé Raynal apparaît c o m m e auteur pro-
bable de T'Eloge à Eliza'. Cette hypothèse est basée sur une publication d'Alice Green
Fredman {Diderot and Sterne), antérieure aux recherches de Michèle Duchet.
28 Michel Delon précisait bien, en partant d'une question différente à la nôtre, ce point: " E l i z a
Draper á été aimée par Sterne, puis, après sa mort, par Raynal. Diderot intervient c o m m e le
troisième visage de cette suite d'écrivains qui, vue en perspective, produit une. figure embléma-
tique du Philosophe, tandis qu'Eliza, d'égérie particulière, personnelle, prend la dimension
d'une Muse de l'histoire." Delon: "L'appel au lecteur dans l"Histoire des deux Indes'." Lü-
sebrink et Tietz, eds.: Lectures de Raynal, p. 57 (souligné par nous).
29 Raynal: Histoire philosophique et politique, vol. 2, p. 69.
30 Si les informations données par Cash sont pertinentes, Eliza mourut néanmoins après son
34e anniversaire; cf. Cash: Laurence Sterne, pp. 2 7 0 - 2 7 3 .
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., p. 72.
Le frontispice représente cette scène. Tout d'abord, le philosophe établit

par son regard sévère un contact direct avec son lecteur tout comme à travers
les fréquents appels au lecteur dans les passages cités. En outre, sur la table de
travail, le lecteur pourra trouver des objets emblématiques — parmi lesquels un
obélisque, une trompette ou une couronne de lauriers — allusifs à la postérité
et la renommée auxquelles Eliza, dans son passage, avait parlé. Le frontispice
du premier tome est-il donc l'illustration d'une scène localisée dans le troi-
sième livre?
Les illustrations de la troisième édition de 1780 se caractérisent - comme
Lise Andries 33 le fait remarquer à juste titre - par une "nette politisation" et
un "changement de tonalité" dans les estampes publiées. Le caractère allégori-
que des images de la seconde édition a effectivement fait place à une fonction
plus précise d'illustration de certains passages de l'œuvre. Avant de nous oc-
cuper des relations qui existent entre ces changements et la stratégie éditoriale
ainsi que des dimensions épistémologiques de l'Histoire des deux Indes, il nous
faut revenir à la texture d'éléments linguistiques et non-linguistiques du fron-
tispice de 1780.
Evidemment, la citation intratextuelle inscrite au socle du bas-relief nous
permettrait de concevoir la scène représentée en tant qu'illustration du passa-
ge évoqué. Le texte remplirait ainsi sa fonction d'ancrage, bien que ce soit
d'une façon beaucoup moins répressive que celle envisagée par Roland Bar-
thes.34 Mais les relations qui s'établissent entre les éléments de type iconique
et scriptural du frontispice vont au-delà d'une telle interprétation. Car les ins-
criptions sont fort différenciées sur le plan typographique, recouvrant une
telle importance que l'aspect grammatextuel35 du frontispice nous permettra
de concevoir les relations intermédiales comme unité indissoluble. Le passage
'manuscrit' signé, pour ainsi dire, avec le nom d'Eliza Draper en majuscules
peut être mis sans aucun doute en relation avec le mouvement de la main du
philosophe qui trace les lignes d'un texte manuscrit sur son papier ou, pour
être plus précis, vient de le faire puisque son regard n'est plus posé sur le pa-
pier mais sur son lecteur. La phrase attribuée à Eliza Draper, et dont nous sa-
vons qu'elle nous est présentée dans un texte écrit par la main de Diderot, ne
remplit donc pas seulement une fonction de légitimation et d'autorisation
33 Andries: "Les illustrations dans l'Histoire des deux Indes," pp. 14ff.
34 Voir supra; ici, il s'agirait plutôt d'un jeu avec ce caractère de contrôle et de répression
qu'exercent les légendes selon la conception barthésienne.
35 Nous utilisons le concept de grammatextualité dans le sens proposé par Lapacherie: "Der
Text als ein Gefuge aus Schrift (Über die Grammatextualität)." Bohn. ed.: Bildlichkeit: Inter-
nationale Beiträge %ur Poetik, pp. 69—88.
(fonction que le bas-relief allégorique remplit déjà). Il déconstruit en même

temps la fonction d'auteur en appliquant à un portrait-robot du philosophe
une phrase fictive d'un personnage historique écrite par un autre philosophe
qui indique l'avoir écouté. Dans ce jeu à plusieurs niveaux, l'origine de la
phrase se perd. Au moment même ou la page de titre souligne l'authenticité
de Guillaume-Thomas Raynal comme auteur - qui, persécuté par l'Etat
français, dans la suite devait chercher asile dans différents pays européens —, la
fonction d'auteur est mise en question, de façon aussi subtile que subversive.
Bien au-delà d'un simple portrait d'auteur, et bien au-delà même d'une
fonction purement illustrative, le frontispice de l'édition in 4° se présente
donc comme structuration sémantique hautement complexe dans laquelle les
éléments de type linguistique et non-linguistique sont fortement interactifs et
forment une unité indissoluble. Par conséquent, nous considérons ce fron-
tispice comme un véritable iconotexte.7'6 Et sa structuration iconotextuelle en
tant que poétique immanente de l'Histoire des deux Indes.
Cette œuvre volumineuse est, on le sait, le résultat d'un travail collectif.
Pour réaliser un tel projet, l'abbé Raynal avait soigneusement construit un
réseau d'informateurs et de collaborateurs aussi bien en France qu'outre-mer.
Avec l'instinct d'un homme de lettres expérimenté, il avait entrevu les possibi-
lités d'une œuvre sur l'expansion coloniale des différents pays européens au
cours d'une période d'intenses discussions sur la politique coloniale de la
France. Le travail dans les bibliothèques et archives coloniales françaises, la
confection de questionnaires ou le recrutement habile de possibles collabora-
teurs permettaient à l'abbé de publier une première édition de l'œuvre en
1770, œuvre qui a provoqué l'interdiction officielle et le succès auprès du pu-
blic que l'on sait. Une fois l'anonymat (très relatif, nous l'avons vu) de la pre-
mière édition levée, des rumeurs s'élevèrent concernant la collaboration
d'autres auteurs dans VHistoire des deux Indes. Sans vouloir trop insister sur un
point que nous avons eu l'occasion d'analyser, 37 l'apport du collaborateur le
36 La définition que nous en donne M. Nerlich est la suivante: "une unité indissoluble de tex-
te(s) et image(s) dans laquelle ni le texte ni l'image n'ont de fonction illustrative"; cf. Ner-
lich, Michael: "Qu'est-ce un iconotexte? Réflexions sur le rapport texte - image photogra-
phique dans 'La femme se découvre' d'Evelyne Sinnassamy." Montandon, ed.: Iconotextes, p.
268. Dans sa présentation du livre, Alain Montandon définit ce terme comme "une œuvre
dans laquelle l'écriture et l'élément plastique se donnent comme une totalité insécable" (7).
Nous essayerons d'appliquer cette notion forgée pour caractériser des œuvres du XX siècle
à une œuvre du XVIIIe siècle en vue d'une différentiation des éléments paratextuels.
37 Voir Ette: "Diderot et Raynal: l'oeil, l'oreille et le lieu de l'écriture dans l"Histoire des deux
Indes'." Communication lors du colloque international de Passau en juillet 1992, à paraître
dans le volume des actes publiés par Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink et Anthony Strugnell à Ox-
ford, The Voltaire Foundation.
plus important et le plus renommé de l'Histoire de Raynal, Denis Diderot, est

devenu, d'édition en édition, plus prononcé. 38 L'anonymat du philosophe, ce-
pendant, ne fut levé qu'après sa mort. 39
Implicitement, le nom de Diderot était pourtant présent sur le frontispice
de l'édition genevoise de 1780 dont nous nous occupons: au fond du portrait
dessiné par Cochin et gravé par De Launay, on aperçoit sans peine trois des
gros volumes de YEncyclopédie. Les mots dans la gravure nous ouvrent, une
fois de plus, plusieurs possibilités interprétatives. Sur le plan de la légitimation
de l'auteur, il est clair que le savoir stocké sous forme de livre ne pouvait s'ar-
ticuler en un objet plus emblématique. D'autre part, comme tout paratexte, la
présence de l'Encyclopédie fournit au lecteur une sorte d'orientation de sa lec-
ture: Y Histoire des deux Indes s'inscrivait donc — tel était un des messages possi-
bles — dans la tradition philosophique marquée par cette œuvre collective.
De plus, la représentation de trois volumes de Y Encyclopédie pouvait signa-
ler en même temps que sur le niveau de la production du texte, Y Histoire des
deux Indes suivait une tradition collective en la réalisation d'un projet vaste et
ambitieux qui voulait épuiser un sujet hétérogène et multiforme tel que le
constituait l'expansion colonialiste des pays européens. Et en effet, bien qu'-
organisé d'une façon différente, YHistoire des deux Indes se constituait en une
sorte de prolongement de Y Encyclopédie de Diderot. Aussi n'a-t-on pas hésité à
parler d'une première histoire encyclopédique du colonialisme, 40 situant
l'œuvre, avec des raisons bien fondées, dans le contexte qu'indiquait le fronti-
spice du philosophe. Dès le 'seuil' du livre, un espace littéraire interne 41 s'ou-
vre qui établit des relations intertextuelles explicites avec d'autres textes. Avec
une telle ouverture, les relations intermédiales présentes dans le frontispice in-
augurent une poétique qui s'insère dans un système complexe de relations in-
tra· et intertextuelles.
Cependant, l'iconotexte en frontispice de cette édition n'articule pas seule-
ment une poétique mais également une épistémologie immanente. Celle-ci
38 Dans une récente étude, Gianluigi Goggi a apporté des preuves convaincantes en ce qui
concerne la collaboration de Diderot dès la première édition de l'œuvre; cf. Goggi: "Quel-
ques remarques sur la collaboration de Diderot à la première édition de T'Histoire des deux
Indes'." Lüsebrink et Tietz, eds.: Lectures de Raynal, pp. 17-52.
39 Voir à ce sujet Lüsebrink: '"Le livre qui fait naître des Brutus . . . ' " Heydenreich, ed.: Denis
Diderot, 1713-1784, pp. 107-26.
40 Ibid.
41 Sur l'utilisation de cette notion, voir mon article "Rezeption, Intertextualität, Diskurs. Ein
Diskussionsbeitrag zur wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Erforschung der französischen
'Idéologues'." Schlieben-Lange et al., eds.: Europäische Sprachwissenschaft um 1800. Methodolo-
gische und historiographische Beiträge %um Umkreis der 'idéologie', vol. 3, pp. 15-27.
concerne la priorité des 'sources' d'information sur lesquelles se base l'écritu-

re-même. Pour bien concevoir cette dimension du frontispice, partons de
nouveau de la présence explicite des trois volumes de YEncyclopédie. Dans l'en-
semble de l'espace iconotextuel du frontispice, les informations écrites, tex-
tualisées, constituent le fondement unique sur lequel se base l'acte d'écrire: un
acte d'appropriation et de transformation de textes. Ce simple constat renvoie
aux bases épistémologiques de cette 'encyclopédie du monde colonial'. Dans
un passage fondamental du onzième livre de l'Histoire des deux Indes, Diderot
précisait bien le statut différentiel qu'il accordait aux différentes 'sources' d'in-
formation:
L'homme contemplatif est sédentaire; & le voyageur est ignorant ou menteur. Ce-
lui qui a reçu le génie en partage, dédaigne les détails minucieux de l'expérience; &
le faiseur d'expériences est presque toujours sans génie. Entre la multitude des
agens que la nature emploie, nous n'en connoissons que quelques-uns, & encore
ne les connoissons-nous qu'imparfaitement. Qui sait si les autres ne sont pas de
nature à échapper pour jamais à nos sens, à nos instrumens, à nos observations &
à nos essais? 42
Sans vouloir insister ni sur les implications philosophiques d'une telle théorie
de la connaissance ni sur les relations intertextuelles de ce passage, 43 nous in-
sisterons ici sur la condamnation à peu près totale du "faiseur d'expériences,"
de ses instruments et de ses observations. Le voyageur ne constitue nullement
une base d'informations digne de foi: il souffre d'un manque de savoir (il est
"ignorant") ou d'un manque de véracité (il est "menteur"). A cet homo faber
disqualifié, Diderot oppose Y homo contemplativus défini comme sédentaire. Peu
lui importent les détails minutieux de l'observation: son lieu d'écriture est le
cabinet de travail, fermé à l'expérience directe de la nature. Les mouvements
du philosophe seront discursifs ou inter-discursifs, mais nullement topogra-
phiques. Ses voyages se limiteront aux archives et bibliothèques. Au centre
d'un vaste réseau d'informations textuelles, le cabinet de travail sera l'espace
propre à la philosophie, à l'écriture.
A partir d'un tel contexte épistémologique, nous commençons à entrevoir
l'importance de la mise en scène de la table de travail. C'est là que poétique et
épistémologie se fondent dans l'écriture du texte. C'est à partir de la table de
travail que l'autre est discuté, que l'objet du discours est constitué. L'écriture
du philosophe ne se légitime nullement par l'expérience et la connaissance di-
42 Raynal: Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, vol. 5, p. 43.

43 II s'agit bien d'une réplique de Diderot à une note contenue dans le Discours sur l'origine et
les jondemens de l'inégalité parmi les hommes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau; cf. Ette: "Diderot et
Raynal."
rectes de cet objet. La légitimation du philosophe obéit plutôt à un double

mouvement. D'un côté, son savoir se fonde sur son travail avec d'autres tex-
tes, sa 'critique des sources' comme l'on pourrait le formuler d'une façon un
peu euphémique. Nous savons aujourd'hui combien YHistoire des deux Indes ne
doit pas seulement aux contributions de nombreux collaborateurs ou à l'étude
d'archives et de bibliothèques; elle s'appropriait également des textes contenus
dans de grandes collections de voyage comme celle de l'abbé Prévost. On sait
à quel point l'Histoire générale des voyages de l'auteur de Manon Lescaut consti-
tuait à son tour une gigantesque réécriture d'autres textes, une fois de plus
sans connaissance directe de l'objet du discours. UHistoire des deux Indes de
l'abbé Raynal se fondait donc sur un travail intertextuel à plusieurs niveaux, à
plusieurs degrés: une suite d'interventions intertextuelles. Et dans le procès de
son élaboration successive, de la première à la troisième édition, elle connut —
au niveau intratextuel, pour ainsi dire — un mouvement analogue et complé-
mentaire dans le discours de Diderot qui se greffait sur le discours hétérogène
du patchwork de cette œuvre collective: ces interventions de Diderot étaient
surtout de caractère philosophique et / ou pathétique - l'"Eloge d'Eliza Dra-
per" en est un bel exemple. De l'autre côté, la légitimité de son discours re-
pose sur ses fins universalistes: notre lecture du frontispice de 1780 a mis en
lumière cette fonction légitimatoire du bas-relief allégorique de la Raison
éclairant la Liberté, et l'inscription attribuée à Eliza Draper se dirigeant "Au
défenseur de l'Humanité, de la Vérité, de la Liberté." Nous assistons à une uni-
versalisation du discours européen qui — investi d'un pouvoir supra-humain,
celui de l'Histoire - croit pouvoir répondre aux besoins de l'humanité entière.
Au centre de ce double mouvement de légitimation se trouve le lieu de
l'écriture, le lieu du pouvoir discursif. Effectivement, si la table de travail du
philosophe devient, dans l'Histoire des deux Indes, un miroir ardent dans lequel
se concentrent toutes les informations textuelles, ce miroir ardent se transfor-
me en parabole émetteur d'un philosophe qui, à travers l'écriture et le livre,
propage ses principes universalistes.44 Ce double mouvement brièvement es-
quissé ici rend à la table de travail tout son pathos45 : dans une histoire du
monde colonisé par les européens, elle devient un point de focalisation, le
centre de la réception, de la transformation et de la propagation d'informa-
44 Pour une étude détaillée de ce double mouvement, nous renvoyons à notre article cité sur
Y Histoire des deux Indes.
45 II va de soi que cette valorisation de la table de travail ne se limite pas à Raynal mais obéit à
une façon historiquement déterminée d'intertextualisation, à une épistémologie: on connaît
l'orgeuil de Buffon d'avoir passé cinquante ans de sa vie dans son bureau. A cause des limi-
tations de la présente étude, nous remettons cependant une étude plus générale de la visua-
lisation de la table de travail au X V I I I e siècle à une date ultérieure.
tions qui concernent le globe entier. L'"Eloge d'Eliza Draper" et les objets
emblématiques posés sur la table de travail soulignaient la présence exhortati-
ve de la postérité, de la vérité, de l'Histoire universelle.
Et c'est là que nous retrouvons ce phénomène d' auteurisation qui caractéri-
se la successive appropriation de l'œuvre par l'abbé Raynal, appropriation
réalisée surtout — nous l'avons vu — sur le plan paratextuel. L'orgueil de se
proclamer publiquement auteur de cette œuvre ne suffit pas à expliquer, à
notre avis cette stratégie éditoriale qui devait mettre en danger la vie de l"abbé
du nouveau monde'. Seules, la structuration (inter)textuelle et discursive ainsi
que le double mouvement de légitimation esquissé nous paraissent expliquer
de façon satisfaisante pourquoi il était nécessaire d'auteuriser cette œuvre,
c'est-à-dire de donner un auteur concret et individualisé à l'Histoire des deux
Indes. Par conséquent, nous avons en vue aussi bien le procès compliqué de la
genèse de cette mosaïque d'intertextualités que sa réception dont le succès
éclatant témoigne de l'effectivité des stratégies utilisées par le philosophe
rouergat. Le caractère profondément hétérogène et hybride de la textualisa-
tion demandait une instance centralisatrice capable de donner une plus grande
cohérence au discours de l'Histoire. L'introduction de la voix narrative d'un
historien philosophe invoquant les puissants de ce monde ou se dirigeant di-
rectement au lecteur en était un des moyens - et l'appel au lecteur, sur lequel
nous reviendrons, se trouvera introduit jusque dans le frontispice de l'édition
in 4° de 1780. Ainsi, Raynal espérait déjouer l'attention du public qui, dès la
parution de la première édition, s'était rendu compte des nombreuses contra-
dictions et ruptures stylistiques dans l'Histoire des deux Indes.46 En plus, la légi-
timation d'une telle œuvre devant le tribunal de l'Histoire, de la postérité, de-
mandait, pour ainsi dire, la figure d'un auteur responsable. La construction
d'un auteur était donc une stratégie nécessaire tant sur le plan de la structura-
tion interne que sur celui de la réception de l'œuvre. Nous avons vu qu'il s'a-
gissait plus précisément de la construction d'une fiction d'auteur, d'un jeu iro-
nique avec certaines conventions littéraires qui à cause du caractère éminem-
ment subversif nous permet de la concevoir comme une véritable déconstruc-
tion de l'auteur.
Mais retournons une dernière fois au regard que le philosophe dirige, dans
le frontispice dessiné par Cochin, sur le lecteur. L'édifice de Y Histoire des deux
Indes repose, nous l'avons vu, sur le travail textuel. La division entre un savoir
formé par la connaissance des textes et un savoir basé sur l'expérience directe
remonte aux réflexions épistémologiques des historiens de l'Antiquité. Dans
46 Dans l'article cité de Guénot se trouvent réunis quelques témoignages d'un public très at-
tentif à cette sorte d'incohérences.
le livre XII de ΓHistoire de Polybe, la vue et l'ouie sont discutées comme les
moyens fondamentaux de l'historien pour se procurer et pour contrôler des
informations sur des régions lointaines. Pour Polybe, l'œil représente la con-
naissance directe acquise par les voyages dans ces contrées éloignées tandis
que l'oreille remplit, pour lui, une double fonction: elle contrôle les résultats
acquis par l'expérience directe en interrogeant le plus grand nombre d'infor-
mateurs possible, mais elle étend son contrôle aussi en interrogeant les textes
disponibles sur un sujet déterminé. Bien que Polybe attribue une supériorité
épistémologique à l'œil, c'est-à-dire à la connaissance directe, l'œil et l'oreille
se complètent mutuellement dans les conceptions de cet historien du Ile
siècle de notre ère.
En analysant YHistoire des deux Indes selon la division épistémologique pro-
posée par Polybe, il est évident que par sa conception, sa genèse et sa structu-
ration interne, l'œuvre la plus connue de l'abbé Raynal se rangera du côté de
l'oreille. Aussi l'œil ne fonctionne-t-il pas comme moyen de connaissance di-
recte mais plutôt comme un des moyens d'expression de l'instance narrative,
(de la fiction) du narrateur-auteur. La direction des informations qui passent
par l'oreille est donc renversée: l'œil peut se mouiller de larmes, 47 brouillant la
vision, ou il peut se diriger sur le lecteur pour établir un contact direct entre
narrateur et narrataire. L'appel au lecteur, omniprésent dans YHistoire des deux
Indes, est complété et renforcé par le regard que l'historien philosophe dirige
sur le lecteur. Le regard du philosophe tel que l'établit le frontispice de 1780
est donc une transposition iconographique de l'appel au lecteur contenu dans
l'œuvre signée désormais par l'abbé Raynal.
* * *
Nous retrouvons le regard sur le public dans un des portraits les plus célèbres
d'Alexander von Humboldt. Mais le contexte de ce regard est profondément
différent de celui du frontispice raynalien. Dans son tableau terminé en 1806,
Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1758-1828) nous présente le naturaliste prussien en
plein milieu d'une nature exubérante, assis sur un rocher (fig. 16). Contraire-
ment à la représentation d'un cabinet de travail séparé du monde extérieur, le
cabinet de travail humboldtien est improvisé sur place et s'ouvre sur un paysa-
ge de Tropiques: un arbre tropical crée, pour ainsi dire, l'espace dans lequel se
47 Parmi les nombreux exemples d'une telle mise en scène de l'œil de l'historien philosophe
nous ne citerons ici qu'un passage rhétorique écrit par Diderot pour la troisième édition:
"J'écris l'histoire, & je l'écris presque toujours les yeux baignés de larmes." Raynal: Histoire
philosophique et politique, vol. 4, p. 1.
16. T a b l e a u à l ' h u i l e d e F r i e d r i c h G e o r g W e i t s c h : .Alexander run ! htmboldt. 1806.

situe le travail d'Alexander von Humboldt. Le tableau de Weitsch devint très

populaire et fut repris plusieurs fois par les dessinateurs et graveurs de l'épo-
que. La première de ces reprises a peut-être été la plus heureuse: c'est en 1808
que le talentueux Johann Josef Freidhof (1768—1818), professeur à l'Académie
de Berlin, a gravé le portrait d'Alexander dressé par Weitsch,48 en respectant
fidèlement la structure spatiale créée par ce dernier.
Le regard entre le naturaliste et le spectateur n'est pas un regard de struc-
ture simplement bilatérale. Car une fois le regard de ce dernier tombé sur la
main gauche du voyageur, le 'lecteur' de ce tableau se rendra compte qu'une
orientation de son regard — et n'oublions pas que là aussi, le regard du specta-
teur sur un naturaliste voyageur est nécessairement un regard pré-orienté par
ce type d'information biographique — lui est proposée: l'index de la main gau-
che de Humboldt attire l'attention sur une plante tropicale que le jeune bota-
niste tient dans sa main droite, posée sur un livre ouvert. Au centre du tableau
se trouve donc une espèce de table de travail improvisée: placés sur le genou
du voyageur, le livre ouvert et la plante analysée indiquent un mode de travail
et, ce qui est plus, une épistémologie. Car le classement de la plante par le bo-
taniste repose sur une observation minutieuse et une analyse détaillée; mais le
résultat de cette expérience directe sera immédiatement contrôlé par les infor-
mations contenues dans le livre, en vue d'une classification future. Le savoir
formé par l'observation sera donc, dans une seconde étape, modifié par le sa-
voir basé sur la connaissance des textes pré-existants. Suivant la scission
épistémologique introduite par Polybe, les informations recueillies par l'œil et
l'oreille, les moyens les plus importants de la connaissance humaine, se com-
plètent, se perfectionnent mutuellement.
Nous voilà au centre d'un changement épistémologique qui produira un
nouveau discours sur le monde non-européen. Les deux piliers de ce discours
moderne seront le fondement du savoir sur l'observation exacte et ce que Mi-
chel Foucault ou Wolf Lepenies ont caractérisé comme temporalisation du sa-
voir.49 De là découlent les différences les plus importantes de l'œuvre hum-
boldtienne par rapport à celle de l'encyclopédie coloniale dirigée par Raynal.
La mise en scène de la table de travail insiste sur le premier des deux aspects,
c'est-à-dire sur celui de l'observation directe: de façon presque emblématique,
le baromètre souligne, comme instrument scientifique de base, cette dimen-
sion epistémologique de façon presque obsessionnelle. Aussi le retrouverons-
48 Dans une des nombreuses reprises, H. Schröder représentait un Humboldt calqué sur le ta-
bleau de Weitsch mais tenant, au lieu de la plante tropicale, un baromètre dans sa main
(nous y reviendrons); cf. Nelken: Alexander von Humboldt, p. 73.
49 Cf. Lepenies: Das Ende der Naturgeschichte', et Foucault: Les mots et les choses.
nous dans la plupart des portraits de Humboldt qui se réfèrent à son voyage
en Amérique.
Le baromètre, instrument magique du naturaliste, est présent dans une
gravure anonyme d'après un dessin de Ferdinand Keller (1842—1922) qui
nous montre un Humboldt "en pose byronienne" 50 (mais baromètre en main)
ou bien dans un autre tableau de Weitsch, montrant Humboldt et Bonpland
(1773-1858) près du Chimborazo (fig. 17). Dans cette œuvre exposée en 1810
à l'Académie de Berlin domine le paysage andin, recontextualisant ainsi l'im-
portance (et les possibilités) de l'homme face à une nature dont les dimen-
sions ne correspondent plus à la 'norme' européenne. Le catalogue51 de la
première exposition berlinoise indiquait les prétentions presque scientifiques
de ce tableau, expliquant au public les caractéristiques climatiques, botaniques
ou géomorphologiques des hautes Andes. On sentait bien que ces informa-
tions détaillées provenaient directement de Humboldt. 52 Celui-ci, représenté
au pied du Chimborazo dont l'ascension était un des grands défis de son
voyage, venait juste de prendre un sextant qu'un indien lui apportait. Sous un
arbre auquel était accroché l'inévitable baromètre, l'ami du prussien, Aimé
Bonpland, 53 était assis, tenant un livre sur ses genoux et une plante dans sa
main: lui aussi venait donc d'herboriser, et dans son travail interrompu il se
trouvait dans une attitude comparable à celle de Humboldt dans le tableau de
1806. Le corps d'un magnifique condor, symbole des Andes, était couché à
côté de ce cabinet de travail improvisé.
Le thème des deux voyageurs improvisant leur table de travail en plein mi-
lieu de la nature tropicale continuait à exercer une certaine attraction sur les
50 Nelken: Alexander von Humboldt, p. 70.

51 Le texte du catalogue correspondant à ce tableau nous est donné par Nelken: Alexander von
Humboldt, pp. 7 1 - 3 .
52 L'influence des conceptions humboldtiennes sur les paysagistes de son temps était immen-
se; il est cependant impossible d'esquisser, dans le cadre du présent travail, la réalisation de
conceptions que le voyageur prussien, lui-même un excellent dessinateur, avait développées
au cours de sa vie et qu'il rassemblait une dernière fois dans le second tome de son 'œuvre
de maturité', le Cosmos; cf. Humboldt: Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weitbeschreibung, vol.
2, pp. 7 6 - 9 4 . Nommons au moins, parmi les nombreux paysagistes qui suivaient ses pas et
/ ou ses conceptions scientifiques et esthétiques, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Ferdinand Bel-
lermann et Frederic Church. Cette influence profonde de Humboldt a été étudiée, entre
autres, par Gould: "Church, Humboldt and Darwin," et Löschner: " D i e Amerikaillustrati-
on unter dem Einfluß Alexander von Humboldts." Hein, ed.: Alexander von Humboldt, he-
ben und Werk, pp. 2 8 3 - 3 0 0 .
53 Humboldt jugeait le portrait de son collègue français fort ressemblant: Weitsch l'avait
préparé pendant le passage du jeune botaniste par la capitale prussienne. L'information en
est donnée dans une lettre de Humboldt au libraire Duncker, citée par Nelken (.Alexander
von Humboldt, p. 73).
17. Tableau à l'huile de Friedrich Georg Weitsch: Humboldt und Bonplatid am Cbimboraô.
Détail. 1810.
peintres de l'époque. La réalisation la plus poussée sera peut-être le tableau

d'Eduard Ender (1822-1883) qui montrait Humboldt et Bonpland dans une
chaumière indienne remplie de toutes sortes d'instruments scientifiques, de
livres, de fruits et de plantes qui envahissent, pour ainsi dire, ce cabinet de tra-
vail à travers une entrée qui s'ouvre sur un paysage tropical romantisé. 54 Ce
souci de la représentation visuelle de l'espace du savoir européen au milieu de
la nature américaine témoigne bien de l'importance de ce sujet dans l'imagi-
naire (collectif) européen au début du XIXe siècle (et bien après). Mais il ren-
voie en même temps à la multiplicité et la variation des lieux de l'écriture que
les œuvres américanistes d'Alexander von Humboldt indiquaient inlassable-
ment. Parmi ces lieux de l'écriture, Humboldt nous cite, par exemple, l'espace
mobile et précaire d'une pirogue, la maison de missionaires catalans, la chau-
mière d'indiens vivants dans les forêts de l'Orénoque, le hamac utilisé lors
d'un bivouac improvisé sur les bords du fleuve ou bien un four indien dans
54 Le dessin de O. Roth, 'Humboldt et Bonpland dans leur chaumière à l'Orinoque', appar-

tient à la même tradition iconographique.
lequel Bonpland s'était enfui pour se protéger des moustiques. On pourrait

donc dire que certains peintres qui n'avaient pas reçu des ordres précis pro-
venant d'un Humboldt qui se montrait toujours très soucieux de son icono-
graphie réalisaient une espèce d'hypotypose concrète en exécutant leurs ta-
bleaux, hypotypose ou bricolage qui mettait en relation les textes humboldtiens
avec d'autres éléments de l'imaginaire collectif de l'époque. 55
Toujours, l'écriture, menacée par un contexte étranger ou même hostile à
sa pratique, constitue un espace dans lequel le savoir européen s'installe pour
réaliser ses tâches scientifiques en poursuivant le 'progrès' de l'humanité
entière. Si ces buts universalistes unissent les voyageurs du XIXe siècle aux
conceptions du XVIIIe, le lieu de l'écriture a bien changé. Quelque contraires
que puissent avoir été les conceptions d'un Diderot ou d'un Rousseau en ce
qui concerne l'importance des voyages pour la connaissance du monde, les
philosophes des Lumières ne doutaient point que l'unique lieu adéquat pour
écrire l'histoire de ces voyages ne fût l'Europe. C'est dans les grandes villes
européennes comme Paris, Londres, Madrid ou même Göttingen — converties
par ses bibliothèques, ses musées ou ses archives en centres de d'accumula-
tion du savoir européen sur le monde non-européen — que le voyageur trou-
vait tout naturellement les meilleures conditions pour réaliser une œuvre qui,
par son caractère scriptural, était seule en état de convertir une 'aventure' en
savoir contrôlé et contrôlable, de l'insérer dans un savoir pré-existant et de
l'ouvrir sur une postérité. Avec le voyage de Humboldt, un espace différent
est créé pour l'écriture européenne: c'est le continent américain qui ne devien-
dra pas seulement le théâtre des expériences et des exploits des Européens
mais aussi celui où ces 'aventures' (scientifiques) et leurs résultats seront fixées
pour les intégrer au savoir européen sur l'Autre.
De là l'importance et la signification de la représentation visuelle de cet
espace culturel européen qui formait une espèce d'exclave territoriale du
monde scientifique européen. Or, il est évident que Humboldt, après son re-
tour du voyage en Amérique (1799—1804) avait soigneusement contrôlé l'ico-
nographie scientifique et non-scientifique d'un voyage qui allait faire date et
dans la connaissance du monde américain en Europe et dans le développe-
ment des relations commerciales et politiques entre l'ancien et le nouveau
monde. 56 Ceci ne concerne pas seulement les illustrations particulièrement
55 Sur l'hypotypose, voir l'article de Jean-Pierre Dubost dans le présent volume.

56 Sur les implications géopolitiques et économiques de ce voyage aux régions équinoxiales,
voir mon article '"Unser Welteroberer': Alexander von Humboldt, der zweite Entdecker,
und die zweite Eroberung Amerikas." Amerika: 1492 — 1992. Neue Welten — Neue Wirklich-
keiten. Essays, pp. 130—39.
riches et coûteuses 57 des 30 volumes in 4° de son Voyage aux Régions équino-

xiales du Nouveau Continent, édition dans laquelle les différentes illustrations
réalisées par les artistes les plus qualifiés de l'époque, remplissaient des fonc-
tions allégoriques, simplement illustratives ou très souvent informatives.
Humboldt était également conscient que l'iconographie personnelle devait in-
fluer sur les conceptions que ses contemporains et les futurs lecteurs de son
œuvre allaient se faire de sa personne et de son voyage américain.
Ce voyage fut particulièrement bien préparé sur le plan scientifique. Le
jeune naturaliste et géographe avait essayé de réunir le plus d'informations
possibles sur le monde d'outre-mer dans des disciplines aussi différentes —
pour nous, aujourd'hui - que la géologie, la botanique, l'anthropologie, la lin-
guistique, le dessin, l'astronomie, la chimie ou l'histoire. Il partait muni des
meilleurs instruments scientifiques existant à la fin du XVIIIe siècle en Euro-
pe pour réaliser des expériences ou des analyses concernant les courants mari-
times, la flore et la faune du continent américain, la précision (souvent dou-
teuse) des cartes géographiques, la différentiation tridimensionnelle des
phénomènes botaniques et géomorphologiques ou les activités volcaniques
un peu partout en Amérique. Son voyage même était bien différent des voya-
ges du XVIIIe siècle: Humboldt ne voyait aucun intérêt en un voyage mari-
time interrompu par des séjours plus ou moins prolongés à terre. Il parcourait
plutôt une immense partie des colonies espagnoles à pied ou en pirogue. La
traversée d'immenses espaces américains fut 'interrompue' par de longs
séjours dans les bibliothèques et archives des grandes villes que l'administra-
tion coloniale espagnole lui avait ouvertes. Le voyage même d'Alexander von
Humboldt et d'Aimé Bonpland se caractérisait donc par un mouvement
rythmé où alternaient l'expérience directe des objets analysés et la consulta-
tion des sources d'informations scripturales. Les deux savants parcouraient
l'espace du continent américain ainsi que celui de ses archives. Savoir topique
('topisches Wissen') et savoir basé sur l'expérience ('Erfahrungswissen'), infor-
mations orales et scripturales, documents historiques et expérimentations
scientifiques entraient donc en un dialogue fécond qui allait produire une vi-
sion de l'Amérique bien différente de celle du XVIIIe siècle, vision qui - mal-
gré le surgissement de l'épistémologie darwinienne et la réorganisation des
57 On sait que même Alexander von Humboldt n'avait pas pu se payer le luxe de posséder
une édition complète de son Voyage in 4. Voir Engelmann: "Alexander von Humboldt über
seine Arbeit am 'Kosmos'." Alexander von Humboldt. Eigene und neue Wertungen der Reisen,
Arbeit und Gedankenwelt, pp. 23-48; ainsi que notre travail (actuellement sous presse) "Von
Surrogaten und Extrakten: Eine Geschichte der Ubersetzungen und Bearbeitungen des
amerikanischen Reisewerks Alexander von Humboldts im deutschen Sprachraum."
différentes disciplines académiques — ont influencé largement la conception

du monde américain (au moins de façon indirecte) jusqu'à nos jours.
C'est dans ce contexte58 des conceptions humboldtiennes et de leur réali-
sation au cours de son voyage qu'il faut 'lire' les représentations iconographi-
ques du voyageur et la mise en scène de sa table de travail au milieu d'une na-
ture étrange et fascinante aux yeux du spectateur européen. Aucune gravure,
aucun tableau ne nous le montrent en train de prendre des notes dans les bi-
bliothèques du nouveau monde ou dans les archives de l'administration colo-
niale. On retrouve par contre une transposition iconographique de ce que
Humboldt avait appelé 'l'écriture à la vue des choses' ('Schreiben im Ange-
sicht der Dinge"). Ce n'est pas le travail textuel qui légitime le discours hum-
boldtien sur le continent américain: c'est la relation directe entre le regard, la
perception rétinale, et le travail scientifique, l'écriture réalisée sur place. C'est
le journal de route, l'écriture à la vue des choses, qui donne la légitimation
profonde au savoir du naturaliste et écrivain prussien.59
Après son retour en Europe, le lieu de l'écriture humboldtienne se dédou-
ble: Humboldt choisit Paris comme centre de ses activités en vue de la publi-
cation de son œuvre immense. Néanmoins, pendant la rédaction définitive de
son Voyage, il avait toujours recours à son journal — et même un demi-siècle
plus tard, il s'y référait pendant la rédaction des passages relatifs à l'Amérique
de son Cosmos·, ainsi, l'écriture en Amérique et l'écriture en Europe entrent
dans une relation dialogique intratextuelle. Le choix de Paris était bien fondé:
la capitale française possédait les bibliothèques, musées et collections néces-
saires à la réalisation d'une œuvre qui voulait réunir, 'encyclopédiquement' elle
aussi, la totalité du savoir sur le monde américain en tenant compte des der-
nières recherches scientifiques et innovations techniques: aussi (pour n'en
donner qu'un seul exemple) les cartes humboldtiennes, illustrant le parcours
du savant, représentaient-elles le niveau technologique le plus avancé de son
58 Pour une analyse plus détaillée de ce contexte, voir notre essai " D e r Blick auf die Neue
Welt." Humboldt: Reise in die Aquinoktial-Gegenden des Neuen Kontinents, Ette, ed., vol. 2, pp.
1563-97.
59 Au cours des dernières années, les recherches autour du journal de voyage humboldtien se
sont considérablement intensifiées. C'est à travers les investigations de la 'Alexander-von-
Humboldt-Forschungsstelle' à l'Académie des Sciences de Berlin et grâce au travail minu-
tieux réalisé surtout par Margot Faak que nous avons une connaissance beaucoup plus
précise de cette écriture à la vue des choses. Ne nommons ici que l'édition de la partie du
journal relative au voyage sur le Rio Magdalena que Humboldt, dans sa Relation historique,
n'avait pu intégrer; voir l'édition du journal humboldtien (préparée dans l'ancienne R.D.A.
mais dont la seconde partie fut publiée après la dite réunification) : Humboldt: Reise auf dem
Río Magdalena, durch die Anden und Mexico. Teil I: Texte. Teil II: Übersetzung, Anmerkungen, Re-
gister.
temps. En ce qui concerne la réalisation matérielle de son œuvre, Paris lui of-
frait des possibilités nettement plus grandes que sa ville natale de Berlin.
Cependant, de ces longues années de préparation de son œuvre majeure,
nous ne possédons aucun tableau, aucune gravure qui nous montrerait sa ta-
ble de travail, le lieu de son écriture à Paris. Tout au contraire, c'est à Paris
qu'il commanda un tableau à Karl von Steuben (1788—1856) qui, sans doute
pour la première fois, le plaçait dans un cadre dominé par le Chimborazo. La
pose de l'écrivain, crayon et papier à la main, était calquée sur certains
modèles de Gérard (que Steuben connaissait fort bien, travaillant dans son
atelier) tandis que les éléments paysagistes suivaient les conseils et, ce qui est
plus, les dessins de Humboldt lui-même.60 Les lacunes iconographiques, ici,
ont presqu'une importance comparable à celle des portraits réalisés. La remar-
que judicieuse de Mitchell selon laquelle nous ne comprendrons jamais une
image si nous ne concevons pas la façon selon laquelle cette image nous
montre ce qui n'est pas à voir61 serait donc à varier: nous devrions tenir
compte d'une série d'images dont les lacunes nous signalent ce qui n'est pas à
voir. Et ici, ces lacunes ne sont nullement dues au hasard.
Ce ne sera que vers la fin de ses jours que nous le retrouverons dans son
cabinet de travail, non plus au milieu de la nature américaine mais dans sa vil-
le natale. En 1848, le paysagiste Eduard Hildebrandt (1818-1869) présenta
une aquarelle qui servait de modèle à de nombreuses lithographies. Elle nous
montre un Humboldt assis à sa table de travail dans son cabinet à l'Oranien-
burger Straße, à Berlin (fig. 18). Le jeune peintre qui, suivant les conceptions
esthétiques de Humboldt, avait fait de longs voyages parcourant le monde
entier et comptait parmi les paysagistes les plus importants en Allemagne,
était entré depuis 1843 en relations amicales avec le savant septagénaire.62
Humboldt jugeait cette aquarelle de 1848 fort ressemblante, de caractère pres-
que documentaire. Ainsi le prouve une inscription en facsimilé sur la lithogra-
phie colorée: "Ein treues Bild meines Arbeitszimmers, als ich den zweiten
Theil des 'Kosmos' schrieb. A. v. Humboldt."63 Les visiteurs de cette période
60 Voir Nelken: Alexander von Humboldt, pp. 82ff. Nous retrouverons ce schéma iconographi-
que peu de temps avant la mort de Humboldt. La peinture de Steuben porte la date de
1812. Dans une lettre de 1813 à Caroline, la femme de son frère Guillaume, il soulignait le
fait que cette fois-ci, il se trouvait représenté "sans instruments, rien qui puisse faire penser
à la boutique de l'optiâen" (en français dans l'original, cf. ibid.·. 81).
61 Mitchell: "What is an Image?" Iconology, pp. 40—42. Cf. aussi l'étude de Peter Wagner: Read-
ing Iconotexts (sur l'importance du cadre et la rhétorique de la gravure).
62 Cf. Nelken: Alexander von Humboldt, p. 134.
63 Ibid.: "Une image fidèle de mon cabinet de travail quand j'étais en train d'écrire la
deuxième parue du 'Cosmos'." Cette deuxième parue contenait — nous l'avons vu — l'en-
18. Lithographie colorée d'après une aquarelle d'Eduard Hildebrandt: Alexander von Humboldt
in seinem Arbeitszimmer. 1848.
soulignaient également tous la fidélité de la création de Hildebrandt, 64 mais il

n'est pas facile, par contre, de se défaire de l'idée que les témoignages de cer-
tains d'entre ces visiteurs étaient calqués sur la représentation hildebrandtien-
ne très connue à l'epoque. Ainsi, James Baylard Taylor (1825—1878), voyageur,
écrivain et traducteur nord-américain, évoqua le cabinet de travail de Hum-
boldt qu'il avait vu en 1856 tout en soulignant le fait que la 'merveilleuse li-
thographie de Hildebrandt' avait orné le cabinet de travail du propre Taylor. Il
ne nous surprendra pas de pouvoir constater que neuf années après la réalisa-
tion de la lithographie, la description de Taylor, dans son At Home and Abroad
de 1860, suivait point par point les objets représentés par Hildebrandt. Rien
ne paraît avoir changé dans ce cabinet de travail, les livres et les manuscrits se
trouvant encore dans les lieux précis que Hildebrandt leur avait assignés. Il est
difficile sinon impossible aujourd'hui de séparer le souci 'documentaire' de
Taylor du caractère ekphrastique de sa description.
semble des conceptions esthétiques et scientifiques de Humboldt sur la représentation pay-

sagiste des régions tropicales.
64 Nelken, dans son ouvrage cité (pp. 134ff.) en donne quelques exemples.
Quoi qu'il en soit, un des nombreux détails de l'aquarelle de Hildebrandt

devrait attirer notre attention dans le contexte de la présente étude: Alexander
von Humboldt est bien assis à sa table de travail, mais il écrit sur ses genoux.
Détail de caractère référentiel (ou testimonial, si l'on veut), il est vrai, mais qui
remplit cependant d'autres fonctions. Or, c'est un fait connu par les
chercheurs que le savant avait l'habitude d'écrire sur ses genoux: c'est ainsi
qu'on explique l'emplacement de l'écriture humboldtienne sur ses pages ma-
nuscrites où les lignes tracées de sa main montaient souvent vertigineusement
vers la droite.
N'oublions pas cependant qu'il s'agit, en dehors de tout souci de type do-
cumentaire, d'une mise en scène, c'est-à-dire d'une construction réfléchie et
soigneusement exécutée ensuite. Les gros volumes et les manuscrits étalés sur
la table de travail ou les cartons renfermants des objets collectionnés par le
naturaliste nous signalent la continuité de travaux intellectuels et un climat de
savoir auquel la mappemonde, tout en établissant un contrepoids esthétique à
la clarté du jour provenant de la fenêtre, ajoute des connotations universalis-
tes. Sans aucun doute, il s'agit d'un espace construit — et même les plus
grands défenseurs du 'réalisme' de cette représentation devront reconnaître
que déjà au niveau référentiel, il s'agissait bien d'un espace sciemment et sym-
boliquement construit et mis en scène par ce tableau. Tout comme cette autre
œuvre de Hildebrandt de 1856 qui nous montre un Alexander von Humboldt
assis dans sa bibliothèque (fig. 19) pleine de livres, de cartes, d'objets collec-
tionnés ou d'œuvres d'art distribuées,65 l'aquarelle de 1848 construit l'espace
du savoir européen sur le monde entier, représenté d'un côté par une mappe-
monde, de l'autre par un globe placé symmétriquement par rapport à la tête
du savant berlinois.
E t c'est dans un tel espace que l'écrivain et géographe écrit non sur sa ta-
ble de travail mais comme s'il était en train d'écrire dans un lieu improvisé, as-
sis dans une chaumière ou en pleine forêt vierge. L'attitude corporelle choisie
65 Une fois de plus, un texte très détaillé soulignait le souci documentaire d'une œuvre dédiée
à Humboldt: ce fut un texte en allemand, en français et en anglais publié à l'occasion d'une
exposition de l'œuvre qui précisait les différents objets représentés dans la bibliothèque du
savant. Parmi les objets que ce texte mentionnait, il y avait le buste du Roi de Prusse créé
par Christian Rauch ou une statuette de la Reine, un modèle de l'obélisque de Luxor où une
peinture exécutée par Bellermann qui montrait l'entrée de la caverne de Guacharo que
Humboldt avait visitée au cours de son voyage, ainsi que les instruments que le voyageur
avait utilisés en Amérique cinquante ans plus tôt (cf. Nelken: Alexander von Humboldt, p.
136). Dans le cadre de la présente étude, il est impossible de poursuivre les relations com-
plexes entre ces différents objets qui inscrivent l'œuvre et la vie de Humboldt dans l'espace
(universaliste) du savoir européen.
19. Lithographie colorée d'après une aquarelle d'Eduard Hildebrandt:

Alexander von Humboldt in seiner Bibliothek. 1856.
pour signifier l'acte de l'écriture continue, sans aucun doute, la position

épistémologique de Humboldt. Cette position que nous avons essayé de
mettre en lumière en tant qu'épistémologie immanente à son portrait exécuté
par Weitsch renvoie en même temps à une dimension poétique. Même en
écrivant son Cosmos Humboldt avait eu recours à son journal de route écrit un
demi-siècle auparavant. Cette fidélité intratextuelle continue d'accorder une
légitimité supérieure à T'écriture à la vue des choses' que le veillard ne pouvait
plus pratiquer. Il pourra cependant maintenir une position corporelle qui cor-
respond toujours à ce type d'écriture qui lui était désormais impossible. Et
c'est ainsi que la mise en scène de la table de travail nous communique
secrètement une épistémologie scientifique et une poétique (intratextuelle) qui
formaient la base de l'œuvre humboldtienne.
C'est là une des raisons profondes de la dernière mise en scène d'un lieu
de l'écriture, d'un espace de travail construit par Humboldt. Dans la peinture
réalisée par Julius Schräder (1815-1900) peu de temps avant la mort du grand
homme, ce dernier était représenté dans une pose presque identique à celle
utilisée par Hildebrandt en 1848 (fig. 20). Assis sur un rocher comme dans la
peinture de Weitsch, Humboldt regarde le spectateur en interrompant son tra-
20. Tableau à l'huile de Julius Schräder: Alexander von Humboldt. 1859.
vail d'écriture: il venait d'écrire dans un petit carnet posé sur ses genoux. La
pose est bien la même, mais le lieu de l'écriture a changé: le vieillard n'est plus
assis dans son cabinet de travail mais devant les sommets enneigés du Chim-
borazo et du Cotopaxi. C'est Humboldt qui avait choisi ce décor, cet espace
dans lequel s'inscrivaient son écriture et sa vie. Une dernière fois, à l'âge de
presque 90 ans, il commandait une mise en scène d'une table de travail im-
provisée. Le tableau réalisé magistralement par Schräder et dominé par le
contraste entre le noir et le blanc sur un fond azuré, évoquant ainsi la fin d'u-
ne vie de voyageur, 6 6 projetait l'image presque surnaturelle d'un vieillard
'déplacé' dans son contexte préféré, mettant en scène une dernière fois la pra-
tique d'une écriture à la vue des choses.
* * *
66 Le contraste avec les couleurs vives utilisées dans le portrait de Weitsch est frappant.
Avant de conclure notre analyse, deux questions, éludées jusqu'à maintenant,

s'imposent: la première concerne le statut intertextuel et intermédial des rela-
tions entre les œuvres artistiques et les textes littéraires, philosophiques ou
scientifiques analysées ici. En ce qui concerne les frontispices utilisés dans les
différentes éditions de Y Histoire des deux Indes, leur statut est évidemment pa-
ratextuel. A l'entrée de leurs livres ou de leurs œuvres, ils projettent une cer-
taine image que le lecteur pourra mettre en relation avec l'ensemble du texte
qu'ils ouvrent. Les frontispices remplissent donc une évidente fonction d'or-
ientation, indépendamment du fait que cette orientation soit de caractère 'sé-
rieux' et informatif ou ludique, voire satirique.
Par contre, les tableaux, aquarelles, gravures et lithographies qui nous
transmettent une image d'Alexander von Humboldt n'ont jamais servi de
frontispices dans les textes publiés du vivant de leur auteur. Ils ne faisaient ja-
mais partie d'un des textes publiés par le savant de Tegel. Dans le contexte de
notre étude, leur statut pourrait donc paraître plus précaire, plus indécis par
rapport aux relations qui s'établissent entre les frontispices et les textes pu-
bliés par Raynal. Il est possible cependant de leur attribuer un lieu textuel ca-
pable de rendre compte des relations profondes entre les œuvres artistiques
que nous venons d'analyser et les textes humboldtiens. Dans sa définition de
ce qu'est un paratexte, Gérard Genette avait introduit une différentiation fon-
damentale entre deux types différents de paratexte définis par leur emplace-
ment. D'un côté, la notion de péritexte regroupe la catégorie d'éléments qui
se situent "autour du texte, dans l'espace du même volume." 67 De l'autre côté
se trouvent rangés, par leur emplacement purement spatial, les éléments de
l'épitexte qui se localisent de nouveau autour du texte, "mais à distance plus
respectueuse (ou plus prudente)," selon Genette. 68 Par conséquent, les fron-
tispices de Raynal relèvent du péritexte, les tableaux humboldtiens de l'épitex-
te: tous les deux font partie du paratexte bien que ce soit à un niveau
différent par rapport à la proximité relative à l'acte de la lecture des ouvrages
littéraires.
La deuxième question ne vise pas les relations entre le paratexte et le texte
même mais plus précisément les structures à l'intérieur de ces éléments pa-
ratextuels. Nous avons vu que la complexité des relations intermédiales à
l'intérieur du frontispice de l'édition genevoise in 4° était telle qu'il serait im-
possible de changer certains éléments visuels ou linguistiques sans détruire
l'unité formée par une sémantisation réciproque à plusieurs degrés. Le fron-
tispice de 1780 est par conséquent un iconotexte dans le sens plein du mot.
67 Genette: Seuils, p. 10.

68 Ibid.
Or, au frontispice de l'édition in 4 succèdent, dès 1780 et auprès du même

éditeur Pellet à Genève, des copies différentes 69 qui, en général, n'en repren-
nent qu'un seul élément: le portrait de T'auteur', présenté en médaillon (fig.
21). Si ce type de copie partielle fait mention du même dessinateur, Cochin, et
du même graveur, D e Launey, s'il reproduit le regard de T'auteur' sur le lec-
teur, il ne s'agit plus d'un iconotexte dans le sens fort de ce concept. Car ce
portrait en médaillon ne place plus le philosophe au milieu de son cabinet de
travail, au milieu donc d'un système d'allusions extrêmement riche, il ne con-
serve que le langage vestimentaire et la relation visuelle maintenue avec le lec-
teur. L'emplacement des différents éléments iconiques et linguistiques sur
l'ensemble de la page en frontispice se trouve remplacé, par exemple dans la
troisième édition de XHistoire des deux Indes parue en 1780 in 8 chez Pellet à
Genève, par une relation 'univoque' entre le portrait en médaillon et une
souscription sur cartouche rectangulaire ne portant que le nom de "GUIL-
LAUME THOMAS RAYNAL" en lettres majuscules. Le bas-relief allégorique et son
encadrement sobre ont disparu tout comme l'inscription attribuée à Eliza
Draper. Le jeu complexe des relations intermédiales est gommé. La construc-
tion d'un espace littéraire interne caractérisé par ses relations intratextuelles
(avec l'"Eloge d'Eliza") et intertextuelles (avec ΓEncyclopédie) est éliminée. L'i-
conotexte du frontispice de l'édition in 4° a été détruit.
Il serait sans doute intéressant d'analyser à fond les raisons qui ont pu me-
ner l'auteur ou ses éditeurs à une telle destruction. Il nous paraît évident que
la solution choisie renforce le lien identificatoire entre le portrait de T'auteur'
et le nom de Raynal inscrit en-dessous. Le caractère ludique et 'déconstruc-
tionniste' du frontispice avec le philosophe dans son cabinet de travail a été
extrêmement réduit. S'il est vrai qu'il s'agit toujours d'un 'portrait-robot' du
philosophe et qu'ainsi une certaine subversion a été maintenue par rapport
aux conventions qui identifient un portrait avec le nom indiqué sous l'image,
le changement profond du frontispice, dès 1780, nous paraît obéir toujours à
la même stratégie d'une appropriation successive de l'œuvre par Raynal, à une
croissante auteurisation de cette encyclopédie de l'expansion coloniale. C'est
peut-être là une des raisons profondes pour l'élimination d'un jeu intermédial
d'une complexité telle que ce frontispice, malgré ses liens multiples avec le
texte même, pouvait se concevoir comme une unité à part, c'est-à-dire com-
me une création (iconotextuelle) de grande autonomie artistique.
C'est ici que nous allons insister sur le lien qui unit les deux questions
dans cette dernière partie de notre travail. C'est ici que se présente l'in-
69 Gilles Bancarel en mentionne "dix copies différentes" localisées dans les différentes édi-
tions raynaliennes; voir Bancarel: " G . Thomas Raynal. D e la séduction à la sévérité," p. 482.

Frontispice de la troisième édition. 10 volumes in 8°, Genève, Pellet, 1780.
terdépendance entre le statut péri- ou épitextuel et le caractère iconotextuel

ou non-iconotextuel. Le portrait d'Alexander von Humboldt dans son cabinet
de travail exécuté par Hildebrandt porte bien une inscription manuscrite du
savant voyageur qui soulignait et approuvait le caractère documentaire de cet-
te aquarelle. Mais cette relation intermédiale ne constitue pas, à notre avis, un
véritable iconotexte, au moins-dans le sens fort du terme. L'inscription limi-
tait plutôt la création artistique à la simple valeur d'un document. Tout com-
me le portrait de Humboldt dans sa bibliothèque brossé par le même peintre,
cette aquarelle construit un espace dont les implications sémantiques - nous
l'avons vu — vont bien au-delà d'une valeur purement documentaire. 70
Les mises en scène des lieux de l'écriture humboldtiens, contrairement au
frontispice de Raynal que nous avons analysé, ne sont pas des iconotextes, et
leur statut épitextuel implique toujours une distance et (surtout) une autono-
mie beaucoup plus grandes par rapport au texte même des écrits de l'auteur
de la Relation historique d'un Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Conti-
nent. Néanmoins, ceci n'implique pas que leurs fonctions paratextuelles soient
plus faibles ou moins déterminées. Tout comme les frontispices de Γ Histoire
des deux Indes, elles entrent en une relation complexe et pluridimensionnelle
avec l'écriture. Et si le lieu de l'écriture joue toujours, à notre avis, un rôle es-
sentiel dans la construction sémantique, narrative ou discursive d'un texte, la
mise en scène de ce lieu implique souvent — comme les œuvres choisies pour
notre analyse viennent de le démontrer - des dimensions poétologiques et
épistémologiques. La mise en scène de la table de travail nous renvoie au tra-
vail artistique sur la scène de l'écriture, représentée souvent en tant qu'acte in-
terrompu, l'écrivain venant d'interrompre son travail pour regarder le lecteur
/ spectateur surgissant dans la scène. La mise en scène de la table de travail
est intégrée dans une narrativité, dans une scène au cours de laquelle inter-
viennent l'auteur, le peintre, le spectateur, le lecteur et le texte écrit. Et, com-
me toute scène originaire, cette scène de l'écriture est toujours révélatrice.
70 La mise en scène de cette partie du cabinet de travail humboldtien nous semble présenter
même une série d'allusions à un des plus célèbres tableaux de Jan Vermeer (1632-1675),
r'AHégorie de la peinture'. La lumière venant de la fenêtre à gauche illuminant une table (de
travail) et une carte géographique (non une mappemonde donc, mais la représentation de
l'Hollande) qui domine la partie droite du tableau représentent un schéma pictural auquel
pourrait répondre la mise en scène réalisée par Hüdebrandt. Suivant le schéma proposé par
Vermeer, la place de Clio, représentation allégorique de la muse de l'Histoire et de la
postérité, est occupée, dans l'aquarelle du peintre allemand, par celui qui s'est appelé à
maintes reprises 'historien du continent américain'. L'appel à la muse de l'Histoire et à la
postérité, présent sous forme emblématique et textuelle dans l'œuvre de Raynal, se retrou-
verait donc camouflé derrière la représentation d'un cabinet de travail dont Humboldt avait
souligné la simple valeur documentaire?
Icono texts:
The Nineteenth Century
PETER SABOR
Université Laval (Quebec)
The Strategic Withdrawal from Ekphrasis

in Jane Austen's Novels
Abstract: Each of Jane Austen's six completed novels, as well as several of her early
writings and the unfinished Sanditon contains at least one scene in which pictures
play an important part. These pictures are used not merely for decorative pur-
poses, but to reveal psychological nuances in her characters and to explore the dy-
namics of their relationships. What makes the pictures - such as the portrait of
Darcy in Pride and Prejudice or the print of a boat in Persuasion - interesting is the
extent to which they are not purely representational, the way in which they create
debates about their subjects. In this respect, the pictures function in the same end-
lessly engaging and provocative manner as the texts of which they are a part. They
are "speaking pictures," dicussed within Austen's novels by her characters and de-
signed to be discussed outside her fiction by her readers.
In March 1817, four months before her death, Jane Austen was forced by ill
health to break off her work on Sanditon. In the last scene she ever wrote, she
depicts the heroine, Charlotte Heywood, and her friend, Mrs. Parker, being
ushered into the stately sitting room of Lady Denham. On the wall, centrally
placed above the mandepiece, Charlotte sees a whole-length portrait of Lady
Denham's late husband, Sir Harry Denham; in another part of the room,
crowded inconspicuously amongst a group of miniatures, is the portrait of a
previously deceased husband, Mr. Hollis. The passage, and the novel frag-
ment, concludes with a witty narratorial observation: "Poor Mr Hollis! - It
was impossible not to feel him hardly used; to be obliged to stand back in his
own House & see the best place by the fire constandy occupied by Sir Hfarry]
Dfenham]." 1
1 Sanditon. Austen: The Novels, vol. 6, Minor Works, p. 427. All further references to the text of
Austen's novels are to this edition.
214 Iconotexts: The Nineteenth Century
The episode plays an important part in Sanditon. Mr. Parker has previously
given Charlotte an account of the rivalry among the various claimants to Lady
Denham's fortune, explaining that of the three competing camps, "Mr Hol-
lis's Kindred were the least in favour & Sir Harry Denham's the most" (VI,
376-77). Now the rivalry is physically embodied in the placings of Mr. Hollis's
miniature and Sir Harry's whole-length portrait, which clearly reveal Lady
Denham's evaluation of the respective merits of her two late husbands.
Austen has used pictures not merely for decorative purposes, but to reveal
psychological nuances in her characters.
Few critics, however, have made much of this intriguing portrait scene.
Park Honan, typically, regards it merely as "a good joke, and her last in a
novel."2 And in general Austen's interest in and use of the visual arts remains
a neglected subject, despite the vast and ever burgeoning secondary literature
devoted to her writings. Several critics have written on the set-piece portrait
scenes in two of her novels, Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815). But
the prevailing view is that Austen had little concern for the visual arts, which
therefore played a negligible part in her fiction. Murray Roston, for example,
who devotes a chapter to Austen in his recent book on literature and the
visual arts in the eighteenth century, mentions what he wrongly calls a "rare
reference to painting" in her letters, but has nothing to say on representations
of paintings in her novels. Lance Bertelsen, similarly, in a recent article, de-
clares at the outset that "Austen's novels are not rich in pictorial imagery, nor
do the visual arts play an important part in her fictional world."3
In the face of this critical consensus, I shall show that in each of Austen's
six completed novels, as well as in Sanditon, the visual arts play a significant
role. Austen depicts both amateur artists, characters in the novels themselves,
and imaginary professionals such as those who painted Mr. Hollis and Sir
Harry Denham. Unlike Samuel Richardson, who refers in Clarissa to a por-
trait of the heroine by Highmore and in Sir Charles Grandison to portraits of
the hero's parents by Kneller,4 Austen does not go so far as to create links be-
tween her characters and specific artists; nor, unlike those of many of her
predecessors, were any of her novels illustrated during her lifetime. But her
interest in the arts was emphasized in her brother Henry's "Biographical No-
tice," written shortly after her death. When he states that "she had not only
an excellent taste for drawing, but, in her earlier days, evinced great power of
2 Honan: Jane Austen: Her Life, p. 391.

3 Roston: Changing Perspectives, p. 333; Bertelsen: "Jane Austen's Miniatures," p. 350.
4 See Clarissa, p. 509 and Sir Charles Grandison, III, 279.
Sabor: The Strategic Withdrawal from Ekphrasis in Jane Austen's Novels 215
hand in the management of her pencil"5 he introduces a subject of consider-

able importance to an understanding of her fiction. That Austen was a con-
noisseur of paintings as well as drawings is suggested by Henry's subsequent
remark, "She was a warm and judicious admirer of landscape, both in nature
and on canvass" (V, 7), and confirmed by several of her letters.
While Austen makes frequent use of the visual arts in her novels, however,
she eschews any detailed evocation of visual representations, and thus frees her-
self from the dilemma of ekphrastic creation that other contributors to this vol-
ume eloquently describe. Bernadette Fort remarks astutely that "to attempt to
represent an art object for a reader as vividly as that object speaks to a beholder
requires from the writer a virtuosity which borders on trickery."6 James Heffer-
nan uses military imagery to characterize the same tension, noting that ekphra-
sis "stages a battle for mastery between two rival systems of representation: a
batde richly complicated by the fact that the battlefield is wholly verbal."7 And
Frederick Burwick suggests that ekphrasis had a confessional purpose for De
Quincey, who "admitted both deceit and personal agony in his very pretense of
bringing language to challenge the representations of art."8 But in Austen, De
Quincey's near contemporary, no such challenge takes place. When pictures ap-
pear in her fiction the focus is on their effect on characters or on the characters'
attitudes to the pictures, rather than on the pictures themselves.
Thus in the scene from Sandition, typically, what matters is the use made of
portraits by one of the characters, Lady Hollis, and the effect the portraits
have on others; no warfare between the verbal and visual takes place, because
the pictures as such are not described. This strategic withholding of pictorial
detail, an approach to but withdrawal from ekphrasis, characterizes all of
Austen's novels, beginning with the short fiction that she wrote in her mid-
teens. In "Lesley Castle" and "Catharine" (both 1792), for example, talented
amateur artists hold out the promise of one of their pictures as gifts to fa-
voured recipients. Eloisa Luttereil in "Lesley Castle," whose love of "drawing
Pictures" is contrasted with her gormandizing sister's love of "drawing Pul-
lets," is accustomed to receiving admiration for her productions, and draws
portraits of a few chosen admirers. Maria Halifax, in "Catharine," uses her tal-
ent for portrait-painting in a similar manner, while Miss Percival, in the same
story, enchants Edward Stanley in part through her drawings.9 What the three
5 Henry Austen: "Biographical Notice," p. 5.

6 Fort: "Diderot and Fragonard's Coresus and Callirhoe," in this volume.
7 Heffernan: "Entering the Museum of Words," in this volume.
8 Burwick: "Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Crisis of Romanticism," in this volume.
9 Austen: Minor Works, pp. 129, 130, 206, 229.
artists have in common is that none of their productions is ever described: we

see responses to their drawings and paintings, but not the works themselves.
A special case among the early writings is that of "The History of Eng-
land" (1791), in which portraiture makes its way quite literally into the text;
each section of the manuscript is headed by a medallion portrait in water-
colours painted by Austen's elder sister Cassandra. The amateur artist here is
not a character within but a contributor to the work. 10 On two occasions
Austen refers specifically to Cassandra's illustrations. Of Edward IV she de-
clares ironically that "this monarch was famous only for his Beauty and his
Courage, of which the Picture we have here given of him, and his undaunted
Behaviour in marrying one Woman while he was engaged to another are suf-
ficient proofs" (VI, 140-41). Cassandra's portrait of Edward (fig. 22), with its
protruding lips, turned-up nose, and staring eyes, makes him perhaps the least
attractive of all the monarchs. He is dressed like an eighteenth-century farmer
rather than a fifteenth-century king, and looks more like a country bumpkin
than the nation's sovereign. But Austen makes no attempt to match Cassan-
dra's visual representation through a verbal evocation; the laconic "sufficient
proofs" is as close to ekphrasis as she wishes to approach. Of Edward V, the
only one of her subjects lacking a portrait by Cassandra, Austen writes: "This
unfortunate Prince lived so little a while that nobody had time to draw his
picture" (VI, 141). Just as Austen is unable to achieve any interest in the
youthful monarch murdered at the age of twelve, devoting only three lines of
her "History" to him, Cassandra cannot bring herself to depict so unformed
a character. Instead, she inserts an illustration of Mary Queen of Scots (fig.
23), uncalled for by a history devoted specifically to English monarchs but
nonetheless appropriate given Austen's repeated panegyrics on the Scottish
queen. Mary is youthful, beautiful, and fashionably dressed in the style of the
1790s. Elizabeth, her remorseless persecutor in Austen's text, in contrast to
Mary is caricatured both in her appearance and her dress (fig. 24). Her
hairstyle is characteristic of the early, rather than the late eighteenth century,
and her clothing is absurdly garish.
Since all the details of Mary's and Elizabeth's physical appearance are sup-
plied by Cassandra, independently of Austen's verbal portrait, the tensions be-
lo Some modern editions, regrettably, omit this essential part of Austen's witty miniature his-
tory. Chapman in Minor Works (p. 2) and the World's Classics editors, Margaret Anne
Doody and Douglas Murray (p. 329), note the existence of Cassandra's illustrations without
reproducing them. A facsimile edition of the History, with excellent colour reproductions of
Cassandra's thirteen medallion portraits, has recendy been published by the British Library,
which possesses the original manuscript, part of Austen's "Volume the Second."
Sabor: T h e Strategic Withdrawal f r o m Ekphrasis in Jane Austen's Novels 217
22. Cassandra Austen: Edward IV. From The History of England. 1791.
Courtesy of the British Museum.
tween text and image that occur in any illustrated work are largely absent
from the "The History of England." The exceptionally close relationship be-
tween author and illustrator enables Cassandra to supply apt visual caricatures
to supplement her sister's verbal parody, yet none of these caricatures corres-
ponds to a specific verbal depiction in Austen's text.11
11 I am indebted here to Fergus's fine essay, "Jane and Cassandra Austen as Collaborators."
Fergus is the only critic yet to study Cassandra's illustrations to the "History."
23. Cassandra Austen: Mary Queen of Scots. From The History of England. 1791.
The extreme brevity of most of the early writings does not permit Austen
to develop her use of visual art to any extent. In her novels, however, she re-
peatedly uses pictures to throw light on her characters' psychology and to re-
veal the dynamics of their relationships. The earliest of her novels, Northanger
Abbey, contains a prototype of such scenes. Catherine Morland, unlike some
other Austen heroines, is not an artist herself: as a child "her taste for draw-
ing was not superior," although "she did what she could in that way, by draw-
ing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another"
Sabor: T h e Strategic Withdrawal from Ekphrasis in Jane Austen's Novels 219
24. Cassandra Austen: Queen Elizabeth. From The History of England. 1791
(V, 14). Yet Catherine does have a capacity to appreciate art, and this capacity
helps entrap her in the quasi-Gothic world of General Tilney's abbey. Before
arriving at the abbey, her imagination has been enflamed by Henry Tilney's in-
ventive account of its Gothic trappings. Over the fireplace of her bedroom,
he declares, she will behold "the portrait of some handsome warrior, whose
features will so incomprehensibly strike you, that you will not be able to with-
draw your eyes from it" (V, 158). Catherine's room, as it transpires, contains
220 Iconotexts: T h e Nineteenth Century
no such portrait - although it does contain other items adumbrated by Henry

- but another picture pläys an important part in her emotional entanglements
at the abbey. Persuaded of General Tilney's cruelty to his late wife, Catherine
asks her friend Eleanor Tilney whether he has her portrait in his room, while
"blushing at the consummate art of her own question." Eleanor replies:
" N o ; — it was intended for the drawing-room; but my father was dissatisfied with
the painting, and for some time it had no place. S o o n after her death I obtained it
for my own, and hung it in my bed-chamber - where I shall be happy to shew it
you; - it is very like." - Here was another proof. A portrait - very like - o f a de-
parted wife, not valued by the husband! — H e must have been dreadfully cruel to
her! (V, 1 8 0 - 8 1 )
When she is later shown the portrait in Eleanor's room, however, Catherine's
expectations are disappointed. The subject is "a very lovely woman," but
Catherine
had depended upon meeting with features, air, complexion that should be the very
counterpart, the very image, i f not o f Henry's, o f Eleanor's; - the only portraits o f
which she had been in the habit o f thinking bearing always an equal resemblance
o f mother and child. A face once taken was taken for generations. But here she
was obliged to look and consider and study for a likeness. (V, 191)
Catherine's being obliged to "look and consider and study" epitomizes the
whole course of her experiences at the Abbey. Most of her assumptions there
are found wanting; in this case her belief that mothers will resemble their
daughters and sons is undermined. Faces are not, as she had supposed, taken
for generations; hereditary and family ties, as well as portraiture itself, are less
straightforward than this. As Marcia Pointon remarks in her recent study of
eighteenth-century portraiture, Hanging the Head, "the portrait has no unprob-
lematic referent; it cannot be explained as a correlative to the text of a sub-
ject's life." 12 In this case, typically for Austen, far from being a correlative the
portrait fails to materialize. The focus is on Catherine, contemplating what
she will see and then gazing at the portrait, but no attempt is made to repres-
ent the portrait for the reader; far from resembling Henry or Eleanor, this
painting resembles no one at all.
The relationship between a portrait and its subject is also an important
issue in Sense and Sensibility (1811). When Lucy Steele, in a tense conversation
with Elinor, reveals the secret of her engagement to Edward Ferrars, she dis-
plays a prized miniature of her fiancé as an emblem of her exclusive rights to
the subject. "To prevent the possibility of a mistake," she urges Elinor, "be so
12 Pointon: Hanging the Head, p. 4.

good as to look at this face. It does not do him justice to be sure, but yet I
think you cannot be deceived as to the person it was drew for. - I have had it
above these three years" (Ί, 131). Lucy continues to harp on the talismanic ef-
fect that her ownership of the miniature affords, and presses home her ad-
vantage over Elinor. She has given Edward a lock of her hair, set in a ring,
"and that was some comfort to him, he said, but not equal to a picture." "If
he had but my picture, he says he should be easy" (I, 135). In her character-
istically vulgar and spiteful fashion, Lucy thus specifies the worth of a picture
in the game of courtship: to possess the image of one's beloved is "to be
easy," and nothing, including billets-doux, rings, or locks of hair, is "equal to a
picture." It is notable too that when Lucy jilts Edward in favour of his poten-
tially wealthier brother Robert, she still retains possession of the miniature, in-
forming him, "I have burnt all your letters, and will return your picture the
first opportunity" (I, 365). It seems fair to suppose that no such opportunity
would present itself to Lucy, who is fully aware of the power that ownership
of Edward's portrait has given her.
Austen makes further use of the visual arts in Sense and Sensibility by en-
dowing Elinor with artistic gifts. One of Marianne's objections to Edward as a
suitor of her sister concerns his inability to appreciate Elinor's accomplish-
ments as fully as he should:
though he admires Elinor's drawings very much, it is not the admiration of a per-
son who can understand their worth. It is evident, in spite of his frequent atten-
tion to her while she draws, that in fact he knows nothing of the matter. He ad-
mires as a lover, not as a connoisseur. (I, 17)
For Marianne, it is inconceiveable that Edward and Elinor could be happily

married unless his connoisseurship is properly developed. This is, she declares
to Elinor, "indispensably necessary to your future felicity. Oh! if he should be
so far stimulated by your genius as to learn to draw himself, how delightful it
would be" (I, 22). As so often in the novel, of course, Marianne is wrong. The
future happiness of Edward and Elinor depends on factors other than his be-
coming an artist; more to the point, he must be disencumbered of his awful
fiancée. In a later scene, however, Austen uses Elinor's artistic talents to
throw a more favourable light on Marianne's character. Here, Fanny Dash-
wood, Marianne and Elinor's sister-in-law, has been shown a pair of screens
that Elinor has painted. Seeing a chance to disparage Elinor at the expense of
a better connected young woman, Fanny declares to her mother:
"Do you not think they are something in Miss Morton's style of painting, ma'am?
— She does paint most delightfully! — How beautifully her last landscape is done!"
"Beautifully indeed! But she does every thing well." (I, 235)
Marianne's reply is splendidly forthright, revealing her at her best: "This is ad-
miration of a very particular kind! — what is Miss Morton to us? - who
knows, or who cares, for her? - it is Elinor of whom we think and speak."
Austen has thus used Elinor's artistic gift to exemplify the two extremes of
Marianne's sensibility: her impetuous egotism, on the one hand, and her loy-
alty and candour on the other. No attempt, however, is made to embody the
various art objects through ekphrasis; Lucy's precious miniature remains as
invisible to Austen's readers as Elinor's painted screens.
The roles of amateur artist and enthusiastic but inexpert viewer played by
Elinor and Edward in Sense and Sensibility are taken up in Emma by the hero-
ine and Mr. Elton. As part of her campaign to marry off Harriet Smith to El-
ton, Emma has the idea o f painting her portrait. Ostensibly, this is to gratify
Emma herself, who exclaims to Elton: "What an exquisite possession a good
picture o f her would be! I would give any money for it. I almost long to at-
tempt her likeness myself' (IV, 43). In practice, however, Emma wishes to
raise Harriet's value and social standing by making her the subject of a por-
trait, and hopes to endear her to Elton in doing so. The portrait is "to be a
whole-length in water-colours, like Mr. John Knightley's, and was destined, if
she could please herself, to hold a very honourable station over the mantle-
piece" (IV, 46). The size and intended place o f the portrait are, of course, sig-
nificant; like Sir Harry Denham in Sanditon, Harriet is to be represented in a
whole-length portrait, rather than a less imposing half-length or miniature,
and to be hung over the mantlepiece, the most prominent position in the
room. The comparison to John Knightley is also telling; in planning to paint a
whole-length portrait of her friend, as she already has of her brother-in-law,
Emma is attempting to confer on her, by association, a comparably re-
spectable place in the social hierarchy.
Elton's response to Emma's suggestion is thus of considerable import-
ance, enabling her to assess to what extent he is already persuaded of her
friend's charms:
" L e t me entreat you," cried Mr. Elton; "it would indeed be a delight! [...] I know
what your drawings are. How could you supppose me ignorant? Is not this room
rich in specimens o f your landscapes and flowers; and has not Mrs. Weston some
inimitable figure-pieces in her drawing-room, at Randalls?" (IV, 43)
The problem, as Emma perceives, is that his enthusiasm is directed more to-
wards her artistic talents than towards the beauty of her intended subject:
"Yes, good man! - thought Emma — but what has all that to do with taking
likenesses? You know nothing of drawing. Don't pretend to be in raptures
about mine. Keep your raptures for Harriet's face." The scene is full of rev-
dations about Emma and her undeclared suitor, Elton. His compliments are
just ambiguous enough to deceive Emma, who continues to suppose that he
is enamoured o f Harriet, not herself. Thus when Elton takes a place by her
easel, "fidgetting behind her and watching every touch," Emma "gave him
credit for stationing himself where he might gaze and gaze again without of-
fence" (TV, 46), unaware that he is gazing at the artist, not the model. We are
also shown Emma's portfolio, which acts as a chastening commentary on her
lack o f purpose in life. It contains
"her various attempts at portraits, for not one o f them had ever been finished [...]
Her many beginnings were displayed. Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pen-
cil, crayon, and water-colours had all been tried in turn [...] but steadiness had al-
ways been wanting" (IV, 44)
— in her artistic endeavours as in the rest o f her life.

For once, however, Emma does complete a portrait, and for once in
Austen's novels it is characterized in some detail; the ekphrastic response to
the finished work provides insight into the various characters in the novel.
Mrs. Weston who, as Emma's former governess, is well aware of her short-
comings, notes that the picture flatters Harriet, who "has not those eye-
brows and eye-lashes. It is the fault o f her face that she has them not" (IV,
48). Mr. Knighdey, more blundy, declares, "You have made her too tall." Mr.
Woodhouse, forever hypochondriac, finds fault with the subject's "sitting out
o f doors, with only a littie shawl over her shoulders — and it makes one think
she must catch cold." Mr. Elton, exclaiming " I never saw such a likeness,"
while ostensibly admiring the beauty o f the subject is coverdy applauding the
skill o f the artist. As Emma's undeclared admirer, his role here is to defend
her artistic powers against the criticism o f Mrs. Weston, Mr. Knighdey, and
Mr. Woodhouse. Thus the full eye-brows and eye-lashes o f the portrait but
not the model he ascribes to "the effect o f shade"; the exaggerated height to
the fact o f Harriet's sitting down, and the supposed "Proportions, fore-
shortening" this entails; and the light clothing in an outdoor setting to "the
naïveté o f Miss Smith's manners." Emma is well aware that Elton protests
too much; she knows, for example, that she has made her subject too tall,
"but would not own it." Harriet, we have already been told, is "short, plump
and fair" (IV, 23); Emma, in contrast, is tall and elegant (IV, 39). Several crit-
ics have noted the significance o f these details in light o f Emma's misrep-
resentation o f Harriet. Bruce Stovel observes that in creating "an image of
Harriet much more like Emma herself than Harriet really is," the portrait
"epitomizes what Emma does to Harriet in general: she transforms Harriet's
actual self into a monstrous new identity fashioned in the image o f Em-
ma."13 Elizabeth Sabiston speculates about Emma's conscious and uncon-

scious motivations. Emma had meant, we are told by the narrator, to "throw
in a little improvement to the figure, to give a little more height, and consider-
ably more elegance" (IV, 47). Sabiston, however, rightly suggests that "al-
though Emma has chosen to improve Harriet's mien and figure, it is clear that
she is unaware of drawing her criteria from her own appearance and bear-
ing"14
This strange, hybrid portrait, both Emma and Harriet and yet neither, cre-
ates further confusion as Elton takes it to London to be framed, exclaiming
as he receives it from Emma, "What a precious deposit!" (TV, 49). The de-
luded artist is left to imagine a scene in which Elton shows the picture to his
admiring mother and sisters as a means of introducing Harriet to them, while
declaring "how much more beautiful is the original" (TV, 56), when doubdess
he is using it instead to introduce Emma, and declaring how much more
beautiful the picture is than its unworthy subject. Finally the portrait, source
of so much misunderstanding, returns framed to hang in Emma's sitting-
room, where Elton, ambiguously, "sighed out his half sentences of admiration
just as he ought" (TV, 69).
On another occasion, Austen again uses art to display Emma's misconcep-
tions about the states of other people's hearts. Informed by Miss Bates that
Jane Fairfax has been shown drawings of Mr. Dixon's seat in Ireland, "views
that he had taken himself," Emma at once entertains "an ingenious and an-
imating suspicion" that Jane and Dixon must be in love (IV, 160). Ironically,
Jane's true but undeclared lover, Frank Churchill, is himself an amateur artist,
who hopes, or claims to hope, to make sketches of a tour through Switzer-
land (IV, 364—65). What Emma, in her naivety, does not perceive is that lovers
may wish to disguise their emotions from others. The relationship between
admiring a picture and admiring a lover is more complex than she supposes;
Elton does not, after all, love Harriet Smith any more than Dixon loves Jane
Fairfax.
Pictures play a much smaller part in Mansfield Park (1814) than in Austen's
other novels. The only ones mentioned are those decorating Mr. Rushworth's
seat, Sotherton, of which "the larger part were family portraits, no longer any
thing to any body but Mrs. Rushworth" (III, 84—85), and the still less im-
pressive works of art adorning Fanny Price's room at Mansfield Park:
three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the three lower panes
of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy, and a
13 Stovel: "Comic Symmetry in Jane Austen's Emma" p. 454.

14 Sabiston: The Prison of Womanhood, p. 34.
moonlight lake in Cumberland; a collection of family profiles thought unworthy of

being anywhere else, over the mantle-piece, and by their side and pinned against
the wall, a small sketch o f a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by
William ... (Ill, 152)
It is characteristic of all that surrounds Fanny that the pictures in her room
should be those "thought unworthy of being anywhere else," and that the
only one she herself has furnished is a sketch by her ever-faithful brother Wil-
liam. Art in Mansfield Park thus draws attention to the heroine's chronically
subordinate position. The objects of her gaze are, perforce, three distincdy
lowly forms of art: the no longer fashionable transparencies, family profiles
that even the family in question no longer cherishes, and a sketch by a sailor
brother not known for his artistic abilities. Our sense of Fanny's position at
Mansfield Park is deepened by Austen's precise account of each neglected pic-
ture in her possession, and it is significant that these pictures are described
more fully than the much grander family portraits at Sotherton. Fanny's at-
tachment to her works of art invests them with a significance that the an-
onymous family portraits lack.
In Persuasion (1817), her last completed novel, Austen again includes a
scene of a picture being analysed by one of the characters. Here it is a print
observed in a printshop window by Admiral Croft, the retired sailor who is
renting the Elliot family's estate. When Anne Elliot encounters the Admiral
gazing at the print, he describes his responses to it (though not, typically, the
print itself) in detail:
Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stop-
ping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat. D o look at it. Did you ever see the
like? What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think that any body would
venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that. A n d yet, here are two
gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks
and mountains, as if they were not to be upset the next moment, which they cer-
tainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built ... I would not venture over a
horsepond in it. (V, 169)
The scene has recendy been analysed by Lorraine Clark, who writes that the
"picture here subject to the Admiral's simultaneous admiration and ridicule
clearly belongs to the 'sublime' school of painting popular from 1750-1850,
where the threatened annihilation of boats and men at sea by mountainous
waves and threatening rocks is a recurrent motif." 15 Since the ekphrasis of the
admiral's commentary is so incomplete - we cannot be sure, for example, of
15 Clark: "Transfiguring the Romantic Sublime in Persuasion," p. 1.

25. J.MAX'. Turner: Shipwreck. 1805. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery. London.
the size of the boat or whether it is at sea or on a lake - Clark's interpretation

is open to dispute, yet convincing.
The greatest English painter of the sublime, of course, is Turner, whose
earliest paintings of shipwrecks and storms at sea predate Persuasion by some
ten years. None of Turner's paintings features two gentlemen in imminent
danger of shipwreck, yet "mightily at their ease." The admiral may, however,
be interpreting in his own fashion a painting such as Turner's famous sea-
piece Shipwreck of 1805 (fig. 25), from which prints made by the engraver
Charles Turner were issued in 1807. 16 Intriguingly, the admiral's keen eye may
have detected something at the heart of Turner's sublime, aptly described by
WJ.T. Mitchell "not just as the record of a vertiginous, disorienting experi-
ence, but as a representation of perceptual resistance to disorientation."
Mitchell notes Turner's "amazing resistance to vertigo" and quotes a contem-
porary account of his sitting in a small boat in heavy waters, "intendy watch-
ing the sea, and not at all affected by the motion." 17 This excursion took
place in 1813, just two years before Austen began writing Persuasion·, it is as
16 See Wilton: Turnerin bis Time, p. 74.

17 Mitchell: "Metamorphoses of the Vortex," p. 140. The account, by Cyrus Redding, is quot-
ed in Finberg: The Life of J.M. W. Turner, p. 198.
though Austen's anonymous printmaker and Turner were responding to the

sublime with similar equanimity.
Clark astutely describes the print in Persuasion as "a concise and brilliant
emblem of the entire world of Austen's novel ... one of radical change which
threatens to sweep all - including and especially its heroine - before it." 18 In
her reading of the novel, the print, ignored by all previous critics, becomes
central to Austen's design: a visual rendition of experiences such as the ad-
miral's penchant for reckless carriage drives, that invariably result in his over-
turning himself and his wife; Louisa Musgrove's wilful but terrifying fall down
the steps of the Cobb; and Anne Elliot's resolute stasis in the midst of all the
frantic motion around her.
Another work of art plays an equally important part in Persuasion. In the
penultimate chapter of the novel, one of two written by Austen to replace her
original, unsatisfactory conclusion, Anne is again shown a picture. On this oc-
casion it is "a small miniature painting" of Captain Benwick, which Captain
Harville has in his possession. It is to be presented to Benwick's fiancée,
Louisa Musgrove, but, as Harville explains to Anne "in a deep tone":
it was not done for her [...] He met with a clever young German artist at the
Cape, and in compliance with a promise to my poor sister, sat to him, and was
bringing it home for her. And I have now the charge of getting it properly set for
another! [...] And with a quivering lip he wound up the whole by adding, "Poor
Fanny! she would not have forgotten him so soon!" (V, 232)
The account of Benwick's inconstancy that the miniature has inspired leads in
turn to the famous debate about the respective constancy of men and women
in love, a debate overheard by Wentworth who now writes the letter that
brings about his reunion with Anne. But the miniature does not merely facilit-
ate the unfolding of the plot; it remains as a disturbing emblem of inconstan-
cy. As Tony Tanner observes: "the man changes in his affections; the portrait
remains 'constant'. In this it is precisely a misrepresentation - an ideal image
of the man which leaves all his emotional changeableness out." 19 It also
serves to emphasize, in its solipsistic fashion, Benwick's narcissism, his being
in love with love itself rather than with either Fanny or Louisa. 20 Like Edward
Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Captain Benwick has had an image of himself
made as a token of his devotion; both tokens, however, are used for purposes
other than had originally been intended. To possess the image of one's be-
18 Clark: "Transfiguring the Romantic Sublime," p. 5.

19 Tanner: Jane Austen, p. 240.
20 I owe this point to Lorraine Clark, letter to the author, 13 October 1993.
loved is not, as Lucy Steele had claimed, "to be easy" (I, 135). In both cases
Austen shows her awareness of the disparity between visual images and the
lives they purport to display.
Without this scene, the many previous references to Captain Benwick's
devotion for Fanny Harville would lack a natural resolution. With hindsight,
in the final version of the novel, these remarks take on a poignant irony.
When we first hear of the couple, for example, we are told that "Captain
Wentworth believed it impossible for man to be more attached to woman
than poor Benwick had been to Fanny Harville" (V, 96-97); the portrait scene
illustrates graphically how wrong Wentworth can be. Wentworth has pro-
jected his own continuing devotion to Anne onto his friend's putative devo-
tion to the memory of his beloved. Later, he expresses his astonishment to
Anne when he hears of Benwick's engagement to Louisa:
A man like him, in his situation! With a heart pierced, wounded, almost broken!
Fanny Harville was a very superior creature; and his attachment to her was indeed
attachment. A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a
woman! - He ought not - he does not. (V, 183)
All this, while true of Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot, has little to do
with Captain Benwick and Fanny Harville. In the portrait scene inserted in
the revised conclusion, Wentworth is made implicitly to acknowledge as much
when we see him writing to Benwick about the framing of the miniature,
Captain Harville having made over this painful task to his friend.
Earlier in Persuasion, Austen also uses portraits to elucidate the psychology
of her characters, in this case the Musgrove family at Uppercross. The Great
House at Uppercross is notable for its "air of confusion" (V, 40). Mary Mus-
grove's sisters-in-law, Henrietta and Louisa, have introduced a grand-piano, a
harp, flower-stands and small tables into a formal parlour, without regard for
the incongruous effect that the clash of styles has created. The disorder is
comparable to that created by the amateur theatricals at Mansfield Park,
where Sir Thomas, on his return, finds a "general air of confusion in the fur-
niture," marked by "the removal of the book-case from before the billiard
room door" (III, 182). In Persuasion, Austen uses the portraits of the Mus-
grove family hanging on the walls of Uppercross to dramatize the overthrow
of the old order:
Oh! could the originals of the portraits against the wainscot, could the gentlemen
in brown velvet and the ladies in blue satin have seen what was going on, have
been conscious of such an overthrow of all order and neatness! The portraits
themselves seemed to be staring in astonishment. (V, 40)
Like the description of the print of the storm at sea, this approaches while
never quite achieving ekphrasis. Details of the gentlemen's and ladies' clothing
("brown velvet" and "blue satin") and their staring expressions enable the
reader to envisage not so much the works of visual art that the verbal account
has constructed as the models for those works, the "originals of the portraits"
rather than the portraits themselves.
It is interesting to compare Austen's depiction of the pictures at Upper-
cross with that of their counterparts at Kellynch-hall. All we hear of the latter
comes from the scheming Mrs. Clay, who in praising the Crofts as potential
tenants assures Sir Walter that "these valuable pictures of yours [...] if you
choose to leave them, would be perfectly safe" (V, 18). Later, Anne Elliot tells
her sister Mary that she has been "making a duplicate of the catalogue of my
father's books and pictures" (V, 38). Yet the "valuable" pictures themselves
are never described. Kellynch-hall, with the baronet's dressing-room full of
large looking-glasses, is a house of show, rather than substance. There are
now two catalogues of Sir Walter's pictures, but no ekphrasis takes place and
the pictures themselves are never made to appear. Kellynch is, as the admiral
declares, a house of mirrors: "Such a number of looking-glasses! oh Lord!
there was no getting away from oneself' (V, 128).
Pride and Prejudice takes pride of place among Austen's novels, at least from
the pictorial point of view, for two reasons. First, it is the novel that prompted
Austen herself to search through art galleries, ostensibly in the hope of find-
ing a portrait resembling her heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. In a letter to Cassan-
dra of May 1813, she writes:
Henry & I went to the Exhibition in Spring Gardens. It is not thought a g o o d col-
lection, but I was very well pleased — particularly (pray tell Fanny) with a small por-
trait of Mrs. Bingley, excessively like her. I went in hopes o f seeing one of her Sis-
ter, but there was no Mrs. Darcy; - perhaps however, I may find her in the Great
Exhibition which we shall go to, if we have time; — I have no chance of her in the
collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Paintings which is now shewing in Pall Mall, &
which we are also to visit. — Mrs. Bingley's is exacdy herself, size, shaped face, fea-
tures & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white
gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me o f what I had always supposed,
that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in Yellow. 21
At the end of the letter, Austen adds with mock chagrin:
We have been both to the Exhibition & Sir J. Reynolds', - and I am disappointed,
for there was nothing like Mrs. D. at either. I can only imagine that Mr. D. prizes
21 Jam Austen's Letters, ed. by Chapman, pp. 309-10.

any Picture o f her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. - I can
imagine he wd have that sort o f feeling — that mixture o f Love, Pride & Delicacy. -
Setting aside this disappointment, I had great amusement among the Pictures,
(p. 312)
T h e exhibition in Spring Gardens at which Austen found her portrait o f Jane

Bennet (styled with due decorum under her married name o f Mrs. Bingley in
the letter) was one held by the Society o f Painters in Oil and Water Colours. It
is intriguing to see Austen provide details about Jane's appearance, the "shaped
face, features & sweetness," and about her favourite colour, green, that supple-
ment her depiction in the novel. Austen was well aware, o f course, that no por-
trait could be "excessively like" any o f her fictional heroines, since none is de-
scribed in painterly detail. In order to find a likeness she must first ascribe as-
pects o f the figure in the painting to the character in the text. That Elizabeth's
favourite colour is yellow is also new to the letter, as is the compelling descrip-
tion o f Darcy's conjugal feelings combining "Love, Pride & Delicacy."
Austen's interest in the visual arts emerges clearly in her correspondence,
although the relevant passages have been largely ignored by her critics: in
part, perhaps, because they are omitted from the byzantine set o f indexes to
Chapman's badly dated but still standard edition. "Painting" is a heading in
his index o f general topics, but it refers to the application o f rouge on ladies'
faces. Among Austen's various observations on the visual arts are comments
on her own sketches, on the paintings, prints and drawings in her family's col-
lection, and on the portraits she sees in visits to country houses. 2 2 In a letter
to Cassandra o f 1798, she writes intriguingly o f her own "designs," alas no
longer extant, for her nephew George Austen Knight: "Perhaps they would
have suited him as well had they been less elaborately finished; but an artist
cannot do anything slovenly" (p. 30). T h e word "artist" here is significantly
ambiguous: while depicting herself humorously as an amateur o f the arts,
Austen is surely also pointing to the novels that were her vocation, and that
are "elaborately finished" indeed; so much so that the novels she was writing
at this time, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, were not to be pub-
lished for manyyears. There is also an amusing ironic remark o f 1813 on her
own potential, as her fame increases, for becoming the subject o f a portrait:
" I do not despair o f having my picture in the Exhibition at last - all white &
22 See letters, pp. 30, 50, 101, 13-14. These and other references are noted by Bertelsen, "Jane
Austen's Miniatures," pp. 352-56, who also speculates about the identity of the portrait
which resembled Austen's conception of Jane Bennet. He proposes as candidates miniatures
by Jean François Marie Huët-Villiers, Charles John Robertson, James Stephanoff, and James
Hewlett, but his "inquiries have failed to turn up any of the above pictures" (p. 359).
Sabor: T h e Strategic Withdrawal from Ekphrasis in J a n e Austen's Novels 231
26. Benjamin West: Christ Rejected. 1814.

Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Philadelphia.
red, with mv Head on one Side." 23 There was, of course, no shortage of strik-
ing painterly prototypes for poses of this kind in works by Austen's contem-
poraries, such as George Romney, Henry Raeburn, John Hoppner and
Thomas Lawrence, and although Austen was never to have her portrait taken,
paintings by these artists have been used on the covers of recent editions of
her novels, thus helping to form our mental image of her heroines. 24
Of particular importance are two letters that Austen wrote late in her life.
In September 1814, she recorded her responses to Benjamin West's immense
history painting, Christ Rejected (fig. 26). Of this vast canvas, 17 feet high and
22 feet across, she declared:
23 Letter to Cassandra Austen, 3 November 1813: Letters, p. 368.

24 The only surviving likeness made of Austen during her lifetime is an unfinished miniature
pencil and watercolour sketch by Cassandra, c. 1810, in the National Portrait Gallery, Lon-
don. T h e Penguin edition of Pride and Prejudice and the Oxford World's Classics editions of
Mansfield Park and Persuasion feature paintings by Raeburn; the World's Classics editions of
Northanger Abbey and Emma have cover-portraits by Lawrence.
27. Benjamin West: Christ Healing the Sick. 1811. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery. London.
I have seen West's f a m o u s Painting, and prefer it to anything of the kind I ever saw
before. I do not know that it is reckoned superior to his 'Healing in the Temple.' But
it has gratified me m u c h more, and indeed is the first representation of our Saviour
w h i c h ever at all contented me. 'His Rejection by the Elders', is the subject. 2 5
The other West painting to which Austen refers is the somewhat smaller
Christ Healing the Sick (fig. 27). In both cases, significantly, she takes no interest
in the great assembly of Biblical characters, focusing her gaze instead on the
single figure of Christ. Significant too is the phrase "of the kind," which im-
plicidy contrasts the genre of history painting, utterly alien to Austen's tastes
and her fictional world, with that of the lowlier but to her much more
valuable genre of portrait painting. 26 This preference emerges clearly in the
famous ironic contrast, made in a letter of 1816, between the "strong, manly,
spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow" of her nephew Edward and her
own preferred medium: "the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which
I work with so fine a Brush, as produces litde effect after much labour." 27
25 Letter to Martha Lloyd, 2 September 1814: Letters, p. 507.

26 See Bertelsen,"Jane Austen's Miniatures," p. 355, n. 15.
27 Letter to J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816, Letters, pp. 468-69. Henry Austen found
the image memorable enough to quote it in a postscript to his "Biographical Notice," al-
As usual Austen is being precise: two inches across was a typical measure-
ment for a Regency portrait miniature, the Lilliput to West's historical Brobd-
ingnag.
Not only did Pride and Prejudice inspire Austen's pictorial analysis in Lon-
don galleries; it also contains the best-known portrait scene of any of her
novels. This episode features prominently in the introductions to both the
Penguin and World's Classics texts 28 and is widely regarded as one of the key
scenes in the novel. Elizabeth Bennet, together with her aunt and uncle, is be-
ing shown around Darcy's estate at Pemberley by his housekeeper, the aptly
named Mrs. Reynolds. Elizabeth sees miniatures of the despicable Wickham,
described by Mrs. Reynolds as "very wild," of Darcy, "a very handsome gen-
tleman," and of his sister Georgiana, "the handsomest young lady that ever
was seen" (II, 247—48). She next is shown a picture gallery, with "many good
paintings" (II, 250), which, knowing nothing about art, she finds less interest-
ing and intelligible than some crayon drawings by Georgiana. All this pales,
however, before a second, larger portrait of Darcy, depicted "with such a
smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he
looked at her." Elizabeth is captivated by this portrait, "and as she stood be-
fore the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself,
she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ev-
er raised before" (II, 251). Particularly striking here is the phrase "fixed his
eyes upon herself," described by Isabel Armstrong as "an amazing moment
of syntactic ambiguity."29 The indeterminate syntax, as Armstrong notes, al-
lows both Elizabeth and the portrait of Darcy (and by extension Darcy him-
self) to be fixing his eyes upon her; either Elizabeth is becoming Darcy, look-
ing at herself through his eyes, or she finds herself unable to evade his gaze.
Remarkably, in quoting this passage Tanner removes the ambiguity by altering
the text, changing "and fixed his eyes" to "she fixed his eyes" and thus mak-
ing Elizabeth unequivocally the active agent. 30
In an article on art in Pride and Prejudice, Katrin Burlin claims that "very
few gentlemen in eighteenth-century portraits smile - why does Darcy?" 31
Full smiles are certainly rare - few subjects would have had teeth fit to be dis-
though he had the temerity to attempt to improve Jane's syntax: "so fine a Brush," for ex-
ample, becomes "a brush so fine" (V, 8).
28 See Tanner, ed.: Emma, pp. 19-24; Armstrong, intro.: Emma, pp. xix-xxi.
29 Armstrong: "Introduction," p. xxi.
30 Tanner, ed.: Emma, p. 23. The error is repeated in Tanner's book on Austen (p. 119), in
which the Penguin introduction is reprinted with some revisions.
31 Burlin: "'Pictures of Perfection' at Pemberley," p. 160.
28. George Engleheart: Tom Lefroy. 1799. Collection of J. G. Lefroy.
played —32 but discreet half-smiles, as Darcy's "such a smile" may have been,
were not unusual. Of particular interest in this respect is a miniature of Tom
Lefroy (fig. 28), painted by George Engleheart in 1799, two years after the
first draft of Pride and Prejudice, entided First Impressions, was completed.
32 See Pointon, who notes that "dental decay and loss of bone may have been a reason why
few portrait subjects smile prior to the early twentieth century" ( H a n g i n g the Head, pp. 131
and 254, n. 75).
Sabor: T h e Strategic Withdrawal from Ekphrasis in Jane Austen's Novels 235
Lefroy is the young Irishman with whom Austen had a quite serious flirtation
in 1796, and whom she describes in her earliest surviving letter as "a very
gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man." 3 3 His half-smile and eyes
fixed upon the viewer create a compelling resonance with Austen's verbal por-
trait o f Darcy.
The portrait scene in Pride and Prejudice takes on an additional significance
in the light o f an earlier passage, in which Miss Bingley has taunted Darcy
about his interest in Elizabeth by belittling her relations: " D o let the portraits
o f your uncle and aunt Philips be placed in the gallery at Pemberley. Put them
next to your great uncle the judge." Continuing with her witticisms, she ad-
vises Darcy: "As for your Elizabeth's picture, you must not attempt to have it
taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?" (II, 52-53).
Miss Bingley has spoken more aptly than she can know. In Austen's novels,
pictures do not "do justice" to their models. What makes the pictures inter-
esting is the extent to which they are not purely representational, the way in
which they create debates about their subjects.
Austen's strategic withdrawal from ekphrasis, her evocation o f visual im-
ages with little specifically visual detail, forces readers to take an active part in
envisaging and interpreting the pictures in her novels. A letter o f 29 January
1813 contains a revealing comment on her own fictional technique, in a dog-
gerel parody o f Scott's Marmion·.
I do not write for such dull elves

As have not a great deal o f ingenuity themselves, (p. 298)
The pictures in her novels function in the same endlessly engaging and pro-
vocative manner as the texts o f which they are a part. They are "speaking pic-
tures," objects for textual interpretation rather than ekphrastic creations, dis-
cussed within Austen's novels by her characters and designed to be discussed
outside her fiction, with a great deal o f ingenuity, by her readers.
33 Letter to Cassandra Austen, 9 January 1796, Letters, p. 2. Lefroy was born in 1776; he
would thus have been 23 when Engleheart's miniature was painted. In his later years, T o m
Lefroy admitted to his nephew that he had been "in love with [Austen], although he quali-
fied his confession by saying it was a boyish love"; see Chapman: Jane Austen: Facts and
Problems, p. 58.
WOLFGANG LOTTES
Universität Erlangen-Nümberg
Appropriating Botticelli:
English Approaches 1860-1890
"Ah, Mr. Ruskin," said a too eager disciple, "the first moment
that I entered the gallery at Florence I saw at once what you
meant when asserting the supremacy of Botticelli." "Did you?"
said the Professor, "and in a moment! It took me twenty years to
find out that." 1
Abstract: Stretching from the ekphrasis of Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the art writing
of the Pre-Raphaelites, this survey of the Victorian reception of Botticelli shows
how appropriation occurs within the limits of prevalent English aesthetic princi-
ples. As the nineteenth-century critics gradually "master" what appear to be am-
biguous paintings, ekphrasis becomes an act of rejecting or accepting the discourse
that had already surrounded the paintings, an act that is distinguished by interfer-
ence, assertion, and, finally, usurpation.
1.
In an article published in 1960 Michael Levey has traced the hesitant begin-
nings of the English Botticelli reception in the nineteenth century that eroded
"the dam of silence so long built up about him." 2 The early appraisals were
scarce and tepid: Maria Callcott found Botticelli's pictures in Florence "inter-
esting" and "curious" 3 (1827), and Anna Brownell Jameson thought him "re-
markable for being one of the earliest painters who treated mythological sub-
1 From a sermon by Canon Scott Holland to University Extension students, noticed in the
Pall Mall Gaiette, September 7, 1891. Cf. Ruskin: Works, vol. 20, p. XXXIX.
2 Levey: "Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England," p.291.
3 Ibid., p. 297.
Lottes: Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860-1890 237
jects on a small scale as decorations for furniture" 4 (1845). Even at a time

when other quattrocento painters, such as Masaccio and Ghirlandaio, had fi-
nally made their way towards an English reputation, Botticelli was still widely
neglected or gave rise to comments as disparate as Lady Eastlake's insight:
"Sandro Botticelli is worthy to stand in the Florentine genealogy, between
Giotto and Michael Angelo" 5 (1854), and the verdict of the acclaimed art ex-
pert and Keeper of the National Gallery, Ralph Nicholson Wornum, that Bot-
ticelli's "type of female face is, as a rule, coarse and altogether without
beauty" and that the painter was "comparatively void of taste in the treatment
of his forms" 6 (1864). A systematic approach was badly wanted.
Enter Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. The un-
likely Anglo-Italian duo, "the somewhat brash and increasingly reactionary
Crowe and the timid yet patriotic insurgent Cavalcaselle," 7 untertook the for-
midable task of writing Λ New History of Painting in Italy from the second to the
sixteenth century, drawn up from fresh materials and recent researches in the archives of
Italy, as well as from personal inspection of the works of art scattered throughout Europe
(1864—66). Within this enormous accumulation of material, which became the
most important nineteenth-century contribution to the knowledge (rather
than appreciation) of Italian painting, an entire chapter is devoted to Sandro
Botticelli. He is introduced as "an artist who developed at various periods of
his career the semi-religious, semi-fanciful feeling of Fra Filippo [Lippi] and
the more realistic character of the Poliamoli and Verrocchio, and a vehement
and passionate manner of his own at last, in which he combined power with
fantastic exuberance of thought." 8 Appearing at a fortunate moment in art
history, "he was in a position to profit by the varying success or failure" of
those before him and "enjoyed the fruits gathered" by them: "He personified
the condition of the art of his time, and [...] embodied most of its defects
with some of its qualities." 9 This does not sound over-enthusiastic, and
4 Jameson: Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 140. In Legends of the Madonna Mrs. Jameson mentions
Botticelli's Madonna del Magnificat, in which "there is absolutely no beauty of feature, either
in the Madonna, or the Child, or the angels, yet every face is full of dignity and character"
(p. 112), and the Mystic Nativity. "With all its quaint fantastic grace and dryness of
execution, the whole conception is full of meaning, religious as well as poetical." (p. 203).
5 Lady Eastlake: "Treasures of Art in Great Britain," p. 482.
6 Wornum: Epochs of Painting, p. 160; cf. Levey, p. 301. For the recepdon of Early Renaissance
Italian art in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, see Steegman, Haskell, and
Lottes: Goldener Traum, esp. pp. 20—32, 39—48.
7 Haskell: Rediscoveries in Art, p. 91.
8 Crowe and Cavalcaselle: Histoiy of Painting in Italy, vol. 2, p. 414.
9 Ibid., p. 415.
29. Sandro Botticelli: Primavera / Spring. Uffici. Florence.
indeed, most of the descriptions of his works contain some depreciatory re-
marks as well as moderate praise. Upon the fresco of St. Augustine at the Flo-
rentine church of Ognissanti Botticelli spent "the vigour of conception and
boldness of hand which were characteristic of his style," 10 but "his skill is
marred by coarseness," vulgarity and grimace "akin to that of Andrea del
Castagno." 11 In his Madonnas the painter "supplied the lack of religious feel-
ing and the absence of select types by affectionate maternity and silent melan-
choly in the face of the mother of Christ, an eager service in childlike saints
and angels attending for the performance of the simplest offices." 12 The fam-
ous Primavera (fig. 29) documents more than anything else the joint influences
of Filippo Lippi and the Poliamoli and Verrocchio, the so-called "goldsmith
painters,"13 but is still "of great interest as an illustration of the gradual
growth of Botticelli's manner, and his characteristic treatment of half heathen
incidents in vogue at the time of Lorenzo de' Medici." 14 Admittedly, the Ador-
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.; cf. also p. 420.
12 Ibid., p. 416.
13 Ibid., p. 417.
14 Ibid., p. 419.
ation of the Magi, executed for the church of S. Maria Novella, "is a tempera, in
which a certain animation pervades the well arranged groups; great truth and
individuality mark the portraits. The heads are well modelled and in fair relief;
and some figures are grandly draped. The drawing is pure and the colour
transparent." 15 The Coronation of the Virgin (fig. 30), an altarpiece painted for
San Marco, gets similar applause, for Botticelli's "mastery of action in spring-
ing and dancing attitudes, his ability in rendering drapery in motion, and his
comparative elegance and grace in female delineation." 16 On the other hand,
the Calumny based on Lucian's description (quoted by Alberti) of a lost paint-
ing by Apelles, fares less well; it shows Botticelli as "a student of classic statu-
ary and of ancient architecture; whilst the figures in their gipsy wildness, al-
though they are here and there admirably draped, remind us that vehemence
of action may be carried too far." 17
The merits of Crowe and Cavalcasele ("the new Vasari") as being the first
to give a coherent critical account of Botticelli's life and work (including a
catalogue of his pictures arranged by locations) are beyond question, but their
nagging tone and "the flat-footed ugliness" 18 of their prose did nothing to
recommend their presentation to aesthetically-minded art lovers. Edward
Burne-Jones was quite outspoken: "I detest them, they're such bores. They're
the beginners of that cursed race that is always worrying at everything and
leaves nothing alone." 19 Botticelli obviously needed some more spirited pro-
motion in England.
2.
In the spring of 1864 Algernon Charles Swinburne, who was shordy to be-
come the enfant terrible of Victorian society and the standard-bearer of dec-
adence, spent many days in the Uffizi and made copious notes of the "huge
mass of original designs, in pencil or ink or chalk, swept together by Vasari
and others, [which] had then been but recendy unearthed and partially as-
sorted." 20 Four years later, the writer arranged this material for an essay in The
Fortnightly Review (July 1868), and this was finally included in Essays and Studies
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 420.
17 Ibid., p. 422.
18 Clark: "Introduction," p. 16.
19 Cf. Christian: "Burne-Jones Studies," p. 93.
20 Swinburne: "Designs of the Old Masters at Florence," p. 314.
3ü. Sandro Botticelli: Coronation of the Ï Irgin: Aitar piece of San Marco. Ltfìci. Florence.
(1875). Summing up his impressions of those drawings which were ascribed

to Botticelli, Swinburne wrote: "In all these is the same constant and noble
effort to draw vigorously and perfectly, in many the same faint and almost
painful grace, which give a distinct value and a curious charm to all the works
of Botticelli."21 Some designs were singled out for special praise or for a
closer look at the artist's temper. A satyr-like head, for instance, "suggests the
suppressed leaning to grotesque invention and hunger after heathen liberty
which break out whenever this artist is released from the mill-horse round of
mythologie virginity and sacred childhood: in which at all times he worked
with such singular grace and such ingenuity of pathetic device."22 More re-
served is Swinburne's reaction to Botticelli's paintings. In particular when
compared with his flexible and dramatic pupil Filippino Lippi, Botticelli lags
behind as the creator "of the somewhat lean and fleshless beauty, worn down
it seems by some sickness or natural trouble rather than by any ascetic or arti-
ficial sorrow,"23 and "the hard types of face and form, the satisfaction appar-
ently found in dry conventional faults [...] disfigure the beauty" of his pic-
tures, notwithstanding the artist's "ambition after new things, the desire of
various and liberal invention, the love of soft hints and veiled meanings."24
The Primavera is "beautiful for all its quaintness, pallor, and deformities."25
Swinburne's generalizing judgment: "The dull and dry quality of his thin pal-
lid colouring can here [in his drawings] no longer impair the charm of his
natural grace, the merit of his strenuous labour" 26 establishes the keynote of
Botticelli criticism from Ruskin up to the present day: the artist's "emphasis
on the ornamental and evocative capabilities of line,"27 Botticelli valued as a
delineator rather than a colourist. Yet there seems to be a Little more to Swin-
burne's comments than this insight; his listing of Botticelli's artistic faults has
distinct overtones of fascination and empathy. The "lean and fleshless
beauty" caused by sickness and the simultaneous occurrence of beauty and
"pallor, and deformities" must have had a strange attraction for the "Demo-
niac youth"28 from England, who was haunted by morbid passions.
21 Ibid., p. 327.
22 Ibid., pp. 326-27.
23 Ibid., p. 329.
24 Ibid., p. 328.
25 Ibid., p. 327.
26 Ibid., p. 326.
27 Oxford Companion to Art, p. 150.
28 Ruskin: Works, vol. 36, p. 501.
3.
Sympathizing with Swinburne's unconventional, anti-bourgeois outlook on

life and art, Walter Horatio Pater seized on Botticelli in 1870 and devoted an
essay to him, also published in The Fortnightly Review (August 1870) and re-
printed in his memorable volume o f 1873, Studies in the History of the Renais-
sance, later called The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. In 1865 the O x f o r d
don had visited Pisa and Florence where he concentrated his interest on the
fifteenth century as "an age productive in personalities, many-sided, cent-
ralised, complete." 2 9 After his famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci written in
1869 Pater felt obliged to justify his dealing with " a secondary painter":
besides those great men [Leonardo and Michelangelo], there is a certain number
o f artists who have a distinct faculty o f their own by which they convey to us a pe-
culiar quality o f pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these too have their
place in general culture [...] O f this select number Botticelli is one. He has the
freshness, the uncertain and diffident promise, which belong to the earlier Renais-
sance itself, and make it perhaps the most interesting period in the history o f the
mind. 30
Pater's Botticelli essay may not have the depth and far-reaching implications
o f his discussions o f Winckelmann or the School o f Giorgione but it is a
highly personal and original piece o f criticism that marks "the beginning o f
the literary cult o f Botticelli." 31
Pater sees in Botticelli an artist who, living in a period o f transition, devi-
ates from traditional concepts and looks ahead at new, individual possibilities
o f expression:
In the middle o f the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much o f that
meditative subdety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the great imaginative
workmen o f its close. Leaving the simple religion which had occupied the follow-
ers o f Giotto for a century, and the simple naturalism which had grown out o f it, a
thing o f birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works
o f the modern world, the writings o f Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings o f
his own o f classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted them with
an under-current o f original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter o f the
picture through the veil o f its ostensible subject. 32
What was the source o f this innovating talent?
29 Pater: The Renaissance, p. 31.

30 Ibid., p. 77.
31 Levey: "Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England," p. 304.
He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story and senti-
ment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line and colour, the
medium of abstract painting. [...] he is a visionary painter, [...] the genius of
which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the exponent of ideas,
moods, visions of its own; in this interest it plays fast and loose with those data,
rejecting some and isolating others, and always combining them anew. 33
Unlike Giotto and his successors, w h o "but transcribe, with more or less re-
fining, the outward image," 34 Botticelli clothes "all his varied work with a sen-
timent of ineffable melancholy." 35
His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the
untempered evil of Orcagna's Inferno·, but with men and women, in their mixed
and uncertain condition, always attractive, [...] but saddened perpetually by the
shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all
sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is
usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so
forcible a realist. 36
Botticelli's vision results from his keen awareness of the conditio humana as a
state torn between high aspirations and sad inadequacy; even his sacred sub-
jects are tinted with the melancholy hue of frail and delicate humanity.
Perhaps you have sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas,

conformed to no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and
more, [...] you may have thought that there was something in them mean or abject
even, for the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour is wan.
For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the "Desire of all na-
tions," is one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies; and her
choice is on her face. 37
This last sentence alludes to the heretic view of the humanist Matteo Palmieri
that the human race was "an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of
Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies." 38 In Pater's time a
painting (probably by Francesco Botticini) of the Assumption of the Virgin
(now in the National Gallery, London) that reflected this heresy was ascribed
to Botticelli. Pater thought Palmieri's wayward doctrine a possible stimulus o f
33 Ibid., pp. 70-71.

34 Ibid., p. 71.
35 Ibid., p. 73.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., pp. 73-74.
38 Ibid., p. 72.
Botticelli's peculiar mood: his Madonnas were supposed to be suffering from

the alleged legacy of paralysing indecision. In the Madonna del Magnificat
(fig. 31)
the young angels, glad to rouse her [the Virgin] for a moment from her dejection,
are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support the book. But the pen almost drops
from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and her true
children are those others, among whom, in her rude home, the intolerable honour
came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see
in starded animals — gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, still
hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become enfants du
chœur, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on their sun-
burnt throats.39
The gist of this wonderful prose, which Kenneth Clark quotes as one of the
purple passages of Pater's Botticelli essay, is given in the sentence: "He paints
Madonnas, but they shrink from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in
unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity," and the same atti-
tude Pater discovers in many of Botticelli's women, in Judith (fig. 32) "return-
ing home across the hill country, when the great deed is over, and the mo-
ment of revulsion come, when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a
burthen," in Veritas, "in the allegorical picture of Calumnia, where one may
note in passing the suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image
of Truth with the person of Venus,"40 and, above all, in Venus herself, rising
from the sea. The "quaintness" of the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi must be
thought to be "incongruous with the subject;" echoing Swinburne's impres-
sion of the Primavera, Pater feels that "the colour is cadaverous or at least
cold,"41 and "what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he [Botticelli]
has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great power
over the lives of men." 42 The characterization of Venus is reminiscent of Pa-
ter's more famous description of another prototype of mysterious woman-
hood, Leonardo's La Gioconda, whose "eyelids are a litde weary" from "all
39 Ibid., p. 74.
40 Ibid., p. 76.
41 Ibid., p. 75. The colours in Botticelli's two large mythological paintings were frequendy
criticized. Vernon Lee wrote in 1884: "in the pallid tempera colour, against the dismal
background of rippled sea, this mediaeval Venus, at once indecent and prudish, is no very
pleasing sight," and, on the Primavera: "what strange livid tints are there beneath those
draperies, [...] what a green ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus!" (Euphorion, pp.
185f.)
31. Sandro Botticelli: Madonna de!Magnificat. I ttici. Florence.

246 Iconotexts: T h e N i n e t e e n t h Century
32. Sandro Botticelli: Judith Returning to Bethulia. Uffici. Florence.

Lottes: Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860-1890 2 47
the thoughts and experience of the world," into whose beauty "the soul with
all its maladies has passed" 43 :
The light is indeed cold - mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed
you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air
each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their
labours until the evening; but she [Venus] is awake before them, and you might
think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of love
yet to come. 4 4
In Pater's opinion the manifest stress of being burdened with tasks too heavy
for them reduces Botticelli's goddesses and heroines to human beings and
thereby makes them, in a rather enigmatic way, attractive and beautiful, "never
without some shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers."45
"This is not of course art criticism as it is understood today,"46 Michael
Levey blundy remarked. Pater's view reveals the attitude of the fin-de-siècle
aestheticist, who was intoxicated with the affinity of beauty and death, love
and languor. "His Botticelli may not be our idea of the painter; but he is the
first to construct a sophisticated personality out of the artist, and for that we
must be greatful." 47
4.
Following on the heels of Pater, John Ruskin was the next to create a distinct-
ive though totally different picture of Botticelli, whose "excellency and su-
premacy" 48 he proudly claimed to have discerned and taught first. Two lec-
tures delivered to students at the University of Oxford in 1872 and 1874 con-
tain the bulk of his Botticelli criticism: Design in the Florentine Schools of
Engraving (1872: republished in Ariadne Florentina, 1876)49 and the seventh
contribution to his course The Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of Art in Florence
(1874). From Ruskin's rambling verbosity that often expresses his moral and
religious preoccupations rather than any sound judgment of art or history,
some recurrent ideas about Botticelli can be distilled. Of those artists who be-
43 Ibid., p. 122.
44 Ibid., p. 75.
45 Ibid., p. 76.
47 Ibid., p. 304.
48 Ruskin: Works, vol. 4, p. 355.
49 This lecture was originally announced as Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Schools of En-
graving.
long to the class of delineators — as opposed to colourists and chiaroscurists -

"the chief is Botticelli. Taught by a goldsmith, he learnt by goldbeating and
engraving, and is himself a master goldsmith and engraver. [...] There is no
drawing like Botticelli's; but under it is colour and chiaroscuro as subde as
Angelico's and Tintoret's, but subordinate. [...] As an artist he is incompar-
able."50 His genius is unique as "he is the only painter of all the religious
schools who unites every bodily with every spiritual power and knowledge.
He only can delight in every earthly and material beauty and enforce every
material law without the least taint passing over him."51 Botticelli was the only
painter of Italy "who understood the thoughts of Heathens and Christians
equally, and could in a measure paint both Aphrodite and the Madonna. So
that he is, on the whole, the most universal of painters"52 {Fors Clavigera,
1872). Less intelligible than this assertion appears Ruskin's thesis that Botticel-
li is "the only unerring, unfearing, and to this day trustworthy and true
preacher of the reformed doctrine of the Church of Christ."53 Together with
Dante and Savonarola the artist ranks among the "southern Reformers," who,
unlike their more aggressive northern counterparts, Holbein, Luther, Henry
VIII, and Cromwell, "set hand to their task reverendy, and, it seemed, did not
by any means carry it through." 54 Evidence for this reforming spirit Ruskin
found in Botticelli's support of Savonarola, his illustrations of the Divina Com-
media, the controversial, wrongly attributed painting Assumption of the Virgin,
and, above all, his works in the Sistine Chapel, the three frescoes The Trials of
Moses, The Destruction of the Rebels, and The Temptations of Christ. When in
1481 Botticelli was commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV to decorate his private
chapel in the Vatican, "the first thing my young gentleman does, mind you, is
to paint the devil in a monk's dress, tempting Christ! The sauciest thing, out
and out, done in the history of the Reformation, [...] yet so wisely done, and
with such true respect otherwise shown for what was sacred in the Church,
that the Pope didn't mind." 55 Botticelli's aim was "not to attack, but to restore
the Papal authority;" with his "perfect grasp" of Jewish and Christian theo-
logy he endeavoured "to show the power of inherited honour, and universal
claim of divine law, in the Jewish and Christian Church, — the law delivered
first by Moses; then, in final grace and truth, by Christ."56
50 Ruskin: Works, vol. 23, pp. 265-66.

51 Ibid., p. 271.
52 Ibid., vol. 27, p. 372.
53 Ibid., vol. 23, p. 266.
54 Ibid., vol. 22, p. 436.
55 Ibid., p. 429.
56 Ibid., p. 442.
Lottes: Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1 8 6 0 - 1 8 9 0 2 49
It is hard to follow Ruskin into the details of his argument, a labyrinth of

wild speculations. His ravings about the Cumaean, Hellespontic, and Libyan
Sibyls, designs which he erroneously ascribed to Botticelli, are as irrelevant as
his exaggerated praise of the painter's awareness of typological references,
"the only man among all the reformers of Europe [...] who knew the rela-
tions of the deliverance from earthly captivity by Moses, to the deliverance
from spiritual captivity by Christ."57 When he restricts himself to the interpre-
tation of individual works, Ruskin is often much more acceptable. With delic-
acy he describes the "close rain of golden rays" falling across the face of the
angel in the centre of the Altarpiece of San Marco, "as fine and true as a line of
gossamer," not in any way spoiling the face but lifting it "in a light of the
spirit brighter than gold," 58 with perceptiveness he differentiates Botticelli's
Fortitude (fig. 33) from the traditional sturdy allegorical type:
Worn somewhat; and not a little weary, instead of standing ready for all comers,
she is sitting, — apparently in reverie, her fingers playing restlessly and idly — nay, I
think — even nervously, about the hilt of her sword.
For her battle is not to begin to-day; nor did it begin yesterday. Many a mom and
eve have passed since it began; and now — is this to be the ending of it? and if this
- by what manner of end? 59 (Mornings in Florence, 1875)
Botticelli's Judith returning to Bethulia is defended against the charge of affecta-

tion founded on her light dancing step, "her drapery all on flutter." For a just
understanding of the Biblical text and Botticelli's illustration Ruskin recom-
mends to wipe out the memory "of about a million of vile pictures [...] in
which the painters thought they could surely attract the public to the double
show of an execution, and a pretty woman" 60 and to recall the essential verses
from the Book of Judith.
And you will feel, after you have read this piece of history, or epic poetry, with
honourable care, that there is somewhat more to be thought of and pictured in Ju-
dith, than painters have mosdy found it in them to show you: that she is not
merely the Jewish Delilah to the Assyrian Samson; but the mightiest, purest,
brightest type of high passion in severe womanhood offered to our human
memory. Sandra's picture is but slight; but it is true to her, and the only one I
know that is; and [...] you will see why he gives her that swift, peaceful motion,
while you read in her face only sweet solemnity of dreaming thought. "My people
57 Ibid., vol. 23, pp. 277f.

58 Ibid., pp. 273f.
59 Ibid., p. 334.
60 Ibid., p. 335.
Iconotexts: T h e Nineteenth Century
33. S a n d r o Botticclli: bortitude. Uffici. Florence.

delivered, and by my hand; and God has been gracious to His hand-
maid!'"51
Though Ruskin's moralist views could hardly be shared by the aestheticists,

his unreserved enthusiasm for Botticelli became an additional impulse of the
artist's sympathetic reception in England. In a letter to Charles Eliot Norton
sent from Florence in August 1874 Ruskin once more summarized his admi-
ration: "I am more and more crushed every day under the stupendous power
of Botticelli [...] there are no words for his imagination, solemnity of pur-
pose, artistic rapture, in all divinely artistic things [...] I never saw or thought
such things possible till I went into the Academy delle Belle Arti this last
time."62
5.
Unimpressed by Ruskin's panegyrics and the "kind of hero-worship" that

"paid tardy and somewhat exaggerated honours" 63 to the Florentine artist,
John Addington Symonds took a more balanced view of Botticelli's merits. In
the third volume (1877) of his comprehensive survey Renaissance in Italy the
keen traveller, who used to work out his conceptions "face to face with the
originals,"64 comes to the conclusion:
Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the same sense as Andrea Mantegna.
But he was a true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. We have to seek his
parallel among the verse-writers rather than the artists of his day. [...] In both
Poliziani^ and Boiardo we find the same touch upon antique things as in Botti-
celli.65
With stronger emphasis than Pater Symonds dwells on Botticelli's "almost

unique value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern
fancy at a moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the
subtlest thought and feeling of men for whom the classic myths were begin-
ning to live once more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in the
sphere of orthodoxy." 66 When a friend wrote to him from Italy that he was
61 Ibid., pp. 336-37.

62 Ibid., vol. 37, p. 138.
63 Symonds: Renaissance in Italy, vol. 3, p. 249.
64 Ibid., p. VII.
65 Ibid., p. 255.
66 Ibid., p. 250.
fascinated by "the touch of paganism" in Botticelli's paintings, "the fairy-story

element, the echo of a beautiful lapsed mythology which he has found the means of
transmitting" Symonds decided to reprint these remarks as he thought them
"very true."67 Yet the way in which the old fables took hold upon Botticelli's
fancy led to a peculiar fusion of mythology and allegory. The "treatment of
pagan themes in the spirit of mediaeval mysticism [...] sometimes ended in a
bathos of grotesqueness,"68 as in Mars and Venusta, subject [...] imperfectly
realised,"69 where to a slighdy satirical viewer "the face and attitude of that
unseductive Venus, wide awake and melancholy opposite her snoring lover,
seems to symbolize the indignities which women may have to endure from
insolent and sottish boys with only youth to recommend them."70 The Birth
of Venus with its "exquisitly outlined" central figure and the Primavera that
shows "the same choice of form, the same purity of line, the same rare inter-
lacement in the limbs," are much happier examples of Botticelli's art, but even
there the painter's ambition to make "every articulation of the body [...] ex-
press some meaning" leads him "to the verge of affectation"71 and causes the
same response of discordant feeling that is evoked by "the occasional concetti
in Petrarch."72 Some religious pictures, however, reveal Botticelli's best qual-
ities. Pater's subversive attitude towards the Madonna del Magnificat is not
shared by Symonds: "For rare distinction of beauty in the faces it is unique,
while the mystic calm and resignation, so misplaced in his Aphrodites, find a
meaning here;" the artist intended "to portray the mingled awe and tranquilli-
ty of a mortal mother chosen for the Son of God."73 Another prime example
of Botticelli's art is his only signed and dated work, the Mystic Nativity, which
had been brought to England in 1799, was shown at the Art Treasures Exhi-
bition in Manchester in 1857 and finally acquired for the National Gallery in
1878: "Poetic imagination in a painter has produced nothing more graceful
and more tender than the dance of angels in the air above, and the embrace-
ment of the angels and the shepherds on the lawns below."74
Symonds' analytic mind endeavoured to place Botticelli in the cultural
context of his age and assess his historical position, thereby avoiding the
more eccentric approaches of Swinburne, Pater, and Ruskin. All these efforts
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., p. 251.
69 Ibid., p. 252.
70 Ibid., p. 253.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., p. 254.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., p. 255.
Lottes: Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860—1890 253
made by men of letters of widely different calibre had a share in creating the
Botticelli fashion in late nineteenth-century England, to which the finishing
touch was given by a few English artists of a special orientation.
6.
When in the autumn of 1848 seven young English artists and art lovers —
among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Ev-
erett Millais — founded the 'Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood' they refused to ac-
cept the established standards of the Royal Academy that were based exclus-
ively upon the appreciation of painting from the High Renaissance onward,
and chose as their guides the masters of the Early Renaissance, whom Ruskin
had recommended in the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843 and
1846).75 Giotto and Fra Angelico, Gozzoli and Ghirlandaio became the he-
roes of the young enthusiasts although most of the admired pictures were
available to them only as poor line-drawings. Long after the short-lived Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood had dissolved in 1853, Botticelli seems to have made
a lasting impression on some of its former members. John Everett Millais was
"delighted with the allegorical picture of 'Spring' by that great Master" 76
when he visited Florence in 1865, and he urged the director of the National
Gallery, Charles Lock Easdake, to acquire the Nastagio degli Onesti paintings
from Casa Pucci, a piece of advice which neither Eastlake nor his successor
William Boxali would take — probably because they thought the subject too
indecent for the eyes of the English public. The ioutNastagio panels illustrat-
ing "the story in Boccaccio where a cruel lady's ghost is hunted by a bogey
hunter and dogs" 77 attracted the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in July
1879 when his patron, the shipowner Frederick Richard Leyland, bought
them and had them cleaned "with perfect success, all restoration being quite
recent and easily removed:"78 by a previous owner "the naked ghost-lady had
75 For a detailed discussion of the foundation and the aims of the Brotherhood, see Lottes:
Goldener Traum.
76 Cf. Levey: "Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England," p. 300.
77 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Letters, vol. 4, p. 1648. D.G. Rossetti's first encounter with Botti-
celli's art is not mentioned in his letters. His brother William Michael reported it to Herbert
Home: '"In 1849 [...] when my brother, with Holman Hunt, first visited Paris, he observed
in the Louvre, with particular pleasure, one or two pictures by Botticelli, and talked about
them on his return. [...] After that, Botticelli remained in abeyance with him for some
years; but certainly not forgotten.'" (Home: Botticelli, pp. XVII-XVIII.)
78 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Correspondence, p. 97.
been draped throughout and her heart and entrails (as thrown to the dogs in
one of the scenes) obliterated, leaving inexplicable results." 79
Rossetti himself had bought "a fine early portrait by Botticelli," 80 Smeralda
Brandirli (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), as early as 1867. His
brother William Michael proudly records this pioneering coup:
In the way o f pictures his most notable purchase was a moderate-sized Botticelli,
obtained at Colnaghi's sale in March 1867 for the small sum o f £ 20 (towards 1880
he resold it to a friend for ¿ 315) - a half-length figure, highly characteristic o f its
painter, o f a young woman in whitish drapery, in a close architectural background.
Botticelli was little or not at all in demand at that now remote date. I f my brother
had not something to do with the vogue which soon afterwards began to attach to
that fascinating master, I am under a misapprehension. 8 1
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who never travelled to Italy, knew most o f Botticelli's
masterpieces through photographs, which he eagerly collected. As he wrote
to Jane Morris in August 1879 the central figure in Primavera looked familiar
to him: " T h e principal head in the Spring and several in other pictures — are
obviously the woman represented in that portrait I have got." 8 2 He continues
with one of the typical light-hearted remarks he usually passed on persons he
really liked: "By the bye there is a portrait o f Botticelli in a fresco by Lippino
[Lippi, The Crucifixion of St. Peter, in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence] which
makes him the rummest looking bloke ever seen, something between a New-
man Street artist of the smoke-and-beer type, and a thirdrate actor. [...] Vasari
improved mightily on it." 83 Again in a jocular mood, Rossetti presented to
Jane Morris "a rhyme on Italian Art: -
Mick and Lenny, Sandy and Vick,

o f all Italian art are the pick:
3+r 3+c ^c sf: afe
Tommy's a Stunner, but Raph's a stick.
79 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Letters, vol. 4, p. 1649.

80 Lightbown: Sandro Botticelli, vol. 2, p. 29. The authorship o f this portrait has been disputed
but most modern scholars ascribe it to Botticelli himself rather than to his School.
81 William Michael Rossetti: "Memoir," p. 264.
83 Ibid. A description o f this portrait, which Giorgio Vasari used for his Vita o f Botticelli, is
given in Crowe and Cavalcaselle: History of Painting in Italy, vol. 2, p. 414. Newman Street,
north o f Oxford Street, was the home o f many young artists and bohemians, among them
D. G. Rossetti himself.
M. Angelo
** Leonardo da Vinci
***
**** Sandro Botticelli
Vittore Carpaccio
Masaccio (which is as one might say Blackguard Tom)
Raffaello Sanzio." 84
Rossetti's final homage to Botticelli, in quite a different vein, was his sonnet
"For Spring by Sandro Botticelli (In the Accademia of Florence)," which ap-
peared, together with a sonnet on Michelangelo's Holy Family in the National
Gallery and sonnets on some of his own paintings, in the anthology Ballads
and Sonnets, 1881.
What masque of what old wind-withered New-Year

Honours this Lady? Flora, wanton-eyed
For birth, and with all flowrets prankt and pied:
Aurora, Zephyrus, with mutual cheer
Of clasp and kiss: the Graces circling near,
'Neath bower-linked arch of white arms glorified:
And with those feathered feet which hovering glide
O'er Spring's brief bloom, Hermes the harbinger.
Birth-bare, not death-bare yet, the young stems stand,

This Lady's temple-columns: o'er her head
Love wings his shaft. What mystery here is read
Of homage or of hope? But how command
Dead Springs to answer? And how question here
These mummers of that wind-withered New-Year?85
Resuming the associations of Swinburne and Pater, perhaps filled with the
presentiment of his own approaching end, the poet looks with some bewil-
derment at Botticelli's spring procession, and following the picture's inherent
motion from east to west, from rise to fall, he feels that in this New Year's
masque of bygone days the ruling of spring, the birth of nature and love are
but a passing hope while the inescapable reality is indicated by the phrases
"wind-withered," "Spring's brief bloom," "not death-bare yet," "dead
Springs."

85 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Poems, pp. 251f. For the context of D. G. Rossetti's poems on
pictures, see Hönnighausen: Präraphaeliten und Fin de Siècle, esp. pp. 85-97; Lottes: '"Take
out the picture'."
7.
Rossetti's disciple Edward Burne-Jones provides the chief evidence for Botti-
celli's direct influence on English art. No discussion of Burne-Jones' life and
work leaves unmentioned the Italian Renaissance painter as a source of pleas-
ure and inspiration for his Victorian colleague. On his first visit to Italy in
1859 Burne-Jones went to Pisa, Florence, Siena, and Venice and made numer-
ous sketches of Renaissance paintings, including works by Botticelli, who at
that time had not yet been 'discovered' either by the Pre-Raphaelites or
Ruskin and Swinburne. Ruskin accompanied Burne-Jones and his wife to Italy
in 1862 and on that occasion seems to have recommended to his protégé the
study of the Venetian rather than the Florentine schools. Partly in order to es-
cape from serious quarrels with Ruskin at home, Burne-Jones went on his
third journey to Italy in 1871; he returned with sketches of Tuscan, Umbrian,
and Roman scenery and art and the confession: "now I care most for Michael
Angelo, Luca Signorelli, Mantegna, Giotto, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, Paolo
Uccello, and Piero della Francesca."86 More sketches at Florence and Siena
were made in 1873 on Burne-Jones' last visit to Italy, which he had to cut
short because he fell ill. After that, his longing for Italy remained painfully
vivid. In a letter sent to Agnes Graham while she stayed in Florence in 1876,
he wrote:
I want to see Botticelli's Calumny in the Uffizi dreadfully, and the Spring in the
Belle Arte, - and the Dancing Choir [in the Altarpiece of San Marco] that goes hand
in hand up to heaven over the heads o f four old men, in that same dear place —
you know them all by n o w - and if those angels are photographed will you buy
them for me? A t the back o f the Virgin the rays o f gold rain on a most dear face
that looks up, and I want to see it. Will you take a spy-glass and look at every
heavenly face in that glory o f pictures? A n d by him in the same gallery is a tiny lit-
tle sweet thing o f the story o f Augustine and the Child by the seashore [part o f the
predella o f the Altarpiece of San Barnaba].87
In 1885 a portfolio with reproductions of Botticelli's designs to Dante, which

was published in Berlin, caused a thrill of delight:
I have the first issue o f the Dante, with selections f r o m the Inferno, Purgatorio
and Paradiso. [...] I think them perfecdy glorious - every touch and thought is
that Master at his best, and a bigger treasure exists not [...]
86 Burne-Jones: Memorials, vol. 2, p. 26.

87 Ibid., pp. 64-65.
Lottes: Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1860-1890 2 57
In two years all will be published, and mine shall I bind in a sweet volume, and
take it nightly to bed with me - blessing its maker, and the maker's Maker. 8 8
Talking to his studio assistant Thomas Matthews Rooke in 1895, Burne-Jones

explained why he preferred Botticelli to other artists: "I don't like parts of
pictures looking as if no trouble had been taken over them. Even Michael
Angelo shirks sometimes, but Botticelli never; he thinks well about it before
he begins, and does what is beautiful always."89 Burne-Jones' most telling re-
mark is quoted by his friend, the writer and co-founder of the Grosvenor
Gallery, Joseph William Comyns Carr: '"If I could travel backwards I think
my heart's desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli.'"90 Carr
comments on this elective affinity:
It was by no accident that he chose this one name among many, for of all the
painters of his school Botticelli's art asserts the closest, the most affectionate at-
tachment to the ideas which gave it birth. [...] he was the poet o f them all. For
him, more than for all the rest of his fellows, the beauty of the chosen legend exer-
cised the most constant, the most supreme authority. [...] It is not wonderful then
that the poet-painter of our day should have recognised with almost passionate
sympathy the genius of the earlier master, or that he should sometimes have trav-
elled backwards in spirit to the city wherein he dwelt. 91
The poetical spirit and a general Botticellian flavour have unanimously been
attested to Burne-Jones' paintings. Some of them, however, contain more ex-
plicit references to the Italian master. The Mill (begun in 1870, completed in
1882, Victoria and Albert Museum) and, more especially, Phyllis and De-
mophoon (1870, City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; reworked as The
Tree of Forgiveness, 1881—82, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) are obvi-
ously inspired by the Primavera. Apart from sharing the source of Ovid's writ-
ings, the entwined couple in Burne-Jones' composition of Phyllis and De-
mophoon recalls the two figures of Zephyr and Chloris at the far right of
Botticelli's Primavera, from which Burne-Jones had made sketches in 1859.
Even more striking are the parallels between the group of the Graces in the
Primavera and Burne-Jones' gouache The Garden of the Hesperides (1870-73, pri-
vate collection; fig. 34).92 The arrangement of the North and South winds in
88 Ibid., p. 147.
89 Ibid., p. 260.
90 Carr: Coasting Bohemia, p. 67.
91 Ibid., pp. 67-68.
92 It is interesting to note that The Garden of the Hesperides was the title generally given to
Botticelli's Primavera in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inventories. Cf. Lightbown:
Botticelli vol. 1, p. 74.
34. Kckvard Colcv Burnc-]ones: 7/JC Garden oftbi· liesperidcs. Private collection.
the watercolour Sponsa dì Libano (1891, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), which
was developed from the third, out of five, pencil designs for the Song of
Solomon, is somewhat suggestive of the air-gods in Botticelli's Birth of I 'enus.
All these examples show that Burne-Jones emphasized two aspects evid-
ent in Botticelli's art: the decorative qualitv and the delicate, vaguely melan-
choly sentiment. Irrespective of subject-matter or message, the very essence
of Burne-Jones' pictures appears to be the combination of ornamental refine-

ment and an almost somnabulist atmosphere. "The impression of languor is
created by means of effective use of linear rhythms, draughtsmanship, and
controlled design and colour." 93 "There is no lift in his graceful figures as in
Botticelli's, no spring in their step as in Mantegna's. It is as though they were
overcome with an immense inertia and lassitude which deprives their faces of
expression and their eyes of animation. They are mute in a vast and spell-
bound silence." 94
Through Burne-Jones, the high-priest of aestheticism, his more or less tal-
ented followers, and Walter Pater Botticelli became a prototype of the fin-de-
siècle cult of beauty and ennui. Along with sunflowers, lilies, peacocks, ancient
Greek marbles, medieval furniture, and Japanese prints, the works of the
quattrocento painter were solemnly adopted as constituent elements of the
Aesthetic Movement, which "made out of Botticelli a rallying cry and a code
word." 95 In due course, the satirists took hold of him: Gilbert and Sullivan
have three young ladies with "tastes [...] etherealized," "perceptions ex-
alted" 96 rave about three dragoons, who have subscribed to the aestheticist
creed and behave and dress accordingly: "The immortal fire has descended
on them, and they are of the Inner Brotherhood — perceptively intense and
consummately utter. [...] How Botticellian! How Fra Angelican! Oh Art, we
thank thee for this boon!" 97 (Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride, 1881). Punch's Al-
manack for 1881 contains a cartoon by George du Maurier in which, under the
heading Nincompoopiana (A Test), two visitors of an exhibition are looking at a
picture. The Squire says: "I believe it's a Botticelli," to which Young Prigsby
objects: "Oh, no! Pardon me! It is not a Botticelli. Before a Botticelli I am
mute!" The Squire wishes it was. 98
Punch and Patience reflect the degree of popularity Botticelli had attained in
the eighteen-eighties. Though serious art lovers and critics may frown at this
kind of idolization the late Victorian Botticelli craze certainly paved the way
for a more academic approach and more thorough research, the first substan-
tial outcome of which was Herbert Percy Home's still valid monograph pub-
lished in 1908. Modern scholarship had finally appropriated Botticelli.
93 Harrison and Waters: Burne-Jones, p. 153.

94 Morgan: "Introduction," p. 10.
96 Gilbert and Sullivan: Complete Plays, p. 189.
97 Ibid., p. 225.
98 Cf. Ormond: George du Maurier, p. 265.
8.
The discoveries and rediscoveries of artists form one of the most intriguing
chapters in the history of taste. From time to time the pendulum of fashion
seems to swing the other way so that long-honoured celebrities become ob-
solete and long-neglected masters are enthroned or re-enthroned in the hall
of fame. It is hardly possible to set up general rules as to how such changes
are brought about and which authorities are responsible for such shifts of at-
tention. Towards the close of "the most vociferous [...] reversal of artistic
values" 99 between 1790 and 1870, a period during which the 'polished'
Domenichino, Guido Reni, and Carlo Dolci were forced to abdicate in favour
of the 'primitive' Fra Angelico, Orcagna, and Benozzo Gozzoli,100 the for-
tunes of Botticelli provide an especially illuminating example of the rise of a
new star.
In his case it was certainly not the voice of the art historians proper that
tipped the scales: the uninspired, pedantic remarks of Crowe and Cavalcaselle
could never stir a wider public. What then made Swinburne, Pater, and
Ruskin so successful in establishing Botticelli's popularity? Precisely the fact
that they did not go in for detailed research and objective analysis. Their com-
ments on the Italian painter are the most prejudiced one can imagine; they
made him their contemporary and the incarnation of their own sentiments
and aspirations.
Rather than contributing to a well-founded assessment of Botticelli, Pa-
ter's brilliant exercises in ekphrasis reveal the innermost tensions of his creat-
ive mind. To Pater and Swinburne the Renaissance painter was the prototype
of an aestheticist, an artist whose desire for beauty was overshadowed by mel-
ancholy and threatened by his awareness of decay and death. Less radical and
more reliable in his judgment, Symonds still moved in a similar direction
when he acknowledged in Botticelli's work "the echo of a beautiful lapsed
mythology," which somehow conflicted with the heritage of "mediaeval mys-
ticism." Ruskin, on the other hand, used his eloquence and critical weight, to
establish Botticelli as an early Protestant, a defender of the 'true Church of
Christ' as opposed to all those Romish artists past and present whom Ruskin
so deeply abhorred. The Florentine is singled out as the ideal interpreter of
the "divine law" proclaimed in the Old and New Testament. Through his
evaluation of Botticelli's art Ruskin managed to convey his personal exegesis
of Biblical texts (as in the story of Judith).
99 Haskell: Rediscoveries in Art, p. 5.

100 Cf. Lottes: Goldener Traum, p. 222.
Lottes: Appropriating Botticelli: English Approaches 1 8 6 0 - 1 8 9 0 261
The different readings of Botticelli that were advanced between 1860 and
1880 recommended him to people of the most heterogeneous dispositions.
Both devout Anglicans and those who worshipped at the shrine of Beauty
could claim the artist as their champion. That the latter party won the day was
not least due to the efforts of the Pre-Raphealites, who embraced Botticelli
rather late but all the more fervently. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Burne-Jones
longed for an autonomous aesthetic dream-world independent of reality, of
existing time and space, and were enchanted by Botticelli, who appeared to
have been an outsider even in his distant Renaissance context. Consequently,
the intellectual climate of the last decades of the nineteenth century adopted
Botticelli as one of its enigmatic, exotic darlings.
Perhaps Botticelli was exceptionally liable to usurpation from various
quarters. Modern scholars are still baffled by the mysteries that surround this
painter's works; the essays on possible sources and meanings of the Primavera
are legion. His art has not ceased to defy precise verbal explanation.
JAMES A . W . HEFFERNAN
D a r t m o u t h College
Entering the Museum of Words:

Browning's "My Last Duchess" and
Twentieth-Century Ekphrasis
Abstract: Museums are built to house and preserve works of art but also to regulate
our experience of them, to certify their provenance and value, and in large meas-
ure to determine - beginning with the very act of fixing their titles - what they
mean. In this sense, every museum of art is also a museum of words. In "My Last
Duchess," Browning shows that no painted image can ever be wholly mastered by
the authority of the word; at the same time, in representing the Duke of Ferrara as
the prototype of the museum curator, Browning prefigures the way that twentieth-
century ekphrasis enters the museum and salutes the power of its words. Typifying
this move, WH. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" verbally reconstructs Breughel's
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting whose meaning is initially determined -
for all who see it in the Brussels museum - by the words of the tide affixed to it
there. Viewing Breughel's picture in light of these words, and of the various texts
that stand behind Breughel's paintings, Auden remakes Icarus in words as a mu-
seum-class specimen of how the Old Masters could represent suffering.
Begotten nearly two thousand years ago by ancient G r e e k rhetoricians and

lately rediscovered by literary theorists, the word ekphrasis has been variously
used and variously defined. 1 With a n o d to Svedana Alpers, it could be tersely
defined as the art o f describing works o f art. B u t unlike the art o f describing
that she has described, ekphrasis is purely verbal: the translation o f visual art
into words. M o r e precisely it is the verbal representation o f visual representa-
tion, since the works o f art typically represented by ekphrasis are themselves
representational.
A t once ancient and p o s t m o d e r n , ekphrasis ranges f r o m Homer's descrip-
tion o f the shield o f Achilles in the eighteenth b o o k o f the Iliad to J o h n Ash-
1 See Heffernan: Museum of Words, p. 191 note 2. This essay is chiefly drawn from chapter
four o f my book, with the kind permission o f the University o f Chicago Press.
Heffernan: Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Twentieth-Century Ekphrasis 263
bery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," his 552-line meditation on a paint-

ing by Parmigianino. Yet in spite of its durability, and in spite too of its strad-
dling the line between literature and art criticism, ekphrasis is astonishingly lit-
tle recognized by students of either one. Part of the reason may be that de-
scription is something traditionally ranked below narrative. In the Iliad, in
fact, where ekphrastic poetry first appears, it seems to serve as an ornamental
adjunct to a larger text, a descriptive digression from the main line of epic
narrative. Yet from Homer onward, the ekphrastic art of describing reveals a
powerful impulse toward narrative, the urge to deliver both story and voice
from the doubly stilled figures of visual art. This narrative impulse is part of
what makes ekphrasis paragonai in the Renaissance sense of that word, a liter-
ature of conflict and competition. 2 Profoundly ambivalent, by turns icono-
philic and iconophobic, ekphrasis evokes the power of the silent, typically
feminized image even as it subjects that power to the order of narrative and
the traditionally male authority of the written word. Essentially, ekphrasis
stages a battle for mastery between two rival systems of representation: a
battle richly complicated by the fact that the b a t t i ç f i e l d is wholly verbal.
Part of my aim in this essay is to show how this powerfully gendered ri-
valry between word and image informs Browning's "My Last Duchess." But
Browning's poem is just as important for the way it prefigures what happens
to ekphrastic poetry in the twentieth century, when it fully enters the museum
of art.
Before the art museum was born in Europe as a public institution in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, ekphrastic poetry was — to use John Hol-
lander's term — largely notional. 3 With few exceptions, most of them in Italy,
ekphrastic poems represented works of art imagined by the poet, paintings and
sculptures wrought wholly in words. But when the public museum made indi-
vidual works of art available for scrutiny, it begot a new kind of ekphrasis, a
poetry generated by contemplation not only of actual works but also of the
place where they are displayed. Significantly, this place is embedded in the
very title of what is probably the best known ekphrastic poem of the twenti-
eth century written in English: W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." 4
2 On the Renaissance tradition of paragone, a contest or dispute about the relative merits of
different arts, ideas, or philosophies, see Hagstrum: Sister Arts, pp. 66—70.
3 Hollander: "The Poetics of Ekphrasis" p. 209.
4 Besides this one, twentieth-century poems about paintings by Breughel include not just
William Carlos Williams' well-known Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems (1962) but six-
teen other poems on Landscape with the Fall of Icarus alone (see Clements: "Breughel's Fall of
Icarus"). For a selective list of recent ekphrastic poems produced in America, see Long and
Cage: "Contemporary;" for anthologies of ekphrastic poems produced in England and
Twentieth-century ekphrasis springs from the museum, the shrine where

all poets worship in a secular age. Only in a museum would Auden encounter
a painting of Icarus incongruously juxtaposed with paintings of martyrdom
and Christ's nativity: paintings put together not because they successively told
anything like a coherent story but because they all came from the same hand.
Auden's own generalization about these paintings - that they all show how
well the Old Masters understood suffering - has become so familiar that we
generally fail to see how different the paintings are, how strange it is to link a
picture of comically splashing legs with pictures of torture and miraculous
birth.
To represent works of visual art within a museum is also, inevitably, to say
something about the words that surround the pictures we see in museums,
beginning with picture titles.5 The Beaux Arts' version of Breughel's Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus (fig. 35), unlike another version of this subject that Breughel
also painted (fig. 36), includes no figure of the winged Daedalus. So without a
title, could Auden or anyone else know that the splashing legs in the Beaux
Arts' painting belong to Icarus, or even to a drowning man? Picture titles are
merely the first of the words we encounter along with the pictures we see in
museums. From tides we move to the curatorial notes on the museum wall, to
catalogue entries, to exhibition reviews, to the explanatory notes that invari-
ably accompany reproductions, and to the pages of art history. Synecdochical-
ly, the museum signifies all the institutions that select, circulate, reproduce,
display, and explain works of visual art, all the institutions that inform and
regulate our experience of it - largely by putting it into words.
Officially, so to speak, the story of what poets make from this museum of
words in the twentieth century begins with Auden's "Musée." But the story
has a prelude of sorts in a poem composed sixty years before our century be-
gan. Though written about an imaginary picture displayed in a private house,
this poem prefigures much of what twentieth-century poets must grapple
with as they encounter actual works of art in a museum. For the entire poem
Germany, Abse: Voices, and Kranz, ed. Deutsche Bildwerke, and, also by Kranz, Das
Bildgedicht, 3 vols.; and Meisterwerke.
5 "Titles," says John Fisher, "are names which function as guides to interpretation" (Fisher:
"Entitling," p. 288). See also Adams: "Tides," and Foucault: This is not a Pipe. What Jacques
Derrida says of the parergon — a frame, colonnade, or decorative ornament that surrounds
the nominal subject of a work of art — could also be applied to a picture title: "A parergon
comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done \fait\, the fact [le fait], the
work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from
a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is
obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bord, à bord}" (Derrida: Truth, p. 54).
35. Pieter Breughel: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1558.

Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. Brussels.
36. Pieter Breughel: The Fall of Icarus. David and Alice Van Buurenmuseum. Brussels.
is spoken by a connoisseur exhibiting a picture that he owns, a picture he

alone controls the viewing of and — he believes — has the authority to explain:
My Last Duchess
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolfs hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
5 Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf ' by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
10 The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
15 Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mande laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
20 Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart — how shall I say? - too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
25 Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace — all and each
30 Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men — good! but thanked
Somehow - I know not how — as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
35 This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech - (which I have not) - to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark" - and if she let
40 Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse
- E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
45 Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
50 Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
A t starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
55 Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
The man responsible for this poem about a connoisseur was something of a
connoisseur himself. Browning's poems about painting are steeped — or at
least dyed - in the lore of art history. To the best of my knowledge, he is the
first English poet to use the art historian that would later be so conspicuously
quoted in the opening lines of Ashbery's "Self-Portrait": namely, Giorgio
Vasari. Though Browning nowhere cites Vasari by name, he plundered Va-
sari's biography of Andrea del Sarto for his poem about that painter, just as
he raided Vasari's Lives for the poem called "Fra Lippo Lippi."
Written in 1842, four years before he eloped to Italy with Elizabeth Bar-
rett and about ten years before he wrote "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo
Lippi," "My Last Duchess" bears no visible trace of Vasari, for it concerns an
imaginary painting by an imaginary painter. But this curiously belated speci-
men of notional ekphrasis is partly based on historical facts about Alfonso II,
an actual Duke of Ferrara in sixteenth-century Italy, and it bears all the essen-
tial traces of art-historical structure — of genesis and reception — that we find
in the later poems. We learn who painted the picture, how and why it captures
a particular expression, and — just as importantly - how it is exhibited, how it
may be viewed. What makes this poem truly remarkable in the history of
ekphrasis is its speaker. The speaker of this poem is neither the artist who
produced it nor the painted duchess herself, who might have been given the
sort of voice that Dante draws from the sculpted Virgin on the terrace of the
proud in canto 10 of the Purgatorio. But instead of the artist or the Duchess
herself, Browning's poem is spoken by the man who owns the painting and
who completely controls the conditions under which it may be seen.
Because the Duke draws a curtain to display the painting to his auditor,
some critics have compared him to a theatrical producer. 6 But as the patron
and connoisseur of art, as the supreme collector of beautifully wrought paint-
ings and sculptures, he seems to me the prototype of the modern museum
director. In the museum of his own p a l a l o he knows the history of every
work: who or what it represents, who created it, how it was made, and who it
was made for. Furthermore, like the director of any museum, he decides just
how each of its pieces will be exhibited, when it can be seen, where the
viewer will sit to look at it, and what the viewer will be told about it. A mod-
ern museum director may have trouble seeing the Duke as a kindred spirit,
but museumgoers know very well that watercolors and other light-sensitive
pictures are often kept under curtains, that viewing hours are always limited
and often inconvenient (the locked door and the closing bell are the art-
lover's twin nemeses), and that pictures are always displayed with explanatory
words of some kind, whether printed, tape-recorded on portable cassettes, or
delivered viva voce by museum guides. Short of being an artist himself, the
Duke combines all of the functions presupposed or exercised by the modern
museum. He commissions art, collects it, guards it, carefully regulates its ex-
hibition, provides a seat from which it can be viewed (admittedly not always
available in modern museums!), and — above all — explains it to the viewer.
The opening words of the Duke's monologue radiate the sense of power
that comes with absolute possession. 7 The second word out of the speaker's
mouth is the possessive pronoun my, which he applies both to the Duchess
and the painting of her, and the whole of his discourse about her is calculated
to make the viewer's experience of the picture utterly dependent on the Duke:
on the Duke's management of the curtain, on the Duke's capacity to anticip-
ate as well as answer any questions the painting might provoke in the viewer.
On the surface at least, this master of rhetorical manipulation sounds su-
premely in control.
6 Peter Wagner, who has kindly offered me a number of fine suggestions on this essay, re-
minds me that curtains have long played a role in western painting, serving as part of the
frame up to the seventeenth century; see Claus Grimm, "Histoire du cadre." To the best of
my knowledge, curtains are first linked to painting in Pliny's story of the ancient Greek
Zeuxis, who was so delighted to see birds pecking at his painted grapes that he challenged
his rival Parrhasius to lift the curtain covering his picture. When Zeuxis discovered that the
curtain was itself a painting by Parrhasius, he yielded the prize to his rival (Hagstrum: Sister
Arts, p. 24). For a discussion of frames and framing as "paratexte" see Wagner: Reading Icono-
texts, Chapt. 3.
7 On the relation between power and ownership of a portrait in Jane Austen's Sense and Sens-
ibility, see Sabor: "The Strategic Withdrawal," in this volume.
What he actually expresses, however, is the will to sound controlling, to

dominate the picture with his words. His failure to dominate it — more pre-
cisely to dominate the person that it represents - emerges plainly in the mid-
dle of the poem, where he repeatedly interrupts himself with commonplace
interjections about his own incapacity to explain or regulate the duchess'
character: "She had / A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad"
(21-22); "She thanked men, - good! but thanked / Somehow — I know not
how " (31-32); "Even had you skill / In speech — (which I have not) — to
make your will / Quite clear [...]" (35-37). The last of these interjections is
patently disingenuous, but they cannot all be explained as rhetorical ploys, as
so many artful gestures of self-deprecation calculated to disarm his auditor.
On the contrary, these repeated self-interruptions express what Herbert
Tucker calls "a private struggle."8
Signs of this struggle actually begin to appear in the very opening line of
the Duke's monologue, where the word "painted" radically destabilizes the
meaning of "Duchess." With a litde help from Stanley Fish, we can see that a
slow reading of the first line provokes two successive responses, two quite
different ways of construing the word "Duchess." By themselves, the first
four words might plausibly refer to a living woman pointed out to the auditor,
just as one might sotto voce identify a former spouse at a cocktail party ("That's
my ex-wife over there at the bar"). But the word "painted" instandy subverts
this meaning of "Duchess," turning it into a signifier just as difficult to grasp
and construe as the meaning of her painted glance. Does the phrase "my last
Duchess" now denote a painting, or the person signified by that painting?
The Duke cannot resolve the ambiguity because the painted image of his
former spouse disturbs him quite as much as her actual face did — which is
why he keeps the painting covered. For all his mastery of rhetoric, the Duke
simply does not know how to master her image with words. If we suppress
for a moment the phrase "painted on the wall," his opening sentence could
all too easily refer to a skillfully embalmed corpse: "That's my last Duchess
[...] / Looking as if she were alive." But with or without the "painted"
phrase, the ending of the sentence merely accentuates its ambiguity. While the
antecedent of "she" must be "Duchess," is it the painted duchess or the real
one? What would it mean to speak of a painted duchess as alive?
We could say, of course, that "alive" here means lifelike. But the subjunct-
ive "were" signals a condition contrary to fact and gives us the first hint that
the woman represented by the painting is dead. What we begin to see through
the words of the Duke is something like the picture described in Edgar Allen
8 Tucker: Brownings Beginnings, p. 178.

Poe's "The Oval Portrait," a short story first published — by an astonishing

coincidence — in the very same year (1842) that "My Last Duchess" first ap-
peared. In Poe's story, the narrator is spellbound by the "absolute life-likeness
of expression" that he finds in the portrait of a young girl who turns out to
have been the painter's wife. But the narrator also learns that to create this
lifelike expression in paint, the painter has drained the very life it represents,
letting the ghastly light of his studio wither the health and gleeful spirit of his
beautiful bride, drawing "the tints which he spread upon the canvas [...] from
the cheeks of her who sate beside him" as he worked.9 When he at last
achieves "Life itself' on the canvas, he finds that his wife is dead.
Unlike the husband of Poe's story, Browning's Duke is not a painter. But
the Duke clearly sees in the "earnest glance" captured by the painter the hint
of an adulterous desire for the painter himself, and his suspicions could only
be strengthened by what he repeatedly calls a "spot of joy" (14—15, 21) in the
cheek of the painted Duchess: a spot called up, the Duke suggests, by some
chance remark of the painter. To the Duke's suspicious eye, the spot of joy is
a stain of guilt. Yet it is also essential to the verisimilitude of the painting, to
the lifelikeness which is repeatedly said to stand for — and thus displace or
even pre-empt - the life itself. Like the story of the portrait in Poe's tale, the
Duke's account of the painting begins and ends with a wondering tribute to
its verisimilitude: "Looking as if she were alive" is echoed by his final words
on the portrait, "There she stands / As if alive" (46—47). The sinister mean-
ing subdy implied by the first statement has become all too plain by the time
we hear its echo, which immediately follows the Duke's report on what he did
about the Duchess's indiscriminate smiling: "I gave commands; / Then all
smiles stopped together" (45—46).
One of her smiles, of course, survives in the portrait itself, which pre-
serves the joyous appearance of the Duchess' face while ensuring that it can
henceforth be seen only under the Duke's supervision. Like the sea horse
tamed by Neptune in the bronze sculpture wrought for the Duke by Claus of
Innsbruck, the very last thing he commends to his auditor's notice, the
Duchess' uncontrollable delight in everyone and everything she sees has been
tamed by art, metastasized by paint; she has been made to take her place
among the objets d'art of a connoisseur's exquisite collection.10 Yet he does not
9 Poe: "The Oval Portrait," Poetry and Tales, pp. 482-84, here p. 483.
10 Apropos the sculpture of Neptune taming the sea horse, Gail S. Weinberg has kindly drawn
my attention to the passage on Neptune's calming of the winds in the first book of Virgil's
Aemid (142-56). Since Virgil compares Neptune's act to the pacifying effect of a respected, au-
thoritative voice on an urban riot, the sculpture may well signify the art of ruling wisely. If so, it
makes a last ironic comment on the style of ruling practiced by the man who commissioned it.
and cannot describe her painted image with a connoisseur's detachment, or

with a purely aesthetic admiration for its beauty. The instability of his lan-
guage, beginning with the ambiguous syntax of his opening sentence, shows
only too clearly that he has not destroyed the power of her glance. In spite of
himself, the Duke's monologue shows that the painted image of his former
wife leaves him powerless to explain her glance, or even to gaze at it for more
than a few seconds at a time.
I said "gaze" by design, for the Duke's rhetorical struggle with the
Duchess' painted face can be usefully defined in terms of Norman Bryson's
distinction between the gaze and the glance. According to Bryson, the gaze is
timeless, magisterially synoptic, and rational; the glance is time-bound, frag-
mentary, and resdess.11 While both terms designate ways of looking at a
painting, they inevitably refer to qualities in a painting, most importantly to
the contrast between its geometric structure, which can be synoptically ab-
sorbed in a timeless gaze, and the texture of its details (like a spot on a
cheek), which must be picked up individually — glanced at - as the viewer's
eye travels through time across the field of the painting. The glance, Bryson
argues, relentlessly subverts the magisterial authority of the gaze:
The flickering, ungovernable mobility of the Glance strikes at the very roots of ra-
tionalism, for what it can never apprehend is the geometric order which is ration-
alism's true ensign. [...] Before the geometric order of pictorial composition, the
Glance finds itself marginalised and declared legally absent, for this celebration of
a faculty o f mind to step outside the flux of sensations and to call into being a
realm o f transcendent forms [...] is beyond the scope of its comprehension: all it
knows is dispersal — the disjointed rhythm of the retinal field; yet it is rhythm
which painting o f the Gaze seeks to bracket out. Against the Gaze, the Glance
proposes desire, proposes the body, in the duree of its practical activity: in the
freezing of syntagmatic motion, desire, and the body, the desire of the body, are
exacdy the terms which the tradition seeks to suppress. 12
So "glance" is Bryson's metonymy for whatever in a painting provokes the

viewer to glance, to catch at a sidelong angle its sensory textures, to see what
the magisterial gaze overlooks and suppresses. But in the portrait of the
Duchess, the glance literally emanates from a painted face. What Bryson says
of the contest between glance and gaze within the viewer applies with very lit-
de adjustment to the contest between the painted glance of the Duchess and
the Duke's habit of gazing at works of art. The portrait is curtained not only
because that is the way paintings were commonly treated in the sixteenth cen-
11 Bryson: Vision and Painting, pp. 94—122.

12 Ibid., pp. 121-22.
tury (see note 6), but also because, as I have already noted, the Duke finds
looking at it profoundly disturbing. He no sooner invites his guest to sit and
look at it than he expects the guest to turn away and ask about the origin of
its profoundly passionate glance. Does this tell us that the Duke can read the
mind of his guest, as he himself would clearly like to believe, or that he is sim-
ply projecting onto the guest his own anxiety about the painted glance: his
own instinct to turn from it, his own incapacity to make rational order from
the lability of its "faint / Half-flush" (18-19), or from what Bryson would call
its "flickering, ungovernable mobility"? Either way, the painted glance raises a
question that the Duke can never satisfactorily answer in words.
The deepest irony of the poem is that for all its silence, the painted face
speaks far more eloquently than the Duke does. Like Ovid's Philomela, the
Duchess has been denied the use of her tongue, and her portrait is nowhere
granted a voice; just once we are told that the living Duchess "thanked men"
(31), and even that may have been with a blush rather than words. The Duke's
monologue, therefore, displaces the story she might have told about herself.
Yet in presuming to speak for her, to tell the story of why she was silenced,
the Duke is compelled to acknowledge the indefinable, inarticulable express-
iveness of her painted glance. As Tucker suggests, the Duke's question about
the origin of the glance - more precisely, the Duke's supposition that anyone
who looked at the painting would want to ask him "how such a glance came
there" - sounds at first art-historical: how did the painter learn to represent
such a glance? But the question, as Tucker says, points beyond the origins of
artistic technique to the genesis of passion itself.13 It points to the unpredict-
able spontaneity of joy, to the indeterminacy of what can neither be put into
words nor comprehended by the orderly and ordering gaze but can only be
expressed by and caught with a glance. Though the Duke owns the painting
and rigorously controls its exhibition, its painted glance expresses all he can
never possess or regulate: the Duchess' irrepressible readiness to be delighted
by "anybody's gift" (34).
The real object of the Duke's ekphrastic monologue emerges only at the
end of the poem, where we learn that his auditor is an emissary from the
family of the woman that he plans to marry next. Like the museum director
cultivating a potential benefactor, the Duke plainly wants the auditor to see
that he is a man of consummate good taste and venerable lineage, possessor
of beautiful objects and "a nine-hundred-years-old-name" (33). Just as clearly,
he wants the auditor to know what sort of fealty he expects from his future
wife, and what penalty she will pay if he fails to get it. But the painted glance
13 Tucker: Browning's Beginnings, pp. 178-79.

subverts the lesson that the Duke tries to draw from it. In spite of his com-
mand to stop all of the Duchess' smiles, the portrait preserves her glance of
inscrutable joy, her challenge to his possessive authority, her refusal to accept
his demand that she smile only for him. Even after her death, her image stub-
bornly declines to obey his word.
To turn from "My Last Duchess" to Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts,"
written - in late 1938 - nearly a hundred years after Browning's poem, is to
move from the private museum of a Renaissance Duke to the kind of public
museum in which great works of art are now commonly displayed. It is also
to move from notional ekphrasis to actual ekphrasis, from an imaginary paint-
ing made wholly of words to the verbal representation of a painting that can
be positively identified and independently seen. But the public museum of
Auden's poem shares something important with the private, imaginary mu-
seum of Browning's duke. Just as Fra PandolPs portrait of the duchess in
Browning's poem is juxtaposed with the bronze by Claus of Innsbruck, a
work of art displayed in a public museum is almost always juxtaposed with
other works. Consequently, Auden acknowledges the institutional site of his
encounter with a painting not only in his title but also in his opening refer-
ence to the Old Masters, whose works can be directly known only in muse-
ums, and in his brief allusions to paintings that swam into his ken as he made
his way to or from the one that struck him most. In fact it is these other
paintings that first illustrate his generalization about the wisdom of the old
masters:
About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walk-
ing dully along;
How, when the aged are reverendy, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood;
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martydom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's
horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Curiously enough, the opening section on the unidentified paintings is slightly

longer than the section devoted to the only painting Auden names -
Breughel's Icarus, as he calls it (for reasons I will shortly explain). The other
paintings, to which Auden merely alludes, have been tentatively identified as
two other Breughels: The Census at Bethlehem (1566) at the Brussels Musée and
The Slaughter of the Innocents (c.1564) at Vienna's Kunsthistorische Museum. 14
Neither one of these quite fits Auden's description. In The Census, which rep-
resents Bethlehem as a snow-covered Flemish village, children are shown
skating (among other things) on the ice around a cluster of trees at right, but
the crowd of mostly older people massed around the building at left have
gathered to be counted and taxed, not to wait passionately and reverently for
the miraculous birth, and they appear to be suffering - if at all — no more
than taxpayers usually do when they have to pay up. There is real anguish in
The Slaughter, where mothers are shown weeping for their slain or doomed in-
fants while dogs indifferently leap about in the snow, but it is hard to find a
torturer's horse scratching its ass on a tree in this picture, and more import-
antly, the slaughter of those who cannot deliberately choose to accept death
cannot be called a "martydom." 15
Since Auden does not mention either The Census or The Slaughter by name,
it may be captious to complain that he has reconstructed them, or that he has
tacitly moved The Slaughter from Vienna to Brussels to join the other
Breughels there in an imaginary exhibition hung for him alone. But what he
does with Breughel's paintings as well as with their location should prompt us
to wonder - more than critics usually do - about what he says of the Old
Masters. If they were "never wrong" about the juxtaposition of suffering with
signs of indifference to it, what would Auden say of Breughel's Parable of the
Blind (1568), which he could certainly have seen at the Museo Nationale of
Naples and which depicts a row of blind men tumbling miserably into a ditch
while not a single animate creature — neither man nor beast — is shown any-
where else in the picture, let alone shown displaying indifference to their
14 See Max Bluestone, "Sources," and Cage and Long, "Contemporary," p. 287.
15 On the first of these points, Peter Wagner has observed to me that the horse on the bridge
could be seen as conforming to Auden's description.
plight? Viewed in light of the museum where this poem is nominally set, and
more specifically of the paintings to which it alludes, Auden's grand general-
ization about the Old Masters is at best idiosyncratic. We should read it not as
a universal truth - which it certainly is not - but as a clue to the state of mind
that Auden's speaker brings to the viewing of Breughel's Landsape with the Fall
of Icarus at the Musée des Beaux Arts.
Auden's representation of Breughel's painting, then, fully participates in
his representation of the museum that he constructs around it. But what does
the museum here signify? What state of mind does it induce in the speaker of
the poem? Michael Riffaterre suggests that the "Musée" of the tide prefigures
the aesthetic detachment epitomized by the "expensive delicate ship" of its fi-
nal lines - the ship "that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling
out of the sky." Riffaterre writes:
What "expensive," "delicate," "museum," and "beaux arts" have in common [...]
is that [...] they all refer to a detached aesthetic distance, to a preference for form,
to an ideal of beauty, that presupposes elitism and the trappings of social privilege,
collecting fine arts, taste, and money lavished on artifacts. They all function as
variants of academic}6
Given the sort of funds that most academics have to lavish on artifacts, I
should rather say that all these aesthetic elements in the poem function as
variants of connoisseurship, or curatorship. But the state of aesthetic detach-
ment — even numbness — induced by the sheer multiplicity of pictures in a
museum might indeed help to explain the startling juxtaposition of despera-
tion and indifference that the poem finds in the painting. "In Breugel's
Icarus," we are told, "everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster"
(lines 14—15). The point of view implicitly imputed to the painting as a whole
might be that of the sun, mirror of the viewer's eye: the sun resting on the
horizon at the vanishing point and watching the fall that its own heat has pre-
cipitated, gazing dispassionately — like an appreciative connoisseur - at the
vivid flash of white legs against green water. Furthermore, as Riffaterre ob-
serves, the ship is "the most exemplary passerby in the indifference se-
quence," 17 for in abandoning the drowning man to his fate, it breaks one of
the most fundamental laws of the sea. But how far does the indifference to
Icarus' plight extend? If the splash and forsaken cry that the ploughman may
have heard did not signify "an important failure" for him, is this also the atti-
tude implied by the painting as a whole, or by the poem? Mary Ann Caws an-
16 Riffaterre: "Textuality," p. 8.
17 Ibid., p. 8.
swers both questions with a yes. The poem, she writes, subordinates the dis-
aster to "the aesthetic stress of the picture: ship and sea in their splendor,
dwarfing the human fate." 18 Riffaterre demurs, arguing that the poem as-
sumes a moral authority which pre-empts the aesthetic standards of the paint-
ing. "Auden's words," he says "focus on the disaster by stressing that [the
painting] pretends to ignore it." 19 More precisely, we could say that the poem
leads us to see how the painting pretends to subordinate the disaster to other
sights, or actually does subordinate it by making it far less conspicuous than
the ship and the ploughman. But above all, Auden's poem makes us see how
the moral meaning of the painting — the meaning it is said to illustrate - is
largely constructed by the words of the title with which the museum has la-
belled it.
Consider for a moment what we could make of this painting without its
title. If we have read Ovid, its three standing figures might possibly remind us
of Book 8 of The Metamorphoses, where the flight of Daedalus and his son is
said to have been witnessed with stupefaction by "some fisherman, [...] or a
shepherd, leaning upon his crook, or a ploughman, on his plow-handles." 20
But unless we are thus reminded of Ovid by the standing figures alone, and
perhaps the partridge (see note 20), could we recognize the splashing legs as
those of Icarus? Could we do so without any sign of Daedalus in the picture
to guide us, with a setting sun scarcely high enough to melt the wax of high-
flying wings, and with a flagrantly non-Ovidian ship to lead us off the scent?
Would we even know that the splashing legs belong to a drowning man and
not to a swimmer happily disporting while the ploughman toils? And would
we sympathize more readily with the swimmer than with the laboring man of
the soil? 21
18 Caws: "Double Reading," pp. 323-30, here p. 328.

19 Riffaterre, "Textuality," pp. 12-13.
20 Ovid: Metamorphoses 8: 217-19. Peter Wagner has kindly drawn my attention to another
Ovidian sign in the painting: the partridge perched on the branch that appears just below
the splashing legs. In the Metamorphoses, the burial of Icarus is noisily applauded by a part-
ridge (Perdix) because this bird is the metamorphosed form of Daedalus' highly inventive
nephew, whom Daedalus tried to kill in a fit of jealousy (Ovid: Metamorphoses 8: 234—59). In
Breughel's painting, however, the partridge pointedly looks away from the upended legs.
21 Given Auden's political views at the time he wrote this poem (late 1938), it is somewhat
ironic that the ploughman gets none of his sympathy. As John Coombes observes, "Auden
was in theory, in the 1930s, a clamorous sympathizer with the working masses: in art how-
ever they are (however prominent in the artwork at stake) 'someone else' and (therefore?)
'dull' " (Coombes: "Constructing the Icarus Myth," p. 25). But a further problem here is
that Breughel's ploughman looks anything but exhausted by his day of toil. With his dainty
tiptoe step, his bright red blouse, and his immaculate tunic falling in elegant folds about his
knees, he seems ready to take his place in the peasant chorus of Don Giovanni.
Heffernan: Browning's " M y Last Duchess" and Twentieth-Century Ekphrasis 277
The honest answer to all of these questions is no. Neither we nor Auden
himself could see a drowning Icarus in this painting without the words of its
tide, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which in the poem becomes simply
"Breughel's Icarus." Auden's compression of the long label sharpens the point
of what the curator's label leads us to see in it: a meaning borrowed from an-
other Breughel painting which hangs in the van Buuren Museum of Brussels
and which is almost identical to the Beaux Arts' Icarus except for the presence
o f a winged man flying through the sky at the very top (fig. 36). In the Beaux
Arts picture, this unmistakeable sign of Daedalus - the sign that would lead
us to identify the splashing legs as those of his fallen son - is missing. Its
place is taken by the key word in the tide, the only word Auden cites.
This version makes it clear that the shepherd leaning on his crook and
looking skywards in both pictures is not just heardessly turning away from the
drowning man but looking up at the winged Daedalus: precisely what Ovid
says all three men were doing as he flew overhead. Auden alludes to
Daedalus, perhaps unwittingly, when he says that the ship "must have seen /
Something amazing." What it saw, of course, was not just the falling boy but
the flying father who wrought the Cretan maê in which both were impris-
oned until Daedalus fashioned the wings that enabled them to escape. 22 But
the poem itself turns away from the suddenly bereaved Daedalus, who must
surely be suffering just as much as his son is. The sole beneficiary of the po-
em's sympathy is Icarus.
The exclusiveness of this sympathy is strange enough in light o f what the
picture shows us of him: a comically upended pair of legs. It is stranger still in
light of the paintings allusively described in the first half of the poem, espe-
cially The Slaughter of the Innocents, where the juxtaposition o f visibly anguished
mothers with frisking dogs and stolid horses leading their horsy lives illus-
trates far more vividly than Icarus the originating premise of the poem. Even
with its tide, nothing in the painting itself compels us to think about the suf-
fering of Icarus, and there is good reason to believe that Breughel painted his
vainly kicking legs simply to signify his folly. In a 1553 etching made by Ge-
org Hoefnagel after Breughel (fig. 37), an upended Icarus kicks his way down
from the clouds into a winding river dotted with sailboats, and the Latin le-
gend warns us to shun the extremes and take the middle as the safest way.23
22 I owe this very good point to Mason: "Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts,'" p. 283.
23 Beat Wyss argues that this is also the essential message o f Breughel's painting, which shows
on either side o f the prudent ploughman the consequences o f belligerence and folly: the
corpse lying under the trees at left, presumably killed in a fight, and the splashing legs o f
the overreaching Icarus at right. See Wyss: Peter Bruegel.
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37. Georg Hoefnagel: AVer Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1553. Etching after Pieter Breughel.
Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er. Cabinet des Estampes. Brussels. Photo Bibliothèque Royale.
Spurning or turning away from this simply prescriptive moral, the poem
gives Breughel's Icarus a quite different meaning. Focussing on the figure des-
ignated by the key word in its tide, the poem works from suggestions made
by other Breughel pictures that Auden linked to this one, even though he saw
them in different museums. Each of those other pictures portrays a moment-
ous event in the life of a family. In the figure of a heavily cloaked woman rid-
ing a mule across the center foreground, The Census at Bethlehem signifies the
imminence of Christ's nativity; and The Slaughter of Innocents, as already noted,
openly depicts the killing of infants before the eyes of their mothers. In addi-
tion, both paintings include figures indifferent to the momentous event, and
both require knowledge of a text in order to be fully understood. We must
know the New Testament to recognize the mule-riding woman as the Virgin
Mary and to know why the infants were slaughtered.
As exemplified by these pictures, then, three things characterize the suffer-
ing portrayed by the Old Masters: it is juxtaposed with signs of indifference,
its meaning depends on the viewer's knowledge of a text, and it is emphatic-

ally familial. We can now see how Auden would be led to make the neglected
suffering of Icarus the moral center of Breughel's picture. Like the paintings
of Scriptural events, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus — the only painting
Breughel did of a mythological subject - depends on a text. Also, the O vidian
text on which it depends makes this subject poignantly familial: the son call-
ing the father's name up to the very moment when the sea catches his lips,
the desperate father calling in vain on the son until he sees the wings floating
on the waves. 24 Isolated from the father's suffering, the suffering of the son
becomes in Auden's poem the sole center of feeling in a seascape of cool in-
difference, and though it was Icarus who recklessly flew up and away from his
father, his own "forsaken cry" here - the sole note of prosopopeia in the en-
tire poem - calls to mind what another dying son famously cried to his
father: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34).
Viewing Breughel through the words of Ovid and turning them into an
echo of the last words of Christ, Auden's speaker turns the painting itself into
a verbal narrative of suffering wilfully ignored. 25 The assertive power of the
word over the image in this narrative becomes all too clear as inferential sub-
junctives — mere conjectures about the story told by the picture — turn into
unequivocal indicatives: the ploughman may have heard the splash and the
cry, but for him it was unimportant; the ship must have seen an amazing sight
but sailed calmly on. Consider the question begged by this final would-be
statement of fact. Since the ship is something Breughel added to Ovid's story
of Icarus, we have no textual guidance on its movements; how then do we
know it will ignore a splash just now occurring, that it will not even try to
come about and rescue the boy? Its Falstaffian sails (oddly incongruent with
its level hull, the calm sea, and the droop of the horse's tail and ploughman's
tunic) tell us only that the wind at sail level is strong. Even if the ship did sail
on, it could not have sailed calmly.
Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" is anything but a "straightforward read-
ing of an art work," as one critic has called it. 26 It is the verbal reconstruction
of a painting whose meaning is initially determined - for all who see it in the
Brussels museum - by the words of the title affixed to it there. Viewing
Breughel's picture in light of these words, in light of Ovid's words, in light re-
flected from Breughel's paintings of Biblical subjects, and in light of the texts
that stand behind those paintings, Auden remakes the picture in words as a
24 Ovid: Metamorphoses, 8: 229-33.

25 On the role of narrative in ekphrasis, see Bernadette Fort's contribution to this volume.
26 Ferguson: "Crossing the Delaware," p. 31.
museum-class specimen of how the Old Masters could represent suffering, as

a story of private anguish publically ignored. If Browning's "My Last Duch-
ess" points the way to the modern museum of words, Auden's "Musée" takes
us into it.
* * *
Museums are built to house and preserve works of art but also to regulate our
experience of them, to certify their provenance and value, and in large meas-
ure to determine — beginning with the very act of fixing their tides — what
they mean. 27 In this sense, every museum of art is also a museum of words.
In representing the Duke as the prototype of the museum curator, Browning
prefigures the way that twentieth-century ekphrasis enters the museum and
salutes the power of its words. At the same time, he bears witness to what no
verbal authority can ever wholly subdue, control, or explain: the disturbing,
unmasterable power of the painted image.
27 For a recent study of how museums use a combination of verbal and architectural cues to
regulate our experience of what we find in them, see Bal: "Telling."
PETER WAGNER
Universität K o b l e n z - L a n d a u
Oscar Wilde's "Impression du matin" -

an Intermedial Reading
Abstract: Applying some ideas of Michel Foucault and discourse analysis to a poem
by Oscar Wilde, this "interprétation d'iconotexte" goes in search of discursive lay-
ers of the nineteenth-century misogynist mentalité as reflected in the male glance.
The article is an archeological attempt to uncover ways of seeing, understanding,
and representing as embodied in Victorian art and literature. Wilde's "Impression
du matin" is shown to be a poem that is eventually totally overpowered by the
gynophobic discourse of the age in which it was written.
In 1969, w h e n that frightening m o n s t e r called intertextuality h a d already b e e n

sighted in Paris, Michel Foucault put p e n to p a p e r t o . p r o d u c e an article many
o f his contemporaries considered outrageous. In what is arguably o n e o f his
m o s t i m p o r t a n t essays in literary criticism, Foucault challenged the c o n c e p t
a n d the authority o f the author. 1 C o n f r o n t i n g the traditional classificatory
function o f the author(name) with his o w n discourse analysis, he sketched a
Utopian vision, a f o r m o f culture in which fiction would n o t b e limited by the
figure o f the writer. In such a culture, Foucault argued,
all discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to
which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur.
We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who
really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authencity or origin-
ality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead,
there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this
discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate
it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects?
1 Foucault was, o f course, not the first critic to attack the concept o f the author in Literary
criticism; his immediate predecessors were Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre (articles in
1968).
Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions,
we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference
does it make who is speaking? 2
This implies that literary texts can be read with much profit if we focus on
the text rather than the author-text relations. Indeed, Foucault suggests that
the big name of the author "is a certain functional principle by which, in our
culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the
free circulation [...] and recomposition of fiction."3 In what follows, I should
like to test Foucault's argument, not in a discourse analysis but in an intertex-
tual reading of one single poem by Oscar Wilde. If Foucault is right, it should
be possible to find in it a treasure trove of information and insights that tradi-
tional author-oriented readings cannot provide.
Before I start, however, let me give you the menu for the courses to be
served in my contribution. In the wake of the trailblazing works by Julia Kris-
teva and Roland Barthes in the 1970s, we have seen, over the last years, an in-
creasing number of studies paying particular attention to the importance and
function of allusions. In this chapter, I shall be working on the assumptions,
derived from intertextuality, that
- a) poetic texts in particular can be considered as networks or, in Roland
Barthes's terms, fabrics, in which the most interesting points are the knots
called allusions which integrate other texts;
- b) poetic texts contain (in the double sense of the term) not only numerous
other discourses but actually open up an endless universe (the phrase is Kris-
teva's) by reminding us of the "déjà lu" and the "déjà vu"; and
- c) such texts, while they do not allow finite readings, may be considered as
archeological material, as textual layers preserving the discursive strategies of
an age.
2 Foucault: "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?," p. 94. English transi., "What is an Author?," transi.
D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, p. 275. The original passage (p. 94) reads: "On peut imaginer
une culture où les discours circuleraient et seraient reçus sans que la fonction-auteur ap-
paraisse jamais. Tous les discours, quel que soit leur statut, leur forme, leur valeur, et quel
que soit le traitement qu'on leur fait subir, se dérouleraient dans l'anonymat du murmure.
On n'entendrait plus les questions si longtemps ressassées: 'Qui a réellement parlé? Est-ce
bien lui et nul autre? Avec quelle authenticité, ou quelle originalité? Et qu'a-t-il exprimé du
plus profond de lui-même dans son discours?' Mais d'autres comme celles-ci: 'Quels sont
les modes d'existence de ce discours? D'où a-t-il été tenu, comment peut-il circuler, et qui
peut se l'approprier? Quels sont les emplacements qui y sont ménagés pour des sujets pos-
sibles? Qui peut remplir ces diverses fonctions de sujet?' Et derrière toutes ces questions on
n'entendrait guère que le bruit d'une indifférence: 'Qu'importe qui parle ...'."
3 Foucault: "What is an Author?," p. 274.
Wagner: Oscar Wilde's "Impression du matin" - an Intermedial Reading 283
In the second part of my article I shall try to show in a brief analysis of the
"male glance" how such archeological research may contribute to gender
studies.
1.
Here is Oscar Wilde's poem in its full allusive glory:

Impression du Matin
The Thames nocturne of blue and gold

Changed to a harmony in gray;
A barge with ocher-coloured hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold
The yellow fog came creeping down

The bridges, till the houses' walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's
Loomed like a bubble o'er the town.
Then suddenly arose the clang

Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country wagons; and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.
But one pale woman all alone,

The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamp's flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.
As a text, "Impression du Matin" forms part of a larger text; indeed, its em-
bedding in the edition of Wilde's Poems published in 1881 deserves some at-
tention, for its verbal and spatial framing as it were already suggests both the
synaesthetic and intertextual nature of the poem itself.4 In fact, the edition of
1881 can be cut down into four "movements": in addition to the lyrics in the
section entitled 'The Fourth Movement,' a term that immediately introduces
the notion of musicality and of musical composition reminiscent of Théo-
phile Gautier's seminal "Symphonie en blanc majeur" (1852: and as such part
of his Emaux et camées, also a rather telling title), we find three sections or
4 I have explored the importance of the (pictorial and verbal) frame for Enlightenment art
and literature in the article, "Swift's Great Palimpsest: Intertextuality and Travel Literature
in Cultiver's Travels" and in the monograph, Reading Iconotexts.
"movements" separated by five larger poems. "Impression du Matin" appears

as the first piece in the third movement, in a group bearing the tide Windflow-
ers which is followed by another group of poems entitled Flowers of Gold. The
very context of the poem introduces the important issues of synaesthesia and
intermediality (i.e., the mingling of music, painting, and writing), issues that
were central to Impressionism. It is hardly a coincidence, for instance, that
"Impression du Matin" is preceded and followed by poems concerned with
Magdalen, a femme fatale who held a particular fascination for the Victorians:
"Magdalen's tall tower" threatens in the final stanza of "The Burden of Itys"
while the personfication of the fallen woman herself speaks in "Magdalen
Walks." The final vision of "Impression du Matin" is thus situated between
two other poems focussing on the pious harlot, a central if stereotyped figure
in art and literature from the Renaissance onward. 5
One could say that the texts surrounding "Impression du Matin" in
Wilde's Poems create what Gérard Genette has termed the "paratexte" of a
work of art, a textual barrier or threshold that shapes the reader's expectations
and reception in decisive ways. In the case of "Impression du Matin" this
"paratexte" sets the tone and indicates the discursive space inhabited by the
poem.
As we move from the first textual layer to the poem itself, we encounter
yet another barrier or entrance way: 6 the title with its intratextual and inter-
textual functions. Intratextually, the tide provides, according to Genette, "une
clé interprétative," its major functions being identification, description and se-
duction. 7 Given the predominant literary and artistic taste at the fin de siècle,
one can see immediately how the collocation 'impression du matin' would
have baited and seduced readers, drawing him/her into the words following
the tide. 8
From an intertextual point of view, the functions of the title are even
more complex, depending on what Genette calls "la complaisance herméneu-
tique du récepteur." 9 To begin with, we notice that it is held in French. A
5 On painterly representations of the Magdalen, see Mullins: The Painted Witch, pp. 35-38.
6 The term is Genette's in his study with the punning tide Seuils.
8 It is also important to consider the three major meanings of the French word 'impression'
as used in the tide. The dictionary lists three denotations: "1. Effet produit dans l'esprit de
quelqu'un; réaction morale, sentimentale devant un fait; 2. [Psychol.] Réaction physi-
ologique des organes des sens aux excitations extérieures, qui provoque dans la conscience
la perception, la sensation; 3. Avoir le sentiment vrai ou faux de." See Lexis. Dictionnaire de
la langue française, s.v. 'impression.' It seems to me that all these meanings are eventually
evoked in the poem.
French title in English poetry was, around 1880, almost de rigueur. Using
French as a writer, one indicated one's preference for contemporary Gallic
culture and art - and, of course, one's own erudition. In that sense, the
French title of the poem functions in the same way as certain epigraphs in
novels that announce themes and leitmotifs while indicating the author's fa-
miliarity with his literary sources. 10
As an allusion, both the denotation and even more the connotation of the
French tide refer to and recall other works labelled 'Impression.' These are,
above all, Wilde's other 'French' poems in the collection of 1881: the one
called "Chanson" at the end of Wind Flowers, the two lyrics entitled "Impres-
sions: 1. Les Silhouettes 2. La Fuite de la lune" (in the section Flowers of
Gold), and "Impression: Le Réveillon" (in The Fourth Movement), which are all
thematically related to "Impression du Matin." 11 I would argue, however, that
the most important aspect of the allusion contained in the title is the fact that
the reader is immediately reminded of some major impressionist works in the
poetry, art and music of the second half of the nineteenth century. The
French title thus associates Wilde's poem with a discourse that had been es-
tablished by such poets and artists as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Gautier, Monet,
and Whistler. 12 In fact, Monet's Impression, soleil levant (1873) immediately
comes to mind (colour plate V), not only because of its title and related subject
matter but because the painting inadvertently gave Impressionism its tempo-
rarily derisive name. 13 Monet, together with Pissaro, was Wilde's favourite im-
pressionist painter, although his greatest praise was reserved for Whistler. 14
10 On the semantic and structural importance of the motto see Berger: '"Damn the Mottoe':
Scott and the Epigraph," pp. 373-96; and Genette: Seuils, pp.134—49. - Wilde, like Swin-
burne, adored French. He spoke and wrote it reasonably well, and he may even have writ-
ten Salome in French, although the critics still do not agree on this point. See Kohl: Oscar
Wilde, pp. 288-89. See also Swinburne's French poems, such as "Nocturne," "Théophile
Gautier," "Ode," and "Au Tombeau de Banville," in The Complete Works of Algernon Charles
Swinburne, vol. 3: pp. 148—154. — The entire fin de siècle period was an international move-
ment which is better understood when one takes into account the many relations between,
say, France and England. See Lindner: "Asthetizismus, Dekadenz, Symbolismus. Englische
Wurzeln und französische Einflüsse," pp. 53-82; Horstmann, Asthetizismus und Dekaden%
and Fuchs: Dekaden
11 In 1882 Wilde wrote two further lyrical 'impressions': "Le Jardin" and "La Mer." See Eich-
baum: "Die impressionistischen Frühgedichte Oscar Wildes," p. 402.
12 See especially Baudelaire's Iês Fleurs du mal (1857) and Le Spleen de Paris (1869); Mallarmé's
L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876); Gautier's Emaux et camées (1852-72); and the paintings by
Monet and Whistler discussed below.
13 For a discussion of the painting and its background see Wildenstein: Claude Monet. Biogra-
phie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 1, pp. 66-70.
14 Ellmann: Oscar Wilde, p. 162.
Published almost a decade after Monet's seminal painting 15 and the enormous
echo it produced in art, literature and critical writing, "Impression du Matin"
thus declares itself to belong to a discursive field in which the artistic treat-
ment of fleeting moments had become common practice.
At first glance, the main 'body' of the poem seems rather unimpressive,
consisting as it does of simple lyrical forms. We find four stanzas held to-
gether by inclusive rhyme and a basic metrical pattern of iambic tetrameters.
Four trochaic inversions in the second and fourth lines of the first three stro-
phes provide musical variation, thus avoiding the monotony that is bound to
arise with this stanzaic form. Everything in the first three stanzas - the metre,
the rhyme pattern, the paratatic structure of the sentences, the sound and
even the images - seems to be designed to create an 'impression' of harmony.
Language is made subservient to this artistic target.
Since my aim here is neither a formal nor a linguistic analysis à la New
Criticism of a palimpsest echoing other poems, I should like to focus mainly
on a few visual and verbal texts that enter the poem by way of allusions, even-
tually weaving a fabric of meaning. The opening lines 1—2 contain a series of
both marked and unmarked allusions as well as a pun. Together, they estab-
lish a dense network of signifiers directing our attention to painting and the
literary and musical discourse inspiring it. At the same time, these verses en-
gage critically and playfully with the romantic conception of nature. 16 For in-
stead of a direct natural view or impression of an early morning scene we are
faced with what is clearly an ekphrasis (a verbal representation of a painterly
representation) 17 — the scene is thus twice removed and seen through two
media, first art and then poetry. 18
The opening line of the poem, "The Thames nocturne of blue and gold,"
combines colours with the term nocturne, signifying "a soft dreamy piece of
15 I am not arguing, of course, that Monet's Impression, soleil levant is a kind of Genettian
'architexte' that stands at the beginning of a development. Had I world enough and time, I
might discuss the intertextual nature of Monet's canvas too: the echoes one finds in it of
contemporary and earlier French art (e.g., Watteau) and literature. On this issue, see the
critical literature cited in D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet, 66-70.
16 Kohl: Oscar Wilde, p. 140.
17 For discussions of the history of 'ekphrasis' and its importance for literature, see my intro-
duction above and especially the recent monographs by Dieterle: Erzählte Bilder, Krieger:
Ekphrasis, and Heffernan: Museum of Words. Also see Krieger: "The Anthropological Persist-
ence."
18 In fact, the reference to J. M. Whisder's art in the first line is so obvious that one cannot
help thinking of a 'bon mot' in Wilde's The Decay of Lying (1889) where Vivian, a thinly dis-
guised Oscar Wilde, argues that it is nature which imitates art and not vica versa. See Kohl:
Oscar Wilde, p. 140.
music" as well as "a painting of a night scene" (OED) in a reference to

Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1872).19 Whistler's
painting (colour plate VI) as well as some of his other nocturnes would have
been known to contemporary readers because they were at the centre of a law
suit that had made headlines in 1878. When John Ruskin, a sort of pope
among the art critics of the time, was faced with Whisder's canvases at the
opening exhibition of The Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, he was so outraged
that he attacked Whistler in a review, charging him with wilful imposture "for
flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." 20 It seems that Ruskin's main tar-
get was Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875). A few
months later, Whisder, urged by a friend, brought a libel action against Ruskin
that was covered by several newspapers. The painter eventually won the law
suit but incurred heavy costs.21
Recalled in the first line of Wilde's poem, Whisder's nocturnes are them-
selves complex iconotexts. They draw on Japanese and French art (e.g., wood-
cuts by Ando Hiroshige22), they attempt to recreate in painterly terms
Chopin's musical cascades, and they allude to French poetry, to name just a
few influential sign systems.23
The word "changed" in line two is one of those Wildean puns one may
easily overlook. Its metrical foregrounding (trochaic inversion), however, in-
19 In poetry, Wilde's synaesthetic attempt was also not new: see, for instance, Swinburne's
poem 'Nocturne,' written in French, in The Complete Works, Poetical Works, vol. 3, pp.
148-149.
20 Ruskin wrote: "For Mr. Whisder's own sake, no less than for the protection of the pur-
chaser, Sir Coutts Lindsey ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the
ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have
seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a
coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." See The
Paintings of ]ames McNeill Whistler, p. 98.
21 During the trial Whisder had to defend the artistic nature of his nocturnes. An interesting
exchange occurred between the painter and the Attorney-General which provides a glimpse
of contemporary viewer/reader expectations: see the quotation in The Paintings of J.M.
Whistler, p. 87.
22 Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) was an influential source especially for the French artists of
the late nineteenth century. He is known for his landscapes. See Exner: Tokaido - Das
Hauptwerk Hiroshiges. - Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge is based on a
coloured woodcut of a fête on the river at night, with fireworks, from the history of Roni-
no. Hiroshige's views of bridges, such as nos. 39 and 55 from his Tokaido, were also influen-
tial. See The Paintings of J. M. Whistler, p. 86.
23 Readings of these paintings will therefore eventually create indeterminacy, leading to what
Jonathan Culler has termed the endless of horizons of intertextuality. See Culler: "Presup-
position and Intertextuality," pp. 100-103.
dicates its importance. The word refers, firsdy, to the changing light in the
small hours of the morning; yet there is a second meaning that implicidy
comments both on the series of Whisder's nocturnes (ranging from the col-
ours black and green to grey) and on the painter's habit of changing the tides
of his works. 24 One might object here that the tone of Wilde's poem seems to
preclude ironic punning; however, the enormously jealous Wilde, although a
great admirer of Whisder's art, never missed an occasion to mock him, with
the ultimate intention of showing off his own talent.25
The noun "harmony," like the preceding "nocturne," is yet another syn-
aesthetic term that reminds us of the fashionable intermedial use of musical
elements in painting and poetry, 26 and more specifically of Whisder's theory
in which he excelled in comparisons of his art with music. The expatriate
American also used the words 'harmony' and 'symphony' as well as 'arrange-
ment' (in the sense of a musical adaptation) in the tides of a great number of
his paintings.27
24 Originally, he called his night scenes 'moonlights'; but his patron Frederick Leyland, an en-
thusiastic pianist familiar with Chopin's music, suggested the term 'nocturne.' Whisder's re-
sponse was enthusiastic. "You have no idea," he wrote to Leyland, "what an irritation it
[i.e., 'nocturnel proves to the critics, and consequent pleasure to me; besides it is really so
charming, and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish." See Spald-
ing: Whisder, p. 50. Until 1886, Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge, for instance,
was known as 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver,' and under its present tide thereafter. As to
Nocturne in Black and Gold, Whisder later wrote to his wife, "it ought not to have been called
Black & Gold - but Blue." See The Paintings of J. M. Whistler, pp. 86 and 99. In her article
"Die impressionistischen Frühgedichte Oscar Wildes," pp. 399—400, G. Eichbaum inverts
the chronological order of the changing of the titles.
25 In the late 1880s the relations between Wilde and Whisder deteriorated, ending at the level
of personal insult. See Eichbaum: "Die persönlichen und literarischen Beziehungen zwi-
schen Oscar Wilde and James MacNeill Whistler," pp. 217-252; Ellmann: Oscar Wilde, pp.
133—177 and passim; and Kohl: Oscar Wilde, pp. 123—156.
26 See, for instance, Wilde's poem, "In the Gold Room: A Harmony," in Poems [1881] (1969),
p. 159.
27 See, for instance, the series of three paintings entided Symphony in White, with The White
Girl (1862) being the best known; his Symphony in Blue and Pink (c. 1868); Symphony in Flesh
Colour and Pink: Mrs. F. R. Ijyland (1873); and the 'harmonies': Harmony in Green and Rose:
The Music Room (1860); Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville (1865); Harmony in Grey and
Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (c. 1872—74) ; and Harmony in Red — Lamplight — Mrs Beatrix God-
win (1886). See also the numerous additional 'harmonies,' 'symphonies,' and 'arrangements'
listed in the catalogue, The Paintings, ed. by A. M. Young. — There are a great many intertex-
tual threads that lead us from Wilde and Whisder to Théophile Gautier's theories of art and
his influential iconotext, 'Symphonie en blanc majeur' published in the collection Emaux et
camées, with editions published in 1852, 1853, 1858, 1863, 1866, and 1872. On Gautier's im-
portance for the fin de siècle movement see Ellmann: Oscar Wilde, p. 133; and H ö n i g -
hausen: Präraphaeliten und Fin de Siècle, pp. 119-130 and passim.
Lines 3—8 of "Impression du matin" might be called a poetic variation on

Whistler's colours. Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge does depict a
barge, but it is not loaded with hay. The function of the barge in Wilde's po-
em consists in reminding us of barges in impressionist paintings (e.g., Monet's
Impression, soleil levant) and in providing the colour ochre which in turn recalls
the ochre of the haystacks in earlier paintings. And with the enjambement the
colour of the hay carries the reader/observer to a related colour, the yellow of
the fog. Yellow, together with white, was arguably the most fashionable colour
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 28 What is important in the poem,
then, is the colour of the fog, and the painterly quality of its depiction. Again
one recognizes that Wilde's poetic art insists on its artificiality that can do
without nature as such. The animal nature of the fog, which the poem also
suggests, was to inspire some of the Imagist poets in the early twentieth cen-
tury.29
The artificial aspect of the night scene finally takes the shape of a fleeting
image, a bubble which may burst at any moment.
In lines 9—12, the break of day is introduced: on the one hand, with poetic
representations of sound and noise and, on the other hand, with images
drawn from verbal and visual representations of the romantic period. In fact,
the entire stanza brims with allusions to romantic scenes as they appear in the
pictures of Thomas Rowlandson and John Constable, to name just two artists
whose canvases relate to Wilde's verbal representation. Among the poems to
which the images in "Impression du Matin" allude it is Wordsworth's vision
28 Again, it seems apposite to quote Vivian from Wilde's theoretical essay The Decay of Lying.
"At present," Vivian explains, "people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because
poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects." See N.
Kohl: Oscar Wilde, p. 140. On the importance of yellow and white for Wilde and Whistler
see Borelius: Oscar Wilde, Whistler and Colours, pp. 5-13; 47-57.
29 See Carl Sandburg's poem "Fog" (1916):
The fog comes

on litde cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Also see lines 15-18 in T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of ]. Alfred Prufrock (1917):
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening ...
of London in 1802, with its glittering towers and domes, that seems to be the
most obvious pretext. 30
But this brief scene of joy and hope expressed in the image of the singing
bird is set against the almost Blakean vision, in the final stanza, of another as-
pect of London to which I now want to turn in an analyis of the Victorian
image of woman generated by the male glance as they (i.e, the fabrication of
the fallen woman in conjunction with masculine ways of looking) emerge at
the end of the poem.
2.
The final stanza is foregrounded by a number of linguistic and poetic means.

We find a sudden change of motif, a comparatively irregular metrical pattern
with several successive stresses at the opening, and the contrasting conjunc-
tion 'but' that jars with the linking between the other stanzas. In addition, the
hypotactic sentence structure (as compared to the paratactic constructions in
the first three stanzas) contributes to the impression that the initial harmony
of the nocturne ends in a picture which although powerfully attractive is also
strikingly different and vastly disturbing to the observer or speaker. A palimp-
sest within the larger palimpsest of the poem itself, the stanza is thus set apart
both formally and thematically. It contains a chain of highly allusive signifiers,
with verbal and visual referents, beginning with the iconic symbols of the pale
woman cut off from society and the personification of daylight as male lover,
through the equally ambiguous images of the gas lamp and its flare, and end-
ing with the erotic-mythical synecdoches in the final line in which misogynist
discursive traditions conflate in an androcentric Victorian sterotype.
30 Criticizing the obvious and often deliberate imitations of or allusions to earlier poems, con-
temporary reviewers complained that Wilde's poems of 1881 are "in fact by William Shake-
speare, by Philip Sidney, by John Donne, by Lord Byron, by William Morris, by Algernon
Swinburne, and by sixty more." See San Juan, Jr.: The Art of Oscar Wilde, p. 19; to these, San
Juan (quoting some influence studies) adds Milton, Keats, Rossetti, Tennyson, Thomas
Hood, Dante, and Flaubert: see pp. 19—20. One may of course dismiss such borrowing as
mere imitation. Samuel Chew and Richard Altick, for instance, have argued that Wilde's
early poems are merely "imitations of Rossetti and Swinburne discordandy juxtaposed to
borrowings from Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Arnold." See their discussion in
Baugh, ed.: A Literary History of England, p. 1480. But Peter Raby has pointed out with
good reason that Wilde's practice can also be seen as an adoption of masks; see Raby's
Oscar Wilde, pp. 12-31; especially pp. 9 and 24. A. Harrison has argued that the ideologies of
Victorian poets are revealed by their self-consciously intertextual uses of precursors. See
Harrison: Victorian Poets.
Before turning to this aspect of the intertextual relations established in the

stanza, let me briefly comment on what might be called the structural negativ-
ity o f the representation. The woman represented here is clearly a disturbing
image - both within the romantic-impressionist cadre o f the poem as it were
and for the male speaker/narrator. The occurrence o f the image at the end o f
the poem immediately recalls the prostitute in the fourth and final stanza of
another poem set in a London night: significantly, the "youthful harlot's
curse" in Blake's poem o f 1792 (published in 1794) "blights with plagues the
marriage hearse." The connotations are quite obvious. The social position of
the prostitute in "Impression du Matin" echoes in "all alone;" and her illicit
behaviour - as seen from the male point o f view - is caught in the secondary
meanings o f the verb form "loitered" (i.e., standing about idly or without per-
mission) and in the choice o f the noun "flare" that suggests the danger o f fire
and, ultimately, death.
At first glance, the gas lamp itself seems to be a reference to contempor-
ary technical developments in London and as such it creates what Roland
Barthes has termed "l'effet de réel." 31 But even this image is not realistic, as
one might expect, but rather conforms to the derived 'nature' o f the entire
poem. One must not forget that it was during the last four decades o f the
nineteenth century that the greatest advance was made in gas lighting. A com-
plete revolution in the methods o f utilizing illuminating gas, accompanied by
improvements in its manufacture, led to an impressive increase in technical
treatises on the subject. In 1875 nobody believed that the typical burner in
the British capital, the London Argand, could be surpassed in illuminating
power; but only a few years later it was found that the incandescent mantle
and the atmospheric burner yielded six times the light that was given by the
Argand. The ostensibly realistic reference, then, is also an allusion to the
enormous volume o f technical jargon that grew out o f these innovations. 32
The musicality as well as the parallelism (in the rhetorical figure of 'enu-
meratio') o f the last line provide an aesthetic form for what are essentially an-
titheses expressed in a favourite paradox o f the nineteenth century - the dan-
gerous woman who is sexually attractive but callous and will not provide sat-
isfaction for the male observer or potential lover. With this view o f a woman
Wilde's poem inscribes itself in the misogynist depiction o f women, and espe-
31 Barthes: "L'effet de réel," pp. 84—89. For a recent, perceptive, discussion o f traditional art
historical fallacies in this respect (interpreting pictures as reliable referents to a "reality") see
Snyder: "Picturing Vision."
32 On the growth of gas lighting in late Victorian London see the article, s.v. 'gas,' in The Ency-
clopaedia Britannica, 11 th ed., vol. 11.
dally of prostitutes and 'femmes fatales,' in nineteenth-century literary dis-

course and art. 33 The roots of this discursive tradition are lost in the mists of
Biblical, Hebrew and and Greek myths. Before turning to Salomé and the
Sphinx, two important figures that inspired Victorian pictorial and verbal rep-
resentation in this respect, I shall provide a few examples from poetry to
show how Wilde's verse echoes French and English pretexts.
What is important for all these texts is the association of the female char-
acters with the fashionable if ambiguous colours white (skin), suggesting in-
nocence and beauty but also consumption or death 34 , and golden or wan
(hair), recalling (together with the white skin) images of Madonnas and Mag-
dalens. Chronologically, we may begin with Keats's verse. In his famous ballad
about a lady without pity, La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1820), it is, however, not
the woman who is white but her lover, the love-sick "knight-at-arms, alone
and palely loitering" (11. 1-2). But in Keats's less known Lamia, also published
in 1820, we are faced with the telling story of another deadly woman changed
into a snake whom Hermes transforms into a woman again — the truth about
her kills her lover. In this poem, colours play a central role. Lamia the snake is
described as being "vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue" (Part 1,1. 48).
During the metamorphosis "a deep volcanic yellow took the place" (Part 1,1.
155) while in the rest of the poem the snake-lady appears to be white or pale
(cf. Part 1,11. 243,287; part II, 11. 65 and 250).35 Similarly, the speaker of Ten-
nyson's Maud (1856) seems to be preoccupied with and even haunted by the
"icily regular [...] dead perfection" (11. 83-84) of the face of the woman he
adores. In a dream he describes it as "Pale with the golden beam of an eye-
lash dead on the cheek, Passionless, pale, cold face, star-sweet on a gloom
profound [...] and ever as pale as before [...] Luminous, gemlike, ghostlike,
deathlike" (11. 90-95).
When Wilde published his poem in 1881, six editions of Théophile Gau-
tier's Emaux et camées (1852) had already been printed, each of them aug-
mented with new lyrics. The collections contained a powerful poem, "Sym-
phonie en blanc majeur," which was to leave a deep impression on writers
33 On this issue, see Stott: The Fabrication of the hate Victorian Femme Fatale; and Roth-Müller:
Die Verfemte in der Literatur. On the erotic part of this discursive field see Webb: The Erotic
Arts, pp. 186-218. Dijkstra, in Idols of Perversity, provides a welter of powerful and partly
arcane visual source material.
34 An ironic echo of Wilde's wording ("pale woman all alone") may be seen in the fact that
many nineteenth-century urban prostitutes died of VD or pneumonia. On the life and dis-
eases of Victorian streetwalkers see Marcus: The Other Victorians (1966 and later); and
Pears all: The Worm in the Bud, pp. 341-378.
35 On the sensual and sexual aspect of Lamia see Hagstrum: The Romantic Body, pp. 44—66.
such as Swinburne and Wilde while artists like Whistler tried to 'translate'
Gautier into painting. In the very first stanza Gautier's "Symphonie" acknow-
ledges its intertextual debt to the "contes to Nord" and then celebrates the
enigmatic "femmes-cygnes" in a verbal orgy set in ice and snow:
De ces femmes il en est une,

Qui chez nous descend quelquefois,
Blanche comme le clair de lune
Sur les glaciers dans les cieux froids; (stanza 3)
Sur les blancheurs de son épaule,

Paros au grain éblouissant,
Comme dans une nuit du pôle,
Un givre invisible descend. (stanza 7)
The poem ends in a synaesthetic vision that yokes together images of the Vir-
gin, the Sphinx and death - a combination of which we find strong reverbera-
tions in the fin de siècle:
Des Groenlands et des Norvèges

Vient-elle avec Séraphita?
Est-ce la Madone des neiges,
Un sphinx blanc que l'hiver sculpta,
Sphinx enterré par l'avalanche,

Gardien des glaciers étoilés,
Et qui, sous sa poitrine blanche,
Cache de blancs secrets gelés?
Sous la glace où calme il repose,

Oh! qui pourra fondre ce cœur!
Oh! qui pourra mettre un ton rose
Dans cette implacable blancheur! 36 (stanzas 16-18)
The verse of Gautier and Keats echoes in some of Swinburne's poems in

which the paradoxical stereotype of the pious prostitute emerges again. The
colours white and red in the first stanza of "Dolores," for instance, establish a
textual bridge between Gautier's "symphonie" and Wilde's nocturne:
36 See Emaux et camées, ed. Μ. Cotón, pp. 45-48. In a textual note (p. 45) the editor provides a
glimpse of the wide intertextual horizons of the poem which is not only a "transposition
d'art" of musical and painterly elements: it also pays homage to a lady, Madame Kalergis,
sketched by Eugène Delacroix during an evening spent with Chopin. These are of course
only a few of the prextexts that have inspired the poem.
Dolores
(Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel

Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
The heavy white limbs, and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower;
When these are gone by with their glories,
What shall rest of thee then, what remain,
0 mystic and sombre Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain? 37
It is the deliberately ambiguous use of the ambivalent colours white and yel-
low, connoting innocence and corruption, that relates such poetry to nine-
teenth-century art, such as the imagery produced by the Pre-Raphaelites. The
painters in particular provide variations of the colour white: the final image of
the woman in "Impression du Matin," a pale or white woman with wan
(golden) hair and red lips, draws on Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite representa-
tions of women. These images are misogynist in that they subject the female
body to the aggressive male glance while turning it into a potentially danger-
ous object of religious-erotic desire.38
Again, a few examples must suffice. Thus we find the stereotype of the
kept or fallen woman in Millais's Mariana (1851; fig. 38), which shows many
intertextual links with Tennyson's poem of the same title published in 183 0 39 ,
in Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853; colour plate VII) and Morris's Guin-
evere (1858; colour plate VIII). It is remarkable how both Hunt and Morris play
with the colour white, which is here associated with adulterous women. The
prime examples, however, are Dante Gabriel Rossetti's languorous love god-
desses, such as the girl at the right in The Bower Meadow (1872; colour plate IX),
The Blessed Damoêl, which is an illustration to his poem painted in the 1870s 40 ,
37 Swinburne: Poems and Ballads (1866), in The Complete Works, vol. 1. p. 284.
38 The intermedial and intertextual threads can, of course, be traced back to previous periods.
On the history of misogynist representations see Trudgill: Madonnas and Magdalens\ Harri-
son: The Dark Angel·, Mullins: The Painted Witch, and the articles by Hofmann and Gross in
the lavishly illustrated catalogue ed. by Hofmann: Eva und die Zukunft.
39 See Wood: The Pre-Raphaelites, p. 30, where Wood notes that "Millais gave the picture no
title, but exhibited it with some lines from Tennyson's poem Mariana·.
She only said, 'My life is dreary -

He cometh not' she said;
She said Ί am aweary, aweary —
1 would that I were dead.'
40 Ibid., p. 103.
Wagner: Oscar Wilde's " I m p r e s s i o n du m a t i n " — an Intermedial Reading 295
38. | o h n I-'.verctt Millais: Mariana. 1851. T h e Makins Collection, l'.ngland.

and Veronica Veronese (1872; fig. 39), which comes closest to Wilde's verbal
representation of such icons. The epitome of this imagery was the depiction
of sleeping, dead or dying women caught in trance, paroxy or bliss, a bliss à la
Saint Theresa that is also an orgasm thinly veiled by religious overtones.41 We
encounter it in Millais's Ophelia (1851; colour plate X) and Rossetti's Beata
Beatrix (1870). Indeed, it seems that the Pre-Raphaelites found four ways of
overcoming their fear of woman: these may be summarized as representa-
tions of the sleeping, the naked, the dead, and the uncanny. Sleeping beauties
and female corpses 42 and androgynic bodies were favourite subjects among
the Victorian painters, for the representation of death (which is in itself a fas-
cinating and highly paradoxical venture in the context of the uncanny) and
hermaphrodism defused the sexual danger of the tempting Magdalen. 43
These paintings exhibit more than obvious intertextual relations with the
verse of Edgar Allen Poe and Dante, and they also show traces of a popular
Western code of representing and disenfranchising women as beautiful dead
bodies.
Recent feminist criticism has turned the searchlight on this highly fascinat-
ing and paradoxical phenomenon in Victorian representations of feminity. It
is indeed striking to notice how male writers and artists, as gendered and cul-
tural creatures, give expression to necrophilia and a phallocentric discourse
that must render the female body (as a sign and site of the uncanny) helpless
(in scenes of sleep and/or death) in order to control the male fear of both fe-
male power and the uncanny. 44 This is not the place to explore the analogies
41 The prime and influential early example is Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture, The Ecstasy of
Saint Theresa (1644—1647), which catches religious and erode bliss in a telling facial and cor-
poreal expression.
42 It is, I think, significant that in Greek mythology, the fountain of Western verbal and visual
representations, Morpheus, the god of sleep, and Thanatos, the god of death, are brothers.
— For visual evidence of the Victorian penchant for representations of dead/sleeping female
bodies see Daly: Pre-Raphaelites in Love-, Marsh: Pre-Raphaelite Women·, and Dijkstra: Idols of
Perversity, pp. 25—64.
43 For a historical analysis of the male fear of women in several cultures see Lederer: The Fear
of Women, chapters 7, 14, and 20. See also Hönnighausen's remarks about "the ideal [female]
lover" in the art and literature of the nineteenth century: to the dead lover and the Ma-
donna he adds the child. See his Präraphaeliten und Fin de Siècle, pp. 263—311. Η. Michie
notes that "the women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings are glowing emblems of female power
and sensuality ... On the one hand flamboyantly sexual, on the other cloaked — even
smothered — in layers of clothing, figuration and myth, Pre-Raphaelite paintings become at
once the code of codes and the key to their unravelling." See Michie: The Flesh Made Word,
p. 123; and Holbrook: Images of Women in Literature.
44 On the issues of necrophilia and the representation of (powerless, sleeping/dead) female
bodies in Victorian culture, see Barreca, ed.: Sex and Death in Victorian Literature·, and the
W a g n e r : O s c a r Wilde's " I m p r e s s i o n du m a n n " - an I n t e r m e d i a l R e a d i n g 297
39. D a n t e G a b r i e l Rossetti: l ironica I 'eroiiese. 18^2.

between corpse and image (for I could then be charged with overreading
Wilde's poem); suffice it to say that the poem does inscribe itself in an age-old
tradition that is predicated on situating representations of female bodies in
the context of danger/death even while the representations themselves are
likened to revenants.45
The Wildean ekphrasis of the white-skinned erotic woman in painting is
also, perhaps even predominandy, indebted to Whistler's white girls in the
paintings entided Symphony in White, No. 1-3. The allusive details of these pic-
tures that associate white with innocence and danger sustain the phallocentric
discourse of the Victorian age. Thus the girl-woman in No. 1: The White Girl
(1862; colour plate XI) stands on a bear skin, the bear's head threatening the
observer almost in the manner of Manet's cat in Olympia,46 The female in
No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864; fig. 40) alludes to the myth of Narcissus by
way of the mirror — a story, we should remember, that ended with the death o f
the male observer of an image. 47 And even Whisder's Symphony in White No. 3
(1865-67; colour plate XII) is ambiguous by virtue of the yellowish whiteness
of the clothes and the sofa covers that suggest a deathbed awaiting the male
voyeur while the two girls ignore the phallic symbol between them. It is in
this seemingly objective representation of female innocence in perfection that
the male glance reveals itself most forcefully. Indeed, Michael Fried has
shown that for Victorians the extraordinary charm of Whisder's white girls
seminal studies by Reynolds and Humble: Victorian Heroines, especially chapters 1 and 3,
pp. 1 0 - 9 8 ; Christ: "Painting the Dead: Portraiture and Necrophilia in Victorian Art and Po-
etry"; and the case study o f Rossetti's The Beloved, by Pearce: "Pre-Raphaelite Painting and
the Female Spectator." While Pearce's article is an exclusive, radical, feminist venture that
ignores much o f what has been written in other languages, the best studies to date are
Bronfen: Over Her Dead Body, and the volume o f essays edited by Goodwin and Bronfen:
Death and Representation (see especially the introduction, pp. 3—25). Bronfen and Goodwin
marshal the forces o f feminism and poststructuralism, from Foucault and Derrida to Lacan
and Baudrillard, to present intelligent and penetrating analyses o f Victorian (and later) rep-
resentatians o f death in which the female body becomes the sign and site o f masculine at-
tempts to make meaning by controlling (verbal and visual pictures of) women.
45 See my brief comments in the Introduction above on Debray's discussion o f the origin o f
visual representations in attempts to overcome death; and Goodwin and Bronfen: Death
and Representation, pp. 11—15.
46 Whisder's White Girl apparendy shared the succès de scandale with Manet's Déjeuner sur
l'herbe at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. See The Paintings of ]. M. Whistler, ed. A.M. Young et
al., [vol. Text] p. 19.
47 The painting inspired Swinburne's poem "Before the Mirror: Verses under a Picture."
There are also echoes o f Millais and Ingres. See The Paintings ofJ. M. Whistler, [vol. Text]
p. 29.
40. J a m e s A b b o t McNeill Whistler: Symphony in White Λ'α 2: The Little White Girl. 1864.
Tate Gallerv. L o n d o n . C o u r t e s y of the Tate Gallery.
was a result of the impression that they seem to be unaware of being be-
held. 48
The essentially misogynist discourse about women in Victorian art and lit-
erature conflates in the figures of Madonnas and Magdalens and, most im-
portando of Salomé and the Sphinx. Therefore, Wilde's concern with the
'femme fatale' in his poem "The Sphinx" (1894) and the play Salomé (first per-
formed in 1896) is hardly unique for the fin de siècle. Wilde's images and fig-
ures of the man-killing female have a long history in art and literature, and the
frequency with which they occur in the Victorian period is a phenomenon
that deserves more of our attention. 49 The most typical examples can be
found in Gustave Moreau's idiosyncratic painterly treatments of myths that
are remarkable for their telling personfications of what is both male fear of
and fascination with the femme fatale'Moreau's Jeune fille thrace portant la tête
d'Orphé (1865, colour plate XIII), for instance, depicts a moment of erotic con-
templation as a beautiful, almost angelic, young girl looks with religious devo-
tion at the severed head of Orpheus who was killed by the furious women of
Thrace when he rejected their love.51 In Moreau's Salomé dansant devant Hérode
(1874—76) we recognize the juxtaposition of such motifs as the serpent, the
erotic dance, female nudity, and, in the background, a sitting figure resembling
a Sphinx; the biblical femme fatale is protected by a black panther at her feet.
Gynophobia also inspires Moreau's L'Apparition (1876) and Dalila (c. 1880).
Like the hermaphrodite, a popular figure and ambiguous symbol among the
Pre-Raphaelites 52 , the sphinx proved fascinating for male symbolist artists
48 See Fried: "Manet in His Generation," p. 50: "de Viel found in Whisder's canvas both an
absorptive, beholder-denying structure (keyed to the woman's state of mind) and a facing,
beholder-aggressing one (based o n the orientation of the animal pelt)."
49 O n the importance of the 'femme fatale' for the Romande period and the later nineteenth
century see Praz: La carne, la morte et il diavolo nella littertura romantica·, also see the m o n o -
graphs by Stott: The Fabrication of the late Victorian Femme Fatale·, and Roth-Müller: Die Ver-
femte in der Literatur. For a detailed discussion of Wilde's play and poem, with pardcular con-
sideration of eroticism, see Kohl: Oscar Wilde, pp. 287-333.
50 For discussions of the deadly and beautiful women in Moreau's artworks see Praz: La
Came, la morte, chapter V; Hofstätter: Gustave Moreau. Lehen und Werk, pp. 82-131 ('Die
Frau — Bild der Anbetung und des Verderbens"); and Paladilhe and Pierre: Gustave Moreau.
Sa vie, ses œuvres, pp. 89—143. J. Pierre notes (p. 77) that Moreau knew some of the Pre-
Raphaelite images, including those by H u n t and Millais. Also see the Catalogue des peintures
(1974).
51 Robert Rosenblum notes that this brutal gang murder was the subject of a painting by
Emile Lévy exhibited at the same Salon (1866). See Rosenblum: Die Gemäldesammlung des
Musée d'Orsay, p. 78.
52 See, for instance, the androgynic figures in Rossetti's Proserpine (1872) and Astarte Syriaca
(1877). O n the importance of the image of the hermaphrodite for the later 19th century see
such as Moreau because it embodied contrasts - beauty and sterility, cruelty

and love, eroticism and monstrosity, seduction and destruction, and, ulti-
mately, desire and death. 53 One of the better known examples is Moreau's
Œdipe et le sphinx (1864; colour plate XIV). It is telling that the artist has chosen
the moment when the future Greek king is being attacked by the monstrous
female winged lion. The myth tells us that Oedipus defeated the Sphinx, the
daughter of Typhon (a monster with a hundred serpent heads) and Echidna
(who was also half woman and half serpent). Yet in Moreau's interpretation,
which seems to be based on Heinrich Heine's re-telling of the myth (in which
the Sphinx kills Oedipus) and stresses the erotic-masochistic aspect, one gets
the impression of a submissive male figure who, despite his grim facial ex-
pression, seems to yield to the will of the female monster.
What one needs to bear in mind is that in the later nineteeenth century
the discursive field in art and literature was saturated with such gynophobic
images, with verbal and visual fabrications describing women with dualistic
concepts. It does not matter which of the images Wilde knew (this approach
would lead us into the traditional field of influence studies) — what matters is
that he apparently could not escape the mentalité of his age established by
such misogynist discourse. Wilde's poem exhibits what Laura Claridge and
Elizabeth Langland have described as the "allure, the fear and the hatred of
the feminine," precisely because these reactions are "generated by patriarchal
binary thinking. 54 The woman described, or rather alluded to, in Wilde's "Im-
pression du Matin" is depicted in terms that recall the gynophobic represen-
tation of women by male artists: her "heart of stone" is the heart of Salomé
or/and the Sphinx.
After this cursory foray into the poetry and art of the nineteenth century,
it should be clear that Wilde's poem is firmly grounded in a particular discurs-
ive space: it continually alludes to this verbal/visual space while contributing
itself to the upholding and continuation of a particular male view. What I find
most striking in "Impression du Matin" is not the fact that, as a palimpsest, it
Busst: "The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century," and Dijkstra: "The An-
drogyne in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature," pp. 62-73. Also see the visual evidence
in Dijkstra: Idols of Perversity, pp. 160-235. To some extent, the artists and writers of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement revived the precoccupation of the Renaissance with the herm-
aphrodite as exemplified in the figure of Ganymede. See Saslow: Ganymede in the Renais-
sance.
53 On the importance of Salomé and the sphinx for late Victorian art and literature see Hön-
nighausen: Präraphaeliten und Fin de Siècle, pp. 348-368; and Dijkstra: Idols of Perversity, pp.
272-333.
54 Claridge and Langland, eds.: Out of Bounds, p. 7.
fuses verbal and visual discourse in the manner of impressionist and sym-
bolist verse, or that, as an ekphrasis, it can be regarded as a poetic representa-
tion of innumerable earlier visual 'pretexts'; the poem is remarkable, I would
argue, because of the almost accidental manner in which it reveals a male fab-
rication of woman, a fabrication that is not Wilde's invention but rather one
both inherited from the past and borrowed from his day and age. According
to Jacques Lacan, we always see "sous le regard," under the gaze, by which he
means that vision is socialized. When we learn to see, Lacan argues, we adapt
to systems of visual discourse that create a screen of signs between retina and
reality. Hence, since the network of signifiers cuts across the visual field, we
see along paths of established chains of signs. This also implies that the view-
ing subject does not command her/his perceptual horizon — and it is this de-
centred, tangential form of seeing which Lacan terms "seeing under the
Gaze." 55
In the wake of Lacan's writings, the role of the viewer's gaze has found in-
creasing interest with both art historians and feminists. Feminists writing on
visuality have made us aware of the undeniable fact that both gender and the
gaze are socially constructed. 56 In addition, "male feminists" 57 like Norman
Bryson have begun to explore not merely modes of looking and the problems
posed by the viewing subject, but also the depiction of what Bryson terms a
"feminine space." 58 Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal define the gaze as pro-
longed and contemplative vision with disengagement, whereas the glance is
looking with desire that brackets out the process of viewing. Whereas the
glance is an understanding of vision as embodied and durational, the gaze
55 See Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, especially chapters 6-9, 'Of the
Gaze' (pp. 67—123). For discussions of Lacan's concept of the gaze, which develops some
ideas of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, see Bryson: "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," pp.
87—115; and Bryson's Vision and Painting, pp. 87-133.
56 See, for instance, the seminal studies by Pollock: Vision and Difference; Rose: Sexuality in the
Field of Vision; Silverman: Subjectivity at the Margins·, and Bal: "Light in Painting: Dis-Seminat-
ing Art," especially pp. 59-64. In addition, see Holly, "Art Theory," p. 52; and the entries,
s.v., 'Film Theory' and 'Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism,' in Groden and Kreiswirth,
eds.: The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.
57 For a collection of important essays by such critics see Claridge and Langland, eds.: Out of
Bounds. I have found the introduction in this book both very helpful and illuminating, not
least because it critiques some of the cherished assumptions of (American) feminism itself.
58 Bryson is, of course, best known for his revisionist studies that have compelled art histor-
ians to confront semiotics and recent French theory. But like J. Hillis Miller, he has always
been aware of the construction of gender differences in visual representations. See espe-
cially his recent exploration of "Still Life and 'Feminine Space'" in the insightful mono-
graph, Looking at the Overlooked, pp. 136-178.
Wagner: Oscar Wilde's "Impression du maun" - an Intermedial Reading 303
eclipses the body and the glance. As an idealized notion of looking, it is vi-
sion decamalized.59 Applying this duality of vision to the last stanza of "Im-
pression du Matin," we notice that the male glance it at work in Wilde's po-
etic reworking of visual and verbal discourse. The text invites us to see the fe-
male body as an object to be appropriated; we are urged to share a mode of
aggressive perception which is that of misogynist nineteenth-century art and
literature - a fabricated image of woman as a dangerous if fascinating 'other'
to be conquered or destroyed.
As can be expected, there are very few exceptions to this hegemonic men-
talité. It is telling that these exceptions can be found either in the works of
thoughtful and courageous women who tried to escape the world of the male
gaze, such as Berthe Morisot, or in those of daring men who challenged the
discursive tradition and thus produced masterworks of painting. Morisot's Le
berceau (1872), for instance (colour plate XV), presents both a radically different
image of woman and of looking at women: it is the image of a mother ob-
serving her child. And the child and its cradle, held all in white colours, oc-
cupy most of the space in this painting.60 And if Manet's Olympia (1865; colour
plate II), like his Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), scandalized (male) observers and
critics into the twentieth century, it is because the kept woman in the painting
challenged the established misogynist male glance with her own mysterious
gaze, reminding the voyeur of his aggressive act of viewing. Whereas Whistler
and Moreau produced "absorptive paintings" (Michael Fried's term) that sup-
59 Although Bryson's definitions of gaze and glance have been adopted and used by other art
historians (see, for instance, Clarke: "The Gaze and the Glance," especially pp. 80-83; and
Bal, discussed below) It is extremely difficult to understand what Bryson actually means
when discussing the duality of vision within the Lacanian gaze. See his Vision and Painting,
pp. 94—95. It seems to me that Mieke Bal, though she intends to use the terms 'gaze' and
'glance' in Bryson's sense, misunderstands Bryson's admittedly enigmatic distinction which
does not differentiate sufficiently between the vision of the painter and that of the viewer
[What does he mean, for instance, by "Painting of the glance"?: p. 94]. See Bal's fascinating
study Reading 'Rembrandt,' pp. 141-143. James Heffernan points out with good reason that
Bryson's terms designate ways of looking at a painting but that they also "inevitably refer to
qualities in a painting." As a semiotician cum poststructuralist who is dissatisfied with the
work of Gombrich and Panofsky (who assume that the 'truth' is hidden somewhere in the
work of art and that it is not entirely established by the observer alone), Bryson apparendy
contradicts himself in this instance. See Heffernan: Museum of Words, pp. 144—45.
60 This is one of the paintings that helped to bring about the 'metamorphosis' of the symbol-
ical femme fatale into the intimist femme féconde. On the 'New Woman' in late nineteenth-cen-
tury France, see Silverman: "The 'New Woman'," pp. 145-46. For a brief discussion of the
painting see Rosenblum: Die Gemäldesammlung des Musée d'Orsaj, p. 300. Morisot's feminine
if not feminist attitude and vision are the subject of Anne Higonnet's Berthe Morisot's Images
of Women, pp. 119-23.
press the role o f the observer, Manet's revolutionary art rejects absorption
and foregrounds the very act of looking. 61
In terms o f semiotics, Wilde's image o f woman is an appeal to the 'déjà
vu' and the 'déjà lu.' In doing so it creates what both Genette and Barthes
have called 'vraisemblance'; in other words, the signifiers in the final stanza
draw on a "body o f [...] prejudices which constitute both a vision o f the
world and a system o f values" 62 ; and it is precisely in the recognition o f the
repeated 'citations,' o f pre-fabricated and pre-established signifiers, that the
(Victorian) reader found what Barthes terms the pleasure o f the text. 63 With
the rise o f feminism, our view o f the interaction between the sign and social
formation has changed in fundamental ways. Feminist critics and discourse
analysts have made us aware o f male ways of seeing. In the wake of the pion-
eering studies by Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf 6 4 , Elaine
Showalter, for instance, has provided a useful approach in her exploration o f
sexual difference in terms o f biology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and culture.
Showalter's concept o f sexual codes embedded in historical and political con-
texts can be applied to Wilde's text. This means that on the linguistic level the
picture o f the prostitute in "Impression du Matin" emerges as 'woman-as-
sign' in an androcentric code 65 that is also at work in Wilde's poems which de-
pict women within the duality o f images conflating angels and harlots. 66
Finally, I should like to return to Foucault's Utopian vision sketched at the
beginning o f this chapter. Foucault's own writings after his attack on the au-
thor-concept provide frameworks o f analysis that have proved as useful as
61 For a discussion o f this aspect o f the painting, and the way John Braine exploits (and in-
deed misreads) it for his novel Room at the Top, see my article, "Learning to Read the Fe-
male Body: Manet's Olympia in Braine's Room at the Top." Also see M. Fried's discussion o f
the relationship between painting and beholder in the art o f Whisder, Moreau, and Manet,
in "Manet in His Generation."
62 Genette: Figures II, p. 70; and Barthes: S/Z, pp. 2 5 - 2 8 . The quotation is a translation from
Genette's text.
63 Barthes: Le Plaisir du texte, especially pp. 8 2 - 1 0 5 .
64 See Woolfs A Room of One's Own and Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
65 T h e term is Showalter's in her "Toward a Feminist Poetics," pp. 125-143. See also her art-
icle "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," pp. 243—270. For a brief survey o f contempor-
ary feminist approaches, with articles by Elaine Showalter, Hélène Cixous, Sandra Gilbert,
and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, see Davis and Schleifer, eds., Contemporary Literary Criti-
cism. Literary and Cultural Studies, pp. 4 4 9 - 5 3 0 .
66 See, for instance, Wilde's poem, " T h e Harlot's House," in which the male speaker com-
plains about his pleasure-seeking female lover: " B u t she — she heard the violin, / And left
my side, and entered in: / Love passed into the house o f lust." (11. 28—30) See Wilde: Works,
pp. 2 4 9 - 5 0 .
those of feminism. 67 "Impression du Matin" exemplifies Foucault's notion of

a fundamentally repressive and exclusive discourse that has been at work in
Western writing about sexuality, a discourse which, for all we can tell, is both
androcentric and misogynist.
My brief exercise in intertextuality and intermediality shows, I hope, that it
is possible to liberate the text at the expense of the author. It might be ob-
jected here that I have totally ignored Wilde's homoeroticism, that one could
or indeed should read his poem in view of this (author-oriented) issue. But in
my view that would be a highly risky enterprise, precisely because it would
imply the reconstruction of an 'author' (and his intentions 68 ) who cannot de-
fend himself because he is dead. And even if he were alive, to what extent
could his metacritical commentary on the poem be considered reliable? I pre-
fer to work with the evidence of the poem itself. Summarizing the advantages
of my reading here, I would argue that it yields an archeological view of the
allusive network of texts and images that established a sexual code of percep-
tion and understanding within the discursive field in the fin de siècle. My im-
plicit assumption is that Oscar Wilde, no matter what his intentions may have
been, re-presents that code. 69 This re-presentation can be studied as a space
of writing in the sense of Derridean différance, a space in which significance
is produced through opposition (gender roles) and an interplay between pres-
ence and absence and through the perpetual deferral of meaning. Simultan-
eously, the intermedial approach also uncovers the strategies and functions of
that discourse in the poem itself. 70 In addition, it demonstrates that the al-
leged disadvantages of intertextual concepts - such as the indeterminacy of
meaning and the infinite potential of texts - are essential emergency exits that
lead us out of the prison house of the apparently autonomous, self-reflexive
67 See especially his three volumes on the history of sexuality: vol. I, La Volonté de savoir.; vol.
II, L'Usage des plaisirs, vol. III, Le Souci de soi. The final volume, entided Les Aveux de la
chair, remained unfinished at his death.
68 On the issue of authorial 'intention' in literary criticism see the entry, s.v. 'intention,' in The
New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) where, among other important critical
works, the monographs of E. D. Hirsch on this subject have been evaluated. Also see my
discussion of the issue, with consideration of recent critical literature, in the Introduction to
this volume.
69 It is apposite here to recall that Julia Kristeva has argued that poetic utterances contain nu-
merous other discourses to such an extent that any given text can be considered as a uni-
verse of signifiers. See her Sémeiotiké, p. 225; and La Revolution du langage poétique, pp.
388-89.
70 Jonathan Culler has argued convincingly that texts always appeal to "presuppositions of an
intersubjective prior body of discouse," something Roland Barthes terms 'codes.' See
Culler: "Presuppositions and Intertextuality," pp. 100-118, especially pp. 101-103.
text. And last but not least, the intertextual approach also allows an evaluation
of the poem. Wilde's "Impression du Matin" is, alas, a rather mediocre poem,
precisely because it does not question its pretexts but rather adapts their mi-
sogyny to the hegemonic male mentalité of the fin de siècle. To write an out-
standing poem, Wilde would have needed the boldness of an Edouard Manet
or the equally challenging vision of a Berthe Morisot. Both stood in opposi-
tion to the mentalité of their age — Wilde, in "Impression du Matin," suc-
cumbed to it.
DAVID BINDMAN
University College London
Text as Design in Gillray's Caricature
Abstract: Turning the critical searchlight on the caricature of James Gillray, this
article considers the use of text in Gillray's works both as a way of reading the
design but also as a part o f the design itself. T h e major focus is on the various
issues raised by the varied modes of text: in a number of cases the text appears to
be at variance with the meaning of the design, indeed to be transparendy at odds
with it. What emerges from the discussion is a sense of words as visual facts in
themselves as they undermine the place and genres they inhabit.
My concern in this paper is text as part of an image and not with text and
image as separate modes; ekphrasis after all depends upon the separate
existence of a text and the painting or sculpture described by the text. But
text can also exist within a visual image. I want to look at the issues raised by
the varied modes of text to be found in caricature, using the work of James
Gillray as my main exemplum, for reasons that I hope will become clear.1
It is not unusual for medieval paintings to contain a certain amount of
text in the form of scrolls, but broadly speaking words make only fleeting
appearances in paintings which belong to the academic tradition dating from
the sixteenth century in Italy, and which becomes pan-European in the
eighteenth century. The reason that this is so is obvious within the terms of
the central academic ambition of making painting a liberal art worthy to rival
other arts: it must convey its meanings in its own language which is that of
visual representation though it does not inhibit it from deriving its subject
matter from literary sources of an appropriate level of moral seriousness. 2 A
1 This paper owes much to conversations with Richard Godfrey over the years, and I am
grateful to Mr Raphael Bernstein whose gift to me of an impression of Gillray's Affability
sparked off the enquiry. I also owe a debt to Dr Peter Wagner. The best work on Gillray is
still Hill: Mr Gillray the Caricaturist.
2 For a recent contribution to discussion on academic theory in the 18th century, see Barrell:
The Political Theory of Paintingfrom Reynolds to Ha?(litt.
310 Iconotexts: Caricature
claim to autonomy on the part of painting rested implicitly on the assumption

that visual forms themselves constitute a language which can convey
profound moral lessons through narrative and the representation of
emotions. A prominent display of text could in terms of academic discourse
be taken as an admission of the ineloquence of visual forms.
It is indicative of Hogarth's equivocal attitudes towards academic dis-
course that he should oscillate between works which employ text prominently
and those which use it minimally. At the same time there is a practical
consideration: it is easier to etch or engrave words than it is to paint them,
hence there is more text in the Rake's Progress prints than in the paintings.3
Even so the text in the Rahe's Progress does not represent speech, and in the
Marriage-a-la-Mode series of a few years later it is much reduced in both
paintings and engravings, serving mainly to identify objects of note in some
scenes. The series was conceived as scenes from 'High Life' and it came at the
point of Hogarth's career when he was becoming conscious of his role in
relation to academic theory and beginning to plan the Analysis of Beauty.
Hogarth seems to have been at pains to use visual rather than verbal signs
even where a high degree of contrivance was necessary. In scene 4, The
Countess's Morning Levee, for example, the next stage of the narrative, the
assignation between the adulterous Countess and the scheming lawyer is set
up in a conversation held in front of, and gesturing towards, a screen
depicting a bagnio while the lawyer holds some tickets for the masquerade to
be held there (fig. 41). The impending act of adultery is reinforced by the little
black boy pointing to the horns on an ornamental stag the Countess has just
purchased from a sale.
There is, of course, a great deal more to be said on the matter of text and
image in Hogarth, but for the moment it should be evident that, regardless of
the meaning or the function of text, its very presence carried connotations of
non-academic conventions. In the case of Gillray's caricatures the problem of
the implicit standing of text is both more visible and more urgent for he
emerged as an artist in the generation after the founding of the Royal
Academy in 1768, where he had himself been a student, and which in Sir
Joshua Reynolds's hands stood for a specifically anti-Hogarthian aesthetic:
anti-realist and centrally concerned with the standing of painting as a liberal
art.4
3 See, for example, the long scroll detailing the excesses of worship of the castrato singer
Farinelli on the back of the musician's chair in plate 2, The Rake's Levee.
4 Reynolds's first important articles on art theory, in The Idler in 1759, were explicitly
anti-Hogarth.
Bindman: Text as Design in Gillray's Caricature 311
41. William Hogarth: " T h e Countess's M o r n i n g I.evee."

From Marriage - i-lo-Mode. Plate IV. Kngraving (detail). P 4 5 .
[fw: ".pu> swQj,-'

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42. William Dent: Present State of the Nation. Coloured etching. 1791. British Museum.
With the exception of a very few caricatures meant for private circulation
all eighteenth-century British caricatures were bound to contain verbal text in
some form or another within the boundaries of the platemark. At a minimal
level it was a legal requirement that a published image, as a consequence of
"Hogarth's Act" of 1736, should have the name, address and date of the
publisher on the print, and few did not also have a tide beneath. Within the
image area of a caricature text might abound, and in some notable cases the
figures were surrounded by a riot of speech bubbles; lengthy documents
might be left on the floor or are held by the figures, or significant objects left
around to comment on the action. In a randomly-chosen caricature by the
attractively crude satirist William Dent, entitled Present State of the Nation and
dated April 8 1791 s (fig. 42), there are essentially four registers of text. The
tide, Present State of the Nation, or, what's saved at the spiggot let out at the bunghole\
the address, "pub. by W. Dent April 8th 1791"; labels on objects, denoting
that the barrel represents the wealth of the nation being drained by the Dutch
and the Prussians; and finally speech represented by informally etched lines
5 British Museum cat. no [hereafter: BMC]. 7842.

Bindman: Text as Design in Gillrav's Caricature 313
of text connected by a line to the mouth of the person supposedly speaking

the text, which I shall call henceforward in this paper 'speech-text.' Here the
figure of Pitt spinelessly allows foreigners to plunder the exchequer and the
words "We are all compliance Brave and Kind Sir" are attached to him as if
by a wire. Much of the sense of spontaneity of caricature of the period comes
from the way in which the subjects seem to pour conversation from their
mouths, and in some cases the lines of text form arabesques throughout the
image.
In fact only a minority of Gillray's prints use speech-text within the image;
it is often displaced into the area beneath the image which normally holds the
tide of the print. One example of this is the print entided Affability, dated Feb.
10th 17956 (fig. 43). Those familiar with satirical imagery at the rime would
easily have recognised George III in the jowly profile and ungainly figure;
equally they would have had no difficulty in working out that the person he is
talking to is a simple countryman, indeed the simplest imaginable, who is in
the process of feeding slops containing entrails to his pigs. One need not
labour the humorous effect of the confrontation between the aggressive and
gauche affability of the King dressed as a country gendeman and the terrified
response of the swineherd. It is a joke on George Ill's laborious attempts and
those of his ministers to present him not as an omniscient ruler but as as an
ordinary middle-of the-road Englishman and benign Father of his People.
Though the King's speech is in the space beneath the tide there is no doubt
that it emanates from him: "Well Friend where a'you going, Hay?_what's your
Name, hay?_where d'ye Live, hay?_hay?"
Why then did Gillray not make the speech come direcdy from the King's
mouth? This question brings us back to the issues we looked at earlier in this
paper in connection with Hogarth. The print's address line includes the date,
the name of the publisher, Hannah Humphrey, and Gillray's signature "Js. Gy.
desfigneat] et fec[it]." The Latinate form of the signature is revealing because
it is the most self-important possible formulation of authorship, of the kind
one might get on a 'serious' engraving after a recognised painter. Gillray is
arrogating to himself, though with heavy irony, the standing both of a
professional Royal Academy-type painter and of the proud and ancient craft
of engraver. At a further level of irony the simple tide, "Affability," recalls the
kind of brief tide so often applied to the well-crafted and elegant prints of
sentimental and idealised scenes by painters of the period like Romney
(.Nature and Sensibility), and especially George Morland and Francis Wheadey.
In the context of such sentimental scenes Gillray's image becomes a ribald
6 BMC 8616. See Bindman: Shadow of the Guillotine, no. 211.

314 I c o n o t e x t s : Caricature
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43. j a m e s Gillrav: .Affability. (Coloured ctching. P 9 5 . Private collection.

reversal of a scene of rustic harmony and the natural deference owed to a

gentleman by a rural labourer; the pompous address, the ironical title and the
generic resemblance to sentimental prints reinforces the absurdity of the
scene and underlines George Ill's ineptness in trying to act out a fantasy of
rustic life.
In the print satirising the response of George Ill's ministers to his
madness, Wierd Sisters of 1791,7 (fig. 44) Gillray employs another verbal
element familiar from engravings after paintings: the dedication, usually to a
noble lord or great political figure. In this print the dedication is to Henry
Fuseli, drawing attention to what would have been obvious to most
observers, that the print is a travesty of Fuseli's recent Royal Academy
painting of The Three Witches from Macbeth.8 The implication is that Gillray's
print is itself the engraving after the picture exhibited, which, of course, it is
not and could not be. At the same time the dedication to a painter rather than
a noble lord hints slyly at the self-importance of Royal Academicians, a theme
taken up in the great satirical print Titianus Redivivus of 1798.9
These examples are evidence of Gillray's extreme sensitivity to matters of
genre and academic status. This is not surprising given his training at the
Royal Academy, and his brief period as an engraver of painted designs
between leaving the Royal Academy as a student and establishing himself as a
satirist. 10 When Gillray does use printed text it is usually only in specifically
political caricatures when the satirical point would be hard to convey without
some identification of the protagonists. In Gillray's Smelling out a Rat of
December 3, 1790 11 (fig. 45) text is used to identify the works of the two
actors in the drama, Edmund Burke and Richard Price, a passionate sup-
porter of the French Revolution, whom Burke denounced as an heir to the
attitudes of those who had been responsible for the execution of Charles I.
Burke appears in his familiar guise as Jesuit inquisitor but Price had no public
identity and so needed the extra identification the titles of his books
provided. His revolutionary intentions are also highlighted by the painting on
the wall, of the execution of King Charles I, which is captioned "Death of
Charles I, or the Glory of Great Britain." The image is full of High Art
associations with memories of D r Faustus in his study and more immediately
Hogarth's famous painting and engraving of Garrick as Richard III.
7 BMC 7937.
8 Johann Heinrich Füssli, exhib. cat., Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1974—5, no. 66.
9 BMC 9085.
10 Hill: Mr Gillray the Caricaturist, pp. 17-25.
11 BMC 7686. Bindman: Shadow of the Guillotine, no. 49.
m ERB-Sis.
4 4 . ) a m e s Gillray: The W'ierdSisters. C o l o u r e d etching. 1791. Private collection.
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45. James Gillray: Smelling Out a Rat. Coloured etching. 1790. British Musuem.
The employment of speech-text within the image immediately places a

satirical print within the tradition of its political predecessors, removing it
from the world of High Art. In the print French Liberty, British slavery of
December 179212 (fig. 46) the scrawny Frenchman and the very fat John Bull
both pour out their feelings in free-form bubbles, the Frenchman excitedly
counting the 'blessings' of revolution, while the bloated Englishman com-
plains of taxes while stuffing himself with roast beef. If we think of this print
in terms of genre, then it can be described as a 'contrast' print, of a kind that
goes back at least to the early eighteenth century, and ultimately back to
sixteenth century German and Flemish traditions.13 Usually applied in British
caricatures to England and France, it involves two extremely polarised and
contrasting images of life in one country as against other, depending on
mutually exclusive stereotypes: fat-thin, rich-poor, plain-speaking against
affectation and so on. The point here is that it is primarily a satirical genre; it
does not imitate or refer to a type of image outside the confines of satire.
Speech-bubbles or speech-text signify, therefore, more 'popular' imagery, and
this is borne out by the context in which this print was made. It clearly
belongs with a group of crudely anti-French Revolutionary caricatures
produced in 1791—2, like Rowlandson's The Contrast, which was designed for
large scale distribution to the potentially insurrectionary labouring classes
who might be tempted by the French example. 14
Speech bubbles or speech-text are often associated with demotic char-
acters like John Bull, who is invariably depicted as a simple rustic, while, in
Gillray's work at least, Royal personages, though treated often with devas-
tating disrespect, are nonetheless usually not given speech-text. Richard New-
ton, on the other hand, who was politically a more radical figure in the
Revolutionary period, coupled his adolescently humorous etchings of the
British Royal Family with speech bubbles which spill out wherever there is
space for them. In the most extreme e x a m p l e ^ Bugaboo!! of June 179215 (fig.
47), rather than a bubble of speech coming from George Ill's mouth he has
made the words pour from the king's throat in a torrent of visible speech;
here the words in their shape and intervals are made expressive in themselves
of the King's hysterical response to dissent. The distance between speech-act
and meaning is collapsed into a visible spontaneity.
This technique helps us to understand another print, and one that could
hardly be more different in sentiment and mood: Gillray's The Blood of the
13 See, for instance, Bindman: Shadow of the Guillotine, no. 2 (ill. p. 43), and Duffy: The English-
man and the Foreigner, no. 67.
14 For this episode see Bindman: Shadow of the Guillotine, chapter 4, pp. 117-22.
15 Ibid., no. 69.
mJLAit'm
46. James Gillray: French Liberty, British Slavery. Coloured etching. 1792. British Museum.
47. Richard Newton: A Bugaboo!!! Coloured etching. 1792. British Museum.

Murdered crying out for Vengeance, published Feb. 16 1793, (fig. 48) 16 less than a
month after Louis's XVI's execution, the event it commemorates. The scene,
of the moment after the execution, is of the highest pathos and Gillray's
treatment impassioned in the extreme. The central motif derives from the
Biblical account of Cain's murder of Abel: "the voice of thy brother's blood
crieth unto me from the ground." The blood is made to cry out in outrage
and in a profusion of words, exclamation marks and other punctuation, giving
concrete form to the emotion behind it. In so doing Gillray borrows a device
from 'low' caricature, but turns it unexpectedly towards tragedy. The shock of
the image derives from the sense of text itself overflowing like blood, but also
from the transgression implied in making the lesser genre intervene in the
higher. The power of the image is all the more striking if one compares it
with a banal effort by Isaac Cruikshank, whose representation of the un-
fortunate king's death borrows the stale conventions of Catholic martyrdom.
Gillray's The Blood of the Murdered refers not only to caricatural traditions
but ironically to a tradition of reportage, for the words at the top "This exact
representation of that Instrument of French Refinement in Assassination, the
GUILLOTINE" is an unmistakeable reference to one of the first responses to
Louis XVI's execution in England: a hastily-converted broadside in which a
woodcut blandly illustrating the new invention of the guillotine was
typographically altered so that it was now headed "MASSACRE OF THE FRENCH
KING!"17 (fig. 49). There is then another reference in Gillray's print to a 'pop-
ular' type of image, the large single-sided broadside which might be stuck on
a wall and which contained a crude woodcut set in at the top above a lengthy
text. Though the form and size tended to be standard the content of such
broadsides could vary from a conventional account of a hanging to a religious
problem-picture or 'Hieroglyphic.' Such popular printmaking is of great
importance and little-studied, but for the purpose of this argument it suffices
to say that the broadside format was assumed to be 'popular,' and was often
used for the most radical of all broadsides, like Citizen Guillotine published by
Richard 'Citizen' Lee in late 179518 (fig. 50).
There are some ironies in the association of text and representation of
speech with 'low' rather than 'high' art. Gillray must have been well aware of
Reynolds's careful structuring of the hierarchy of art from History painting at
the top to still-life at the bottom (caricature does not, of course, feature as an
art form at all, but merely as a term of abuse), and of Reynolds's agonies over

17 I b i d , no. 102.
18 I b i d , no. 19.
48. J a m e s Gillrav: The Blood of the Murdered. Coloured ctching. 1793. British Museum.
B i n d m a n : T e x t as D e s i g n in Gillray's Caricature 321
49. A n o n y m o u s : Massacre of the I'nncb King. Printed broadside. 1793. British M u s e u m .

50. Richard Lee: Citizen Guillotine. Printed broadside. 1795. British Museum.
whether genres or different styles could be mixed. Though Gillray could

never forebear to satirise the Royal Academy and Royal Academicians at
every available opportunity his subde discrimination between one genre and
other, and even his occasional evidendy self-conscious transgressions, show
him to have been, in spirit at least, a true academician.
There is of course a great deal more to say about the words within Gillray
and very much more in the case of Hogarth; but what I hope has emerged
from the above discussion is a sense of words as visual facts in themselves:
they have connotations which go beyond their verbal meaning and which
depend on an exact sense of the genre they inhabit and their place within that
genre. Caricatures, in other words, are complex organisms and they are ever
locked into an unstable relationship with other forms of rhetoric. They
deserve to be treated with the respect of close and attentive scrutiny.
WALTER PAPE
Universität zu Köln
The Battle of the Signs:

Robert Crumb's Visual Reading
of James Boswell's "London Journal"
Abstract: Comic strips are the modern example of a combination of the sister arts.
But in contrast to traditional pictorial arts, their 'natural signs' are abbreviations
and reductions almost to the same extent as the text is. Robert Crumb's Klassic
Komik at first sight may not seem superficial, but rather a clever contemporary cri-
tique of an eighteenth-century text. Whereas Boswell's text is often ambiguous and
evocative, Crumb's visual rendering offers a specific but constrained reading. The
German translation of Crumb's excerpts from Boswell by Harry Rowohlt further
reveals how iconic ekphrasis tends to iconic ellipsis.
If there is actually a "warfare between the two media" text and image 1 , the
comic strip must be the field of their wildest battles or the tribunal in which
they have negotiated a temporary truce. Even if a ceasefire could be man-
dated, there would still remain an inevitable conflict not only between the ver-
bal and the visual signs, but also between these signs and what they presume
to signify. The combat is not one simply between the media, but rather
among their interpreters, among those who try to resolve the "enigmas" of
1 Miller: Illustration, p. 73. See pp. 61-151: Part Two: Word and Image; the false alternative of
Word and Image has been replaced in this volume by the relation of Text and Image. See e.g.
also Martin Heusser's incorrect translation of Walter Benjamin's characterization of baroque
poetry: "[es] drängt das Geschriebene zum Bilde" in: "the word strives to be a picture."
(Benjamin: Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 1, 1, p. 351.) Mar-
tin Heusser: "Introduction: 'The Ear of the Eye, the Eye of the Ear': On the Relation be-
tween Words and Images." Heusser, ed.: Word & Image Interactions, pp. 13-19, here p. 13.
Stephen Orgel in an essay on unabridged comic-strip versions of Shakespeare plays em-
phasizes the "power of the image over the word" by arguing: "We are at heart radical pla-
tonists about language; we deeply believe that the only way to understand a concept is to
visualize it, and that the best way to explain something is to draw a diagram of it." Orgel:
"Shakespeare in Stunning Full Colour," p. 275.
Pape: Robert Crumb's Visual Reading of James Boswell's "London Journal" 325
language and imagery. 2 Theoreticians since antiquity have emphasized the

predominance of the eye, but even since antiquity it is clear that visible ap-
pearances gain their quality only within a verbal con text before 'idea' (Ιδέα)
became a philosophical term it denoted both the visible or deceptive appear-
ance (Gestalt, Schein) of a person or a thing and their qualities. 3 For percep-
tions to become ideas, the perceiver must generate some kind of mental nar-
rative. There are always several kinds of stories within us that guide our visual
perception. 4
In comparison to traditional texts and images, comic strips seem to be
much shorter, they seem to tell less and show less than a well written story or a
properly painted picture. Comics reduce the given phenomena to an easily per-
ceivable level. Abbreviation and reduction 5 take place not only within the
realm of themes of comic-book narrative but also within the realm of its con-
stituent signs: image, picture, language. The latter, of course, are already abbre-
viations and reductions of 'reality.' As a popular mass genre some comic strips
and their heros can well be interpreted as the myths of bur times. Depending
on one's view of myth, this statement may be either condemnation or praise.
Comics and myths both give an 'abbreviation of phenomena' (Nietzsche). 6
According to a recent study of the so-called Sunday comics, their pre-
ferred contents are "domestic relations, crime, nature and animals, the armed
forces and war, love and romance, business and industry, and government
and public affairs (in that order)." 7 Comics thus express a particular world
and also determine a particular form of perception that excludes or even re-
presses certain themes. Taboo subjects - and hence subjects of underground
comics such as the one to be discussed here - are drugs, sex of all kinds, ex-
crement, religion, violence, horror, and social and political satire. 8 Reading a
2 Mitchell: Iconology, p. 8.
3 H. Meinhardt: "Idee (antike)." Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie vol. 4, cc. 55-65, here c.
55. — Cf. also Ludwig Pfeiffer: "Suggestiveness of Interpretation: On the Vitality of Ap-
pearances." Pape and Burwick, eds.: Reflecting Senses, pp. 15-32, here p. 22.
4 Cf. Pape/Burwick: "Introduction." ibid., pp. 1—11, here p. 3.
5 Cf. also Lichtenberg: "Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche." Göttinger
Taschen Calender (1791), p. 200. Achte Lieferung (1805), p. 25. This is not contained in
Schriften und Briefe, vol. 3, pp. 657-1060: on the editorial problems, see Herding: "'Die
Schönheit wandelt auf den Straßen' - Lichtenberg zur Bildsatire seiner Zeit." Herding: Im
Zeichen der Aufklärung, pp. 212—13.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche: "Die Geburt der Tragödie." § 23. Sämtliche Werke vol. 1, p. 145.
7 Estren: A History of Underground Comics, p. 109.
8 Ibid, pp. 17 and 109. There are of course nowadays all sorts of pornographic cartoons, es-
pecially in Italy and France; cf. e.g. Schnurrer and Rinaldi: Die Welt der Bildetfrauen and
Sabin: Adult Comics.
comic strip asks for an interaction between different kinds of perception, de-
coding signs, and imagination. The interaction between the context of the
reader and the context of the genre - the comic strip with its visual picture
and its variety of optical signs, with its captions and dialogue baloons - create
a complex image. Directly applicable to comics is the definition of myth for-
mulated by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies·. Myths are "un système sémi-
ologique second" that can destroy a reasonable perception (against which the
underground comics and their counter-culture themes seem to be directed):
"[...] le mythe ne cache rìen\ sa fonction est de déformer, non de faire dis-
paraître." 9
But with the comic strip to be studied in the following pages additional
problems arise: the strip has no story of its own but is the 'illustration' of se-
lected parts of James Boswell's London Journal. The strip thus forces modern
visual images upon an eighteenth-century text. Illustration means, to quote
J. Hillis Miller, "bringing up to light." 10 But how could Robert Crumb, born
in 1943 as the son of a naval officer and well known as the leading writer of
underground comics in the 1970s, bring light to a diary recorded during the
European Enlightenment? Mallarmé's often quoted statement might well ex-
press the reaction of every European literary historian: "Je suis pour - aucune
illustration, tout ce qu'évoque un livre devant se passer dans l'esprit du
lecteur." 11
The struggle between text and image in Crumb's strip can be shown more
explicity than in a 'regular' comic where text and picture are by the same au-
thor. For as is often the case in the study of art, extreme or marginal ex-
amples allow a closer insight both into the structure and function of a genre.
To demonstrate problems in the interrelation between text and image, not
only Robert Crumb's Klassic Komik: Excerpts from Boswell's London Journal
1762-1763 (1981)12 (figs. 51-55) will be analyzed, but also the German trans-
lation of the text by Harry Rowohlt (1986) will be considered.13
Crumb's critical attitude towards the American way of life is that of a satir-
ist satirized, as can be readily observed in his Confessions of Robert Crumb,
9 Barthes: Mythologies, pp. 199 and 207. - See also Stahl: "Comics und Mythenkritik."
10 Miller: Illustration, p. 61. In the present case the text actually has to be "taken for granted"
and "the imagery is the new ingredient in the intertextual mix." John Dixon Hunt: "Making
Virgil Look English." Heusser, ed., Word & Image Interactions, pp. 97—109, here p. 97.
11 Mallarmé: "Sur le livre illustré." Œuvres complètes, p. 878. Cf. Miller: Illustration, p. 61.
12 Aline and Robert Crumb, eds., Weirdo No. 3 (Autumn 1981), [pp. 25-99]; on Crumb see
also Estren: A History of Underground Comics, pp. 60—4, 121, 130-32; and Sabin: Adult
Comics, pp. 37-47.
13 Crumb: Endêit-Comics, pp. 85-9.
Pape: Robert Crumb's Visual Reading of James Boswell's "London Journal"
327
Λ K L A S S I C KOMIC
EXCERPrs FROM TUESDAY, 14 DECEMBER, 1762
" IT IS VfcAV CURIOUS TO THINK THAT J
gßoswell's HAVE NOW BfcfcM IN uWDoN SfcVeRAL WfciKS

WITHOUT EVtR HAVING fcNjovlD THt DÉ -
U6HTFÜL SEX, ALTWOUfeN 1 AM .SURROUMDfcD
\*IIIH NÜMBCRS OF FRÉL HtARTtt> LrtPH S
OF ALL KINDS... ,
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HIGHES FfeLlLITV ON tARTH EHJWfcD tìV
MfcN THAN THt PARTICIPATION OP GENiUNt
JOURNAL RECIPROCAL AMOROUS AfFtCTlON WITH AN
AMIAtìie WOMAN· THtSt HE HOS A FVU. IN
DULGENCfc OF AU THL OfclKATt PtHJNGJ AND
PUASURtJ BOTH ot BODY AND MlND-WHlU. AT
THÈ SAMÉ TIMÉ IN THIS ÉNlXAWT'NG UNION Ht
1762-1763 ecAUÍ wnw A LONJtlíArtNtJÓ "THAT Ht IS THt
SUlWOft PÉRSON. THÈ 0I6NITY OF HIS ¿ÜÍ IS
S « R James Boswell was a ä o t t i s k KEPT UP THESE PARADISIAL SCENES OF
ARISTOCRAT WHO WENT TO LONDON llsr GALLANTRY HAVÉ. EXALTED MY IDEAS AND
THE YEAR 1762, A T THE AGE OF 2 2 . HE RLFINt-O MY TASTE, S-J THAT I REAOV LAN -
LIVED ON AN ALLOWANCE FROM K1S FAM- NOT THINK OF STOOPING SO FAR AS ΤΟ ΜΛΚΙ
ILY AND SPENT HIS TIME TRYING TO A ewSr ΙΝΤΙΜΑΓΕ COMPANION OF A 6«)VfcLIN<i
PROMOTE HIMSELF SOCIALLY- HE ALSO MINOfcO, IU- W D, WORTHIEST CRCATURÊ ,
KCPT A DETAILED CMARV OP ALL HIS l/AR- NOR CM IVH 06LICACY Bt PLÉASÉD Wir« It«
IOUS ADVENTURES AND REFLECTIONS. GROSÍ vouiPrteuSNEU OF WE STEWS.·'»
" I n TMIJ view, I WAD NOW CAtteO SeêROL times f o r a h a k j

SOME. ACTREW Of COMENT GARDEN THÉÂTRE, WHOM 1 WAS Α LIT- 51 R , νου ARC
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51. Robert Crumb: Klassic Komic: Excerpts from Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763. 1981.
Panels 1-4. © by Robert Crumb.
328 Icono texts: Caricature
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52. Robert Crumb: Klassic Komic: Excerpts from Boswell1 s London Journal 1762-1763. 1981.
W * L L , I A D M I R E ÖRRY FLOJWEU. F I N A L L Y A O S A N TA 6 5 Α T RY S Γ W I T H LOUISA. HE

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53. Robert Crumb: Klassic Komic: Excerpts from Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763. 1981.
T D £ » I » M , 1-2 APAU- I T B J I — " L A S T NK3HT J M & T WITH A M O N - LPfíGÍ

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54. Robert Crumb: Klassic Komic: Excerptsfrom Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763. 1981.
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ί ΝΟ PnfMî Ν ι TH£ OftlfilNAt. | THÈ Ν WENT Tû LORDN AEGwfJ
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ION'S. WHO WAS HG t HLV ENtRTAlNtr· WITH MY tASr NI6HT5'ααε
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Goooi OP pprtunè ANO Aov¿*mst>k3 α R A N K went ncth<n&
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ku>UE® JOHNSON ' I ~ " ___
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tPŒ ev HIMSELF, this Mtónr se thug, but in oviuzep ^ n
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' DEMPSTER THEN ARGueO "THAT INTERNAL MEAIT OUGHT "THUS ΟΙΟ MR. JOHNSON SHOW UfcJN 50UD PR/NCIPLfcS THE
MAKE THE ONLY DISTINCTION AMONGST MANKIND- '' NECESSITY AND THE ADVANTAäeS OF SUBORDINATION, WWCH GAVE
Hr' MANKN I D HAV6 FOUND FROM EXPERIENCE THAT THIS much satisfaction to nie, who have always wad strong
• COULO NOT ΘΕ WERE AU- DISTÏ NCTONi A&OWSHED, THEM ONARCHICAL INCLINATIONS BUT COULD NEVER GIVE STRON6
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• ORDINATION IS AeSDOrieuY NECESSARY, MANKIND CWAT 5TEO OK UP THE AR6UM6NT FOR SUBORDINATE* AGAINST OCWA-
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ANIMAL· PLEASURE·
THURSDAY 2Δ JWLY 1763 "AT NIGHT: MR. JOHNSON AND"W1E H TA

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55. Robert Crumb: Klassic Ko mie: Lzxcerptsfrom Boswell's London Journal 1762—1763. 1981.
which ends with a final panel showing him merrily wearing the ears of Mickey
Mouse:
[...] cause if I didn't love it, I'd leave it, but I aint leavin'! It's my country, right or
wrong, so I know it's my duty in life to help right th' wrongs in th' land of my
people, the good ol U.S.A.!!! [And finishing with:] This land is your land - this
land is my land [.. ,]. 14
He thus claims that Woody Guthrie's situation and reputation are his own.
This kind of love-hatred for modern culture and counter-culture has also been
recognized by the historian of underground comics, Marc Estren: "It seems
that even when Crumb tries, he can't escape himself or his culture." 15
Crumb's Excerpts from Boswell can be regarded as a conscious twentieth-
century American counter-cultural reading of a text written by an author who
in his own time was a sort of social enfant terrible and a child of nature in the
European field of literature. Boswell, however, was by no means a conscious
critic of his society. For many years in the history of Boswell scholarship,
Thomas Macaulay's Essay on Boswell (1832) has influenced the reader's re-
sponse to his work. Macaulay called Boswell "a man of the meanest and fee-
blest intellect," "servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a
sot," 16 and he explained the literary quality of his work by calling him an "in-
spired idiot." 17 Crumb, in his adaptation seems to follow this conception, be-
cause his drawings show Boswell looking like a person of little understanding,
often smiling boyishly, looking puzzled, unappreciative of the theme dis-
cussed, or just naive, but self-confident.
As to the actual content of Boswell's London Journal, it is a detailed report
on his personal, social, and sexual activities. Frederick A. Pottle provides an im-
age of Boswell that can explain why a diary from his pen was well suited to
Crumb's treatment in a comic strip: "He was by temperament intensely social
and by physical endowment intensely sensual, a creature of ecstasy whose ap-
petites were so ardent and whose pleasures of sense so vivid that under the
best of reputation he was not likely to get through life without succumbing to
the sins of intemperance and incontinence." 18 On the other hand, despite his
"exhibitionism, his passion for notoriety at any cost," 19 his London Journal ob-
14 Quoted from Estren: A History of Underground Comics, p. 284.

15 Ibid, p. 192.
16 Macaulay: "Samuel Johnson," pp. 94 and 95.
17 Ibid, p. 96: Goldsmith also was "described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired
idiot."
18 Pottle: James Boswell: The Earlier Years 1740-1769, p. 53.
19 Ibid.
served a certain delicacy concerning both persons mentioned in it and style.

The reason for this was not only that the entire journal was written with
Boswell's friend Johnson as a potential reader in mind, 20 but also the fact that
he generally showed "a strong disinclination for speaking or writing coarse or
obscene language." 21 So his references to sexual adventures are always given in
a very delicate style which inspires the reader's imagination. Apparendy, it was
especially this feature of Boswell's character and style that prompted Crumb's
obscene drawings as an answer by the counter-culture to cultured language.
There are three main themes in Boswell's journal which Crumb astutely
adapts in his excerpts: women and sex, time and society, and literature. Since
Crumb gives us little more than one percent of the text from the original
journal, we must recollect the entire journal in order to appraise the strategy
of excerpting. We must determine, that is, what is omitted, what is stressed,
and what is represented by the non-verbal representation of the comic. To be
sure, Crumb's reading is in part dictated by the demands of his genre, but the
intention of underground comics is also to reveal the 'true' content and struc-
ture of social or personal phenomena. Thus twenty out of his twenty eight
panels are devoted to Boswell's sexual adventures, four to problems of literat-
ure, three to general questions of society, and one to Boswell's time. This may
seem to offer a rather one-sided reading of Boswell, but it actually points out
Boswell's strongest personal interest. Only six days after his arrival in London
he noted: "I was really unhappy for want of women." 22
Boswell's narrative is well suited for an adaptation to a genre that com-
bines both visual and verbal art in a kind of dramatic representation, for the
"distinguishing structural features of Boswell's journal" it has been observed,
"can be summed up in the one word d r a m a t i c é Moreover, as a critic has also
recendy stated, "Boswell's literary art can be remarkably visual in its imaginat-
ive power." 24 Nevertheless, as our discussion will show, this kind of "visual
appeal" and "reality-creating imagination" 25 must strictly be separated from a
visualised reading. In analyzing the interrelation of the sister arts, Gottfried
20 Boswell: London Journal 1762-1763, p. 40, note 4.

21 Pottle: James Boswell, p. 85.
22 Boswell: London Journal 1762-1763, p. 49 (25 November 1762).
23 Potde: James Boswell, p. 90.
24 Colby Haight Kullman: The Visual Appeal of Boswell's Prose.
25 Primeau: "Boswell's 'Romande Imaginadon' in the London Journal," p. 20. - Cf. also Kay
and Kay: "The Face in the Mirror of Boswell's London Journal," also for further reference
material on the London Journal. — See also James F. Woodruff: "The development of
Boswell's technique of 'epiphany' in the London Journal ," (summary) p. 1400: "this method
of showing rather than telling."
Willems discerns an inverse correspondence between language and the visual

arts: "The representational word always contains a reference to a quasi-pictor-
ial sensory appearance; the representational picture always a reference to a
postulate of meaning that can be achieved only by a word. Within the word
dwells an obscure picture, within the picture a silent word." 26
The abbreviated narrative Robert Crumb has sustained in his excerpts
may be briefly summarized thus: Boswell, after staying in London for several
weeks, has as yet been "without ever enjoying the delightful sex"; 27 he then
meets an actress from the Covent Garden Theatre whom he calls Louisa in
his journal. The first half of the strip is devoted to his siege, her eventual ca-
pitulation, and the venerai disease he got from this affair. The wooing in the
strip is twice interrupted by social conversations, the first on the present age
and on translations of Horace (with Thomas Sheridan, Richard Brinsley's
father), the second on poetry (between the bookseller Davies, Oliver Gold-
smith, and Boswell). The second half of the strip begins by relating three
amorous adventures with four whores, without any interruption by other ad-
ventures. The story ends with two conversations on human society (between
George Dempster, Member of Parliament, Samuel Johnson, and Boswell) and
another conversation between Johnson and Boswell on the unhappy situation
of prostitutes. The most prominent event has been omitted: Boswell's first
meeting with Samuel Johnson on 16th May 1763.
For his purposes Crumb needs to employ a particular strategy of pictorial
transformation. First of all he must give the depicted person a proper physi-
ognomy; it is evident that Crumb employed contemporary engravings or
paintings as sources for the characters and their clothing (see figures 57-60;
compare Goldsmith in fig. 60 with Crumb's caricature in fig. 52, bottom
right). 28
As to the technique of transformation from the mere text into the comic
strip, I shall examine a few panels more closely. Panels 3 and 4 (fig. 51, at the
bottom) deal with the dinner at the Sheridan's on 17th December. The text of
the journal only has "dined at Sheridan's." 29 Boswell very seldom gives more
26 Willems: "Kunst und Literatur als Gegenstand einer Theorie der Wort-Bild-Beziehungen,"
p. 423: "Im darstellenden Wort ist immer der Bezug auf einen quasi-bildlichen Sinnen-
schein, im darstellenden Bild immer der Bezug auf eine nur durch das Wort zu leistende
Bedeutungssetzung beschlossen. Dem Wort wohnt ein verdunkeltes Bild, dem Bild ein ver-
stummtes Wort inne."
27 Boswell: London Journal 1762-63, p. 83 (14 December 1762); Crumb: "having enjoyed."
28 Ibid, p. 89.
29 The sources of figs. 57 and 58: David Daichies: James Boswell and his World, p. 80: Johnson
in Travelling Dress as Described in Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Engraving by
Pape: Robert Crumb's Visual Reading of James Boswell's " L o n d o n Journal" 335
T H U R S D A Y 2&JUVÌ 1763 "Ar NIGHT! M R . J O H N S O N A M O 1 H A D

A R O O M A T THE " T U R K ' S H E A D * H E SAID S W I F T HAD Λ H I G H E R .
REPUTATION THAN HE. D E S E R V E D ; THAT HIS EXCELLENCY W A S INI
É T R O N û S HNS E j Fou H li HUMOR WAS NOT REMARKABLY G R E A T ·
PiS V>IE W A L K Ê D ACON6 THE STRADO V3Nl£HV ACM IN A R M . Λ
WOMAN o F THe T O W N C A M E eNTKINÔLV NEAR U Í
56. Robert Crumb: Klassic Kornic: L:\cerpts from Boswell's l.ondon Journal 1762-1763.
Panel 27. 1981. © by Robert Crumb.
than stage directions concerning the domestic surroundings, and thus Crumb
has to add the decoration and costume. As with the individual physiognomy,
he has also tried here to render the settings historically accurate. In the fourth
panel, for example, he has added a servant not mentioned in the text. His
mise en scène also deserves attention: in panel 3 both Mrs. Sheridan and
Boswell have finished eating, while Mr. Sheridan is still handling his knife and
fork, which indicates that he has done most of the talking during this dinner
T. Trotter; p. 75: Johnson, shown the sights (and scents) of Edinburgh, grumbles in
Bozzie's ear, Ί smell you in the dark.' From the Picturesque Beauties of Boswell, 1786, etched
by Thomas Rowlandson after designs by Samuel Collings. — Figs. 59 and 60 from: Water-
house: Reynolds, figure 121: James Boswell (1787), London, National Portrait Gallery; and
from figure 53: Oliver Goldsmith (1770), Knole, Lord Sackville.
J o h n s o n in Travelling Dress as D e s c r i b e d in Boswell's journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

E n g r a v i n g by T. Trotter.
58. Johnson, shown the sights (and scents) of Edinburgh, grumbles in Bozzie's car, "I smell YOU
in the dark." From the Picturesque Beauties of Boswell. 1786. Etched by Thomas Rowlandson after
designs bv Samuel (Zollings.
- and indeed, the complete text confirms this interpretation. Mrs. Sheridan
seems to play a rather marginal role, looking quite disgusted, especially when
the men are talking about Francis's and Pope's translations of Horace. By
contrast, the full text also reports on Mrs. Sheridan's contribution to the con-
versation; in fact, she was a well known writer, and her novel Memoirs of Miss
Sidney Bidulph had been published the previous year.
Why, then, did Crumb leave out the only intelligent bourgeois woman
Boswell mentions in his journal, a person whom he called "a woman of very
homely looks, but very sensible and very clever"? 30 She would have been a
contrast to the other women who are considered only as sexual objects. Here
we must remember the purpose and intention of Crumb's genre. As an abbre-
viation of the phenomena, addressing only the putative main problems and
30 Ibid. p. 54 (28 November 1762).

59. joshua Reynolds: lames Home//. F 8 • National Portrait G a l l e n ; London.

e: R o b e r t Crumb's Visual Reading of James Boswell's " L o n d o n J o u r n a l "
fid. |oshua Rc\nolds: O/ìn-r CnMsmitb. 1 I). Knolc. Lord S.ickvilk·,

issues, Crumb's comic strip is compelled to omit the stunning exception. The
intellectual woman is a marginal figure in Boswell's journal and in his dme.
Calling attention to progressive tendencies would alter the essence of the
eighteenth-century image Boswell relates. Crumb certainly would not have
chosen Boswell's journal if it had not revealed precisely those social attitudes
persistent in our time. A closer look at the social themes discussed in the con-
versations excerpted by Crumb shows that he very consciously selected topics
which are still a matter of interest: the party at the Sheridan's discuss the
struggle of merit and genius against that dullness and corruption supported
by the political system. Rousseau's conception of pity as a natural passion and
the need to value man according to his internal merits are expounded - in an-
other discussion in Boswell's own 'chambers' — by Mr. Dempster, Member of
Parliament, and contested by Samuel Johnson, who insists that in a civilized
society money always serves one better than internal goodness. Johnson also
gives an anthropological justification of subordination. These issues, which
are still hotly debated, remain equally relevant to contemporary society.31
While Boswell defends Johnson's principles in the discussion with John-
son and Dempster, Crumb is obliged to visualize his reading of the text.
Panels 24 to 26 (fig. 55, top right and middle) deal with this discussion. Here
Boswell is shown as the uninspired follower of the prevailing conception of
society - he does not take part in the talk, but the rather stupid, consenting
astonishment on his face in panel 25 (fig. 61) exposes both him and Johnson.
And Crumb makes an even more sarcastic comment on Boswell by illustrat-
ing and, at the same time, changing the meaning of the following words from
the journal (fig. 62): "After Johnson went away, I took up the argument for
subordination against Dempster, and indeed after his hearty drubbing from
the hardtongued Johnson, he was but a feeble antagonist. He appeared to me
a very weak man; and I exulted at the triumph of sound principles over
sophistry." 32 The picture thus changes the meaning of the words, giving
something like the involuntary connotation of Boswell's direct and naive re-
port. The words are definitely defeated by the picture, creating quite another
image of this conversation.
The visual elements show their superiority over the words, which is a typ-
ical phenomenon in comic strips. Very rarely do the words control the per-
ception of the picture; normally it is rather vice versa. This can be gathered
from an erotic adventure where Crumb actually leaves out only a few words.
Panels 19 to 22 (fig. 64) illustrate the following episode:
31 Ibid. pp. 3 1 2 - 1 6 (20 July 1763).

32 Ibid. p. 316; C r u m b has "exalted."
Pape: Robert Crumb's Visual Reading of James Boswell's "London Journal"
"DEMPSTER TUEN ORÜUeO THAT INTERNAL MERIT OUOHT TO

MAKE THE ONLY DISTINCTION AMONasr MANKIND- ''
mf MANKIND HTOÊ fODND FROM EXPERIENCE THAT TX LS
COULO Nur ee. vtepB AU. PISTI NCTIONJ abollshed, THE •
• STPtóNS wooto NOT PERMIT IT LONG . ßUt-SIR.» AS SUS' I
• ORDINATION IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY, MANKIND Γ ΤΗ AT •
• IS TO SAY, AU- CIVILIZED NATIONS) HAVE SETTLED IT
• UpaN A PLAIN INVARIABLE: FOOTING. A MAN IS SOftN •
• TO 8ERIDITARY RANK. SUBORDINATION TENDS GREAT- •
• u τοTOe happiness of men. t h e r e is a r e o p - •
• ROCAT10N OF PLEASURE IN COMMANDING AND O- •
¡IL BEYIN&. WERE WE AU- UPON AN EQUALITY
Hm n o n e OF US WOULD e e HAPPY, ANY iVIORt ^ H H
gfgjfi THAN SINGLE ANIMALS WHO 6NJ0Y6O (VIERE ^ ^ H B
BHEbcfSl ANIMAL PLEASURE- >
61. Robert Crumb: Klassic Komic: Excerpts from Boswell's London journal
1762-1763. Panel 25. 1981. © by Robert Crumb.
" t h u s did mr. (Johnson s h o w upon 5 o u d principles t h e

NECESSITY AND THE ADVANTA6ES OF SUBORDINATION, UJHfCH GAVE
MUCH SATISFACTION TÖ ME, WHO HAVE ALWAYS HAD STRONG
MONARCHICAL INCUNATIONS 8UT COULD NEVER SIV£ STRONG
REASONS IN THEIR JUSTIFICATIONS. AFTER JOHNSON WENT AWAY,
I TOOK UP THE ARGUMENT FOR. SU30RDI NATION AGAINST DEMP-
STER, AND INDEED AFTER HIS HEARTY DRUBBING FROM THE Hf«D-
TONSU6D JOHNSON, HE WAS GUT A FEEBLE ANTAGONIST. HE
APPEARED TO ΟΊΕ A VERY WEAK MAN," AND 1 EXALTED AT THE
TRIUMPH OF SOUND PRINCIPLES OVER SOPHISTRY."
62. Robert Crumb: Klassic Komic: Excerpts from Boswell's London Journal
I [then] sallied forth to the Piazzas in rich flow of animal spirits and burning with
fierce desire. I met two very pretty little girls who asked me to take them with me.
"My dear girls," [said I,] "I am a poor fellow. I can give you no money. But if you
choose to have a glass of wine and my company and let us be gay and obliging to
each other without money, I am your man." They agreed with great good humor.
So back to the Shakespeare [Crumb has: "to the Shakespeare's Head"] we went.
"Waiter," [said I,] "I have got here a couple of human beings; I don't know how
they'll do." "I'll look, your Honour," [cried he, and with inimitable effrontery
stared them in the face and then cried,] "they'll do very well." "What," [said I J
"are they good fellow-creatures? Bring them up, then." We were shown into a
good room and had a botde of sherry before us in a minute. I surveyed my
seraglio and found them both good subjects for amorous play. I toyed with them
and drank about and sung Youth's the Season and thought myself Captain Macheath;
and then I solaced my existence with them, one after the other, according to their
seniority. I was quite raised, as the phrase is: though I was in a London tavern [, the
Shakespeare's Head,] enjoying high debauchery after my sober winter. 33
Here, Boswell shows, as Frederick Pottle has stated, "a strong disinclination
for [...] obscene language." The facts truly reported show him "in rich flow
of animal spirits," and Crumb indeed provides a very likely picture of the ver-
bal image "I solaced my existence." This complex expression is simplified
and reduced by the visualization: solace means a spiritual comfort in sorrow
and trouble; existence, on the other hand, the mere natural being of man.
And this evidently obscene use of 'solace' evoked Crumb's critical and ob-
scene drawing; what Boswell's cultured language conceals is brought to light
by Crumb's illustration. But here a change of meaning must be considered; in
the eighteenth century 'solace' also meant - according to the Oxford English
Dictionary - 'to give oneself entertainment or amusement.' 34 This is almost the
only one of the few words with an obsolete meaning in the text of Crumb's
comic strip; but it leads us to the next problem, the translation of comics.
Translating a comic into another language means to translate only one
part of signs: the words. With Crumb's Boswell comic strip there is one main
problem concerning a German translation. Harry Rowohlt did not use Fritz
Güttingens German translation of Boswell's Journal; instead, as he confirmed
when I interviewed him, he tried to give his German style a kind of eight-
eenth-century touch. Hence the diction in his translation is artificially con-
trived, fully ignoring the distinctive attributes of Boswell's eighteenth-century
English prose. When Rowohlt translates the phrase just discussed as "dann
33 Ibid, pp. 263-64 (19 May 1763).

34 Oxford English Dictionary vol. 15, p. 948.
tröstete ich mein Dasein mit ihnen," he disregards Boswell's play with the
altered meaning. Güttinger's translation, on the other hand, gives a German
phrasing that more accurately captures the original English: "[•••] und dann
tat ich mich [...] an den beiden gütlich." 35
Rowohlt's intrusion of an artificially archaic verbal elegance exaggerates
the disparity between word and picture. He was probably induced to do this
because he had his mind on Crumb's drawings and on Boswell's text. One
telling example we have just discussed: Samuel Johnson's defense of subordi-
nation is presented in a remarkably clear and reasonable style. Frederick A.
Pottle explains why, today, we respond to his diction as modern: "It is be-
cause Boswell's style is so scrupulously low-pitched that it affects us like the
writing of a contemporary." 36 This style is deliberately converted by Rowohlt
into a seemingly old-fashioned and — for present-day readers - less serious
diction, e.g.: "Mankind have found from experience that this [i.e. distinction
among men according to their internal value] could not be." Rowohlt: "Die
Menschheit hat aus Erfahrung festgestellt, daß dies nimmer sein könnte."
Güttinger: "Erfahrungsgemäß geht das nun einmal nicht." Boswell: "[...]
single animals who enjoyed mere animal pleasure." Rowohlt: "[...] vereinzelte
Tiere, so lediglich aus tierischen Genüssen Vergnügen ziehen." Güttinger:
"[...] das einzelne Tier, das seiner tierischen Lust nachgeht." 37 Rowohlt, who
ranks as one of Germany's best translators, would never have translated the
mere text of Boswell's journal in this manner. The critical elements of Crumb's
drawings seduced him to make them part of his translation: The German ver-
sions thus contain a ridiculous element which is by no means part of the
original text; this text has obviously been altered through the illustrations.
Here again the visual elements prove their superiority over the verbal signs.
Nevertheless, it is also true that iconic ekphrasis can effectively direct the
reader's attention to the special visual quality of poetic texts. Robert Crumb,
together with David Zane Mairowitz, recently published Kafka for Beginners.
Iconic ekphrasis often tends to iconic ellipsis: the text is reduced to only one
level. This is what occurs in the comics Crumb has made out of Kafka's nov-
els and short stories: e.g. eight pages for The Trial, seventeen for The Castle.
But when Crumb visualizes one single metaphor, as in the illustration of a
famous passage from Kafka's diaries (fig. 63), 38 his iconic ekphrasis gains
35 Boswell: Londoner Tagebuch 1762-1763, p. 289.

36 Potde: James Boswell, p. 90.
37 Boswell: lj>ndon Journal 1762-1763, p. 314 (20 July 1763); Boswell: Londoner Tagebuch
1762-1763, p. 342.
38 Mairowitz and Crumb: Kafka for Beginners, p. 3. Kafka: Tagebücher, entry 4 Alay 1913, p. 560:
"Immerfort die Vorstellung eines breiten Selchermessers das eiligst und mit mechanischer
63. Robert Crumb: "The image of a wide pork butcher's knife."

From Mairowitz and Crumb: Kafka for Beginners. 1993. © by Robert Crumb.
'literary qualities,' i. e. visually realizes the verbal ekphrasis. Hans-Georg

Gadamer in an essay of 1980 indicated the difference between the image
evoked by a single word and the "Anschaulichkeit" (imagery, intuition) evoked
by a text the latter can be compared to a restless stream or flow of images
which accompany the understanding of a text and do not terminate in a fixed
mental image ("Anschauuung") as a result.39
An underground comic strip version of a literary text — and probably also
those strips for which 'reality' serves as a pretext and context — can certainly
have a critical effect upon the context, which in our case is represented both
by Boswell's journal in its entirety (and its original intention) and the present
reader's consciousness. But unlike the reaction to a verbal critique, the critical
impulse in a visualization that is secondary to an original text seems to freeze:
the restless flow of literary images is stopped. To the average reader of these
comics their pictures might have the same "deceptive appearance of natural-
ness and transparence" as a pre-modern picture in a gallery. For those who
are unable to decipher "the enigmas" of both text and image, the image be-
comes opaque, and what was meant to be counter-cultural critique is reab-
sorbed in the "process of ideological mystification."40 In the present ice age
of images, an age in which it often seems to be impossible even to tell 'origi-
nal' images from counterfeit images, only a few are actually able to defrost the
image and free the silent words hidden within, but hardly anyone cares.
Regelmäßigkeit von der Seite her in mich hineinfahrt und ganz dünne Querschnitte los-
schneidet, die bei der schnellen Arbeit fast eingerollt davonfliegen."
39 Gadamer: "Anschauung und Anschaulichkeit." Gadamer: Werke vol. 8, p. 189-205, here
194: "Die Anschaulichkeit, die wir an einem erzählenden Texte rühmen, ist dagegen durch-
aus nicht die eines durch Worte erzeugten Bildes, das sich wiedergeben läßt. Sie ähnelt weit
mehr einem ruhelosen Fluß von Bildern, die das Verstehen des Textes begleiten und in
keiner festwerdenden Anschauung wie in einem Resultat enden."
40 Mitchell: Iconology, p. 8. - See also Watts: "Comic Strips and Theories of Communication,"
p. 180: "The iconic nature of pictorial representation tends to cut short the path from sign-
types to mental representation."
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List of Illustrations
Colour Plates
I. Jacques Louis David: Le Serment des Horaces. 1795. Paris. Musée du

Louvre. Courtesy of the Musée du Louvre.
II. Edouard Manet: Oljmpia. 1863 (Salon of 1865). Paris. Musée d'Orsay.
Courtesy of the Musée d'Orsay.
III. Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Le Grand-prêtre Corésus s'immole pour sauver Cal-
lirhoë. Salon of 1765. Paris. Musée du Louvre. Copyright photo R. M. N.
IV. Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Les Débuts du modèle. 1769?. Paris. Musée Jac-
quemart· André. Courtesy of the Musée Jacquemart André.
V. Claude Monet: Impression, soleil levant. 1873. Musée Marmottan. Paris.
VI. James Abbot McNeill Whisder: Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Old Battersea
Bridge. 1872. Tate Gallery. London. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery.
VII. William Holman Hunt: The Awakening Conscience. 1853. Birmingham
Museum and Art Gallery.
VIII. William Morris: Guinevere. 1858. Tate Gallery. London. Courtesy of the
Tate Gallery.
IX. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Bower Meadow. 1872. City Art Gallery Man-
chester. Courtesy of the City Art Gallery.
X. John Everett Millais: Ophelia. 1851. Tate Gallery. London. Courtesy of
the Tate Gallery.
XI. James Abbot McNeill Whistler: Symphony in White No. 1: The White
Girl. 1862. National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the
National Gallery of Art.
XII. James Abbot McNeill Whisder: Symphony in White No. 3. 1865-1867.
Barber Institute of Fine Arts. University of Birmingham.
XIII. Gustave Moreau: Jeune fille thrace portant la tête d'Orphé. 1865. Private
collection. Paris.
XIV. Gustave Moreau: Œdipe et le sphinx. 1864. The Metropolitan Musem of
Art. New York City. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
XV. Berthe Morisot: Le Berceau. 1872. Musée d'Orsay. Paris. Courtesy of the
Musée d'Orsay.
384 List of Illustrations
Black and White Illustrations
1. Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Le Grand-prêtre Corésus s'immole pour sauver

Callirboë. Detail. Salon of 1765. Paris. Musée du Louvre. Copyright photo
R. M. N.
2. Charles Le Brun: Tête d'expression: L'Effroj. Paris. Musée du Louvre.
Copyright photo R. M. N.
3. Michelangelo: Moses. Tomb of Julius II. Church of San Pietro in Vincoli,
Rome. Photo by author.
4. Antoine Watteau: L'Embarquement pour l'île de Cythère. 1717. Paris. Musée
du Louvre. Copyright photo R.M.N.
5. Antoine Watteau: Einschiffung nach Kythera / Embarkation for Cythera. Ber-
lin. Schloß Charlottenburg. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
6. Antoine Watteau: Einschiffung nach Kythera / Embarkation for Cythera. Ber-
lin. Schloß Charlottenburg. Detail. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
7. William Hogarth: Harlot's Progress. Plate 1 (engraving). 1732. Courtesy
of the British Museum, London.
8. William Hogarth: A Harlot's Progress. Plate 2 (engraving). 1732. Courtesy
13. Guillaume-Thomas Raynal: L'Histoire philosophique et politique ... Fronti-
spice de la seconde édition. 6 volumes in 8°, La Haye, 1774.
spice de la seconde édition. 3 volumes in 4°, Genève, Libraires Associés,
1775.
spice de la troisième édition. 4 volumes in 4°, Genève, Pellet, 1780.
16. Tableau à l'huile de Friedrich Georg Weitsch: Alexander von Humboldt.
1806.
17. Tableau à l'huile de Friedrich Georg Weitsch: Humboldt und Bonpland am
Chimboraô. Détail. 1810.
18. Lithographie colorée d'après une aquarelle d'Eduard Hildebrandt: Ale-
xander von Humboldt in seinem Arbeitszimmer. 1848.
List of Illustrations 385
19. Lithographie colourée d'après une aquarelle d'Eduard Hildebrandt: Ale-

xander von Humboldt in seiner Bibliothek. 1856.
20. Tableau à l'huile de Julius Schräder: Alexander von Humboldt. 1859.
spice de la troisième édition. 10 volumes in 8°, Genève, Pellet, 1780.
22. Cassandra Austen: Edward IV. From The History of England. 1791. Cour-
tesy of the British Museum.
23. Cassandra Austen: Mary Queen of Scots. From The History of England. 1791.
24. Cassandra Austen: Queen Elizabeth. From The History of England. 1791.
Courtesy of the Bridsh Museum.
25. J. M. W. Turner: Shipwreck. 1805. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery. London.
26. Benjamin West: Christ Rejected. 1814. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Aca-
demy of Fine Arts. Philadelphia.
27. Benjamin West: Christ Healing the Sick. 1811. Courtesy of the Tate Gal-
lery. London.
28. George Engleheart: Tom Lefroy. 1799. Collection ofJ.G. Lefroy.
29. Sandro Botticelli: Primavera / Spring. Uffici. Florence.
30. Sandro Botticelli: Coronation of the Virgin: Altarpiece of San Marco. Uffici.
Florence.
31. Sandro Botticelli: Madonna del Magnificat. Uffici. Florence.
32. Sandro Botticelli: Judith Returning to Bethulia. Uffici. Florence.
33. Sandro Botticelli: Fortitude. Uffici. Florence.
34. Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Garden of the Hesperides. Private collecti-
on.
35. Pieter Breughel: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1558. Musées Royaux
des Beaux-Arts. Brussels.
36. Pieter Breughel: The Fall of Icarus. David and Alice Van Buurenmuseum.
Brussels.
37. Georg Hoefnagel: River Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1553. Etching af-
ter Pieter Breughel. Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er. Cabinet des
Estampes. Brussels. Photo Bibliothèque Royale.
38. John Everett Millais: Mariana. 1851. The Makins Collection. England.
39. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Veronica Veronese. 1872.
40. James Abbot McNeill Whistler: Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White
Girl. 1864. Tate Gallery. London. Courtesy of the Tate Gallery.
41. William Hogarth: "The Countess's Morning Levee." From Marriage A-la-
Mode. Plate IV. Engraving (detail). 1745.
42. William Dent: Present State of the Nation. Coloured etching. 1791. British
Museum.
386 List of Illustrations
43. James Gillray: Affability. Coloured etching. 1795. Private collection.

44. James Gillray: The Wierd Sisters. Coloured etching. 1791. Private collec-
tion.
45. James Gillray: Smelling Out a Rat. Coloured etching. 1790. British
Musuem.
46. James Gillray: French Liberty, British Slavery. Coloured etching. 1792.
British Museum.
47. Richard Newton: A Bugaboo!!! Coloured etching. 1792. British Museum.
48. James Gillray: The Blood of the Murdered. Coloured etching. 1793. British
Museum.
49. Anonymous: Massacre of the French King. Printed broadside. 1793. British
Museum.
50. Richard Lee: Citizen Guillotine. Printed broadside. 1795. British Museum.
1762-1763. 1981. Panels 1-4. © by Robert Crumb.
57. Johnson in Travelling Dress as Described in Boswell's Journal of a Tour to
the Hebrides. Engraving by T. Trotter.
58. Johnson, shown the sights (and scents) of Edinburgh, grumbles in Boz-
zie's ear, "I smell you in the dark." From the Picturesque Beauties of Boswell.
1786. Etched by Thomas Rowlandson after designs by Samuel Collings.
59. Joshua Reynolds: James Boswell. 1787. National Portrait Gallery. London.
60. Joshua Reynolds: Oliver Goldsmith. 1770. Knole. Lord Sackville.
63. Robert Crumb: "The image of a wide pork butcher's knife." From Mairowitz
and Crumb: Kafka for Beginners. 1993. © by Robert Crumb.
Notes on Contributors
D A V I D BINDMAN
is Durning Lawrence Professor of the History of Art, University College
London, and Head of Department. He has also taught at the University of
California at Berkeley, and in 1980 was a Resident Fellow at the Yale Center
for British Art. His publications include William Blake as an Artist and William
Blake: His Art and Times as well as Hogarth (1981). He is General Editor of
Blake's Illuminated Books, published by The William Blake Trust and Princeton
University Press, and has just completed a book on eighteenth-century tomb
sculpture for Yale University Press.
FREDERICK BURWICK
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cali-
fornia, Los Angeles, where he is also editor of European Romantic Review. His
expertise in language theory, perception theory, and the theory of ekphrasis is
evident in his numerous studies of English and Continental Romanticism. Re-
cent books include The Haunted Eye: Perception and the Grotesque in English and
German Romanticism (1987); Approaches to Organic Form (1987); Coleridge's Bio-
graphia Literaria: Text and Meaning (1989); and Illusion and the Drama: Critical
Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era (1991). He has published on Lich-
tenberg^ commentary of Hogarth and, together with Walter Pape, has edited
Aesthetic Illusion (1990), and Reflecting Senses: Appearance and Perception in Cultural
Representations (1995). He is currently serving as co-editor of the critical-histo-
rical edition of The Works of Thomas De Quincey in 16 volumes.
CATHERINE CUSSET
ancienne élève de TENS, agrégée de Lettres, est assistant professor à Yale
University (French Department). Elle est l'auteur de nombreux articles sur
le dix-huitième siècle et d'un livre (à paraître) sur l'esthétique du plaisir dans
le roman et la peinture des lumières. Outre ses publications comme dix-
huitièmiste, elle est aussi l'auteur de deux romans parus chez Gallimard.
J E A N - P I E R R E DUBOST
est Professeur à l'Université de Stuttgart (Allemagne), département de littéra-
tures romanes. Il a publié entre autres: Wiederholter Anlauf einer unab-
388 Notes on Contributors
schließbaren Rede über das Verschwinden der Welt (1985); Eros und Vernunft (1988);
Der Weg ist nunmehr vorgerechnet: Sade und die französische Revolution (1989); Bild-
störung: Gedanken einer Ethik der Wahrnehmung (ed., 1994); Passagers de l'Occi-
dent: Maghrebinische Literatur in französischer Sprache (ed., 1994). Il est co-éditeur
de deux volumes dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Erotiques et libertins (à pa-
raître).
OTTMAR REINHARD ETTE

is Lecturer in the French Department (Romanische Literaturwissenschaft) at
the Katholische Universität Eichstätt. He received his PhD from the Univer-
sität Freiburg and is the recipient of several distinguished awards for research
and publishing: the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Preis (1987) for editing A. von
Humboldt's Relation historique (Frankfurt: Insel, 1991), and the Nachwuchs-
wissenschaftler-Preis für Romanische Literaturwissenschaft of the Universität
Freiburg (1991) for a study of José Martí, published by Niemeyer (1991). He
has written a great number of articles and edited special collections of essays
in European and American journals on intertextuality, the reception of myths,
travel literature and Latin American literatures. He has just completed a major
study of the works of Roland Barthes.
BERNADETTE FORT
is Professor of French at Northwestern University (USA) and co-editor of
Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has published articles and reviews on eight-
eenth-century French literature, art criticism, and cultural history, edited a
volume of essays on Fictions of the French Revolution and is the author of a
book on Crébillon fils and another, forthcoming, on Diderot's dialectic of art
criticism. Her essay on "Voice of the Public: The Carnivalization of Salon Art
in Prerevolutionary France" received the Clifford Prize of the American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1990. She is currently at work on a
book-length study of the academician C.-N. Cochin and the public sphere.
JAMES A . W HEFFERNAN
is Professor of English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire
(USA). Since his first book, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry: The Transforming Imagi-
nation (1969), he has published a number of articles on the relations between lit-
erature and the visual arts. His recent books on this topic include The Re-Creati-
on of Landscape: Λ Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner (1985) and
Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbety (1993). He has
also edited Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts (1987)
and Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography and Art (1992).
Notes on Contributors 389
WOLFGANG LOTTES
is Professor of English at the University of Erlangen-Niimberg. He has writ-
ten mainly on English poetry and interrelations between literature and fine
art. His publications include books on seventeenth-century English devotion-
al literature and on aspects of medievalism in Pre-Raphaelite art and numer-
ous articles (on 'metaphysical poetry,' the art theory of Shaftesbury, the
Gothic novel, Victorian literature and art criticism, the poetry of Philip Larkin
and Ted Hughes). He is co-editor of the Standard Edition of the works of the
Third Earl of Shaftesbury and he contributed to the revised Catalogue of Recu-
sant Books by Α. E Allison and D. M. Rogers.
A L A I N MONTANDON,
ancien élève de l'ENS, agrégé de philosophie, est professeur de Littérature
Comparée à l'Université Biaise Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand), où il dirige le Cen-
tre de recherches sur les littératures modernes et contemporaines. Il a publié
entre autres des ouvrages sur Sterne en Allemagne, Jean-Paul romancier, les
formes brèves, traduit en français des œuvres d'Hoffmann, de Jean Paul, de
Knigge, de S. Johnson, et édité de nombreux ouvrages collectifs consacrés
aux rapports du texte et de l'image (Iconotextes; Signes-Textes-Images), au savoir-
vivre en Europe ( Uber die deutsche Höflichkeit; Etiquette et Politesse; Du goût, de la
conversation et des femmes; Pour une histoire des traités de savoir-vivre, etc.) ainsi que
des ouvrages sur les littératures {La Répétition, L'Anecdote, Le Point final, etc.).
FRÉDÉRIC OGÉE
is Lecturer in English Literature at the Université de Paris X - Nanterre. He is
the author of many articles ranging from Restoration comedy to the English
novel of the eighteenth century, particularly Fielding and Sterne. His research
focuses on the emergence of an autonomous aesthetic discourse and, more
generally, on the relationship between empiricism and aesthetics. He has also
published studies on Hogarth and landscape gardening. The editor of Image et
société dans l'œuvre graphique de William Hogarth (1992), which is being enlarged
for a new edition, he is also at work on a study of Fielding and aesthetics.
W A L T E R PAPE
is University Professor of German Literature at the University of Cologne.
He was Guest Professor at the University of California (San Diego and Santa
Barbara campuses) in 1983 and 1985, and Resident Fellow at the Humanities
Research Institute, University of California at Irvine, in 1991. His books
include Joachim Ringelnat.Parodie und Selbstparodie in Leben und Werk (de
Gruyter 1974), Wilhelm Busch (1977), Das literarische Kinderbuch (de Gruyter
390 Notes on Contributors
1981). He is the editor of 1870/71-1989/90: German Unifications and the

Change of Literary Discourse (European Cultures, vol. 1); together with Frederick
Burwick he has edited Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches (de
Gruyter 1990) and Reflecting Senses: Appearance and Perception in Cultural Repres-
entations (de Gruyter 1995). He has also published editions of the works and
letters of Ringelnatz (8 vols., 1982-1988; 2nd ed. 1994) and of Lessing, Men-
delssohn, Hoffmann von Fallersleben. Numerous articles on German literat-
ure from the seventeenth century to the present time.
RONALD PAULSON
was Donnelly Professor of English at Yale University and is now Mayer Pro-
fessor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (USA). He is
also senior editor of English Literary History and a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. His extensive writing on British literature and
art of the period 1660-1820 includes his revised biography of William Ho-
garth in three volumes (1991-1993), books on Swift, Fielding, Rowlandson,
Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Gainsborough, Turner and Constable and the
genres of satire and the novel. In 1989, he published the revised catalogue of
Hogarth's Graphic Works. Other recent books include Breaking and Remaking:
Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700—1820 and Figure and Abstraction in Contem-
porary Painting, both published by Rutgers University Press.
PETER SABOR
was Professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, and is now

Professor of English at the Université Laval, Quebec.. His publications inclu-
de Horace Walpole: A Reference Guide·, Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage·, and
editions of Richardson's Pamela·, Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure·, Sa-
rah Fielding's Remarks on Clarissa, and (in collaboration), Burney's Cecilia
and The Wanderer, and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. He has co-edited, with Margaret
Anne Doody, Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, and most recently has edi-
ted, in two volumes, The Complete Plays of Frances Burney.
PETER W A G N E R
is Professor of English Literature at the Universität Koblenz-Landau, Landau,

and Head of Department. He has published on colonial American Puritan-
ism, erotica of the Enlightenment, and the relations between literature and
art. He is the editor of two eighteenth-century English novels in the Penguin
Classics series. His most recent book is Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the
French Revolution (1995). At present, he is concluding a study of William Ho-
garth's graphic art.
Index
Page numbers refer to text and footnotes,

numbers with 'n.' ( e. g. Abbé Du Bos 138n.) to notes only *.
Abbé Du Bos 138n. Appearance 325

Abel and Cain 319 Arabesque(s) 22,107,125,126, 184,
L'Académie Royale de peinture et de 313
sculpture 183 Architexte 24
Achille Tatius 44 Aretino, Pietro 49
Achilles 79, 100 Aristode 46, 47η.
Addison, Joseph 166n., 174 Armstrong, Isobel 233
Pleasures of the Imagination 166η. Arnold, Matthew 290n.
Aeneis, shield of 79 Arrested movement 82, 85
Aesthetic illusion 21, 78 Ars longa, vita brevis 80
Aesthetic Movement 259 Art history 4, 5, 13, 18n., 38n.
Aesthetics 36n., 39n. Art imitating art 79
Aesthetics of the gaze 63 Ashberyjohn 12,262
Affect 65 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 262
Alberti, Leon Battista 239 Auden, Wystan H. 12, 27, 263, 274n.
Allegory 54, 167 "Musée des Beaux Arts" 12,27,
Allusion 10 263-65, 273-80
Alpers, Svedana 13,14n., 34, 38n., 59, Audran, Claude III 125n.
262 Augustine and the Child 256
Alter, Robert 147 Austen, Cassandra 216, 231n., 235n.
Althusser, Louis 2 Austen, Henry 214,215η.
Altick, Richard 290n. "Biographical Notice" 214
Ambiguity 123 Austen, James Edward 232n.
American way of life 326 Austen, Jane 26, 213-235, 268n.
Analogies 137 "Catharine" 215
Andrea del Sarto 256 Emma 214, 222
Andries, Lise 185,178η. First Impressions 234
Androgyne 296 "The History of England" 216
Angelico, Fra 243, 253, 260 "Lesley Casde" 215
Anschaulichkeit 345 Mansfield Park 224
Apelles 239 NorthangerAbbey 218, 230
Aphrodite 248 Persuasion 26, 225, 226, 227, 228
* In compiling the index, Bruno Bittis, Oliver Chech, and Thomas Leitheiser, Cologne, pro-
vided valuable assistance.
392 Index
Pride and Prejudice 26, 214, 229, 233, Body 139

234 Boehm, Gottfried 13n.
Sanditon 26, 213, 215, 222 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 251
Sense and Sensibility 220, 221, 222, 227, Bonpland, Aimé 196
230, 268n. Book of Judith 249
Author function 177 Borelius, Birgit 289n.
Authorial intention 4, 305n. Bosch, Hieronymus 89
The Garden of Earthly Delights 89
Bakhtin, Michail 2 Boswell, James 29,324-345
Bal, Mieke 3,122, 280n, 302 London Journal 29, 326, 332
Balzac, Honoré de 116 Botticelli, Sandro 27, 236-261
Bancarel, Gilles 177 Adoration of the Magi 238
Bann, Stephen 7, 6n. Altarpiece of San Marco 249, 256
Barker-Benfield, G. J. 166n. Assumption of the Virgin 248
Barnett, Louise 5n. Birth of Venus 244,258
Barreca, Regina 30n., 296n. Calumny/Calumnia 239, 244, 256
Barreü, John 34n., 309n. The Coronation of the Virgin 239
Barthes, Roland 2, 17n., 31, 48, 180n., The Destruction of the Rebels 248
187, 281n., 282, 291n., 304, 326 Fortitude 249
Bataille, Georges 49 The Garden of the Hesperides (Primavera)
Bath, Michael 8n., 16n. 257n.
Battestin, Martin 138, 139,141 Illustrations of Dante Alighieri's Divina
Baudelaire, Charles 7, 108, 121n., 285 Commedia 248
Les Fleurs du mal 285η. Judith returning to Bethulia 244, 249
Baudouin, Pierre-Antoine 143 Madonna del Magnificat 244
Baudrillard, Jean 3 , 1 1 7 , 298n. Mars and Venus 252
Baxandall, Michael 14n., 59, 63n. Mystic Nativity 252
Beaumont, Sir Georges 83, 84 Primavera 238, 241, 244n., 254, 257,
Beauvoir, Simone de 304 261
Beck, Hanno 176 Primavera: Zephyr and Chloris 257
Beholder 5 9 , 6 3 , 6 8 Smeralda Brandini 254
Spring 256
Bellini, Giovanni 10η.
St. Augustine 238
Belting, Hans 4n.
The Temptations of Christ 248
Benjamin, Walter 324n.
The Trials of Moses 248
Berger, Dieter A. 285n.
Veritas 244
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 74, 296n.
Botticini, Francesco
St. Theresa 74, 296n.
Assumption of the Virgin 243
Bernstein, Raphael 309n.
Bourdieu, Pierre 37, 39n.
Bertelsen, Lance 214, 230n.
Boxali, William 253
Besançon, Alain 31 n.
Braider, Christopher 6n., 36n.
Bible 9, 16
Braine, John 10, 304n.
Biermann, Kurt-R. 176 Room at the Top 10, 304n.
Bindman, David 16, 28, 313n. Breughel, Pieter 27, 36n., 123, 263n.,
Blake, William 22,290,291 264, 273, 274
Blonsky, Marshall 34n. The Census at Bethlehem 274
Bloom, Harold 21, 22n. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 27, 123,
Boccaccio, Giovanni 242, 253 264, 273, 274
Index 393
Parable of the Blind 27 4 Carr, Joseph William Comyns 257

The Slaughter of the Innocents 214 Carretta, Vincent 28n.
Brewer, Daniel 6n. Carrier, David 10, l l n . , 14n., 61, 162n.
Brewer, John, and Roy Porter 34n. Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista 27, 237
Brinsley, Richard 334 Caws, Mary Ann 275
Brissenden, R. F. 139 Caylus, Comte de 121η., 135η.
Bronfen, Elisabeth 26n., 30n., 298n. Certeau, Michael de 40n.
Brontë, Charlotte 26 Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri 304n.
Jane Eyre 26 Chapman, R.W. 216n., 230, 235n.
Brooks, Peter 15n., 39n. Charles I 315
Brown, Laura 5n. Charon 132
Brownell Jameson, Anna 236 Charteris, Colonel 159, 162n.
Browning, Robert 12n., 27, 263-73 Chew, Samuel 290n.
Fra Lippo Lippi 267 Chimborazo 205
"My Last Duchess" 27, 263-73 Chloris 257
Brunette, Peter 15n. Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek 287,
Bryson, Norman 3, 6n., 33, 35n., 69n., 288n., 293n.
70n., 1 2 2 , 1 2 6 , 1 2 7 , 1 2 9 , 1 3 3 , 1 4 5 , Chouillet, Jacques 61,72n.
271,302 Christ 264, 278
Calligram 3 Christ, Carol 30n., 298n.
Vision and Painting 126n., 271n. Christian iconography 89
Word and Image 122, 127 Christian, John 239n.
Buffon, Georges Louis Ledere 191n. "Bume-Jones Studies" 239n.
Bukdahl, Else Marie 61,76n. Christin, Anne-Marie 36n.
Burke, Edmund 315 Church, Frederic Edwin 176η.
Burlin, Katrin R. 233 Cicero 45
Burne-Jones, Edward 239, 256, 257, Rhetorica ad Herennium 45
258 Cixous, Hélène 304η.
The Garden of the Hesperides 257 Claridge, Laura 301
Memorials 256n. Clark, Kenneth 244
The Mill 257 Clark, Lorraine 225, 227
Phyllis and Demophoon 257 Clarke, David 303n.
Song of Solomon 258 Clarke, Samuel 138n.
Sponsa di Libano 258 Clergyman 158
The Tree of Forgiveness 257 Clio 209η.
Burwick, Frederick 13n., 21, 162n., Clüver, Klaus 33n.
173n., 215, 325n. Cochin, Charles-Nicolas 75n., 180, 189
Busch, Werner 4n., 8 Code 22
Busst, A J. 301 n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 21, 80, 85,
Butor, Michel 29, 34,138n. 91,92, 94, 95,101, 102
Byron, Lord George Gordon 290n. "Dejection: An Ode" 94
"Epitaph for S. T. C." 94
Cain and Abel 319 "Kubla Khan" 9 2 , 9 4 , 9 5
Callcott, Maria 236 "Limbo" 91
Camille, Michael 8n. "The Pains of Sleep" 94
Campo Santo 101, 102 "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Caricature 8 , 1 6 , 2 8 , 3 1 0 , 3 1 2 94
394 Index
Collage 16 David, Jacques Louis 9, 10, 15n.

Colley, Linda 170 Le serment des Horaces 9, 10
Colonna, Francesco 64n. "Déjà lu", "Déjà vu" 282, 304
Comic strip 324, 325 De Quincey, Thomas 2 1 , 7 8 - 1 0 4 , 2 1 5
Conan, Michael 61, 62n. Blackwood's Magasine 78, 81, 97, 99,
Confession 78 103
The Conscious Lovers 169 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Constable, John 289 78, 80
Cook, Albert 33n. "Dream Fugue" 79, 92, 101
Corregio (=Antonio Allegri) 116 "Elegiac Stanzas" 84
Correspondance littéraire 183 "The English Mail-Coach" 79, 92,
Correspondences of the arts 5, 15n. 96
"Correspondences-of-the-arts- Excursion 85
approach" 23 "The Glory of the Motion" 92
Cosmetics 31 Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
Couture, Thomas lOn. 90, 98
The Craftsman 151 On Laohoon 96
Crébillon fils 52, 132 The Death of the author 5
Crick, Francis 39n. Debray, Régis 3, 29, 298n.
Cromwell, Oliver 248 Deconstruction 4n., 35
Crow, Thomas 123,125η. Delacroix, Eugène 293n.
Crowe, Joseph Archer 27, 237 Delilah 249
Crowe, Joseph Archer, and Giovanni Dempster, George 334, 340
Battista Cavalcaselle 237 Denon, Vivant 133
Crozat, Pierre 135η. No Tomorrow 133
Cruikshank, Isaac 319 Dent, William 312
Crumb, Aline 326n. Present State of the Nation 312
Crumb, Robert 8, 29, 324-345 Derrida, Jacques 1, 2, 3n., 4n., 17n.,
Confessions of Robert Crumb 326 33n., 46n., 60n., 125, 137n., 140,
Klassic Komik: Excerpts from Boswell's 264n., 298n.
London fournal 324, 326, 332 Différance 2
Culler, Jonathan 287n., 305n. La Vérité en Peinture 125
Culture and counter-culture 332 Of Grammatology 2n.
Cusset, Catherine 23 Supplement 2
Cuzin, Jean-Pierre 138n. The Truth in Painting 264n.
Cythera 123, 124, 127,129, 130, 135 Description 263
Description topographique 52
Daedalus 264,276 Diderot, Denis 8, 13, 20, 21n., 58-78,
Daichies, David 334n. 143, 175n., 185, 188n., 189
Daly, Gay 30n., 296n. Eloge de Richardson 75n.
Damisch, Hubert 3n. Engclopédie 189
Dandré-Bardon, Michel 62n., 68, 69 Salon de 1765 59
Daniel,Jean 3In. Didi-Huberman, Georges 3n.
Dante Alighieri 12n., 242, 248, 267, Dieckmann, Herbert 176, 185
290n., 296 Dieterle, Bernard 13n., 21, 286n.
Purgatorio 267 Dijkstra, Bram 30n., 296n., 301n.
Darwin, Charles 176n. Dionysius of Halicarnassus 12
Index 395
Dirscherl, Klaus 8n. Notional 12,273

Discourse 19, 127, 128, 130, 170 Ekphrastic fear 79, 94
Discourse aporias 19 Ekphrastic hope 80
Libertine discourse 19 Ekphrastic image 100
Discourse analysis 4n., 281,282 Ekphrastic moment 92
Dispositif libidinal 105 Ekphrastic poem 27
Divers traités de morale et d'éloquence Eliot, Thomas Stearns 289n.
43, 44n. The Love Song o f f . Alfred Prufrock
Dolci, Carlo 260 289n.
Dölvers, Horst 19n. Ellmann, Richard 285n., 289n.
Domenichino 260 Embalmment 80
Don Quixote 173n. Embarkations for Cythera 147
Donne, John 290n. Empedocles/Empédocle 54
Doody, Margaret Anne 216n. Ender, Eduard 197
Dorment, Richard 25n. Engleheart, George 234, 235n.
Dr Faustas 315 Enlightenment 6, 19, 50, 185, 283n.
Draper, Eliza 185,186η. Epistemology 166
Drawing 222 Eros 43, 111
Dream 60,64,75 Eroticism 23, 138, 142,144,147
Du Maurier, George 259 Erotography 51
Punch's Almanack for 1881 259 Erotology 51
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste (abbé) 62, 68, 70 Esrock, Ellen 40n.
Dubost, Jean-Pierre 19, 59η., 65η., Estren, Marc 325n., 326n., 332
117η. Ette, Ottmar 17,18n., 25
Duchet, Michèle 176,185 Evanescent 85, 87
Duffy, Michael 317n. Evanescent moment 90
Durational time 90 Evanescent time 86, 90
Duve, Thierry de 3n. Exner, Walter 287n.
Dying Trumpeter 79, 102,103
Fantasy 109n.
Earl of Rochester 166 Farinelli 31 On.
East India Company 186 Farmer, Norman K., Jr. 6n.
Easdake, Charles Lock 253 Farquhar, George 173
Echidna 301 Faust 103
Eco, Umberto 2, 30, 31η., 34η., 38 Félibien 64n.
L'Ecole des filles 49 The Female Quixote 171
Écriture 19,25 Feminism 3, 4n., 302n., 304
Écriture libertine 49 Feminist criticism 40
Edward IV 216 Femme fatale 30, 284, 300, 303η.
Eichbaum, Gerda 285η. Femme féconde 303n.
Ekphrasis 2, 3η., 10-15, 27, 44, 45, 48, Fergus, Jan 217η.
58-77, 78-104,121, 123,128, 162, Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 12
215, 223, 235, 260, 262, 273, 286η., Fête galante 130
298, 309, 343 Fielding, Henry 159, 167, 169, 173,
Actual 273 174
Critical 62, 65 Champion 159n., 169,173
Iconic 343 Covent-Garden Journal 159n.
396 Index
Jacobite's Journal 159n. Emaux et camées 283, 285n., 289n.,

Joseph Andrews 169, 174 292
Rape upon Rape 159 L'Orient 107n.
Works 159n. Roman de la momie, Le 107
Fin de siècle 27,284,305 Mlle de Maupin 22,107n., 118n.
Finberg, A. J. 226n. Spirite 22, 105, 111, 114η.
Fish, Stanley 39n., 269 Symphonie en blanc majeur 283, 292
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 10η. Voyage en Algérie 109n.
This Side ojParadise 10η. Voyage en Egypte 11 ln.
Flaubert, Gustave 290n. Gay, John 169,173
Fontanier, Pierre 68n. The Beggar's Opera 169
Fort, Bernadette 13, 20, 52n., 215 Gaze 30n., 33, 64, 65, 126, 130,193,
Fosse, Antonia de la 76η. 200, 271, 302, 303n.
Foucault, Michel 2, 4n., 15n., 31, Gender 302
137n., 177,195, 264n., 281, 298n., Gender difference 2
304 Gender studies 283
Genette, Gérard l i n . , 28, 180η., 206,
This is not a Pipe 264n.
284, 304
Fowler, Alastair 18
Seuils 180η., 206η., 284η.
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 8, 20, 59, 60,
Gent, Lucy, and Nigel Llewellyn 26n.
128,136-148,183
The Gendeman's Magazine 171n.
Le Grand-prêtre Cornus s'immole pour
George III 313
sauver Callirhoe 20, 59,128 Gérard 201
Les débuts du modèle 138 Gérôme, Léon 10η.
Progress ojLove 138 Gersaint, Edmé 121η.
Freidhof, Johann Josef 195 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 237, 253
French Revolution 315 Gibson, Edmund 159
French theory 302n.
Pastoral Letter 159
Freud, Sigmund 72, 117n. Gilbert, Sandra 304n.
Fried, Michael 61, 75, 76n., 144, 298, Gilbert, William Schwenck 259
300n., 303 . Gilbert, William Schwenck, and Arthur
Frozen moment 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 95 Sullivan 259
Fumaroli, Marc 43 Complete Plays 259n.
Fuseli, Henry [or Johann Heinrich Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride 259
Füssli] 315 Gilles 122
The Three Witches from Macbeth 315 Gillray, James 28,309-323
Affability 313
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 39, 345 The Blood of the Murdered Crying outfor
Gainsborough, Thomas 170 Vengeance 317,319
Gandelmann, Claude 63n. ^ Bugaboo!! 317
Ganymede 301 n. French Liberty, British Slavery 317
Gaskell, Ivan 35n. Smelling out a Rat 315
Gautier, Théophile 8, 22,105-118, Titianus Redivivus 315
121η., 125, 283, 285, 289η., 292 Wierd Sisters 315
Capitaine Fracasse 118n. Gilman, Ernest Β. 18n.
Caprices et Zigzags 107 Giorgione 242
Constantinople 109n., 111 n. Giotto di Bondone 63, 237, 242, 253,
Critique artistique et littéraire 115n. 256
Index 397
Glance 126,271,283 Heine, Heinrich 301

Godfrey, Richard 309η. Héliodore 44
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 13,103 Henry VIII, King of England 248
Faust, Part Two 103 Herder, Johann Gottfried 11 On.
Goldsmith, Oliver 161, 332n., 334 Herding, Klaus 8,325η.
Gombrich, Ernst H. 3, 36n., 62n. Hermeneutics 5η., 35η.
Goncourts, brothers 121n., 122, 127, Hermes 292
128,130,133,146 Heusser, Martin 28η., 34η., 325η.,
Gonson, Justice 161 326η.
Goodwin, Sarah Webster, and Elisabeth Hewlett, James 230η.
Bronfen 30n., 298n. Hieroglyph 22, 107
Gothic 219 Highmore, Joseph 214
Goya, Francisco José de 12η. Higonnet, Anne 303n.
Gozzoli, Benozzo 253, 260 Hüdebrandt, Eduard 201,209η.
Graff, Bernd 30η. Hül, Draper 309η.
Graham, Agnes 256 Hiroshige, Ando 287
Greenaway, Peter 1 Hirsch, E.D., Jr. 38η., 305η.
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 143 Histoire de Juliette 55n.
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 60, 183 Histoire du prince Apprius 52
Grimm, Jakob, and Wilhelm Grimm History Painting 170,319
30n. Hobson, Marian 76
Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreis- Hoefnagel, Georg 277
wirth 302n. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 108
Grub-street Journal 167n. Hofmann, Werner 294η.
Guthrie, Woody 332 Hofstätter, Hans 300η.
Güttinger, Fritz 342, 343 Hogarth, Jane 24, 150
Gutwirth, Madelyn 6n. Hogarth, William 2, 5,16, 24, 89,110,
Gynophobia 300 145,149-174,310,312, 315
Gysin, Fritz 10η. The Analysis ofBeauty 110,150η., 163,
166, 310
Habermas, Jürgen 15 Autobiographical Notes 173n.
Habitus 39 Beer Street 16
Hackabout, Kate 161 The Cockpit 150
Hackabout, M. 153 Enthusiasm Delineated 150
Hagstrum, Jean H. 6, 70n., 292n. Garrick as Richard III 315
Hansen-Löve, Aage A. 18 A Harlot's Progress 89, 151-157,159,
Harmony 288 161
Harms, Wolfgang 8n. Hogarth's Act 312
Harrison, Antony Η. 290η. Industry and Idleness 162n.
Harrison, Fraser 294η. The Laughing [or Pleased] Audience 169
Hardey, David 138n. The March to Finchley 170
Haskell, Francis 35n., 237n., 260n. Marriage à-la-Mode 89,160,162n.,
Hayter, Alethea 80 174,310
Hebel, Udo 10η. Rake's Progress 89,160,168, 310
Heffernan, James A.W. 10,12,27, Southwark Fair 169
33n., 36n., 70, 126n., 215, 286n., The Tailpiece 150
303n. The Times 150
398 Index
Holbein, Hans 10η., 248 Illusions of time 86

Holbrook, David 296n. Illustration 20
Hölderlin, Friedrich 57 Image 107,298,340,345
Hollander, John 12,263 Changing the meaning of the words
Holly, Michael Ann 1, 35n., 40, 302n. 340
Homer 12, 71, 79, 95, 96, 262 Evoked by a word versus evoked by
Achilles 12 text 345
Iliad 12, 79, 95, 96 Imagetext 16
Homofaber 190 Imitation of human action 79
Honan, Park 214 Impressionism 284
Hönnighausen, Lothar 255η., 289η., Indeterminacy 10, 38n., 107,166,
296η. 287n., 305
Hood, Thomas 290η. Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 298n.
Hoppner.John 231 Intention 37n.
Horace 5 , 9 , 8 0 , 8 1 Intermediality 2, 7, 9,18, 19n., 126n.,
Home, Herbert Percy 253n., 259 137, 305
Horowitz, Gregg 38n. Interpretation 131
Huet, Daniel Père 48 Intertextuality 17, 19n., 126n., 189n.,
Huët-Villiers, Jean Francois Marie 192, 281, 283n., 305
230n. Ireland, John 149,162n., 172n.
Humboldt, Alexander von 25,175, Hogarth Illustrated 149
176,195,196n., 199, 200 Iser, Wolfgang 4n., 38
Cosmos 176, 196n., 200
Reise in die Aquinoktial-Gegenden 176, Jacquin, Abbé 48
199 James, Henry lOn.
Tableaux de la nature 176 James, Liz 62
Humboldt, Wilhelm 8 Janus face 13
Humphrey, Hannah 313 Jean Paul 95,108
Hunt, John Dixon 28 Hesperus 108n.
Hunt, William Holman 253, 294 Titan 108
The Awakening Conscience 294 Jesuits 48
Hypotyposis 19, 44, 46, 65,198 John Bull 317
Johnson, Samuel 171, 172n., 333, 334,
Icarus 264, 276n. 340, 343
Icon 6, 49 Journal littéraire de Berlin 178
Iconicism 16n. Journal to Eliza 186
Iconoclasm 19
Iconolatry 19, 49 Kafka, Franz 343
Iconotext 15, 16n., 18, 106n., 188 Kant, Immanuel 20, 45, 55
Idea 325 Kay, Donald 333n.
Idem in alio 89,90 Keats, John 12, 21, 92, 93,101, 290n.,
Idler 172 292
Iliad 100 "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" 292
Illusion 13n., 58, 75, 76, 115 "Eve of St. Agnes" 93
Illusionism 21,77 "The Fall of Hyperion" 92, 93,101
Illusionistic 60 "Lamia" 292
Illusions of temporality 98 "Ode on a Grecian Urn" 12,21,92
Index 399
"Ode to a Nightingale" 93 Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Mahk-

Keller, Ferdinand 196 rey und Poesie 6, 81, 87, 89, 95, 98,
Kemal, Salim, and Ivan Gaskell 33n. 104,163
Kemp, Wolfgang 4n., 14, 19n., 39n. Letters from Yorick to Eliza 186
Knapp, Steven 38n. Levey, Michael 236, 242n., 247n.,
Kneüer, Sir Godfrey 214 253n., 259n.
Knight, George Austen 230 Levine, Stephen 38n.
Kohl, Norbert 286n., 300n. Leyland, Frederick Richard 253, 288n.
Kohle, Hubertus 21η. Libanius 59n.
Körte, Barbara 26n., 36n. Libertinism 19
Kranz, Gisbert lln., 15n. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 24,149,
Krieger, Murray 6, lln., 13, 59n., 150η., 159η, 162-68, 173-74, 325η.
286n. Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen
Kristeva, Julia 2, 17n., 282, 305n. Kupferstiche 149, 159n, 162n.
Kullman, Colby Haight 333n. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline 31, 70n.
Kunzle, David 29n. Lightbown, Ronald 254n.
Lilley, Ed 31n.
Lacan, Jacques 2, 4, 298n., 302 Lillo, George 172n.
Lamy, Bernard 65 Lippi, Filippo 238,254
Land, Norman 59n. The Crurífixion ofSt. Peter 254
Langland, Elizabeth 301 Literary criticism 5
Language 147 Logos erotikos 48
Launay, Nicolas de 183,189 London Magazine 81
Lausberg, Heinrich 45 Longus 44
Lawrence, Thomas 231 Lottes, Wolfgang 6n, 27, 237n, 253n,
Le Brun 68 260n.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 147n.47n. Louis XVI 319
Lederer, Wolfgang 296n. Loyola, St. Ignatius of 47
Lee, Rensselaer 6, 70n. Exercices spirituels 47
Lee, Richard'Citizen' 319 Lubbers, Klaus 35n.
Citizen Guillotine 319 Lucian 239
Lee, Vernon 244n. Luhmann, Niklas 35n.
Euphorion 244n. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen 15n, 37n.
Lefroy, Tom 234,235η. Luther, Martin 248
Le Goff, Jacques 37η. Lyndamine ou l'optimisme des pays
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 138n. chauds 52
Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Nicolas 48n. Lyotard, Jean-François 22η, 105
Lennox, Charlotte 171
Leonardo da Vinci 22, 64n., 76, 111, Macaulay, Thomas 332
112, 242, 244 Macdonald, Raymond A. 11, 34n.
La Gioconda/'Mona Usa 244 Magdalen 284
Mona Ljsa 111 Mairowitz, David Zane 343
Lepenies, Wolf 195 Male gaze 39
Leppert, Richard 18n. Male glance 303
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 6, 59, 70, Mallarmé, Stéphane 285, 326
71n, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, L'Aprìs-midi d'unfaune 285n.
98,104,163 Mandelker, Amy lOn.
400 Index
Manet, Edouard 10, 298, 303, 304η., Miller, J. Hillis 15n., 34n., 122,137n.,
306 302n., 324n., 326
Déjeuner sur l'herbe 298n. Milton, John 9, 9 4 , 1 5 0 , 1 7 2 , 290n.
Olympia 10, 298, 303, 304n. Paradise Lost 94
Mantegna, Andrea 251, 256 Mimesis 1 3 , 7 8 , 8 2
Marat, Jean Paul 54 Mimetic 64, 76
Marcus, Stephen 292n. Mimetic desire 90
Marin, Louis 3, 37n., 137n. Mimetic illusions of language 79
Marsh, Jan 30n., 296n. Minguet, Charles 176
Mary Queen of Scots 216 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel R. de 54
Mary, Virgin 278 Misogynist discourse 301
Masaccio 237 Misprision 22
Mason, John Hope 5n. Mitchell, W. J. T. 6, 19n., 31n., 62n.,
Matejka, Ladislav, and Irwin R. Titunik 7 0 n , 79, 97, 201, 226, 3 2 5 n , 345n.
37n. Monet, Claude 285
May, Gita 6In. Impression, soleil levant 285
McClary, Susan 18n. Montage 16
McNeill, David 26n. Montandon, Alain 15, 22, 70n., 105n.,
Medea 8 7 , 8 8 125,188n.
Medici, Lorenzo de' 238 Moreau, Gustave 300, 301
Medusa 8 1 , 9 1 Dalila 300
Medusa-moment 81, 91, 102,103, 104 Jeune fille thrace portant la tête d'Orphé
Meinhardt, Η. 325η. 300
Melancholy 123 L'Apparition 300
Melancholy myth 122 Œdipe et le sphinx 301
Melville, Herman 9 Salomé dansant devant Hérode 300
Moby-Dick or, The Whale 9 Morisot, Berthe 303, 306
Melville, Stephen 33n. Le berceau 303
Memoria 46n., 47 Morland, George 313
Mendel, Gérard 112 Morpheus 296n.
Mentalité 2 7 , 3 7 , 3 0 3 Morris, Jane 253n., 254
Mermoz, Gérard 33, 35η. Morris, William 290n., 294
Metaphor 343 Guinevere 294
visualized 343 Motherwell, Robert 12n.
Meursius français ou Académie des Da- Moxey, Keith 33, 35n., 38n.
mes 49 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 111η.
Meyers, Jeffrey 10η. The Magic Flute 11 In.
Michaels, Walter Benn 38η. Muckenhaupt, Manfred 33n.
Michelangelo 72, 248, 242, 255, Muffet, Mary 167
255-56 Mullan, John 142,147
Holy Family 255 Mullins, Edwin 284n., 294n.
Moses 72, 248 Murray, Douglas 216n.
Michie, Helena 296n. Museum 27
Millais, Sir John Everett 2 5 3 , 2 9 4 , 2 9 6 , Music 141
298n. Mutual illumination of the arts 2
Mariana 294 Myth 326
Ophelia 296
Index 401
Narcissus 30 Pathos 191

Narrative 59,60,69,263 Patten, Robert L. 28n.
Narratology 3 Paulson, Ronald 24, 25n., 160n., 161n.
National Portrait Gallery, London Pausanias 69, 71
23 In. Payne, Michael 34n.
Necrophilia 30 Pearce, Lynne 30n., 298n.
Neriich, Michael 15, 188n. Pears, Iain 34n.
Nerval, Gérard de 121 η. Pearsall, Ronald 292n.
New Criticism 286 Perception 33n., 39n., 172, 325
New Historicism 15η., 35η. Visual 325
New Woman 303η. Percy, Thomas 150
Newton, Isaac 165,138n. Reliques ofAnâent English Poetry 150
Newton, Richard 317 Pernéty, A.-J. 75n.
Nichols, John 162 Petrarca, Francesco 252
Nietzsche, Friedrich 49, 325 Pfeiffer, Ludwig 325η.
Nocturne 286 Pfister, Manfred 19n.
Norton, Charles Eliot 251 Pfotenhauer, Helmut 13n.
Novalis l l l n . Phallocentric discourse 296
Phillipson, Michael 35n.
Observer 30n., 38 Philostratus 61, 62n., 65n., 69
Ogée, Frédéric 23,117η., 132 Phonotextuality 18n.
Omphale 113 Piero della Francesca 256
Opium 80,81,91 Pierrot 122
Opium-dream 94 Pües, Roger de 70, 75n.
Orcagna 243,260 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 15n., 101,
Inferno 243 102
Orgel, Stephen 324n. The Antiquities of Rome 101
Ormond, Leonée 259η. Carceri 101
Osterkamp, Ernst 13n., 21 Pissaro, Camille 285
Ovid, Publius Naso 12, 272, 276 Pitt, William, the younger 313
Oxford English Dictionary 12, 17, 20 Plato 31, 44, 50, 58, 60, 64n, 75, 76n.
The Symposion 44, 50
Painting 6, 44 Plett, Heinrich 18
Paladilhe, Jean, and José Pierre 300n. Pliny, Gaius Caecilius Secundus 268n.
Palimpsest 115,290,301 Poe, Edgar M e n 270,296
Palmieri, Matteo 243 The Oval Portrait 270
Panofsky, Erwin 39 Pointon, Marcia 220, 234n.
Pape, Walter 7, 13η., 21η., 29, 325η. Poliziano, Angelo 251
Paralysis of vision 93, 94 Poliamoli, Antonio and Piero 237
Paratext 178,284 Pollock, Griselda 302η.
Parergon(al) 23, 125, 140, 263, 264n. Polybius 193
Parrhasius 268n. Pope, Alexander 151,160,167,172
Parthénon 114n. Epistle to Bathurst 160
Patchwork 191 Pornography 52
Pater, Walter Horatio 27, 242, 244n. Portalis, Baron Roger 146
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry Portrait 16,44,52,207,215,220
242, 244n. Posner, Donald 122,126, 127,129
402 Index
Poststructural theories 3 Response 61

Poststructuralism 4n., 7, 35 Reynolds, Kimberley, and Nicola
Pottle, Frederick A. 332, 333n, 342, Humble 30n., 298n.
343 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 88, 89, 170, 229,
Poulet, Georges 137 310, 319, 335n.
Poussin, Nicolas 63, 87 Discourses 170n.
Et in arcadia ego 87 Sarah Siddons Contemplating the Tragic
Praz, Mario 300n. Muse 88, 89
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 253 Rhetoric 3,13, 43, 323
Pre-Raphaelites 27, 294, 296n. Richardson, Samuel 24, 70, 152,158n.,
Prévost, Abbé 191 160, 214
Manon Lescaut 191 Clarissa 158n., 160,214
Preziosi, Donald 4n., 14n. Pamela 152, 158n.
Price, Richard 315 Sir Charles Grandison 214
Priestley, Joseph 138n. Riepenhausen, Ε. 150η.
Primeau, Ronald 333n. Riffaterre, Michael 275
Probyn, Clive 5n. Roberts, Marie M., and Roy Porter 26n.
Prostitution 161 Robertson, Charles John 230n.
Psychoanalysis 4n., 304 Robinson, Alan 34n.
Pygmalion 90,91 Rococo 23, 121n.
Pygmalion-moment 81, 91, 102, 103 Rococo arabesque 125
Romantic 130
Quintilian 4 6 , 8 2 Romantic irony 167
Romanticism 21
Raby, Peter 290n. Romantisme 56
Radcliffe, Anne 115 Romney, George 231, 313
Raeburn, Henry 231 Rooke, Thomas Matthews 257
Ragionamenti 49 Rose, Jacqueline 40n., 302n.
Raleigh, Sir Walter 81 Rosenberg, Pierre 138n., 144
Rambler 172 Rosenblum, Robert 300n., 303n.
Raphael 112,116 Roskill, Mark 38n.
Rauch, Christian 203η. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 253, 255,
Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas 8, 25, 175, 290n., 294, 296
176, 185η. Ballads and Sonnets 255
Histoire des deux Indes 175, 176, 185η. Beata Beatrix 296
Reader, Keith Α. 18 The Blessed Darnell 294
Reading 333 The Bower Meadow 294
Visualized 333 For 'Spring' hj Sandro Botticelli (In the
Realism 40,203 Accademia of Florence) 255
Reception theory 39n. Letters 253n.
Redding, Cyrus 226n. Poems 255n.
Reflexivity 79 Veronica Veronese 296
Rembrandt 3n. Rossetti, William Michael 253n., 254
Renaissance 6, 12n., 29n., 47, 167, Roston, Murray 6n., 214
237n., 242, 253, 263n., 284, 301n. Roth-Müller, Christel 292η., 300η.
Reni, Guido 260 Rouquet, Jean André 24, 149, 151n.,
Representation l i n . , 20, 47, 129, 130, 153,154n, 171n.
135,163,197, 215, 226, 296
Index 403
Description du tableau [,..] 151n., 171n. Schulze, Sabine 34n.

Lettres 153, 154n. Scott, David 36n.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 175, 184n., Scott, Grant F. 6n., 10, 11 η., 12η.,
198, 340 34η., 37η.
La Nouvelle Héloïse 175 Scott, Sir Walter 235
Rowlandson, Thomas 289, 317, 335n. Marmion 235
The Contrast 317 Searle, John R. 38n.
Rowohlt, Harry 326, 342, 343 Semiology 37n.
Roy, P.C. 76n. Semiotics 35, 304
Royal Academy 171,315 Sensibility 136
Rubens, Peter Paul 22,111,112, 113, Sensorium 136, 138n.
130,133 Sequentiality 59
Conversation 130 Sexual adventures 333, 340
La Toison d'or 111, 113 Visualized 333,340
Ruskinjohn 27, 236η., 241, 247, 248, Sexuality 305η.
249, 253 Shakespeare, William 9, 12, 150,171,
The Aesthetic and Mathematic Schools of 172, 290n., 324n.
Art in Florence 247 Hamlet 9
Ariadne Florentina 247 The Rape ofLucrece 12
Design in the Florentine Schools ofEngra- Sheridan, Geraldine 48n.
ving 247 Sheridan, Frances 337
Fors Clavigera 248 Sheridan, Thomas 334,340
Modern Painters 253 Sheriff, Mary 61, 63n., 68, 69n, 71,
Mornings in Florence 249 74n, 143,144,145
Pall Mali Gazette 236n. Showalter, Elaine 2n., 304
Works 236n., 241 η., 247n. Sidney, Philip 290n.
Sign(s) 7, 62
Sabin, Roger 326n. Instituted and arbitrary signs 58
Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean 224 Natural sign 62
Sabor, Peter 26 Verbal sign 324-45
Sade, Marquis de 20, 49, 50, 53-56 Visual sign 324—45
Sahut, Marie Catherine 76n. Signorelli, Luca 256
Saisselin, Rémy G. 70η. Silverman, Deborah 302n., 303n.
Salomé 292,301η. Similitude in dissimilitude 89
Samson 249 Sinnasamy, Evelyne 15
Sancho Pança 164 La femme se découvre 15
Sandburg, Carl 289η. Sister arts 5, 35, 59
"Fog" 289η. Sister-arts approach 10
Sarto, Andrea del 267 Snow, Edward 40
Sartre, Jean-Paul 28In., 302n. Snyder, Joel 40n., 291 n.
Saslow, James Μ. 301n. Sollers, Philippe 122, 143n.
Satire 326 La Fête à Venise 122
Savonarola, Girolamo 248 Sonesson, Göran 36n.
Schlegel, Friedrich 111 n. Spacing 33
Schlegel, August Wilhelm 6n. Spalding, Frances 288n.
Schmitt, Jean-Claude 26n. Spatial arts 33
Schräder, Julius 204 Spectacle 63, 64, 77
404 Index
Spectator, see beholder 63, 64, 65 Tanner, Tony 221, 233n.

The Spectator 167,168η. The Tatler 168
Speech-text 313 Taylor, James Baylard 202
Spenser, Edmund, 80, 150 At Home and Abroad 202
Epithalamion 80 Teleology 55
Sphinx 292,301η. Temporal movement 80, 83, 98
Stafford, Barbara Maria 4, 26n. 32n., Temporal perception 80, 83
61, 76n. Temporalisation 195
Stahl, August 326n. Temporality 98
Starobinski, Jean 61, 69, 122 Tennyson, Alfred 290n., 292, 294
Stasis of a literary text 79 "Mariana" 294
Steegman, John 1830-1870 237n. "Maud" 292
Steele, Richard 168 Testelin 69
Steinberg, Leo 19n. Thanatos 296n.
Steiner, Wendy 6 Theatricality 76
Sten, Christopher 15n. Thornhill, Sir James 169n.
Stephanoff, James 230n.
Thornton, Bonnell 171
Stereotype 159,290
The Times of the Day 162n.
Sterne, Laurence 3, 7, 8, 23,136-148,
Timomachus 88
162,163,164,186
Tintner, Adeline R. 10η.
A Sentimentaljourney through France and
Tintoretto 248
Italy 3, 7, 138,139, 186
Titzmann, Michael 33n.
Tristram Shandy 8, 138, 142, 162, 163,
Todd, Janet 138n.
164
Todorov, Tzvetan 2n.
Yorick 23
Toepffer, Rodolphe 24
Steuben, Karl von 201
Topazio, Virgil W. 61 n.
Stevens, Martin 8n.
Tortonese, Paolo 107
Stevens, Wallace 145
Notes towards a Supreme Fiction 145 Hiéroglyphes 107n.
Stewart, Philip 6n. Transformation 190,334
Stott, Rebecca 292n., 300n. Text into Image 334
Stovel, Bruce 223,224η. Translation 342
Sublime 225 Altering the meaning of the text 342
Sullivan, Arthur 259 The Triumph of Death (fresco) 102
Summers, David 37n. Trudgill, Eric 294n.
Swift, Jonathan 5, 17n., 151, 167, 172, Trusler, John 24, 149, 160n.
283n. Hogarth Moralised 149, 160n.
Gulliver's Travels 5n., 17n. Tucker, Herbert 269
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 27, 239, Turner, Charles 226
285n., 287n., 290n., 293, 298n. Turner, Joseph Mallord William 15n.,
"Designs of the Old Masters at Flo- 226
rence" 239n. Shipwreck 226
"Dolores" 293 Typhon 301
Essays and Studies 239
The Fortnightly Review 239 Uccello, Paolo 256
"Théophile Gautier" 285η. Ut pictura poesis 5, 6n., 70, 137n., 163
Symonds, John Addington 27, 251 Uzzah 158
Sympathy 139
Index 405
Van Gogh, Vincent 126 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 8, 23, 105n.,

Varga, A. Kibédi 33η. 121-135
Vasari, Giorgio 27, 239, 254n., 267 Embarkationfor Cythera 124
Ventura, Roberto 176n. Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera 23,
Venus 123,126,132, 244 123,124-130,135
Vénus dans le cloître 49 Watts, Richard. J. 345n.
Verbal art 6 Webb, Peter 292n.
Verbal representation 10 Webb, Ruth 62
Verlaine, Paul 121η. Webster's New Twentieth-Century Dic-
Vermeer, Johannes 3n., 10η., 209n. tionary 20
Veronese, Emmaüs 113n., 114 Weisstein, Ulrich 6n., 18n.
Verrocchio, Andrea del 237 Weitsch, Friedrich Georg 193,205η.
Victorian 27, 256, 284, 290, 296, 304 Wenders, Wim 30
Vidal, Mary 129,130 Bis ans Ende der Welt 30
Viewer 62, 64, 76 Wendorf, Richard 16
Viewer, see beholder 59, 63, 68 West, Benjamin 231, 232
Virgil, Publius Marcus 12n., 79, 95, 96, Christ Healing the Sick 232
270n. Christ Rejected 231
Aeneid 95, 96, 270n. Wheadey, Francis 313
Ekphrasis 96 Whistlerj a m e s Abbot McNeill 285,
Virolle, Roland 61 286η, 287, 289, 298
Vision 40,193 The Little White Girl 298
Visions 78 Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling
Visual art(s) 6,13,214 Rocket 287
Visual poetics 1, 2, 7, 34n. Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Old Battersea
Visual representation 10, 35n. Bridge 287, 289
Visual rhetoric 3 Symphony in White, No. 1 - 3 298
Voile, Nathalie 76n. Symphony in White, No. 3 298
Voltaire 175 The White Girl 298
Candide 175 Wigley, Mark 33n.
Voyeurs 74n. Wilde, Oscar 5n, 22, 28,126n,
Vues des Cordillères et Monuments des 281-306
Peuples Indigènes ... 177 "The Harlot's House" 304n.
"Impression du Matin" 22, 283-306
Wagner, Peter 44, 70n., 156n., 162n., Poems 283
268n., 309n. Salomé 300
Walpole, Sir Robert 159 "The Sphinx" 300
Walzel, Oscar 6n. Willems, Gottfried 8n, 333, 334n.
Warburton, William 11 On. Williams, William Carlos 12, 263n.
Warburton, Bishop 151 Picturesfrom Breughel and Other Poems
Warncke, Carsten Peter 8n. 12, 263n.
Warton, Joseph 151 Wills, David 15n.
Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope Wilson, Robert 30
151 Wilton, Andrew 226n.
Warton, Thomas 150 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 242
Observations on Spenser's "Faerie Queene" Wittgenstein, Ludwig 31
150 Wolf, Bryan l l n , 32
406 Index
Wollheim, Richard 36η. "Elegiac Stanzas" 21

Wollstonecraft, Mary 136,145 Essay on Epitaphs 86, 87
Extractfrom the Cave ofFancy 136 "Upon the Sight of a Beautiful
Wölpe, Hans 176 Picture" 83
Woman 337 Wornum, Ralph Nicholson 237
As sexual object 337 Wright, Beth S. 76n.
Wood, Christopher 294n.
Yates, Francis 47n.
Woodruff, James F. 333n.
Yorick, Parson 163
Woolf, Virginia 304
Word-image relations 1
Zander, Horst 18
Words 340 Zeno 96,98
Controlling the perception of the Paradoxes 96
image 340 Zephyr 257
Wordsworth, William 21, 83, 84, 86, Zeuxis 268n.
87, 289, 290n.
Colour Plates
II. E d o u a r d M a n c t : Olympia. 1863 (Salon o t 1865). M u s é e d'Orsay, Paris.
III. I c a n - H o n o r é F r a g o n a r d : Le Cmnd-pñtrr Cmsiu s'immole pour samr Ca/tirboë. Salon o t 1 '65.
Musée du Louvre, Paris. Copyright p h o t o R . M . N.
IV. ) e a n - H o n o r é F r a g o n a r d : Les Débu/s dn modèle. 1769?

Musée j a c q u e m a r t - A n d r é , Paris.
VI. James Abbot McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Cold- OldBattersea Bridge.
1872. Tate Gallery, London.
I X . D a n t e G a b r i e l R o s s e t t i : The Boirt-rMeudon'. 18 2.
City A r t G a l l e r y , M a n c h e s t e r .
X . | o h n F.yerett Millais: Opbt/hi. 18nl.

T a t e Gallery, L o n d o n .
x i . James Abbot McNeill Whistler: Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl. 1862.
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
XII. James Abbot McNeill Whistler: Symphony in White Λ α i . 1865-1867.

Barber Institute of Fine Arts. University of Birmingham.
XV. Berthe Morisot: Le Berceau. 1872.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
European Cultures
Studies in Literature and the Arts
1870/1871-1989/1990
German Unifications and the Change
of Literary Discourse
Edited by Walter Pape
1993. VI, 382 pages. Bound. ISBN 3-11-013878-6 (Volume 1)
The City of Scholars

New Approaches to Christine de Pizan
Edited by Margarete Zimmermann and Dina De Rentiis
1994. XI, 314 pages. With 32 plates. Bound. ISBN 3-11-013879-4 (Volume 2)
The Turn of the Century / Le tournant du siècle

Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts
Le modernisme et la modernité dans la littérature et les arts
Edited by / Edité par Christian Berg, Frank Durieux, Geert Lernout
1995. X, 660 pages. Bound. ISBN 3-11-014018-7 (Volume 3)
Hanna Leitgeb
Der ausgezeichnete Autor
Städtische Literaturpreise und Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1926—1971
1994. VIII, 428 pages. Bound. ISBN 3-11-014402-6 (Volume 4)
Robert S. Leventhal
The Disciplines of Interpretation
Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and Hermeneutics in Germany 1750 — 1800
1994. XI, 351 pages. Bound. ISBN 3-11-014424-7 (Volume 5)
Walter de Gruyter W
DE Berlin · New York
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Aesthetic Illusion
Theoretical and Historical Approaches
Edited bj Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape
1990. X, 478 pages. With 21 illustrations. Cloth. ISBN 3-11-011750-9
'Illusion' has shown itself more and more in recent times to be a key concept in
the perception of art and reality. This volume, proceedings of an international sym-
posium of the University of California Humanities Research Institute (1989), con-
tains representative studies on questions in epistemology, psychology, sociology, and
the pictorial arts, relating to mimesis and the theories of fiction and illusion from
Plato to Post-Structuralism, and especially in English, French and German literature
from the Renaissance to the present. Bibliography, index of names, and subjects.
Reflecting Senses
Perception and Appearance in Literature, Culture, and the Arts
Edited by Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick
1995. VI, 369 pages. With 37 figures and 8 tables. Bound. ISBN 3-11-014580-4
Appearance and illusion have been studied (and denounced) at least since Plato. But
the impetus European culture derives from them, and in turn, the imput art and
literature give to their psychological study, proves their seminal and continuing
power. This group of important papers concentrates on three epochs: The Enlight-
enment, Romanticism, and the modern period, to exhibit the complex relation
between the study of appearances in science and in art. A major topic in this
relation, touched upon in each of the papers, is the perceptual process by which
sensory data are integrated into a mental gestalt or transformed into a verbal or visual
representation. — The essays of this volume were produced by a collaborative research
group at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, Irvine.
Walter de Gruyter WDE Berlin · New York

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Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality

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Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

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Icons, texts, iconotexts : essays on ekphrasis and intermediality /

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Icons — texts — iconotexts : essays on ekphrasis and

© Copyright 1996 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin.

Koblenz-Landau, August 1995 Peter Wagner

Ekphrasis and Theories of Reading Visual Representations

Iconotexts: The Eighteenth Century

Iconotexts: The Nineteenth Century

The Strategie Withdrawal from Ekphrasis in Jane Austen's Novels . . . 213

Butt-head: "Is this art?"

If a narrative is created in words, that's where it should stay.

It's more reassuring to regard paintings as sardine tins

fields of ekphrasis and intermediality (whose changing boundaries I will try to

13 Bann: The True Vine, p. 28 (italics in the original).

ceedings of conferences have already been published on the twentieth century

1. Definitions and Concepts

24 Macdonald: Review of Krieger: Ekphrasis, p. 85.

41 See my articles on Hogarth listed in the bibliography.

In the section concerned with theories o f reading visual representations, Jean-

potential of ambiguity and ambivalence contained in the images to be sub-

manoeuvres. In a most impressive manner she demonstrates what research on

minology, misprision56, involve the same self-reflexive strategies that inform

56 Bloom: A Map of Misreading.

evokes a feeling of both strangeness and familiarity, remains something mys-

58 See Toeppffer's Essai dephysiognomonie (1845), p. 6.

59 For a first step in this direction see my "How to (Mis)Read Hogarth."

and artistic aims, Heffernan's essay is a thoughtful close reading of important

O n e of the many paradoxes surrounding the image in Western culture is the

particularly the Pre-Raphaelites, exploited this potential of the image in rep-

possesses an irresitable force. It produces an effect of reality, even when it is false.

76 I am referring to the sub-title of his article, "Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic."

visual art as silent and surrounded by an aura of nonverbal immediacy. We

of analysis in art history dialectical enough, and subtle enough, to compre-

Iconolâtrie et iconoclastie de l'écriture libertine

1 Fumaroli: L'âge de l'éloquence.

la rhétorique religieuse quand il s'agit pour elle de s'avancer sur le terrain de

d'avance le mouvement de spirale dialectique. Les signes semblent inchangés

Premier acte donc: l'appropriation religieuse moderne des puissances de l'hy-

4 Cf. Dubost: Eros und Vernunft, pp. 182-227.

essentiellement sur l'hypotypose, l'ekphrasis et la memoria, redistribuant à des

8 Barthes: Sade, Fourier, hoyola, p. 69.

Je reviens donc à mon point de départ et je clos ce premier acte en

matérielle et physiologique qui signifie, à mi-chemin entre le discours libertin

10 Cf. sur ce point Dubost: Eros und Vernunft, pp. 31-67.

tien du transcendantalisme platonicien sous le masque de sa reconduction,

nissent la dynamique de l'écriture (le type le plus connu en est l'œuvre de

11 A paraître dans le premier volume à'Erotiques et libertins, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la

Quelle est cette chimère impuissante et stérile,

14 Œuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, vol. 14, p. 81.

D u vrai républicain unique et chère idole

Pourquoi l'idole divine serait-elle bizarre et dégoûtante parce qu'idole tandis

Devenant tour à tour, aux mains de qui l'érigé

17 Dans XHistoire de Juliette la Delbène expose longuement ses conceptions philosophiques

par l'hypotypose de la vérité de la contre-image libertine, mais qu'elle indique

Ekphrasis as Art Criticism:

Abstract: Are ekphrasis and interpretation two 'incommensurable modes of writing,'

Ekphrasis has a suspect status in the theory of representation. Participating in

entable, even while that representation is allowed to masquerade as a natural