410
for the outrage expressed by Salon visitors in the 1860s to move toward
present-day accounts by Bourdieu and Alfred Gell. Despite differences
in style, iconography, medium, and genre, these works turn out to raise
similar issues about agency, excess, and material presence that offer
ways of moving beyond Bourdieu and Gell to understand the effects of
artworks on their viewers.
411
Fig. 1. Antonio Canova, Pauline Borghese as Victorious Venus, 1808, marble, Rome: Villa
Borghese [photo: Wikipedia Commons]
the frisson of the uncanny gave way to less elevated sentiments among
the viewers, and ultimately the Princess Borghese would ask the Prince
to remove her statue from public viewing. After its removal to Rome,
he put the statue in a specially constructed wooden cage to which he
kept the keys; in the 1830s, the Pope and his vicar were still so uneasy
about the indecency of the pose and the reactions it caused that one
of the inheritors of Canova asked the engraver Domenico Marchetti to
make a new version of his etching of the Venere Vincitrice, this time
with veils added to cover her naked torso.5
Another feature added to the excessive nature of this statue: its genesis. As mentioned, Pauline Borghese had posed naked for the sculptor.
When asked how she felt about this, she famously replied, Well, the
room was heated. But the fact that Canova had made a moulage vif of
her body added to its scandalous character. In itself, the use of a molding made on the living body of the model, to serve as the plaster model
from which the statue would be made (and which in this case is still
preserved in the Canova Museum in Possagno) was considered slightly
disreputable, because it was felt to be a sign of poor craftsmanship on
the sculptors part. But there was also a whiff of scandal because of the
412
intimacy it implied between the sculptor and his model, as well as the
transgressive nature of the interaction that took place in the sculptors
studio. Neoclassicist art theorists rejected such procedures because the
result would be too naturalistic and would thereby excite base feelings
in the viewers.6 In the case of the Venus Victorious, moulages of the
hands, feet, and breasts of Pauline Borghese survive; a hand ended up
in the collection of Vivant Denon, the founding director of the Louvre
and an arbiter of taste at the Imperial court. A molding of a breast is
now in the collection of the Museo Napoleonico in Rome (Fig. 2).7
All this resulted in an almost uncanny suggestion of living presence.
The statues torso is turned toward the viewer, and its lips are opened as
if on the point of speaking, but its eyes gaze past the viewer, as do those
of its famous predecessor, the Venus deMedici in the Uffizi nearby, who
also seems first to invite, but eventually to refuse, an interaction with
the spectator. The framing is at the same time a summum of artificiality,
if not of artistic distancing. The marble is made to suggest a living and
breathing body; the wooden bed is disguised as a marble couch. Thus,
what Canovas biographer, the art theorist Quatremre de Quincy, called
the characteristic of high artaesthetic distance resulting from a use of
materials that mark the difference between the living being represented
and its representationhere almost topples over into its opposite, a
statue that is so lifelike it appears to be animated.8 Hence Canovas
Venus presents many features we would now call excessive, in the sense
that the statue transcends the boundaries of decorum and neoclassical
aloofness. By its very virtuosity in representing a divine female body, it
destroys the distance of artistic representation and suggests that we are
looking at a living being, not a statue.
The Cup
Yet the suggestion that Pauline Borghese was somehow really present
in her images could be made even more intense. In the same years as
the statue was made, 18041808, the French Imperial goldsmith JeanBaptiste-Claude Odiot produced a cup of gilt silver in the shape of a
breast, with a butterfly as a handle (Fig. 3).9 Its shape is very similar to
that of the Canova Venuss breast. The connection with her is strengthened by the use of the butterfly, which she used as a personal symbol.
There are historical precedents for this form. In ancient Greece and
Southern Italy, so-called mastoid cups made in the shape of a breast were
produced quite frequently, often decorated with apotropaic eyes (Fig.
4). Closer to Pauline Borgheses time, in the 1780s, a porcelain service
413
Fig. 2. Antonio Canova [attr.], plaster moulding of Pauline Borgheses breast, c. 1808,
Rome: Museo Napoleonico [photo: author]
Fig. 3. Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot, cup in the shape of Pauline Borgheses breast, c. 1810,
17 x 19.5 cm, gilt bronze, Paris: Muse des Arts Dcoratifs [photo: Wikipedia Commons].
414
Fig. 4. Mastoid cup, Attica, c. 520-500 BC, black figure pottery, 110 x 190 mm. The cup
was found in Etruria, and purchased by the British Museum in 1837 from the collection
of Lucien Bonaparte [photo: British Museum].
415
Fig. 5. Jean-Jacques Lagrene le Jeune, bowl from Marie-Antoinettes Dairy at Rambouillet, porcelain, 1787, 13.5 x 7 (cup), 13 x 9 cm (tripod) [photo: Wikipedia Commons].
416
417
418
laid the foundation for an ethnography of the love of art that looked
beyond arts special aesthetic and artistic status to concentrate on the
interaction between images or artifacts and their viewers. But at the
same time, opening up this new way of thinking made it very difficult
to understand what it is in art that causes such attribution, because, as
the quotes by Coleridge and Dulaure suggest, everything could become
a fetish. Fetishism was considered as part of the early stages of mankind
and also as present in each persons childhood. Auguste Comte, together
with Marx and Freud one of the major theorists of fetishism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pointed out that if his readers found
it difficult to understand the fetishism of primitive civilizations, they
would only have to recall their own childhood, or situations in which
they had been extremely affected by objects they did not understand,
to recognize that the tendency to attribute life to inanimate objects is
universal.23 By the end of the nineteenth century, Alfred Binet and Freud
placed this kind of viewer behavior under the large category of paraphilia or fetishism, now defined as the attribution of excessive affective
value or agency to an object in an attempt to form a relationship with
that object, which the sufferer from paraphilia cannot form with a real
human being.24 They identified the psychological mechanisms involved
but had far less to say about the qualities of the object that made it into
a fetish. In a disenchanted world, what is now generally called fetishism
is still as present as ever, but it becomes an enigma. In particular, all
these thinkers are silent about what it is in artworks that makes their
viewers engage with them as if they were living beings.
419
Fig. 6. Edouard Manet, Le Djeuner sur lherbe, 1862-3, oil on canvas, 208 x 265.5 cm, Paris:
Muse dOrsay [photo: Runion Nationale des Muses].
Fig. 7. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm, Paris: Muse dOrsay
[photo: Runion Nationale des Muses].
420
Fig. 8. Edouard Manet (183283), Victorine Meurent, c. 1862, oil on canvas, 42.9 x 43.8 cm,
Boston: Museum of Fine Arts [photo: Museum of Fine Arts].
421
Fig. 9. D. Vlasquez, The Toilet of Venus (Rokeby Venus), 164751, oil on canvas, 122.5 x
177 cm, London: National Gallery [photo: National Gallery].
of Venus that precedes the one sculpted by Canova. The public reacted
no less intensely.26
Apart from a few critics praising Manets skill as a painter, reactions
were generally negative. They ranged from puzzlement at the lack of a
recognizable subject or at Manets mixture of genres (the landscape, the
still life, the scene from contemporary life) and disregard of academic
conventions (using the canvas size normally reserved for religious or
history painting), to outrage or mockery at the inclusion of a naked
woman sitting next to two fully dressed men. A majority of critics considered the female figure a prostitute and put the painting among the
vast number of depictions of naked women who, in their view, transgressed the boundaries of art to excite desire in their male viewers. In
the Catholic press, much archaeological material was presented that
aimed to show that the representation of naked women was a sign of
decadence in the development of ancient Greek art, such that the depiction of Aphrodite had declined from a dressed goddess of celestial love
to a naked Venus available to all. In one splendid exercise of aesthetic
defence mechanisms, Flauberts friend Maxime Du Camp noted in his
review of the Salon des Rfuss that the principal [quality], of art is its
chastity.27 Nancy Locke summed up the reasons for the fierce dislike
that the painting caused: The act of viewing Manets Djeuner sur lherbe
422
The Bracelet
Olympia and the Venus Borghese are connected in many ways: by their
subject matter, pose, and excessiveness. In both cases, that the sitter was
a recognizable person, known to the public, who posed as a goddess or
one of her avatars, added to the whiff of scandal. But there is another
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
works of art, and tried to define them. All the responses discussed here
move beyond the realm of aesthetic distancing, fictional engagement,
or phenomenological introspectionbeyond representation. It is this
feature of these responses in its double manifestationin the work of art
whose material presence disrupts conventional viewing attitudes, and in
the psychological reactions of the viewers who feel compelled to disrupt
these boundaries as wellthat must be the foundation for a historically
and psychologically informed account of viewers experiences.
Conclusion
We have looked at four versions of Venus, all of which exercise such
an effect on their viewers that their status as artworks is challenged or
outright denied. Despite the insights that Bourdieu and Gell offer into
the ways art exercises its effects on viewers, and despite the fact that
Gells art nexus offers very interesting ways to refine and historicize
Bourdieus institutional analysis of art, we are still left with incomplete
answers to the central question: what is it in artworks as images, in their
representational aspect, that exercises such a spell on their viewers? That
we have to take into account this aspect of art seems unavoidable, given
that all reactions discussed here revolve around some sort of identification or elision of the person represented and the work representing it.
Agency, I have argued, is created through artistic qualities, representational features of artworks, but also through material presence. In all cases
discussed here, their excessive nature, in the sense of an erosion of the
boundaries between the image and the person represented, was related
to an experience of the living presence of this same person. Viewers
confuse or identify the artwork with the living being it represents, and
then move into an interaction in which the image seems to be present
and sometimes even alive. The fiction or illusion of living presence can
be created through artistic means (the luster of the marble skin of the
Venus Borghese, the exchange of glances in the Rokeby Venus), but also
through the material presence of objects that are very close to the living
being represented: a moulage vif suggesting the tangible presence of
the sitter; the bracelet containing Manets hair suddenly revealing the
painters presence as an attribute of the person depicted in the painting.
The material presence of the artwork is also a condition for the most
excessive reactions: iconoclasts such as Mary Richardson did not attack
photos of the Rokeby Venus, but the painting itself, and precisely at the
places where one would wound a living human being to kill.
430
The greatest excess, therefore, seems to occur not when the fiction of
living presence is strongest, but when that fiction is disrupted by intrusions of real persons or features closely associated with them. That is,
such reactions are not extreme cases of divided consciousness or serious
games of make-believe, in which viewers know they are dealing with an
image while acting as if they were in touch with a real being.55 Something more complex is going on. In the case of the Venus Borghese, its
origin in moulage vif and the persistent rumors that moldings of her
hands and breasts were circulating in Rome contributed significantly
to the liberty with which viewers handled the statue. This transgressive
behavior compelled Pauline Borghese to ask her husband to retire the
statue from public viewing, and to make him construct a wooden cage
in which it was locked up, thus depriving the statue of its artistic status
in an even more drastic way than its licentious viewers did. In the case of
the Manet paintings and the Rokeby Venus, the works stage a fiction of
interaction that becomes so intense that viewers forget they are dealing
with art, not life. At the same time, their protagonists ignore a major
convention of the female nude: they gaze directly out of the painting
into the eyes of the viewers and thus refuse to be the passive object of
their gaze. As the reviews of Olympia and the Djeuner document, this
active, dispassionate scrutiny made viewers uncomfortable and fed the
aggression toward these works. This experience comes very close to the
fear and fascination felt by non-Western worshippers of idols as described
by eighteenth-century students of fetishism, or the primitive fear of the
eyes of images figured in representations of the myth of Medusa, which
plays on the same fear that statues might turn out to be living beings.
In other words, many existing accounts of the reactions discussed
here, from studies of fetishism as an early phase in the development of
human culture or individual human beings to more recent theories of
agency, single out representational features of images such as lifelikeness or artistic virtuosity as the main cause of such reactions. But the
cases discussed here suggest a different cause. It is not the illusion of
life itself that causes the most intense reactions, but the intrusion of real
life, or rather the awareness that such intrusions can never be avoided.
Where Bourdieu singles out the conflicts caused by attempts to create
symbolic revolutions, and Gell defines technical virtuosity as a main
cause of the effect of art, the works discussed here suggest that artistic
agency is strongest when a complex interaction is set up between persons
represented and viewers that is at the same time highly virtuosic in its
creation of an illusion of living presence, but also excessive because the
borders between art and life turn out to be permeable. We now know
much about the artistic means of achieving this effect, but what needs
to be investigated are the psychological mechanisms of the viewer.
Leiden University
431
Notes
I am much indebted to Odile Nouvel, Curator Emerita of the 19th-Century Department
of the Muse des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris, for drawing my attention to the cup by Odiot
and its implications for our understanding of fetishism; to the organizers of the Beyond
Representation conference held at the Bard Graduate Center and the Institute of Fine
Arts of New York University in September 2012 for giving me the opportunity to present
a first version of this paper; and to Stijn Bussels, Bram Van Oostveldt, and Miguel John
Versluys for their astute and generous comments.
1 See M. A. Flecken, Und es ist Canova, die sie machte (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2008),
92136, for the genesis of the statue.
2 For discussions of torch-lit visits, see Melchior Missirini, Della vita di Antonio Canova
libri quattro (Prato: Fratelli Giachetti, 1824), 189, and Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremre
de Quincy, Canova et ses ouvrages, ou, mmoires historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce clbre
artiste (Paris: A. Le Clerc et cie, 1834), 14749. The observation on the gradazione della
carnazione can be found in Antonio Canova, Lettre Vivant Denon, Rome, 2 April
1811, A 117.55 (Biblioteca nazionale, Rome), quoted in Pascal Griener, Le Gnie et le
thoricien. Canova selon Quatremre de Quincy, in Griener and Peter J. Schneemann,
eds., Images de lartiste - Knstlerbilder (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), 149160.
3 On torchlit visits see J. J. L. Whiteley, Light and Shade in French Neo-Classicism, The
Burlington Magazine 117, no. 873 (1975): 76873; C. Mattos, The Torchlight Visit: Guiding the Eye through Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Antique Sculpture
Galleries, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49/50 (2006): 149; and Griener, La Rpublique
de lOeil: LExprience de lart au sicle des Lumires (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 53.
4 Josef Joubert, Essais (17791821), ed. R. Tessonneau (Paris: Nizet, 1983), 45: Ces formes
idales et molles dont ils [les corps anims] semblent comme environns [apparaissent]
chaque trait.
5 Hugh Honour, Canova e lincisione, in Canova e lincisione, ed. Grazia Bernini Pezzini and Fabio Fiorani (Bassano del Grappa: Ghedina & Tassotti, 1993), 1121; Kristina
Herrmann Fiore, Lettere inedite sulla statua di Paolina, in Canova e la Venere Vincitrice,
ed. Anna Coliva and Fernando Mazzocca (Milan: Electa, 2007).
6 Tom Flynn, The Body in Three Dimensions (New York: Abrams, 1998), 11522.
7 Flecken, Und es ist Canova, 136.
8 Quatremre, Canova et ses ouvrages, 68.
9 Odile Nouvel, Symbols of Power: Napoleon and the Art of the Empire Style 18001815 (New
York: Abrams, 2007; exh cat Muse des Arts Dcoratifs, St. Louis Art Museum and Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston), 25051.
10 Selma Schwartz, The Etruscan Style at Svres: A Bowl from Marie-Antoinettes Dairy
at Rambouillet, Metropolitan Museum Journal 37 (2002): 25966; The Svres Porcelain
Service for Marie-Antoinettes Dairy at Rambouillet, French Porcelain Society Journal 9 (1992):
195200.
11 Pierre-Franois Hugues dHancarville, Antiquits Grecques et Etrusques: Tires du cabinet
de M. Hamilton, 4 vols. (Naples 176678, actually published 176876), 3:144, 3:145, 4:45.
12 Nouvel, Symbols of Power.
13 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria VI.ii.2930; see also Caroline A. van Eck, Art, Agency and
Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2015), ch. 2.
14 On Jonathan Richardson see Carol Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of
the English Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).
432
15 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men: Collected from
Conversation, ed. J. M. Osborn (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 1:1289. Quoted by John
R. Hale, Art and Audience: The Medici Venus c. 17501850, Italian Studies 31 (1976):
47.
16 See, for example, Johann Gottfried Herders ambivalent reaction to the Borghese
Hermaphrodite, with its mix of sexual attraction and embarrassment, in Van Eck, Art and
Agency, Introduction.
17 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (1905; London: Hogarth,
196674), 7:130243.
18 Van Eck, Art and Agency, ch. 6.
19 Ottaviano de Guasco, De lusage des statues chez les anciens: essai historique (Brussels: J.
L. de Boubers, 1768), xii. On Guasco see, most recently, Stefano Ferrari, La Scultura
Antica tra Montesquieu e Winckelmann: Il De lUsage des Statues chez les Anciens di Ottaviano
Guasco, Anabases 21 (2015), 1124: Pour un Antiquaire, les statues sont des trsors,
lamateur les caresse comme ses dlices, elles sont des poupes pour lhomme riche &
fastueux.
20 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Sammler und die Seinigen, in Smtliche Werke
nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Munich, 1988), 6:7786.
21 Jacques Antoine Dulaure, Des cultes qui ont prcd et amen lidoltrie ou ladoration des
figures humaines (Paris: Imprimerie De Fournier Frres, 1805), 18, 20ff, and 68.
22 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4, The Friend,
ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), 4:106. See also 4:518,
where he argues against fetishism in all perception and representation.
23 Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (18301842; Paris: La Socit Positiviste,
18921896), 5:1920 and 5:66, note 1; see also 2:8186 and 3:6.
24 On the history of fetish theories, see Alfonso M. Iacono, Le ftichisme: Histoire dun
concept (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992); William Pietz, The Problem of the
Fetish, I, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 517; Pietz, The Problem of the Fetish,
IIIa: Bosmans Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism, Res: Anthropology and
Aesthetics 16 (1988): 10523; and Pietz, Le ftiche: Gnalogie dun problme (Paris: Kargo &
Lclat, 2005); Hartmut Bhme, Fetischismus und Kultur: Eine andere Theorie der Moderne
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006).
25 On douard Manets use of sources, see Michael Fried, Manets Modernism: Or, The
Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 23185.
26 Aby Warburg, Manets Djeuner sur lHerbe, in Warburg, Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin
Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig et al. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 64759. Much
ink has been spilled on the meaning of this group; for summaries of its interpretations,
see the entries on the Djeuner in the Paris exhibitions of 1983 and 2011; Manets Djeuner
sur lHerbe, ed. Paul Hayes Tucker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998); and David
Carrier, Manet and His Interpreters, Art History 8 (1985): 32055.
27 Maxime Du Camp, Le Salon des Rfuss, Revue des Deux Mondes (July 1863), quoted
in Anne McCauley, Sex and the Salon: Defining Art and Immorality in 1863, in Manets
Djeuner, ed. Tucker, 48.
28 Nancy Locke, Le Djeuner sur lHerbe as a Family Romance, in Manets Djeuner, ed.
Tucker, 125.
29 For this anecdote and an overview of reactions, see Fried, Le Modernisme de Manet ou
Le visage de la peinture dans les annes 1860: Esthtique et origines de la peinture moderne, trans.
Claire Brunet (1996; Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 3:176 ff. (hereafter cited as MM).
30 Gronte [Louis Leroy?], Le Salon en 1865, La Gazette de France, 30 June 1865, quoted
in MM 197.
433
31 Flix Derige, Le Salon de 1865, Le Sicle, 2 June 1865, quoted in MM 197: Le blanc,
le noir, le rouge, le vert font un vacarme affreux sur cette toile: la femme, la ngresse, le
bouquet, le chat, tout le tohu-bohu de couleurs disparates, de formes impures, vous saisit
le regard et vous stupfie.
32 Jean Ravenel (Alfred Sensier), Salon de 1865, LEpoque, 7 June 1865, in MM 197:
Le bouc missaire du salon, la victime de la loi du lynch parisien. Chaque passant prend
sa pierre et la lui jette la face.
33 See the conservation notes of 19721973 mentioned in Susan Sidlauskas, The Spectacle
of the Face: Manets Portrait of Victorine Meurent, in Perspectives on Manet, ed. Therese
Dolan (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 45n10.
34 Alain Clairet, Le Bracelet de lOlympia: Gense et destine dun chef doeuvre,
LOeil 333 (1983): 3641, which quotes the short note by Julie Manet and shows an image
of the bracelet, now in a private collection.
35 See Marcia R. Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellry
(New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), 293315.
36 In defining this kind of relation between protoype and index, Alfred Gell draws on
Nelson Goodmans notion of exemplification. See Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach
to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), 69.
37 Pierre Bourdieu, Manet: Une rvolution symbolique. Cours au Collge de France (19982000)
suivis dun manuscrit inachev de Pierre et Marie-Claire Bourdieu, ed. Pascale Casanova (Paris:
Raisons dAgir/Seuil, 2013) (hereafter cited as M).
38 Bourdieu refers to Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, Art and Literature 4
(1965): 193201, and Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Partisan Review 6/5 (1939). But unlike
Greenberg, Bourdieu does not see Manets formalism as part of a telelological movement
toward the complete autonomy of art in abstract painting; for him, Manets endeavours
obey the logic of the champ artistique as the locus for social competition, habitus, etc.
See M 168: Voil lhypothse: lhistoire de Manet, selon moi, cest le passage dun corps
constitu, dune Eglise au sens Wbrien, un champ. . . . Ce que Manet ralise . . .
cest une mise en question du corps, et en particulier de son pouvoir discrtionnaire de
constituer une oeuvre comme peinture ou non-peinture: tre expos au Salon, ctait
tre constitu comme peintre. See also Bourdieus summary of his aims in the Lecture
of January 8, 2000 (M 489).
39 For his formalist approach, see for instance his observations on Manets Le Balcon in
M 7045: Le lien formel entre les couleurs sur la toile est privilig au dtriment des
liens entre les gens de la ralit.
40 M 723: En fait, les deux rvolutions, celle qui conduit Manet conqurir de nouveaux
objets, et en particulier tous les symboles de la modernit, et celle quil accomplit, dans
le domaine de la forme, en rpudiant toute message littraire, signifi transcendant
lexpression proprement picturale, qui, dans la tradition, confre loeuvre son unit et
sa raison dtre, au profit de la cohrence esthtique, nen font quune: elles ont toutes
les deux pour principe labsolutisation du point de vue esthtique.
41 See the Lecture of February 24, 1999 (M 20910).
42 Quoted in McCauley, Sex and the Salon, 59, from Thophile Gautier, Salon de 1864,
Le Moniteur Universel, 15 June 1863. See also Manet, 18321883, eds. Franoise Cachin and
Charles S. Moffett (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), in collaboration with
Michel Melot. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Manet, 18321883 shown
at the Grand Palais in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
43 M 503: [Manet] ne veut pas figurer la vie intrieure, et il fait des efforts pour carter
tout ce qui peut tre peru comme une vocation de lintime et du subjectif. . . . lrotisme
mivre de la Vnus de Cabanel ou les sourires cucul des tableaux de Bouguereau.
434
44 M 528: Dernire chose, le regard de la femme qui fait que cest une sorte de sphinx.
Je pense quil y aurait beaucoup dire sur le fait que le regard est trait comme a. Et
puis il y a aussi. . . .
45 On the meaning and reception of the Rokeby Venus, see John K. G. Shearman, Only
Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press,
1992), 22730, and Andreas Prater, Venus at Her Mirror: Velzquez and the Art of Nude Painting (Munich: Prestel, 2002).
46 Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 6467.
47 Gell, Art and Agency, 67.
48 Gell, The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology, in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon,
1992), 43.
49 Gell, Technology of Enchantment, 44.
50 See, for example, Elsje van Kessel, Not Painting but Flesh: Venetian Thinking on the
Lives of Paintings in the Early Modern Doges Palace, in The Secret Lives of Art Works: Exploring the Boundaries of Art and Life, Van Eck, Elsje van Kessel, and Joris van Gastel (Leiden:
Leiden Univ. Press, 2014), 95116, for a development of Gells theory into a model for
historical anthropological inquiry into the agency of sixteenth-century Venetian paintings.
51 Gell, Art and Agency, 5, 66, 9697.
52 Pascal Boyer, What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996): 8397.
53 Homer, Iliad, Book 18, lines 462617. On this description and its influence on Western art and viewers responses, see Anne-Marie Lecoq, Le Bouclier dAchille: Un tableau qui
bouge (Paris: Gallimard, 2010); on ekphrasis there is a vast literature, but for its relation
to experience, see Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical
Theory and Practice (Ashgate, UK: Farnham, 2009).
54 Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetische Erfahrung und Literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1991); Griener, La Rpublique de lOeil; James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A
History of People Who have Cried in Front of Paintings (London: Routledge, 2004); T. J. Clark,
The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2006).
55 For these accounts of living presence response, see Kendall Walton, Mimesis as MakeBelieve: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
1990), and Jason Gaiger, Participatory Imagining and the Explanation of Living-Presence
Response, in British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 4 (2011): 36381.
570
by john rodden
university of
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