Works of Art That Refuse to Behave:

Agency, Excess, and Material Presence

in Canova and Manet
Caroline van Eck
Introduction

ntonio canovas statue of pauline borghese and douard

Manets Olympia and Djeuner sur lherbe are among the most
scandalous representations of the female nude shown to the
public in the nineteenth century. The Djeuner caused intense outrage;
policemen had to be posted in front of Olympia to protect the painting
from the aggression of viewers, and the Canova Venus caused so many
indecent reactions that it was eventually locked away from public sight
in a wooden case. Although Canova and Manet had little in common,
Canovas statue of Pauline Borghese as Venus Victorious and Manets
Djeuner sur lherbe and Olympia share some suggestive features that allow
us to understand more about the ways in which these works acted so
intensely on their public. Playing on the theme of the victorious goddess,
they represent well-known living women in the nude, in a recognizable
way. In all three works, the sitter and the artist are present in the work
in ways that cut through academic and theoretical conventions prevalent at the time of their creation, thus contributing to their excessive
character. Manet is also is the subject of Pierre Bourdieus posthumously
published lectures on the effects of art held at the Collge de France in
19982000, which provides an added argument for considering Manet
in this cluster devoted to the French sociologist.
This essay consists of two parts, structured along similar lines: a reconstruction of the effects of these works on their contemporary viewers and of the material presence of the sitter and artist in these works,
and a discussion of the various theories developed to account for their
excessive effect. In the case of the Venus Borghese, these range from
the classical precepts of rhetoric, urging artists to achieve such vivid
lifelikeness that viewers are led to believe they are looking not at a work
of art but at the living being it represents, to early theories of fetishism
developed around 1800. In Manets case, we start from the grounds

New Literary History, 2015, 46: 409434

410

new literary history

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.

I. Canovas Statue of Pauline Borghese as Venus Victorious

In 1804, Prince Camillo Borghese asked the sculptor Canova to make
a statue of his wife Pauline, Napoleon Is favorite sister. The result,
finished in 1808, was a lifesize portrait of Pauline reclining naked on
a bed, represented as Venere Vincitrice, Venus Victorious: she holds the
apple that Paris gave her when asked to choose the most beautiful goddess (Fig. 1). It was shown to the public for the first time in 1809, in
the Palazzo Chiablese in Turin, where the Prince was holding court at
the time as governor of Piedmont, appointed by his brother-in-law Napoleon. It was the first statue of this size representing a living woman, a
very public figure, naked, and as a goddess, put on show in the palace
where she lived.1
From the moment the Venere Vincitrice was shown, it inspired scandal.
The beauty and social position of the sitter, the pose, the nudity, and the
fact that Pauline Borghese had posed naked for Canova were already
sufficient in themselves to attract a crowd. But the extreme virtuosity
of Canovas treatment of the body of the goddess, and in particular his
ability to suggest the softness and lustre of living skin, also made the
statue a celebrity. Crowds came to gaze at the statue at night: it was illuminated by torchlight, which, as Canova himself also claimed, enabled
one to appreciate le gradazione della carnagione, the rendering of
living skin, much better than daylight did.2 These nocturnal viewings of
Pauline Borghese as Venus were part of the fashion for looking at statues by torchlight that had originated in late eighteenth-century Rome,
where it had been propagated at the Villa Albani, and that reached its
culmination in the nocturnal visits by Napoleon and his court to the
newly arrived Laocon in the Muse Napolon. The French diarist Joseph
Joubert observed how, under such viewing conditions, in the flickering
light the statue seemed to move toward the viewer from the dark.3 The
play of light on the marble suggested living skin, and the ideal and
soft forms, that seem to surround these animated bodies appear with
every new cast of the light. A philosopher, he added, would call these
the appearance of the soul.4 Often, however, aesthetic appreciation and

works of art that refuse to behave

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

new literary history

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

works of art that refuse to behave

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

new literary history

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].

was created at Svres for Marie-Antoinette, to drink milk produced at

her dairy in Rambouillet. It was designed by Jean-Jacques Lagrene and
included a set of ttons avec ses pieds ttes de chvre, cups in the shape of
a breast supported by goats heads (Fig. 5).10 It may have been inspired
by the images of mastoid cups reproduced in Hancarvilles Antiquits
trusques, grecques et romaines of 176667, which served as a model for
many neoclassical porcelain objects designed in Svres in the 1780s.11
More importantly, as Odile Nouvel has argued, this cup, together with
other decorative art works from the Empire, exemplified a new way of
creating and conceiving the excessiveness of objects (and what we now
would call the attendant paraphilia or fetishism of the viewer).12 As in the
cup created by Odiot, antiquity here became tangible. Handling these
objects meant handling classical deities and symbols in a very direct,
almost physical relationship, intensified by the unmediated character of
touch. But these classical presences served at the same time as framing
devices. The handle of Odiots cup modeled after the breast of Pauline
Bonaparte is a butterfly, or psyche in Greek. It is both an element of
the story of Eros and Psyche often represented in Empire art and the
Greek word for the soul, and it thus suggests a very intriguing extra layer

works of art that refuse to behave

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].

of meaning to this cup. It indicates by its shape and connotations the

representational nature of the cup that is at the same time subverted
by its very lifelike, subtle modeling and coloring, suggesting living skin.
As Nouvel has pointed out, lifesize, freestanding mirrors first came on
the market around 1800. They were mainly located in the bedroom of
the mistress of the house, with classical figures surrounding the mirror,
often taken from the same story of Eros and Psyche. They framed the
glass in which the woman could admire herself, or look at herself and
her partner as objects of desire. A double interaction between viewer
and image is staged here: instant fetishism, framed by classical references that draw attention away from the paraphilic image toward its
representational nature. At the same time, the real presence of the
viewer reflected in the mirror adds reality to the classical figuration of
the frame and transforms the whole object into a tableau-vivant.

From Enargeia to Fetishism

Now what takes place here, in viewers interactions with these Empire
statues and mirrors, marks an important transition in the way the effect

416

new literary history

of artworks is conceived. Often it manifests itself as an attribution of

life or animation to art. Canovas Venus Victorious was first shown to
the public at the very moment when traditional ways of understanding
such reactions were becoming discredited. They are part of a very long
tradition going back to Homers Iliad, shaped in large part by classical
rhetoric. Vivid lifelikeness, or enargeia, was one of the most powerful
means of persuasion. Quintilian argued that oratory fails of its full effect
. . . if its appeal is merely to the hearing . . . and not displayed in [its]
living truth to the eyes of the mind. The orator should act on the eyes,
not the ears of the public, and should excite vivid images before their
minds eyes.13 Such words have an almost physical impact; they proceed
from the memory and mind of the orator to penetrate the minds of the
listeners, where they activate their memories and thus trigger a similar
process of imaging, almost a mental staging of the experience of looking
at the scene, object, or person described by the orator.
This rhetorical account of creating lifelikeness and its impact shaped
how viewers in Europe in antiquity and the early modern period looked
at statues and put into words what they saw or felt. Reactions to the
Venus deMedici in the Tribuna in Florence are particularly well documented. They range from conventional exclamations at her lifelikeness
or liveliness to attributions of emotions, an inner life, and perhaps even
a character to the statue. Sometimes viewers would be carried away by
enargeia and really treat the statue as a living being. Jonathan Richardson,
for instance, wrote in the 1720s full of admiration for the same Venus,
in particular of the softness of her flesh, which seemed it would yield to
the touch, but he also noted that the statue needed rigid surveillance
. . . to repress the too vivid enthusiasm of some spectators.14 The Scottish painter Andrew Ramsay endowed the statue with a personality and
an inner life, observing that she displayed three different passions . . .
in three different postures. Before, she seems to invite you to her; move
to the right and she seems in a more rapturous degree of pleasure, and
on the left she seems to turn away from you, either in scorn or being
tired.15 Up to the 1750s, such attributions were generally understood
in the rhetorical terms of enargeia. In the following decades, however,
under the influence of the emerging discipline of aesthetics, they became
increasingly a source of discomfort, because engaging emotionally with
a statue as if it were a living being disrupted the autonomy of art and
the rational independence of aesthetic judgment.16
In Empire art, the illusion of the tactile presence of antiquity and of
a merging of the representation of a body with that body itself is both
suggested and glorified by the use of framing devices that transfer the
image into a fictive antiquity and draw attention to the representational

works of art that refuse to behave

417

character of the excessive image. This is an intermediate stage between

the rhetorical interest in vivid lifelikeness as a means of persuasion
and the nineteenth-century disapproval of lavishing love and desire on
inanimate objectsemotions now held to be normally reserved for fellow human beingsas a form of what Freud would call paraphilia or
fetishism.17 As in rhetorical theories of enargeia, there is an awareness that
a statue or painting is a representation (and, for neoclassicist theorists
such as Quatremre, this was the foundation for an artifacts claim to be
a work of art). At the same time, its extreme vividness leads the viewer
to forget its representational character and to identify it with the living
being represented. In the case of Canovas Venus, the singular physical
closeness of the statue to its sitter caused by its moulage vif also creates
an intensification of material identity and presence.
This is also an issue in the new notion of art that emerged around 1800:
such excessive reactions to artworks could be related to what was called
the fetishism of non-Western cultures. Charles de Brosses introduced the
term ftichisme in 1760 to describe the veneration by so-called primitive tribes in Africa of natural objects, artifacts, or statues as imbued
with the presence and power of the divinities that were associated with
these objects.18 It took some decades before this term was also used to
label the behaviour of European art lovers. The Piedmontese rudit Ottaviano de Guasco was one of the first to put into print his observation
that connoisseurs loved their art objects just as intensely as they loved
their mistresses, if not more so: For an antiquary, statues are treasures,
the amateur caresses them like his delights, they are dolls for the rich
and fastidious man.19 In his novella Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1798),
Goethe places the European art lover among the gallery of characters
who have trouble observing the borders between artworks and the living
beings they depict, and he thus suggests in a sly manner that there is
not that much difference between the African fetishist and the Weimar
art lover.20 The French Jesuit Jacques-Antoine Dulaure and the English
poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge were among the first to state explicitly
that everything can become a fetish, and everybody a fetishist. Dulaure
in 1805: All things, and even all words, spoken or written, to which one
attributes a miraculous force foreign to their essence and contrary to
the laws of nature, must belong to fetishism.21 And here is Coleridge:
Could we emancipate ourselves from the bedimming influences of
Custom, and the transforming witchcraft of early association, we should
see as numerous Tribes of Fetish- Worshipers in the streets of London and
Paris, as we hear of on the coasts of Africa.22
This new way of thinking about the tendency of viewers to endow
works of art with life, emotions, and sentience had two implications: it

418

new literary history

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.

II. Manets Djeuner sur lherbe and Olympia

To pursue the question of what it is in works of art that cause such
reactions, I will now turn to two nineteenth-century images of Venus that
are in some respects similar to the Venus Borghese: Manets Dejeuner sur
lherbe and Olympia (first exhibited in the Salon des Rfuss in 1863 and
1865, respectively, and now in the Muse dOrsay, Paris; Figs. 6 and 7),
both showing Victorine Meurent (Fig. 8). To further explore the issues
of agency, excess and material presence, I turn to Bourdieu and Gell.
One common thread that links these authors is that artworks representing Venus play a major part in their theories: in Bourdieus lectures on
Manet, the Djeuner sur lherbe and Olympia figure prominently; Gell used
Diego Velsquezs Rokeby Venus (164749, National Gallery London; Fig.
9) and the severe iconoclasm it suffered in 1914 as a major illustration
of the complexities of the agency exercised by artifacts.

works of art that refuse to behave

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

new literary history

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].

As is well known, in the group of three central figures in the Djeuner,

Manet alluded to two Renaissance paintings, one the Concert Champtre
by Giorgione in the Louvre, the other a painting by Raphael, now lost
but disseminated through an engraving by Marc-Antonio Raimondi that
showed the Judgment of Paris.25 From the latter he took the group of
three naked demi-gods. The male figures watch the appearance of the
Olympian gods in the sky, the female figure gazes out of the picture, but
not at the spectator. Manet transformed these pagan divinities into two
well-dressed Parisian bourgeois (for which his brother and brother-in-law
posed) and a naked woman who looks straight out of the painting at
the viewer. In its turn, the three-figure composition used by Raphael was
based on a Roman sarcophagus now in the garden faade of the Villa
Medici in Rome. The Djeuner thus presents an episode in the biography

works of art that refuse to behave

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

new literary history

both evokes an unthinkable social situation and suggests the figures

submission to involuntary desires. This was one of the most dangerous
things about the pictures subject.28
Olympia caused such outrage that the authorities had to place a
policeman in front of the painting to prevent the public from spitting
and throwing things at it or tearing it to pieces.29 As with the Djeuner,
there were some negative reactions based on artistic issues such as the
female bodys lack of life in contrast to the flowers, the handling of
color, contours, and again the flatness of composition; but here the
presence of a naked woman, obviously a prostitute who looks frontally
at the viewer, in a cool, appraising, and ultimately inscrutable gaze, was
what made viewers lose their sense of decorum completely. Looking at
the painting was compared to paying a visit to the morgue; its palette
was compared to a surgeons knife that pierces through the flesh.30 It
was a petrifying, primitive chaos: White, black and red colours make
an awful noise on this canvas: the woman, the negress, the bouquet of
flowers, the cat, the entire cacophony of unconnected colours, of impure
forms, seizes ones gaze and stupefies.31 Olympia became the sacrificial
goat of the Salon, forcing the viewer into an inevitable iconoclasm: The
sacrificial goat, the victim of Parisian lynch laws. Everyone who passes
takes his stone and throws it in her face.32 Whereas in the case of the
Venus Borghese the extreme lifelikeness of the statue and its closeness
to the body of Pauline Borghese caused its impact on viewers, here their
outrage was caused sometimes by Manets way of depicting Victorine
Meurent, but above all by her completely unabashed, unfazed appraisal
of the viewer. Despite being a courtesan, like the naked female figure
in the Djeuner, she renders any unreflected, spontaneous projection of
desire by the male viewer impossible because in this way of looking at the
spectator, conscious and clearly full of her own thoughts and ideas, she
refuses to be reduced to a passive object of desire. She thereby became
an insupportable provocation that had to be put beyond the pale of art
and society. Victorine Meurents painted gaze continues to exercise its
agency. In the 1970s, Manets Boston portrait of her (c. 1861) was cut
diagonally across both eyes.33

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

works of art that refuse to behave

423

similarity: their material proximity. As we saw, Canova made a plaster

cast of Pauline Borgheses naked body to prepare a model for his statue;
during the molding process her skin had been in direct contact with
the cast. In the case of Olympia, the painter is almost present in the
painting, for the bracelet worn by the modelvery similar, incidentally,
to the one worn by the Venus Borghesewas identified by Manets
cousin Julie Manet as a bracelet owned by his mother that contained
a lock of Manets hair, cut off when he was fifteen months old.34 One
can only speculate about the personal, psychological, or anthropological ramifications of this identification, or about possible sources of this
gesture in practices such as including lockets containing hair or teeth
of loved ones in portraits.35 But what stands out here is that it is the
painter himself who paints his material presence, as a case of what Gell
would call distributed agency. The prototype, here the painter rather
than the model, creates an index of himself that is not a conventional
sign but a sample of himself, and includes it in the image.36 Thereby he
establishesfor those in the knowan intense personal relationship,
in which he becomes very close to Olympia, and by the same gesture
disrupts the conventional boundary between an artwork and its painter.

Bourdieu: Manet and the Effects of Art

Toward the end of his life, in 19982000, Bourdieu devoted two
series of lectures at the Collge de France to Manet. Death prevented
him from finishing the project, and the transcriptions were published
posthumously in 2013.37 Two paintings are central to the lectures: the
Djeuner sur lherbe and the Bar aux Folies-Bergres (188182, now at the
Courtauld Gallery in London). Bourdieu sees the Djeuner as a major
advance in Manets attempt to transform academic tradition in order to
operate what he calls a symbolic revolution. He interprets the distinctive features of the painting as Manets deliberate decision to ignore,
confuse, or subvert academic conventions, with the ultimate aim of
developing a truly modern painting. Here Bourdieu follows Clement
Greenbergs definition of modernism (M 14344).38 Paintings should
be autonomous and reflexive. They should draw attention to their own
pictorial nature, through compositional devices such as unexpected
framing and disrupting perspectival conventions, or through brushwork
that is either too flat or too rough, but in both cases draws attention to
its own materiality.39 He therefore favors a formalist approach that does
justice to what he sees as the achievement of Manets two revolutions:
In fact, the two revolutions are but one: the one that leads Manet to

424

new literary history

conquer new objects, and in particular all the symbols of modernity;

and the one that he accomplished, in the domain of forms, rejecting all
literary messages, or signified that transcends pictorial presentation in its
proper sense, which traditionally gave unity and its raison dtre to a work
of art, enhancing its aesthetic coherence. Both revolutions have as their
principle the absoluteness of the aesthetic point of view.40 Depicting
modernity and producing paintings that do not contain any reference
to domains outside the expression proprement picturale are thus merged
into one project, in which becoming a modern artist and the painter
of modern life become one. In the 1860s, critics had already compared
Manet and Flaubert. They equated Flauberts realism, his portrayal of
female adultery without any authorial disapproval, with Manets similarly
distanced portrayal of a female nude surrounded by men fully dressed
in contemporary costume.
At the same time, since Manet was also aiming for official recognition,
the painting establishes a relationship with iconographical traditions, as
academic painting in France was expected to do in this period, but it
transforms its models in a very idiosyncratic way. It clearly uses elements
from Giorgiones Concert Champtre and from Raimondis engraving after
Raphaels Judgement of Paris. But Manet does not retain the iconographical
meaning of the latter; instead he prevents any coherent or conventional
reading of the subject, setting, or interaction. One could add to Bourdieus argument that it is in fact not even clear whether the painting
depicts, as its title suggests, an outdoor setting. The dressed woman in
the background is too large in relation to the figures in the foreground.
Because of this disruption in perspective, some critics have suggested
that the painting represents a tableau-vivant against the backdrop of a
canvas depicting natural scenery. The painting itself, incidentally, was
often represented as a tableau-vivant in Paris, which added yet an extra
layer to its scandalous reputation, but also contributed to the blurring
of the boundaries between living persons and their painted images.

Bourdieu as Art Historian

Bourdieus discussion of the Djeuner thus moves within the parameters
of critical positions taken toward the painting when it was first shown. At
one extreme critics reacted to what Bourdieu calls the iconological issues
it presented, that is, to the figures and situation represented, perceiving
the painting as a transformationor parodyof the traditional iconography of Venus.41 The nudity of the female figure in the front was an
outrage, as we have seen, and accordingly critics put the painting in the

works of art that refuse to behave

425

same category as the depictions of Venus and related subjects by academic

painters such as Alexandre Cabanel, reducing them to titillating pin-ups.
They noted the undeniable fascination the painting exercised, but tried
to deal with it by what we might call a moral reflex that concentrated on
the iconography of the naked figure. At the other end, there was what
we would now call a formalist approach, first proposed by Thophile
Gautier and mile Zola, which ignored the figural or representational
aspects of the painting and simply referred to it as a composition of lines
and colours. Gautier, for instance, described the Djeuner as a bizarre
composition with an astonishing intensity of colour.42
Both approaches, like the analysis developed by Bourdieu, ignore a
conspicuous feature of the Djeuner, and the foundation for its agency: the
naked female figure looking straight into our eyes. Her appraisal of the
viewer makes it difficult to reduce her to an object of sexual fantasies, as
the paintings by Cabanel do, where Venus half-gazes at the viewer in an
inviting way. Victorines gaze initiates an interaction between the viewer
and the painting that goes beyond iconologial, formal, or sociological
analysis. It moves into the domain of consciousness, emotional engagement, and reflection between the depicted individual and the individual
viewer. Bourdieu, however, focuses on the institutional social effect of
Manets work, not its impact on individual viewers. He analyzes how
Manets work transformed the official institutions that constituted the
Parisian art world of the 1860s and 70s. It is a reconstruction of what he
calls the thorie de la pratique, the set of implicit and often unarticulated competences, abilities, techniques, generative schemes, knowledge,
and social or cultural capital an artist uses, seen as fundamentally different from official artistic discourse. Art history thus conceived becomes
a history of artworks and their social or institutional effects. Its aim is
to reconstruct what Bourdieu called le transcendental historique: the
historical formation of sets of beliefs, ambitions, desires, knowledge,
capacities, etc., that determine, often in an implicit or unconscious
way, how artists work and how the public or the critics, studied here as
groups, react. On the one hand, there are the dispositions of the producer, and on the other the schmas dinterprtation of the viewer.
Their interaction becomes as much a communication of unsconscious
dispositions as a conscious exchange.
This is a history of art, then, that reconstructs the ways in which dispositions interact in the course of history: bodies of knowledge, artistic and
viewing competences, attitudes, know-how, etc. It does not address the
interaction between the work of art, seen as expression or representation of persons, feelings, events, or situations, and individual viewers.
Therefore, although Bourdieu is very interested in the impact of the

426

new literary history

Djeuner, his historical sociology of art leaves no room to accomodate

or account for such interactions. Bourdieu only addresses the issue of
the gaze at the very end of his lectures, first when he dismisses Manets
way of painting it by claiming that [Manet] does not want to depict
interior life, and he puts a lot of effort into removing everything that
could be perceived as an evocation of the intimate and the subjective.
Bourdieu thus reduces the representation of the inner life of Manets
figures to the cloying eroticism of the Venus by Cabanel or the titsand-asses smiles of the paintings by Bouguereau.43 But in the very last
sentences, speaking about the Bar aux Folies-Bergres, he admits, though
in a rather inarticulate manner, to the spell that Manets figures can
exercise: Last thing, the gaze of the woman that makes her into a kind
of sphinx. I think there is much to say on the fact that the gaze is treated
in this way. And then there is also . . . .44
Manet is the painter of consciousness. His subjects gaze out of the
painting and past the viewer, as in Le Balcon (1868); they seem to consider something or somebody in their pictorial space, which the viewer
cannot see, as in the portrait of his parents from 1860, now in the Muse
dOrsay; or they look directly at the viewer. They set up fictional dialogues
that can become very complex, because they appear to be aware of being viewed: first by the painter while posing for him, but also while on
display for other viewers, sometimes in another identity than their own,
as when Victorine Meurent or Lon Leenhoff put on historical or exotic
costume. Manets subjects are conscious of the presence and actions of
these others, and it is precisely this meeting of consciousness, however
fictional, that Bourdieus institutional history of art cannot accomodate,
but that constitutes the foundation for their effect on viewers. Patches of
colour, however intense, do not make spectators take a knife to a canvas.

Beyond Bourdieu: Consciousness and Agency

Some paintings have a very powerful way of establishing an interaction
between the gaze of the painted figure and the gaze of the spectator.
One of the strongest cases is that of Velsquezs painting of Venus at
her mirror, also known as the Rokeby Venus. Venus is seen from the
back, gazing into a mirror held up by Amor. As is well known, because
of the optics underlying the composition, the fact that we, as spectators
of the painting, see her face reflected in the mirror means that she sees
our reflection in that mirror.45 While we were thinking we could gaze at
her body unobserved, she had us already in her sight. Because of the
particularities of this pictorial composition, we are drawn into the sphere

works of art that refuse to behave

427

of the composition and forced to enter into a visual and psychological

interaction with Venus. Unfortunately, the effects this painting may have
exercised on its viewers are not very well recorded, but it became the
victim of one of the best documented cases of iconoclasm. In 1914, the
suffragette Mary Richardson took a knife to her and caused severe damage to her neck, heart, and torsoin fact, the parts that are also attacked
by real murderers when they really want to kill a living human being.
This attack is one of the central examples in Art and Agency, Gells
1998 anthropological study of the effects of art.46 Because this is an
anthropological theory of art, the stress is on the network of social relations in which artworks are embedded, or the art nexus.47 It does not
consider these artworks in terms of their formal or aesthetic value, or
their appreciation within the culture that produced them. Neither does
it consider them as signs, visual codes to be deciphered, or symbolic
communications. Instead, Gell defines art objects as systems of actions,
intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions
about it. Artworks thus considered are the equivalents of persons, more
particularly social agents. To understand why and how art objects exercise
such influence on their viewers, Gell takes art to be a special kind of
technology. In an earlier article he calls works of art devices for securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of intentionalities
in which they are enmeshed.48 Agency is achieved through technical
virtuosity. It can enchant the viewer: The technology of enchantment is
founded on the enchantment of technology.49 But although Gell mainly
discusses technical virtuosity in the handling of material, other varieties
of technical refinement may also achieve agency. Stylistic virtuosity and
in particular the artifice that results in vivid lifelikeness is an instance,
as we saw in the case of the Venus Borghese.
Using Gells theory to configure the social networks in which artworks
exert such agency on their viewers that they engage with them as if they
were living beings is very useful in order to identify the actors involved,
the network of relationships in which the viewer becomes enmeshed,
and the effects of agency on the viewers behavior or beliefs. It thus helps
to integrate the analysis of such reactions into a much wider range of
anthropological and psychological enquiry.50 Where Bourdieu focused on
general habitus and dispositions, and saw the effect of art in the general
social changes it may cause, Gell tries to develop a theory of the interactions between individual artworks and those involved with them, and in
particular to account for the fact that objects can make people do things
just as living persons can exercise their agency on others. Animacy and
personhood are therefore key concepts introduced by him to understand
such effects. Animacy serves to explain that viewers can attribute some,

428

new literary history

but not all, characteristics of life to an artworkfor instance when they

claim that the eyes of a statue gaze into their eyes, just as we can say that
the eye of a camera blinks at us, without claiming that it is alive in the
biological sense. Personhood, another Wittgensteinian family likeness
concept, is introduced to account for the phenomenon that inanimate
objects can exercise the same agency as living persons.51
I would argue, however, that there is a defining characteristic of such
reactions that is not covered by Gells theory: its experiential character.
Art and Agency maps the ways in which indexes make viewers do things
(in the widest sense of the word), and this mapping depends heavily
on the cognitive psychology of Pascal Boyer.52 But it does not engage in
much detail with the actual experience of the viewers on which the index
exercises its agency. Yet, as we have seen in the cases discussed here, it
is precisely the emotional engagement with the person represented, the
awareness, which is fictional or even deluded, but nonetheless powerful,
that plays a major role in the effect that artworks exercise. To understand
the nature of such responses, that is, we have to delve deeper into the
nature of the agency, or rather, the interaction with the viewer, set up by
the work of art by means of its material presence and representational
features (composition, perspective, direction of the gaze, presence of
implied spectators, dimensions of the identity relation between the sitter, painter, and artwork, etc.).
Whereas Gell therefore offers a theoretical account of the agency
of artworks that is not covered by Bourdieus more institutionally oriented approach to the effects of art on its public conceived as social
groups, neither author addresses the experiential aspects of how works
of art act on their viewers. There exists a long tradition of exploring
viewersexperiences of artworks, which goes back to the tradition of ekphrastic writings, already present in a very sophisticated form in Homers
description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad.53 Since the 1970s, the
field has been renewed by the German school of reception studies,
whose theories of literary reception have been applied to art as well,
and more recently by accounts inspired by the anthropology of grief and
mourning or by more phenomenologically inflected approaches, such
as James Elkinss Pictures and Tears or T. J. Clarks The Sight of Death.54 All
of these have engaged the experiential dimensions of art, but mostly in
a contemplative, distanced, and disembodied way that is very different
from the intense, visceral, and often uncontrolled responses described
above, which have in common that they disrupt or ignore the boundaries of representation. What is needed, as I have tried to show in this
essay, is an account of the viewing experiences that starts from the way
the viewers themselves lived these experiences in the presence of the

works of art that refuse to behave

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

new literary history

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

works of art that refuse to behave

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

new literary history

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.

works of art that refuse to behave

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

new literary history

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

new literary history

Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of

English at the University of Virginia. His five books include Poetry and Its Others:
News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2013) and A Transnational Poetics
(2009), winner of the ACLAs Harry Levin Prize. He coedited the most recent
editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetryand The Norton
Anthology of English Literature.
Scott Selisker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona.
He is the author of Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American
Unfreedom (forthcoming), and his work has also appeared inAmerican Literature,Novel: A Forum on Fiction,Science Fiction Studies,Debates inthe Digital Humanities
2015,and theLos Angeles Review of Books.
Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University and director of its Center for Body, Mind,
and Culture. His Pragmatist Aesthetics is published in fifteen languages. His most
recent books in English are Body Consciousness (2008) and Thinking through the
Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (2012).
Caroline A. van Eck is Professor of Early Modern Art and Architectural History
at Leiden University and will be Slade Professor of Fine Art in Oxford in 2017.
She has taught and published on early modern visual rhetoric, theatricality, and
the agency of art. Her most recent book is Art, Agency and Living Presence: From
the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (2015).

Between Self & Society

Inner Worlds and Outer Limits in
the British Psychological Novel

by john rodden

From Tobias Smolletts The

Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) to D. H. Lawrences
Women in Love (1920), here is a
psycho-political approach to the
societal constructs and narrative
nuances of six provocative works
of dynamic British prose ction.
30 b&w photos | $55.00 hardcover

university of
texas press

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.