Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print

print culture in early modern france

In this book, Carl Goldstein examines the print culture of seventeenth-century France through a study of the career of Abraham Bosse, a well-known printmaker, book illustrator, and author of books and pamphlets on a variety of technical subjects. The consummate print professional, Bosse persistently explored the endless possibilities of print – single-sheet prints combining text and image, book illustration, broadsides, placards, almanacs, theses, and pamphlets. Bosse had a profound understanding of print technology as a fundamental agent of change. Unlike previous studies, which have largely focused on the printed word, this book demonstrates the extent to which the contributions of an individual printmaker and the visual image are fundamental to understanding the nature and development of early modern print culture. Carl Goldstein is a professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Kress Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Philosophical Society of America. He has published widely, including Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Theory, Criticism, and Practice of Painting in Renaissance and Baroque Italy and Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers.

P

rint Culture in Early Modern France

Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print

carl goldstein University of North Carolina, Greensboro

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107012141  C Carl Goldstein 2012

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Goldstein, Carl. Print culture in early modern France : Abraham Bosse and the purposes of print / Carl Goldstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-01214-1 (hardback) 1. Bosse, Abraham, 1602–1676 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Prints, French – 17th century. 3. Printing – France – History – 17th century. 4. Arts and society – France – History – 17th century. I. Title. ne650.b55g65 2011 769.92–dc23 2011026273 isbn 978-1-107-01214-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This too is for Alicia

Contents

List of Illustrations



xi

Acknowledgments



xv

Introduction



1

chapter 1 A Printmaking Revolution  13 The Treatise on Etching and Engraving  19 A New Beginning  25 Original and Copy  28 Collecting Prints  31 The Originality of an Etching-Engraving  32 Prints as Reproductions  36 Original Forgeries  39 An International Market  40 The Legacy  41 chapter 2 Scenes of Everyday Life  43 The City  43 The Trades  47 Fashion Plates  51 chapter 3 Drama, Theater, and Prints  56 The Theater Observed  56 Printed Drama  59

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contents

Versions of Farce  65 The Battle of the Sexes  68 Women at Large  72 The Spoken Word  74 The Theater of Everyday Life  75 The Carnivalesque  77 The Morality Play  80 The Neoclassical Theater  82 chapter 4 Contingencies and Contradictions Religion  85 War  90 The Bourgeois  92 Science, Not-Science  95



85

chapter 5 The Royal Portrait  106 The King in Print  107 Breaking the Code  111 chapter 6 Image and Text: Reading Single-Sheet Prints  118 Viewing the Image, Reading the Print  118 Word and Image  124 chapter 7 Book Illustrations  126 Types of Pictures  127 Plays and Romances  128 A New Spirit  132 The Antique  134 Science  136 Technical Manuals  138 chapter 8 Books and Pamphlets  142 Painting and Theory Before Bosse  142 Bosse’s Theory of Painting  145 Reinventing the Wheel?  146 Art as Knowledge  151 Pamphlet Wars  153 Architecture  155 Academic Publishing  157

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contents

Coda: Poussin, Scarron, Bosse, and the Economy of Transgression Notes



Bibliography Index



ix

165 

183

211



159

List of Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Bosse, The Engraver and the Etcher. 1643. Etching page 14 Bosse, The Intaglio Printers. 1642. Etching 15 Bosse, The Fortune of France. c. 1635–1637. Etching 17 Bosse, The e`choppe. 1645. Etching 21 Bosse, The Art of Engraving. 1645. Etching 23 Bosse, Painting and Engraving. 1649. Etching 27 Bosse, La saign´ee [The Blood-Letting]. Drawing 33 Bosse, La saign´ee [The Blood-Letting]. c. 1632–1633. Etching 33 Jacques Callot, View of the Pont-Neuf and the Tour de Nesle. 1630. Etching 44 Stefano Della Bella, The Pont Neuf in Paris. 1646. Etching 45 Bosse, Le marchand de mort-aux-rats [The Rat-Killer]. Etching 46 Bosse, Le crocheteur [The Firewood Vendor]. Etching 47 Jacques Callot, A Print Seller. c. 1621. Etching 48 Bosse, Le cordonnier [The Cobbler]. c. 1632–1633. Etching 49 Bosse, Title page to Le jardin de la noblesse franc¸oise. 1629. Etching 52 Bosse, Le courtesan suivant le dernier edit [The Courtier after the Last Edict]. Etching 53 Bosse, Actors at the Hˆotel de Bourgogne. c. 1633–1634. Etching 57 Bosse, La Galerie du Palais. c. 1638. Etching 59 Bosse, Le contrat de mariage [The Marriage Contract]. 1633. Etching 60 Bosse, La visite a` l’accouch´ee [Visit to the New Mother]. 1633. Etching 61 Bosse, L’accouchement [Childbirth]. 1633. Etching 63 Bosse, Le mari´ee reconduite chez elle [Return Home of the Bride]. 1633. Etching 65

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list of illustrations

23. Bosse, La femme batant son mari [The Husband-Beater]. c. 1633. Etching 24. Bosse, Le mari battant sa femme [The Wife-Beater]. c 1633. Etching 25. Bosse, Lettre amoureuse du capitaine extravagant [Love Letter of the Extravagant Captain]. c. 1636. Etching 26. Bosse, R´eponse de la demoiselle a` la lettre du capitaine extravagant [Response of the Lady to the Letter of the Extravagant Captain]. c. 1636. Etching 27. Bosse, Les femmes a` table en l’absence de leurs maris [A Banquet of Women without Their Husbands]. 1636. Etching 28. Jacques Callot, Varie figure, Gobbi. 1616. Etching, Frontispiece 29. Jacques Callot, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. c. 1635. Etching 30. Bosse, Ce fardeau de paix et de guerre [Under the Burden of Peace and of War]. Etching 31. Bosse, Le capitaine fracasse [The Fearsome Captain]. c. 1635. Etching 32. Bosse, Les vierges sages s’entretiennent des f´elicit´es c´elestes [The Wise Virgins at Their Devotions]. c. 1635. Etching 33. Bosse, L’enfant prodigue quitte la maison paternelle [The Prodigal Son Leaving Home]. c. 1636. Etching 34. Bosse, Pr´eparation du soldat chr´etien au combat spirituel [Preparation of the Christian Soldier for Spiritual Combat]. Etching 35. Bosse, La b´en´ediction de la table [The Benediction]. c. 1635. Etching 36. Bosse, Un soldat de faction [A Sentry]. 1632. Etching 37. Bosse, La villagoise [The Girl of the Village]. Etching 38. Bosse, Le toucher [Touch]. c. 1638. Etching 39. Bosse, L’ouie [Hearing]. c. 1638. Etching 40. Bosse, La vue [Sight]. c. 1638. Etching 41. Bosse, Almanach pour 1638. Etching 42. Bosse, La voeux du roi et de la reine a` la vierge [The Vow of the King and Queen to the Virgin]. 1638. Etching 43. Bosse, La sage-femme pr´esente le nouveau-n´e au roi [The Midwife Presenting the Dauphin to the King]. 1638. Etching 44. Bosse, Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus. c. 1635. Etching 45. Bosse, David et Goliath [David and Goliath]. 1651. Etching 46. Bosse, Loger les p`elerins [Give Shelter to Pilgrims]. Etching 47. Bosse, Vestir les nuds [Clothe the Naked]. Etching 48. Bosse, Donner a` boire a` ceux qui ont soif [Give Drink to the Thirsty]. Etching 49. Bosse, Ensevelir les morts [Bury the Dead]. Etching 50. S´ebastien Bourdon, Clothe the Naked. Etching and Engraving 51. S´ebastien Bourdon, Bury the Dead: Tobit Having the Victims of Sennacherib Buried]. Etching and Engraving 52. Bosse, title page to L’En´eide de Virgil. 1648. Etching xii

66 67 69

71 73 76 77 78 79 81 83 87 89 91 95 97 97 99 108 109 110 111 116 119 120 121 121 122 123 129

list of illustrations

53. Bosse, after Claude Vignon, frontispiece for Desmaret de Saint-Sorlin, L’Ariane. 1639. Etching 54. Bosse, The Sack of Troy. From Virgil, The Aeneid. 1648. Etching 55. Claude Mellan, after Nicolas Poussin, frontispiece to the Biblia Sacra. 1642. Engraving 56. Bosse, title page to Lec¸ons donn´ees dans l’Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture. 1665. Etching 57. Bosse, Alo¨e Americana from Dodart, M´emoire pour servir a` l’histoire des plantes. 1676. Etching 58. Bosse, after S´ebastien Leclerc, A Chameleon, from Claude Perrault, Description anatomique d’un cam´el´eon, d’un castor, d’un dromadaire, d’un ours et d’une gazelle. 1669. Etching 59. Bosse, Repr´esentations g´eom´etrales de plusieurs parties des bastiments faites par les reigles de l’architecture antique. 1659. Etching 60. Stefano Della Bella, frontispiece to Les oeuvres de Scarron. 1649. Etching

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130 131 133 135 137

139 140 160

Acknowledgments

Among the many colleagues and friends who provided stimulation and encouragement during the years that this study gestated, special thanks are owed to Svetlana Alpers, the late Harcourt Brown, Rackstraw Downes, Marc Fumaroli, Paula Gerson, Jennifer Montagu, John O’Malley, the late Donald Posner, Maxime Pr´eaud, Orest Ranum, Sue Welsh Reed, Pierre Rosenberg, Jacques Thuillier, and my teacher, the late Rudolf Wittkower. I am grateful to Maxime Pr´eaud and the staff of the Cabinet des Estampes, Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris, for allowing me to study original prints during repeated visits over many years. And to Suzanne Boorsch and Connie McPhee of the Drawings and Prints Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for making original prints available to me on many occasions. Roberto Campo helped with translations from the French and he and George Dimock read early drafts and offered advice and suggestions for which I am most grateful, as I am, too, for the criticisms and suggestions of three anonymous readers. Without the support and encouragement of my editor at Cambridge, Beatrice Rehl, this book would not have seen the light of day. A fellowship from the Howard Foundation supported my early investigations. A Faculty Research Grant from my university, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, supplemented by a grant from its Kohler Fund for the purchase of photographs, greatly aided my study. My greatest debt as always is to my wife and severest critic, Alicia Creus, to whom I owe more than words can say.    Some of the material discussed in Chapter 1 appeared in different forms as “Printmaking and Theory,” Zeitschrift f¨ur Kunstgeschichte, 71, no. 3 (2008): xv

acknowledgments

373–88; and “Canon and Copy: The Canon Communicated,” in Welt, Bild. Museum: Topographien der Kreativit¨at. Edited by Andreas Bl¨uhm & Anja Ebert, 121–35. K¨oln, Weimar, Wien: B¨ohlau Verlag, 2011. Some of the material in Chapter 4 appeared as “Popular Science in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse’s Sight,” Word & Image, 23, no. 2 (2007): 182–94; some of that in Chapter 6 appeared as “Mixed Messages: Interpreting Bosse’s Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus,” in Source Notes in the History of Art, 26, no. 2 (2007): 9–15.

xvi

Introduction

would have liked to underline the human element in my title by taking the early printer as my “agent of change.” But although I do think of certain master printers as being the unsung heroes of the early modern era, and although they are the true protagonists of this book, impersonal processes involving transmission and communication must also be given due attention. In the end, practical considerations became paramount. I decided that cataloguing would be simplified if I referred to the tool rather than the user. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, xv.

I

This book examines the full range of print activities of Abraham Bosse during the years 1622–1676 within the broad context of the milieu of printing in early modern France. Bosse is well known as a printmaker and book illustrator and as the author of books and pamphlets on a variety of subjects. A consummate print professional, he was, in fact, more or less unique at the time in his persistent and sustained interrogation of the seemingly endless possibilities of print – independent prints on single sheets combining image and text, broadsides, placards, almanacs, theses, book illustrations, and books and pamphlets – based on the same and similar models followed by other publishers of books and of “job printing” or ephemera, of the aforementioned and related publications such as petitions, certificates, jest-books and plays. He was, not least of all, a publisher who also sold prints and books. His was a user of print, in other words, grounded in a shared consciousness of the possibilities enumerated by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein in her foundational study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979). 1

print culture in early modern france

To be sure, printed texts were the principal outcomes of these technologies, and although Eisenstein reminded us that images were other such “agents of change” she examined texts more or less exclusively.1 Focusing attention on “impersonal processes” – “the tool rather than the user” – she also bypassed the contributions of the individual agents involved.2 With few exceptions, print culture scholars have done the same, concentrating on print technology and the impact of the “printed word.” That technologies as such are not cultural practices, nor the relationship between technologies and texts one of simple cause and effect, Eisenstein made clear; the scope of her book, she said, was the result of “practical considerations” in attempting to bring a vast amount and variety of material under control.3 In this spirit and in light of the continued importance of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the present study returns to the original project as envisaged by Eisenstein, enlarging on her work by shifting attention to one extraordinary “user” and the hows and whys of his uses of print. That the aforementioned ephemera constituted the most ubiquitous printed matter was also underscored by Eisenstein.4 The ephemera of her discussion consist, however, of texts of from one to four pages long or, if images, of crude woodcuts. Such ephemera are, by definition, short-lived; serving immediate needs, they are quickly discarded or destroyed. Tessa Watt recently has noted that the survival rate of sixteenth-century English ballads is perhaps one in ten thousand copies and one in ten editions. She cites Folke Dahl’s estimate of 0.013 percent of English news books surviving from 1620 to 1642.5 The rate of survival of other such ephemera, of broadsides, almanacs, pamphlets, placards, and so on, is not significantly greater. Etchings and engravings such as were produced by Bosse, by contrast, were preserved in substantial numbers and eventually collected for being of “timeless” interest. As such, they have remained for the most part the exclusive purview of art historians/ printmaking specialists applying the principles of connoisseurship, its scope recently extended by archival research; they have been studied, in other words, as the rough equivalents of paintings. Questions of how such prints were received and interpreted, of what differences they made, and of the roles they played in culture and everyday life have rarely been asked.6 The differences are striking and would seem to be those between types of ephemera and works of graphic “art,” so that to invoke ephemera in a study of Bosse’s skillfully executed etchings and engravings would seem to go against the very meaning of that term. But how real were these differences? How do we determine what was ephemeral? Did printmakers such as Bosse deliberately intend their images to last? An obvious answer is that it was the viewer/reader rather than the printmaker who decided. Bosse created images, for example, for one of the most ubiquitous of ephemera, the almanac, with observations about planets, predictions of the weather, and so on, all for a specific year and therefore 2

introduction

completely useless once that year had ended. And so these particular almanacs were obviously regarded and discarded – except for the etchings that were cut from the sheets and preserved. Similar acts of individual agency were evidently behind the preservation of other of his images made for a variety of ephemera – broadsides, placards, and so on. But while acknowledging the importance of the responses of different readers, the encounter between reader/viewer and text/image, my argument will not be about such responses – or not primarily – anymore than it will be about the iconography of printed images in some absolute sense.7 The crucial point is that the almanacs with Bosse’s etchings, as other print products including his etchings, were by their very nature ephemeral and fall within the same discursive frames and practices as other types of ephemera. The notion of discursive practices evoked here is that of Michel Foucault, who has suggested that such practices are not reducible simply to ways of producing discourse but are rather “embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms for transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them.”8 The discourses of Bosse’s prints thus understood would not be restricted to their linguistic equivalents and associations, but rather expanded to include technical, social, institutional, and pedagogical processes and changing paradigms, as reflected in types of more widely accepted verbal and visual ephemera, which, in turn, as recent research has shown, must be considered not as marginal but rather integral to our understanding of the cultural role of print.9 The prints themselves provide valuable testimony as to their more specific conceptual and cultural frameworks.10 Given that the images are accompanied by inscriptions, usually in the vernacular, it is obvious that Bosse was addressing an audience with basic reading skills. Literacy having increased during this period, extending down the social scale, that potential audience would have been large and diverse, from artisans and tradesmen to merchants, and perhaps also up to civil servants and lawyers. The latter two groups would have constituted a more limited public for the prints with Latin inscriptions, although these are usually hybrids, with Latin deepening the sense of the vernacular, and so would have been accessible at least in part to those with less traditional educational backgrounds. One exceptional print contains only texts in Latin and Greek and therefore has been clearly addressed to a literate elite capable not only of reading these languages but also understanding the use of rhetorical figures and exempla and familiar with the major classical authors. Not surprisingly, this image is of the king, its primary audience no doubt high-ranking civil servants and members of the court. Bosse’s prints, in sum, would have been accessible to a large and growing audience, much of it newly literate, with a range of tastes and values, many of them different from those catered to by painters and by the authors of learned books. (Of course, there was nothing to prevent the barely literate placed by Tessa Watt on the 3

print culture in early modern france

“fringes of literacy” from responding to, and interpreting, the images in many different ways, according to different levels of education and comprehension.)11    While I have been expressing my admiration for Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s book, in recent discussions of print culture studies a contrast is often drawn between that book and Adrian Johns’ critique of it in his The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making.12 Printing did not foster the advance of learning as Eisenstein claims, Johns argues, but in fact, as the result of too little oversight, undermined its stability. But Johns’ investigation, in turn, has been seen as unnecessarily polemical and too narrow in scope, concentrating on England at the expense of the rest of Europe. As my discussion to this point should have suggested, I have nevertheless taken to heart Johns’ insistence on the importance of differences between print cultures, with readers reacting in different ways to the same texts. From this perspective, print is recognized as a thoroughly social and cultural practice contingent on reception and interpretation; individual agents could “open” and change any specific print product in different and unpredictable ways, although these will always be limited by historical circumstances. I make use equally of the insights of both Eisenstein and Johns, in sum, examining Bosse’s varied print output within the broad framework described by Eisenstein with the aim of contributing to what Johns has heralded as a “new historical understanding of print.”13 I will argue, too, that even though all of the print materials discussed in this book were produced in France during roughly the first half of the seventeenth century, their evidence – particularly of single-sheet prints – should be of broader relevance. For these prints circulated widely, finding homes in England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain, their familiar, time-honored subjects resonating far and wide. For this reason, the following study should throw interesting new light on print culture around Europe as much as in early modern France.14    Some of the previously mentioned possibilities were intimated in the pioneering two-volume study of Bosse that Andr´e Blum published in 1924.15 The first volume is little more than a list of the prints, some illustrated, but the second is a discussion of Bosse’s print activities within a broad cultural context, as what we would call “agents of change.” Blum touches on Bosse’s etchings, book illustrations, art theory, theory of etching/engraving, and also books and pamphlets. Most suggestive is a seminal chapter discussing Bosse’s prints within the context of social and economic conditions represented across a range of discourses. In this relatively brief chapter, in sum, Blum laid the foundation 4

introduction

for what should have been many years of fruitful research into Bosse’s role in early modern print culture. But it was not to be. One reason that it was not was the excessive weight attached to Bosse’s art theory. Andr´e Fontaine had called attention to this theory before the publication of Blum’s study (1909) and writers who followed Fontaine during the next years, through the reorientation in the study of seventeenth-century French art and art theory that took place after 1960, maintained the same focus.16 But if Fontaine’s negative opinion was later reversed by Jacques Thuillier and others, Bosse the print professional described earlier remained remote and ultimately unavailable. Far from disavowing this single-minded interest in Bosse’s art theory, they – myself included – embraced it. Similarly, in her recent monograph (2004), the first since Blum’s, Marianne Le Blanc adds to the store of factual knowledge about Bosse’s life and art but lavishes attention principally on his art and perspective theories.17 A seemingly different approach taken by the organizers of the recent quartercentenary exhibition celebrating Bosse’s birth (2004) turned out to be surprisingly similar.18 The catalog accompanying the exhibition opens with a series of brief essays touching on Bosse’s varied activities, followed by the catalog proper. The essays rarely venture into the print world from which Bosse’s works are inseparable, however, and this failure to do so is still more striking in the catalog, which focuses attention on the images to the virtual exclusion of everything else, most notably the inscriptions. Ignored, so to say, is the collaborative nature of print production, channeling the contributions of publishers, printmakers, authors, editors, proofreaders, and others, the exigencies and mechanisms of the print world to which Bosse was responsive and that this study will address.    The historical Bosse has remained an elusive and much misunderstood figure, in no small part because of the unusual range of his print activities.19 The bare bones of a biography, to be fleshed out during the course of this book, are as follows. He was born in Tours, into a Calvinist family, the son of a tailor – and not, as one might have expected, a printer or printmaker! – in 1602 according to a death certificate of 1676 giving his age as 74, or in 1604 according to his 1620 certificate of apprenticeship to the engraver and publisher Melchior Tavernier, another Calvinist who was one of his publishers from then until Tavernier’s death in 1665. Other printmakers who seem to have played roles in his formation, either directly or indirectly, were the Dutch Simon Frisius, the Swiss Mathieu M´erian, and, most of all the great and innovative Jacques Callot, with whom he collaborated in 1628–1630. In 1632, Bosse married Catherine Sarrabat, the marriage resulting in many births, only four children living past childhood, however, two boys and two 5

print culture in early modern france

girls, one of the latter cited by contemporaries for the excellence of her drawing skills. His name appears several times as godfather on birth certificates and a few official documents concerning the business of printing, to be discussed during the course of this study. Bosse’s first dated prints appeared in 1622. Beginning in the 1630s, during a period of expansion in the French print market, he produced his most original single-sheet prints and other print ephemera and also his most ambitious series of book illustrations. In 1645, he published a treatise on etching and engraving that was the first of its kind, went through two further French editions, and was translated into English and several European languages. Still earlier, in 1643, he authored what became the first in a series of books applying the discoveries of the mathematician Girard Desargues to practices in a variety of crafts and in the art of painting, culminating in a treatise on perspective published in 1648. Just as he had used Desargues’ discoveries to his own purposes, so, too, had he organized his treatise on etching and engraving around a technical innovation of Jacques Callot. Bosse’s own contributions were secondary, in other words, dissemination rather than invention being the common denominator across these books. In 1648, shortly after the publication of the treatise on perspective, Bosse was invited to teach perspective in the newly created Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, with the title “membre honoraire,” because at that time the academy did not admit artisans such as those in the print professions. The academy’s choice proved disastrous for both parties, and Bosse was formally expelled in 1661 – an act that has received an inordinate amount of attention in Bosse studies.20 That year marks the beginning of his most intense and sustained activity as author, printer, and publisher, particularly of further books on perspective and architecture. Such are the basic facts, except for the extraordinary record of his publications. Modern catalogs of his prints conservatively list some 1,500 items of the different kinds mentioned earlier; it has been estimated that he illustrated at least 120 books. In his role as author-publisher-bookseller, he issued a catalog in 1674 advertising the books and pamphlets he authored. Seventeen titles are listed with summaries of the contents of each and promise of the future publication of “three or four” others: on drawing and on enameling gold, copper, and glass, on the proportions of the human body, on the cutting of stones, and still another treatise on architecture, none of which saw the light of day, however, before his death in 1676.    On a personal note, let me say that Bosse has been on my mind for more than four decades. He was an important figure in a master’s thesis that I wrote in

6

introduction

1962 and the PhD dissertation that I defended in 1966. I published essays on his art theory and role in the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture with some regularity during the following decades. I planned eventually to tackle his prints and to this end I would regularly leaf through the Bosse albums in the Cabinet des Estampes, Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris, only to come away each time baffled and confused. Every conceivable type of print product was included in these albums, the single-sheet narrative prints for which he has been best known constituting only a small part of the whole. I had the feeling, too, that even the single-sheet prints were eluding my grasp. According to received opinion, these prints are transparent images, recording the appearances and manners of the people of early modern France – an opinion, it is to be stressed, based on the images alone. Their accompanying texts, it was agreed by print specialists, were not of his invention and therefore irrelevant for an understanding of his “intentions.” Discussions of his prints tended to begin and end, therefore, with a straightforward description of the images, with comments about the dress of the figures, the settings and so on – no more, no less. It was as though the texts did not exist. When I studied the same images, however, I found many of them anything but transparent, and the texts only further complicated matters. Most surprising were those that seemed to me traceable to the learned discourse of the period, to Neoplatonic philosophy, Petrarchan love poetry, and so on. Was it conceivable that a mere craftsman whose images have seemed antipathetic to intellectual activity actually participated in this activity? A colleague specializing in the art of the period to whom I put this question thought not, that the suggestion was so farfetched as to be ludicrous. How, then, are these echoes of learned discourse to be explained? And were such utterances intentionally “learned?” I had realized early on that the answers to these vexed questions were not to be found in the art historical literature on printmaking. As my investigation became increasingly interdisciplinary in scope, I was drawn to the interpretive framework of print culture studies. Slowly but surely the pieces of the Bosse puzzle began to fall into place. I realized that a more useful and accurate way of thinking about Bosse was as a member of a team of print professionals responsible for the different stages of production, another member of the team being the poet entrusted with writing a text articulating and amplifying the meaning of the image – or the other way around, the image conveying the sense of an existing text. The extent to which Bosse himself believed in the ideas expressed in these texts is naturally difficult to pinpoint. What is abundantly clear, however, is that this conception of a dynamic relation between image and text developed within the distinctive context of early modern print production.   

7

print culture in early modern france

The book opens with a distinction between different printmaking materials and techniques, with attention called to copperplate engraving. More versatile than the older woodblock technique and woodcut, engraving was made possible by a demanding technology and so this technology, developed parallel to that of printing with movable type, is discussed in detail. The discussion revolves around a printmaking manual published by Bosse in 1645 both for what it tells us about this technology and also for its description of an innovative technique combining etching and engraving that, Bosse argues, is superior to that inherited from the previous century and that did, indeed, help alter the course of printmaking during his and the following centuries. In this chapter, I also aim to counter persistent assumptions about the definitiveness of a print that rule out redactions and appropriations. I begin with a key distinction made by Bosse between “original” and “copy” that would seem to deny the whole purpose of printmaking as mechanical production, namely the creation of many “copies” of an “original.” Bosse’s distinction, however, is between “copies” printed from one and the same plate etched or engraved by the printmaker whose name most usually appears on it and “pretend copies” pulled from plates on which other printmakers reproduced that image. His is the familiar complaint of a print professional about how others are infringing on his “property rights,” with – paradoxically, I argue – mechanical production contributing to a sharpened focus on the hand of the artist/printmaker. This discussion then opens onto an examination of the competing and conflicting impulses inherent in collecting prints, when this phenomenon was in its infancy. A related question is of the relation of a print to the drawing of which it is a copy. Is it that and nothing more, an exact copy intended for mechanical production, or can a claim be made for its originality as a print? I argue the second, that creating an etching or engraving entailed translating a drawing into another language different from that of drawing and unique among the graphic arts. At several such removes, too, are prints reproducing paintings and sculptures by Marcantonio Raimondi, Agostino Carracci, and a small army of anonymous printmakers. These reproductive prints, in turn, help bring out the very different status of Bosse’s single-sheet prints, which originate not with the history of art but rather the same discursive field as other types of print ephemera. His prints are steeped in the world he inhabits rather than works of art by the masters, in other words, but that world as filtered through the print culture of early modern France. Some final observations on the questions of original-copyreproduction are occasioned by a series of prints made as forgeries, and when eventually exposed as such, designated “original forgeries,” only slightly less valuable than actual originals by the printmakers so misused. As well as enlarging on print technologies, engraving had wide-scale cultural ramifications that are evident in the broad dissemination of prints. Engravers 8

introduction

and their publishers moved easily from one European capital to another, the same prints circulating freely between England, France, Spain, Flanders, and so on, making the engraved image, I argue, a model of internationalism, a kind of visual lingua franca and template of European unity. From Chapter 2 on, I reconsider prints by Bosse and others as cultural production. I begin by focusing attention on images representing life in the early modern city, the city as such, followed by representations of street vendors, hawkers, and tradesmen, which have been accepted at face value as celebrations of the street and marketplace. In early modern France, however, the very meanings of street and marketplace were being transformed by the proliferation of print in its various forms, the majority of them belonging to the category of ephemera. I argue that images of the inhabitants of the city by Bosse and others are dependent and contingent on this production of print ephemera. More obviously ephemeral still were “fashion plates,” images picturing the latest fashion that quickly became pass´e and not worth preserving. That many were eventually to be gathered into print cabinets does not change this fact. In Chapter 3, I examine other of the many discourses of prints by calling attention to Bosse’s images of the contemporary stage and of popular actors. I then turn to print series that, I argue, belonged to the ubiquity of dramatic ephemera that existed alongside actual play-texts and that included ballads, broadsheets, and printed dialogues. The focus of a key such series is the “woman question” or querelle des femmes that had been revived in fifteenthcentury France, raged during the following century, and continued to be a battleground of gender relations. Other of Bosse’s images of women are also rich and largely untapped resources for a historical understanding of the Quarrel as dynamic and ongoing, within a society in flux and these, too, are discussed. Beginning with a discussion of Bosse and the theater, then, this chapter acknowledges the central preoccupation in Bosse’s oeuvre with anxieties – and fantasies – about the role of women in early modern culture. Additionally, Bosse draws on other theatrical models, from the Neoclassical to the religious. The results were visual-verbal narratives with rich possibilities that were exploited by such printmakers as Hogarth during the following centuries. Bosse’s “print dramas” are essentially compatible, too, with the notion of the Theatrum Mundi or “theater of human life,” which was virtually an emblem of the early modern world. Some of the prints discussed in this chapter as well as Chapter 2 inevitably raising the issue of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque celebrating the natural body, that relationship is also explored. The lesson is of the instability and changing valence of such images within the context of early modern culture. The mainstay of printmaking as of the print profession more generally was religion, and Chapter 4 addresses the vexed question of competing postReformation attitudes toward imagery that is regularly invoked in discussions of “the Calvinist printmaker Bosse.” The question is vexed, for one, because 9

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the Protestant church rejected imagery of all kinds as idolatrous; on the other hand, Calvin accepted religious images as helpful and sanctioned their use in the homes – if not churches – of the faithful. It is conceivable, therefore, that the “Calvinist printmaker Bosse” did create images for a specifically Calvinist public. Not so, I argue. With possibly one exception, all of his religious images are consistent with those produced in the pre-Reformation church, some, indeed, with a particularly post-Tridentine turn, my observation supporting those of others about how Protestants and Catholics were not so widely divergent in their thinking about the usefulness of different types of images. Second only to religion as subjects for printmakers were the nonstop military campaigns that began with a civil war and continued through France’s involvement in the Thirty Years War. Images of new weaponry, particularly artillery and muskets, proliferated, as did topographical views of sieges and, ultimately, victories. Such news was spread by “newspapers,” pamphlets, and placards, the last among Bosse’s print vehicles. No less a construct than the previously mentioned are Bosse’s images of the new bourgeoisie, whose rise he has frequently been understood as documenting. These provocative images are examined next in relation to others in the literature of the period. Among modern disciplinary formations, none is more closely associated with printing than modern science, which I discuss next and again in Chapter 6 on book illustrations. The focus here is a print by Bosse seemingly endorsing the “new science” of Galileo but that, I argue, was more likely read within the context of the old esoteric philosophy. Produced at a time when the methods of the new experimental sciences were deeply contested, this image is a reminder of the conflict and instability that accompanied the Scientific Revolution. To be sure, not all the images discussed in these first four chapters would qualify as Elizabeth Eisenstein’s “agents of change.” Like others in the print professions, Bosse and his publishers were opportunists who most often resorted to tried and tested favorites. But forward-looking or not, all these prints contribute, to say it again, to a historical understanding of print in its various forms. Royal images are examined next, beginning with iconic portraits of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria that would seem to have little relevance to the challenges facing the monarchy at this time. I argue that these challenges are nevertheless invoked, even if only implicitly. Among these images are several apparently integral to almanacs but preserved while the outdated sheets were discarded. One royal image is of particular interest. A single-sheet print of Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus, it is initially baffling and must have seemed all the more so to a public unable to read its inscriptions in Latin and Greek. Clearly intended, or intended primarily, for the literate elites, it brings home 10

introduction

the importance of thinking of printed images not in terms of “true” readings or authorial intentions but of many truths as perceived by viewers-readers belonging to different cultural and social strata. Given that the specialized talents of many individuals were involved in print production, in which of these participants did agency reside? Was it the printerpublisher, as some have believed, the reader, as others have suggested, or the author and printmaker? Chapter 6 examines the collaboration of author and print (image) maker, while at the same time allowing for agency in publisher and (viewer) reader. Nowhere are relations between image and text more critical than in book illustrations, which are discussed in Chapter 7. Various “visual aids” such as diagrams and numbers and elements of packaging, or “paratext” such as dedications and title pages, are examined, followed by illustrations to plays and romances fueled by a surge in the production of these textual forms. Humanist ideals are equally reflected in illustrated books, I show, particularly a series of luxurious books upholding the traditional model of literacy. I then return to the role of images in the Scientific Revolution discussed in Chapter 4, with an examination of two series of botanical illustrations. Related to such illustrations are others made by Bosse for technical treatises on perspective, architecture, and so on, which he himself published and in which text and image are exceptionally well coordinated. The final chapter reviews Bosse’s activity as author-printer-publisherbookseller. Although this nexus of multiple agencies was unusual for a professional printmaker, it was altogether consistent with the dizzyingly rapid growth of the print industry in early modern France. The principal publications are those explaining and defending his controversial perspective method, which I discuss in relation to a larger controversy reflecting a major social and cultural upheaval. The essence of this discussion is then continued in a Coda examining famous exchanges between Poussin, Bosse, and the farceur Scarron, which have been understood as encapsulating the clash between the elite culture of painting and the new culture of print, but actually, to the contrary – it will be argued – bring out the overlaps and exchanges between these cultures.    A few words about translations. The discussion makes extensive use of materials originally published in French as the language was written in the seventeenth century. I reproduce the texts as found in the originals, particularly the inscriptions on prints, the exceptions being the modernized spelling and punctuation of R.-A. Weigert’s edition of Bosse’s important Sentiments, with which it would have been silly to tamper. I have also provided English translations of the inscriptions. Literary translations are always contentious. In traditional scholarly practice, the words of the originals are usually rendered literally. 11

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But this is not traditional scholarly material. And I decided to translate relatively freely, attempting to capture the comic metrical and verbal effects. Given the extensive and at times vast literature across many disciplines pertinent to the topics of this book, I decided, too, to cite the most recent scholarship, from which interested readers will be led back to earlier studies.

12

chapte r 1

A Printmaking Revolution

rints published in early modern France were principally of two kinds: the first, woodcuts, made by cutting away material from around the desired design, and the second, intaglio prints, resulting from lines or channels incised in a metal plate either directly (engraving) or by means of acid (etching). Printing from a raised design on a block of wood could be as simple as placing a sheet of paper over the inked block and then rubbing over the sheet with a wood or metal implement. Printing from intaglio plates, by contrast, required tremendous physical force, exerted by a specially designed press. Early printmakers were typically artisans trained to work with these different materials, woodworkers who more usually made shop signs, picture frames, and other such things, and goldsmiths producing and decorating metal objects such as chalices, cups, and plates. The images were predominantly sacred, most often of the Madonna and Child, the Saints, the Passion, and other stories from the Bible to be used in daily payers. That the authors were anonymous artisans, the images lacking in the refinement associated with works of fine art, was of no importance. What mattered was that they were within the price range of people who until then had been denied the solace of religious images. Here was a new form of picture-making, directed at a new public: not highpriced altarpieces commissioned by the upper classes, but icons that almost anyone could afford. These circumstances were substantially the same by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, but for the fact that printmaking had become an acknowledged and regulated profession. Few prices were actually recorded. However, in 1580, Bernard Palissy mentioned “histories of Our Lady” printed by D¨urer that existed in such large numbers that one could be had for two liards, and in 1610, Pierre l’Estoile paid

P

13

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1. Bosse, The Engraver and the Etcher. 1643. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.51 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

four sols for a few “bagatelles,” including broadsides of the death of Henri IV and a copperplate portrait of Louis XIII. Prices in this range – from one to four sols per print – most likely remained more or less constant throughout the seventeenth century.1 Liards were among the smallest units in the monetary system, sols – or sous – larger but still a fraction of the livre in which exchanges of valuable commodities such as paintings were calculated. Toward the end of the century, for example, the paintings by Poussin assembled by Chantelou were valued at 100 to 200 livres for copies of the originals to an astonishing 70,000 livres for Chantelou’s adored Seven Sacraments.2 It is hardly surprising, then, that printmaking flourished, the circulation of cheap images ever increasing. To be sure, references to “cheap” print in print culture studies are to the crude woodcuts that were the cheapest prints of all, but with few exceptions, most prints were “cheap enough” to be within the means of a substantial part of the population. On the evidence of two prints by Bosse, the print market of his time was dominated, as earlier, by religious images.3 The prints are of the intaglio processes that were his specialty and were published in 1642 and 1643. One shows an engraver and an etcher at work (Figure 1); the other, preparing and printing from finished plates (Figure 2). In the first (Figure 1), the engraver, on the right, tilts his plate to add the finishing touches to a Madonna and Child. The etcher, on the left, incises his composition in the acid-resistant ground of 14

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2. Bosse, The Intaglio Printers. 1642. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1922. 22.67.15 C The Image  Metropolitan Museum of Art

the copper plate, on the floor to his side the basin used for biting the plate and, on top of the cabinet, a funnel and two bottles of acid; slightly off center is a screen for reducing the glare of the light entering through the two windows. In the back, two monks and another browser – from his dress and sword a nobleman – inspect religious prints, a Crucifixion, figures of saints, and others. In the image of the printing shop (Figure 2), a pressman and printers are engaged in the principal stages of printing from a copper plate that are much the same today as in Bosse’s time. (Not represented are additional helpers who prepared the paper and performed other necessary, albeit menial, tasks.) On the left, in the background, one workman covers an entire plate with ink while, in front of him, another wipes the surface of the plate with the palm of his hand, leaving ink only in the incised channels. The plate, covered by a damp sheet of paper and layers of thick felt, is placed upright on the flat bed of the press, which will be pushed between two rigid rollers. On the right, the pressman turns the handle of such a rolling bed press designed to print engravings and etchings. The tremendous pressure exerted by the rollers transfers the ink left in the channels of the plate to the damp paper. Packages of paper and pots of ink lie around the shop; paper litters the floor. Multiple impressions of the images have been hung up to dry – again of religious subjects, the Crucifixion, figures of saints, and so on. Note, however, in Figure 1, next to the nobleman’s left 15

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shoulder, a faint but recognizable image of Bosse’s own The Fortune of France (Figure 3), so that although this shop specializes in religious subjects, it is not limited to such subjects.4 Other shops specialized in maps and topographical views or ornamental prints – motifs used in embroidery, damascening, and cabinetmaking.5 Pictured by Bosse in the paired etchings (Figures 1 and 2), in sum, is the firm of a publisher-printseller who owned a press and published prints that he offered for sale – although workroom and salesroom were usually separate spaces and the press typically occupied the floor above the salesroom, out of sight of the street.6 Bosse himself was that publisher-printseller of the etchings in question, the location of his establishment inscribed on each of the prints (“A Bosse a Paris en Lisle du palais”), suggesting that they represent his establishment, the etcher and engraver to be taken for “Bosse.” More usually, however, because of the continued domination of the old guilds and specialization within the printing trades and, most of all, the capital necessary to produce large editions, his prints were published in partnership with, or on order from, other publishers. The Fortune of France (Figure 3) is of the second kind, this one published by “LeBlond le jeune,” that is Roland Le Blond, located on the Pont Notre Dame. It is one type of single-sheet print, combining image and text, designed as well as etched or engraved by one and the same print professional in collaboration with an author. The images being transferred to the plates in Figure 1 may be understood as such original designs or, alternatively, designs furnished by an established painter or sculptor. During the seventeenth century, as indeed all through the history of printmaking, printmakers at times worked from their own inventions and at other times from compositions furnished by other printmakers, painters, or sculptors. Bosse did both and at times produced compositions that were etched or engraved by others. So as not to be misunderstood, let me stress that under discussion throughout this study are compositions made expressly to be turned into prints, as opposed to those copying famous paintings and sculptures as part of the reproductive print industry – to be discussed briefly later in this chapter. This division of labor is indicated on the prints themselves. The name of the designer is usually acknowledged with the Latin word invenit [did invent] or delineavit [did draw], that of the etcher-engraver with fecit [did make], sculpsit [did hollow out or carve], or incidit [did cut], and the publisher with permission to produce the prints, excudit [did issue]. The name of the author of the text is rarely if ever mentioned, nor that of the specialist entrusted with engraving the text; even the names of designer and engraver are, at times, omitted as are, not surprisingly, the names of the laborers entrusted with inking and then cleaning the plate and the printing itself. Indeed, the only name invariably included is that of the publisher, the entrepreneur who coordinated all aspects of the printing process, including securing the capital investment, negotiating with 16

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3. Bosse, The Fortune of France, c. 1635–1637. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1930, C 30.54.29 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

printmakers and authors, acquiring paper, paying wages, and selling the prints to other printsellers and to retail customers, and who, in acknowledgment of these risks and responsibilities, had been accorded the privil`ege or exclusive right of publication for a given period of time. Brought out by the aforementioned is the collaborative nature of an enterprise that depended on the active participation of many, often anonymous workers, from inkers, pressmen, and others to authors, designers, engravers, etchers, and, of course, the publishers who may have been printers and retailers as well. An exclusive attention to the engraver and etcher obviously fails to do justice to the actual structure of the print trade, or, to put it in terms of the argument of Adrian Johns, this attention to the “author” erases the essential contributions of all those working men and women to the development of literate culture.7 The print workshop typically being a family, matrilineal enterprise, women were indeed able to contribute in many ways, some achieving formal recognition as reproductive printmakers. As a result of recent research, the names Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughters, Johanna and Dorothea, Diana Mantuana, Isabella Parasole, and Magdalena de Passe are now found alongside those of their male contemporaries.8 One of Bosse’s daughters, lauded for her drawing skills, was most likely another such print worker.9 17

print culture in early modern france

Here it is worth noting that the aforementioned division of labor, particularly with regard to the blend of word and image, was substantially the same as in book publishing. From the earliest period of printing, leading entrepreneurs developed a whole panoply of techniques for using illustrations together with discursive texts, not simply as another kind of “reading” matter but in conjunction with short poems, illustration and poem both intended to expand and illuminate the conceit presented in the text. From the later years of the sixteenth century, such illustrations detached themselves, as it were, from books as single-sheet, large-format prints – the image now dominating the accompanying poem. In the one case as the other, it was a question of the publisher perceiving the possibilities as well as limitations of the different forms of publication and of specialized practitioners in each, and of ensuring cooperation between them in production.10 The design of the print itself, whether originating with the printmaker or furnished by another, would most usually, from the sixteenth century on, have been transferred by means of engraving, the mainstay of printmaking by this time – burin engraving, the burin a small, V-shaped chisel set into a wooden bulb-like handle. It is with this instrument that lines are cut into the plate. Straight lines are produced by placing the plate in front of the printmaker and moving the burin diagonally, usually from right to left. Arcing and circular lines cannot be negotiated with the burin alone, however, but result from the movements of the burin and plate combined; placed on a cushion filled with sand, the plate is rotated against the burin, as in Bosse’s image of the engraver at work (Figure 1). An engraving is limited to these two linear movements, one straight and the other circular – parallel lines, intersecting straight and arcing lines, cross-hatchings, strokes, flecks, and dots – all depending on the skill of the engraver in coordinating the movements of burin and plate. Engraving was not the only such intaglio technique, however; others were drypoint and etching, both simplicity itself compared to engraving. A drypoint involves nothing more than scratching a plate with the point of a needle. As the metal is displaced, a burr is raised, the impression from the plate registering the incised groove and its accompanying burr. Both are extremely fragile, however, and, as a result of the friction caused by inking, wiping, and printing, the plate will yield a mere ten or twenty prints of varying degrees of sharpness. Etching, although not as delicate as drypoint, offered the possibility of a comparable spontaneity and license preferred by “painter-etchers” such as Rembrandt and was at times used in conjunction with engraving by professional printmakers. But it, too, has its limitations.11 Made by drawing with a needle not directly on the metal surface but rather on, or in, an acid-resistant ground covering that surface, etching involves even less physical exertion than drypoint: acid biting into the exposed channels of the metal plate, rather than controlled force, creates the grooves into which the paper will be pressed – the 18

a printmaking revolution

reason it is called taille douce or soft cutting. One problem, however, is that the acid may penetrate or lift the ground, causing an uncontrolled or “foul” biting; another is that the action of the acid never results in lines as crisp as those cut directly by a burin or may bite or etch the lines unevenly. That conventionally etched lines are of a relative sameness was also a serious drawback. Using an etching needle, in sum, it was virtually impossible to create lines of the crispness and subtly varying widths and depths as those produced by the burin. It was so impossible, that is, before the intervention of Jacques Callot. A professional printmaker, Callot conceived of the possibility of yoking the spontaneity of etching to the greater resources of engraving. His resolution was twofold. For the soft ground of traditional etching consisting of waxes, gums, and resins, he substituted a harder, more uniform varnish (vernis dur) used by lute makers. And for drawing in the ground, he dispensed with the etching needle, using in its place a specially designed steel cylinder with its end cut off at an angle – an e´choppe, with which he was able to mimic the swelling and tapering lines of engraving (Figure 4). A groove once formed with the e´choppe could be deepened, too, through multiple bitings, this technique resulting in lines of a crispness and strength equal to those of engraving while drawn with the ease and quickness of etching.12 From the point of view of technique, this was a crucial, indeed revolutionary moment in the history of intaglio printmaking. Many printmakers were quickly converted to it, among them Bosse, who learned the technique directly from Callot and went on to explain and disseminate it in two treatises.

the treatise on etching and engraving The first, the technical treatise of 1645, explains the new method of Callot, but also much more. One of a new kind of how-to book, it treats the subject of intaglio printmaking, as its title suggests, comprehensively, bringing to light the “secrets” until then taught only by masters to pupils, themselves sworn to secrecy: Trait´e des mani`eres de graver en taille douce sur l’airin par le moyen des eaux fortes et des vernix durs et mols, ensemble la fac¸on d’en imprimer les planches et d’en construire la presse et autre chose concernant lesdits arts [Treatise of the Methods of Engraving by means of Etching with Hard and Soft Grounds, together with the means of Printing Plates, Constructing the Press, and other things Concerning these Arts].13 The book became a standard work, was translated into English, Italian, Dutch, German, and Portuguese, with multiple editions in those languages and two further editions published in eighteenth-century France, and became the basis for virtually all subsequent discussions of the practice.14 That Bosse felt compelled to write it is indicative of a commitment that would lead to other books during the following years: to the new and better, to a brand of 19

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utilitarianism most closely associated with the Englishman Sir Francis Bacon and the modern project. Carefully organized, the treatise covers soft and hard ground etching and engraving, handling the burin, printing the plate, and constructing the press. The text is clarified by sixteen illustrations, the various objects and their parts clearly designated by letters of the alphabet. Bosse begins with the preparation of the plate, preferably of red copper (“cuivre rouge”). He illustrates the application and darkening of the varnish with candle smoke and then its drying and hardening with heat. He proceeds to describe ways of transferring a drawing to the plate and of selecting needles of two kinds, pointes and e´choppes, the first the sharply pointed needle suggested by the word, the second a larger cylinder ground at a bias. Key passages and plates teach the handling of these tools and illustrate the range of lines and hatchings that may be produced with them. A method for controlling the biting of the plate with acid follows and then advice about how to go back into, and thereby strengthen, the etched lines using the engraver’s burin with an ease that was not the least of the merits of Callot’s new technique – although Callot himself relied for the most part on the etched line alone. A final group of six plates shows how the plate is to be printed. The parts of the press are identified, of a rolling bed press with two rigid rollers to produce the pressure needed to print engraved plates. And the press itself is shown in different perspectives, as operated by a pressman. Two years earlier, it is to be recalled, in 1643, Bosse had published a print of an engraver and an etcher at work as one of a pair anticipating the treatise on etching-engraving (Figure 1), the second of the prints showing, in far greater detail than the plates of the treatise, the printing process (Figure 2). Very clearly represented is a shorthand of allusion to the din and disorder highlighted by Robert Darnton in his characterization of an early book-printing shop that would have been substantially the same as a shop for printing engravings and etchings: Real printing shops were dirty, loud and unruly – and so were real printers. The presses creaked and groaned. The ink balls filled with wool soaked in urine gave off a fierce stench. And the men waded about in filthy paper, swilling wine and banging their composing sticks against type cases for the sheer joy of making noise, bellowing and brawling as opportunities arose, and tormenting the apprentices with practical jokes.15

Printers had to contend with more than dirt and abuse; serious illness was a likely and more permanent consequence of their physical exertions in the small, overcrowded, and poorly ventilated spaces in which they and their assistants worked, ate, and often slept.16 The work was repetitive and tedious at best and also physically exhausting. The wooden presses of the day were heavy, rolling bed presses requiring brute strength as well as discipline to operate. The fumes of oils and printing ink were not only disagreeable but potentially noxious. 20

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4. Bosse, The e´choppe. 1645. Etching. Traict´e des mani`eres de graver. (Photo: Author)

Type was comprised of an alloy of lead with antimony as a hardening agent, sometimes combined with copper, arsenic, or tin. In the shop pictured by Bosse in Figure 2, the varnishes, candle smoke, and, most of all, the acids used to bite the copper plates would have added to the pernicious fumes permeating the atmosphere. All in all, printers had to expect that their working lives would be cut short by arthritis and consumption. Such printers belonged to an artisanal class, functioning within a welldefined hierarchy, ranging from apprentice to journeyman to master, the last a status that few who began in the profession achieved. Paid by the job – in this context, for the number of prints produced in one day – such workers had to resign themselves to lives of perpetual work, of labor despised to an extent 21

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perhaps unimaginable in these more democratic times. As the jurist Loyseau put it in a social tract published at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Trait´e des ordres et simples dignitez [Treatise of the Orders and Human Dignity]: Trades which are crafts and commerce (“mestiers et merchandises”) combined . . . are honorable and those who exercise them are not numbered among the vile persons . . . On the contrary there are trades which rest more in the effort of the body than in the traffic of commerce or in the subtlety of the mind, and those are the most vile.17

The arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture had formed a subcategory of the first and had only slowly, from the Renaissance on, been accorded the status of liberal subjects – or such was the status desired for them in a campaign still being waged by artists in Bosse’s time. To achieve this status, it was necessary to distract attention from the “effort of the body” by means of which works of art were produced. But if it was difficult for artists to do so, it was all the more daunting a task for those in the print professions. For from its early days, this profession was known for its labor intensiveness and for the reputed ignorance and riotousness of its workforce, which, as a result, was regarded with the utmost suspicion. Involving a range of skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled labor, printing brought together a critical mass of working men engaged in potentially explosive activities, almost literally so in the sense that they more than likely were Protestants and their industry was associated with Protestantism, which was the single greatest threat to the security of Catholic France. For this as well as reasons of what we would call class bias, from the early days of printing, complaints were regularly registered about the recklessness and unreliability of print workers, both within and outside of the workplace, of their vulgarity and lack of a proper education.18 Such is the broad context of Bosse’s images of a printing press and print shop, frankly acknowledging the indispensable role of manual labor in cultural production. Francis Bacon’s advice to intellectuals to learn from artisans, from printers most of all given that printing had “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world,” was, in fact, little heeded.19 In spite of the arguments of recent scholars about how the gap between the “liberal” and “mechanical” arts was narrowed at this time, stressing the importance of hands-on investigations within the scientific revolution, the same call went out again with the articulation of the Enlightenment project, Diderot, himself the son of a cutler, appealing to practitioners of the liberal arts to join him in “pulling the mechanical arts up from the debasement where prejudice has held them for so long.”20 What is so extraordinary about the prints of 1642 and 1643 and the treatise of 1645 within European cultural history, then, is their frank Baconian acknowledgment of the integral and indispensable role of manual labor in the domain of printmaking. Not least of all is their 22

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5. Bosse, The Art of Engraving. Etching. Frontispiece, Traict´e des mani`eres de graver, 1645. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris)

refusal to engage with the theoretical discourse arguing the liberal nature of visual art, to which Bosse himself alluded in a famous etching of The Noble Painter contemporary with those of the printer’s shop and showroom (Figures 1 and 2).21 But then, the treatise was conceived as a technical manual filled with practical information and recipes such as are altogether lacking in books on the arts in the humanist tradition, focusing attention on a trade of growing prominence because of the spread of literacy. And it opens with a frontispiece loudly proclaiming the dignity and worth of intaglio printmaking, its mechanical nature notwithstanding (Figure 5). The image is of a classically draped figure on a seat supported by a half human–half fish Siren holding an engraved plate with the 23

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title of the book, her gesture calling attention to a bottle of acid and rag and also the trough and basin used to catch the acid during the course of washing and biting the plate. If the materials are those of practice, the classical figure, allegorical in type, clearly was conceived to dignify that practice. The figures “engraved” under the title should help negotiate this transaction, but just how they do so is far from clear. Who are these men and what are they doing? One tantalizing possibility emerges from the writings of the noted French scholar and bibliophile Gabriel Naud´e (1630). Classical learning had taken a great leap forward during the reign of Louis XI, he claimed, when, under royal patronage, printing was introduced into France. Concluding with a summary of the cultural contributions made by all past French kings, Naud´e addresses Louis XIII directly: “It is now up to you oh most victorious and triumphant of all our monarchs to follow the road traced by your ancestors, and to place the last stone as you have the first upon this new Parnassus.”22 Might Bosse’s frontispiece have been similarly addressed to Louis XIII, the men on the “plate” in the hands of the draped female figure printers under the protection of the French monarchy? Not likely. There is nothing here to suggest such a reference. At the same time, other narratives of the early history of printing may help throw light on the meaning of the image. At the outset of the treatise, Bosse argues that engraving and etching on metal belong within a larger category of engraving, on stone, glass, wood, and so on, and that engraving as such is shown by the Book of Moses to have originated in the most ancient times: “il est des plus anciens puis que Moyse en a escrit ainsi que d’une chose laquelle estoit de son temps fort en usage [it is among the most ancient, for Moses wrote that it was widely used in his time].”23 Exodus does indeed contain numerous references to engravings on stone and gold, to one of which Bosse seems to be referring specifically: the engraved “tables of stone” of the covenant with the Hebrew people brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai. When Moses came down the mountain, the skin of his face “radiated,” we are told, as does the face of the figure on the right of Bosse’s title plate, the others reacting with surprise or fear, also in keeping with the biblical account (Exodus, xxiv–xxxiv). (The short strokes “radiating” from that figure rarely register in reproductions.) Given Bosse’s identification of engraving with the technology of printing, his argument cannot but recall one first promulgated by Luther about how the invention of printing was “God’s highest and extremist act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward; it is the last flame before the extinction of the world.”24 The allegorical figure and plate, then, signifying the underpinnings or theory and practice of intaglio printmaking, are traceable not to early French history but to the beginnings of history as such in God’s plan for humankind. The claim is that printmaking is neither less ancient nor dignified than any

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other “liberal” subject but, indeed, more so – nor Bosse, the lawgiving Moses of the printmaking world, less distinguished than prophets of other types! That intaglio printmaking has indeed an intrinsic value is indicated by the Siren that appears in Ripa’s popular Iconologia as a symbol of PIACERE.25 We are to understand, in sum, that intaglio printmaking, while not inferior to other liberal disciplines despite its humbler means of production, is particularly pleasing to those capable of grasping the possibilities of this most ancient of modern inventions.

a new beginning Bosse expanded his defense of printmaking in a further publication of 1649, this one placing his revolutionary technique in relation to the older methods of creating and transmitting images. The broad context of the book is the tradition of the Italian Renaissance treatise – but with a striking difference. Renaissance writers, even while aiming at a comprehensive treatment of the arts of drawing and design (disegno), limit their discussions to painting, sculpture, and architecture; engraving, if mentioned at all, is relegated to the margins of drawing and painting as an inferior, strictly reproductive art. Such was the verdict of the influential Giorgio Vasari, who, in the 1568 edition of his Vite, included engraving among the arts of disegno, but in a completely subservient role. Discussing it at some length in the Life of the innovative engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, he treated it as a merely reproductive art, not to be confused with true disegno.26 Even while allowing engraving a place among the arts, in other words, he whittled it down to a strictly mechanical practice, distinct from disegno as such. Bosse, by contrast, not only foregrounds intaglio printmaking, etching/engraving – the term “gravure” of his title covers both – but treats it as equal to drawing and painting, Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses mani`eres de peinture, dessin, et gravure, et des originaux d’avec leurs copies [Opinions on the Distinctions between different Styles of Painting, Drawing, and Etching or Engraving, and of the Relations between Originals and Copies]. The frontispiece is a representation of the same or a related figure as served for the treatise of 1645 personifying intaglio printmaking (Figure 5), but this time coupled with painting, both under the aegis of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, protectress of the arts of painting and sculpture and “the mother of printing” (Figure 6).27 What specifically is the connection between printmaking and painting? It hardly seems necessary, Bosse observes, to state that a printmaker needs to have mastered drawing, without which his works will always be weak: “sans cela il ne pourra jamais bien imiter aucun tableau, ni dessin, parce que cet ouvrage ne sera fait que tˆatonnant” [without this he will never be able to make a painting or drawing that is other than tentative].”28

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He is contesting the old bias against printmaking discussed earlier – this time, however, by annexing the aura surrounding drawing as a production of the mind (esprit). But this is only part of his argument. Earlier writers who dared to defend engraving focused attention on its demanding technique, which, they claimed, in and of itself made it the equal of drawing. Such was the argument, for example, in the 1604 Schilder-Boeck of Karel van Mander, who placed reproductive prints “among the highest achievements of northern art” and, in a set piece of rhetorical invention, made the great engraver Hendrick Goltzius the Michelangelo of the North on the grounds that the virtuosity of his burin technique is comparable to the ease and flow of Michelangelo’s drawing.29 Bosse stands this argument on its head. The appeal of printmaking, he states, making still more explicit the argument of the treatise of 1645, consists not in its demanding technique, but the opposite: its utter simplicity. Indeed, the treatise of 1649 is addressed not to budding print professionals but amateurs, implying that printmaking is no less pleasurable than drawing and therefore no less deserving of a place in the liberal curriculum designed for the ruling elite. It is also addressed, more narrowly, to painters and others engaged in the arts of design (“Peintres & Desseignateurs”), promising to show them that printmaking need be no more difficult than drawing.30 Bosse is arguing, in other words, that his technical innovation is tantamount to a new beginning for printmaking, expanding not only its possibilities but its cultural reach. He makes his case, to begin with, by reviewing the history of intaglio printmaking, the origins of which he places around 1490, roughly the period of the invention of printing, commonly credited at the time to Johann Gutenberg (these origins have, in fact, been pushed back to the 1430s).31 The historical production in question, it is to be stressed, was largely dependent on the techniques of engraving, to which those of other types of intaglio printmaking were at that time entirely subordinated. The luminaries of the medium are mentioned, particularly Albrecht D¨urer and Marcantonio Raimondi, and the names of other German and Italian printmakers fill out the picture: Lucas van Leyden and Heinrich Aldegrever, Giulio Bonasone and Marco Dente, among others. The list continues with the major figures of the following century, most notably Agostino Carracci, Francesco Villamena, Cherubino Alberti, Aegidius Sadeler, Hendrick Goltzius, and, into the early seventeenth century, Callot, “[who] greatly perfected this art.”32 Working along similar lines as earlier printmakers, Callot compares favorably with the best of them, Bosse states, and indeed is in many ways superior and alone deserves credit for the recent successes of the art (Bosse’s emphasis). His superiority is all the more apparent, Bosse asserts, given the small scale of Callot’s prints and their technique: neither engraving as such nor etching but a combination of the two, the innovative technique described earlier and disseminated in the technical treatise of 1645. 26

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6. Bosse, Painting and Engraving. Etching. Frontispiece, Sentiments, 1649. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris)

“If it had not been that his genius carried him to little figures,” Bosse asserts, “he would doubtless have done in big etchings all that can be done in imitation of the engraver’s tool.” This was accomplished, he notes, through Callot’s invention of the e´choppe, the use of which underlies his own method, as he proceeds to explain (Figure 4): “For myself the greatest difficulty I have met in etching is to make hatchings that swing, big, fat, and thin, as needed, as 27

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the engraver’s tool does and with which the plates may be printed for a long time.” It is not that I do not appreciate work done in etching that has not this neatness . . . but all will agree with me that it is the invention, the beautiful outlines, and the touches, of those who have worked the other way which makes their work appreciated rather than any neatness of the way they laid their lines. I believe that those who etched the other way would have acquired greater success in their business if they had availed themselves of my system of laying lines.33

The strength of this “system of laying lines,” he states, does not depend on its darkness but on its gradations from light to dark; if the halftones are too dark, they will destroy and prevent the effect by overwhelming the gradations necessary to sustain that strength.34 Not too much black nor too much contrast in any part of the composition. In Bosse’s regularized and systematized scheme, each form is built up of a variety of etched and engraved lines that are carefully and subtly adjusted to one another. This new method taught by Callot has, then, two distinct advantages over traditional etching techniques: the first, that with it a clarity or “neatness” hitherto possible only by mastering the recalcitrant burin could be achieved; and the other, a more subtle tonal range. Callot’s line is indeed unusually precise and expressive, combining the simplicity of a Marcantonio with the intricacy of a Goltzius. Defining form and structure as the first, it has the liveliness of the second. The essential difference from both, however, to say it again, is that Callot’s initially was etched, albeit by means of his e´choppe in such a way as to simulate that of engraving. Avoiding strong contrasts and carefully calculating his tones, Callot combined such lines to create designs of an extraordinary lucidity and expressiveness. That this was achieved on a foundation of etching was all the more remarkable – and auspicious.

original and copy More complicated in Bosse’s Sentiments are the distinctions between “originals” and “copies” promised by the title. The difficulty, he states, is of recognizing a good copy of an absent original (“une bonne copie d’un original absent”), or a copy of an original that one has never seen (“sans avoir jamais vu l’original”), or, still greater, of an impression of one kind or another when the two come from one and the same type of copper plate (“l’impression ou la mani`ere d’imprimer l’une et l’autre desdites planches est toute semblable”).35 In question are problems posed by the multiplication of originals, the very purpose of the print profession, those impressions having the status of “original copies,” however, not to be confused with unauthorized and inferior “copies” by other hands. If the first or “original copy” would be difficult to recognize in only a 28

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single such example, the second, in the absence of an “original” with which it might be compared, would be difficult to identify as a “pretend original.”36 If this distinction has a familiar ring, it may be for bringing to mind humanist polemics concerning invention and imitation with respect to the texts of the canon, or, perhaps more so, the analysis of reproduction by Walter Benjamin, an analysis that turns precisely on the question of the status of “the original” when that “original” is not unique. To be sure, Benjamin’s analysis is not of printmaking but photography and film, which he understands, however, to be only the latest reproductive techniques in a historical process tracing its origins back to the woodcut, engraving, and etching. The conceptual focus of his discussion and the idea that has become something of a scholarly clich´e is that of the loss of “aura” that results from multiple reproduction: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. . . . The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.37

Although Benjamin’s distinction goes to the heart of the printmaking enterprise, it was not the one intended by Bosse, for whom the “original copy,” while only one of many, belongs nevertheless to a whole different category from the “pretend original.” Bosse’s is not the conventional and present-day understanding of “original” as either the directly experienced or of the original work of art in the Benjaminian sense. Neither is it one of the terms in the usual binary opposition of original-good, copy-bad, because the whole point of the print profession is the production of multiple images or copies. Bosse’s point is that all such seemingly identical impressions or copies are not equal. Copies in his discussion will most likely be inferior to the originals: “dures, s`eches, et bien souvent plus noires que leurs originaux, quand mˆeme ils compteraient le nombre des hachures [hard, dry, and often darker than the originals, particularly when many hatchings are involved].”38 What, then, are these copies of and what motivated Bosse to focus attention on the differences between originals and copies? A related, albeit more straightforward, distinction is made in the same Sentiments about painting. It would seem to be more straightforward because of the documented proliferation of painted copies of works by famous artists and confusion as to their authenticity.39 More narrowly, as Donald Posner has stressed, Bosse directs attention to the idiosyncrasies of execution – here of the brush. Bosse had introduced the book by defining some of the technical terms used to describe the application of paint to the surface: croqu´ee, tranch´e, frais, etc. (“sketchy, contrasting, fresh, etc.”) – arguing that carefully executed, highly finished styles (“d’une mani`ere finie, fort l´ech´ee et peign´ee”) are easier to imitate than freer, more spontaneous ones, “where a single stroke of the 29

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brush creates what is hard to replicate in a hundred.” Only such attention to the artist’s hand will make it possible to distinguish original paintings from copies or forgeries of them.40 The distinction holds, then, for painting as well. But this only returns us to the overarching problematic. Why this sudden preoccupation with the notion of originality and differences between the original and the copy? Christopher Wood has recently written about the unexpectedness of this distinction: The reliability of mechanical copying paradoxically allowed the conception of a unique, non-interchangeable style to take hold. . . . The authored, event-like artwork could now define itself clearly against the background of the print. The concept of the original comes into focus only through the lens of its opposite, the perfect replica.41

The paradox, then, is twofold: first, that multiple production resulted in a new appreciation of the unique work of art; and second, that it called attention to the hand of the artist. A definite sequence is now established privileging the first or original work in a series, with traditional notions of the singular preeminence of the author reaffirmed and indeed bolstered. Indeed, Bosse was one such preeminent printmaker-artist whose original inventions were frequently copied or plagiarized by other printmakers. The individual personality of the printmaker-as-artist was manifest, too, in a signature, not the least distinction of prints at a time when few paintings or sculptures were signed.42 The obvious model was D¨urer, whose monogram, sometimes accompanied by his full name and also a date, appears on all his prints. Virtually all printmakers who followed him did the same, at times imitating his monogram, others using their initials or some other form of their names, all used by Bosse at one time or another: “AB,” “A. Bosse,” “Abraham Bosse.” It is not possible to specify the number of impressions Bosse himself pulled – or had pulled, since he did not do the actual printing – from a single plate. (Single-sheet etchings or engravings on hard copper plates might be produced in as many as 1,000 or more proofs, but no doubt were run off in smaller numbers, to satisfy demand.) One would have thought it would be possible to do so, as did Marianne Grivel when she set about studying archival documents in hopes of reconstructing the print market in seventeenth-century France. Existing documents hardly brought that market back to life, however, showing neither how many prints were in circulation nor the appeal of particular printmakers or subjects. They proved, at best, she frankly admits, ambiguous and ultimately unhelpful. To learn about the print market of seventeenth-century France, she states, one must rely on the evidence of the prints themselves.43 So far as Bosse’s prints are concerned, even if it is not possible to specify the number of impressions he had pulled from one of his plates, given their continued 30

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availability down through the centuries – and still today at most print dealers in Paris – it must have been considerable. That his images were in demand is proven, too, by the many replicas, copies, and imitations of them, at times in larger or smaller formats, as originally printed or in reverse, that circulated in France and even more so in Holland and Flanders. (Bosse’s treatise on etching was also “copied” or “pirated” in unauthorized English, Dutch, German, Italian, and Portuguese editions, although, of course, this notion of “piracy” is a modern one, seventeenth-century printmakers and authors not owning their inventions in the sense of copyrighted property.)44 While speaking of the lower quality of the “copy,” then, Bosse’s overriding concern would have been with copies or replicas of his images sold by rivals, no doubt for lower prices than he was asking. His is the familiar lament of the early print professional about how unscrupulous publishers are infringing on his “property rights.”

collecting prints The Sentiments was intended, Bosse repeatedly states, for the edification of artists and “art lovers” (“pratitiens” and “amateurs”) but most of all for “curieux,” namely collectors of paintings and of prints. The aim: to help such “curieux” become “connoisseurs,” with a “belle connaissance” of the means of judging works.45 The distinction between original and copy was made to this end, as also the survey of the history of printmaking, with attention to the leading printmakers and their best prints.46 The aim of the Sentiments, in sum, was to forge close links between collecting paintings and the relatively new phenomenon of print collecting. Landau and Parshall have shown that it was not uncommon to assemble collections of prints in Renaissance Italy, perhaps in the same spirit as drawings, the one as the other until then completely overshadowed by paintings. These collections seem to have been relatively small, the collectors typically choosing those reproducing important paintings and sculptures or prints by the most famous printmakers such as Marcantonio and his school.47 Collections of prints were formed in early-seventeenth-century France as well, although there is little information about the individual agents involved or of the contents of these collections. All of this began to change by the 1630s, however, with the formation of print collections of unprecedented size and variety, the most famous the collection of Michel de Marolles, which, when sold to Louis XIV, amounted to some 123,400 pieces. (Marolles immediately began to assemble a second collection no less staggering in size.) 48 Bosse’s idol and guide, Callot, a favorite among French print collectors, was also much admired by Marolles. The collector considered Marolles’ successor, Beringhen, aimed to assemble Callot’s complete oeuvre, as also that of Mellan and perhaps Bosse, who was represented by 1,071 prints. Some images by these 31

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printmakers were no doubt included in the lots and collections still available in the print market. But the salient point here is that whereas the bulk of such collections was considered to be of little interest or monetary value, in the range mentioned earlier (40 sols per hundred), rare prints and prints of high quality could fetch anywhere from 100 to 6,000 livres – the prices of paintings.49 The project of the Sentiments, focusing on connoisseurship and the history of printmaking alongside that of painting, is, then, a crucial and sometimes fundamental reference for an understanding of the growing interest in and appreciation of prints in seventeenth-century France.

the originality of an etching-engraving Here I return to the previously mentioned paradox about a mechanically reproduced image being an “original” by rephrasing the question: what, if anything, was the unique contribution of a printed image? To begin to answer this question, I turn to the process whereby a drawing is turned into an etching/engraving. Few final drawings for prints, it must be said at once, have survived. As the text under Bosse’s print of the etcher and engraver explains (Figure 1), a drawing is transferred by coating the reverse of the paper with carbonate of lead and then tracing the image onto a lightly waxed plate by pressing along the contours of the figures. This process, once completed, would have left a discolored and torn sheet hardly worth preserving. Extant drawings for prints are, for the most part, then, not the final designs but those leading up to them. Such studies document the printmaker as draftsman, showing how, with chalk or pen, he drew contours and handled drapery folds. Comparing these studies with the prints in connection with which they were made should establish differences between the handling of drawing tools on the one hand and the burin or e´choppe on the other. They are of inestimable value for an understanding of the printmaker’s thinking about these distinct methods of dessin or dessein. Consider one such study by Bosse for La saign´ee [The Blood-Letting] (Figures 7 and 8).50 The principal elements of the print appear in the study down to the objects in the room, only the head of the surgeon’s assistant lacking its definitive orientation. (Note that a mirror, or a second drawing made with a mirror, would have been used in transferring the drawing for the printed image to correspond to the original.) With pen in hand, Bosse described the forms with sharp, nervous lines, adding decorative twists and flourishes throughout. The principal forms in the foreground were modeled with washes of brown or grey more fully to articulate the volumes, whereas those in the background were left as simple linear notations, only lightly washed. The method is a venerable one used by Italian artists of the High Renaissance and adopted by painters and 32

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7. Bosse, La saign´ee [The Blood-Letting]. Drawing, Pen and Brown Ink, Grey Wash. Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Inv. No. 23972 (Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/ Art Resource, NY

8. Bosse, La saign´ee [The Blood-Letting], c. 1632–1633. Etching, from Les m´etiers, Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris)

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printmakers of the seventeenth century, its usefulness consisting in its being much like that of painting, in which modulated colors, approximated in washes of three tones – black, white, and grey – were applied to delineated forms. The passage from drawing with washes to painting involved first drawing and then “washing” the drawing with lighter and darker tints of different colors.51 Having learned this technique from painters, intaglio printmakers had to adapt it to an entirely different medium. What remained to be resolved, in other words, was the technique, for the drawing in question lacks the consistency or “neatness” and unity of the print. Bosse being the one who explained this intaglio technique in detail, let us consider his translation of the lines and tones of his drawing (Figures 7 and 8). To reiterate, everything in the drawing is in the print, with few revisions, the most obvious being the finish of the second. In filling in the open areas of the composition, however, Bosse has adjusted and readjusted the tones creating a whole of exceptional consistency and uniformity. Gone is the stark contrast between dark foreground and light background, between volume, mass, and outline. All areas are, rather, of relatively equal importance. Nowhere are the reasons for this equality more clearly brought out than in his handling of the “patient.” In the drawing (Figure 7), this figure is outlined and modeled with light, medium, and dark washes, as is especially clear in the intricate drapery folds: the large masses were laid in with light tones, darker tones then applied for further differentiation and shading. Now consider this same passage in the etching (Figure 8). The lines are strong and sure in their articulation of the masses. A crucial difference, however, is that this articulation is strictly linear: line, whereas only one element in drawing and painting, is the whole of intaglio printmaking. And whereas this would seem to be of the very nature of the medium, it had a particular significance for Bosse. Few of the lines describing and modeling that same passage of drapery appear as spontaneous gestures. They are, rather, unusually regular and systematic. Rhythmically repeated in more or less parallel sequences and cross-hatchings, they are consciously arranged in series and nets. The different aspects of form expressed in the drawing by contrasting areas of washes are here minimized and generalized by one and the same schematic linear treatment. This is not to say that the lines are all the same. Their range is, in fact, considerable both in terms of actual length and width and relative intensity, as determined by the biting and selective re-biting of the plate and by going back into the lines with the burin. They are nevertheless of the same unrelenting calculation. This is the method referred to by Bosse as “my system of laying lines.” The strength of a printed image, he states, does not depend on its darkness but on its gradations from light to dark; if the halftones are too dark, they will destroy and prevent the effect by overwhelming the gradations necessary to sustain the strength.52 There should not be either too much black or too much

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contrast in any part of the composition. In Bosse’s regularized and systematized scheme, each form is built up of a variety of etched and engraved lines that are carefully and subtly adjusted to one another in a way similar to flat washes of different tints. A head is not an observed form with a particular texture contrasted with, say, that of drapery folds. The two are related not as one illusioned form or material to another, but as elements in a graduated and fully integrated tonal design. One striking effect that those who have written about such prints seem entirely to have missed is of their utter artificiality. For all their seeming accuracy and transparency, these images could not have less to do with the figures and objects in scenes that they are accepted as describing. They are, in sum, remarkable for entirely different ends, consciously envisaged by Bosse: each of subtly adjusted linear weights closely woven into a graphic whole different in kind from a drawing or painting.53 Thus to call attention to the “code” of printmaking is to take what must seem a distinctly modern, post-photographic approach to images. Much of William Ivins Jr.’s Prints and Visual Communication is devoted to a discussion of the “visual syntax” of printed images, to devices and conventions that have been of great interest to E. H. Gombrich and central to Barthes’ structural analyses of works of visual art and literature.54 It may seem that such an analytical approach to the “methods of representation” would have been alien to the seventeenth century, when, it has been imagined, images such as Bosse’s were accepted as snapshot-like records of the scenes themselves. But Descartes, for one, did not so view such images. Engravings, he notes in his La dioptrique, are notorious instances of the gap between representation and reality, for made simply of a little ink placed here and there on a piece of paper, they represent to us forests, towns, men, and even battles. Yet from an infinity of diverse qualities which they lead us to conceive in the objects, they actually resemble them only in shape. And even this resemblance is quite imperfect, since engravings represent to us objects variously convex and concave on a surface which is entirely flat; and again, following the rules of perspective, they often represent circles by ovals rather than by other circles, and squares by diamonds rather than by other squares. Thus very often, to be more perfect images and to represent the object better, the engravings must not resemble it.55

The circles translated by ovals, and so on, representations without resemblances, suggest anamorphoses, composite perspectives in which images are systematically distorted to be unintelligible from all but the intended point of view.56 But Descartes’ larger point is the one made by Ivins, Gombrich, Barthes, and many other recent theorists and that has a particular relevance in coming to terms with a method of printing images that keeps us suspended in an unreal graphic world, with just enough references to reality to make us accept it as such.

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Bosse’s method, then – or, more accurately, the Callot-Bosse method – for all its seeming realism and transparency, is pure artifice. If it were ever possible to reproduce the “thing itself,” this was not the way to do so.

prints as reproductions Bosse does not make an explicit distinction between prints as independent, single-sheet compositions and prints reproducing works by other artists, in other media, intended for those with an interest in the more or less recent history of art. And the two are ambivalently interconnected in the literature on printmaking. But even if at times blurred, the distinction was real and traceable to the exigencies of the print marketplace.57 The story of reproductive printmaking begins with Marcantonio Raimondi, a professional engraver who first produced “pirated” versions of woodcuts by D¨urer and then went to work for Raphael, producing engravings after drawings made expressly to be engraved as well as after painted compositions by the master. Given Raphael’s exalted position in the Renaissance tradition and also the innovative technique developed by Marcantonio for transmitting Raphael’s designs, these engravings achieved canonical status in that tradition and charted a course for printmaking as reproduction during the following centuries. The leading figures after Marcantonio were those mentioned by Bosse in his treatise of 1649 and listed earlier: Giulio Bonasone, Marco Dente, Agostino Carracci, among others, all known principally as reproductive printmakers and including the many nameless and faceless technicians laboring in print shops around Europe. “Original” printmaking was left to a relatively few enterprising professionals such as Callot and Della Bella and also “peintre graveurs” such as Salvator Rosa and, most famous of all, Rembrandt, etchers all, creating original works for the print market. The principal market for prints remained, however, that for reproductive prints in the production of which the majority of printmakers continued to be employed. And not only career reproductive printmakers. As was typical for intaglio printmakers, Callot had trained under a goldsmith, learning the basic techniques of engraving on gold and silver. He went on to study with the master engraver Antonio Tempesta, who taught him the art of the burin. He then worked for the printmaker and publisher Philippe Thomassin, reproducing paintings and sculptures by a variety of artists and copying prints by such popular engravers as the Collaerts and the brothers Sadeler, with the addition of the inscription “J. Callot fecit” or “J. Callot fe.” His earliest “original” prints were produced in collaboration with Giulio Parigi: “Jullius Parigi In. Callot delineavit et f.”58

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Bosse’s early career was of a similar kind. Having trained under the printmaker and publisher Melchior Tavernier, his first prints reproduce designs by Bellange, Merian, and Saint-Igny, all carrying the inscription “A. Bosse fecit” – or “AB. Fe.” Later in his career, he worked from designs by the painter Jacques Stella, among others, his position vis-`a-vis “originality” shifting and, in terms of present-day distinctions, paradoxical.59 But, to say it again, this was the nature of an open and fluid marketplace for prints. The upsurge of interest in printmaking in later-seventeenth-century France was fueled at least in part by its reproductive capacity. As a means of “mechanical” reproduction, it came to be valued for its effectiveness in spreading knowledge of the accomplishments of Louis XIV, in this context as patron and collector of great works of art. The engraver G´erard Edelinck was made graveur du cabinet du roi and charged with translating the Raphaels, Poussins, and other masterpieces in the royal collection in order, as stated in the introduction to the volume in which they were published, that they be seen “by the most remote nations who are unable to contemplate them here in the original.”60 Some years later, for similar reasons, G´erard Audran was ordered to engrave Le Brun’s “Battles of Alexander” series, which he did in images of an extraordinary tonal range and refinement that spread his reputation, as that of French printmaking, throughout Europe. Note that his basic technique was the one commonly used at this time, combining etching and engraving to achieve the integrated tonalities stressed in Bosse’s publications and demonstrated in his prints. The situation was summed up in 1699 by Roger de Piles, who, won over by improvements in printmaking techniques, recommended prints as the “depositories of all that is fine and curious in the world.” He suggested different lines along which such collections might be organized, by images of the king, festivals, ceremonies, and so on, or by great artists and their disciples: the Roman school led by Raphael, the Venetian headed by Giorgione and Titian, and the like. Another possible classification would be by the printmakers themselves.61 These print copies are, De Piles suggests, incomparably better as art historical documents than the originals. For while it is unlikely that even a man with a sizeable collection will have more than one or two examples by a particular artist, “by means of prints, one may easily see the works of several masters on a table, one may form an idea of them, judge by comparing them one with another, know which to choose, and by practicing it often, contract a habit of good taste.”62 In other words, the reproductive prints of the day, more detailed and “accurate” than those of earlier times, constitute a storehouse of the European tradition of art, allowing for the examination and confrontation of masterpieces by a great variety of artists and schools. Such comparisons made by means of prints would have had many pitfalls, however, not all of which the likes of a De Piles may have been aware of.

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For the masters as filtered through etchings and engravings are not the same as the artists known from their actual paintings. As was noted previously and as William M. Ivins, Jr. some time ago observed: When it came to copying a picture, that is making a visual statement about a visual statement, the copyist felt under no obligation to be faithful to either the particular forms or the visual syntax of the earlier draughtsman he was copying . . . [as] painstakingly and carefully as D¨urer might copy a real rabbit or a violet in his own syntax, when it came to copying a print by Mantegna he refused to follow Mantegna’s syntax, and retold the story, as he thought, in his own syntax. I doubt if it ever occurred to him that in changing the syntax he completely changed both the facts and the story.63

Sir Joshua Reynolds had spoken to this same point during his travels through the Netherlands in 1781. Comparing Rubens’ altarpiece Christ on the Cross between Two Sinners with the engraving after it by Boetius a` Bolswert, he was struck by the differences in the treatment of light from the one to the other: The engraver has certainly produced a fine effect: and I suspect it is as certain, that if this change had not been made, it would have appeared a black and heavy print . . . it appears therefore that some parts are to be darkened, as well as others made lighter; this consequently is a science which an engraver ought well to understand, before he can presume to venture on any alteration from the picture which he means to represent. The same thing may be remarked in many other prints by those engravers, who were employed by Rubens and Vandyck; they always gave more light than they were warranted by the picture; a circumstance which may merit the attention of engravers.64

To be sure, few members of the viewing public would have had the opportunity to compare an engraved copy with its original, and reproductive prints were – and remained – the principal means of access to works by the masters. As Stephen Bann has recently shown, this use of prints reached a climax in nineteenth-century France, with engravers and lithographers aspiring to reproduce the paintings of the tradition with the greatest possible accuracy, this time aided by the resources of photography.65 The investment in time and energy at times was staggering: an engraving by Luigi Calamatta of the Mona Lisa on which he worked for perhaps twenty or thirty years and that exercised no less a “fascination” than the painting itself, nineteen burin engravings of such works as the Laoc¨oon, the total output of Charles-Cl´ement Balvay (known as Bervic), who labored endlessly on these few prints during his thirty-oddyear career. Identifying completely with the artist whose work they were reproducing, these, as all reproductive printmakers, are nevertheless present only as technicians as the focus shifts entirely to the original of the reproduction, these “originals” constituting what Andr´e Malraux was later to call Le mus´ee imaginaire: modern art and art history books with their photographic reproductions. 38

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To reiterate, what distinguishes Bosse’s original single-sheet print with image and text from all of the previously mentioned is its separation from such a history and active participation in the discourses of early modern culture.

original forgeries Finally, having discussed Bosse’s conception of “original” and “copy” and having noted the key role of prints both as reproductions and as “pirated” images, I want to acknowledge a slippage within all of these categories: a print as an imitation or forgery with the status of an original. The printmaker: Hendrick Goltzius. Goltzius was unusually adept at imitating the styles and techniques of the best artists of the Northern tradition: van Heemskerck, Frans Floris, and others. But between 1593 and 1594, he went further, producing a series of six engravings on the “Life of the Virgin” in imitation of the manners not only of Northern printmakers but famous Italian painters as well. He did not simply copy existing works by them – that is to say, as would have been usual for a reproductive printmaker making authorized or unauthorized copies – but rather invented in their manners by bringing together and synthesizing elements from different works of theirs. He also aged the paper and sent the prints to various book fairs, where they were avidly sought after as previously unknown originals by such masters as D¨urer and Lucas van Leyden. (Later, in 1597, he engraved an entire “Passion” series in Lucas’s manner.) Not the least reason for the commotion, albeit one played down by Goltzius’s admirers, was commercial, these prints entering the marketplace at a time of a “D¨urer Renaissance” that led to an increased demand for prints by Lucas van Leyden as well. In any case, Goltzius soon ended the deception by issuing the same prints with his own monogram.66 Marcantonio Raimondi, while in Venice, had made engraved copies of several of D¨urer’s woodcuts, it is to be recalled, including on them D¨urer’s famous monogram. According to Vasari, an incensed D¨urer rushed to Venice and complained to the Signoria, which promptly prohibited not the reproductions but the use of the monogram. This story may not be true in all its details, but D¨urer did indeed seek a state ban on “pirated” reproductions of his works such as Marcantonio’s. In the colophon to the Life of the Virgin published in book format in 1511, he warns the “envious thieves of the work and invention of others” away from his works: “[W]e have received a privilege from the famous emperor of Rome, Maximilian, that no one shall dare to print these works in spurious forms, nor sell such prints within the boundaries of the empire.”67 In question is the proprietary origination of all that constitutes “D¨urer,” individual compositions and their component parts, and also composition in the larger sense of conception or what we might broadly 39

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understand as personal style. In the event, neither the censure implied by Vasari nor any real or seeming penalty for violating “privilege” deterred Goltzius, whose “forgeries” paid unexpected dividends: even when they became known as forgeries, they were no less sought after than if they had been “originals.”

an international market Prints circulated widely, then, in originals and copies (replicas), the second sometimes with a new inscription if intended for a non-French-speaking audience. Seventeenth -century printmakers and publishers moved around Europe as freely as prints did. As for the first, a colony of Flemish engravers was established in Saint-Germain-des-Pr´es-l`es Paris already in 1576, after the sack of Antwerp by a Spanish army. And among leading printmakers in early seventeenth-century Paris were several of Flemish origin: Thomas de Leu, Carel Van Boeckel, and Melchior Tavernier.68 Crispijn de Passe the Younger, carrying on the family trade, moved to Paris in 1617, remaining until 1631 and no doubt printing from his father’s plates – although even before this, many of the elder De Passe’s prints carried inscriptions in French (as French prints often did in English and other languages) – and so evidently were made to be sold in French markets.69 These would have been only a small part of an enormous volume of prints from all over Europe available in Paris. One especially well documented case is of a set of prints by the Prague-born Wenceslaus Hollar, made and first printed in London and then reissued in a French edition by the important publisher Franc¸ois Langlois, who either bought the plates and had them printed in Paris or arranged to have the edition printed in London. We know, too, that Langlois and Tavernier frequently visited London, just as English printmakers and print enthusiasts visited Paris. Prints by artists from all parts of the Continent and probably England as well were shipped, in turn, in tremendous numbers to Spain and Portugal. Just one such shipment from Paris to Spain, for example, in November 1605, included 7,100 engravings, 25 dozen hand-colored devotional prints, 2,000 small saints, 400 large sheets of the life of St. Francis, and more.70 Thus, the seventeenth-century print world was one of relative fluidity. The same and similar images appealed to people different from one another geographically, linguistically, and confessionally, be they Protestant and Catholic – about which more later. What does this say about correspondences between printed images and the life of the time? How can peoples outside of France have responded to images apparently so distinctively French – or English, Flemish, or German? The answer would have to be that in important ways, the cultures of the countries of early modern Europe were not so vastly different from one another as is often imagined, that there were underlying traditions respecting neither physical landmarks nor linguistic differences, and that, as Robert 40

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Darnton famously declared about books, prints “refuse to respect national boundaries.”71 In a widely influential formulation, Benedict Anderson has argued the opposite, calling modern nations “imagined communities” created by the “fatal diversity” of European languages: “The fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.”72 This pluralism being the direct result of publications in the vernacular, national identities, in these terms, would be the end product of the agency of print. This is not the place for an extended critique of Anderson’s work, which in any case has not been accepted uncritically.73 Suffice it to say that although a sense of national identity is no doubt essential to nation building, Anderson may exaggerate the extent to which this identity trumped an older identification with larger communities. Latin remained the lingua franca of the educated classes. More significantly, as the earlier discussion should have suggested, print in the sense of printed images constituted a kind of visual lingua franca and template of European unity across ranks and geographical boundaries. To be sure, interpretations of these images would have been overdetermined in a “diversity of idioms.”74 But their wide circulation nevertheless suggests the existence of a broad and deeply rooted European culture. The printed image was, then, a unique phenomenon that deserves far more study as a unifying force within early modern European culture.

the legacy That Bosse’s improved technique contributed to the success of printmaking in later-seventeenth-century France is not to say, however, that all intaglio prints were like Bosse’s in all respects. On the contrary, printmaking continued to develop both technically and conceptually, as well as to steer a course between new stylistic currents. Thus, even while republishing Bosse’s 1645 treatise on etching and engraving, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, in 1745, notes possibilities that he says were unknown in Bosse’s time. The most important of these possibilities concerns what Bosse had called “my system of laying lines,” rejected by Cochin in favor of freer techniques. The incomparable Audran (mentioned earlier in the chapter), “le plus excellent Graveur d’Histoire qui ait jamais parˆu” [“the greatest engraver ever of histories”], Cochin asserts, avoided such a systematized scheme conceived in imitation of engraving, using in its place a mix of hatchings and points, “un m´elange de hachˆures & de points mis en apparence sans ordre.”75 For similar reasons, he prefers the greater freedom of Stefano della Bella to Callot and recommends the etchings of Castiglione and Rembrandt. In still another edition of Bosse’s treatise reflecting the new taste, Jombert, in 1758, contrasts the techniques of engraving and etching as 41

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the differences between a well-turned-out matron on the one hand and a young and charming coquette on the other, the second obviously preferred to the first. Bosse’s approach, even while combining the two techniques, would be of the dowdy matron. A similar distinction is made in the entry on engraving in that landmark of the Enlightenment, the Encyclop´edie. Bosse’s essential contribution is acknowledged out of a belief that its essential value still persists – but as brought up-to-date by Cochin.76 The wide influence of Bosse’s treatise, then, to say it as plainly as possible, consisted in its revolutionary marriage of etching and engraving and not, or in spite of, his “system of laying lines.” Bosse’s technique, whether in its original or revised form, was not, however, the only one available by this time.77 For an alternative method, developed from about the mid-seventeenth century on, was the mezzotint or halftone process, working from black to white rather than white to black. Here the plate would be thoroughly roughened with a spike-toothed small wheel or “rocker,” leaving a surface covered with dot-like abrasions. When inked, this surface prints pure black, although parts would first have been smoothed with a scraper or burnisher and these areas would have registered as white. This method was popular in England, especially as a means for reproducing paintings, but it had a drawback in that the burr thrown up by the rocker is fragile and wears down quickly, necessitating frequent reworkings of the plate, and even then the yield would be lower than that of an intaglio plate. This relative fragility, taken together with a soft focus and lack of subtlety, made the mezzotint no match for the precise and durable intaglio print and the ease of the Callot-Bosse method. From the later eighteenth century on, in addition to the mezzotint, new types of engraving – “stipple” engraving, wood engraving, steel engraving, lithography, and, finally, through the application of photography, photogravures, phototypes, and the like – became more popular for art reproduction than the traditional kind.78 Of the traditional techniques of engraving and etching, the first continued to be favored in eighteenth-century France and, as Stephen Bann has shown, experienced a serious revival as reproductive engraving from the 1830s on. The second, in the sense of Rembrandt’s etchings, was periodically “rediscovered” and lived on as an art medium.79 But engraving as such, once the glory of French printmaking, before long became a lost art. Despite the efforts of Stanley William Hayter from the 1930s on to revitalize the art of intaglio printmaking by means of an admixture of various print techniques – engraving together with different forms of drypoint, etching, and aquatint, intaglio with relief printing, among other things – it soon passed into oblivion.80

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chapte r 2

Scenes of Everyday Life

I

n this and the following chapters, I turn from print technology to print culture, focusing attention on the reception and interpretation of singlesheet prints consisting of image and text. My aim is to bring out the many and changing investments in these images, contingent on individual and cultural circumstances as well as on how the texts, while seeming to fix the meanings of the images, are equally open to multiple interpretations. I suggest that it is nevertheless possible to narrow the range of interpretation by contextualizing these prints and treating them in the same ways as other types of print ephemera.

the city The center of social and cultural identity, as of the publishing and print trades in early modern France, was Paris, the least medieval and most easily navigated city in Europe. Maps of Paris regularly issued from presses, as did topographical views of important sites. In one image, Callot highlights the Louvre; in another the Pont Neuf as extended in the Place Dauphine, the Samaritaine, the distant bell towers of Notre Dame, the church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, and the Hˆotel-de-Ville (Figure 9). An etching by Stefano della Bella offers a close-up of the Pont Neuf, the bridge dominated by an equestrian monument of Henry IV and known for its open-air book merchants (libraires e´talans) (Figure 10). We are invited to contemplate the teeming population of the city and its incessant movement, of coaches, carriages, soldiers, criers, hawkers, beggars, prostitutes, and colporteurs (peddlers) selling political pamphlets, the

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9. Jacques Callot, View of the Pont Neuf and the Tour de Nesle. 1630. Etching. R.L. Baumfeld Collection, Image courtesy The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

new gazette or news-sheets, and street poetry, and including a whole new subgenre known as les ponts neufs representing life in the city.1 The Pont Neuf was only one of the centers of print activity; others were the Petit Pont and the Pont Notre Dame and the streets of Saint-Jacques des Noyers, Saint-Etienne des Gr`es, and the Montagne Sainte-Genevi`eve. The shop of Bosse’s master and occasional publisher, Tavernier, at first was on the Pont Notre Dame “`a l’enseigne du Franc Gaulois,” moving from there to the Isle du Palais beginning at the Pont Neuf, “au coin de la rue de Harley, a` la rose rouge.” With time, Bosse installed himself in these last quarters, as indicated on prints published in the later 1630s: “fait par A. Bosse en l’ile du Palais, au coin de la rue de Harlay” or “Abraham Bosse, demeurant en l’isle du Palais, sur le quay qui r´egarde la M´egisserie, a` la Sph`ere royale.” Images of the criers, hawkers, and beggars of Figure 10 were ubiquitous around Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the most famous in the literature of art history were the artisans, craftsmen, and tradesmen of the Arti di Bologna drawn by Annibale Carracci and etched and published by Simon Guillain in 1646.2 They had their greatest vogue, however, in France: such series had been published by Lagniet, Br´ebiette, and Richer, with related images of beggars published by the same Lagniet and Callot, who published the most extensive of such series. Related to these, although better known than some of the others, is a suite of twelve etchings by Bosse: Les cris de Paris [The Cries of Paris], published by Le Blond probably during the 1630s.3 It includes a well cleaner, water carrier, rat killer (Figure 11), and chimney sweep, as well as vendors of firewood (Figure 12), stomach remedies, pastry, and oysters, and also a street singer and a beggar.

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The theme – that of the intonations and chanting accompanying the peddling of foodstuffs, wine, merchandise, and various services – traces its origins back to the late Middle Ages and was singled out by Mikhail Bakhtin for its “lowly” nature, its celebration of the language of the street and marketplace. Bakhtin cited Bosse’s series in this regard.4 To be sure, Bosse’s series is unusually extensive, but it is far from exhaustive. For the prints purport to inventory the street trades of Paris, the largest city in Europe at this time, with a population of more than 500,000, perhaps 6,000 to 7,000 of whom worked in the streets, plying scores of trades and not only the twelve of this series.5 Note, too, that whereas the changing nature of actual experience in the new metropolis is recorded in one image – in the background of the firewood vendor (Figure 12) is the Pont Neuf and the pump of the Samaritaine, a public space that was a favorite haunt of peddlers, beggars, and the like, as mentioned earlier – others are clearly burlesques, the rat killer for one (Figure 11): a Don Quixotesque Spanish knight who at one time caused the earth to tremble now strikes fear only into the hearts of rats: Un hidalgo qui aux combats / Faisoit trembler toute la terre / Par un infortune de guerre / Va criant de la mort aux rats A Spanish knight who in combats / Made the earth quake / Through a reverse of fortune in war’s wake / Goes about crying death to rats

Here is a stock representation of the Spanish “other,” differentiated from the French physically and materially (cf. Figure 3). Related incongruities and an

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10. Stefano Della Bella, The Pont Neuf in Paris. 1646. Etching. Rosenwald Collection, Image courtesy The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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11. Bosse, Le marchand de mort-auxrats [The Rat-Killer]. Etching, from Les cris de Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1960. 60.634.53 (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

overall lack of subtlety are found throughout, so that one conclusion seems inescapable, namely that these are not “truths” of the emerging modern city as perceived by Bakhtin and others, but rather are fantasy projections of a “mythologized” cityscape.6 Produced according to a system of permissions or privil`eges, such prints, as the others in this study, were sold in shops and by peddlers (colporteurs) in the streets of Paris and in the provinces. Bosse pictured the first (Figure 1), Callot the second, a street print market (Figure 13), with a print merchant displaying his wares. Among those attracted to the display are children and a peddler, members of a more humble public than that in Bosse’s print shop. Prints sold by such street merchants and peddlers no doubt tended toward 46

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12. Bosse, Le crocheteur [The Firewood Vendor]. Etching. From Les cris de Paris. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris).

the “cheap” kind, carelessly printed on poor-quality paper; however, such prints – “cheap” or “cheap enough” – could be found in shops as well.7 Thus it is always necessary to keep in mind the full range of prints within the marketplace and differences between them not only in terms of artistic quality but as commercial “products,” designed, printed, and priced accordingly.

the trades Broadly related to the Cris and also published by Le Blond are Bosse’s Les m´etiers [The Trades], seven prints recapitulating, as it were, the trades distinguishing 47

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13. Jacques Callot, A Print Seller. c. 1621. Etching. Frontispiece to Varie figure.. R. L. Baumfeld Collection, Image courtesy The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

metropolitan goods and services. Attention is focused on the cobbler (Le cordonnier) and shoe shop (Figure 14), the pastry cook (Le pˆatissier), the barber (Le barbier), the surgeon (La saign´ee) (Figure 8), the apothecary (Le clyst`ere), and others. Such series were fairly common in the Middle Ages, when they typically articulated models of moral behavior.8 In contrast, Bosse’s images satirize extravagances of dress and food, ostensibly in and of themselves, in step with the coarse humor associated with farces on the contemporary stage that were similarly set in the early modern city and that will be discussed in the next chapter. Thus, The Cobbler (Figure 14) is shown with an assistant holding a footmeasuring device with its top carved in the shape of a shoe. The foot of the customer apparently having been measured, the cobbler is trying on a shoe for size. Can anything be more innocuous? Yet has Freud not recognized in the foot a highly charged sexual symbol or fetish? And do the pictures on the wall not begin to make this scene positively Freudian?9 One is of an extravagantly dressed young woman and the other of a theme commonly called “musicmaking,” both typically alluding to illicit sex. Any lingering doubt about a reference to a Freudian shoe “fetish” is dispelled by the verse that follows; the woman refers to the shoemaker as handsome, while he, expressing admiration 48

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14. Bosse, Le cordonnier [The Cobbler], c. 1632–1633. Etching, from Les m´etiers [The Trades]. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris).

for her feet, warns that although the shoes are a tight fit, he has just the tool for the job: Ayant a` chausser une Belle / Jamais je ne suis maladroit. /Poussez le pied, Madamoiselle: / Sus courage: il entre tout droit / . . . Quoy qu’on vous chausse avecque peine, / Ayant le coˆu du pied si haut; / J’ay pourtant une bonne alesne, / Et la mesure qu’il vous faut Finding shoes for a beautiful woman / Is for me easy / Push your foot, Madamoiselle / It will soon enter: don’t be queasy . . . though there may be a problem fitting you / It is because your instep is so high / But I have a good tool / As a remedy

Note the pun exploiting the homophony of coˆu = (cou-de-pied) instep and cul, arse. To be sure, Bosse was no “Freudian.” Why, then, bring Freud into the discussion? Precisely this question was posed by R. Howard Bloch, who proposed elucidating a medieval text with Freud’s remarks on the joke and fetish. The essential point, he states, is not to illustrate “something like a universal or ‘human nature,’” but to show how the texture of western literature has been flattened and smoothed, as well as the displacements that a textual corpus such as that in question is capable of working on the canons of modernism. The aim, in other words, mine and Bloch’s, is to bring to light factors that have been repressed for belonging to what became the shameful part of high/low 49

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discourse, in the case in point, of an “unacceptable” lubricity considered obscene.10 More explicit still is Le clyst`ere [The Apothecary]. We see a man armed with a large syringe such as was more usually the implement of a midwife or woman healer, who used it to deliver enemas before childbirth. The syringe was also used in restoring a humoral balance in an ancient tradition, tracing its origins to Hippocrates and Galen; an excess of humor, it was believed, could cause fantasies and even madness.11 Its function in Bosse’s image: to provide a remedy for sexual desire. In the words of the apothecary, speaking in verse: J’ay la siringue en main, hastez vous donc, Madame, De prendre pour le mieux ce petit lavement. Il vous rafaischira, car vous n’estes que flame, Et l’outil que je tiens entrera doucement. I’ve the syringe in hand, so hurry, Madam, And accept for the better this little purging. It will cool you, because you are all aflame, And the tool I’m holding will enter without urging.

La saign´ee [The Blood Letting], discussed earlier (Figure 8), features a related procedure and stages a parallel narrative, here the focus shifting to the woman’s pleasure: Picquez asseurement faictes bonne ouverture . . . O Dieux la douce main lagreeable picquure; Le souvenir m’en faict reuenir le soubzris Qu’un peu de sang tir´e me rend fort alleg¨ee Prick with assurance, make a good opening . . . Oh God’s gentle hand, this pricking The memory of it again makes me smile That the taking of a little blood should be so soothing

This was the coarse humor common to farces on the stage, as noted, and also to related broadsides and pamphlets offering collections of puns, jokes, riddles, festive songs, and the like – ephemera that constituted the bulk of print production. Consider, for example, the following song about the sexual adventures of a young girl from a collection published by the farceur Gaultier Garguille in 1631. The opening lines are ostensibly about the girl’s domestic talent for spinning and sewing, which keep her occupied at home when her father departs for the market: Mon comp`ere a une fille Qui coud, qui brode et qui fille My comrade has a daughter Who sews, who embroiders and who spins 50

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In her father’s absence, the girl quickly becomes involved with her neighbor Gilles, conjuring up the familiar topos of the spinner’s thread figuring female sexual allure, as she turns her attention to his penis, fille, referring at first to the sewn thread but later to Gilles’s ejaculation. The song concludes: Elle a tant dress´e sa quille Qu’il luy a faict une fille Ha! Qu’il est heureux qui coud! She had so erected his staff That he made her into a whore Ha! How happy is he who sews!12

Such publications, more usually penned by anonymous authors, appeared with increasing frequency during the course of the seventeenth century within a largely unregulated subdivision of the print industry. Some, written in the names of farce players, replicate the themes of farce on the stage. Others are mock almanacs in which farce players make predictions for each month of the coming year, typically with predictions of sexual adventures and drunkenness; still others ridicule particular social types or tell stories about different professions. The pamphlet The Ballet of Turlupin, for example, presents a series of racy tales about apothecaries and lawyers and their clerks, including one about a solicitor’s clerk who seduces a young woman in the back of a boot maker’s shop, leaving few physical details to the imagination.13 (Series of Cris, it is worth noting, are often no less filled with sexual innuendo than Bosse’s M´etiers and the previously mentioned farces, an image from the series by Lagniet cited earlier being one such blatant example: a chimney sweep flaunts the “lance” with which he offers to clean [“ramener”] the milkmaid.)14

fashion plates In contrast in their directness are images picturing contemporary dress or fashion. Such images, collected in recueils de costumes [collections of dress], were published at least sixteen times in France between 1600 and 1649, an early stage in the creation of Parisian cultural authority in the fashion market, culminating in the fashion illustrations for the 1678 Nouveau mercure gallant, the first periodical reporting on the latest fashion.15 A series of twelve etchings by Callot, usually called the Nobility of Lorraine, although ambiguous, has been assumed to be such a costume collection. Two of Bosse’s earliest projects, with Saint-Igny, also were such series, Le jardin de la noblesse franc¸aise [The Garden of the French Nobility] (Figure 15) and La noblesse franc¸aise a` l’´eglise [The French Nobility in Church], images not of the nobility as such – their lineage, symbols of rank, and so on – but only of their dress, “leur manierre de vettements” 51

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15. Bosse. Title page to Le jardin de la noblesse franc¸oise. 1629. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris).

[“way of dressing”].16 These series were followed at intervals with “fashion plates” illustrating the latest decrees, among them a decree of November 18, 1633, reaffirmed on April 16, 1634, prohibiting the wearing of silks, satins, and laces and the use of gold and silver threads. In his Courtisan suivant le dernier edit [Courtier according to the latest edict], Bosse presents a courtier having discarded his accustomed outfit of beribboned breeches of heavy silk, with a 52

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16. Bosse, Le courtesan suivant le dernier edit [The Courtier after the Last Edict]. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris).

brocaded doublet (Figure 16). In its place is the approved dress, consisting of simple breeches and a vented doublet, with undecorated boots. The woman, in keeping with the edict (La dame suivant l’edit), is in a plain dark dress laced over a stiff bodice, adorned only with a pearl necklace and glass pendant hanging from her belt.17 53

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Seventeenth-century writers dwelled on the subject as well, addressing the most varied publics. The overriding message of these discussions: appearance equals station in life; everyone should appear according to his or her rank (´etat). Dress was an arena in which relations across the whole social structure were played out. To this end, going back to the fifteenth century, royal decrees were promulgated regulating both clothing and ornamentation: what one could wear according to one’s rank. The preamble to a decree of 1514 explicitly identifies rank with clothing: Prohibiting absolutely and categorically all persons, commoners, non-nobles . . . from assuming the title of nobility either in their style or in their clothes.18

During the next century the monarchy did its best to restrict silks and lace to the nobility and prohibit the use of gold and silver in fabrics or as ornament. Even the nobility were placed under constraints, still further establishing the privileged apartness of the court, the clear message being that wealth alone – the means necessary to buy fine clothing – does not determine rank, which in principle was a matter of birth.19 A particular instance of the latter is documented in Bosse’s frontispiece and three double-page plates accompanying a collection of heraldic devices of the Knights of the Ordre du Saint-Esprit, which was open only to those of noble birth.20 The most arresting plate represents the seating arrangement for meetings, specifying the place of each member in relation to the king, according to seniority. Membership in the Ordre was intended as an honor for a meretricious career, but only those of high birth were eligible for such a distinction. The problem was that it had become impossible to draw a sharp line dividing the old nobility from other groups within society. Originally a question of race, of blood, and of heredity, nobility could be and increasingly was acquired as a reward for service or simply through material success – the purchase of titles. Even merchants and visual artists could be ennobled, as the painter Charles Le Brun was in 1662. The newly ennobled learned to look and live “like nobles,” which in a society in which appearance equaled station in life meant, for one, dressing like a noble. As a result, dress – crucial to the making and unmaking of status – became one of a range of “texts” inscribing and decoding the many and changing norms of sociability.21 Nowhere is the instability of these norms more famously performed than in the comedies of Moli`ere. His Sganarelle appears in different guises in five plays, each as a different embodiment of the bourgeois character.22 In each he is immediately recognizable by his costume, the key item an archaic piece of neckwear (fraise) intended to reveal two basic aspects of his character: his stinginess and difference from the nobility.23 54

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Moli`ere’s most famous bourgeois, Monsieur Jourdain of Le bourgeois gentilhomme, is determined to have a gentilhomme for a son-in-law (“Je veux voir un gendre gentilhomme” [“I want to see a nobleman as my son-in-law”]) and so is Orgon of Tartuffe.24 Neither has difficulty recognizing a gentilhomme: “Et tel que l’on le voit, il est bien gentilhomme” [“You can tell by his appearance that he is truly a nobleman], Orgon explains, not only offering his daughter’s hand in marriage but going so far as to disinherit his son and even dispossess himself in Tartuffe’s favor, all to the advantage of this imposter who “looks like a nobleman.”25 In the next century, Mariette applauded Bosse for accurately representing the dress and manners of his time.26 Indeed, Bosse’s images must have seemed to his contemporaries a “mirror” of their world. As such, it was, however, as the earlier discussion suggests, both erratic and paradoxical, simultaneously contributing to social stability by disseminating codes of dress and undermining that stability by facilitating the subversion of those codes.

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chapte r 3

Drama, Theater, and Prints

T

his chapter considers Bosse’s handling of dramatic subjects, expanding on the discussion of the previous chapter. It begins with an examination of his representations of the contemporary stage and then turns to one of his most famous and influential series: a set of six etchings on the subject of marriage, Mariage a` la ville [Marriage in the City], published in 1633 – for which see Figures 19–21 later in this chapter. Each etching consists of an interplay of word and image that is essentially theatrical and that suggests a relationship to the contemporary theater. But the theater in the sense of the staged play or printed play-text was only one of a whole range of dramatic genres, others belonging to the ephemeral world of ballads, broadsides, and so forth, as touched on in Chapter 2. The prints of the “Marriage” series, I suggest, bear refracted traces of these circumstances and throw light on the rich and complex relationships between types of print materials in early modern France.

the theater observed That the theater was a magnet for Bosse is not news. His images of popular actors, playhouses, and productions are found in most theater histories. The most frequently reproduced is the Hˆotel de Bourgogne (Figure 17), picturing a troupe of comedians that performed regularly in Paris at the theater of that name from 1616 to 1634.1 The characters were derived from the types popularized by the com´edie italienne (Commedia dell’arte) that performed regularly in Paris from the sixteenth century through the reign of Louis XIII, the plays broad farces replete with the coarse humor and sexual innuendos of certain 56

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17. Bosse, Actors at the Hˆotel de Bourgogne. c. 1633–1634. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris

of the images of city life discussed earlier. The urban publics for these performances were known for their unruliness: these “miserable buffooneries of our farces . . . recommended only to ignoramuses and scum because of the rough language and vile actions which form the basis of their attraction.”2 As is well known, orthodox Christian thinking since the early Middle Ages had been antitheatrical, fixing on the threat of plays to public morality. Increasingly perceived as a threat to the established class categories and hierarchies, the type of theater in question here, identified with the lower orders – artisans, apprentices, shopkeepers, domestic servants and laborers of different kinds – was considered the most dangerous of all, undermining society and playing into the Lutheran “heresy.” The theater of the Hˆotel de Bourgogne, the most famous in Paris, was of fairly recent origin, having opened in 1548.3 The property of the Confraternity of the Passion, it was rented out to traveling troupes until it was gradually monopolized by the company here represented and featuring a memorable Gaultier, whose published songs were cited in the previous chapter. He is described below together with the other actors: the roguish valet Turlupin, in floppy hat and stripped pantaloons, “wild looking and up to no good,” his hand in the purse of Gaultier-Garguille, an old man with pointed beard, long thin legs, and walking stick; and Gros Guillaume, a clown so fat that he affected two belts, one high on the chest and the other below the navel, “aping a courtier and trussed up like a tennis player,” speaking to a pretty 57

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young woman, the whole witnessed by a Frenchman at the left – her lover? – and a grimacing Spanish Captain at the right. Another of Bosse’s theater images is much to the same effect, of Jodelet, the farce name of the actor Julien Bedeau, applauded for his performances equally of the roles of master or valet, that is, of either Turlupin or Gaultier-Garguille; good at slapstick and a musician, he was the favorite of Scarron, who wrote two comedies as vehicles for him.4 An altogether different kind of spectacle pictured by Bosse originated with an enormously successful comedy by Pierre Corneille first performed in 1633 and conceived as an alternative to the low comedy of the aforementioned prints, La Galerie du Palais (Figure 18). The play itself draws on traditional pastorals and tragicomedies, with lovers undergoing many travails and confusions before true love is recognized and lovers reconciled. The setting, however, is entirely original: in place of the traditional woods is the most important commercial shopping center in seventeenth-century Paris, running beside the law courts housed in the former royal palace on the Ile de la Cit´e. And the curtain parted to reveal several typical shops, of a bookseller, a purveyor of fabrics, fans, gloves, masks, and muffs (mercier), and a vendor of collars, cuffs, and other items of personal linen (ling`ere). Corneille’s dialogue was equally everyday, the merchants discussing their business affairs and the linen draper promising the young women hunting bargains that even more beautiful collars would be delivered the following Wednesday, all the while that other shoppers examine the books. All of this is recreated in Bosse’s image and its accompanying inscription, although with particular attention to a bookseller-publisher (libraire) advertising a wide range of ancient and modern authors, from Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca to Bocaccio and Rabelais, and also popular novels and books of poetry, the subjects of both: courtly love and chivalrous combat, among them d’Urf´e’s Astrea and Desmarets’ L’Ariane. The gentleman is being shown a copy of Tristan L’Hermite’s La Mariane, published in 1637 with a frontispiece by Bosse – who also illustrated Gomberville’s Polexandre (1637), the aforementioned L’Ariane (1639), and Chapelain’s La pucelle ou la France delivr´ee (1656), all to be discussed in a following chapter. In a further bit of self-advertisement, Bosse inscribed his name on the box being removed from the shelf by the man in the center: “evantails de Bosse,” fans by Bosse, still another of his print products for the marketplace. Especially noteworthy among the previously mentioned titles are historical romances and adventures organized with implausible and often barely coherent plots involving great battles and natural disasters and warriors and princesses from ancient Rome and France to Mexico, Senegal, Denmark, and the Congo – books conceived, the inscription tells us, to whet the appetites of young men (“les Cavaliers”) for battles and passion. And if the presence of a female book-clerk seems surprising, the indifference of the female shoppers 58

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18. Bosse, La Galerie du Palais, c. 1638. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1922. 22.67.16 C The Image  Metropolitan Museum of Art

to the book stall is not. For the books displayed, particularly the romance fiction, were widely regarded as “unsuitable,” contributing to the immorality of women. The contrast is drawn explicitly in Bosse’s The Wise and Foolish Virgins: the wise virgins spend their time reading the Bible, while their foolish counterparts squander their time reading romances.5 Note, too, in light of what is to follow that the inscriptions on all of the aforementioned theater prints merely describe the characters and scenes; in none do the actors themselves “speak” or the action unfold in a narrative sequence.

printed drama And so we return to the relationship between the printing press and the dramatic genres. The relationship could not have been closer or more beneficial to both. Texts of theatrical performances regularly appeared in print, often with illustrations, as did a vast array of theatrical ephemera – the images of actors discussed earlier, posters and playbills, theater calendars, promptbooks, and the like, as well as ballads, broadsides, and printed dialogues – attesting to an interest in drama on the part of a large and growing public and to the profitability of such publications to publishers. Bosse’s “Marriage” series is 59

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19. Bosse, Le contrat de mariage [The marriage contract]. 1633. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.38 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

one such “performance,” I will argue, conceived within the broad context of “printed drama.”6 The subject was a recurrent one in dramas, comedies and farces: the family and household, characterized by Sarah Hanley as the “family-state compact,” promoting a “family model of socio-economic authority under patriarchal hegemony”; husbands and fathers were in firm control of all family property and activities, their children’s marriage choices, and the distribution of family wealth through inheritance. Within the early modern political economy, contracts regulated the circulation of money and goods, and the marriage contract was a frequent metaphor for such lawful regulation. Comedy and farce reverse these proper social values by foregrounding two dominant themes: the trials and tribulations of romantic love on the one hand and illicit love and adultery on the other. 7 The emblematic mask held by one of the children in Figure 19 signals that the series is structured around such a theatrical theme. And the principals of the series, Damon and Sylvie, were the names of lovers in popular comedies and romances, for example, Damon in Corneille’s La suivante (1637) and Sylvie in Mairet’s pastoral tragicomedy of that name (1628). The series opens with a recognizable, stagelike room as the setting for the businesslike negotiation of the marriage contract (Le contrat de mariage), even while allowing for and endorsing idealized love (Figure 19). (Note the 60

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20. Bosse, La visite a` l’accouch´ee [Visit to the New Mother]. 1633. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926, C 26.49.42 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

exceptional participation of women in what more usually would be an all-male meeting.) First the prospective groom, Damon, using the customary hand-holding and de praesenti formula solemnized in the church ceremony: “Tu brusles de la mesme envie/ Que j’ay de n’aymer rien que toy” [“Your wish is the same as mine/ which is never to love anyone but you”]. Indeed, sighs Sylvie: “Ie veux vivre sous ton Empire/ Et mourir dans ton souvenir” [“I desire only to live under your authority/ And to live on in your memory”]. He promises to love, she to obey, the attitude toward the contrasting roles of husband and wife of the period. The “contract” marriage or “spousal” was accepted in medieval canon law as sufficient and binding and not requiring a church ceremony. And so the series jumps to the return home of the bridal couple and then to events surrounding childbirth, which is the focus throughout: fully two-thirds of the images picture the stages of childbirth, not marriage. In a patriarchal society, what makes a man a man is his ability to reproduce: “C’est une maxime ou se fonde/La plus part de l’humain soucy,/ Que les enfans qu’on met au monde/ En produissent d’autres aussy [A maxim on which is based/ Most human concerns / That the children one brings into the world/ Will produce others in turn].”8 The most obviously theatrical of these images is La visite a` l’accouch´ee [Visit to the New Mother] (Figure 20). Gynecological handbooks and medical manuals of 61

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the period stress that childbirth is strictly women’s work, the women attending the birth remaining to keep watch over, and raise the spirits of, the new mother, who was to be kept from excessive sleep and depression. In order, then, was women’s talk or, as was commonly understood, gossip; the postnatal period encouraged female gossip.9 Such is the talk of the women in Bosse’s image. Seated in a circle beside the bed and identified by the speech-prefixes of promptbooks and play-texts, they state different and conflicting views of sex and childbearing, The new mother complains about the pain of labor: “Si je pouvois tenir une chose imposible/ je jurerois ma foy de ny tomber jamais [If I could do the impossible/ I would swear never to fall into such a state].” This is a small price to pay, reply the sexually voracious demoiselles reiterating the widely disseminated teachings of the Galenic and Hippocratic medical model: “pour contenter un peu ce naturel desir/ rec¸oit ce reconfort que c’est bien peu de chose/ q’un moment de douleur pour neuf mois de plaisir [to satisfy this natural desire/ take comfort in knowing that it is a small price to pay/ one moment of pain for nine months of pleasure].” Husbands are ultimately to be blamed for a woman’s “martyrdom,” counter the more soberly dressed bourgeoises: if childbirth is as agreeable as they claim, they should try it themselves. The male “spy” (Lespion) hiding behind the bed at the right has the final word: if pains must be endured, they are often not the making of the husband: “ce n’est pas bien souvent le mary qui le faict” [“it is often not the husband’s doing”], which is to say, that it is not the cuckolded husband who is to blame but the woman’s lover. (The theme of cuckoldry, recurrent in Bosse’s oeuvre, abounds in medieval fabliaux (obscene verse narratives), in Rabelais’ Tiers livre, and in the theater of Moli`ere.)10 An unseen character overhearing what is being said on stage is a familiar theatrical device and such characters often address the audience directly as does the “spy” in Bosse’s image. But a male speaker has no business in this all-female preserve. Is this not a false note in an otherwise believable scene? The answer comes not from the theater, or not primarily, but a work of comic fiction in the tradition of Boccaccio and, in France, of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptam´eron: Recueil g´en´eral des caquets de l’accouch´ee [Collected Gossip (Cackle) of the New Mother], a serial publication that began to appear in 1622 and was popular enough to be reissued in a separate volume in 1663.11 The anonymous author explained – there seem, in fact, to have been several such authors – that, recovering from a serious illness, he felt in need of amusement and so persuaded a cousin who had recently given birth to hide him behind a curtain in her room to listen in on the conversations of her visitors. These were women of all ages and backgrounds, he writes, young and old, rich and poor, all of whom, after greeting those present, would begin to “cluck away like hens in a farmyard,” supposedly voicing conventional feminine points of view on love, marriage, and sexuality. 62

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21. Bosse, L’accouchement [Childbirth]. 1633. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.40 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This was no harmless satire, then, but a blatantly misogynous depiction of women as intellectually and morally inferior to men in an ongoing quarrel tracing its origins back to the ancients, revived in late medieval France (querelle des femmes) and again in the following century. Here was an all too familiar depiction of women as garrulous and potentially unruly, chafing at the inequality of marriage; a “good” woman was expected to keep the home and, when in company, “hold her tongue.”12 Moreover, this was a complaint associated in the seventeenth century with the salons of the pr´ecieuses, who were imagined as plotting the overthrow of traditional relationships. These salons were organized around a woman’s bed, and Erica Harth and Elise Goodman have suggested that Bosse’s Visit to the New Mother pictures just such a ruelle, the narrow corridor or recess reserved for visitors between the bed and the wall, marking the boundaries of the salon.13 Bosse’s image, then, suggested by the Caquets and reflecting an ongoing fear of women’s independence, takes its place on the margins of the broad querelle des femmes, exploiting its comic potential. Is the image, as its literary source, equally antifeminist and comic?14 And if the second, how is the “Marriage” series as a whole to be understood? The answers are provided by the most extraordinary image in the series – that of childbirth (Figure 21). Astonishing in its anatomical and physiological accuracy, this scene is altogether consistent with contemporary accounts in gynecological handbooks and medical manuals.15 As described in these handbooks, going into labor, the 63

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woman’s body was to have no hindrances, at the same time that nakedness was considered indecent. And so she was to be covered with a loose-fitting garment as a metaphor for the gross physicality of the act itself. As represented by Bosse, the woman, in the final stage of labor, is shown in the prescribed seated position still preferred in many parts of the world, surrounded by women supporting and restraining her, while the midwife (La sage-femme) helps bring out the child. A scene of childbirth as it may actually have looked rather than conventionally represented! Such a focus on the female reproduction process was, however, a violation of one of the great taboos of the period. And could it conceivably have been represented more outrageously, the “suffering” mother so immodestly shown, her features all distorted as she cries out in pain, the child appearing from between her spread legs in flagrant violation of the principle of decorum. As if this were not enough, the presence of the husband, Damon, dazed and confused, forces questions about the paternity of the child. This very accurate and lifelike portrayal is, in sum, obviously a comic scene, one moreover of the kind associated with the greatest comic writer of the French tradition, Rabelais, whose Gargantua similarly enters the world amid much shouting and heaps of excrement and tripe. Nor is this the only touch of coarse Rabelaisian humor in the series. In Le mari´ee reconduite chez elle [Return Home of the Bride] (Figure 22), the husband dismisses the women – and his male companions! – preparing the bride for the nuptial bed, anxious to get on with his “business:” “je m’en vay faire un ouvrage/ Ou je n’ay besoing de vous” [“I have work to do/ For which I don’t need you”], a motif perhaps less outrageous than those in the “Childbirth” but in polite society no less offensive. A related scene, treated still more lewdly, appears as the concluding image in the parallel series, Mariage a` la campagne [Marriage in the Country], a rare representation of the popular ritual known as “charivari,” a boozy row outside the cottage in which the newlyweds have spent their wedding night, serenaded by jongleurs, wandering minstrels specializing in satiric stories and obscene verse narratives (fabliaux), one playing a flute, while the man’s boon companions bring him a “cauldron” (“le chaudeau”) to help him recover from his own night of “fluting” (“Il a flust´e d’une autre sorte”).16 The humor throughout is Rabelaisian to be sure, but in the sense of a venerable French tradition of which Rabelais was only the most famous representative. Originating in the Middle Ages, the tradition was that of the anonymous literature of fabliaux, soties (fools’ plays), and, most importantly, the farces discussed earlier, with situations drawn from everyday life, albeit filled with bawdy jokes and stereotypes: domineering wives deceiving their henpecked husbands, merchants and customers cheating one another, teachers trying to instruct stupid pupils; the action is frenzied, the humor slapstick, involving hiding, beating, urinating, the dialogue filled with obscene double entendres. 64

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22. Bosse, Le mari´ee conduite chez elle [Return Home of the Bride]. 1633. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.39 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

versions of farce If the “Marriage” series was conceived in relation to farce on the stage, it takes its place within a more widespread and long-lived farce tradition. For the stage was obviously not the only site available for the representation of resistance and transgression. This fact is brought out further by two etchings by Bosse on the ancient theme of mastery in marriage.17 In one, La femme qui bat son mari [The Husband-Beater] (Figure 23), the wife looms over her husband, promising to “brain him” with the keys: “je tiens des clefs a` la main, /Qui vous ouvriront la cervelle” [“with the keys in my hand/I’m going to open your skull”], her fury copied by the rest of the household; the girl strikes her brother and a chicken pecks at a rooster, all to the amusement of the woman’s lover hiding behind the bed. The companion image – it is impossible to say which came first – Le mari qui bat sa femme [The Wife-Beater] (Figure 24), shows the opposite: the offending wife has been subdued and begs forgiveness (“Pardonnez moy donc mon offence”); the pitiable children are prepared to resume their roles in an orderly household as the husband acts out the role of dominant male that, in the “Marriage” series proper, the wife, Sylvie, had promised to respect. Whereas the descent of marriage into violence by either partner offended community norms, violence enacted on a husband by a masterful woman or husband-beater was the more offensive; representing what Natalie Zemon 65

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23. Bosse, La femme battant son mari [The HusbandBeater]. c. 1633. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.48 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Davis has called “women on top,” she was considered the greater threat to the social order. The ritual that would follow, called “skimmington” in England, involved many forms of display, all intended to shame the woman – and her weak or cuckolded husband – and restore a proper gendered hierarchy.18 But the template of the theme was, as noted, age-old and was used to frame narratives in comedic and farcical plots and subplots tracing their origins back to classical antiquity and associated with such of Bosse’s contemporaries as Moli`ere. It is most often associated in the Anglophone world with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, in which the shrewish Katherine is so thoroughly subjugated by Petruchio as to provoke sympathy for women in marriage as much in male as female viewers.19 Visual depictions were no less common, at least from the thirteenth century on, on household objects, broadsides, single-sheet prints, and related forms of “popular” art. So much so that to some modern viewers, the theme will be associated, first and foremost, with early-twentieth-century comic strips such as “Bringing Up Father,” in which Maggie regularly goes at Jiggs with her rolling pin, or the “Katzenjammer Kids,” with its related scenes of domestic violence. Whereas such images, however farcical, foreground gender issues, they could just as well, as previously mentioned, have brought to mind social and

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24. Bosse, Le mari battant sa femme [The Wife-Beater]. c. 1633. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.47 Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

religious questions no less hotly disputed in early modern France. For the “woman question,” once restricted to a wife’s relation to her husband, became a way of expressing the relations of all subordinates to their superiors. In the words of Natalie Zemon Davis: “In the little world of the family, with its conspicuous tension between intimacy and power, the larger matters of political and social order could find ready symbolization.”20 Symbolized was obedience to the Lord, on the one hand, particularly in light of the doctrine of the Reformed Church encouraging men and women alike to disobey priests and the Pope and the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church, and to the king, on the other, in a period of civic unrest. To be sure, the extent to which such images would have been so read is difficult to pinpoint; certainly only more educated viewers can have been expected to make this leap. And these same viewers may have perceived an instructive parallel between Bosse’s images and exercises in humanist paradox. Jean Nevizan”s Sylvae nuptialis libri sex of 1540, for example, consists of two books for marriage and two against; and Sebillet also published two such works (1551, 1581), one for and one against women. 21 But, again, other readers/viewers might have been offended at this confusion of domestic relations with brutality by one gender or the other, the strongest objection no doubt

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raised by feminists, who proposed as an alternative to this model of marriage one based on mutual affection and tenderness.

the battle of the sexes Related to the foregoing are further images of women that open onto the “woman question” recurrent in western history and especially closely associated with the querelle des femmes that had been revived in early-fifteenth-century France and had raged during the following century. That this “question” was directly involved is suggested by the outpouring of writings by and about women produced at this time, touching on the perennial issues of gender relations.22 In question here are paired images in the form of “love letters,” the images in this case minor components, the texts – presumably as written by Bosse’s poet collaborator – the entire substance of the prints. The first is by a captain (“Capitaine Extravagant”) to his mistress (Figure 25): Il faut bien avoir le coeur plus dur que la fressure d’une balle d’artillerie, pour regarder sans piti´e les douleurs inexcogitables & impenetrables d’un pauvre Amant . . . sans compter les grenades & lances a` feu que Cupidon luy mesme luy iette continuellement dans l’ˆame . . . : mais de faire sortir tous les canons de l’arsenal de vos rigueurs, pour batter en ruine ma fidelit´e, ie ne croy pas que la Damoiselle la plus confite au vinaigre qui soit en tout l’univers de la France, me voulust avoir traitt´e de la sorte . . . mais voila le desespoir qui commence a` donner l’escalade aux bastions de la citadelle de mon pauvre coeur, voyant les bataillons de ma constance presque d´econfits par les escadrons de vostre cruaut´e . . . One would have to have a heart harder than the casings of an artillery shell to look without pity on these inexpressible and unfathomable pains of an unfortunate lover . . . not to mention the fiery arrows that Cupid continually shoots into his soul . . . ; but to bring out all the cannons of your unfeeling arsenal to blow my fidelity to pieces, I think even the most sour woman in all of France would not want to treat me in this way . . . I become desperate at the assault on the citadel of my poor heart, seeing the battalions of my constancy almost undone by the squadrons of your cruelty . . .

The response of La Demoiselle (Figure 26): Vostre letter m’a afflig´e de telle sorte, qu’il m’a fallu, pour me consoler, manger tout a` l’heure une douzaine de petis pastez, autrement i’eusse bien eu de la peine a` attendre le disner; mais sur tout, la resolution que vous avez prise de vous laisser mourir, m’a iett´ee dans une douleur si angoisseuse, qu’un plat de potage qui avoit est´e dress´e pour six personnes, a port´e la peine de ma desespoir Your letter so pained me that to console myself I had to eat a dozen cakes, otherwise I could hardly have waited for dinner; but above all the resolve you took plunged 68

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25. Bosse, Lettre amoureuse du capitaine extravagant [Love Letter of the Extravagant Captain]. c. 1636. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris)

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me into so anguished a state that a pot of soup prepared for six hardly assuaged my despair . . .

What bizarre models for a society that cultivated letter writing as an important social skill and art, encouraged by the publication of sample letters in letterwriting manuals and of published letters, real and fictional, that were a staple of the print trade. Could there be a greater contrast with these formulas of politesse or with the expressions of desire and torment of the lettres galantes, both more usually associated with the period?23 While differing from the aforementioned, Bosse’s letters do nevertheless engage diverse literary precedents and types of print ephemera in broad humanist and vernacular traditions. As for the first, from Quintilian’s Rhetorica ad Herennium on, rhetorical handbooks frequently contain passages describing a besieged town, including the make-up of armies, course of battles, extent of the slaughter and destruction, sackings, and so on, all attesting to a penchant for enumeration deemed indispensable to eloquence. Warfare is presented not as a topic in its own right, but as one among several subjects providing examples of effective description. 24 And although the rhetoricians may not have intended this martial enumeration as a general model, least of all for courtship, it was used as such by Rabelais – who had compared and contrasted love and warfare, with marriage as a battle – and, in the seventeenth century, by writers as different from one another as the pr´ecieuses and Fureti`ere, as well as in a popular marriage manual, in which the woman’s body is a fortress to which her lover lays siege. Mistresses are to be attacked like towns, according to their fortifications and garrisons: some are to be mined, others bombarded, some won by storm, others to be starved into surrender. This male construction of the unresponsive female is, too, the ultimate “icy” lady of the Petrarchan discourse – and mock discourse – of unrequited love: a cold woman who must be conquered by an aggressive man.25 The tables having been turned on Bosse’s captain, he has failed in his siege, “siege” in farce on the stage being a bawdy term signifying the sex of a woman to be “taken” by a virile man, so that the failure of the suitor is his sexual impotence. Bosse’s two prints, in sum, traceable to an unusually extensive range and variety of sources, ultimately attest to the importance of military strategy as the model for gender relations in western society as contended by Foucault in his History of Sexuality.26 So as not to be misunderstood, let me state once again that I am not claiming that any one of these parallel narratives was the “source” of these prints; nor am I suggesting that all viewers/readers would have wished, or been able, to unravel the various threads so woven together. What these related metaphors reveal, as others cited throughout this study, is the multiplicity of “learned” models available in the discursive construction of subjects so seemingly trivial and “merely comical.”

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26. Bosse, R´eponse de la demoiselle a` la letter du capitaine extravagant [Response of the Lady to the Letter of the Extravagant Captain]. c. 1636. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris)

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women at large Let us return to the Visit to the New Mother based in part on the Collected Gossip of the New Mother (Figure 20). This publication, as noted earlier, was only one in a long line of misogynist tracts depicting women as morally inferior to men on the grounds of their verbal promiscuity, namely gossip.27 Nor was any doubt left about the dangers of this predilection. One sixteenth-century print of the caquets, for example, pictures the spectacle of women gossiping on every conceivable occasion: at the mill, the washing stream, the fountain, the baker’s, the bathhouse, the back of the church, and, not least of all, around the new mother’s bed. The predictable outcome: a breakdown of order and fall into the kinds of transgressive behaviors associated with the Seven Deadly Sins, Sloth, Anger, Envy, and the rest.28 Bosse’s image (Figure 20) is also of the space around the new mother’s bed, evoking a similar atmosphere of feminine apartness. And, as noted in the previous chapter, feminist scholars have suggested a connection between this image and the salons of the pr´ecieuses. With the growth of the publishing industry, curiosity about the discussions in these women-led salons increased, leading to an outpouring of publications on male-female relationships and on marriage and childbirth – again the topics of Bosse’s print.29 Like Bosse’s characters, salon women rebelled against marriage as a legal prison and childbirth as at best an inconvenience and all too often a health hazard. Another image of the same feminine space, a bedchamber doubling as a reception room, brings to mind these same issues: Les femmes a` table en l’absence de leurs maris [Women at Table in the Absence of Their Husbands] (Figure 27).30 One is immediately struck by the strangeness of an all-female gathering that was bound to cause social and psychological reactions. For the ordinariness of eating and drinking notwithstanding, a banquet was an event palpably fraught with meanings. It was, to begin with, an occasion for enacting the solidarity of a group, members meeting to swear oaths and participate in other ceremonies that bound them together for social, commercial, and religious purposes. The most well-known visual examples are the Dutch banquets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Frans Hals and others, particularly those publicizing the hierarchies of a militia culture from which women were of course excluded. But banquets figured in the ceremonial life of many other kinds of corps, including the learned professions and confraternities of all kinds. More consonant with Bosse’s image would be a banquet in the tradition of Plato’s Symposium, an account of a drinking party (synposi´on: to drink together) as a site of discussion, debate, conversation, and storytelling. Erasmus was only one of the Renaissance humanists drawn to the congenial atmosphere of such banquets, incorporating several in his Colloquia as occasions for questioning received wisdom and simultaneously satisfying the appetites of the body and 72

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27. Bosse, Les femmes a` table en l’absence de leurs maris [A Banquet of Women in the Absence of Their Husbands], c. 1636. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951. 51.501.2267 C The Image  Metropolitan Museum of Art

mind. Montaigne, too, explains that a good meal, seasoned with good conversation, is a rare occasion in which all human capacities are brought into play, realizing an essential aim of humanist ethics. And Rabelais, no less a product of humanist culture, also stresses the importance of banquets and drink, addressing his Gargantua to “most noble boozers.”31 Michel Jeanneret’s book, Des mets et des mots, stresses this association of banqueting with humanist thought and dining as a culmination of man’s achievement, a demonstration of his ability to harvest nature and construct his own universe of sensorial pleasures, of man’s ability to do so and not, as in Bosse’s image, woman’s.32 But is this not, nevertheless, a banquet in the Platonic and Rabelaisian traditions? “Ie ne puis plus filer que premier je me mouille,/ Fille versez du vin, je vays boire d’autant [I can “spin” no longer without whetting [my whistle]/ Girl pour some wine, I must drink first].” Is this drinking party not, then, a “syn-posion”? However, even if in some sense a time-honored – if unexpected – occasion, at this particular moment in history, such an image would surely have had a purchase on the salons (“banquets”) of the pr´ecieuses in which women trespassed on male preserves.33 And occasions for drinking by women had long been regarded by antifeminists as a particular trespass. So understood the image would be compatible with the derogatory stereotypes of Bosse’s better-known contemporaries who regularly ridiculed the “bad” women of the salons, particularly Moli`ere, in whose often-cited Les pr´ecieuses ridicule (1659), women are associated with garrulity, 73

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argumentativeness, and worse.34 A misogynist or feminist, how could Bosse have been both? But why one or the other? It should by now be clear that an image – or text – is not necessarily evidence of the deeply held beliefs of its author but is the outcome, rather, of a dynamic and open process, contingent on agency, audience, time, and place. All in all, Bosse’s images of women are so mutable that misogynism and feminism cease to be meaningful categories.

the spoken word To return to the argument with which this chapter began, more than subject matter was involved in Bosse’s attraction to the dramatic genres. He drew on their basic resource as well: the spoken word. To be sure, as previously noted repeatedly, there is nothing unusual about inscriptions on prints. But that is not to say that the relationship is always of the same kind. Most usually, as in the images of the Hˆotel de Bourgogne (Figure 17) or La Galerie du Palais (Figure 18), the characters perform a kind of pantomime, with a description of the scene inscribed below the image. The relationship of word to image in the “Marriage” series is strikingly different, however, from those just described. In The Visit to the New Mother (Figure 20), for example, the women are seated in a circle listening to the new mother; it is not clear whether one or another of the women is speaking as well. But whether one or several speakers, what is the topic of conversation? Is this a pious woman invoking and thanking God for protecting her and her child during the ordeal of childbirth? (Note the image of the Crucifixion at the left.) Is the mother reliving this ordeal as in the Return from Baptism? Is she expressing love for her newborn, as also in the Return? Or is it something else entirely – the latest fashion in clothing? How do the assembled women feel about what they are hearing? About all of this, the image leaves us in the dark. We have only to drop down to the verse text, however, to discover the identities of the dramatis personae, their words, preceded by speech-prefixes, at times distinguished by a different typeface, “spoken” as though by actors seated before us: we are an audience witnessing a dramatic performance or, more to the point, enjoying a moment of “frozen theatricality, whose narrative power lies in the stilling of the frame.”35 Similar arrangements were in fact fairly common in earlier series of explicitly theatrical engravings and woodcuts representing performances of the Commedia dell’Arte or, in France, of the integration of the commedia and French farce as begun by Agnan Sarat in the 1570s.36 A series picturing Sarat and his troupe, for example, includes the indispensable Harlequin in various guises, with all the characters identified by name above, Agnan included, while “speaking” their characteristic lines below. Each element is crucial as a reflection of a

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performance on stage, however, unlike Bosse’s prints and in keeping with the nature of the Commedia, with no attempt to create believable characters or a “real” setting. And this difference is, of course, of the utmost importance: reflecting actual concerns and contextual specificities, Bosse reinvented the theatrical print for new publics.

the theater of everyday life We are witness in Bosse’s prints, too, to actors playing out scripted roles in an epitome of the “theater of human life” that, according to twentieth-century psychoanalysis, makes us who we are as we play out assorted parts in response to the gaze of other people; awake, we play out such roles before the audience of the world, whereas in dreams, we resist our own capture by these roles. The Theatrum Mundi or theater of the world, one such metaphor of roleplaying, is the most famous of such historical formulations.37 And although this metaphor was something of a clich´e already by 1600, it had a particular resonance in seventeenth-century France. The ancien r´egime was, as is well known, a “society of orders,” of court ranks and hierarchy, one in principle as rigid, Roland Mousnier has stated, as an Indian “society of castes,” a society in which birth was destiny. The French subject so understood would have had little opportunity for “self-fashioning,” in Stephen Greenblatt’s influential formulation, little chance of escaping his or her origins.38 Recent research has brought out ample evidence, however, of an unmooring of such traditional relationships and blurring of many of the old distinctions that had separated the orders. Wealthy merchant families were abandoning commerce and investing their capital in land and royal offices. Having achieved more than their ancestors, they would appear to have risen above the third estate into which they had been born. But which, then, was their proper estate? The one to which they aspired was that of gentilhomme (nobleman), the members of which despised the merchant class. But what made a gentilhomme? If one dressed like a gentilhomme and acted like a gentilhomme, who was to say that he was not a gentilhomme? The concern with rank had become, therefore, a preoccupation with manners and appearances that gave rise to the variety of images of dress discussed in Chapter 2. The topics of conversation in Bosse’s Visit to the New Mother (Figure 20) may be marriage and childbirth, but the talk of the women in the Caquets that was one of his sources turns on precisely such questions of rank and role-playing: the unhappy new mother complains of the mixed company of yesterday’s visitors, with the wives of greengrocers, millers, and other “riffraff” “disguised” as people of “quality” and having the effrontery to speak on equal

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28. Jacques Callot, Varie figure, Gobbi. 1616. Etching, Frontispiece. R.L. Baumfeld Collection, Image courtesy The National Gallery of Art, Washington

terms with the wives of treasury officials, secretaries of state, and others of their betters. The only thing that counts today, remarks one of the women, is money, that is, the wherewithal to change guises and (attempt) to hide one’s true identity and low status. Is this second “face” not essentially theatrical, the effects created by a stage actor who indeed is at times twice disguised – once as a character in a play and a second time as that character “disguised” for some intrigue? (As various characters in his plays, Moli`ere often refers to and ridicules “Moli`ere” the author.) Had role-playing in everyday life not become as obvious as it was in the theater? About half way through the century, the theorist of society Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de M´er´e, suggested that it had: It is a rare talent indeed to be a good actor in life; much wit and precision are needed if perfection is to be found . . . I am convinced that on many occasions it is not without its uses to regard what one does as a play and to imagine that one acts a part in the theater.39

I am suggesting that such are Bosse’s characters in his “Marriage” series, “disguised” as “maiden,” married woman, mother, and so on, as in the theater of everyday life. (That the series ends abruptly with The Visit to the Wet Nurse rather than with the denouement of one of the plots suggested by the earlier images – of marriage or the continuity of the family – may have resulted, I would hazard to guess, from disappointingly poor sales.) 76

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29. Jacques Callot, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. c. 1635. Etching. the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Edwin de T. Bechtel, 1957. 57. 650.600 C The Image  Metropolitan Museum of Art

the carnivalesque Related to farce on the stage is an image that played a recurrent role in early modern print culture: of the natural body. Consider the title page of Callot’s Gobbi series of dwarfs and hunchbacks on which one of the gobbi pokes a reedlike object into the crevice of a figure whose trousers have dropped (Figure 28). While perhaps too coarse for the farce theater discussed earlier, this is a recreation of a popular Commedia dell’Arte scene in which a character with his rump exposed has the clown Pulchinello write on it.40 Nor is this the only such image in Callot’s oeuvre. Maxime Pr´eaud has called attention to similar motifs in his Temptation of Saint Anthony (Figure 29) – most prominently lower left – and he has noted their presence in other of his works as well.41 (Robert Scribner has underlined the importance of such scatological imagery as print propaganda in Lutheran Germany, Luther himself issuing one such picture book in which soldiers defecate into an upturned papal tiara, while the devil seated astride a gallows excretes a pile of monks onto the ground below.)42 An example related to the Callot is of the kind more usually associated with the editing and reinterpretation of texts: a redaction of one of Bosse’s images in his Prodigal Son series, with a comic diversion in an otherwise conventionbound subject: in the background of a scene of prostitution, the Prodigal mounts a woman, his buttocks exposed.43 And a related such image of the 77

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30. Bosse, Ce fardeau de paix et de guerre [Under the Burden of Peace and of War]. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Paris)

“hind” parts by Bosse is of a “musical ass” with a trumpet protruding from its anus, literally figuring the vulgar expression, “cornar al cul” [“a musical fart”] (Figure 30). The roots of this last image run unusually deep in French and European cultures, particularly in medieval art, in which it typically appears in the borders of illuminated manuscripts, on misericord seats, and so on. It and related images have attracted much critical attention and perplexity. What was the didactic purpose of these marginal, noncanonical images and at who were they aimed? Were they an admonition, warning Christians of behavior to be avoided? V. A. Kolve, discussing the iconography of what he calls medieval “bum bearing,” has noted its frequent ambiguousness and resistance to thematic explication; it is as casual and haphazard as graffiti scratched on walls, he concludes. At the same time, he states, its essential purpose is clear: to provoke laughter in the spirit today associated with the Bakhtinian carnivalesque.44 To Bakhtin’s mind, carnival was far more than a festive interlude; it was a “second life” or “second culture” sustained by the common people all through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, when it engaged and opposed “official” culture. As a result of carnivalization, literature – and art – are permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and, finally – this is the most important thing – carnival inserts into these structures an indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contact with the unfinished, stillevolving contemporary reality.

Particularly revealing is the laughter associated with Rabelais’ treatment of the “grotesque body” and “the material bodily lower stratum,” where “there is an interchange and inter-orientation:” eating, drinking, defecating, and 78

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31. Bosse, Le capitaine fracasse [The Fearsome Captain]. c. 1635. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

other forms of elimination (sweating, blowing the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body.45 A further example and exemplification of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque is Bosse’s Le capitaine fracasse [The Fearsome Captain] (Figure 31), the braggart soldier of theatrical farce. The overarching tradition is that of the epideictic oration or encomium serving the function of “praise” for a morally or intellectually superior individual, here rendered as a mock encomium in which the material and biological forces of the human body burst forth at the expense of a vaunting human intellect. Bosse’s Le capitaine fracasse is so promoted or self-promoted as he boasts of the irresistible force with which he sweeps aside his enemies, forcing them to lay down their arms. Its 79

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source: not military strategy or virtue, but garlic, onions, and radishes (“Des aulx des oignons et des raves”), which is to say that he triumphs through the unbearable stink of his breath, like Rabelais’ Pantagruel, whose garlic-breath spreads the plague. The view associated with Rabelais by Bakhtin was not his alone. The comic potential of “the bodily lower stratum” was discussed in detail by Laurent Joubert in a treatise on laughter published in 1560. A member of the Montpellier Medical School in which Rabelais had studied and later taught, Joubert, like Rabelais, stresses the curative power of laughter – the complete title of the treatise in translation: A Treatise on Laughter, Containing its Essence, Causes, and Wondrous Effects Curiously Studied, Discussed and Observed by M. Laur Joubert. Laughter, he states in words tracing their origins back ultimately to Aristotle – and echoed by Rabelais – is “one of the most astounding actions of man . . . which counteracts old age, is common to all, and proper to man.”46 To study its causes, Joubert focuses attention on its social context, and on one phenomenon in particular: laughter as a reaction to certain parts of the body when unexpectedly revealed in public: if perchance one uncovers the shameful parts which by nature and public decency we are accustomed to keeping hidden, since this is ugly yet worthy of pity, it moves the onlookers to laughter. . . . It is equally unfitting to show one’s arse, and when there is no harm forcing us to sympathize we are unable to contain our laughter.47

Recall the images in Chapter 3 that conform more or less exactly to that of the conduct manuals promoting what Norbert Elias has termed the “civilizing process,” laying stress on the anal prohibition. The carnivalesque exists, therefore, in an intimate and mutable relationship with “official” culture, as will be discussed further in Chapter 5 and the Coda to this book.

the morality play More numerous than the aforementioned are print series developing the themes of traditional morality plays: “The Four Ages of Man,” “Dives and Lazarus,” “The Wise and Foolish (Mad) Virgins,” and “The Prodigal Son.” As the “Marriage” series, these are episodic, but with the significant difference that the main characters are always moving toward the ultimate goal of salvation – or damnation.48 Conflicts are fully resolved, with nothing to be gained by adding another episode – unlike the abrupt and unresolved ending of the “Marriage” series. The parable of “The Wise and Foolish Virgins” (Figure 32), for example, likens the kingdom of heaven to ten virgins, five of them wise, five foolish,

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32. Bosse, Les vierges sages s’entretiennent des f´elicit´es c´elestes [The Wise Virgins at Their Devotions]. c. 1635. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

going forth to meet their bridegrooms; the wise take oil for their lamps; the foolish do not (Mathew 25:1–13). In other words, the foolish virgins are busy enjoying the diversions of this world, and so are unprepared for the next.49 Each group is shown in its own distinctive environment, surrounded by signs and symbols of its way of life: the wise virgins, seated to the sides of holy images and a cross, study scripture, whereas the foolish virgins waste their time reading romances, with card games, music, and other sensual pleasures. When Christ the bridegroom appears, only the wise virgins are ready for him as for their just reward. Only the first image of “Dives and Lazarus” pictures the early part of a parable based on Luke (16: 19–31): a rich man, dead, finds himself in hell, whereas an unfortunate leper, having begged crumbs from the rich man’s table, is carried into heaven.50 The other two prints are of the deaths of the two protagonists: the luminous beauty of the leper Lazarus’ just reward as contrasted with the grotesque apparitions foretelling the torments of hell signifying the rich man’s fate. The Prodigal Son is the best known of such Everyman characters and was featured by Bosse in a series that, in its size and complexity, ranks as one of the most important in his oeuvre.51 The Prodigal is shown leaving home with his inheritance (Figure 33), which he soon squanders and is driven from

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town to town until reduced to begging. His degradation complete, he awakens among the pigs and begins his journey home, where he is welcomed by his father. It is with the last that such series typically end, though Bosse stresses the “just reward” by adding scenes of the reinstatement of the Prodigal and the “eucharistic” feast of the return.52 If all of the aforementioned picture the world of early modern France, filled with people appearing and acting as in actual life, they construct this world in terms of Christian ethics as dramatized in the morality genre. This is the substance and focus of all, as amplified in verbal narratives inscribed beneath each scene. These narratives do not originate, however, with the dramatis personae such as in the “Marriage” series; they are rather in the form of a “voiceover” spoken by a narrator imagined as outside the frame and off stage. Thus in “The Wise and Foolish Virgins” (Figure 32): “Ces belles vierges que tu vois/Tout a` lentour de cette Table;/Des hauts Mysteres de la Croix/Font leurs entretien delectable [These beautiful virgins are here of course/ All gathered around a table/ To delight in the high mysteries of the cross/ Which makes their conversation delectable].” Their foolish counterparts “Tu vois comme ces Vierges foles/S’amusent inutilement/apres des actions frivoles,/Dont Elles font leur Element [You see how these virgins so foolish / Amuse themselves uselessly / In pursuit of things frivolous / Which they keep in their vicinity].” The image of the Prodigal Son about to leave home is just that, a scene of leave-taking, but for the text (Figure 33): O qu’on souffre icy bas de penibles travaux!/ Espineux reiettons de l’humaine foiblesse;/ Que nostre espoir est vain! Et que l’homme a` demaux,/ Quand il suit les humeurs de sa folle jeunesse! Oh, how one suffers through difficult travails!/ The prickly refuse of human weakness;/ How our hope is in vain! And man a wastrel/ When he follows the impulses of his foolish youth!

A crucial difference, then, between these and the “Marriage” series is that the characters accept or reject a strict moral standard. But my larger point is that differences from the “Marriage” series notwithstanding, Bosse’s response to the stage is analogous: that of the adaptation and reconfiguration of a dramatic to a print genre.

the neoclassical theater An altogether different kind of theater from all of the above is re-staged in Bosse’s poster for the drama Telaristus, a variation on the theme of the Prodigal 82

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33. Bosse, L’enfant prodigue quitte la maison paternelle [The Prodigal Son Leaving Home]. c. 1636. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951. 51.501.2255 C The Image  Metropolitan Museum of Art

Son and example of the theater promoted by the Jesuits for the edification of the urban elites.53 As Marc Fumaroli notes: Jesuit college drama and ballet at their best are, with their erudite allegories, another and an outer form of spiritual exercise, rehearsing the anagogical and mystical drama of the divine Word at work in the labyrinthine world of human souls and actions, in order to return multiplicity to unity, disorder to order, anguish to joy.54

Performed in Latin and drawing on a repertory of religious and moral themes, this theater was created in adamant opposition to farce, which the Jesuits associated with ignorance and immorality.55 The poster advertising the play demonstrates its conformity to contemporary neoclassical rules. Various vignettes above and below illustrate key moments in the plot, which is summarized in the elaborately decorated heart-shaped frame at the center; the passions that come into play “hang” from the frame, to either side, while Hercules, below, “enchains” the audience with his eloquence. This sacred theater was at the opposite pole from comedy and farce, a theater for the literate elite, as is the Latin of the text, and is a further reminder of the essential connection of printed materials with particular religious and cultural communities.    83

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Before concluding this chapter, a word about the afterlife of Bosse’s theatrical narratives. About 1731, William Hogarth painted half a dozen pictures that he published in 1732 as a series of engravings with the title “The Harlot’s Progress,” the genesis of which he described in his autobiographical notes: I therefore turned my thoughts to a still more novel mode, viz. painting modern moral subjects, a field not broken up in any country or any age . . . I wished to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage; and further hope that they will be tried by the same test and criticized by the same criterion. . . . In these compositions, those subjects which will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest utility, and must therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class.56

These engraved images were immediately successful and have been counted among Hogarth’s most enduring achievements. That they are original, moralizing compositions “similar to productions on the stage” is not in doubt. Nor has there been any doubt about their indebtedness to Bosse’ Marriage series. In other words, although the theme and compositions are original to Hogarth, the idea of a series based on the stage would surely not have come to him from the stage alone; Bosse’s staged narratives were his necessary models.57

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chapte r 4

Contingencies and Contradictions

ere I turn to prints reflecting some of the most contentious issues of the early modern period, such prints providing valuable testimony to the beliefs and practices of a cross-section of the population and often throwing into question assumptions made on the basis of printed texts alone.

H

religion It was noted at the outset of this study that religious images were among the staples of the printmaking profession alongside inspirational treatises, sermons, and meditations. It has widely been assumed that such prints were either exclusively Protestant or Catholic. And of the leading printmakers of the period, Mellan and Callot, both Catholic, have been imagined as committed to the Counter-Reformation Church, whereas the “Huguenot Bosse” has been understood as devoted to the Reformed Church. Do the prints themselves support this assumption? Let us begin to answer this question by turning to a religious image the affiliation of which cannot be in doubt, one of the most famous of the century: Mellan’s The Sudarium.1 Represented is the veil of Veronica, who is said to have wiped the face of the suffering Christ, his features thereby transferred to her veil, which was venerated in Rome from the thirteenth century on. A miraculous occurrence, the engraving is technically no less so. Mellan placed the point of his burin in the center of the plate or nose of Christ, completing the image with one continuous spiral line; he then went back into the line, widening it to model the face with lights and darks. Using a virtuoso one-line technique, Mellan created an image as though with no technique at all, a 85

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miracle of engraving – and of Christ. In his Likeness and Presence, Hans Belting describes a category of images called a-cheiro-poetic, “not manufactured” or “not made by hand.”2 Barthes refers to “the image of Christ which impregnated Veronica’s napkin” as such a relic, an object that seems to exceed the possibilities of human technique and thereby is accepted as having been in contact with the body of a saint or martyr at the moment of trauma or death.3 Mellan’s one-line technique is such a wonder seemingly “not made by hand,” as though originating in a growth process such as is found in nature, in the “thing itself,” and that thereby functions as such a medium for the divine. A quintessentially Catholic icon, it encapsulates everything that we would imagine Protestants objected to in a religious image. No less emphatically Catholic are images by Callot contributing to the cult of the Virgin and the veneration of the saints, the last a particular critique of Protestants and renewed emphasis of the post-Tridentine church. Callot devoted extended series to both, to the Roman martyrology, to cite just one project, 123 etchings containing 489 images of martyrs.4 Bosse no doubt objected to such images as much as to that of Mellan – or so it has been implied. References to Bosse are typically to the “Calvinist printmaker,” with the implication that his images are immersed in Protestant doctrine. To be sure, as a Calvinist, Bosse had a vested interest in the “religious question,” whose French origins went back to the Wars of Religion that broke out in 1562. Although technically ended by the Edict of Nantes (1598) guaranteeing civic and religious rights to the Protestant minority, the struggle continued in other forms all through the next century, until its definitive resolution in the revocation of the Edict in 1685 that effectively abolished the Reformed Church and resulted in a Protestant exodus.5 Bosse’s career fell neatly into the period of relative tranquility between the Edict and its revocation – a time, nevertheless, when the “question” was the regular focus of attention by theologians and philosophers and was the subject of popular stories and songs – and print propaganda. A preliminary consideration raised by any seemingly Protestant images would be of their status within the Reformed church. For, whereas reading and literacy were promoted by Protestant reformers, images of the divine were rejected as blasphemous and idolatrous on doctrinal grounds. Robert Scribner has shown, however, that German woodcut artists were able to place traditionally Catholic images in the service of the Lutheran Reformation.6 We know that images were also accepted as regrettable necessities by Lutherans and Calvinists, whose homes – as opposed to churches – were often adorned with them.7 A more difficult – and for this study more important – question is of the kinds of responses such images would have provoked. Would Catholics have found “Protestant” images unacceptable, Protestants offended by explicitly

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Catholic icons? We arrive once more at the problem of the audience for print materials, compounded by that of the division within the church. The crucial fact about Bosse’s religious images is that the majority of them are no different from Catholic icons, images of the Virgin, the saints, and other traditional themes such as “The Crucifixion” pictured in his views of print shops (Figures 1 and 2), images that we know were staples of the print profession; the “Calvinist printmaker” Bosse regularly created the same types of images as the Counter-Reformation Callot. To be sure, he also treated subjects with a particular appeal to Protestants such as a six-part series of “The Prodigal Son” that was one of the most extensive treatments of the theme anywhere in Europe at the time – except for an earlier, smaller scale, such series by Callot. Although apparently popular among Protestants such subjects, no less than images of the saints, belonged to well-established iconographic traditions, to which the Catholic church continued to subscribe.8 A particularly telling example for its potential confessional associations is Bosse’s Pr´eparation du soldat Chr´etien au combat spirituel [The Preparation of the Christian Soldier for Spiritual Combat] (Figure 34). Here is a soldier armed with the “sword of the spirit,” flanked by allegories of Divine Inspiration and Faith. Behind these figures are others moving back into a deep space, inscriptions placed throughout calling attention to each in turn, the Cardinal Virtues on the left, Vices on the right. The Virtues ascend a path that is “harsh and forbidding,” signifying the greater difficulty of the spiritual life. The comparison of a Christian confronting a hostile world with a soldier preparing for battle traces its origins back to St. Paul, whose doctrine was held in especially high esteem by the Reformers.9 Paul speaks of the spiritual weapons of “our warfare” and urges the faithful to arm themselves with the “armor of God,” the “breastplate of righteousness,” the “shield of faith,” and

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34. Bosse, Pr´eparation du soldat Chr´etien au combat spirituelle [Preparation of the Christian Soldier for Spiritual Combat]. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

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the “helmet of salvation.” The image had been projected in medieval writings and inspired fifteenth-century woodcuts.10 Erasmus drew on this tradition, recasting this thematic material into one of the most readable and popular religious tracts of the sixteenth century: the Enchiridion or Handbook of the Christian Soldier. The ideal is of a Christian faith so clear and strong that the dangers of the real world could seem less threatening: But lest you be deterred from the path of virtue by the fact that it is harsh and forbidding, or that you must renounce the comforts of the world or wage a constant battle with the three restless enemies, the flesh, the world, and the devil, set this third rule before your eyes. You must ignore, after the example of Virgil’s Aeneas, all those specters and phantasms which spring up before you as if you were at the very gates of hell.11

This is the passage that Panofsky thought had inspired one of the most famous printed images of the previous century as of all time: D¨urer’s engraving, Knight, Death, and the Devil, in which the enemies of the knight do not appear real but rather as specters and phantasms through which the rider passes, in Erasmus’ words: “fixing his eyes steadily and intensely on the thing itself.” With this stress on the spiritualization of religion and cultivation of a more intimate relation between the individual soul and God, the Enchiridion was especially closely read by Protestants, Calvin among them.12 But, of course, the subject was a Catholic one before becoming Protestant, and it would be difficult to make a case for its having become exclusively the one or the other. If there are other images that were intended to evoke an altogether different, specifically Protestant, doctrine, they have been difficult to identify, which is to say that the question of the precise relation – if any – of Bosse’s prints to the Protestant cause is at best an open one. It is far from obvious that he conceived of his prints as weapons in the religious wars. Such interventions are, indeed, usually impossible to miss; flagrantly partisan, they ridicule and dismiss the opposing point of view in no uncertain terms. One (dubious) print included in Bosse catalogs is of this kind: an assault on Jansenism no doubt issued in connection with a papal Bull fulminated in 1653.13 The problem for the Protestant cause, however, is that the Bull is equally a repudiation of Calvinism, which it associates with Jansenism and the print is a copy of another, inspired by the Jesuits. There are no other, overtly propagandistic images by Bosse for or against Calvinism such as proliferated in the religious struggle. On the whole, then, Bosse’s images, like Callot’s, seem to have been addressed to those on both sides of the Protestant schism and to have circulated still more widely than has been thought, which is to say that the potential audience for religious and moralizing prints would be understood as larger and more diverse than has been suspected. At the same time, the relatedness of Protestant and Catholic iconographies notwithstanding, the weight 88

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of the evidence may from time to time tip the balance in favor of a specific affiliation. This has been the case with the one image by Bosse that, more than any other, has been associated with the Calvinist community: the Benediction (Figure 35).14 The subject, saying grace before a meal, is bound to have overtones of “The Last Supper” and so is obviously not in itself Protestant. There are prints and paintings of the same theme demonstrably of a Catholic nature.15 Bosse’s image is different from these, however, in its utter simplicity. The family is shown at table in a room devoid of ornament, its only decoration, in the place of honor, a reproduction of Exodus, chapter 20: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” No less prominent in this rigorously symmetrical composition is the father, who is pronouncing the blessing but doing more than saying grace. As explained by the verse, he is reminding the members of the family of their moral and spiritual obligations: “Chers enfans ayez soing de bien vous conformer/ Au saint vouloir de Dieu en banissant le vice/ Et de ses mandementz tousiours vous informer [Take care to conform/ To God’s holy will by banishing vice/ And by his commandments be informed].” Thus he charges his children, asking his wife to join with him in their moral education – note that it is the mother who instructs the girls of the family. This is a father fulfilling his role as head of a Protestant family, as enjoined, for example, by Olivier de Serres: The father shall exhort his servants, insofar as they are capable of understanding, to seek virtue and shun vice, so that, well instructed, they will live as they should without injuring anyone. He shall prohibit blasphemy, debauchery, thievery, and other vices, suffering none of these to proliferate in his home so that it may remain a house of honor.16 89

35. Bosse, La b´en´ediction de la table [The Benediction]. c. 1635. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

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The note struck is true to a Protestant imperative and so would seem to have been intended for that audience. Its specificity only brings home, however, the difficulty of associating other, more common religious subjects with a distinctively Protestant iconography.

war After religious images, those of war were the most ubiquitous and, as it were, inevitable, given that religion and war went hand in glove. The spread of Protestantism led to terrible religious wars all over Europe, nowhere more disastrously than in France, in which a civil war fueled by religious passions raged from 1559 to 1598. When, in 1625, the kingdom seemed to be emerging from the effects of that conflict, it was only to be drawn into a wider European war, the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), another religious struggle complicated by territorial and dynastic disputes and marked by constantly shifting alliances among the warring parties. The representations of soldiers and battle scenes were, therefore, no more than acknowledging fundamental facts of the times. The meaning of such actions was invested in an infantry bearing pikes, halberds, or swords that had dominated the battlefield since at least the later fifteenth century and that had been represented by such printmakers as D¨urer, Urs Graf, Lucas van Leyden, and Jacques de Gheyn. This tradition extended into the seventeenth century with related prints by Callot and Bosse (Figure 36). Military strategy was being modernized, however, by the increasingly widespread deployment of artillery and the arming of infantry with powerful muskets, which necessitated changes in tactical thinking.17 To this end, tracts on war regularly issued from presses with parallel series of prints picturing the new means of warfare. Della Bella, for example, published series on the new cavalry formations, the new armaments and the new stress on drill, training, and discipline.18 These new means and techniques notwithstanding, the siege remained the most widespread strategy. Two types were documented by printmakers: a set-piece involving occasional battles with besiegers and relieving forces; and a guerre de course consisting of limited raids into enemy territory and skirmishes with small enemy forces while establishing de facto domination of local territory.19 Elements of both – the mechanisms of blockade, organization of assault parties, and so forth – are pictured in spectacular images by Callot: of the defeat of the English on the Ile of R´e, of the Huguenots at La Rochelle that signaled the end of the civil war, and of the Spanish forces under the Marquis de Spinola defeating the Dutch at Breda in 1625. (Callot’s later Miseries and Misfortunes of War [1633] are the most famous images of the wanton destruction of war, perhaps provoked by the Thirty Year’s War.)20

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36. Un soldat de faction [A Sentry]. 1632. Etching. From Les gardes franc¸oises [The French Guards]. 1632. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

Sieges were also treated by Bosse in images typically made for almanacs and placards, all but one of which have survived only as the independent narratives mentioned at the outset of this study. There are at least four, with fundamentally similar arrangements of mounted princes and generals accompanied by their officers, a few members of their guard, typically with pikes, at times with a citizen offering the keys to the city, the last represented by Bosse with the same care as in the etchings by Callot. La lev´ee du si`ege de Cazal is the one complete placard, published with two sonnets glorifying the king and a summary of events.21 The title placed between the verses:

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Heureuses & veritables pr´edictions de la lev´ee du si`ege de Cazal, tir´ees du tres auguste nom du roy Lou¨ıs le Juste, avec une sommaire description de tout ce qui s’est pass´e audit siege. Happy and true account of the raising of the siege of Casal in the name of the august Louis the Just, with a summary description of what happened during the siege.

To be sure, this was important news and such news was delivered by means of a variety of print vehicles in addition to almanacs and placards. News of court and crown was published from 1605 on in the Mercure franc¸ois, which served as the model for the better-known Gazette of Th´eophraste Renaudot published from 1631 on and formerly thought to have been the first French “newspaper.” (Courantos in the French language, printed for distribution in France, were published in Amsterdam as early as 1618.)22 An “official” organ of the regime, with a royal privilege, the Gazette with its related Extraordinaire enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the publication of the news of the day, with regular reports of Louis’ military victories.23

the bourgeois Another “question” taken up by Bosse was of the challenge to the dominant aristocratic ideology by bourgeois mercantilism on the rise. Indeed, his production typically has been characterized in these terms, that “the kind of life which he describes is a limited one, that, namely, of the well-to-do bourgeoisie.”24 But how do we know, for one, that certain of his figures are bourgeois? How would we know whether someone who looks bourgeois to us looked so to their contemporaries? And if “bourgeois,” do these figures thereby belong to a definable “culture?” The problem is that the term was used in different ways in Bosse’s time, none in Marx’s sense of the social class with which we tend to associate it today. There was no bourgeois social class in its relation to the means of production, no single economic, political, or philosophical outlook that clearly distinguished it from the menu peuple on the one hand and the elites on the other; the borders, insofar as they existed, were porous.25 Bosse nevertheless implies that the bourgeois are identifiable by focusing attention on certain figures that he names as such, as “bourgeois.” Such, for example, are “Les Bourgeoises” in the Visit to the New Mother (Figure 20); and in the shop of the solicitor from the series of “Trades,” “La Villageoise” is contrasted with “La Bourgeoise.”26 In the first, the women so identified are among those with opinions about the single topic of conversation, marriage and childbirth, complaining about the burden of both on women. But in the enormously popular Caquets that have a direct bearing on

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them, the conversation turns on different topics altogether, the principal ones as noted in chapter 3 having to do with wealth and status. With the one as the other, the etching with its inscription and the text recalled by it, we recognize a recurrent literary and psychological invention of the period. One of the better known literary examples is Antoine Fureti`ere’s satirical Roman bourgeois (1666), introducing a circle of base, grossly materialistic bourgeois obsessed with money. To these characters, everything has a price, including marriage: the book opens with a “price list of appropriate matches,” showing the exact monetary value of eligible partners from various social levels. Nor do Fureti`ere’s bourgeois earn their money honorably, but rather by tricking and swindling people.27 In Bosse’s Marriage Contract (Figure 19), the mask can be taken as such a symbol, of Fraud. Corneille had earlier, from the 1620s on, delineated this same bourgeois universe. Even though he did not use the term, his characters were recognizable as members of the Parisian middle class, preoccupied with bourgeois concerns, particularly the money connected with marriage dowries.28 And such, too, are the characters of Moli`ere, who, more than any other writer, plunges his readers into a world of bourgeois pretense. His Sganarelle, referred to in Chapter 2, is constantly resorting to trickery and swindle, and his most famous bourgeois, Monsieur Jourdain of Le bourgeois gentilhomme, is head of a bourgeois family in which working for a living is regarded as something base that one does not talk about. To be sure, these figures are caricatures, but Jean-Marie Apostolid`es for one has argued that they were created by Moli´ere not in fun but out of repugnance for bourgeois mendacity and greed.29 This verdict was fed by long-standing structural links between ancestry, occupation, and wealth. Nor were these all regarded equally in early modern France – or not in the ways that the bourgeois hoped. Some, indeed, so far as the elites were concerned, presented difficulties that could not be overcome. Two were paramount: the first, attitudes toward the means by which the new money was acquired, namely work, inimical to social respectability in the classical and Judeo-Christian traditions for reasons mentioned in Chapter 1; and the second, even more repugnant, of the lengths to which those obsessed with money would go to gain an advantage: lying. Or so the mercantile or trading class was reputed to be inclined. Francis Bacon distinguished three motives for lying: the poet’s lie (told for pleasure), the general lie (told for its own sake), and that told “for advantage, as with a merchant.” Erasmus, too, noted the meanness of merchants’ methods: “their lies, perjury, thefts, frauds, and deceptions are everywhere to be found.”30 Nobles, by contrast, were under only one obligation, namely military service owed to the king. As a correlative to this obligation, they were expressly forbidden to work, whether in manufacture, administration, or banking; to work was to become d´eclass´e. Rich commoners such as magistrates might

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be ennobled, but nobles could not work; they could count only on income from their lands. Idleness understood as an expression of moral and spiritual superiority was, in sum, a state to be maintained to the exclusion of all others. To be sure, Bosse’s depictions of the bourgeois are more ambiguous than the preceding discussion would suggest, and are even playful. In one image, he contrasts a village girl with a bourgeois (“villageoise/bourgeoise”) overburdened with concerns of wealth and status (Figure 37) – “bourgeois” meant literally city dweller. Not having the cares of the latter, the village girl spends her time, she states, singing and dancing: Nestant que simple Villageoise,/ Je puis asseurer sur ma foy,/ Qu’il n’est ny Dame ny Bourgeoise,/ Qui soit plus heureuse que moy./ De creinte que ie ne m’abuse/ Dans le commerce des Marchans,/ Au son de cette cornemuse,/ Je gouste le plaisir des chans. Being only a simple village woman/ I can swear on my faith/ That there is neither a Lady nor Bourgeoise,/ Who is happier than I/ For fear that I may go astray/ In dealings with merchants/ To the sounds of these bagpipes/ I am amused/ As I taste the pleasure of songs

In question, obviously, is not the reality of a carefree peasant existence as against that of the overtaxed life of the urban bourgeoisie, but rather the moral difference between what we today would call nature and culture in a recurrent trope tracing its origins back to Plato and recurrent in the comic rustic of the popular theater. An example from early modern Europe is Antonio de Guevara’s popular and much translated Dispraise of the Court and Praise of Rustic Life (1544), setting the corruption faced daily by courtiers against the honest pleasures of village life. Nor are the more deeply comical elements far to seek: the bagpipes to which the village woman dances traditionally symbolize both male genitalia and foolishness.31 To be sure, the bourgeois of early modern French society were not only tradesmen and merchants; they were also office holders (robe) with access to the schools teaching the disciplines of Renaissance humanism. The children of such families were sent to these schools to receive an education that, if nothing else, would be still another way to move up in society. Indeed, as Eric Auerbach has noted, few of the important thinkers of the day came from the feudal aristocracy, whereas a list of those originating with the bourgeoisie reads like a who’s-who of the intellectual leaders of the day, including Descartes, Pascal – and Moli`ere!32 The Bureau d’Adresse of Renaudot was only one of the sites in which these “bourgeois” debated new ideas. Others were the bookstalls of the Galerie du Palais (Figure 18), with their classical and scientific books. Bosse’s prints, then, like contemporary literature and the theater, while often

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37. Bosse, La villagoise [The Girl of the Village]. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

comical or slanderous, help bring out the dynamics of a social phenomenon both imaginary and real.

science, not-science Here I want to examine a series with roots running deep in the French and European traditions and possibly gaining new meaning in the distinctive context of the Scientific Revolution: “The Five Senses” etched by Bosse during the 1630s.33 The template of this theme was created by the Church

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Fathers, who admonished the faithful to guard the Senses “like guilty robbers” capable of stealing the soul – a warning articulated over the centuries in a range of images, from the allegorical, consisting of various personifications with animals as their attributes, at times linked to ancient astrological theories, to scenes of everyday life.34 Developments in philosophy and science in the early modern world, however, had forced thinking about the Senses into new channels. Questioning classical, no less than patristic, models, leading intellectuals were proposing sensory experience as the most reliable basis of human knowledge; knowledge, they declared, is acquired by means of direct experience, from which it is possible to arrive at heretofore obscured “truths.” Many of these thinkers went so far as call into question the very notion of the efficacy of either study or faith. As a result of the Scientific Revolution, in sum, notions of the Senses had become unstable, contradictory, and conflicting.35 What of Bosse’s series? The images are in his characteristic “realist” mode, his protagonists his actual contemporaries, in the dress and settings of the period. But to picture the Senses in terms of everyday life was in keeping, as I mentioned earlier, with long-established iconographic traditions, with which certain of the images are altogether compatible. Smell, to begin with, consists of a springtime setting of lovers in the kind of terrestrial paradise, hortus conclusus, ubiquitous in late medieval miniatures and tapestries and associated with the most famous of medieval literary monuments, the Roman de la rose, with inscriptions celebrating the sweet breath of flowers yielding “to a divine odor/which the glory of a chaste reputation lifts to the stars.” Taste is more explicitly moralizing, picturing a frugal repast with inscriptions warning against overindulgence in food. And Touch is emphatically so, apparently reflecting the traditional association of this Sense with the sin of lust (Figure 38).36 Here, a woman in a state approaching undress is seated in the lap of a male visitor to her bedchamber, her stocking riding down her leg, exposing soft flesh; the fire is an obvious metaphor for the sexually enflamed couple, while the handkerchief that the woman holds between her legs is a direct reference to her sex, a vulgar, if not obscene, element. One would expect all of this to be made explicit by the inscription, which surprisingly only reconfirms the importance of “touch:” Bien que d’un bel object l’amour prenne naissance,/ L’oeil ne peut toutefois contenter un Amant;/ Car de celle qu’il sert cherchant la ioussance;/ Il n’y peut deruler que par l’attouchement. Though love is born from a beautiful object/ The eye cannot satisfy a lover:/ Because so great a desire for pleasure:/ Only touch can measure.

Equally ambiguous is Hearing (Figure 39). The manifest meaning could not be clearer: two women, two men, and a boy appear to the sides of a table, singing 96

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38. Bosse, Le toucher [Touch]. c. 1638. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.26. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

39. Bosse, L’ouie [Hearing]. c. 1638. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.22. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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and playing musical instruments with such abandon that, in the words of the traditions of art criticism, “one can almost hear the music.” There is nothing to distract from this concert, neither symbolic objects nor animals. The motif itself, however – playing musical instruments and singing – was fraught with meanings. One was the association of the lute with female genitalia, a “concert” with sexual intercourse, a reading in keeping with the salaciousness of Touch. Other readings were equally plausible, however, for music-making was associated with conjugal harmony on the one hand and appreciated for its psychological power on the other.37 In the event, harmony is the recommended meaning: not in the sense of relations between men and women, but harmony as such: A bien considerer la douceur infinie/ Des tons de la Musique et leurs accords divers,/ Ce n’est pas sans raison quon dict que l’Harmonie/ Du mouvement des Cieux entretient l’Univers So infinitely sweet is music/ The tones and their agreements diverse/ That it is not without reason that it is said that the harmony/ Of the movement of the spheres underlies the universe

Invoked are Pythagoras and Plato, who believed that the harmony of the universe could be expressed by the initial set of whole numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, which are closely connected with the harmonic intervals of music. Rife with numerology, mysticism, and magic, such ideas had an immense vogue in France in the sixteenth century and a good part of the seventeenth century as well.38 At that time, however, they underwent an important modification within the framework of early modern science, associated above all with Marin Mersenne, who argued that discussions of musical harmonies are meaningful only when accompanied by mechanical accounts of sound. Within Mersenne’s scientific enterprise, in other words, music provides a paradigm of harmony not as purely spiritual satisfaction but as the “physics of sound.”39 Is Bosse’s Hearing to be understood as conveying such a mechanistic view of musical harmonies, or does it endorse the earlier metaphysical view? Image and inscription strongly suggest the traditional reading. And so we come to Sight (Figure 40), the defining image in such series, for a preoccupation with sense experience was essentially Aristotelian and Aristotle had privileged seeing as the most reliable of the senses.40 This reliance on sense experience had been called into question, however, by the “new science,” most famously by Galileo and associated with his telescope. It is precisely such an image of a man looking through a telescope that is part of Sight and that has been understood as an endorsement of the theories of Galileo and his French followers.41 Is this reading supported by the remainder of the image and its inscriptions? That there is more here than “meets the eye” is suggested by the

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40. Bosse, La vue [Sight]. c. 1638. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.23. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

grotesque mask with bulging eyes and prominent eyeglasses at the bottom of the image, for eyeglasses were widely thought to be veritable magical instruments capable of uncovering hidden meanings.42 As a reference to the discoveries of Galileo, Sight would not have been the only one of its kind to appear in the French print world. The engraver Claude Mellan published several such images picturing – or purporting to picture – the moon as seen through Galileo’s telescope.43 The initiative was that of Mellan’s friend and patron, the humanist Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a supporter of the new scientific activity, who had the idea, shared with the philosopher Pierre Gassendi and using a telescope given Gassendi by Galileo himself, of mapping the moon. To this end, the painter Claude Salvatus was commissioned to execute a series of paintings that served as the models for engravings of the full moon and two of its quarters, published by Mellan in 1637. (In his Siderius Nuncius [Starry Messenger] [1610], Galileo had published five engraved images of the moon, four of them unique with one repeat, together with a text describing the mountains, plains, craters, and so on in detail, and he was not altogether pleased with Mellan’s images, which he found lacking in features of the lunar surface that he considered essential.) Descartes, too, like Peiresc and Gassendi, was convinced of the importance

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of the scientific work made possible by the development of the telescope and microscope, both of which he acknowledged in his La dioptrique: ces merveilles lunettes qui, n’´etant en usage que depuis peu, nous ont d´ej`a d´ecouvert de nouveaux astres dans le ciel, et d’autres nouveaux objets dessus la terre. These marvelous glasses which have been in use for only a short while have already led to the discovery of new stars in the sky and other new objects on earth.44

Note, however, that once Galileo had been condemned by the Church, Descartes postponed publication of his own treatise, Le monde. Some of the most dramatic discoveries of the “new science” had been made possible, in sum, by means of the advanced technology of optical devices, culminating in Galileo’s telescope and, a few years later, Newton’s improved telescope, and printmakers helped spread word of these discoveries. The instrument as pictured by Bosse is, moreover, consistent with Galileo’s wooden tube – further evidence in support of a possible connection. Nor would it be farfetched to propose a connection between Bosse and the “new science,” for he did indeed collaborate on the publication of scientific works – as discussed in Chapter 7. The question of the meaning of the telescope is complicated, however, by the fact that “science” was understood differently even by those engaged in the activity, and there was no control over how it was perceived by lay men and women. Optical devices in particular provoked many and different kinds of responses. Vasco Ronchi has argued that lenses, albeit known from the Middle Ages, were not developed systematically until the early seventeenth century because they were mistrusted as trick or magical devices that distorted appearances and deceived the viewer; a more positive or trusting attitude toward them is evidenced, he asserts, by the uses to which they were put by Galileo and his followers.45 Not only did Galileo’s adversaries reject the telescope as scientifically unreliable, but it and other optical devices continued to be widely associated with tricks, deceptions, and magic well into the seventeenth century. The last was the most widely believed: that the telescope dangerously falsifies reality – while eyeglasses such as appear at the bottom of Bosse’s image are, as noted earlier, capable of discovering deep and hidden truths. Consider in this regard an etching published by Jacques Lagniet introducing a collection of proverbs published between ca. 1657 and 1663: only after rejecting the obvious but misleading sense of the proverb will the hidden and true meaning emerge, the search for that meaning and also its pitfalls characterized by eyeglasses and the telescope, the eyeglasses discovering the truth (“Il decouvre la verit´e”) beneath the surface (“aye du bien mais regarde dou il vient”), while the telescope, fixed on the mask of deception, promotes the falsehood (“le mensonge”) of appearances (“Ie n’espere ny ne croy, sinon ce 100

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que ie voy”). Here, then, the telescope is altogether at variance with scientific progress, which it will only impede. (Consider in this regard, too, an emblematic buffoon wearing eyeglasses and looking through a telescope is included in a scene of human folly, Figure 30.)46 So understood, the telescope in Bosse’s Sight would be a reference not to discoveries about the true nature of the universe, but rather of the hiddenness of that nature and deceptiveness of appearances. An endorsement of the new scientific discoveries or rejection of them – how is one to decide? It is time to look more closely at the image (Figure 40) and examine its inscriptions. Its central motif is the venerable one of a mirror, a simple icon of seeing – the eye as a mirror – and, coupled with the reflection of a woman, an emblem of the vanity of seeing as such.47 The cat may be explained in terms of its keenness of vision, although it too was identified with Vanity, which Ripa associated with clothing as well.48 So far, Sight would seem to be a typical enough image in the moralizing tradition of the “Five Senses,” grounded in Aristotelian natural philosophy. Unusual, however, as noted, is that intrusive man looking through a telescope that has seemed so emblematic of scientific activity as to have made it difficult not to see it as a reference to the new and controversial astronomy, paradoxically as a refutation of virtually everything else in the print. Such a meaning would perhaps be confirmed by the French inscription at the right, with its seeming reference to Copernican heliocentricity, confirmed through Galileo’s observations with his telescope: “l’Astre du jour est l’oeil de tout le monde” [“The sun is the eye of all the world”]. But of course, this is only a fragment of the two inscriptions on the print, one in French, the other Latin. The French text appears directly under the man with the telescope and begins with a celebration of sight: Il n’est rien de pareil sur la terre ou sur l’onde/ Aux charmes que la Veue a dans ses facultez;/ Puis que c’est par les yeux qu’on voit tant de beautez,/ Et que l’Astre du iour est l’oeil de tout le monde There is no equal on earth or on the seas/ To the charms that sight has among the faculties/ Because it is through the eyes that one sees so many beauties / And that the sun is the eye of all the world

Thus the words express more or less exactly the manifest meaning of the activities. The final line is the one mentioned earlier, about how “the sun is the eye of all the world.” If considered a seeming reference to the new astronomy, however, it is in fact a recurrent topos tracing its origins back to Plato and the Psalms and recurrent in literature from Dante on about a radiant sun as the all-seeing eye of God.49 And this standard and orthodox conceit is further elaborated in the Latin inscription at the left, beneath the woman preening in front of a mirror. 101

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The central image is, again, of the sun illuminating the earth, in a series of conjunctions: “Quod mens est animo quod clarissimus orbi,/ Est mea cervici cara pupilla tuae” [“What the mind is to the soul, what the very bright sun is to the earth, so is the loving pupil of my eye to your neck”]. The focal point, then, is the mundane eye of the servant adjusting the collar of her mistress, the image on her retina, in keeping with the Aristotelian conception of the unity of mind or intellect, the model for the human mind that, mirrorlike, reflects likenesses. The overriding significance of this motif is explicitly stated: “Qui cupit humanae simulacrum cernere mentis” [“To perceive a likeness of the human mind”]. The sun is, therefore, the cosmological eye in the Platonic, idealist tradition in which knowledge is “brought to light” as a direct emanation or reflection of the Godhead in a world filled only with simulacra and likenesses. In these terms, seeing is conceived as a particular kind of process in which everything perceived functions as a likeness or mirror image of its actual being.50 (Alternatively, in still another of the multiple interpretations of the telescope, it is understood as the “farseeing and foreseeing abilities of the mind’s eye.”)51 We have migrated from Galileo to the tradition of the old esoteric philosophy that in principle was rejected by the new scientists. Can Bosse’s Sight (Figure 40) have embraced both, the new science and the old occult philosophy? In fact, there is ample evidence of attention constantly shifting backward even as it moved forward during this early period of modern science. Copernicus had published his hypothesis of the revolution of the Earth around the Sun within the framework of the old philosophy, and the first defenses of Copernicanism – by, among others, the occultist Giordano Bruno – were founded on the belief of its being consonant with religious hermeticism.52 An equally prominent mystic, Tommaso Campanella, was no less receptive to Galileo, whom he hailed as the new Pythagoras, welcoming the telescope for confirming the deep truths of the Bible.53 To Campanella’s mind, Copernican heliocentricity, as confirmed by Galileo’s observations, was both a valuable new addition to the Book of Nature and a portent of the age of universal reform to which he had dedicated his life and which he described in his most famous publication, The City of the Sun. His early schemes having landed him in prison, Campanella fled to Paris in 1634, placing his hopes in the French monarchy as the channel for universal reform. Received by the king, he was made to feel at home in Renaudot’s Bureau d’Adresse, in which Plato and Pythagoras were frequently invoked within the broad context of traditional and modern philosophizing.54 Is it significant that Campanella was in Paris during the period in which Bosse’s series of “Five Senses” was published? Perhaps, but then, with or without Campanella, philosophical discourse in Paris at this time was, as noted, predominantly Platonic. So this would seem to be the meaning of the man with the telescope according to the inscriptions, a meaning consistent with the other of Bosse’s “Senses,” particularly Hearing: 102

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the man with the telescope would be still another signifier of the falseness or duplicity of appearances along with the woman looking in the mirror, all impure likenesses. For that other, pure and perfect form of beauty, it is necessary to look to another source entirely: the perfection of an invisible God. A comparable, albeit more diagrammatic and more obviously metaphysical, presentation of Bosse’s rebus-like arrangement is found in a famous image illustrating Robert Fludd’s notion of consonances in the universe between macrocosm and microcosm and of God as a type of light illuminating His creatures: the hand of God reaches down to Nature and through her to Man, the Ape of Nature, measuring a little world reflecting the larger world on which he squats.55 Thus understood, the “Five Senses” acquire a thematic coherence of a second order, particularly in the relation of Touch to Sight, for taken together, these images conform to the Neoplatonic tradition of the double-Venus, with the woman in the first as an embodiment of corporeal lust, the woman before the mirror in Sight of spiritual love and beauty.56 Expressed by Bosse’s images and accompanying inscriptions, in sum, is a continued acceptance of the authority of the old occult philosophies. That is not to say, however, that the newer, more strictly empirical sciences were thereby rejected. As Frances Yates and others have shown, the transition from the medieval to the modern was more often one of accommodation than rupture. The new formation was a complex mix of ancient, medieval, and modern theories, the Copernican and Galilean among others, blended with hermetic ideas espoused by such figures as Bruno, Fludd, and Campanella.57 To understand Bosse’s print in this broad context, however, more than a superficial knowledge of Latin would have been necessary, and such knowledge had become specialized by the early seventeenth century. Equally important would have been a grasp of types of idealizing, Platonic philosophy. What, then, might those lacking in both qualifications have made of the work, perhaps as offered by an itinerant print peddler (colporteur) or on a table in an open market (Figure 13). What of the illiterate for whom the written French language was equally mysterious? Obviously the print would have been understood in different ways by different viewers, from an image with much to “see” in it, no more no less, to a carrier of philosophical and Christian truths. This openness to multiple interpretations must have been accepted as a fact of life and, indeed, considered desirable by those in a commercial enterprise organized to maximize profits. Print publishers would surely have commissioned images of a range and ambiguity to appeal to as diverse an audience as possible, in other words, expecting that different members of that audience would understand the images in different ways, contingent on diverse backgrounds, aspirations, and ideals. Natalie Zemon Davis has shown how interpretation could be based as much on speculation within a group as from standardization from above.58 And Tony Bennett has argued similarly that a 103

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meaning “is not a thing,” but “is something that can only be produced” . . . and “is constantly re-written into a variety of material, social, institutional, and ideological contexts.”59 To ask about the meaning of the print, then, is necessarily to initiate an interrogation of a hierarchy of contexts, from the cultural and social to the individual and personal. In the case of Sight (Figure 40), possible meanings would range from spiritual striving to the material progress of science, from the philosophically sublime to the (to us) ridiculous notion of scientific instruments being useful only for playing tricks on the mind. The crucial fact about Sight is that its subject was capable of arousing many and conflicting thoughts and opinions, no one necessarily more “correct” than the others. Nor need we simply try to imagine how these different interpretations would have come into play. The published conf´erences of Th´eophraste Renaudot’s aforementioned Bureau d’Adresse, a forum for the exchange of ideas of the type that in later times would be known as a Debating Society and that was evidently frequented by members from different social ranks, show just how this was done.60 Having initiated weekly conf´erences, Renaudot published the proceedings in pamphlet form, later bringing out collections of the individual pamphlets. Included with the text of each weekly conf´erence was an announcement of the subject to be taken up in the next one, two topics to be discussed in each meeting. The format was constant, the method essentially that of scholastic disputation and dialectical analysis: each conf´erence was opened by a speaker, followed by others expanding on that discourse, disputing it or approaching the same topic from a different angle altogether. The participants evidently came from different walks of life, their identities not revealed; what mattered was the sophisticated play of ideas rather than status or reputation. A mixed group, these were professional scholars and amateurs alike – among the former, Campanella – who found a platform for his ideas in the Bureau during his stay in Paris. The ideas ranged from the concrete to the abstract, the commonplace to the metaphysical, not excluding such strictly rhetorical exercises as to whether it is better to speak or remain silent; which is the more difficult to endure, hunger or thirst; are there more than five senses; and the like. On October 24, 1633, the topic was one of central importance to the “new science:” “Of the motion or rest of the earth.”61 The first speaker argued the immobility of the earth, echoing the opinions of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Tycho Brahe. Heliocentricity is both illogical and contradicted by common experience, he argued, the first because simple bodies “have but one sole and simple motion. . . . Wherefore the earth having, by reason of its gravity, a direct perpendicular motion of its own, cannot also have a circular one”; it runs counter to actual experience because “if the earth moved, then a stone thrown upward would fall to earth at some distance from he who threw it.” A following speaker offered scriptural evidence for the same argument against 104

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heliocentricity: God created a firm and stable earth and a sun that rises and sets, for which reason Joshua’s stilling of the sun was a great miracle – precisely the argument that Bruno and Campanella were determined to refute in their support of heliocentricity.62 The Copernican argument was made as well, even if in traditional terms, on the grounds that the noblest body must occupy the noblest space: “the middle, most noble space, is therefore reserved for the most noble body of the world . . . the sun.” The uniformity of nature also supports heliocentrism, this speaker adds, because “the circular motion of the planets around the sun seems to argue that the earth does the same.”63 As for the telescope that has been the focus of our attention, all speakers agree about its deceptiveness and unreliability. One speaker suggests that the spots on the sun and moon observed with a telescope might be the result of the movements of small planets like those that revolve around Jupiter. Another speaker argues that these same spots must reside in the eye of the viewer or something close to hand, and still another that the spots only go to show that the moon is like the earth, which would seem equally to have spots if viewed from the moon, and so on.64 One would assume that many of the participants in such “learned” assemblies knew Latin, were generally aware of the traditions of philosophy, and therefore were capable of “decoding” Bosse’s Sight (Figure 40). But the conf´erences were open to all interested parties, regardless of rank or educational background. They were conceived, too, in the belief that no problem was to be considered as solved so decisively as to preclude further analysis; all points of view were regarded as potentially well founded, no one more than another and nowhere more so than with regard to questions of astronomy, because no experience or demonstration made it possible to be as certain of Copernican and Galilean truth as is taken for granted today.

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chapte r 5

The Royal Portrait

T

he Duc de Saint-Simon used such terms as com`edie and sc`ene to describe the court of Louis XIV as the center of that Theatrum Mundi or theater of the world discussed in Chapter 3.1 In the highly theatricalized world of royal society, all eyes are fixed on the king as lead actor in a performance. Every move he makes, every affirmation of his personality, is examined for its significance, everything conceived to attract attention, admiration, and awe. To this end, the talents of playwrights and set designers were mobilized in theater productions and ballets. Writers, printmakers, and artists were enlisted in the same effort, producing books and images in print, paint, bronze, and stone. Evidence of the king’s greatness was spread far and wide in an elaborate campaign to promote his policies. What this consisted of in the case of Louis XIV has been discussed in great detail in several excellent studies that I have no intention of recapitulating.2 Suffice it to say that the sheer number of painted and sculpted images was remarkable and even more so that of printed images, of which nearly 700 have survived.3 Of these, the most well known are the eleven engraved portraits by Robert Nanteuil, a portrait specialist who, with Charles Mellan, was a leading practitioner of traditional engraving in the century.4 Consistent with the great princely portraits of earlier centuries in their detachment and e´clat, these images set a standard in turn for those that would follow. Here were icons commanding respect, images to be venerated as were those of saints such as St. Louis, with whom Louis XIV was frequently identified.5 But such images were not unique to the reign of Louis XIV. Others, more varied and not always as obviously mendacious, were produced for his father, Louis XIII. One reason for such differences is that whereas French kings held

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all public authority, Louis XIII had to reclaim this authority and position at the center of the political order. He had, for one, to wrest control of the court from his regent mother, Marie de M´edicis. And he needed to prove that he was a pious Catholic, thoroughly committed to stamping out the Protestant “heresy.” In his study of the orchestrated public image of Louis XIV, Peter Burke wonders whether such a “master-plan” already existed during the reign of his father.6 The answer is a qualified yes, some such “plan” did exist, but subject to imperatives different in the reign of Louis XIII from that of his son. A word before continuing about the relation of the theater to life noted earlier and supported by the materials discussed in Chapter 3. The metaphor used by the Duc de Saint-Simon with which this chapter opened was attributed to Louis XIV himself, and actual spectacles, with the king as one of the performers, were regularly staged at his court as, indeed, they had been at that of Louis XIII. The frequent comparison of the world to a stage was more than a colorful figure of speech; it was regarded as expressing an essential truth about the actual world.7

the king in print I begin with an altogether predictable image, produced for one of the mainstays of the print market, an almanac (Figure 41), a type of product that existed before printing but that as a printed broadside became one of the most popular publications after the Bible. An almanac is a collection of tables including saints’ days, observations about planets and other astronomical phenomena and the terrestrial phenomena they influence, and predictions of weather, here set within borders filled with putti, ribbons and garlands, and allegorical figures.8 As Genevi`eve Bollˆeme has noted, the aim of the almanac was not simply to provide information but to mold public opinion. And she has provided impressive figures for their reach, calling them, “the books of people who hardly read.”9 Few images of the time would have been of greater importance for winning the support of the people, then, most obviously of all an Almanach Royal [Royal Almanac], such as the one created by Bosse in 1638. As one could have predicted, it is dominated by profile portraits of a supremely detached royal couple, their virtues announced by the allegorical figures to the sides, of Justice, Force, Prudence, and Temperance. To be sure, almanacs, as the other types of ephemera of this discussion, were produced for a range of audiences, and were priced accordingly. “Cheap” almanacs, intended for the lower orders, were similar to one another in content, illustrated, if at all, with crude woodcuts, and printed on the lowest-quality paper available. Others, more attractive and printed more skillfully on better paper and somewhat more expensive but “cheap enough” were aimed at

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41. Bosse, Almanach pour 1638 [Almanac for 1638]. 1638. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

merchants, government functionaries, and the educated. Bosse’s almanac is obviously of the second kind. A related image by Bosse that may have been conceived for an almanac teaches an important lesson about the afterlife of such ephemera (Figure 42). Here Louis and Anne, in their royal robes, Louis with his crown and scepter, Anne the Dauphin, kneel before the Virgin, under whose protection they had vowed, in 1637, as a result of an increasingly calamitous war with Spain, to place “our person, our estate, our crown, and our subjects.”10 More immediately, they prayed for an heir to the throne. That a royal pregnancy would have been 108

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an important public occasion and celebration is obvious; circumstances made it seem truly miraculous. For when the queen declared herself pregnant in the spring of 1638, her announcement was greeted with as much incredulity as joy, and the course of the ensuing pregnancy and birth were followed with the greatest interest by Court and public alike. At the time of the announcement, the royal couple was childless, the king rumored to be impotent, so that the queen was suspected of feigning pregnancy. At this time in particular, Louis was in ill health and, without an heir, would have been succeeded by his brother, Gaston d’Orl´eans. The birth of the Dauphin in September was regarded, therefore, with an awe ordinarily reserved for the sacred, the epithet “godgiven” applied to the boy – Louis le Dieudonn´e. (Conversely, the queen was rumored to have a lover, the future king thereby illegitimate.)11 An emotional outpouring extreme in its exhilaration followed, one as much religious as secular. The birth was celebrated with bonfires and fireworks, bell-ringing and cannon salutes, and, of course, pamphlets, broadsides, and poems. So far so good, an example of celebratory ephemera, no more, no less. This same theme is amplified in four small prints, however, that, it has been suggested, were originally made for the margins of the almanac for 1639 that would have been crowned by Figure 42. (No example of such a complete almanac is known.)12 These four cartouches show the “joys” of France in different ways, one of unusual interest: a midwife handing the newborn over to the king (Figure 43). To be sure, it is made clear in the image that this is no ordinary birth, for the new father is shown to be noble through his dress, sword, and bearing. And yet the usually remote king appears in a way that is familiar enough to arouse general sympathy. “Sire,” says the midwife, “vostre cher Dauphin/ Est l’image de vous-mesme” [“your dear son is the very image 109

42. Bosse, La voeux du roi et de la reine a` la Vierge [The Vow of the King and Queen to the Virgin]. 1638. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

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43. Bosse, La sagefemme pr´esente le nouveau-n´e au roi [The Midwife Presenting the Dauphin to the King], c. 1638. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

of you”] – removing lingering doubts about the paternity of the Dauphin! This and three other images, as noted, seem to have been produced for the same, later dismembered, almanac. And there are others as well, apparently from other almanacs, demonstrating that the practice of preserving skillfully produced almanac images once the almanac itself had outlived its usefulness was not uncommon.13 110

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44. Bosse, Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus, c. 1635. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.35. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

breaking the code The preceding images of royal authority are fairly straightforward, with inscriptions in the vernacular to reinforce their social and political messages. The meaning of another image of Louis XIII, however, would have been difficult to decipher (Figure 44). More consistently allegorical than any of the previously mentioned, it not only engenders an imaginary king but, with inscriptions in Latin and Greek – in which there are many mistakes– places that king beyond the reach of most viewers-readers. The image, Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus, alludes to the purported descent of the French royal line from the ancient hero and promulgates the notion of the king as an incarnation of divine power and authority.14 Given that the image of the Hercules Gallicus was very publicly absorbed and disseminated by French history, this version may very well have been widely recognized as a particular kind of representation of the king. Those so recognizing it may be imagined, too, as having understood that the cock, suggestive of the word gallus (Latin for the “Gallic” or French people but also for “cock”), was an age-old symbol of France and one with which Louis XIII had himself been especially closely associated: at his birth, a medal was struck in which he, the future king, was represented above a cock standing on a globe of the world with the motto, Natura et orbi [“nature has made him for his 111

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kingdom and for the world”]. The lion, representing the Nemean lion, had been vanquished by the original Hercules – it may also or alternatively been identified as a symbol of Spain, with which France was at war. So that we are confronted by the fascinating spectacle of a victory guaranteed by tradition and learning, by Christian and classical celebrations of apotheosis and the “laws” of nature: Louis, a Gallic Hercules and member of the wide communion of gods, heroes, and kings, united with natural precedent, cannot but prevail in his war with Spain. As a contemporary panegyrist proclaimed, no one and nothing can resist the divine power of the king [“effect de l’authorit´e du Roy”].15 Despite his generally good physique and sturdy legs, however, this Louis is hardly the type of the ancient hero or of a Hercules “reborn.” He is far less prepossessing, in fact, than in many portraits showing him as he was in life, much less than with the Hercules of the French iconographic traditions. Included in the most ambitious of the publications sponsored by Richelieu as part of a campaign to improve the public image of this much maligned king, for example, is an engraving of such an authentically classical Hercules together with a bust of the young Louis XIV, the accompanying ode developing the parallel between the monster slayer of old and Louis XIII as a modern victor in war.16 And what of the other figures and objects surrounding Louis? What roles do they play in this panegyric? What is the meaning of the print as a whole? For answers and, indeed, as a check on that first, more or less spontaneous interpretation, one would naturally turn to the inscriptions, which in this case, however, are in (incorrect) Latin and Greek, the languages of only hommes de lettres, Greek of a still smaller segment of that classically educated elite.17 The inscriptions are as follows. The Latin text on the right: Pulchrum eminere est inter illustres viros,/ Consulere patriae, parcere afflictus, fera/ Caede abstinere, tempus atque irae dare,/ Orbi quietem, seculo pacem suo./ Haec summa virtus, petitur ac coelum via It is an admirable thing to shine conspicuously amongst illustrious men of the land,/ To consult the welfare of one’s country,/ to spare those who are afflicted,/ to abstain from cruel slaughter,/ to control one’s anger (to give time for it to cool down),/ to secure tranquility for the world,/ peace to the age in which we live/ This is the highest form of virtue, and by such a road is heaven to be arrived at.

The Greek text on the left is in two parts. The first: “Hail lord, son of Zeus, and grant me excellence and happiness,” followed by “For thy fame goes up to the broad heaven, as does the fame of a blameless king, who with the fear of the gods in his heart, is lord over mighty men, upholding justice.” These inscriptions, particularly the second, far from fixing authority and clarifying Louis’ heroism, are ambivalent and inadequate. To appreciate their relevance and bring their unique contributions into focus, an identification of their sources is imperative. It would have sufficed to know that the source 112

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of the Latin text was the play Octavia, thought to have been written by the younger Seneca, the lines in the play addressed to the emperor Nero.18 The Greek text begins with a line from a short hymn that probably dates from the sixth century b.c. and then slides into a passage from Homer’s Odyssey.19 To be sure, the tones are laudatory. But as texts having some purchase on this image of the king, they leave certain problems unresolved. The words of the Greek text, to begin with, while first addressed to Hercules, shift to Ulysses, who greets his “Lady” while disguised as a beggar, as Louis is here “disguised” as Hercules. And Ulysses, even though a hero who triumphs over adversity, is a liar who most notoriously lies about his identity, which could be taken as an allusion to Louis’s (false) claims about his expert management of what was proving to be a disastrous war with Spain.20 A “comic Ulysses” who dons a fool’s cap and pretends to be mad to avoid participation in the war was also a popular figure of ancient comedy; a “comic Hercules” was another, the one as the other descending from the high plane of tragedy to the low plane of parody and travesty.21 As for the Latin text, Octavia was a fairly obscure play, rarely performed at the time. However, Thomas More in his Utopia, which we know was admired in early modern France, cited the passage on Bosse’s print as an example of inappropriate role playing: in the midst of the performance of a comedy by Plautus, someone appears on stage reciting this passage of Seneca disputing with Nero. To insist on reciting these solemn lines regardless of the other characters is, therefore, to make oneself both absurd and ineffectual, hardly better than lying about one’s identity or masquerading as a fool in the manner of Ulysses.22 Thus the two inscriptions magnify differences between a merely literate public on the one hand and the classically educated elite on the other, as they also bring out the importance of a nuanced understanding of the interpretive practices of that elite. And if the most learned response seems the most surprising, placing the print squarely in the comic and farcical traditions discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 – which would be consistent, too, with the wretchedly incorrect Latin and Greek if understood as a Rabelaisian caricature of the intellectual pretensions of the elite – one of the most fascinating and no doubt baffling features of the court of Louis XIII was its mix of hieratic austerity and pomp with the opposite: the travesty of the “world turned upside-down,” and obsession with the abject. As noted earlier, these were characteristics of farce on the stage and of the carnivalesque blending of the serious and the comical, carried out in verse, music, and costume, most elaborately in ballets danced by the courtiers for the entertainment, and at times, the participation of the king himself.23 All-male casts appeared at times as male, others female, the plays revolving around pornographic motifs, the audience addressed with obscene innuendos. As “females,” courtiers performed for the king who was seducer and tyrant and 113

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also, by means of gender reversals, “mistress,” the courtiers suitors, implying a feminized king to be subjugated. While the king himself was in principle always “better than the others,” he at times played unseemly roles, such as, in 1623, of a pickpocket and the bourgeois were often portrayed as socially superior to the nobility. Moreover, an appreciation of such spectacles was not restricted to the court. Similar ballets were danced in Renaudot’s Bureau d’Adresse, mocking the seriousness and high-minded discourse with which it was more usually associated.24 Thus, Bosse’s image of Louis XIII as a “comic Hercules”-cum-“comic Ulysses,” evoking a type of buffoonery popular at the time and that the king himself was known to enjoy, could have had a special appeal at court – to those whose educations prepared them to read not only Latin but also Greek and, more specialized still, to decode classical texts. As such, it might have been understood as, in its own way, evoking the heroic king of a ballet written by Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin in 1641 (Ballet de la prosperit´e des armes de la France): an allegory of a Gallic Hercules triumphing over Austria and Spain.25 It turns out, however, that such ballets in themselves were used to criticize Louis and his policies. One famous example was an anonymous pamphlet published in 1627 with the title Le ballet politique, in which France is represented as a political theater, with the various entr´ees signifying the deplorable state of the kingdom, among the injustices cited the brutal tactics used in wringing from the people the taxes needed for the prosecution of the war.26 And Louis was regularly criticized as a weak and ineffectual ruler, a criticism most famously echoed in Dumas’ Three Musketeers – a Louis, in Dumas’ words, deserving to be called not Louis the Just of contemporary panegyrics but “Louis the Idiot or Louis the Miserable.”27 Was Bosse’s print of the “play-acting” king, even while a seeming literal reference to a common pastime at the court, understood by informed viewers such as those who frequented the Bureau d”Adresse as just such a critique of Louis and his policies? So understood, the print would have been an act of insubordination, subjecting the stock of the publisher to seizure. Systematic censorship of print materials such as that associated with Louis XIV and his minister Colbert was not fully in effect, but Richelieu’s “print police” did act in the face of real or perceived threats to the state.28 All through the 1620s, extraordinary steps were taken to suppress unlicensed printed materials, and a decree of December 19, 1639 specifically banned caricatures and satires of the king and his ministers.29 Note, too, that in 1618 and again in 1620, books and illustrated books from the establishment of one of Bosse’s regular publishers, Melchior Tavernier, were seized with neither warning nor explanation but obviously for containing what were perceived as illegal materials of one kind or another.30 Given Tavernier’s stature within the publishing world, it is unlikely that these were unlicensed materials. Were they satires of the kind later forbidden by decree and that 114

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became still more irksome during the 1630s, when the war with Spain went from bad to worse? To be sure, Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus, undated but agreed to be “ca. 1635,” was published cum Privilegio Regis [with permission of the king], which suggests that it was officially sanctioned. However, such privileges were monopolies on works published, usually for three to five years, and not case-by-case stamps of approval. Here it is worth interjecting another print by Bosse with an allusion to Hercules that is not at all problematic. Published by Tavernier and conceived as an elaborate panegyric to the king’s minister, Cardinal Richelieu – and, by association, the king himself – it consists of a portrait of the Cardinal at the center of a sun, its rays a catalog of his virtues, two inscriptions at the foot of the print. The first is an anagram of “Le Dieu Mars dans Paris” [“the god Mars in Paris”], the second a quatrain in which he is celebrated as “Vray Hercule Franc¸ois, Grand Prince de l’Eglise,/ Vous soustenez un Roy d’admirable vertu” [“true French Hercules, great prince of the Church and support of the king”].31 There is a redacted Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus comparable in its unambiguous praise of Louis XIII, this one issued as a placard by a different publisher, Jean Le Blond – the original, single-sheet print was published by Franc¸ois Langlois, called Ciartres.32 Here is as clear a case as possible of a wellestablished practice in the print industry of extending or recreating an existing published text to suit the tastes and interests of a different audience. For this redaction, Le Blond commissioned an ode that he appended to the original print. In the vernacular and praising the king to the skies for his prosecution of the war with Spain, it was accessible to all literate French men and women, namely a large public hitherto shut out by the inscriptions in Latin and Greek. That is not to say, however, that here we have the “true” meaning of the print as originally published. What, then, was that meaning? Was the print intended as a flattering image of the king in the tradition of the French Hercules, a travesty of the kind that amused Louis and his court, or a satirical reference to his ineptitude in the form of a “political cartoon?” Can it have been one and all, depending on the educational backgrounds of viewers? To reiterate, Latin, Greek, and classical learning were the more or less exclusive privilege of the nobility and bourgeois intelligentsia. The parallel inscriptions in the vernacular, therefore, acknowledge the hermeneutic limitations of other, less learned publics, as they also undermine the possibility of a single meaning agreed-to by members of all existing communities, because a community is founded on the assumption of a shared language and experience – recall that the Acad´emie Franc¸aise was founded in 1635 to regularize the French language and oversee the creation of the classical French taught in schools to all pupils. To be sure, the openness and contingency of prints such as Bosse’s were, as noted earlier, consequences of print and indeed an explicit publishing strategy. The separate, independent, and at times seemingly 115

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45. Bosse, David et Goliath [David and Goliath]. 1651. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

conflicting messages of such prints may be understood, nevertheless, as further evidence of a disruption of the old system of orders. One final image from the minority of Louis XIV speaks directly of the political upheavals of the time and so deserves to be included in this discussion (Figure 45). The image is from the period of the Fronde, which raged from May 1648 to February 1653 and was the most serious threat to the stability of the ancien r´egime since the Wars of Religion of the preceding century until the Revolution of 1789. At stake was nothing less than the question of who would rule the nation, of the rights and responsibilities of the monarch, on the one hand, and the different orders and groups on the other. And while it has proven impossible to draw hard and fast lines between the shifting alliances, 116

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all those in revolt recognized one and the same symbol, namely the slingshot ( fronde). The most well-known missives were in printed form: private gazettes, memoirs, and pamphlets, the last generally referred to as Mazarinades, after the title of a satirical epic published by Scarron in 1651, targeting the First Minister, Mazarin, the most detested enemy of the frondeurs, for, among other things, his alleged homosexuality: Constable with a rod of Sodom, Exploiting the kingdom left and right, Buggering bugger, buggered bugger, And bugger in the highest degree, Bugger this way and bugger that way, Bugger in large and small size, Bugger sodomizing the state, And bugger of the highest carat.33

But visual images proliferated as well, engravings and etchings such as the emblematic image of Figure 45 distributed by the same vendors hawking pamphlets and other printed materials in the streets of Paris (Figure 13). Bosse would surely have relied on such a makeshift method for the distribution of his image issued in 1651, at the height of the Fronde.34 Although the aforementioned do not account for all of Bosse’s images of or relating to the king and court, overall, such images constitute a relatively small part of his production, the larger part consisting of religious images, scenes of everyday life, parodies, satires, and so forth. Obviously, Bosse did not count on state patronage such as was later enjoyed by printmakers and writers under Louis XIV. He relied, rather, on the shifting and arbitrary tastes of different groups within a broad public, such as have been invoked earlier. We are thus forced to reject static models of power in the ambit of king and court and to confront the dispersed and dynamic forces at work within early modern French society.

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chapte r 6

Image and Text: Reading Single-Sheet Prints

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t has been implied in the previous chapters that in bringing out single-sheet prints of the type associated with Bosse, agency resided with the printerpublisher. Questions remain, however, of the precise relation between the two essential parts of the print, image and text. Did the overarching idea originate with the printer-publisher or with either the printmaker or the author? If the first, did author and printmaker receive detailed instructions, image and text executed under the direct and continuous control of the publisher? If so, was the image produced first, the text an interpretation of it – or the other way around?1 In the final analysis, to say that agency resided with the printer-publisher is not to rule out the possibility of significant agency by others.2

viewing the image, reading the print The texts integral to Bosse’s single-sheet prints are unusually varied, ranging from the admonitory, to the dramatic and theatrical, and the allusive, the allusions at times in Latin and (once) in Greek, texts that Bosse scholars have agreed were not of his invention or choice but rather the contributions of (anonymous) authors or hommes de lettres. The concern of these scholars being Bosse the printmaker, they then largely ignored the texts. (As was customary, the actual etching of the texts would have been assigned to specialists.)3 That in so doing they oversimplified and misconstrued the meanings of many of the prints should by now be clear. In this chapter I shift attention from such questions of intent or meaning to the exchange at the heart of the single-sheet print: of image and text in accordance with a strict synchronism. 118

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46. Bosse, Loger les p`elerins [Give Shelter to Pilgrims]. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.17. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

My examples come from an important series picturing “The Seven Acts of Mercy” (Figures 46–49). The text is Matthew (25:35–36): For when I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger you took me into your home, when naked you clothed me; when I was ill you came to my help, when in prison you visited me.

To this was usually added the pious act of burying the dead, making seven acts in all promising salvation through good works – another instance, incidentally, of this “Calvinist printmaker” apparently helping promulgate a doctrine rejected by Luther and Calvin.4 The figures in these images are in the dress of early modern France and appear within equally contemporary settings. When a figure or object seems anachronistic, it turns out that it belongs in fact to the period; striking examples are the exotic figures of pilgrims, intended to represent, among others, the enemies of France: a Spaniard and an “Ottomon Turk,” both recurrent figures in staged comedies and tragedies (Figure 46).5 Dressing is pulling up stockings (Figure 47), feeding the hungry, distributing loaves of baked bread, and so on. With this in mind, consider the treatment of Clothing the Naked (Figure 47). The arrangement is balanced and symmetrical, contrasting fashionably dressed figures on the left with others wearing rags on the right. A literally pivotal figure in the center has discarded his torn and tattered clothing, which he 119

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47. Bosse, Vˆetir les nud [Clothe the Naked]. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.20. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

is replacing with new clothes. Compositionally and thematically, this figure should convey the essential emotion of the drama, and yet he is simply absorbed in the act of dressing. The figures on the right are the ones still in need, which should be expressed by their movements and expressions, which in fact are strikingly similar to those of the fashionably dressed figures on the left. Missing, in sum, are the tension and inner life of figures caught in a moment of great drama. In Give Drink to the Thirsty (Figure 48), a crowd of men, women, and children enters from the right to receive water, which, one would understand from the woman on the ground suckling a child, they urgently need. But this figure is, in fact, highly conventional and not at all specific to the event, such figures appearing in scenes of suffering of many different kinds. At the same time, the other figures show no emotion at all. For all its seeming naturalness, this scene, too, lacks the vividness of an intensely human drama. The greatest surprise of all is Bury the Dead (Figure 49). Representing a procession that has already passed by, Bosse offers us the backs of the mourners’ heads, the scene shown so exactly according to actual life as to be emptied of emotion. In its neutrality it resembles no other work so much, in fact, as Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans (1849), a succ`es de scandale in his day for undermining the artistic hierarchies. 120

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48. Bosse, Donner a` boire a` ceux qui ont soif [Give Drink to the Thirsty]. Etching. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926. C 26.49.16. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

49. Bosse, Ensevelir les morts [Bury the Dead]. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`erque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

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50. S´ebastien Bourdon, Clothe the Naked. Etching and Engraving. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Author)

Fed by perceived structural links between painting and poetry, these hierarchies separated the serious from the trivial and vulgar.6 The subject, to begin with, was to be drawn from a literary canon almost exclusively biblical and classical. So far, so good; Bosse’s subjects are of broadly biblical origin. But his treatment of them falls far short of that required by the hierarchies in one especially striking regard: his handling of human emotions or the precept of expression. The latter, equally derived from dramatic literature and rhetoric, required that the essential drama of the event be communicated by the gestures and facial expressions of the participants, each thereby contributing to the overall effect and to the instruction and edification of viewers. Everything in the image, in sum – the setting, dress, figure types, and expressions and gestures – was explicitly to teach the religious and moral lesson of the subject, in this case of the doctrinal truth of each of “The Seven Acts of Mercy.” Consider another treatment of “Clothing the Naked,” this one respecting the hierarchies so blatantly ignored by Bosse: an etching and engraving by S´ebastien Bourdon, Bosse’s coreligionist and colleague in the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, after his own painted series of “The Seven Acts of Mercy” (Figure 50).7 Here, in contrast with Bosse’s version (Figure 47), the figures, classical in type and in a classical setting, are swept up in a rush to receive the clothing. They reach up with open mouths crying out for individual attention. The dramatic intensity of the moment is brought out in the detail left of center, of the visibly distressed boy being stripped of his newly acquired shirt, to the dismay of the woman beside him. Or compare Bourdon’s 122

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51. S´ebastien Bourdon, Bury the Dead: Tobit Having the Victims of Sennacherib Buried. Etching and Engraving. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Author)

Bury the Dead (Figure 51) to Bosse’s (Figure 49), Bourdon’s truly a scene of collective grief, with the expression of emotion rising to a peak of intensity. The figures in the center watch the burial with gestures and expressions of desperate anxiety, whereas those on the right, completely overwhelmed, have dropped to their knees or lie prostrate. And so we come to the texts. The inscriptions on Bourdon’s prints consist of the name of Colbert, to whom the series is dedicated, that of the artist, and the title of each image in Latin with a biblical citation of its actual source, nothing more, which is to say that the figures were conceived to “speak” for themselves. In Bosse’s images, by contrast, the words of the texts rise well above the expressions and gestures of the strangely mute figures. In Clothing the Naked (Figure 47), for example, we read of the pitiable state of man, born naked and so destined to go through life, if not for those who would take pity on him (“Par un effet assez connu,/ L’Homme vray sujet de misere;/ Sortant du ventre de sa Mere,/ Entre dans le Monde tout nˆu”). The text on Give Drink to the Thirsty (Figure 48) evokes the profound emotions of the Jews, dying of thirst in the desert during the Exodus (“Ceux qui dans l’ardeur violante/ Dont l’avide soif les tourmante,/ Sont presque reduits a` mourir./ Leur peine n’estant pas petite,/ Tu dois tesmoigner un grand soin/ De les soulager au besoin,/ . . . ”). And Bury the Dead (Figure 49), showing spectators so inexpressively observing the funeral cortege, is of the tears and cries accompanying death (“Tous vos pleurs, et vos crys, ne ranimeront pas,/ Le vaisseau de ce corps, plus fragile que verre . . . ”). (Similarly, the visually inexpressive Prodigal Son of Bosse’s 123

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series is tormented, the inscription tells us, by thoughts of his previous actions, imploring forgiveness with tears running down his cheeks [“A ce piteux abord il implore sa grace,/ Et les larmes aux yeux se prosterne a` genous;/ Avec un tel effet, que son pere l’embrasse,/ Plus enflamm´e qu’il est d’amour que de courrous.”]). The expressiveness that the figures so palpably lack is more than amply provided by these impassioned verbal eruptions, profound emotions evoked by constantly shifting attention from the image to the words and then back again, the constituent parts of the print complementing one another to create a whole in which each of the parts becomes dominant at different times according to the function that it is called on to perform. Agency, therefore, is manifest not only in the theme or conception of the print as conceived or approved by the publisher, but also in the interpretation and execution of that conception by the (anonymous) author and printmaker working in tandem. And what of the viewer-reader, more or less literate or illiterate? They were not excluded, given the continued importance of hearing and seeing by the literate and illiterate alike; then as now, audience response was neither fixed nor necessarily consistent.8 And so agency must be assigned here as well. Publisher, author, printmaker, and viewer-reader – all sharing in the agency of the single-sheet print.9

word and image In Bosse’s single-sheet prints, then, the image is incomplete without the text – the text and the image in a binary relationship that was a topic of ancient lineage.10 Words are the signs of things, the traditional theory of language affirmed, and images are a special case, as it were, of this theory, deriving from the same principle of imitation (mimesis). The visual and the verbal were thus inextricably interwoven, as explained by Father Louis Richeome in his widely read book on religious images, Tableaux sacr´es (1601), a book interspersing pictures and text: If there is anything in the engraved pictures [the images] that does not correspond to the speaking pictures [the narratives], the reader will compensate for what the picture lacks, if he wishes, correcting the pictures with the words of the text.11

The relation of reading and seeing so understood is symbiotic, with neither of significantly greater importance than the other. Not so, it has more recently been argued. Reinforced by literary polemic, one has been understood as necessarily eclipsing the other.12 Barthes, for one, a theorist of the “mixed arts,” identifies the linguistic as the more indispensable: “as a caption, as a headline, as a press article, as a film dialogue, as a comic-strip 124

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balloon.” It is thus clear, he observes, that ours is not a civilization of the image, as has so widely been claimed, but still, as in former times, of the word: [W]e are still and more than ever a civilization of writing, because writing and speech are still the ‘full’ terms of informational structure. As a matter of fact, only the presence of the linguistic message counts, for neither its position nor its length seems pertinent.13

The visual carriers of meaning, in other words, are vaguer and more ambiguous than the verbal ones and may result in a range of readings; the experienced viewer (reader) will therefore trust in the more reliable words. To be sure, Barthes’ principal concern is with present day mass media, but he insists that his analysis holds true for “former times.” He may have been thinking of medieval illuminated manuscripts, in which speech is often written on scrolls alongside the figures.14 This understanding of the relation of word to image can also be traced back almost to the very beginnings of printmaking – to the prehistory, that is, of Bosse’s single-sheet prints. Consider first a drawing by D¨urer, evidently for a woodcut or engraving of The Mass of Angels, that contains a small white panel on which is written: “Fill in what you would like here,” signifying that the viewer is to complete the print with an inscription. And the empty banderoles on early prints by the Housebook Master and Israel van Meckenem can similarly be understood as inviting the viewer/reader to project what would have to be one of many possible interpretations.15 As for present-day parallels on the order of those cited by Barthes, especially striking examples are the literally talkative but otherwise minimally expressive figures in the cartoon sequences of Jules Feiffer and in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury – though both artist-authors draw the images and write the texts themselves. In striking contrast with these are the New Yorker cartoons published during the last several years without captions. Readers are asked to imagine different possible meanings to be conveyed by different captions when read together with the image, the three best of these chosen by the editor and published in a subsequent issue of the magazine, followed by the “best of all” as voted by readers. Thus, while arriving at the caption is ostensibly an exercise in problem solving, it is so only through the interactions of the readers with the editor and the one as the other with the cartoonist – agency, as a result, residing in one and all. With all the revolutions and “turns” of recent (postmodernist) years – pictorial, linguistic, digital – has it not become increasingly difficult to maintain that there is one, and only one, standard to which all visual-verbal statements must conform? Have we not come full circle from the single-sheet prints of early modern print culture in which the combined power of image and text was harnessed as a means of coping with an increasingly troublesome and complicated world?

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chapte r 7

Book Illustrations

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n this and the following chapter I turn to Bosse’s many and changing investments in the book trade. The activity of this chapter is introduced by the bookseller included in La Galerie du Palais (Figure 18): at the left, two gentlemen are being shown a copy of La Mariane, a tragedy by Tristan L’Hermite first performed in 1636 and published in 1637 by the booksellerpublisher Augustin Courb´e, with an etched frontispiece by Bosse. We see a bookshop – Courb´e’s? – designed to encourage genteel browsing as a form of sociability. The adjacent booth selling fashionable gloves, fans, and lace, among other things, is also an outlet for print-related objects, here fans by Bosse (“Eventails de Bosse”) published in 1637 and 1638. The frontispiece was only one of the outcomes of Bosse’s engagements with the book. Others were title pages, historiated initials and borders, culsde-lampes and illustrations placed throughout texts ranging from bibles and other religious tracts to novels, scientific studies, and technical and theoretical treatises, his own and others.1 Some images were entirely of his conception and execution, others only of his execution after designs by others in the kinds of collaborations described in Chapter 1. The frontispiece for La Mariane, for example, was his responsibility alone, whereas other compositions of related kinds were commissioned from artists whose designs he executed, sometimes in collaboration with other printmakers; still other illustrations designed by him were etched or engraved by others – a division of labor characteristic of the print profession and clearly indicated by the separate stages of book production as texts passed from author to publisher, designer, illustrator, typesetter, printer, and binder.2 There is not always a clear logic to such decisions, which can be assumed to have been made principally out of financial considerations.3

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Whether as designer-illustrator or etcher-engraver – or author-publisher, to be discussed in the next chapter – Bosse participated in the various processes of book production throughout his career more completely than any other printmaker of his or earlier times. With regard only to illustrations, it has been estimated that he contributed to at least 120 books; in addition, there are loose sheets that may originally have been made as book illustrations.4 Illustrating books with etchings or engravings was not unusual by this time, although such illustrations, needing to be printed on high-quality paper, often separate from the text, and therefore increasing the cost of production, were commissioned only for higher-priced books, typically in quarto or in-folio editions;5 Bosse’s most important series appear within such editions. (Smaller formats, using cheap paper and illustrated by lesser printmakers, might include crude woodcut illustrations or make use of the woodblock technique integrating text and illustration on the same page.) The book illustrated with engravings or etchings was, all in all, the most costly and risky of print enterprises.

types of pictures I begin with a typical publication strategy: the dedication. Of ancient origin, the dedication was brought back into fashion by the humanists and continued in use until the end of the ancien r´egime.6 In question here is a dedication etched by Bosse for a volume containing a French translation of the first six books of Virgil’s Aeneid, published by Pierre Moreau in 1648 (Figure 52) – each book also contains one illustration by Bosse to be discussed below.7 At the center, a Roman base is inscribed with the title of the work in Roman capitals, with the dedication to Cardinal Mazarin in calligraphic italics. Above is a cartouche with the device of the Cardinal and to the sides eleven vignettes, each with one of the labors of Hercules – the exemplar of virtue in emblem books – accompanied by an inscription in Latin. Is it not odd that a book making one of the classics available in the vernacular should be introduced by a dedication in Latin? But then the dedicatee was a member of the educated elite and a book lover building one of the great libraries of Europe.8 He is addressed here either for having underwritten the cost of publication or in hopes that he will reward the author-translator for this praise of his virtue as a new Hercules. Characteristic as well of the higher-priced book is the illustrated title page, this one of the most famous of the period, for Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.9 Composed in Paris during the author’s residence from 1640 to the end of 1651, it consists of one large image in the upper register and two sets of panels, left and right. The topmost image is of a town and surrounding landscape, at the

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back of which we see the upper body and head of a gigantic figure, wearing a crown and brandishing a crozier in one hand and a sword in the other. Innumerable men entirely cover his body, most wearing the contemporary outdoor dress of gentlemen, a cloak and tall hat, but also including a few bareheaded men in overalls and a priest in a skullcap. Emblematic of the argument of the book, this title page encapsulates Hobbes’s comparison of the human body with the body politic, a literal image of his Leviathan or Commonwealth; the head is the king, whereas the body consists of his subjects, their bodies incorporated by the monarch together with the lands attached to his crown. In Hobbes’s words: “as if every man should say to every man, I Authorize and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorize all his Actions in like manner.” Indeed, so perfectly does the title page project this representation of the absolutist body, that it has at times been claimed that it must have been invented by Hobbes, Bosse only etching the design – which would indeed not have been at all unusual given the different types of relationships and degrees of responsibility within print and book production. It has generally been accepted on stylistic grounds, however, that the image was in fact designed as well as etched by Bosse.10 (Neither designer nor etcher is named on the sheet itself.) Dedication and title page fall into what G´erard Genette called “paratext,” visual and verbal aids and devices accompanying texts and mediating between author, publisher, and reader.11 The paratext is a “group of practices and discourses” that “enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.” Such matter is usually found in the opening of the book – dedication, title page, preface, table of contents. It is a threshold or what Borges called a “‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back . . . a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also transaction.”12 Several of Bosse’s frontispieces and title pages are literally such thresholds, entranceways or porticos inviting the reader to enter, that were among the most popular front-of-the-book devices of the period.13

plays and romances Printed plays and novels staging pastoral dramas, historical romances, and tragedies, organized around mistaken identities, great battles, and natural disasters, and filled with shepherds and shepherdesses and warriors and princesses from ancient Rome to medieval France and – because Europe was “discovering” hitherto unknown parts of the world – Mexico, Senegal, and the Congo, were widely appreciated and consumed.14 (Corneille’s early comedies of the everyday discussed in Chapter 3 were conceived as alternatives to costume 128

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52. Bosse, title page to L’Eneide de Virgile. 1648. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

dramas performed on stage.) Among the more important such texts illustrated by Bosse are Gomberville’s Polexandre (1637), Desmarets’ L’Ariane (1639) and Chapelain’s La pucelle ou la France delivr´ee (1656). For the different parts of Gomberville’s book, Bosse designed and also etched five title pages.15 His part in the other two publications was as executor of drawings by the Baroque painter Claude Vignon of seventeen illustrations 129

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53. Bosse, after Claude Vignon, frontispiece for Desmaret de SaintSorlin, L’Ariane. 1639. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

and a frontispiece for L’Ariane (Figure 53), and twelve in addition to the frontispiece for La pucelle.16 That Bosse had complete responsibility for some designs while providing only technical assistance for others may have mattered less than one would think, given that Bosse, as Vignon wrote on a rough sketch, was expected to fill in and complete (“supplera”) the artist’s drawings as he etched them.17 In the frontispiece for L’Ariane (Figure 53), for example, we see the heroine, Ariane, and hero, M´elinte, in “Turkish” costumes within a heavy and florid 130

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54. Bosse, The Sack of Troy. From Virgil, The Aeneid. 1648. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

“baroque” setting replete with swags of fruit and flowers and images of Minerva and Apollo; equally “baroque” are the dramatic poses and gestures. The characters are those at the center of the narrative, but the image is not a literal translation of a specific episode; it is, rather, an iconographic or emblematic invention, adding new elements and a sharpened focus conceived to draw in the browser – as in Figure 18. The model and source for both is the language of “history” painting that was Vignon’s habitual mode, used in depicting every type of historical and mythological subject and of such modern epics as Tasso’s universally admired Gerusalemme liberata.18 The frontispiece to La Mariane, promoted in La Galerie du Palais (Figure 18), while designed as well as etched by Bosse, is another “history” altogether in the spirit of the previously mentioned invention by Vignon. Here we see King Herod on his throne, with members of his family and court, listening to a false accusation against queen Mariane that will lead to her death. At the center of the tragedy, this confrontation is in fact acted out in scene 2, act 3. Used as a frontispiece, it serves as a visual gloss on the play.19 Other illustrations, particularly those appearing within the body of texts, at times decorate them more literally. The dozen plates for the French translation of the Aeneid are such examples, depicting easily identifiable scenes more or less as enacted in the text. Can there be any doubt about what is represented in Figure 54? To readers of the text, it is self-explanatory: Aeneas and his 131

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family, at the lower left, flee a sacked and burning Troy, whose fate was sealed by the wooden horse at the right – all important compositional features and iconographic details found in the text. Nothing is added, at least nothing of importance. Behind these illustrations, it has been suggested, must have been other inventions by Vignon. I would suggest, however, that in their scenic effects, vast and complex spaces, and dizzying shifts in scale, they are more closely related to the engraved illustrations by the Mannerist Antoine Caron in Blaise de Vigen`ere’s luxurious edition of 1614 of the Images of Philostratus.20 Of the different sources of book illustration, these would belong, therefore, to the history and traditions of illustration as such.

a new spirit The future of French painting – as opposed to printmaking – rested neither with the Mannerist Caron nor the Baroque Vignon, but with the classicist Poussin, who, as noted earlier, was so recognized by Bosse in print as early as 1649. Poussin’s influence was first exerted on French painters in Rome during the 1630s, interpretations of his classical style carried by them to Paris, where they were joined by other young painters, among them the future founders of the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. The official style of the academy, classicism or academic classicism, it became synonymous with the style of the king: the Style of Louis XIV. Further evidence of the early turn to “Poussinism” is provided by books published by the state publishing house (Imprimerie Royale du Louvre), set up by Cardinal Richelieu together with Sublet de Noyers, one of the king’s ministers. Poussin was called on to produce two title pages, for Virgil’s Opera (1641) and a Holy Scripture (Biblia Sacra, 1642) (Figure 55) both engraved by Claude Mellan and both, in their power and authority, contributing to the marginalization of the style of the likes of Vignon.21 Bosse’s frontispieces of 1645 and 1649 discussed in Chapter 1 (Figures 5 and 6), albeit neither as severe nor authentically antique as Poussin’s, are in the same classical mode as works by Poussin’s followers. Other of Bosse’s frontispieces were equally so, for example his Maniere universelle of Desargues of 1647, with similarly draped figures in equally antique settings. These figures are, nonetheless, more voluminous, refined, and elegant, their overall effect decidedly marmoreal. Precisely such figures are found in paintings by Laurent de La Hyre, which, for their extreme smoothness and refinement, have been placed in a subcategory of French classicism dubbed “Atticism.”22 The classical figures of Figure 6, by contrast, are relatively simpler and softer, recalling the figures of S´ebastien Bourdon.23

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55. Claude Mellan, after Nicolas Poussin, frontispiece to the Biblia Sacra. 1642. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1941. C 41.57.31. Image  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most complex of Bosse’s classical frontispieces appears in his Lec¸ons donn´ees dans l’Acad´emie Royale de la Peinture et Sculpture par A. Bosse, 1665 (Figure 56). Here the figures are thrown into sharp relief by light imagined as entering from the right, in the tradition of Raphael and his school and of Poussin himself, in the sense of Mellan’s engraved frontispieces discussed previously. That the spirit of Poussin hovers over all these etchings by Bosse – and others still – is not in doubt. Unusual, however, is their range of classical styles, apparently springing from the works of different artists, among them La Hyre and Bourdon, both of whom we know to have been allied with Bosse

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in the academy. One possible explanation is that the works of these artists stimulated Bosse’s own imagination and that these inventions are his alone. Another is that the designs were in fact provided by these other artists, with Bosse acting, as he often did, as executor. But if the second is true, why is the origin of the invention not acknowledged on the etching? In fact, there is no such acknowledgment or, for that matter, identification of Bosse as the etcher-engraver. On these frontispieces as others for theoretical and technical manuals, such information is unusually suppressed, apparently in the interests of the book as a stable and unified commodity by an “author” – “A. Bosse Graveur en taille douce” – in whose shop that author-publisher-bookseller was offering the book for sale – “A. Bosse a Paris en lisle du Palais a la rose rouge.”

the antique Related to these and also illustrated, published, and sold by Bosse in his shop was a treatise on human proportion brought out in 1656, fulfilling a promise made seven years earlier, when, in the Sentiments of 1649 discussed in Chapter 1, he sketched the broad outlines of a teaching program for the newly created Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. To this end, he had illustrated the Sentiments with an etching of the head of the Apollo Belvedere, an exercise for beginners, with the understanding that this would be only a first step in a demanding process, involving mastering the figure as a whole. That figure, based on a system of proportion purportedly derived from several of the most celebrated ancient sculptures, is the subject of the treatise of 1656, illustrated with etchings of the Venus de’Medici, Hercules Farnese, Meleager, and Apollo Belvedere.24 This little treatise – as his books on perspective, to be discussed in the next chapter – was in a tradition of ancient lineage, tracing its origins back to Vitruvius’s books on architecture and carried forward in the Italian Renaissance by Alberti, Leonardo, and Pomponius Gauricus, among others. In the Sentiments, Bosse cites the treatises of D¨urer and Jean Cousin as among the many such books, expressing different tastes and opinions (“goˆuts et opinions”).25 Some such investigations, he notes, have been grounded in the study not of the originals in Rome but of casts of them. Indeed, the Sentiments is, among other things, a “history” of art in the Vasarian tradition, with the difference that, as he makes clear, his judgments, too, are based not on the originals but reproductions of them, prints above all. This “history” thus begins with an ancient painting, the so-called Aldobrandini Wedding, but as copied, he says, by Pietro da Cortona and engraved by Bernardino Capitelli. The works of Raphael may similarly be studied in prints, he notes, and ancient sculptures as well; for the latter, he recommends the 134

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56. Bosse, title page to Lec¸ons donn´ees dans l’Acad´emie Royale de la Peinture et Sculpture. 1665. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris)

print album (Segmenta nobilium) published by Franc¸ois Perrier in 1638, a recent such publication in what was one of the staples of reproductive printmaking, whether as single-sheet prints or collections of them, dating from the earliest period in the history of printmaking.26 Such were among the stock-in-trade of Marcantonio and the members of his School such as Agostino Veneziano and Marco Dente; Hendrik Goltzius’s engravings after ancient sculptures were other such famous images, even though all of these were only a small part of the tremendous volume of such reproductive prints produced by a small army of anonymous printmakers plying their trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.27 135

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science Here we come to one of the most controversial topics in the study of the history of printing: the role of the printed image in the scientific enterprise.28 Did printed images contribute significantly to the “scientific revolution?” Or did they, to the contrary, as the books they illustrated, simply help disseminate the old ideas, thereby delaying that revolution? If the first is true, what was the nature of their distinctive contribution?29 These are difficult questions that have been examined in detail in the scholarly literature. They are worth taking up here, nevertheless, even if only as a kind of footnote. I argued in Chapter 4 that the man looking through a telescope in Bosse’s image of Sight (Figure 40) cannot be taken as prima facie evidence for his engagement with the “new science” of Galileo. As other printmakers, he did nevertheless contribute to the articulation of the “scientific” enterprise, most of all botany, one of the first of the sciences to make extensive use of illustrations. Sixteenth-century treatises on plants, from Brunfels (Herbarum vivae eicones, 1530) to Fuchs (De Historia Stirpium, 1543 and 1545) and on into seventeenthcentury France, contain quantities of pictures.30 Two projects are of interest here, the first the most ambitious to date: a projected series of 1,000 etchings by Bosse of plants collected by Guy de la Brosse, physician in ordinary to Louis XIII, for a new garden for the king ( Jardin du roy).31 The project was motivated at least in part by a passion for gardening and was to be supplemented by views of the garden itself in a lavish publication celebrating this horticultural spectacle. The patron in view was of course the king, both Louis XIII and Louis XIV sharing in this passion for gardens, of which those at Versailles were the ultimate expression. But the garden had been founded by De la Brosse for pharmacological purposes as well, and to this end was filled with plants from all over Europe, Canada, the Antilles, and East Indies. Bosse completed 120 plates of these specimens, each showing its characteristic features – flower, fruit, and any unusual details – together with two plans of the garden and a title page. With De la Brosse’s death in 1641, the project ended with none of the plates having been published. (An abbreviated, limited edition was published in the early 1700s.) Some years later, Denis Dodart assembled a team of scholars drawn from the fields of botany, medicine, pharmacy, and chemistry for an equally ambitious Histoire des plantes undertaken under the auspices of the newly created Acad´emie Royale des Sciences. The plan was to provide a detailed description of each plant along with an accurate illustration of it; for the latter, Dodart enlisted a team of etchers/engravers, Bosse among them (the others were Louis de Chastillon and Nicolas Robert). The first and only volume of a projected multivolume work appeared in 1676; the project was officially abandoned

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57. Bosse, Alo¨e Americana, from Dodart, M´emoires pour servir a` l’histoire des plantes. 1676. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale)

in 1694.32 Bosse had completed forty-seven etchings, of which only ten were published (Figure 57). That the publication of such enormous collections was – or was to become – feasible is proven by the later and even more ambitious project undertaken and completed by Buffon, the monumental fifteen-volume Histoire naturelle (1749– 1967).33 Other of Bosse’s illustrations for natural history books include four plates illustrating a detailed discussion of the anatomy of a viper, with attention to the structure of its fangs, published in a treatise by Moyse Charas in 1669, and a plate bringing together detailed information about the anatomy of a

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chameleon as observed in a dissection in the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences, published in 1669 and republished in other natural history books in 1671, 1672, and 1676 (Figure 58).34

technical manuals Unlike the previously mentioned, Bosse’s treatise on etching/engraving discussed in Chapter 1 is concerned primarily with practical information; other of his technical books are on sundials, stonecutting, architecture, and – most numerous of all – perspective. This category intersects that of “scientific” books and has attracted almost as much critical attention and controversy – here, too, concerning the roles of printed pictures and other devices in developing and clarifying the argument of the text. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein has insisted on the indispensability of such devices, citing letter-number keys, tables, indication lines, and so on.35 Edward R. Tufte has demonstrated the importance of other didactic visual aids, “graphical designs,” types of pictures used to summarize quantitative information;36 Bosse’s technical treatises are such cases in point, in which diagrams – including numbers, letters, and so forth – and text gain meaning in relation to one another. The typical arrangement of the perspective treatises, to begin with, is of a double page, one of roman text facing a picture of the text in a graphic mode, deploying an elaborately modulated typography with figures and scales, numbers and letters, in upper- and lowercase italics. Why the pictures if they only double the text? Not because perspective books are always illustrated; even though they generally are, few have as many or as detailed pictures as these. Was it to supply information not in the text? One could put the questions the other way around and ask about the justification for the text when the pictures seem to say it all. The need for both would in fact have been obvious to anyone attempting to learn the practice of perspective from these books. For, as I noted, neither text nor illustration is systematic or complete without the other. Bosse always begins with the basics; in the case of perspective, it is the subject to be represented, the surface of representation, and the eye of the viewer, all defined and designated in the text: A the eye, AD, AE the angle of vision, the objects I and L, and the man H behind the surface ff, that segment of line ff cut by the visual angle. It is imagined that the subject is seen by a single, stationary eye by means of straight lines or visual rays, constituting a visual pyramid, a single ray extending from the eye of the viewer being the “eye point” or vanishing point to which all orthogonals will converge, and so on. My apologies for a description that obviously is incomprehensible in and of itself. Where is point A, points AD, AE, line ff? And if these points and lines might conceivably, with enough time and effort, be drawn on the basis 138

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58. Bosse, after S´ebastien Le Clerc, A Chameleon, from Claude Perrault, Description anatomique d’un cam´el´eon, d’un castor, d’un dromadaire, d’un ours et d’une gazelle. 1669. Etching. Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale (Photo: Biblioth`eque Nationale)

of the text alone, the same is not true for the complex method that follows, which is to say, this “improved” method as such. But then, the text need not and does not stand alone. It is supported by the illustrations, which need the text as much as they are needed by it. The treatises on other technical subjects are organized according to the same or related principles. In the architectural treatises, for example, each page is crowded with images – some only outlined, others hatched – scales, 139

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59. Bosse, Repr´esentations g´eom´etrales de plusieurs parties de bastiments faites par les reigles de l’architecture antique. 1659. Etching (Photo: Author)

measurements in lowercase and capital italics, and texts without which the images, numbers, and other elements would make little if any sense (Figure 59). But of course, none of these is to be viewed separate from the others. The page is a unified whole, in which everything is to be “read,” the pictures 140

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no less than the text – or more to the point, the pictures along with the text. These pages are indeed striking examples of an ideal envisioned by Edward R. Tufte and associated by him with the manuscript pages of Leonardo Da Vinci – which Bosse had no way of knowing – of a “thorough integration of text and figure, a quality rarely seen in modern work.”37

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Books and Pamphlets

P

rint historians long have agreed about the connection of printing with key philosophical, religious, and scientific movements of the early modern world – even if they have not always been able to agree about the precise nature of the role it played.1 Bosse’s books and pamphlets were among the ubiquity of such texts in the vernacular aimed at a new and constantly expanding reading public. Only two of these publications, discussed in Chapter 1, deal with printmaking. Others, touched on in the previous chapter, range widely over painting and architecture and various disciplines applying the discoveries of the mathematician Girard Desargues, an improved geometrical perspective the most important of them.2

painting and theory before bosse Bosse’s theory of painting, surprising in itself, is all the more unexpected given the paucity of such theory in France up until his time; little art theory of any kind was published in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century France, and that which has come to light is too fragmentary and chaotic to constitute a theory in the Renaissance sense.3 Of greatest interest to the French were Renaissance architectural theory and practice, discussed in several treatises, most notably Jean Bullant’s book on the Orders (1564, new editions, 1568, 1619) and Philibert de l’Orme’s Le premier tome de l’architecture [First Book of Architecture] (1568, reprinted 1648). Classical and Renaissance theories underlying this architectural tradition were acknowledged in translations of the books of Vitruvius (1547), Alberti (1512, 1553), and Serlio (1545, 1547).4 For the other arts, however, there were principally 142

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traditional pattern books and technical manuals such as Jean Cousin’s books on drawing and painting, and on perspective (Livre de portraiture and Livre de perspective), both published in 1560.5 Conspicuously absent were French translations of Alberti’s books on painting and sculpture or of other of the foundational treatises of Renaissance and later French theory. Rare exceptions and faint – and in some ways distorted – reflections of this theoretical tradition were Geoffroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529) and a French translation of the theoretical excursus in D¨urer’s treatise, published in 1557 and reprinted in 1613, both books treating human proportion – recall that Bosse explicitly refers to treatises by D¨urer and Cousin.6 Bosse’s Sentiments of 1649 was, then, unquestionably, a landmark publication within the French traditions of art theory and criticism.7 To say that Bosse’s publications, most of all his Sentiments, were pivotal is not to claim, however, that nothing of the sort had existed before or during his time.8 Evidence that it, in fact, had exists, for both the manuscript and print dissemination of Italian theory. The most fascinating such published evidence is the text of a conf´erence in the Bureau d’Adresse of the type described in Chapter 5.9 The subject this time was painting, discussed on December 27, 1634.10 The speakers, clearly belonging to the educated elite, were broadly familiar with the classical corpus, including such figures as Ovid, Pliny, and Aristotle. Apelles’ name was regularly invoked, as were the principles of optics and proportion as found in Renaissance theory. Thus the first speaker, having declared painting to be a kind of writing like the other arts based on imitation, introduced the paragone, the question of the relative merits of the different arts recurrent in Italian Renaissance treatises but especially closely associated with Leonardo.11 There are three methods of representation, the speaker notes, the first on two-dimensional surfaces, namely painting, the second three-dimensional or sculpture, and a third, mediating the first two, engraving. Painting is the most difficult and therefore the noblest, he argues, for having to fool the eye (“tromper la veu¨e”) into believing something flat to be round. So far, so good. The argument for the superiority of painting based on its greater difficulty was recommended by Italian theorists. The French speaker does not stop here, however. The means of creating this illusion, he says, are shadows, which, as the absence of light, are in effect nothing (“un pur rien”), the superiority of painting consisting, paradoxically, in this nothing.12 The most focused – and for our purposes interesting – contribution was that of the fifth speaker. In painting as in much else, he begins, the ignorance of principles is too often the rule rather than the exception, these principles being proportion, perspective, light and shade, composition, and history. Drawing is the very foundation of painting, he then asserts, reiterating the Vasarian doctrine of disegno, although even drawing is of secondary importance as compared with proportion, “la plus divin action de l’entendement” [“the 143

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most divine faculty of the intellect”]. The significance of this statement is brought out by what follows: “cette proportion pour estre exacte ne doit seulement imiter les sujets particuliers, mais l’esp´ece de chacune en general” [“This proportion, to be true, should not imitate only individual subjects, but the type of each in general”], which was not done by Caravaggio sixty years ago; for instead of following the excellent rules of D¨urer, he merely copied nature; such copying devoid of rules [“destit¨ue´ e de ses r`egles”] he passed on to his successors, who, in turn, are responsible for the shortcomings of painting at this time. Here is an explicit connection with seventeenth-century classical theory, in which the mere copying of nature is censured, as is the art of Caravaggio, the archetype of the artist as “ape” of nature. There are problems, however.13 Criticism of Caravaggio, for one, was not new in and of itself, having appeared in print as early as 1604 in Van Mander’s Schilderboeck and again in 1633 in Carducho’s Di`alogos de la pintura, and the speaker is only vaguely aware of when Caravaggio lived – closer to thirty than sixty years earlier. Most ambiguous of all is the meaning of the phrase, “the type of each thing in general,” particularly when associated with the “rules” of D¨urer, who did not in fact formulate rules. It would seem, indeed, to be grounded in the Neoplatonic Idea as a higher form of nature, a philosophical construct much in vogue in the Bureau d’Adresse and usually associated with Mannerist rather than classic theory. But as Panofsky long ago demonstrated, the Mannerist Idea was, with a subtle shift of emphasis, made integral to classic theory as well.14    In his published treatise, Bosse mentions a discussion of art theory that he had prepared earlier but left in manuscript form. It is by now well established that such texts existed alongside print materials and were disseminated by scribes and redactors. While Bosse’s manuscript has not yet been found, another, identified as an early draft of Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy’s L’art de peinture – known to have been written in Rome between c. 1640–1646 and published posthumously in Paris in 1668 – was copied in Paris in 1649.15 In an essentially Vasarian analysis, painting is resolved into its three principal parts – composition, drawing, and color – and is said to have achieved perfection in the classical world and to have declined after that until revived by the painters of the Italian Renaissance (“depuis deux cents ans”). These painters are discussed – Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, Titian, Correggio, among others – all having been surpassed, however, by Raphael, the most excellent of the moderns and equal to the ancients, the last a revision of Vasarian criticism central to classic theory as revived in the seventeenth century, and further proof of the broad dissemination of elements of this theory and of their availability for discursive appropriation. 144

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bosse’s theory of painting Versions of Bosse’s theory appear in two publications: the Sentiments, mentioned repeatedly, and Le peintre converty aux r`egles de son art [The Painter Converted to the Rules of Art] (1667). It is all the more extraordinary for being the kind of theory underpinning the classic theory of the later Acad´emie Royale and, as articulated in 1649, the first such unambiguous statement to be published in France. It belongs, then, within the larger context of seventeenthcentury classicism and of a doctrine most clearly and completely expressed in the paradigmatic statements of that doctrine by the Italian Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1672) and in France by Andr´e F´elibien (1679), writing in the wake of Bellori’s publication.16 The Sentiments opens, similarly as these later discussions, by distinguishing between different approaches taken by painters, in broad terms: Mannerist, relying strictly on the imagination, realist, simply copying nature, and classicist, that of the Renaissance tradition. The first such artists or Mannerists named are Spranger, Goltzius, and Bellange, the second or realist artists, Ribera, Orazio Gentileschi, and Valentin, and the third, the singularly preeminent artist of the Renaissance tradition, Raphael.17 That eminence, however, need not be Raphael’s alone. Our own age and nation have produced artists so knowledgeable in these matters, Bosse adds, as to raise hopes of seeing many Raphaels. The particular focus of this promise is the rare Nicolas Poussin, whose works have reached the same high summit as Raphael’s.18 Once again, in Le peintre converty, Raphael is singled out among Renaissance artists for having most fully realized the potential of the antique, a distinction as well of the modern Raphael, the incomparable Poussin, whose works are so miraculous, we are to understand, as to make him the most universal painter of all – apparently Raphael included. French painters are fortunate, Bosse says, to have a model so close to home to follow.19 To be sure, Bellori and after him F´elibien, named an Italian artist as the primary heir of Raphael: Annibale Carracci. But Bosse’s French bias and focus on Poussin were all the more auspicious in light of the same emphasis in the later classic doctrine of the academy. Bosse’s theory as such, namely his theory of imitation as distinct from his opinions about artists, is presented within the broad context of the opposition of “original” and “copy” discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume.20 But whereas the above distinctions must be considered, one against the backdrop of print technologies and the other of the practice of painting, those about “imitation” diverge from both. Most striking is the omission of the Idea underpinning both Mannerist and classical theory and its replacement by a process of inherently radical potential. Bosse begins by contrasting two ways of executing a painting, the first copying objects as seen by the naked eye (“sans autre regle ny mesure, que celle que 145

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l’oeil & le jugement luy en peuvent fournir”), the second proceeding by means of definite measurements (“mesures regl´ees”).21 This last procedure, commonly called perspective (“ce qu’on appelle communement la Perspective”) – including light and shade and color – is the single indispensable precept, he says, to the point that in its absence, paintings, no matter how well conceived in other ways, must be regarded as badly executed and fatally flawed (“fautifs”).22 It is true, he admits, that many works by the masters, subjected to a strict perspectival analysis, will be found so flawed, but no matter; it is not a question of what has been done but of what it is reasonable to do (“raisonnable de faire”).23 The Renaissance theory of art is thus reconfigured, painting redirected at the basic level of praxis. Not so fast, his critics responded. So extreme a faith in perspective is far from “rational,” a chimerical and ridiculous idea based on a misapprehension of the nature and purpose of pictorial art, a struggle ensuing over the meaning and authority of theory as such.

reinventing the wheel? This theory of perspective is more accurately the new perspective method of Girard Desargues that Bosse taught in the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture from 1648 on. After several years of this teaching, however, the role of perspective, and of this method in particular, was contested, and in 1661, Bosse was officially expelled from the academy. His publications on perspective, then, were simultaneously the dissemination of a new method and justification of that method once it had come under attack.24 To be sure, neither Desargues nor Bosse invented perspective.25 That distinction belongs to the great Italian sculptor, architect, and technical wizard, Filippo Brunelleschi, who, in the early 1400s, demonstrated a method known as perspectiva artificialis – as opposed to traditional optics or perspectiva naturalis – intended specifically for the use of visual artists. This method was applied in key works produced during the next years, most notably by Donatello and Masaccio, and was published by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise On Painting, issued first in Latin in 1434 and then in the vernacular in 1435, prefaced by a dedication to Brunelleschi. As its title suggests, this treatise is ostensibly concerned with painting rather than perspective, but it opens with an affirmation that slides into a denial acknowledging the basic paradox. The discussion is in three books, Alberti states, the first “entirely mathematical, shows how this noble and beautiful art arises from roots within Nature herself.” But painters, he soon adds, are not mathematicians: “In everything we shall say I earnestly wish it to be borne in mind that I speak of these matters not as a mathematician but as a painter.”26 The contention, in other words, is that even though perspective cannot in and of itself be regarded as having

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artistic merit, it is indispensable and in no way detrimental to the creation of works of art of the highest order. What was begun by Brunelleschi and Alberti was continued by painters and theorists who followed them, in both works and texts, especially Uccello and Mantegna with regard to the first and Piero in both works and a treatise on perspective – which had to wait until the nineteenth century, however, to be published. Leonardo’s investigations of perspective were the most probing of all, albeit the least rigorous; they also went unpublished for more than a century after his death and, when published, created a controversy in the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.27 D¨urer carried perspective to Germany and Jean P´elerin (“Viator”) to France in a book that appeared in 1505. More important still for the French tradition was Jean Cousin’s treatise (Livre de perspective) published in Paris in 1560, followed by a veritable explosion of publications in the seventeenth century: Vaulezard (1630), Desargues (1636), Niceron (1638 and 1646), Dubreuil (1642, 1647, 1649), Aleaume and Mignon (1643), Bosse (1648, 1653, 1665, 1667), Gaultier (1648), Le Bicheur (1660), Bourgoign (1661), Huret (1670), and Le Clerc (1682).28 All these treatises resolved issues of perspective practice through the use of a variety of methods and techniques, but importantly, their conceptual focus was substantially the same, going back to Alberti’s foundational publication. This focus seemed of the utmost importance, for one, for a clearer recognition of the dignity of the painting profession: grounded in the geometry of perspective, visual art was to be emancipated from the lowly mechanical occupations that, as we have seen, were no less despised in the seventeenth century than earlier, and thus guaranteed a position among the liberal arts.29 But clearly more was involved in this preoccupation with perspective than a desire for a rise in status on the part of visual artists. The appeal of perspective was no more exhausted by its imitative effectiveness than by its usefulness in the struggle of artists to raise the esteem in which their profession was held. Something still more enviable came into play: the aura of pure mathematics on the one hand and of the science of vision (optics) on the other, subjects of unrivaled importance in the Western intellectual traditions.30 Virtually every general theory of knowledge, from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, turned on analyses of these phenomena. The ancient Pythagoreans seem to have maintained that nature is essentially mathematical. Plato accepted this claim, arguing that the four elements are reducible to regular geometrical solids, which are reducible in turn to triangles. The fundamental building blocks of nature thereby would be geometrical forms governed not by some outside force but rather by geometrical proportions. Aristotle, too, believed that nature is mathematically informed, even if he admitted a difference between mathematics and natural science or physics.31

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As the study of light and vision, optics was no less central to theories of knowledge.32 Once Euclid had developed his system, it became impossible to draw a hard and fast line between mathematics and optics. In his Optics, he analyzed the act of vision and postulated the existence of a visual cone or pyramid. From here he developed a theory of vision, translating the relation of viewer to object into geometrical terms. The sole and lofty purpose of this obsession with mathematics, as with optics as such, was of the possibility of determining principles of universal validity, without regard to their exemplification in specific natural phenomena. With St. Augustine, the science of vision was directed into more definitely Christian channels, the light imagery of Plato’s Republic, in which knowledge of the eternal forms is acquired by a process analogous to vision in the imperfect world, used for ulterior, spiritual, or metaphysical ends. God is the infinite uncreated light, the true light and source of all light, light not figuratively but properly; God is the archetypal light and sensible light is the imitation of it. According to Augustine, God functions in man’s acquisition of knowledge exactly as the “form of all good” in Plato, supplying the illumination by means of which the human soul is enabled to grasp intelligible things. A similarly transcendent God in the Neoplatonic tradition gives rise to the universe by a process of emanation, just as the sun sends forth its rays; from the One emanates nous, from nous the world soul, and subsequently individual souls and the material world. In the Christian “metaphysics of light,” optics could not only reveal the essential nature of material reality but of God himself. Whether to understand nature or revealed religion, then, the study of optics, especially geometrical optics, was of capital importance. Thus the attraction of perspective in the sense of geometrical optics to art theorists from Alberti on becomes easier to comprehend. To the minds of these theorists it was a question of the very stuff of which not only art but life itself, of God and his creations, was ultimately constructed. Grounded in mathematics, visual art is a spiritual exercise as it is also a “science,” or so it was thought from the Renaissance on. Paradoxically, despite the overwhelming verbal evidence endorsing perspective theory, it was rarely applied in actual works of art – or far less frequently than one would have thought. The works by Donatello, Masaccio, and Mantegna mentioned earlier are among the few organized with strict geometrical perspective in Early Renaissance art. With the addition of Ghiberti, Uccello, and Piero, the list of Early Renaissance artists who applied perspective principles in their works would be more or less complete – the list, that is, of those systematically applying the principles of one-point perspective as opposed to the many who had recourse to abbreviated and improvised constructions with two, three, four, or more vanishing points. During the High Renaissance, with the exception of experiments by Leonardo, strict geometrical perspective virtually disappeared from works of art, contravening the 148

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injunctions of the theorists. In other words, the intellectual appeal of perspective was evidently largely distinct from practice and was in various ways acknowledged to be so. A case in point is the position of Vasari. In his seminal Vite [Lives] (1550, 1565), perspective is cited as one of the principles that had contributed to the achievement of Early Renaissance artists. However, it was a principle, he later remarks, at times leading to results as harsh as they are disagreeable to look at. “Excessive study or diligence,” he states, “tends to produce a dry style when it becomes an end in itself.”33 Piero and Uccello are the artists most strongly criticized for this obsession, the first dismissed as a mathematician more than a painter and the second for a lack of proper judgment. If not perspective, then what? “No better standard can be applied,” he states, echoing words attributed to Michelangelo, “than the judgment of the eye; for even if a thing is perfectly measured, if the eye is still offended, it will not cease to censure it.”34 Bosse was fully aware of this contentious history. In his Sentiments of 1649, he endeavors to establish criteria for discriminating between different styles and distinguishing good (bon) from bad taste (mauvais goˆut), the second, indeed, more common than the first: For it is certain that if from the time painting had been invented, it had been practiced by excellent artists knowledgeable in perspective and exercising good taste (“ce bon goˆut”), it would not be necessary to distinguish so many different styles.35

Diversity being the lesson of Renaissance art history, however, what are the distinguishing characteristics of the “true” style? Needless to say, the key such characteristic is its perspective organization. Armed with the rules of perspective, it is possible, he claims, to distinguish the good from the bad, more of the second, among them formerly esteemed works of art, emerging from these analyses. Perspective, in short, which he calls the foundation and soul of painting (“soit la base ou pour mieux dire l’ˆame de la portraiture”), is the only assured way of creating superior works of art as it is of determining the validity of the works of others.36 As for the reasons for the gap between theory and practice, Bosse offers various hypotheses, all reducible to the ignorance and laziness of artists. One type of painter, he says, while still an apprentice, adopts one style from among many in fashion, remaining attached to it from that time on. Another is so enamored with nature as simply to copy figures and objects, blind or indifferent to their faults. A third type is capable of recognizing these faults and so opts for an alternative style that seems free of them, but without understanding its true nature. The absence of consensus as to the role of perspective, in other words, does not in and of itself invalidate its central importance.37 The problems of practice aside, Bosse’s theory is altogether compatible with those cited earlier. But if his conception of perspective was not original, his 149

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method was of a whole new kind, and with it we arrive at his place in this tradition. Or the place occupied by Desargues’s new method. For, as I noted earlier, the perspective published by Bosse was not of his invention but rather the brainchild of Girard Desargues, whose discoveries Bosse was determined to make available to a wide public.38 Who was Girard Desargues? An architect and civil and military engineer as well as mathematician, Desargues was the inventor of what eventually came to be called projective geometry – as opposed to the analytical geometry of Descartes – a discovery with which he aimed to reform all disciplines based on geometry. To this end, he published a pamphlet in 1636 describing his method, Exemple de l’une des mani`eres universelles du Sr. G.D.L. touchant la pratique de la perspective [Example of One of the Universal Methods of Sr. G.D.L. Concerning the Practice of Perspective], and more detailed publications followed on both perspective theory and its applications, all authored by Bosse, two books published in 1643 on the cutting of stones in the building trades, on the making of sundials, and others, but most of all on perspective, all crediting Desargues with the invention of a new and improved method using geometry to solve the most fundamental problem of perspective theory, namely of the means of constructing a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.39 The underlying principle is a theorum bearing Desargues’ name and proving the convergence of parallel lines in infinity to be not something “seeming,” as justified by perception, but rather following from the geometrical definitions of point, line, and plane, free of all metrical notions and therefore dispensing with all points outside the actual picture.40 A basic assumption of classical mathematics is thereby nullified, with implications noted by Michel Serres: Euclidean geometry posits a homogeneous space in which all points are equivalent, in which all points are of no account, as regards spatial composition. . . . The geometry of Desargues, by contrast, posits a space organized in relation to a point of view through which order is imposed on the random variety of the first. Here the point encompasses space and space encompasses the point, the word “encompasses” being understood to embrace not only geometry, but vision and thought as well.41

In the pragmatic terms of Bosse’s discussion, such a space is more exact and consistently geometrical than any devised by earlier perspectivists – a space, as he puts it, so emphatically geometrical as to be as self-evident as the axioms of geometry. This claim was vigorously attacked from the time it appeared in print – as will be discussed later in this chapter. Here it is worth mentioning that even Descartes had reservations about it, worrying that the relation of parallel lines meeting in infinity to straight lines converging in a point was on the order of an analogy rather than a proof; he was prepared to go only so far on philosophical grounds to accept the “indefiniteness of extension.”42 Obviously, doubts about 150

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geometrical investigations were expressed not only on technical grounds but on the basis of fundamental mathematical principles and philosophical beliefs as well. The crucial point here is that such doubts, as the investigations giving rise to them, were part of a peculiar obsession with geometry characteristic of this particular moment in French and modern intellectual history and of this moment as disseminated in print. But why this obsession? What made perspective both so irresistible and so disputatious at this particular time?

art as knowledge The answer: an epistemological crisis within the broad context of the Scientific Revolution or “new philosophy.” Geometry, the model of demonstrable knowledge from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and beyond, was a stimulus for the rhetoric contrived and deployed in response to challenges to religion, learning, and politics. Skepticism reigned supreme. As a preliminary position, it was maintained that no experience or assertion, positive or negative, is prima facie true. Every sensation, every idea, was considered open to question and doubt. And while this was not the only period in Western intellectual history in which this was the case – skepticism was called at the time “Pyrrhonism” after the late Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, and Richard H. Popkin has suggested that this crisis was deepened through the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient skeptics – universal doubt was the order of the day, the crisis Europe-wide, but with a particular resonance in France.43 Consider, for example, Marin Mersenne’s La v´erit´e des sciences [The Certainty of Science] of 1625, an encyclopedic compendium of more than 1,000 pages bringing together the most devastating arguments of the skeptics – called alternatively “Pyrrhonians” and “libertines” – to show that “there are many things in the sciences which are true, and that it is necessary to give up Pyrrhonism if one does not want to lose his judgment and reason.” But how is one to know what is true or, more importantly, demonstrate its truthfulness? The answer is to be found in the mathematical paradigm. “After having discussed the sciences and shown that it is not necessary to suspend judgment about everything,” Mersenne asserts, “I want now to show that mathematics is the certain and true science, in which doubt has no place.”44 The claim, in other words, is that even if the arguments of skeptics cannot be definitively refuted, there is a type of knowledge that is not open to question and from which it is possible to take heart, namely mathematical knowledge – although such certainty being possible only in mathematics, “reasonable proof ” was the accepted standard for the sciences. But what do the arguments of philosophers and scientists have to do with the thinking of a “lowly” print professional? We come back to the old prejudice against manual work and dismissal of Bosse as a mere craftsman with unjustified 151

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intellectual pretensions. It must be stressed again, therefore, that Bosse’s ideas about geometrical perspective were not his alone and did not originate with him but rather with Desargues, who was part of an intellectual network that included Mersenne and also Pascal and Descartes, the philosopher credited with using radical doubt as a means of achieving certainty. (Note that all the members of this group published their learned treatises not in Latin but in the vernacular – or Latin quickly followed by editions in the vernacular.) This is not the place to attempt a summary of Descartes’ philosophy or the vast literature surrounding it.45 Suffice it to say that Descartes begins from a position of extreme skepticism, a radical doubt in recognition of the lack of certainty in the world of common sense and tradition, and proceeds to the realization of the limits of doubt itself. One cannot doubt doubting: “I think therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum). Because I have an idea of an infinite God, that idea must have been implanted by God himself, proving His existence. And such a perfect being cannot be imagined as deceiving us any more than mathematical truths can be so imagined or explained. Arithmetic and geometry are axiomatically or self-evidently true and serve, therefore as models for propositions that are either themselves self-evident or may be deduced from others that are self-evident in investigations of all areas of human knowledge. The precise nature of the role of mathematics in Descartes’ philosophy is ambiguous and remains contested.46 My argument is that Bosse, through Desargues, became convinced that visual art is a branch of knowledge like any other and as such may be resolved into different factors, the geometrical being not only one but the most important of all. For the universal validity of geometrical relations, all the more readily apprehended through this improved perspective method, held out the possibility of achieving ends heretofore pursued more or less exclusively with various artistic devices that had only given rise to confusion. Had not Vasari already noted the existence of diverse styles as different from one another as Michelangelo’s from Raphael’s and Titian’s? By Bosse’s time, the number had increased dramatically, had indeed proliferated beyond the wildest dreams of Renaissance critics. On what basis, then, was one to sift through all these styles and distinguish the best from the good from the bad? Having chosen, how was doubt about its correctness to be dispelled? To Bosse, the answer was itself self-evident: a style partaking of the certitude of geometry. A special focusing of attention on geometry, an obsession with it in European intellectual life, was the context, then, for Bosse’s controversial position. What has seemed more recently a rather absurd commitment to a technical method of space construction declared entirely dispensable by early-twentiethcentury artists and critics, and that is in any case only one and perhaps the least part of an infinitely complex process, was to him, in keeping with the beliefs of many of the most influential thinkers of his time, the end to which 152

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pictorial art should aspire. Nor did it matter that geometrical perspective was easy to learn: Desargues had boasted that anyone can learn his method in less than two hours. In the Desargues-Bosse system, it is as though nothing else compares with it in importance, that it has an intrinsic value tantamount to the worth of the work itself, a worth readily determined on the basis of an objective geometrical analysis. It was this refusal to qualify judgments made by such means that made this method and theory so controversial. Bosse’s adversaries reacted to works of art in traditional ways, attaching importance to various pictorial effects, many of them far more elusive than the means of perspective.47 Descartes, too, was later taken to task by the pragmatic John Locke for “expecting demonstration and certainty in things not capable of it,” and to “refuse assent to very rational propositions . . . because they cannot be made out so evident, as to surmount every the least pretense of doubting.”48 Bosse, as Descartes, was deaf to such objections. A crucial point here is that Bosse’s commitment to perspective gave rise to polemics in the academy that were played out in print. The landmarks were the following.49 In 1652, a French translation of a “treatise” collecting some of Leonardo’s notes on painting was brought into the academy and said to contain all that one would wish to know about that art. Bosse objected on the grounds that the notes were random – as indeed they were – the book full of errors, principally its observations on perspective. The gap, once having been created, widened during the following years. In 1657, Bosse’s adversaries offered an “easier” perspective method by Jacques Le Bicheur (published in 1660) as an alternative to his, and still another such alternative was published by Gr´egoire Huret in 1670. Bosse eventually responded to these attacks in a book published in 1665 detailing his perspective course in the academy. But before then, while the controversy raged, he, as his adversaries, had recourse to another major print vehicle: the pamphlet.

pamphlet wars As should be clear from the previous discussion, if the printing industry of early modern France was unusually versatile, it was also largely unregulated. This was the industry, after all, that during the years between 1647 and 1653 – the period of the civil wars known as the Fronde – produced a formidable corpus of invective, totaling some 5,000 pamphlets, targeting the First Minister, Cardinal Mazarin, and called Mazarinades after a poem by Paul Scarron published in 1651 and attacking Mazarin for his alleged homosexuality; other pamphlets used a combination of religious, political, and sexual themes to the same end. As Hubert Carrier has shown, these pamphlets, sold in the libraries e´talans centered around the Pont-Neuf (Figure 10) were addressed to a wide variety 153

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of audiences, from office-bearers and bourgeois to barely literate laborers.50 And as Henri Martin has demonstrated, this print environment allowed for a new freedom of expression, characterized by increased conflict with authorities over privil`eges and licensing and with the authorities struggling in vain to control the sale of pamphlets and libels.51 Recall that Bosse was the creator of an image in support of the Fronde (Figure 45); he very likely printed some of the anonymous, untraceable Mazarinades. He showed himself no less a frondeur during his difficulties in the academy, for he responded to attacks by those in power with a series of pamphlets (libelles) making his case without official sanction, in the way this was done during the Fronde. Indeed, it was only in 1653, in recognition of the ubiquity and importance of such small-format, widely distributed publications, that the word pamphlet (libel) first appeared in French. And Bosse, not surprisingly, was attacked for his libelles and labeled a frondeur by his enemies in the academy.52 Here it is worth noting that Desargues had engaged in such exchanges when his publications were attacked. A 1642 perspective treatise by a “Jesuit of Paris” ( Jean Dubreuil) explained a method not unlike Desargues’s, albeit simplified to make it more appealing to artists. An irate Desargues immediately shot off leaflets accusing the author of “incredible error” and “enormous mistakes and falsehoods,” that author in turn responding in a pamphlet charging that Desargues himself had plagiarized his ideas from treatises by Vaulezard and Aleaume. Desargues’s complaint was, for one, that the “Jesuit” had failed to understand his method, which the countercharge of plagiarism had only proven. In the event, the Jesuit’s publishers issued a collection of anti-Desargues pamphlets under the ironic title: Advis charitables sur les diverses oeuvres et feuilles volantes du Sieur Girard Desargues [Charitable Opinions of the Various Works and Leaflets of Sieur Girard Desargues of Lyons]. Desargues replied in turn, these charges and countercharges preparing the way for those that would follow.53 Once Bosse entered the picture, his publications, too, were attacked. His treatises on sundials and on stonecutting were dismissed by one Curabelle in three separate pamphlets detailing their “mistakes.” Other criticisms followed, the most scathing those of his perspective method emanating from the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture during the 1650s, the one episode in Bosse’s literary career that has received sustained attention from scholars.54 As the pamphlets occasioned by Desargues’ geometry, these, too, were in the form of pamphlets, Bosse’s rejoinders published on his own press and sold in his shop – “A Paris, chez le Sr Bosse, en l”isle de la M´egisserie, a` la sphere.” Thus Bosse addressed the members of the academy in a pamphlet detailing the shortcomings of a perspective method proposed as an alternative to his, accusing its author of plagiarism as well (1660). The controversy only increasing in intensity, he followed this up with another published “letter” repeating some 154

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of his arguments and refuting another libelle (1661). Once expelled from the academy, he presented his case to the public – “A. Bosse au lecteur” – in still another pamphlet (1667). Nor did his quarrel with the leadership of the academy end with his expulsion: during the following months, he published two more pamphlets in his own defense. (It is surely noteworthy that even as he was strictly forbidden by decree from establishing a rival school, it apparently seemed impossible to suppress his publications, no attempt having been made to do so.) This constant recourse to print in its various forms has tended to color the judgments even of those inclined to be sympathetic to Bosse. To cite only one recent example, Paul Duro both recommends Bosse’s writings for throwing light on the art of his time and faults the man for being “intemperate, impetuous, and argumentative.”55 But in fact, Bosse’s print interventions were no different in kind from others at the time intended to bring ideas – and conflicts – to the attention of a wide public. Jesse M. Lander has recently called attention to polemic as a seventeenth-century print phenomenon that he identifies with religious controversies occasioned by the Reformation. As this discussion has shown, while polemic was not limited to such controversies, a response in print was similarly motivated, “because such a document was immediately seen to be attempting to reach a diverse audience [and] also because from its beginnings print conferred a certain authority.”56 Additionally, these pamphlets served as promotional vehicles, Bosse sprinkling them with lists of recent publications and announcements. They were, in sum, quite apart from his actual differences with members of the academy, a means of attracting attention to his print business. Finally, in these publications, particularly the pamphlets, Bosse selfconsciously creates an authorial persona along the lines of a model that Michel Foucault defines in his seminal essay: “What is an Author?” The “author function,” Foucault contends, signifies a certain discursive set within a society and culture, the “author” in this sense being the creation of readers and critics engaged in “author construction.”57 Persistently contesting and disputing the doctrine of the academy, Bosse becomes such a “construction” and “ideological product” passed down to posterity.

architecture Bosse’s books on architecture interrogate and renegotiate the classical and Renaissance theories of architecture, to make architectural practice more uniform and, significantly, as with his treatises on printmaking, sundials, and the cutting of stones, more intelligible to those putting theory into practice – in this case, workmen in the building trades. The problem was similar as in the case of perspective, namely that there was little agreement among the earlier 155

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authorities, and the problem with regard to architecture was compounded by the actual antique buildings that all purported to be elucidating. From the Roman Vitruvius to the Renaissance Italians Palladio, Vignola, Scamozzi, and others, a variety of measurements for the classical Orders and other elements were put forward, few agreeing with one another and agreeing even less with extant classical remains.58 On what or whose authority, then, was architectural practice to be based? Before Bosse, this problem had been addressed by various Italian and French theorists, among the latter most notably Roland Fr´eart Sieur de Chambray in his Parall`elle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne [Parallel of Ancient and Modern Architecture] (1650).59 Convinced of the beauty and perfection of the ancient buildings that he saw firsthand in Rome, Chambray was appalled by the diversity of measurements for the Five Orders given in the architectural treatises: “c’est pourquoy j’estime qu’il est toˆujours plus certain d’aller a` la source, & suivre pr´ecis´ement les modenatures & les proportions des edifices antique” [“for this reason it is always better to go to the actual buildings, which are to be followed exactly”].60 To be sure, even these measurements do not always agree, Chambray admitted. But no matter, he says. Not all ancient buildings are worthy of emulation, so that one should accept as one’s models only those that have met with universal approbation: the Theater of Marcellus, the Pantheon, and others.61 When there is disagreement between these buildings and Vitruvian rules and proportions, these last are to be regarded as superceded. The same for the Renaissance theorists: only those closest to his preferred antique originals, principally Palladio and Scamozzi, are to be considered. Bosse had not benefited from a trip to Rome; he knew all ancient works, buildings as well as sculptures, only secondhand, principally from engravings. He obviously had access to French translations of select Renaissance treatises but, as Chambray had complained, “taste and opinions differ regarding the proportions of the main members of the Orders.”62 Bosse’s aim, therefore, was to sift through the various opinions, arbitrating differences and reforming practice through recourse to a strictly geometrical method, “to give, if possible, general satisfaction.” Thus, on one occasion, he offers two variations for the different parts of the Orders, whereas on others, as the different proportions proposed by Palladio for the Orders, the one that to his mind is most satisfactory.63 With these numbers and ratios, the practice of architecture was to move beyond irreconcilable differences and enter a new period of utopian consensus. Or so Bosse hoped; as with most of his books, however, it was not to be. The same problem bedeviled the Academy of Architecture from the time of its founding in 1671. Further efforts to resolve it undertaken in publications by the academy’s director Franc¸ois Blondel (1675–1683) and by Claude Perrault (1683) produced results that themselves were contested no less than the earlier

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ones; thus the gap between theory and the practice of the ancients remained too wide to be bridged.64

academic publishing A final word about the Acad´emie Royale de la Peinture et Sculpture and the printing press. Bosse’s Sentiments was, as noted from Chapter 1 on, a landmark event in the history and theory of engraving and of painting. Dedicated to the members of the academy, it also contains the outline of a teaching program. Students should begin by copying prints of ancient sculptures, Bosse advises, and from these proceed to draw directly from ancient reliefs and then sculptures in the round, these exercises teaching important lessons to be learned before confronting the live model. To get students off on the right foot, he included an etching of the head of the Apollo Belvedere as a beginning exercise.65 The first publication to carry the name of an academy that became known for its exploration and consolidation of issues relating to artistic practice, it was followed by Bosse in 1665 with a book on his perspective course (Trait´e des lec¸ons) and, in 1667, a review and critique of the academy’s teaching after his expulsion (Le peintre converty). Bosse’s books and pamphlets perhaps bringing home the power of print, the academy followed with publications of its own, of various Conf´erences de l’Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture conceived to extract general principles from the examination of individual works by the masters (1668 on), a posthumous publication of Charles Le Brun’s Conf´erences on expression (published 1698), a Sentiments des plus habiles peintres sur la pratique de la peinture et sculpture mis en table de pr´eceptes by Henri Testelin summing up forty or so years of teaching in the academy (1680); and related books by Roland Fr´eart, Sieur de Chambray, Charles Perrault, and others appeared on the margins of those of the academy.66 Not least of all were the many publications of the amateurs d’art associated with the academy, Andr´e F´elibien, beginning in 1660 and culminating in his Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres, anciens et modernes (1666–1688, 1725, Hamburg, 1711, Venice, 1755), and Roger de Piles, especially his Abrege´de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages (1699, 1715, Amsterdam, 1767, London, 1706, 1744, and so on) and Cours de peinture par principes (1708, 1766, 1791 – and in English,1743, German, 1760, and others.) It has long been recognized that these efforts began with a rewriting of key Italian texts in a tradition tracing its origins back to Alberti’s book on painting (Latin,1434; Italian, 1435) and, most important of all, Vasari’s Vite (1550, 1568), the first in a genre that flourished throughout Italy and then other parts of Europe. There are two fundamental differences, however, between this tradition and the French publication history outlined earlier. The first is

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that whereas Italian discussions were typically framed in the abstract and often abstruse language of Neoplatonic philosophy, those in the French Acad´emie Royale became increasingly pragmatic, making sense of art history on the level of praxis.67 The other, related difference between the two traditions consists precisely of the recognition by the French of the importance of print. Neither in Italy nor any other part of Europe were interpretive models to be used in teaching art so widely disseminated as in France – and from there to the rest of Europe. Creating an impression of fundamental concordance, stability, and unity, these publications played no small part in the success and influence of the French academy and its art over the following centuries.

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Poussin, Scarron, Bosse, and the Economy of Transgression

P

articular attention has been shown of late to an exchange between Nicolas Poussin, the great “peintre philosophe” of seventeenth-century French art, and Paul Scarron, the author of burlesque novels.1 In 1645, Scarron wrote to Poussin in Rome, expressing his desire to commission a painting from the artist.2 Having been politely but firmly refused, Scarron turned to his friend Paul Fr´eart de Chantelou, Poussin’s leading French patron, asking that he try to change the artist’s mind and also sending a copy of one of his books to Poussin, perhaps the Recueil de quelques oeuvres burlesques, which the artist characterized with a by-now famous phrase: I’ve received an absurd book filled with the wild imaginings of Monsieur Scarron. If I were obliged to express my feelings about the works of this good invalid, I would say, with all due respect to you, that he makes marvels, for he has a round asshole and shits square turds. Pardon the liberty. (“qu’il fait des merveilles, car il a le cul rond et fait les e´ trons carr´es”).3

The essence of Scarron’s humor is summed up in the frontispiece to his Oeuvres etched by the Callotesque printmaker Stefano della Bella (Figure 60). Here we see the poet from the rear, surrounded by nine grimacing women dancing to music played by satyrs on a bagpipe and flute, a winged horse above surveying the scene. The poet is the actual Scarron, the cul-de-jatte [legless cripple] as he called himself, whose almost completely paralyzed body left him confined to a chair. As represented, he is a gobbi-like hunchback, in an arrangement based on the first plate of Callot’s Gobbi series. And as Callot’s image, Della Bella’s frontispiece is in a carnivalesque mode: a grotesque “bacchanal,” animated by the sounds emanating from bagpipes and flute, both symbols of male genitalia,

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60. Stefano Della Bella, frontispiece to Les oeuvres de Scarron. 1649. Etching (Photo: Author)

the bagpipes also an attribute of the fool, mimicking the sounds coming from Scarron seated on his chair cum chaise-perc´ee. Undaunted, Scarron sent another of his books, Typhon, ou la Gigantomachie, which irritated Poussin no less than the previous one: I am sorry he took the trouble to send it to me; but what makes me even angrier is that he now threatens me with a Virgile travesti by himself . . . He pretends to make me laugh like cripples such as he, but rather I should weep, seeing that a new Erostratus appears in our land.4

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Chantelou continued to apply pressure on Scarron’s behalf until Poussin capitulated. Imagining that the subject was to be of his choice, he proposed one that he thought would appeal to the author of burlesques: a “bacchanal.” In the event, and in unknown circumstances, the subject was changed in honor of the patron saint to whom Scarron’s father had been devoted, to an Ecstacy of Saint Paul, which Poussin sent to Paris in May 1650. Had Scarron confused Poussin with an artist of an altogether different kind? Why else would he have thought that his writings would ingratiate him when he should have known that they would have the opposite effect on a learned painter versed in the philosophies of Aristotle and the Stoics and in the ancient and modern classics of Ovid, Virgil, and Tasso? To complicate matters further, Poussin’s dismissal of Scarron’s burlesques is framed in the same scatological language as these writings. Poussin does nevertheless explicitly reject low comedy and farce and so his response to Bosse in still another well-known letter has been found perplexing.5 The circumstances were as follows. During a heated debate in the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture over the Leonardo “treatise” mentioned earlier in Chapter 8, Bosse solicited the opinion of Poussin, who, famously, endorsed Bosse’s embattled position with the words, “vous eˆ tes trop bien fond´e” [“your position is well founded”]. What has been difficult for scholars to accept, for one, is Poussin’s siding with the farceur Bosse and, as if this were not enough, lining up against Charles Le Brun, one of the leading Poussinistes in the academy. Here is Poussin, the standard-bearer of an art of “clarity” and “reason,” the embodiment of the “classic” art that would soon dominate the academy and that came to be viewed as the ultimate expression not only of French art and literature but of the French character itself, reaffirming the position taken by a printmaker whose images would seem to be antithetical to classic principles. Indeed, the very presence of Bosse in the academy has seemed an affront. Did the members not grasp the transgressiveness of his images? As for Bosse, did he imagine, like Scarron, that his images would appeal to Poussin? Did they so appeal, as seems to be suggested by Poussin’s support of Bosse’s position? The answers are, first, that Bosse’s role in the academy was supposed to be restricted to a perspective course that was at issue in his correspondence with Poussin; and second, the debate had nothing whatsoever to do with the style or subjects of Bosse’s prints. In question were only theories of perspective, Bosse’s, Leonardo’s, and the one championed in the academy, the first as explained in the treatise Bosse published in 1647 with a decidedly classical (“high”) frontispiece similar to Figure 56. There is no contradiction, then, between Poussin’s opinions concerning the writings of Scarron on the one hand and his endorsement of Bosse’s theory of perspective on the other. Had he in fact been asked what he thought of Bosse’s prints, say Figures 30 and 31, 161

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he no doubt would have responded in much the same way as he had in the letters to Chantelou about Scarron’s books. To be sure, Poussin was not the only one to disapprove of low comedy and farce. Criticism of performances at the Hˆotel de Bourgogne was cited in Chapter 3 and such criticism intensified after mid-century. Writing in 1650, the Parisian gossip Tallemant des R´eaux pronounced the death of farce. Crude farce players such as Gaultier Garguille have been replaced, he declared, by honorable actors whose performances are noble exercises in elocution.6 And Antoine Fureti`ere claimed, too, as the century was drawing to a close (1690), that farce had lost its popularity: “qu’on y a introduit trop de license, tant dans le sujet que dans le vers, & trop de ridicules plaisanteries” [“because too much license was introduced, both in the subject and in the verse, and too much ridiculous pleasantry”].7 If Fureti`ere’s conclusion seems to be supported by the facts, earlier pronouncements of the death of farce were manifestly premature. Like his father, Louis XIV was a devot´e of farce and did not attempt to suppress it. In 1658, only a few years after the report of Tallemant des R´eaux, Moli`ere and his troupe arrived in Paris to be received at the court of Louis XIV. The king was unmoved by Moli`ere’s attempt at tragedy and only came to life at the troupe’s final number, a trifle belonging to its comic repertoire. The farce was fresh, the king amused, and Moli`ere’s Parisian career was launched.8 Moli`ere is remembered not for low comedy and farce but for what have been characterized as sophisticated comedies of ideas. In La critique de l’Ecole des femmes [Critique of the School of Women] (1663), Dorante – who we might see as Moli`ere’s mouthpiece – declares that the aim of comedy is to “deal, as is befitting, with mankind’s ridiculousness and to offer a pleasing representation on the stage of the failings of all people” (scene 6). The literary critic and playwright Nicolas Boileau was not fooled, however, decrying the vulgarity of Moli`ere’s comedies, here the Mischief of Scapin: Would he had not pandered straight to the crowd, And all those artistic misjudgments allowed, And for some cheap humour abandoned good taste Spoiling Terence with Tabarin – Oh what a waste! When Scapin hides himself in that ludicrous sack The Misanthrope’s author becomes just a hack.9

And more recently, writing about one of the “neoclassical” comedies, La malade imaginaire [The Imaginary Invalid ] (1672), Mitchell Greenberg, after underlining the play’s obsessive references to excretory functions, to enemas, purges, and the like, noted: “Of all the works in the French canon, including Rabelais’ oeuvre, no other is so persistently scatological . . . so insistently rubs our noses in shit.”10 A taste for low comedy and farce evidently lived on during the second half of the century – and, Fureti`ere’s testimony notwithstanding, 162

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“by other means,” well through the eighteenth century and beyond. “Even as the Commedia dell’Arte is being dismissed and exiled in 1697,” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have observed, there is a veritable explosion of artistic representations of the pierrots, players, tumblers and rope-dancers by painters of the time – by Gillot and Watteau in particular. A sort of refined mimicry sets into the salons and ballrooms of Europe in which the imagery, masks, and costumes of the popular carnival are being (literally) put on by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in order to simultaneously express and conceal their sexual desire and the pleasures of the body.11

The overarching context here is Bakhtin’s generalized notion of the carnivalesque, which Stallybrass and White had proposed at the outset of their study to reconfigure with regard to specific contexts and contingencies: It is only by completely shifting the grounds of the debate, by transforming the “problematic” that these issues can be solved. It is precisely such an intervention in the current surge of Bakhtin-inspired studies which we have attempted in this book . . . We have chosen therefore to consider carnival as one instance of a generalized economy of transgression and of the re-coding of high/low relations across the whole social structure. The symbolic categories of grotesque realism which Bakhtin located can be rediscovered as a governing dynamic of the body, the household, the city, the nation-state – indeed a vast range of interconnected domains.12

The conclusion, in other words: the Bakhtinian carnivalesque remained a major, if at times furtive, presence long after low comedy and farce had lost much of their former appeal. My study, focused on specific images and texts by workers in the French print industry during roughly the first half of the seventeenth century, similarly requests such a broadened definition of the “economy of transgression.” So understood, images derived from low comedy and farce or carnivalesque images as such, would no longer be considered part of a minority history on its way to oblivion, but rather integral to a majority history and to the cultural and social mainstream. My argument in sum has been as follows. It was common for printmakers in early modern France to create “low” images at times derived directly from low comedy and farce and various forms of related print ephemera, these images at times reinforced by inscriptions in “high” Latin and Greek with the learned allusions of the dominant (“high”) culture, the same printmakers at other times and in different circumstances creating classical images belonging to that same culture. The contingencies of each mode evidently reflected the interests and backgrounds of different audiences, from the little-educated members of the artisanal and commercial classes to the better- and highly educated middle and upper bourgeoisie and perhaps the aristocracy, although responses could not be 163

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expected to be fixed or necessarily consistent; the “low” could thrive alongside the “high” as still another face of the same or a related cultural practice. To be sure, as soon as one of the subcultures preponderated it was bound to be to the detriment of the other. And this is indeed what happened during the reign of Louis XIV. That it happened, however, was not a question of the inevitable march of progress or “reason” or of good taste triumphing over bad, but rather of the reinvention of the “bad” for official taste and consumption. All in all, I have argued, the meanings of prints of all kinds were contingent on, and malleable to, changing concerns, the print industry especially well suited to project these changes. To imagine a single, unified reaction to a printed image or text along the “high/low” divide would have to be to flatten its meaning and defuse its cultural charge.

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Notes

To keep the following lists from becoming unnecessarily cumbersome, whenever possible recent, synthetic studies are cited from which the interested reader can work back through the older literature. Complete information on the sources cited in short form can be found in the bibliography. introduction 1. For an appreciation of the importance of images and illustrations, see Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print, 32–70, 145–82. 2. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, xv. 3. On this question, see the debate between Eisenstein and Adrian Johns, Eisenstein, “AHR Forum: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?” 84–128. 4. Also McKenzie “The Economics of Print,” 389–425; Stallybrass, “Little Jobs,” 315–41. 5. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 141, 259; also Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1–19. 6. Notable exceptions within this art historical specialty are Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives; Silver, Marketing Maximilian. 7. For reader-response theory privileging reading and reception over production, see Rosenau, Post Modernism and the Social Sciences. 8. See Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought,” 200. 9. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety; Stallybrass, “Little Jobs,” 315–41. 10. Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” 154–75; “The Practical Impact of Writing,” 111–59. 11. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 5; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 36–45, 406–13. 12. Johns, The Nature of the Book; cf. n. 3 above. 13. Ibid. 28. 14. Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 190, has noted that foreign prints far outnumbered their English counterparts in seventeenth-century London; and

165

notes to pages 4–19

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Robert Darnton has argued that “by its very nature . . . the history of books must be international in scale,” “What is the History of Books?” 135. Blum, Abraham Bosse et la soci´et´e franc¸aise, and L’oeuvre grav´e d’Abraham Bosse. The standard catalog has nevertheless remained Duplessis, Catalogue de l’oeuvre de Bosse, listing the prints by subject. A brief monograph by Valabr`egue, Les artistes c´el`ebres: Abraham Bosse, was superseded by Blum. A catalog of Bosse’s prints in the Biblioth`eque Nationale, Paris, was published by Roger-Armand Weigert as part of his Graveurs du XVIIe si`ecle. Inventaire du fonds franc¸ais. Fontaine, Les doctrines d’art en France, 21; cf. esp. Thuillier, “Pour un ‘Corpus Pussinianum,’” 82, 90–92, 121–22, 138. Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur; also the new catalog by Lothe, L’oeuvre grav´e d’Abraham Bosse, graveur parisien. Ibid.; Blum, Abraham Bosse et la soci´et´e franc¸aise, Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre. See esp. Thuillier, “Acad´emie et classicisme en France,” 181–209; Teyss`edre, Roger de Piles et les d´ebats sur le coloris, 31–35, 53–61; Goldstein, ”Studies in SeventeenthCentury French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” 231–43; Heinich, Du peintre a` l’artiste, 147–52; Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting, 168–80; Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 143–81.

chapter 1. a printmaking revolution 1. Palissy, “De l’art de terre,” 34, cited Grivel, “Printmakers in Sixteenth-Century France,” 46; also Schnapper, Curieux du Grand Si`ecle, 248; cf. Landau & Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 350: “It seems safe to say that prints were on the average not very expensive.” To be sure, print collectors were prepared to pay higher prices for especially rare or desirable prints, the most famous such example being Rembrandt’s etching, Christ with the Sick Around Him Receiving the Children, which fetched an unheard-of 100 gulders at auction during his lifetime. For such collections, see Robinson, “The Passion for Prints,” xxvii–xlviii. Further on collecting prints later in the chapter. 2. Schnapper, Curieux du Grand Si`ecle, 235. The basic unit was the livre tournois, containing twenty sous or sols, each reducible further into twelve deniers, the last circulating also in the less desirable copper coins as liard, double, and blanc. See also Hoffman, Les monnaies royales de France, 168–91. 3. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosser,savant graveur, cat. nos. 203 & 204. 4. Pr´eaud, “Intaglio Printmaking in Paris,” 9. 5. Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 173; Grivel, “The Print Market in Paris from 1610 to 1660,” 13–19. 6. Johns, The Nature of the Book, 75. 7. Ibid., 58–186. 8. Reitsma, Maria Sibylla Merian & Daughters; Lincoln, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker, 11–45; Markey, “The Female Printmaker,” 51–61. 9. Blum, Abraham Bosse et la soci´et´e franc¸aise, 8–9. 10. See esp. Russell, Emblematic Structures, 57–109; also Armstrong, Technique and Technology, 157–206. 11. Landau & Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 323–58. 12. On Callot’s technique, see Pr´eaud, “‘Saint Antoine,’ morsures et remorsures,” 415– 20. 13. See Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, 71–82.

166

notes to pages 19–28

14. See, e.g., Le Comte, Cabinet des singularitez, 3: 121–31; Diderot & d’Alembert, Encyclop´edie, 7: 877–84. For details of workshop training, see Essick, William Blake, Printmaker, 8–38. Though the first of its kind, the treatise is in a tradition of manuals publishing the “secrets” of such crafts as metalworking, the most famous the potter Bernard Palissy’s dialogues on chemistry and agriculture; see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 112–20; Williams, “The Beginnings of Etching,” 16–18; Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 214–16. 15. Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment, 242–43. 16. See Raven, The Business of Books, 25. 17. Loyseau, Trait´e des ordres, cited in Sewall, Jr., Work and Revolution in France, 23; also Heller, The Conquest of Poverty, 65. For book production, Febvre & Martin, The Coming of the Book, 128–66; Johns The Nature of the Book, 92–93. 18. See Chauvet, Les ouvriers du livre en France, 2–147; Johns, The Nature of the Book. Stressing the difficulties French artists continued to face, Donald Posner recently called attention to a swipe published as late as 1660, comparing artists to barbers and paintings to clocks, eyeglasses, and assorted useful objects; Posner, “Concerning the ‘Mechanical’ Parts of Painting,” 585. 19. Bacon, Novum Organum, 3: 370. In fact, however, the printing profession was unusual for publicizing its “mechanical” status from its beginnings; see Grivel, “Printmakers in Sixteenth-Century France, figs. 10, 13; also Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 24, pls. 5, 7. Also Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 75–104. 20. Roche, A History of Everyday Things, 171; Sewall, Jr., Work and Revolution in France, 65. For discrimination against engraving in the English Royal Academy, see Fyfe, Art, Power, and Modernity, 34–36, 111. The classic text arguing the reconciliation of the “liberal” and “mechanical” arts is Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science; see also Meli, Thinking with Objects. 21. Goldstein, “The Noble Painter,” forthcoming, in which I suggest that this is most likely a mock panegyric. 22. Naud´e, Addition a` l’histoire de Louys XI, 37; cf. Clarke, Gabriel Naud´e, 33. For other constructions of the origin of printmaking, see Johns, The Nature of the Book, 305. 23. Bosse, Traict´e des mani`eres de graver en taille douce, 1. 24. Quoted in Black, “The Printed Bible,” 432. Black points out that Luther also criticized the greed and incompetence of printers, for which see also Eisenstein, Printing as a Divine Art, and McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 4. 25. Ripa, Iconologia, 424–25. 26. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 102–8; Bury, “The Taste for Prints in Italy to c. 1600,” 12–26; Karpinski, “The Print in Thrall to its Original,” 101–9; Landau & Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 103. 27. Davis, “Strikes and Salvation at Lyon,” 5. 28. Bosse/Weigert,Sentiments, 115–17; for related arguments in sixteenth-century Italy, see Lincoln, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker, 153–64. 29. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, esp. 102–8. 30. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 1–2. 31. Johns, The Nature of the Book, 329–30. 32. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 160–64. 33. Bosse, Traict´e des mani`eres de graver en taille douce, 2–3: “Pour moi, j’avoue que la plus grande difficult´e que j’ai rencontr´ee en la graveure a` l’eau forte, est d’y faire des hacheures tournantes, grandes, grosses et d´eli´ees au besoin, comme le burin les fait, et dont les planches puissent durer longtemps a` l’impression. Et me semble

167

notes to pages 28–36

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

que la principale intention que peuvent avoir ceux qui gravent ou veulent graver a` l’eau-forte, est de faire leur ouvrage paroisse comme s’il e´ toit grav´e au burin.” Ibid.; For earlier such methods, see Landau & Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 65–77. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 117, 166. For the “copy,” see Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective; Rose, Authors and Owners, 12. As put in the Encyclop´edie, one of the advantages of print technology, printing texts, that is, is the sameness of all impressions: “on peut multiplier leurs e´ crits en tirer, en renouveler sans cesse le nombre d’exemples qu’on desire, sans que les copies cedent en valeur aux originaux,” 8: 609. The more recent notion of an “original” print dates from the late nineteenth century, when artists published limited editions in which each print was signed by hand; see Arnar, “Original Printmaking Practices and Symbolic Gestures,” 741–54. See Gramaccini, Meier, Die Kunst der Interpretation, 23–27; Benjamin, Illuminations, 220–21. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 167. Gibson-Wood, Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship, 44; Schnapper, Curieux du Grand Si`ecle, 55–56. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 113–15; Posner, “Concerning the ‘Mechanical’ Parts of Painting,” 591–92. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 126–17. Ibid., 346–50; Pon, Raphael, D¨urer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, 68–73, 77–82. Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 15. Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 83–85. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 124–27; cf. Gibson-Wood, Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship, 159. See earlier discussion, 28–31. Landau & Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 294–98. For this and the following, see Schnapper, Curieux du Grand Si`ecle, 247–56. See earlier discussion, 13–14. See Goldstein, “Two Drawings by Abraham Bosse,” 23–25. This method of modeling was explained by Alberti and discussed by Vasari. For a useful survey and elucidation of this method, see Hall, Color and Meaning, esp. 48–55. Bosse, Traict´e des mani`eres de graver en taille douce; for earlier such methods, see Landau & Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 65–77. Cf. Bury, The Print in Italy, 25–37; Lincoln, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker, 147–64. A case was later made for the originality of reproductive engravings based on differences between the syntax or style in the works of different engravers; see Michel, “Une mutation du regard,” 591–601. Ivins. Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, 3; Gombrich, Art and Illusion, esp. 39–44; Gombrich, “Image and Code,” 11–42; Barthes “Rhetoric of the Image,” 21–40; cf. Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts, 9–17; Mitchell, Iconology, 47–94. La Dioptrique, in Oeuvres de Descartes, 6: 109; cf. Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 135. Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 87. Baltruˇsaitis, J., Anamorphoses ou perspectives curieuses, 68; Clark Vanities of the Eye, 92–97. Landau & Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 161; Pon, Raphael, D¨urer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, 28–38; Zorach & Rodini, Paper Museums; and most recently, with key

168

notes to pages 36–42

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

distinctions that place the study of reproductive prints on a whole new footing, Gramaccini & Meier, Die Kunst der Interpretation. 58. See Jacques Callot, 1592–1635, 106–263. See Jacques Callot, 1592–1635, 106–263. Blum, L’oeuvre grav´e d’Abraham Bosse. F´elibien, Tableaux du cabinet du roy, cited in Clayton, The English Print, 1688–1802, 49. See also, Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, (1986), 36–55; Marchesano and Michel, Painting the Grand Manner. The catalogue of a print cabinet published c. 1640 classifies artists under such rubrics as “Decadence de la sculpture & peinture,” “Retablissement premier,” etc. all meant in the Vasarian sense. See Goldstein, Abraham Bosse: Painting and Theory in the French Academy, 27–8. Other classifications conformed to those suggested by De Piles, e.g., that of Marolles. See Schnapper, Curieux du Grand Si`ecle 247–48. De Piles, The Art of Painting, cited Clayton, The English Print, 1688–1802, 42–43; similarly Le Comte, Cabinet des singularitez, 1:133–34. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication, 60–61. Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Journey to Flanders and Holland.; cited, Diels, The Shadow of Rubens, 55. Bann, Parallel Lines. Melion, “Theory and Practice: Reproductive Engravings in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands,” 57; Melion, “Cordis circumcisio in spiritu: Imitation and the Wounded Christ in Hendrick Goltzius’s Circumcision of 1594,” 31–77. For other printmakers imitating D¨urer, see Korey, “Creativity, Authenticity, and the Copy,” 34. Loewenstein, The Author’s Due, 28–35. See Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 43–45, 126–27, 247–69; Grivel, “The Print Market in Paris from 1610 to 1660,” 13–14. Ibid.; Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain, 40, 133–36. Grivel, “The Print Market in Paris from 1610 to 1660,” 14; Fleury, Documents des Minutier Central, 763–84. The importance of these exchanges has been underlined by Pierce, Unseemly Pictures, 27. Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” 107–35. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12–19, 37–46; cf. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 109. See, e.g. Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison,” 4. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 22–23. “With expanded communication and intercultural influence, people interpret others, and themselves, in a bewildering diversity of idioms – a global condition of what Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘heterroglossia.’ This ambiguous, multivocal world makes it increasingly hard to conceive of human diversity as inscribed in bounded independent cultures. Difference is an effect of inventive syncretism.” Bosse/Cochin, De la mani`ere de graver, 19. For Cochin, see Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, esp. 24, 69–72, 219–20. Bosse/Jombert De la mani`ere de graver, 26; Diderot & d’Alembert, Encyclop´edie, 7: 877–84. Benson, The Printed Picture, 22–53. Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts. Bann, Parallel Lines, e.g. 157, 172; also Fyfe, Art, Power, and Modernity, 124–35. For the etching revival, see Parshall, The Darker Side of Light, 3–39; for the influence of Rembrandt, see Hausler, “An Rembrandt kann keiner vorbei,” 81–91. Hayter, New Ways of Gravure.

169

notes to pages 44–54

chapter 2. scenes of everyday life 1. Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV; Newman, Cultural Capitals, 34–41. 2. McTighe, “Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the Imaginaire of Works,” 75–91, notes the conventionality of such series and inclusion of “quasi-mythical” figures; see also Beall, Kaufrufe und strassenhandler; Steinitz, “Les cries de Paris” und die kaufrufdarstellung. 3. Milliot, Les cris de Paris, 52–58; also Reed, French Prints from the Age of the Musketeers, 65–67; Adh´emar, “French Sixteenth Century Genre Paintings,” (1945), 194. For related English series, see Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, 26–59; Shesgreen, The Criers and Hawkers of London, 2–22. 4. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 181–82. 5. Milliot, Les cris de Paris, 139. Among those not included: porters, carters, prostitutes, pickpockets, and, most surprisingly, hawkers. For an overview of the workforce, see Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France, 16–39. 6. Ibid., 172–74; see also Beall, Kaufrufe und strassenhandler; Steinitz, “Les cries de Paris” und die kaufrufdarstellung. 7. See earlier discussion, 14. 8. Kettering, “Men at Work in Dutch Art,” 694–714. 9. “The foot owes its preference as a fetish – or a part of it – to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet – as has long been suspected – are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member.” “Fetishism,” 1927, FSE, 20:152–7, cited in Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 113; Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law, 101–28. For more on the usefulness of Freud’s analysis, see Demerson, Humanisme et fac´etie, 171–89. For classical and medieval traditions of erotic wordplay, see Kendrick, The Game of Love, 1–23, 95–120. Note, too, the crucial connection between such verses and the songs of Carnival, e.g., the following song sung by a Florentine company of key-makers, serenading ladies on their balconies: “Our tools are fine, new, and useful / We always carry them with us / They are good for anything / If you want to touch them you can.” A related song was sung by dentists boasting of the “hard iron” that prepares patients for “poking with love.” Wind, “A Foul and Pestilent Congregation,” 40. 10. Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law, 57. See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy; Stoichita, Coderch, Goya, 180. 11. Dixon, Perilous Chastity, 151; Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 59–61; Posner, “Watteau’s Reclining Nude,” 385–89. For related works, see Dixon, Perilous Chastity, 147–59. 12. Beam, Laughing Matters, 157–58, with English translation. For the broader context, see Stewart, Before Bruegel, 227–32; also Darnton, Poetry and the Police, esp. 66–117. 13. Beam, Laughing Matters, 168–70. 14. Illus. Milliot, Les cris de Paris, 187. 15. Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 144. 16. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 86–87, cat. nos. 15–20, 46–47, 94–96. 17. Ibid., 132, cat. no. 88. 18. Cited in Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 49. 19. On the concept of a society of orders or estates, see Mousnier, The Institutions of France, 112–253. Even though some historians have criticized this view for being

170

notes to pages 54–63

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

partial, none have denied the inordinate importance of privilege and status in seventeenth-century France; see, e.g., Beik, Absolutism and Society in SeventeenthCentury France, 6–31. d’Hozier, Les noms, surnoms, qualites, armes et blazons des chevaliers et officiers de l’ordre de Saint-Esprit; cf. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 134, cat no. 90. On the cultural importance of dress, see most recently Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction. Gaines, Social Structures in Moli`ere’s Theater, 71–78. Ibid. Moli`ere, Oeuvres completes, 2:755. Ibid. 1:917. Cited in Blum, Abraham Bosse et la soci´et´e franc¸aise, 91–92.

chapter 3. drama, theater, and prints 1. Duportal, Etude sur les livres a` figure de 1601 a` 1660, 307–8; Wiley, The Early Public Theater in France, 133–57. 2. The mid-seventeenth-century critic, the Abb´e d’Aubignac, la pratique du theatre . . . , cited ibid., 57. Shakespeare was similarly lambasted as part of a neoclassical reaction: “Our poets,” wrote Dryden in 1668, “present you a Play and a farce together; and our stages still retain somewhat of the Original civility of the Red-Bull” – the last proverbial for catering to the rowdiest audiences; in Works, S. Monk, ed., cited in Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, 5–6. 3. Duportal, Etude sur les livres a` figure de 1601 a` 1660, 307–8; Beam, Laughing Matters, 142–79. 4. Howarth, French Theatre in the Neo-Classical Era, 50–59; Williams, Artisans and sansculottes, 19–38; Mamczaz, “L’inspiration th´eaˆ trale dans les Balli di Sfessania,” 233–60. For other actor images, Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France, figs. 5–8; Howarth, French Theatre in the Neo-Classical Era, nos. 40, 41, 169. 5. See for example, Robert J. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). For The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. nos. 109–10. 6. Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1–10; Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House, 1–13. 7. See Henderson, “The Theater and Domestic Culture,” 173–94; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 271. 8. Henderson, “The Theater and Domestic Culture,” 173–94. 9. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 80–94; G´elis, History of Childbirth, 96–111. 10. See Segal, Death of Comedy, 359. 11. See Jeay, “De l’autel au berceau,” 39–62; Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 77–110; Adh´emar, “French Sixteenth-Century Genre Paintings,” 191–95. For an English redaction as “Tittle-Tattle: or the Several Branches of Gossipping,” see Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 177–78, pl. 6. 12. See Orlin, “Three Ways to be Invisible during the Renaissance,” 183–293. 13. Harth, Cartesian Women, 19; Goodman, “Bosse’s Etchings of Women’s Coteries,” 383–88. 14. Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 53–54. It is worth mentioning that the author of a publication revolving around a conversation between women about the pleasures to be experienced in sexual intercourse was a book published some twenty years later and typically cited as the first work of French pornography: L’ecole des filles.

171

notes to pages 63–79

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

Consisting of a dialogue between two young women, it has been characterized by Joan DeJean to the contrary as “strikingly good-natured and seems more a throwback to medieval and Renaissance ribaldry than a precursor of the darkness to come,” which is to say in the tradition of our discussion. DeJean, “The Politics of Pornography,” 116; also DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity, 56–83. For the following, see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 55–94; G´elis, History of Childbirth, 112–64. Thompson, Customs in Common, 467–516; Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 124–51. For the overarching theme, see Solterer, The Master and Minerva, 23–60. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 124–51; Thompson, Customs in Common, 467–516. Dolan, “Household Chastisements,” 204–25; Fineman, “The Turn of the Shrew,” 138–59; Boose, “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds,” 239–79. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 129. Bowen, The Age of Bluff, 11; Colie, Paradoxia Edpidemica, 57–59. Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des femmes,” 19; Jardine, Gynesis, 96. See esp. Boureau, Dauphin, Chartier, Correspondence; Hellegouarc’h, L’art de la conversation; Jensen, Writing Love. See Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 31–32. Rabelais, Tiers livre; DeJean, Literary Fortifications, 28; Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 235; Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law, 81–90; Crawford, The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance, 152–94. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 10, 17. See earlier discussion, 61–2. Illus. Davis, Fiction in the Archives, figs. 7 & 8. For women in the print industry, see Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 145. See also Goodman, “Bosse’s Etchings of Women’s Coteries,” 388–91. Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots, 15–20; Jeanneret, “Renaissance Orality and Literary Banquets,” 159–62; Burke, The Art of Conversation, 102–8. For Rabelais, see Lapp, The Esthetics of Negligence, 4–14. Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots, 17. See Solterer, The Master and Minerva, 178–80. See earlier discussion, 62. Peters, Theatre of the Book, 63. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia, pls. 357–59. Blair, The Theater of Nature, 153–79. Mousnier, The Institutions of France; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Craveri, The Age of Conversation, 35. Otto, Fools are Everywhere, 23–27; Wind, “A Foul and Pestilent Congregation,” 29. Pr´eaud, “Les tribulations de Saint Antoine,” 291–303; cf. Kahn-Rossi, “Le rˆole de Jacques Callot dans la naissance d’un genre: la caricature,” 263–87; Posner, “Jacques Callot and the Dance called Sfessania,” 203–16. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk, 79–86. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 164, cat. no. 133. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 190–97. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 317; also Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 7.

172

notes to pages 80–90

46. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 17; cf. Bristol, Carnival and Theater, 133–39; Bowen, Enter Rabelais Laughing, 141–47. 47. Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, 20. This is precisely the type of sight to which Plato had objected in his review of Homer: that it is bad for youths to read about great personages in postures of weakness. Republic, 3,2, cited in Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 94. 48. Knight, The Literature of Satire, 20–24. 49. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. nos. 109–16. Bosse produced a related series, J´ezebel ou l’impiet´e punie; see Duplessis, Catalogue de l’oeuvre de Bosse, nos. 1178–83. Cf. Dixon, Perilous Chastity, 128–29; Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre esp. 95. 50. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 181. 51. Ibid., cat. nos. 132–39. 52. For this focus of attention on eating, cf. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, with an entire chapter (4) devoted to “Banqueting Imagery in Rabelais.” 53. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 141. 54. Fumaroli, “The Fertility and the Shortcomings of Renaissance Rhetoric,” 96. 55. See Beam, Laughing Matters, 210–40. 56. Hogarth (1753), 2:22–49; see Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790, 118. 57. Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 3; Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art. 98.

chapter 4. contingencies and contradictions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

See Reed, French Prints from the Age of the Musketeers, 178, no. 94. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 84. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 84. Lieure, Jacques Callot, cat. nos. 807–1295. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 15–74. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk, chapters 2 and 7. For related political satires, see Cillessen, Krieg der Bilder. For a nuanced discussion of Calvin’s attitude toward imagery, see Zachman, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin; see also King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 162–66. Halewood, Six Subjects of Reformation Art, 52–63. Ibid., 5–8. Panofsky, “Erasmus and the Visual Arts,” 221. Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, 58. Busson, La pens´ee religieuse franc¸aise, e.g., 243–47. For other images of the Christian Knight, see De Jongh, Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 65; Eire, War Against the Idols, 28–53. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 280. Lebrun, “The Two Reformations,” 102–03; Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 201; Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 10–11. De Jongh, Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 124–28; Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches,150–58. Lebrun, “The Two Reformations,” 103. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, 19–83. De Vesme, Massar, Stefano della Bella, nos. 213–69, 947. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, 56–59. See Russell, Jacques Callot, 209–69.

173

notes to pages 91–101

21. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 39–40, cat. nos. 58–61. Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 77, identifies other prints that may originally have adorned almanacs. 22. Solomon, Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda in Seventeenth-Century France, 107. 23. Ibid., 134. 24. Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700, 157. 25. See esp. Moriarty, Taste and Ideology, 24–38. 26. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 71. 27. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 177–78. 28. Brereton, French Comic Drama, 30, 260. 29. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 174–76; Apostolid`es, Le prince sacrifici´e, 137–79; also Stackelberg, “Moli`ere und die Gesellschaftsordnung seiner Zeit,” 257–75. 30. Bacon Of Truth, Erasmus In Praise of Folly, both cited in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 93–94. 31. Plato, Laws, 626c. Gaines, Social Structures in Moli`ere’s Theater, 239–40; Dupr´e, Passage to Modernity, 167–72; Guevara as cited in Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel, 195. For the bagpipes: Keith Moxey, “Master E.S. and the Folly of Love,” Semiolus II (1980), 125-48, esp. 131 and note 18. 32. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 168–70; Porter, “Seeing the Past,” 188–89. 33. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. nos. 163–67. For the following, see esp. Goldstein, “Popular Science in Early Modern France,” 182– 94. 34. Camille, The Gothic Idol, 307. For the tradition of the “Five Senses,” see Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600,” 135–54; De Jongh, Luijten, The Mirror of Everyday Life, 241–45. 35. See esp. Popkin, The History of Scepticism, e.g., 143–57. 36. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. nos. 163–67; Goldstein, “Popular Science in Early Modern France,” 183–85. For a possible Dutch source for Touch, Bosse’s treatment in turn plagiarized in Holland, see De Jongh, Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 286–87. 37. Ibid., 63, 218. On the lute, see Zecher, “The Gendering of the Lute,” 769–80. 38. On the metaphysics of music in France, see Yates, The French Academies, 77–94; Carpenter, Rabelais and Music and Music in Medieval and Renaissance Universities; Dear, Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools, 100–03, 139–41. 39. Ibid., esp. 117–69. 40. As Plato did in the Timaeus as well. 41. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 193–94. For the extensive literature on the telescope, see G¨ottler, Last Things, esp. 4, notes 7, 8; 9, note 13. 42. Klein, “La th`eme de fou et l’ironie humaniste,” 11–25; Margolin, “Des lunettes et des hommes,” 375–93; Stoichita, Coderch, Goya, 217, 268–71. 43. Jaffe, “Mellan and Peiresc,” 168–75; Ficacci, Claude Mellan, gli anni romani, 43–47; Reeves, Painting the Heavens, 12. 44. La diotrique in Descartes, 6: 81. 45. Ronchi, “The Influence of the early Development of Optics,” 195–206; idem, “The General Influence of the Development of Optics,” 123–33. 46. Blum, L’oeuvre grav´e d’Abraham Bosse, 82, cat. no. 1417; see above, n. 42. 47. Grabes, The Mutable Glass; Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscoverry of Linear Perspective, 72–73, 174. For Vanity, Ripa, Iconologia, 522.

174

notes to pages 101–112

48. Tervarent, Attributs et symbols dans l’art profane, 90. 49. See Fineman, “The Turn of the Shrew,” 110–25. 50. The literature is vast. The main points are brought out by Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition. 51. G¨ottler, Last Things, 11. 52. Yates, Giordano Bruno, 151–56; Strong, A Study in the Philosophy of MathematicalPhysical Science, 15–47. 53. Bonansea, “Campanella’s Defense of Galileo,” 383–84; Yates, Giordano Bruno, 383– 84. 54. Headley, Tommasso Campanella, 117–31; Goldstein, “Popular Science in Early Modern France,” 182–94. 55. Ammann, “The Musical Theory and Philosophy of Robert Fludd,” 216–26. 56. Grabes, Last Things, 92–98. 57. See n. 52 to this chapter. For the more esoteric, see Solomon, Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda in Seventeenth-Century France, esp. 81–82; Yates, The French Academies, 77–151. 58. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 225. 59. Bennett, “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations,” 8, 14. 60. See Solomon, Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda in Early Modern France, 60–99; Wellman, Making Social Science, 3–8, 121–22. 61. Ibid., 121–22. 62. Bonansea, “Campanella’s Defense of Galileo,” 206–14. 63. Wellman, Making Social Science, 122. 64. Ibid.

chapter 5. the royal portrait 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

See Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 7. Ibid.; Apostolid`es, Le roi machine and Le prince sacrifi´e; Marin, The Portrait of the King. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 16. Reed, French Prints from the Age of the Musketeers, cat. nos. 31, 34, 35. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 9. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 7. Bollˆeme, Les almanachs populaire aux XVIIe si`ecle. Ibid., 16, 122, Moote, Louis XIII, 260. This accusation was eventually elaborated on in print. See Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, 367–68. Join-Lambert, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 171. ibid., 38–40. On balance, this is not as odd as it may seem, given that prints were kept in albums more or less strictly by subject, in this case Louis XIII. On this question, see Griffiths, “The Archaeology of the Print,” 9–27. For this tradition, see Wind, “Hercules and Orpheus,” 208–10; Wittkower, “The Vicissitudes of a Dynastic Monument,” 497–531; Jung, Hercule dans la litt´erature franc¸aise, 159–79. For the following, see Goldstein, “Mixed Messages,” 9–15. Fumaroli, The Poet and the King, 257. The words are Charles Bernard’s (Histoire des guerres de Louis XIII, 1633), cited in Ranum, Artisans of Glory, 103–28. See Chatelain & Arnhold, “War, Fame, and the Classical Aesthetic,” 95–103. Wittkower, “The Vicissitudes of a Dynastic Monument,” 526–28.

175

notes to pages 113–122

18. Seneca, The Ten Tragedies of Seneca, lines 472–76. I am grateful to Hugh Parker for identifying the source and for the translation. 19. Homer, The Homeric Hymns, 15.9. An alternative reading of the line is: “Hail, lord, Son of Zeus. Give me success and prosperity.” I am grateful to Susan Shelmerdine for identifying the source and for these readings. 20. See esp. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme; Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey. 21. See Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 54. 22. Utopia, 99, cited in Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 35. On Odysseus, see Cave, Recognitions, 10–24. 23. McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour de France, 133–53; Franko, Dance as Text, 63– 107. 24. Ibid., 65–74; McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour de France, 142–43; Moote, Louis XIII, (1989), 42–51. For precedents and parallels of transvestitism, see Orgel, Impersonations,” 94–98; Crawford, The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance, 195–240. 25. The ballet was danced for the first time on February 7, 1641 and then again on March 14, 1641. Note another reading of Ulysseus, whose rags, in a Platonist interpretation of the kind common in Renaudot’s academy, are a “disguise” for his soul; see Cave, Recognitions, 144–48. 26. McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour de France, 172. 27. See Moote, Louis XIII, 6–7. 28. This notion is most closely associated with Darnton, as in The Great Cat Massacre, 145–89. 29. Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 89; Adam, Grandeur and Illusion, 53–5. 30. Grivel, Le commerce de l’estampe a` Paris, 87–8. 31. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 172. 32. Ibid., cat. no. 107. 33. Moreau catalogued more than 5,000 entries in his Bibliographie des Mazarinades. See also Carrier, La presse de la Fronde; Jouhaud, Mazarinades; Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 264. The translation is from Russell Goulbourne, “Satire in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France,” in A Companion to Satire, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. Quintero (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 139–60, 143–4. 34. When Bosse later quarreled with members of Louis XIV’s Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, his support of the Fronde was thrown in his face; see Dussieux, M´emoires in´edits, 2: 269–76.

chapter 6. image and text: reading single-sheet prints 1. A striking case of this is the frontispiece for Marchand’s Histoire de l’origine et des premiers progr`es de l’imprimerie (1740), for which the publisher provided the engraver with a crude sketch, including and labeling all the allegorical figures; see Eisenstein, Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought, figure 2. 2. On this question, see Bowen, Imhof, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations, 99–102. 3. For the second kind, see ibid., 24. 4. See earlier discussion, 85–90. 5. See Longino, Orientalism, esp. 14–28. 6. See esp. Lee, Ut pictura poesis, 3–9; Hulse, The Rule of Art, 47–76. 7. See Thuillier, S´ebastien Bourdon, cat. nos. 293–99.

176

notes to pages 124–134

8. See King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 205–06. 9. Arguments have tended to favor one or the other. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, seems to favor the printer-publisher; Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 21–40, and Chartier, The Order of Books, vii–ix, seems to favor the reader. 10. See Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 181–212. 11. Richeome, Tableaux sacr´es, 7. He is using images, he states, because, “il ny a rien qui plus delecte, ne qui face plus suauement glisser vne chose dans l’ˆame, que la peinture: ne qui plus profondement la graue en la memoire, ne qui plus efficacement pousse la volont´e pour luy donner branle . . . ” The broad context is that of the emblematic tradition, for which see Russell, Emblematic Structures, esp. 248, note. 24. 12. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. Others of importance in this debate are Goodman, Languages of Art, and Mitchell, Iconology and Picture Theory. 13. Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 21–40, 27. 14. Ringbom, “Action and Report,” 34–51. 15. Van der Stock, “Ambiguous Intentions, Multiple Interpretations,” 25–26.

chapter 7. book illustrations 1. For the subject in general, see Russell, Emblematic Structures; Bland A History of Book Illustration; Hofer, Baroque Book Illustration; Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et soci´et´e, 1:162–69, 346–54. 2. See earlier discussion, 16–17. 3. Blum, L’oeuvre grav´e d’Abraham Bosse, 14–15. 4. Lothe, in Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 42. 5. Bowen, Imhof, Christophert Plantin and Engraved Book Illustration, 17–30. 6. See esp. Dolet, Pr´efaces franc¸aises, 9–16; Badius, Pr´efaces de Josse Bade, 9–16. 7. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 251. 8. See Clarke, Gabriel Naud´e, 62–63. 9. See Corbett and Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece, 219–30; also Pye, “The Sovereign, the Theater, and the Kingdome of Darknesse,” 101–06; Champion, “Decoding the Leviathan,” 255–75. 10. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 268. 11. Genette, The Architext, 1–2. 12. Ibid. 13. E.g., Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. nos. 230, 262. 14. Adam, Histoire de la litt´erature franc¸aise, 219–20, 232–38, 408–18; Bannister, Privileged Mortals, 116–29. 15. For a preparatory drawing, see Bjurstr¨om, The Art of Drawing in France, 53. For the book, see Bannister, Privileged Mortals, 116–29. 16. Bassani, Claude Vignon, 346–53, 479–89; see also Meyer, “Bosse, Rousselet, et Vignon,” 195–96. On the plots, see Bannister, Privileged Mortals, 103–15. 17. Bassani, Claude Vignon, 346–53. 18. Ibid. 19. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 149. 20. Martin, The French Book, 89–90; Ehrmann, Antoine Caron, 182–88. 21. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. no. 191. 22. For the painters, see M´erot, French Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 129–54. 23. On Bourdon as a printmaker, see Thuillier, S´ebastien Bourdon, 54–63; on the “Seven Sacraments,” ibid., 410–17. 24. See Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. nos. 284–88.

177

notes to pages 134–145

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 175. Goldstein, Teaching Art, 144–45. Landau, Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 103–68. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2: 453–519. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication, 1–21; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 1:187–254; Martin, The History and Power of Writing, 324–27. For such illustrations as scientific evidence, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 225–29. Hofer, Baroque Book Illustration, 28. Blum, Abraham Bosse et la soci´et´e franc¸aise, 190–92; Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat. nos. 194–96. See Renaux, Louis XIV’s Botanical Engravings, 7–21. For the evolution of this garden, see Laissus, “Le jardin du roi,” 296–97. Join-Lambert, Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, cat nos. 318–20. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2: 520–74. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 181–82. Ibid.

chapter 8. books and pamphlets 1. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; Johns, The Nature of the Book. See the exchange of Eisenstein and Johns, Eisenstein, “AHR Forum,” 84–128. 2. See esp. Lee, Ut pictura poesis, 3–9; Hulse, The Rule of Art, 47–76. 3. See previous discussion, 138–41 as well as Introduction, n. 20. 4. See Goldstein, “Forms and Formulas,” 345–55; Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 152–69. For the architectural theory, Fruft, A History of Architectural Theory, 118–27. 5. Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” 231–56, and “Forms and Formulas,” 345–55. 6. Ibid. 7. It is in a line of books on diverse subjects originating with a treatise on medicine published in 1578; see Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France 258–59. 8. See earlier discussions, 25–8. 9. See earlier discussion, 104–5. 10. Renaudot, Seconde centurie des questions trait´ees ez conferences du Bureau d’Adresse, 69– 73. Cf. Thuillier, “Doctrines et querelles artistiques en France,” 125–37; Goldstein, Abraham Bosse: Painting and Theory in the French Academy, 14–18, 127–36; Goldstein, “Forms and Formulas,” 345–48. 11. See Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 269–78. 12. Renaudot, Seconde centurie des questions trait´ees ez conferences du Bureau d’Adresse, 69. This “nothingness” can be traced to an ancient concept expressed in Homer’s Illiad, where Achilles attempts to embrace the shadow of Patrocles; see Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 44. For the humanist paradox of “nothing,” see Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 219–72. 13. See Goldstein, “Forms and Formulas,” 347–48. 14. See esp. Panofsky, Idea, 71–99. 15. Thuillier, “Les ‘Observations sur la peinture’ de Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy,” 193–210. 16. Goldstein, Abraham Bosse: Painting and Theory in the French Academy, 31–52. 17. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 134; cf. Goldstein, Abraham Bosse: Painting and Theory in the French Academy, 8.

178

notes to pages 145–153

18. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 150; cf. Goldstein, “French Identity in the Realm of Raphael,” 238–39. 19. Bosse/Weigert, Le Peintre converty, 59. 20. See earlier discussion, 28–31. 21. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 121. 22. Ibid., 141. 23. Ibid. 24. Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” 231–56; Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting, 165–70; Heinich, Du peintre a` l’artiste, 147–52. 25. For the following, see esp. Kemp, The Science of Art, 35–98; Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 32–63. 26. Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture, 37; cf. Wright, “Alberti’s De pictura,” 52–71. 27. See earlier discussion, 117. 28. Kemp, The Science of Art, 120 and note 76. 29. See earlier discussion, 21–2, and Wittkower, The Artist and the Liberal Arts; Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” 145–206. 30. See Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 85. 31. Ibid. 32. For the following, see Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 95–102. 33. Vasari, Le vite, 4: 10. 34. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 39–40, 371–72. 35. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 171. 36. Ibid., 128–30. In a widely publicized quarrel, Roland Fr´eart de Chambray, on the basis of the importance attached to perspective in art theory, argued that works by Raphael are organized according to strict perspective principles, which Bosse demonstrated not to be the case, although without compromising, he conceded, their artistic merit; Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” 234–39. 37. Bosse, Trait´e des pratiques g´eom´etrales et perspectives enseign´ees dans l”Acad´emie Royale, 14–15. 38. For the following, see Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 105–41; Kemp, The Science of Art, 120–25. For a biography, see Taton, “Desargues” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 39. Kemp, The Science of Art, 120–21; Ivins, Art and Geometry, 87–94; Field, “Linear Perspective and the Projective Geometry of Girard Desargues,” 3–40; Field and Gray, The Geometrical Work of Girard Desargues. 40. Field, The Invention of Infinity, 220–21; also Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 387. 41. Ibid., 49; Serres, Le syst`eme de Leibnitz, 693. 42. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 387; Kemp, The Science of Art, 129. 43. Popkin, The History of Scepticism, 64–79; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England, 74–78, 120–24; Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance, 15–59; Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 266–99. 44. Mersenne, La v´erit´e des sciences, 225; cf. Popkin, The History of Scepticism, 99–111. 45. For an overview, see Gaukroger, Descartes, an Intellectual Biography. 46. See, e.g., Clarke, “Descartes’ Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Revolution,” 258–85. 47. Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” 239–42; Goldstein, Abraham Bosse: Painting and Theory in the French Academy, 53–64; Heinich, “La perspective acad´emique,” 47–49.

179

notes to pages 153–160

48. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4: 11: 10, cited in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 208. 49. Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” 234–40. 50. Carrier, La presse de la Fronde. See earlier discussion, 116–17. 51. Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et soci´et´e, 1, 362–90. 52. When Bosse later quarreled with members of Louis XIV’s Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, his earlier support of the Fronde was thrown in his face; see Dussieux, M´emoires in´edits, 2:269–76. For the whole question of libels, see Darnton, The Devil in the Holy Water, 257–68. 53. See Kemp, The Science of Art, 120–21; Ivins, Art and Geometry, 87–94; Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 117–41. 54. Thuillier, “Acad´emie et classicisme en France,” 181–209; Teyss`edre, Roger de Piles et les d´ebats sur le coloris, 15–44; Goldstein, Abraham Bosse: Painting and Theory in the French Academy, 1–5; Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 225–52. 55. Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting, 168–69; also Heinich, Du peintre a` l’artiste, ch. 5; McTighe, “Abraham Bosse and the Language of Artisans,” 1–26. 56. Lander, Inventing Polemic, 15. 57. Foucault, “What is an Author?” 118–19. 58. Goldstein, Teaching Art, 945–46; Herrmann, The Theory of Claude Perrault, 31–69. 59. Ibid., 36–39. On Chambray’s related Id´ee de la perfection de la peinture and Bosse, see Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” 234–36; B¨atschmann, Nicolas Poussin, 61–69. 60. Chambray, Parall`elle de l’architecture, 14. 61. Ibid. 62. Bosse, Trait´e des mani`eres de dessiner les orders d’architecture, 1; also Join-Lambert/ Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 277; Le Blanc, D’acide et d’encre, 258–65. 63. Join-Lambert/Pr´eaud, Abraham Bosse, savant graveur, 35. 64. Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory, 128–40; Herrmann, The Theory of Claude Perrault, 34–35; Goldstein, Teaching Art, 94–96. 65. Bosse/Weigert, Sentiments, 182. 66. See Goldstein, Teaching Art, 90–94, 99–102. 67. Ibid.

coda: poussin, scarron, bosse, and the economy of transgression 1. See Thuillier, Nicolas Poussin, 232–37; Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstacy of Saint Paul,” 114–16. 2. Jouanny, Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, 402. 3. Ibid, 419–20 and, Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” esp. note 10. 4. Jouanny, Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, 402:” Je suis marri de la peine qu’il a pris de me l’envoyer; mais, ce qui me fˆache davantage, il me menace d’un sien Virgile travesty, et d’une e´ pˆıtre qu’il m’a destin´ee dans le premier livre qu’il imprimera. Il pr´etend me faire rire comme les estropi´es comme lui; mais au contraire j’en devrais pleurer, voyant qu’un nouveau Erostrate se trouvre en notre pays.” See also Dempsey, “Poussin’s Ecstacy of Saint Paul,” 114, and note 7. Erostratus was known for burning down the temple of Diana at Ephesus as Scarron would thus be making himself famous by destroying another masterpiece of antiquity, the Aeneid.

180

notes to pages 161–163

5. Goldstein, “Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Art Theory and Ceiling Painting,” note 10; Goldstein, “The Meaning of Poussin’s Letter to De Noyers,” 233–39. 6. See earlier discussion, 57–8, and Beam, Laughing Matters, 240. 7. Fureti`ere, Dictionnaire universel, unpaginated: “farce.” 8. Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, 40–41. 9. Nicolas Boileau Despr´eaux, Art po´etique, 1674, 3; cited Segal, The Death of Comedy, 331; Beam, Laughing Matters, 241–42. 10. Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, 40–41. 11. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 103. 12. Ibid., 19.

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Art Bulletin Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Renaissance Quarterly

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209

Index

Acad´emie Franc¸aise, 115 Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 6–7, 122, 132, 133–4, 146, 154, 157–8 debate over Leonardo, 147, 161 perspective in, 146–7 Acad´emie Royale des Sciences, 136–8 acid, use of in etching, 18–19 actors. See Hˆotel de Bourgogne agent of change, 1, 10. See also Eisenstein Alberti, Cherubino, 26 Alberti, Leon-Battista, 134, 142, 146–8, 157 his On Painting, 134 Aldgrever, Heinrich, 26 Aldobrandini Wedding, 134 Aleaume, Jacques (on perspective), 147, 154 almanacs, 2–3, 107–8 ancien r´egime, 75, 116 Anderson, Benedict “imagined communities,” 41 Anne of Austria, 10, 108 her pregnancy, 109 Apelles, 143 Apostolid`es, Jean-Marie, 93 Apollo Belvedere, 134, 157 apprentice, 20–1 Aristotle, 98, 101–2, 104, 143, 147, 161 art and craft, valuation of, 25–6 Arti di Bologna, 44

“Atticism,” 132 Aubignac, Abb´e d’, 171 n. 2 Audran, G´erard, 41 engravings of Le Brun’s Battles of Alexander, 37 Auerbach, Eric, 94 “aura” of a work of art, 29. See also Benjamin authorship, the “author function.” See Foucault Augustine, Saint, 148 Advis charitables sur les diverses oeuvres et feuilles volantes de Sieur Girard Desargues (anonymous pamphlet), 154 Bacon, Francis, 22, 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9, 45–6, 78–9, 163, 169 n. 74. See also “carnivalesque ballads, 2–3, 56 ballets at court, 113–14 at the Bureau d’Adresse, 114 Le ballet politique, anonymous pamphlet, 114 The Ballet of Turlupin, 51 Balvay, Charles-Cl´ement (known as Bervic) engraving of the Laoc¨oon, 38 Bann, Stephen, 38, 42 banqueting, 72–3 Barthes, Roland, 35, 86, 124–5 Bellange, Jacques, 37, 145

211

index

and Desargues. See Desargues, perspective fans by, 58 fashion illustrations, 51–3 Bosse, and the Fronde, 116–17, 176 n. 34 on the history of painting, 145–6 on the history of printmaking, 26 as illustrator, 127–32 and the king, 107–17 his M´etiers, 47–51 “original” and “copy,” 28–31 on the origins of engraving, 24 pamphlets by, 153–5 on perspective, 150–1 posthumous revision of system, 41–2 as publisher, 16 and the “querelle des femmes,” 68–74 and religion, 85–90 and science, 95–105, 136–8 his system of laying lines, 28, 34–5 on technique, 19 theory of painting, 25, 142, 145–6 theory of printmaking, 25 treatise on etching and engraving, 25–8 and the theater, 56 training of, 37 and war, 91–2 word and image, 119–23 etchings/engravings by: L’accouchement, 63–4, Figure 21 Actors at the Hˆotel de Bourgogne, 56–7, Figure 17, 74 Almanach pour 1638 107–8, Figure 41 Alo¨e Americana (from Dodart, M´emoire pour sertvir a` l’histoire des plantes), 137, Figure 57 Apollo Belvedere, 134 L’Ariane (frontispiece), 129–31, Figure 53 The Art of Engraving, 23, Figure 5, 132 La b´en´ediction de la table, 89–90, Figure 35 Le capitaine fracasse, 79, Figure 31 Ce fardeau de paix et de guerre, 78, Figure 30 A Chameleon (after S´ebastien Leclerc), 138–9, Figure 58 Le clyst`ere, 49–50 Le contrat de marriage, 60–1, Figure 19 Le cordonnier, 48–9, Figure 14 Le courtesan suivant le dernier edit, 52–3, Figure 16

Bellori, Giovanno Pietro, 145 Belting, Hans, his Likeness and Presence, 86 Benjamin, Walter on mechanical reproduction, 29 on printmaking, 29 Bennett, Tony, 103–4 Beringhen, 31 biblical subjects in printmaking, 15–16 Bloch, R. Howard, 49 Blondel, Franc¸ois, 156 Blum, Andr´e, 4–5 Bocaccio, 58, 62 Bodin, Jean, 15 bodily lower stratum, 78. See also Bakhtin Boeckel, Carel van, 40 Boetius a` Bolswert engraving of Rubens’ Christ on the Cross between two Sinners, 38 Boileau, Nicolas, 162 Bollˆeme, Genevi`eve, 107 Bonasone, Giulio, 26, 36 book illustration, 126–41 book police, 176n. 28. booksellers, 58 and censorship, 114. See also printers Bosse in the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, 154–5, 180 n. 52 books and pamphlets by: Catalogue des traittez que le Sr Bosse a mis au jour, 6 Mani`ere universelle de Mr Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective, 146 Le peintre converty aux r`egles de son art, 145, 157 Repr´esentations g´eom´etrales de plusieurs parties des bastiments . . . , 140 Sentimens sur la distinction des diversd mani`eres de peinture et de graveure . . . , 25, 32, 134, 145, 149, 157 Trait´e des mani`eres de dessiner les orders d’architecture, 156 Trait´e des mani`eres de graver en taille douce . . . , 19 Trait´e des pratiques g´eom´etrales et perspectives enseign´ees dans l’Acad´emie Royale de la peinture et sculpture, 157 and Callot, 25–8, 31 “Calvinist printmaker,” 9–10 career of, 5–6, 37 and the city, 43–51 his Cris, 44–7

212

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Le crocheteur, 47, Figure 12 La dame suivant l’edit, 53 David and Goliath, 116, Figure 45 Dives and Lazarus, 81 Donner a` boire a` ceux qui ont soif, 120–1, Figure 48 The e´choppe, 21, Figure 4 L’En´eide de Virgil (title-page), 127–9, Figure 52, 131–2 L’enfant prodigue quitte la maison paternelle, 80–3, Figure 33 The Engraver and the Etcher, 14, Figure 1, 18, 20 Ensevelir les morts, 120–1, Figure 49, 123 La femme batant son mari, 65–6, Figure 23 Les femmes a` table en l’absence de leurs maris, 72–3, Figure 27 The Fortune of France, 16–17, Figure 3 La Galerie du Palais, 58–9, Figure 18, 74, 94, 126, 131 The Intaglio Printers, 15, Figure 2 Le jardin de la noblesse franc¸oise (title-page), 51–2, Figure 15 Lec¸ons donn´ees dans l’Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture (title-page), 133–5, Figure 56 Lettre amoureuse du capitaine extravagant, 68–9, Figure 25 Loger les p`elerins, 119, Figure 46 Louis XIII as the Hercules Gallicus, 111, Figure 44 Le marchand de mort-aux-rats, 46, Figure 11 Le mari battant sa femme, 65–7, Figure 24 Mariage a` la campagne, 64 Le mari´ee reconduite chez elle, 64–5, Figure 22 The Noble Painter, 23 La noblesse franc¸aise a` l’´eglise, 51. L’ou¨ıe, 96–8, Figure 39 Painting and Engraving, 27, Figure 6, 127 Pr´eparation du soldat Chr´etien au combat spirituel, 87–8, Figure 34 R´eponse de la demoiselle a` la lettre du capitaine extravagant, 68–71, Figure 26 R´epr´esentation g´eom´etrales de plusieurs parties des bastiments (illustration to), 139–40, Figure 59 The Sack of Troy (from L’En´eide), 129–31, Figure 54

La sage-femme pr´esente le nouveau-n´e au roi, 110, Figure 43 La saign´ee (drawing), 32–3, Figure 7 La saign´ee (etching), 32–4, Figure 8 Un soldat de faction, 90–1, Figure 36 Telaristus (poster for), 82–3 Le toucher, 95–7, Figure 38 Vestir les nuds, 120–3, Figure 47 Les vierges sages s’entretiennent des f´elicit´es c´elestes, 59, 80–2, Figure 32 La villagoise, 94–5, Figure 37 Le visite a` l’accouch´ee, 61–3, Figure 20, 74–5, 92 La voeux du roi et de la reine a` la vierge, 109, Figure 42 La vue, 99–104, Figure 40, 136 Borges, Jorge, 128 Bourdon, S´ebastien, 132–3 etchings by: Ensevelir les morts (Bury the Dead), 123, Figure 51 Vestir les nuds (Clothe the Naked), 122, Figure 50 [at margin] the bourgeois (bourgeoisie), 10, 62–3, 92–5 definitions of, 92 and mercantile fortunes, 93–4 in Moli`ere’s theater, 55, 93 rise of, 54, 94 Bourgoign on perspective, 147 Brahe, Tycho, 104 Br´ebiette, Pierre, 44 Bringing up Father, 66 broadsides, 1–3, 56, 109 Brosse, Guy de la, 136 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 146–7 Brunfels Herbal, 136 Bruno, Giordano, 105 Buffon his Histoire naturelle, 137 Bullant, Jean, 142 Bureau d’Adresse, 94, 144 ballets in, 114 conf´erences in, 104–5, 143–4 Gazette in, 92 Burke, Peter, 107 burin engraving, 18. See also engraving burlesque, 159 burr, 18. See also drypoint Cabinet du Roi, 37 Calamatta, Luigi his engraving of the Mona Lisa, 38

213

index

Callot, Jacques, 5–6, 26–7, 36, 41, 44, 51, 85–7, 90, 159 and collectors, 31 etching technique, 19 etchings by: La lev´ee du si`ege de Cazal, 91–2 Miseries and Misfortunes of War, 90 Nobility of Lorraine, 51 A Print Seller, 48, Figure 13 Temptation of Saint Anthony, 77, Figure 29 Varie figure, Gobbi, 76–7, Figure 28 View of the Pont-Neuf and the Tour de Nesle, 43–4, Figure 9 Calvin, Jean, 88, 119, 173 n. 7 Calvinism, 5, 86, 88–9 Campanella, Tommaso his The City of the Sun, 102, 104–5 canon taught by means of engravings, 36–9 Capitelli, Bernardo, 134 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da), 144 Carducho, 144 his Di`alogos de la pintura, 144 carnivalesque, 9, 77–80, 113. See also Bakhtin carnival songs, 170 n. 9 Caron, Antoine, 132 Carracci, Agostino, 8, 26, 36 Carracci, Annibale, 145 his Arti di Bologna, 44 caquets, 62, 72, 75, 92 Carrier, Hubert, 153 Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto, 41 Catholic Church, 22, 67, 85–9, 107 censorship, 114 Chambray, Roland Fr´eart Sieur de, 157 his Parall`elle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne, 156 on perspective, 179 n. 36 Chantelou. Paul Fr´eart de Chantelou Poussin’s Seven Sacraments in his collection, 14 and Scarron, 159–62 Chapelain, Jean his La pucelle ou la France delivr´ee, 58, 129 Charas, Moyse, 137–8 Charivari, 64 Chastillon, Louis de, 136 “cheap” print, 14, 47, 107, 127 Church Fathers, 95–6

Ciartres. See Langlois, Franc¸ois childbirth, 63–4 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 58 civilization and the “civilizing process.” See Elias, Norbert clothes laws concerning, 54 and social status, 54–5. See also fashion Cochin, Charles-Nicolas his edition of Bosse’s Trait´e des mani`eres de graver, 41 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 114, 123 Collaerts, the (Hans, Adriaen), 36 collecting and collectors, 31–2 colporteurs, 43, 46 Commedia dell’arte, 56, 74–5, 77, 163 Com´edie italienne, 56 conf´erences in the Bureau d’Adresse, 104–5 in the Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 157 copies, 28–31 Copernicus, 101–2 copper plate engraving. See engraving “copy,” Bosse’s definition of, 8, 28–31. See also “original” copyright, 31. See also property rights Corneille, Pierre, 58, 128 his La Galerie du Palais, 58 his La suivante, 60 Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 144 Cortona, Pietro da, copy of Aldobrandini Wedding, 134 Counter-Reformation. See Reformation Courantos, 92 Courb´e, Augustin, 126 Courbet, Gustave, 120 Cousin, Jean, 134 his Livre de portraiture, 143 his Livre de perspective, 143, 147 cross-dressing, 113–14. See also transvestism cuckoldry, 64–6 cuivre rouge, 20. See also engraving cul-de-lampe (tail-piece), 126 Curabelle, against Desargues, 154 curieux, 31 Dahl, Folke, 2 D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond. See Encyclop´edie Dante Alighieri, 101 Darnton, Robert, 20, 40–1 the Dauphin, 109–10

214

index

Davis, Natalie Zemon, 65–6, 103 debating society. See Bureau d’Adresse d´eclass´e, 93 dedications, 128 Della Bella, Stefano, 36, 41, 90 etchings by: Les oeuvres de Scarron (frontispiece), 160, Figure 60 The Pont-Neuf in Paris, 45, Figure 10 demonstration, 151–3. See also proof Dente, Marco, 26, 36, 135 De Passe, Crispijn the Younger, 40 De Passe, Magdalena, 17 Desargues, Girard, 6, 153 Career, 150 Desargues’ Theorum, 150 on perspective, 146–7. See also Bosse his works: Exemple de l’une des mani`eres universelles du Sr. G.D.L . . . , 150 Descartes, Ren´e, 94, 150 Cogito ergo sum, 152 La dioptrique, 99 on engraving, 35 his Le monde, 99 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean his L’Ariane, 58, 129–31 his Ballet de la prosperit´e des armes de la France, 114 dessin (dessein), 32 Diderot, Denis on the crafts, 22. See also Encyclop´edie disegno, 25, 143 division of labor in printmaking, 21–2 Dodart, Denis his Histoire des plantes, 136 Donatello, 146, 148 Don Quixote, 45 doubt, 151–3. See also skepticism dramatis personae, 74 drawings, preparatory, 32–4 dress, importance of. See clothes, fashion Dryden, John, 171 n. 2 drypoint, 18 Dubreuil, Jean, on perspective, 147, 154 Dufresnoy, Charles-Alphonse his L’art de peinture, 144 Dumas, Alexandre his Three Musketeers, 114 D¨urer, Albrecht, 13, 26, 30, 38–9, 90, 134, 144, 147

his Knight, Death, and the Devil, 88 his Life of the Virgin, 39 his The Mass of Angels, 125 “D¨urer Renaissance,” 39 Duro, Paul, 155 “echoppe,” 27, 32. See also engraving, tools of “economy of transgression.” See Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon Edelinck, G´erard, 37 Edict of Nantes, 86 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 1–2, 4, 10, 138 Elias, Norbert “civilizing process,” 80 Encyclop´edie (Diderot and d’Alembert) printmaking in, 42, 168 n. 36 engraving, 13 burin engraving, 8, 18 copper plate, 15 copyright issues, 31 division of labor, 16–17 after drawings, 32–6 etching compared with, 26–7 forgery issues, 39–40 history of, 26 linear system, 34–5 origins of, 23–4 press, 15 as reproduction, 36–9 size of edition, 30 steel, 42 stipple, 42 tools, 27 wood, 42 Enlightenment, 22, 42 ephemera, 1–2, 9, 56, 59, 107–8 Erasmus, Desiderius, 72, 93 his Enchiridon or Handbook of the Christian Soldier, 88 Erostratus, 160–1, 180 n. 4 L’Estoile, Pierre, on prices of prints, 13–14 e´tat, 54 etching, 18–19 acid, 13 Callot’s method, See Callot foul-biting, 19 grounds, soft and hard, 20 revival of, 42. See also Bosse Euclid his Optics, 148 eyeglasses, 100–01 Exodus, Book of, 24, 89

215

index

Fabliaux, 62, 64 farce, 56 farceur, 11, 50, 161 fashion, 9, 52 and social status, 54. See also clothes Feiffer, Jules, 125 F´elibien, Andr´e his Entretiens sur les vies et les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres.., 145, 157 the Five Senses, 95–105 Floris, Frans, 39 Fludd, Robert, 103 Fontaine, Andr´e, 5 food, in the streets of Paris, 44–5 forgeries and piracy, 8, 39–40 Foucault, Michel “author function,” 155 his History of Sexuality, 70 foul biting, 18. See also etching Freud, Sigmund, 48–9 Frisius, Simon, 5 the Fronde (frondeur), 116–17, 153–4, 176 n. 34 Fuchs’s Herbal, 136 Fumaroli, Marc, 83 Fureti`ere, Antoine, 70 on comedy and farce, 162 his Roman bourgeois, 93 Galen, 50, 62 gallic, 111 Galileo (Galileo Galilei), 10, 98, 136 his Siderius Nuncius, 99 Gargantua, See Rabelais Gassendi, Pierre, 99 Gaston d’Orl´eans (see Orl´eans) Gaultier and perspective, 147 Gaultier Garguille, 50, 57–8, 162 Gauricus, Pomponius, 134 Gazette, 44, 92. See also Th´eophraste Renaudot Genette, G´erard (on the “paratext”), 128 Gentileschi, Orazio, 145 gentilhomme, 75 geometry, 147–53 Gheyn, Jacques de, 90 Ghiberti, 148 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 144 Gillot, Claude, 163 Giorgione, 37 Goltzius, Hendrick, 26, 28, 135, 145

his forgeries of D¨urer and Lucas van Leyden, 39–40 Gombaud, Antoine, Chevalier de M´er´e, 76 Gomberville (Marin le Roy, seigneur de) his Polexandre, 58, 129 Gombrich, E.H., 35 Goodman, Elise, 63 Graf, Urs, 90 Greek language, 112–13, 115, 118, 163 Greenberg. Mitchell, 162 Greenblatt, Stephen “self-fashioning,” 75 Grivel, Marianne, 30 grotesque body, 78 Gros Guillaume, 57 Guevara, Antonio de his Dispraise of the Court and Praise of Rustic Life, 94 Guillain, Simon etchings after Annibale’s Arti di Bologna, 44 Gutenberg, Johann, 26 Hals, Frans, 72 Hanley, Sarah, 60 harmony, 98. See also music Harth, Erica, 63 Hayter, Stanley William, 42 hearing, Sense of, 96–8 Heemskerck, Martin van, 39 Henri IV, 43 Hercules Farnese, 134 Hercules Gallicus, 111, 115 heresy, 22 Hippocrates, 50, 62 Hobbes, Thomas his Leviathan, 127–8 Hogarth, William, 9, 84 Hollar, Wenceslaus, 40 Homer, 173 n. 47 his Odyssey, 113 hommes de letters, 112, 118 hortus conclusus, 96 Hˆotel de Bourgogne, 56–8, 162 Housebook Master, 125 Huguenots, 85 humanist, 29 Huret, Gr´egoire, 147, 153 Idea. See Neoplatonism identity clothes and, 51–5 illustration. See book illustration

216

index

Imprimerie Royale du Louvre, 132. See also Richelieu intaglio printing processes, 13–14, 19, 23, 25, 34 drypoint, 18 engraving, 13–18 etching, 18–19 mezzotint, 42. See also drypoint, engraving, etching, mezzotint Ivins, William, Jr. on “syntax,” 35, 38 Jansenism, 88 Jardin du roy, 136 Jeanneret, Michel, 73 Jesuits, 83, 88 “job printing,”1.See also ephemera Jodelet (Julien Bedeau), 58 Johns, Adrian, 4, 17 Jombert, Charles-Antoine his edition of Bosse’s Trait´e des mani`eres de graver, 41–2 jongleurs, 64 Joubert, Laurent his A Treatise on Laughter, 80 Katzenjammer Kids, 66 Kolve, V.A., 78 labor, division of. See engraving Lagniet, Jacques, 44, 51, 100 La Hyre, Laurent de, 132–3 Landau, David, 31 Lander, Jesse M., 155 Langlois, Franc¸ois, dit Ciartres, 115 Latin, 3, 10, 83, 103, 112, 118, 163 lnternational language of print culture, 41, 115 laughter, 80. See also Joubert laws concerning marriage and property, 60–1 laying lines, system of. See Bosse Le Bicheur, Jacques, 147, 153 Le Blanc, Marianne, 5 Le Blond, Roland (“Le Blond le jeune”), 16, 44, 47, 115 Le Brun, Charles, 161 his Battles of Alerxander, 41 his conf´erence on expression, 157 ennobled, 54 Le Clerc on perspective, 147 Leonardo da Vinci, 134, 141, 143, 147, 148 his “treatise,” 153

les ponts-neufs, 44 letter-writing, 70 lettres galantes, 70 Leu, Thomas de, 40 Leyden, Lucas van, 26, 90 forged by Goltzius, 39 L’Hermite, Tristan his La mariane, 126 libelles, 154 “liberal” arts, 22–3, 25–6 libertines, 151 libraire, 58 librairies e´talans, 43, 153 libraries of Cardinal Mazarin, 127. See also Naud´e lingua franca, visual, 41 literacy, 3–4, 23 lithography, 42 Locke, John, 153 L’Orme, Philibert de his Le premier tome de l’architecture, 142 Louis le Dieudonn´e (Louis XIV so called), 109 Louis XIII, 10, 24, 56, 106–7, 111–16, 136 and the ballet, 113–14 Louis XIV, 31, 37, 114, 116, 132, 136, 164 court ceremonies, 106 and Moli`ere, 162 love letters, 68–71. See also Petrarch Loyseau, Charles his Trait´e des ordres et simples dignitez, 22 Luther, Martin, 57, 86, 119 on printing, 24 scatological language of, 77 Mairet his Sylvie, 60 Malraux, Andr´e, 38 Mander, Karel van his Schilderboeck, 26, 144 Mannerism, 144–5 Mantegna, Andrea, 38, 147–8 Mantuana, Diana, 17 Marcantonio Raimondi, 8, 25–6, 28, 31, 36, 135 D¨urer copied by, 36, 39 after Raphael, 36 Marchand, Prosper design for frontispiece, 176 n. 1 Marguerite de Navarre her Heptam´eron, 62 Marie de M´edicis, 107 Mariette, Pierre, 55

217

index

market, 46 peddlers, 46 shops, 14, 20–1 Marolles, Michel de, 31 marriage, 59–64 Martin, Henri, 154 Marx, Karl, 92 Masaccio, 146–8 mathematics, 146–53. See also geometry Maximilian, Emperor, 39 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules and the Fronde, 117, 153 his alleged homosexuality, 117 his library, 127 Mazarinades and Bosse, 116–17, 153 “mechanical arts,” 22, 25, 37, 167 n. 18, 19 “mechanical reproduction,” 125. See also Benjamin Meckenem, Israel van, 125 Meleager, 134 Mellan, Claude, 31, 85, 106, 133 engravings by: Biblia Sacra (frontispiece after Poussin), 132–3, Figure 55 The full Moon and its Quarters, 99 The Sudarium, 85–6 Virgil, Opera, 132 membre honoraire, 6 men of letters readers of Greek and Latin, 115. See also hommes de lettres Mercure Franc¸ois, 92 Merian, Maria Sibylla, 17 M´erian, Mathieu, 5, 37 Mersenne, P`ere Marin mathematics as a model for knowledge, 151–2 and music, 98 his La v´erit´e des sciences, 151 mezzotint, 42 Michelangelo Buonarotti, 26, 144, 152 microscope, 100 Mignon and perspective, 147 Mimesis, 124 Minerva, as the “mother of printing,” 25 mirror, 101–3 misogyny Moli`ere’s, 73 Moli`ere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 54, 62, 66, 76, 94 and Louis XIV, 162

plays by: Le bourgeois gentilhomme, 55 La critique de l’´ecole des femmes, 162 Malade imaginaire, 162 Mischief of Scapin, 162 Les pr´ecieuses ridicule, 73 Tartuffe, 55 Montaigne, Michel de, 73 More, Thomas his Utopia, 113 Moreau, Pierre his edition of Aeneid, 127, 131 Mousnier, Roland, 75, 170 n. 19 music, 96–8 Nanteuil, Robert, 106 nationalism, and print culture, 40–1. See also Anderson, Benedict Naud´e, Gabriel on the origins of printing, 24 Neoplatonism, 7, 144, 148, 158 Nevizan, Jean his Sylvae nuptialis, 67 Niceron, P`ere Jean-Franc¸ois on perspective, 147 newspapers, 92 Newton, Isaac, Sir, 100 Nouveau mercure gallant, 51 optics, 99–101 geometrical, 148 Ordre du Saint-Esprit, 54 Orl´eans, Prince Gaston d’ and Louis XIII, 109 Ovid, 143, 161 “original,” Bosse’s definition of, 8, 28–31. See also copy “painter-etcher,” 18. See also peintre graveur Palissy, Bernard, on prices of prints, 13 Palladio, Andrea, 156 pamphlets, 109 explosion of, 153. See also Mazarinades Pantheon, 156 Panofsky, Erwin, 88, 144 Pantagruel, See Rabelais paper, 15 high quality for book illustrations, 127 paragone, 143 Parasole, Isabella, 17 paratext (visual aids), 128. See also Genette Parigi, Giulio, 36

218

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Paris, 45 maps of, 43 Parshall, Peter, 31 Pascal, Blaise, 94 patrons and patronage printed dedications to, 127 Paul, Saint, 87 peintres graveurs, 36 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de, 99 P´elerin, Jean, 147 Perrault, Claude, 156 Perrier, Franc¸ois his Segmenta nobelium, 135 perspective, 146–53. See also Acad´emie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, Bosse perspectiva artificialis, perspectiva naturalis, 149 Petrarch, 7, 70 photography, 29. See also Benjamin photogravures and phototypes, 42 Piero della Francesca, 147–8, 149 Piles, Roger de his Abreg´e de la vie des peintres, 157 his Cours de peinture par principes, 157 on prints and the history of art, 37 Plato, 94, 98, 101, 102, 147, 173 n. 47, 176 n. 25 his Republic, 148 his Symposium, 72–3 Plautus, 113 play-text, 56 Pliny the Elder, 143 Plutarch, 58 pointes, 20 politesse (and letter writing), 70 Pont-Neuf, 43, 45, 153 Popkin, Richard H., 151 pornography, origins of, 171 n. 14 Posner, Donald, 29 posters, 82 Poussin, Nicolas, 11, 37, 132–3 Bosse’s opinion of, 145 his Ecstacy of St. Paul, 161 as “peintre philosophe,” 159 and Scarron, 11, 160–2. See also Mellan Pr´eaud, Maxime, 77 Pr´ecieuses, 70, 72 press rolling bed, 20 pressmen, complaints about, 22 prices of prints, 13–14, 166 n. 1

print culture studies, 2, 7 printing, 8 coupled with compass and gunpowder, 22 divine inspiration of, 24 invention of, 24 printing shops, 15–16, 20–1 printers complaints about, 20–2 nationality of, 20 relations with authors, 126 prints and drawings, 32–6 early, 13–14 “original” and “copy,” 8 prints without borders, 40–1 printing and publishing as “divine” gift, 24 print technology, 13–14 privileges, 17 Privilegio Regis, 115 propaganda, anti-Catholic, 77 property, and marriage, 60 property rights, 8. See also copyright proportion, 143 Protestantism, 10, 22, 85–90, 107 Psalms, 101 Ptolemy, 104 publishers, 16 Pulchinello, 77 “Pyrrhonism,” 151. See also skepticism Pythagoras and Pythagoreans, 98, 102, 147 Pyrro of Elis, 151 querelle des femmes (“woman question”), 9, 68 Quintilian his Rhetorica ad Herennium, 70 Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 58, 70, 80, 113, 162 his Gargantua, 64, 73 his Pantagruel, 80 his Tiers livre, 62 Raphael (Sanzio), 36–7, 133–4, 144–5, 152 and Marcantonio, 36 Poussin compared with, 145 reader-response theory, 165 n. 7 recueils de costumes, 51 Reformation, 9, 155 Rembrandt van Rijn as “painter-etcher,” 18, 36, 41 Renaudot, Th´eophraste, 92, 94, 102, 104–5, 114. See also Bureau d’Adresse

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reproductive printmaking, 36–9 and collecting, 31 and Marcantonio, 31 and Raphael, 36 Reynolds, Sir Joshua on Rubens’ Christ on the Cross between Two Sinners and the engraving of it, 38 rhetoric, 70. See also Quintilian Ribera, Jusepe de, 145 Richelieu, Armand Jean de Plessis, Cardinal, 112 founds French Academy, 115 as the French Hercules, 115 policies of, 112 his “print police,” 114. See also Imprimerie Royale du Louvre. See also Th´eophraste Renaudot Richeome, Father Louis his Tableaux sacr´es, 124 reversal of images, 32 Richer, Pierrre, 44 Ripa, Cesare, 25, 101 robe, 94 Robert, Nicolas, 36 rocker (mezzotint), 42 rolling bed press, 20 Roman de la rose, 96 Ronchi, Vasco, 100 Rosa, Salvator, 36 Rubens, Peter Paul, 38 ruelle, 63

Sebillet, Thomas his Art po¨etique franc¸oys, 67 secrecy concerning craft techniques, 19–20 Seneca, 58 his Octavia, 113 Serlio, Sebastiano, 142 Serres, Olivier de, 89, 150 Seven Acts of Mercy, 122–4 Seven Deadly Sins, 72 skepticism, 151 Society of Orders, 51–5, 170 n. 19 soties, 64 Shakespeare, William, 171 n. 2 his Taming of the Shrew, 66 sight, Sense of, 98–105 skimmington, 65 smell, Sense of, 96 Spaniards stereotypes of, 45, 119 Spinola, Marquis de, 90 spinning and sexuality, 51 Spranger, Bartholom¨aus, 145 Stallybrass, Peter, 163 Stella, Jacques, 37 Stoics, 161 Sublet de Noyers, Franc¸ois, 132 succ`es-de-scandale, 132 sun as eye of God, 101 “syntax” in prints, 35, 38. See also Ivins, Jr.

Sadeler, Aegidius, 26, 36 Saint-Igny, Jean de, 37 Saint Louis, 106 Saint-Simon, Claude de Rouvroy, Duc de description of court of Louis XIV, 106–7 salons, 73 Salvatus, Claude, 99 Sarat, Agnan, 74 Sarrabat, Catherine (Bosse’s wife), 5 Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 156 Scarron, Paul, 11, 58, 153 as “cul-de-jatte,” 159 his Recueil de quelques oeuvres burlesques, 159 and Poussin, 11, 159–62 his Typhon, ou la Gigantomachie, 160 Scholastic disputation, 104 Scientific Revolution, 10–11, 95–6, 136, 151 scribes and copyists, 144 Scribner, Robert, 77, 86

taille douce, 19 tailor (Bosse’s father), 5 Tallemant des R´eaux, G´ed´eon, 162 Tasso, Torquato, 161 his Gerusalemme liberata, 131 Tavernier, Melchior, 5, 37, 40, 44, 114 Telaristus, 82 telescopes, 98–105, 136 Tempesta, Antonio, 36 Testelin, Henri his Sentiments des plus habiles peintres, 157 the theater, 56–9, 75–6 audiences, 56–7 criticism of, 57, 171 n. 2. See also Hˆotel de Bourgogne Theater of Marcellus, 156 Theatrum Mundi, 9, 75, 106 theses, 1 the Thirty Years War, 90 Thomassin, Philippe, 36

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Thuillier, Jacques, 5 Titian, 37, 144, 152 Tory, Geoffroy his Champ fleury, 143 touch, Sense of, 98 transgression, 159 transvestitism. See cross-dressing Trent (Tridentine), 86 Tristan L’Hermite, Franc¸ois his La Mariane, 58, 131 Trudeau, Gary, 125 Tufte, Edward R., 138, 141 Turks, Ottomon stereotypes of, 119 Turlupin (Henri Legrand dit), 58 Uccello, Paolo, 147–149 Ulysses, 176 n. 25. See also Homer Urf´e, Honor´e d’ his Astrea, 58 Valentin de Boulogne, 145 varnish, as an etching ground, 19 Vasari. Giorgio, 19, 143–4, 152, 169 n. 61 his Vite, 25, 149, 157 Vaulezard on perspective, 147, 154 Veneziano, Agostino, 135 Venus de’Medici, 134

vernacular translation movement, 152 vernis dur, 19 Vigen`ere, Blaise de his Images of Philostratus, 132 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da, 156 Vignon, Claude, 132 illustrations to L’Ariane, 129 illustrations to La pucelle, 129–30 Villamena, Francesco, 26 Virgil, 127, 161 Vitruvius Pollio, 134, 142, 156 war, 90–2 Watt, Tessa, 2–3 Watteau, Antoine, 163 Weigert, Roger-Armand, 11 White, Allon, 163 women as gossips, 62 as sexually voracious, 62 Wood, Christopher, 30 woodblock technique, 127 woodcut, 13, 29, 127 devotional, 13 word and image, 124–5 workshop training, 166 n. 14 Yates, Frances, 103

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