WORD AND IMAGEPUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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French painting of theAncien Regime
http://www.cambridge.orgNORMAN BRYSONFellow of King's College, Cambridge
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of any part may take place withoutthe written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published Ig81
First paperback edition 1983Reprinted 1985 1986 1987 19941995 19972000
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
Library of Congress catalogue card number: 81-10124
British Libmry Cawloguing in Publication DataBryson, NormanWord and image.r. Painting, French 2. Painting, Modern-17th-18th century - FranceI. Title
759·4 )!D546
ISBN 0521 27654 3 paperback
"CAMBRIDGE<: - UNIVERSITY PRESS
2 The legible body,' LeBrun
F R ENe H p A I N T 1N G in the mi ddle of the seventeenth centuryfaces a crisis which is at once institutional, political, and semio-tic. At the level of their institutional organisation, the paintersfound themselves forced to choose between two equallyunde-sirable alternatives: either corporatism, or favouritism; eitherto submit to the exorbitant authority of a guild (Mattrise) or torely on the haphazard patronage of the Crown. 1Membershipof the guild was essentially closed: it passed, like other artisanalfranchises, from father to son; admission from the outsiderequired apprenticeship to an already accredited master, andeven here the franchise was in the gift of the guild's committeeUure) and not of the individual studio. The effect of thisarchaic corporate structure was the monopolisation of artisticproduction: those who were not guild-members were intheory not permitted to paint professionally, and those whotried to do so ran the risk of having their work physicallyconfiscated. 'One sees the arts in France reduced to a mechaniccaptivity, subordinated to the tyrannical rule of its own ser-vants, and relegated to the category of mere craft (metier) ';2 'InFrance, the fine arts are submitted to the oppression of acorporation that degrades them, chained by an avid and ignor-ant group of committees made up of base workmen withneither vision nor skill.l" The word artiste, with its modernconnotations of spirituality, individual freedom, and a certainmystique of creativity, was not yet current: language obligedthe painters to describe themselves as artisans.
The only recourse open to painters was direct appeal to theCrown, and here there was limited success. From 1608 chosenartists were allowed lodging in royal residences, the right totwo apprentices, exemption from guild membership and dues,and lettres de brevet that styled them as Painter or Sculptor to theKing, the Queen, or the Children of France. But by the 1640S
the guild began actively to resist this challenge to its authority;in r647 it petitioned the newly authoritative Parlement torestrict the number of Painters to the King and to the Queen tosix, and to prohibit independent artists from accepting anykind of commission from the Church. Already a politicalschism was developing among the painters as a social group:the guild, weakened by the death of its leader Vouet, relied forsupport on the power of the Parisian bourgeoisie expressed in 29
30 WORD AND IMAGE the Parlement; the independents, menaced by that power,turned to the Crown and the Court.
One outstanding figure possessed the artistic authority, theindependence, and the political support to begin to reorganisethis closed-shop professional framework: Poussin. But Pous-sin remained committed to a life of exile in Rome, and theattempts of Richelieu and his aides to lure him to Paris hadresulted only in a visit which, though brief, was long enoughto persuade Poussin that administrative responsibilities werenot for him." By default, the task fell to a secessionist groupheaded by Charles LeBrun. Almost all were history painters,and almost all had connections with the Court: LcBrun him-self enjoyed the direct patronage of the Chancellor, Seguier."With the war cry of'Libertas artibus restituta ', in March 1648,the group founded the Academic, and in the first years of itsestablishment attracted a sufficient number of painters to con-stitute a rival body to the Maitrise, Yet the creation of theAcademic, so far from solving the institutional problem,instead inaugurated a division amongst the painters which wasto have far-reaching consequences for the future. While thehistory painters were in the Academic, the little mastersremained within the old framework. From its inception, theAcademic divided French painting into two provinces, that ofhomo significal7s, and that ofl1OlI1O faber. The final ascendancy ofthe Academic over the Maitrise marks the institutional! y sanc-tioned supremacy of those who painted by text over thosewho painted without it.
The consolidation of the Academic is part of the generalmovement of political ccntralisation which began when LouisXIV made his decision, in 1661, to govern 'alone'. This, ineffect, meant government by ministers with direct responsi-bility to the Crown; and, with the arts, the extension of thepowers of the Ministre des Elitiments, Colbert. In 1663 Colbertbegan his full-scale work of instituting an artistic state mon-opoly. The process is typified by the case of tapestry: beforethe reorganisation, the tapestry studios were dispersed inateliers tbroughout Paris; from 1663, they were assembledtogether into the Manujacture Royale des Gobelins under a direc-torship delegated by Colbert to Leflrun, who in the same yearwas ennobled and raised to the status of First Painter to theKing. Already this brought over two hundred weavers andfifty painters under Lebrun's administrative control. In thesame year, the A cademie received its full recognition andsupport from the state. Since their secession from the guild, theacademicians had languished: since the great days of theiremancipation in 1648 their number had been reduced byfifteen deaths." The splendid isolation of the Academic failedto attract younger painters, who feared the hostility of the
Maitrise. But with the visible support of the King, and thebureaucratic power of Colbert, the sense of threat passed fromthe guild to the Academic, and the younger artists defected indroves: in 1663 alone, more than fifty painters joined. Thework of centralisation developed momentum. In r667 afurther decree patent grouped together all the goldworkers,engravers, mosaicists, cbenists and decorators in a singlecompany. An imminent and colossal project required maxi-mal submission to a common goal: Versailles; and as Versailleswent into full production, the artists under the direct authorityof LeBrun ran to the hundreds. It is an index of his personalpower that after 1675 only his signature could authorise thedecrees of the Academic, of which Colbert had made himChancellor and Rector. 7
LeBrun is the site of convergence of two great forces:bureaucracy, and text. Almost before he is a painter, he is abureaucrat, and the profile of his career ('career' is the opera-tivc word) is that of the eminent civil servant. 8 He was neverwithout an immediate state patron - Seguier, Fouquet, Col-bert; and only at the death of Colbert in r683 did he finally fallfrom favour. His endurance is that of a government ministry.And this bureaucrat is a man of the Word. At once he claimedfor the centraliscd Academic a power which had hitherto beenexerted onl y by the Church and the Crown: the right to dictateto the painters the texts which their work was to illustrate.in [663, he instituted the Annual Prize, using as text 'theheroic exploits of the King'; in 1666, the Prix de Rome, wherethe subject of the competition is chosen from Scripture. Thisright not onl y determined the paranoid competitiveness whichwas to distinguish Prcnchpainting for the next two centuries,but ensured the supremacy of a certain kind of painting -discursive; and the insertion of the discursive into the figuralparallels both the insertion of the monarch into the COI11-
munity of painters through the delegation of Colbert andLeBrun, and the personal dictatorship of LeBrun within theAcademic. The shape of the state and of the institutionalstructure of painting determine the shape of the painterlysign.
The atmosphere of the Academie after r663 becomesfiercely linguistic. In r648, while history painting dominatedover the 'lower' genres in terms of personnel, the Academicwas still basically a cenacle, and it had its material problems:whereas the guilds collected dues from their members, thesecessionists relied on the modest payments of pupils, and ontheir own intermittent contributions." The structure wasamateur in the sense that no official policies prevailed. Butafter 1663, not only does painting start to emanate - for thefirst time on any scale in a secular context - from empowered
THE LEGIBLE BODY:LEBRUN
31
32 WORD AND IMAGE texts: the act of painting is surrounded by a verbal mystique.In r666, at the instigation of Colbert, LeBrun introducedthe practice of the Discourse: every month a work from theroyal collection was to be discussed before the publicby the Academic assembled as a whole.V' Whereas theguilds had transmitted instruction by practical example,now instruction takes the form of codex, and an officialstenographer is employed to transcribe and later to publishthe proceedings of the debates. In terms of his own work,LeBrun insists for the first time on the Livret: his manifestowork for Louis XIV was accompanied by a lengthy treatiseand description by Pelibien, later the Academic's chief scribe.In r673, the series of his paintings known as the Battles wasdisplayed before the public with a complex explanatorypamphlet; and it was to be the same with the general icon-ography of Versailles, and with LeBrun's series of paintingsfor the Grande Galerie.
The Discourses not only, through verbal description ofthe works in the royal collection, focus the word on theimage with an intensity that is without precedent; they reveala bias in favour of the discursive that is at times bizarre. Inr667, LeBrun delivered a major address on Poussin'spainting entitled Ellezer and Rebccca.n When the debate wasthrown open, he was confronted by a strange obj ection: itwas noted that Poussin had omitted the animals which, in thescriptural account, had attended the scene; the Biblical camelsfeature nowhere in the image; surely this constituted a breachof decorum. Had LeBrun argued that Poussin was free to omitthese creatures, a dangerous precedent might be set, and hal-lowed by the Academic, for present and future painters todepart from the authority of the text; and since the second ofLeBrun's great political advances on behalf of discursive paint-ing, the Prix de Rome, was still in its infancy, such a tendencyhad to be nipped in the bud at once. On the other hand, Poussincould not be discredited: alone among the painters chosen fordebate he represented France - the rest were Italians; and theright of the Academic to class his work with that of Titian andRaphael was part of its general chauvinist mission.P What issignificant about the debate is that the issue of bureaucraticcontrol of the painter and textual control of the image havefused into near-identity. LeBrun at first hedges the question:he argues that the famous beasts have been omitted in favourof the work's unity.
N ow, it might seem that in taking this line LeBrun is placinga 'compositional' requirement over a discursive one; butinstead of the term 'composition', with its twentieth-centuryabstractionist connotations, of pure formalism and asemanticfigurality, we should stay with the word LeBrun in fact uses, a
word that shows the proximity to his theory of painting ofclassical rhetoric: disposition. 13 Whereas compositional unityis an affair of balancing forms, dispositional unity concerns thebalancing of messages; and it is this sense, as a rhetoricaldispositio or distribution of information, that we should under-stand LeBrun's defence. The camels would offend, notthrough their intrinsic oddness, their suggestion of the mon-strous or the absurd, but because if included they wouldbecome a dispositional distraction: a secondary text would begenerated and might come to rival the primary one. And it ison these lines that one should understand LeBrun's hostility togenre-painting. Of course, it is at the same time an institutionalposture: the triumph of history painting over genre is thetriumph of the Academic over the Maitrise, Genre-painting is,after all, pre-eminently textual: it is devoted to the anecdoteand the generation of superabundant discourse from theimage. But though textual, genre-painting does not transmitits narrative messages in any order of priority: its humility ofcontent is matched by a democracy of messages all on the samelevel, with no one amongst them subordinating the rest. Inother words, genre does not understand language as a form ofpower over the image - and it is precisely the power-~spectof the discursive which interests LeBrun. The textuality ofLeBrun is cybernetic, a form of authority which is lostamongst the proliferating and equivalent messages of theanecdotal. The unity of dispositio is discursive, not figural,and this centralising power of the text is defended because itprecisely corresponds to the power of the Academic over thecommunity of painters; to challenge that centralising auth-ority is to challenge the Academic itself.
Because so much more was implied than the pulchritude ofcamels, the debate was resumed. Those painters who resentedeither the hegemony of the Academic within the professionalstructure, or the omnipotence within the Academic of LeBrun,or both, demanded a second hearing; not before the Academichad mo bilised its hierarchical resources, and passed resolutionscondemning 'the confusion that attends the public sessions'(the Academie debates had become minor manifestations), andhad required that non-academicians seat themselves onbenches remote fr0111the arena of debate, as passive witnesses.LeBrun delivers a second defence of Po us sin which reveals allthe faith of the official in his memorandum. In Scripture, hedeclares, the famous camels are nowhere mentioned as in theIsraelite camp itself, or as near the Israelites themselves; Pous-sin's exclusion of them does not therefore break with the letterof the Old Testament. 14 His answer is Byzantine; certainly itfailed to satisfy the opposition. In the end Colbert personallyintervened - and his presence as arbiter reveals the urgency of
THE LEGIBLE BODY:
LEBRUN33
34 the debate - to bring the meeting to a close, and to guaranteethat LeBrun's answer be the last word on the subject; inLeBrun's appeal to the voice of the centralised state to bring torule the dissidence of both the figural image, and the com-munity of painters, one can see the depth of complicitybetween textuality and power. To question the supremacy ofthe discursive, before the double presence of LeBrun andColbert, is both artistic heresy and political treason.
In LeBrun's most ambitious and extensive work, the seriesof eleven full-scale and eighteen minor paintings devoted admaioremgloriam Ludovici at Versailles, we meet with the follow-ing constellation: Allegory, Conquest, Monarchy. The paint-ing ofFranche-Comte Conqueredfor the Second Time (illustration7) is at the centre of Lebrun's career, as the Apotheosis of Homeris at the centre ofIngres, and the Oath of the Horatii of David.When Largilliere came to paint the portrait through whichLeBrun was to be carried forward into posterity, it was thiswork which he chose to place on LeBrun's easel (illustration8). It is an image which translates effortlessly, and with mini-mal figural residue, into narrative. Louis had already con-quered the province in r678, and returned it to Spain at theTreaty of Aix-Ia-Chapelle. When Spain declared a second war,the province was reconquered within three months. In theimage, Mars leads Pranche-Cornte and its villages to the King
WORD AND IMAGE
7 Charles LeBrun,Franche-Comte Cotlquered forthe Second Time
as suppliant maidens. The river Soux, alarmed at the sight of THE LEGIBLE BODY:
Victory attaching trophies to a palm-tree, holds on to the L E B RUN
King's coat. Behind Louis stands the figure of Hercules, orheroic virtue. The fawning lion represents Spain, and the rockthe citadel of Besancon, Germany has offered the provincevain support: an eagle on a dry tree. The three months of thesiege belonged to winter: there are three zodiacal signs. AndFame appears with double trumpets: the province has beentwice conquered (these details are sadly obscured in the presentreproduction).
With its sombre, drab coloration and thick-set, gracelessfigures, the work points to central deficiencies in LeBrun as apainter: lack of imagination, lack of figural involvement. Butexamined at the rhetorical level at which it was pitched, theimage reveals a striking symmetry of intellectual design. Thepainting exploits a duplicity in the word 'history': in history,event and scripture fuse, for the historical is not only thatwhich has occurred, but that which has recurred as writing.Between the figures of allegory and the historical figure of
35
8 Nicolas de Largilliere,Charles LeBruli
WORD AND IMAGE Louis, there is therefore no ontological disjunction. In con-quest, event is Scripture even as it happens: the battle is alreadynarrative at the moment it takes place, so that when Homer orTolstoy or Stendhal " describe their battles, narrative is notsuper-added to a scene which lacks discursive intelligibility,but is instead the repetition of a discourse which is pre-existent. War is perhaps the most ancient, and certainly one ofthe most powerful, of rhetorical topoi.
The epics of world literature, from the Iliad to theUpanishads, witness to an affinity between war and narrativewhich can be said to emanate from an inherent similarity: inwar, events acquire a dimension that has already all the intel-ligibility, visibility, and recountability of the narrative act. It isthe same at the lowest, childhood level of historiography,which consists almost exclusively in a listing of battles, andwhere the work of history as an interpretative discipline is at aminimum: so far from shaping event into meaning, all thehistorian there has to do is to repeat the writing that emanatesspontaneously from history itself In the battle, human actionconsolidates into a united purposiveness that is patent andvisible at all points; in this it differs from guerrilla warfare andfrom terrorism, which rely on invisibility and concealment.These other forms of aggression are perhaps the more terrify-ing because they lack the consolidation of open intelligibilitywhich the battle provides (in this sense, it is hard to image anallegory of guerrilla war). But battle possesses a spectacularitythat is heraldic: each side blazons its identity with a clarity thatis not at all exhausted by strategic need. And in the descriptionsof battle one sees a marked tendency towards a significationthat is highly abstract: the model here is the war-room, with itsmaps and pointers, markers and counters. Although only asimulacrum of the battlefield, the war-room is also its realtheatre: in the conversion from the mud and chaos of the fieldto the hygienic spread of the diagram, nothing essential is lost.On the contrary, the essence of the battle is revealed in theschema. Military planning requires a glance at the body whichis altogether indifferent to its materiality; the martial body isenciphered, made into a statistical entity, a vortex of abstractforce. The militaristic use of the body may be heavily physical:carefully clothed and tended, trained to a pitch of physicalexcellence, the superbia of the material body borders on aneroticism which must never, however, announce itself assuch. ,. But always that priority is overtaken by signification,not only in the decoration of the body with insignia, but in afinal purpose for that body which is, of course, a completebetrayal of its right to physical existence.
It is, therefore, no accident that Leflrun, with his commit-ment to the textuality of the image over its figurality, should
also have expended such colossal effort on images of military THE LEGIBLE BODY:
conflict. In his Battle of Arbela one can see a sadism which, if it L E B RUN
had not been so bureaucratically constrained, might havemoved far closer than it did to De1acroix, who is a prolepticpresence in all these scenes (illustrations 9 and 10). It is a sadismwhich cannot, however, be thought morbid, since it lacks thequest for privacy which marks authentic perversion. Quite theopposite: what is sought is absolute publicity, for the battle is aform of aggression that takes place without guile, deceit, orany aspect of the clandestine. In the swordplay of the duel,there is room for the artistry of fencing, which is full of feintsand misdirections: but in the swordplay of battle, intentionand action are far more co-extensive. It is this legibility of thebody which above all interests LeBrun. In his arrangement ofbattle scenes there is hardly a head which docs not turn in someway towards the viewer, to display fully its readable surface;
37
9 Charles Lebrun, Battleof Arbela (detail)
WORD AND IMAGE
IO Charles LeBrun, Battleoj Arbela (detail)
not surprisingly, many of the embattled figures are takendirectly from LeBrun's work on the expression of the passions(illustration II). The ethic is Cornelian, and concerns a wordsacred to Corncillc, to France, and to LeBrun: gloire; neithermerit nor excellence by themselves, but these qualities caughtin a double movement of display and recognition.P Cor-neille's warriors in his play Horace exhibit a sadism thatextends, as we know, to the most brutal sororicide, and themurderous brother is incapable of the inwardness of shame;absolutely unrepentant at the death of his sister, the brother isconcerned only with the possibility of a stain on glory. Theheroic act is so extraverted, so insistently spectacular, that forPolyeuctc martyrdom is pursued not as an abnegation of theself before God, but as a final and resplendent display ofpersonal glory before both God and man. Claire cannot existwithout its spectators; it is also indifferent to the rights of theflesh, which it seeks constantly to transcend through the wi 11.ISIts culmination is therefore in public violence, a violence that isalways observed; not just the battle, but the battle that is fullydisplayed and intelligible.
Lebrun's paintings for the Grande Galerie, which togetherform a continuous narrative of the conquests of the King,exploit to the full this collaborative relation between warfareand narrativity. Allegory is the artistic form appropriate toconquest because for both conqueror andallegorist, detail is ofno importance. What the heroic invader requires from a prov-ince is not its snbstance or booty, but the signs ofits surrender;the synecdoche of the lion for Spain, the hunched eagle forGermany, are like the exalted and manically generalised formthe world assumes when Antony addresses Cleopatra asEgypt, or like the allegorical reduction of the world whichChaplin used in the Great Dictator, to define megalomania:alone in his study, the dictator plays with the globe as though itwere a balloon.
Yet these works of LeBrun, alongside war and allegory,include always a third term, which completes their specificconstellation: the body of the King. Let us for a moment returnto an earlier comment on the word 'history': history is a fusionof event with writing. The historical is not only that which has
THE LEGIBLE BODY:
LEBRUN39
I J Charles LeBrun, Thed'expression: la Frayeur
40 WORD AND IMAGE occurred, but that which has recurred as writing. The bondbetween event and signification grows ever stronger as weapproach the presence of the King, for with the anointed Kingevery action and every gesture is history: the actions of theKing exist to be recorded. Outside the Court, there may bekingdom, and even empire, but these are silent; only withinthe court does the event become history, and that in pro-portion as the event nears the regal presence. The King is avortex of significance and everything he touches, howeverhumble, acquires the stamp of the historical: the plume of hishat, the glass of Burgundy mixed with water, the inflections ofvoice, the marks of favour and of disdain, the acts of lever andcoucher. It is in the historical character which the insignificanttakes on through and around the regal body that we can bestsee its power to transform, at a touch, even the basest into theennobled: when Louis presents a gift to the Pretender ofEngland at his marriage, the gift is not a province, a chateau, ora chest of gold, but a night-gown; the marks of absolute favourare not titles or responsibilities but admission to the bed-chamber, to witness and assist at the most creatural acts.Centre of the nation's strength, so that the force of all theministries is concentrated into a single organism, the King ispower in tangible form, converted from abstract relation intocorporeal substance, from mystique into physique. The atmos-phere which emanates from this distilled flesh is paranoia: notonly through the King's capacity, at a nod, to inflict death, butbecause paranoia is a representational crisis in which nothingcan exist for itself or innocently, for everything is perceived assign. To the paranoid, all existence is plot, not only as conspi-racy but as narrative: paranoid reality is entirely discursive. 19
With the courtier it is the same: nothing around the King canmerely exist, everything changes from entity into signal.Materiality vaporises as we near the King's presence, and eventhe images of his Court, which LeBrun supplies, take on thisquality of the hyperdiscursive. Despite his archaic politics, thetypical courtier remains the Duc de Saint-Simon, in whoseendless anxiety over groupings we should see not only thedefensiveness of an aristocracy on the wane, but the normalstate of courtly consciousness. At the Court, the agentbecomes the spectator, for everything is to be watched; and thespectator becomes the interpreter of signs, for everything is tobe read. Courtly life is entirely filled by the space between thelegible and the illegible. Preoccupied with signs, the courtier isalways deciphering and never experiencing without suspicionthe influx of his sensations, since his ability to survive and thedegree of his success equally depend on his virtuosity as amanipulator of signs: on whether he can read clearly, and notjust those signs that are patent, but the subtles t nuances of
meaning that occur precisely where no one is to expect THE LEGIBLE BODY:
signification. LE B RUN
This typical legibility of the court intensifies at Versailles toa point where one can see that any form of painting other thanallegory would be out of place. The characteristic art of Ver-sailles is allegorical because life there is, so to speak, allegoryalready. Institutionally, as we know, Versailles was an instru-ment designed to take from its courtiers real and executivepower, and to put in its place, as an almost perfect replica,power's signs - a machine for the production of allegory, forthe real substance is fed in at one end, to re-emerge at the otheras the sign of itself Out of context, in reproduction, LeBrun'spaintings in the Grande Galerie may seem lexically over-charged, signification triumphing over figurality with apressure that is crushing; yet in place, they are only at the samedegree of semantic pressure as the rest of the court.
The work of interpreting gesture and inflection, as we see itin Saint-Simon, is intensified by a problem which, as we shallsee, obsessed LeBrun: courtly restraint. This is not simply anaffair of reserve, but a protective obliteration from the body ofrevealing signs. The body must be managed with rigorouscontrol, for it is the last site of possible betrayal. The codes ofgesture are thoroughly mastered, so that nothing that mightimperil the body is allowed to be read there: the body, pre-cise!y because it is so charged with significance, requires anerasive grooming. The courtly body consists only of eyes,hands, and impassive facial muscles, the only muscles thatrequire attention; a fully informational and semantic physique,and almost a corps glorieux.20 Only when the courtly bodybelongs to the highest rank is it permitted the freedom todisplay before the world the truth of its inward agitations:'Mademoiselle de Blois ... being naturally very kind, andhorribly afraid of the King, believed herself sent for in order tobe reprimanded, and trembled so much that Madame deMaintenon took her upon her knees, where she held her, butwas scarcely able to reassure her. '21 The offstage intimacy ofbodies is allowed at court, and even encouraged, but sheer andpublic physicality, the taking of another body to one's own, inview of everyone, is the prerogative of only the most exalted.At its highest level, in the King, the body re-achieves a frank-ness that is all the more striking because it is denied everyoneelse: the royal physician circulates his findings throughout theCourt, so that even at a distance of centuries and in anothercountry one knows of the King's nocturnal sweatings, his longattacks of gout. One knows this: 'His stomach above allastonished, and also his bowels by their volume and extent,double that of the ordinary, whence it came that he was such agreat yet uniform eater. '22
41
WORD AND IMAGE Knowledge of the creaturality of the King is privileged, andit is a function of power. For the rest of the Court, the body is aplace of drilling, ballet, and concealment. In Racine, who wasalso, we remember, the Court's historian, the body is almostentirely optical, 23 It is solely through the eye that the fatalpassions that ignite Phedre and N eron are transmitted; andwhen a secret exists, it is above all by a tremendous concentra-tion on the eye that its nature is discovered. The rest of thebody has been erased and discarded, and all that is left of it isthis all-signalling zone around the orbits of the eyes, as the lasttrace of a natural body which remains ungovernable by thewill. Here the physical focuses its whole existence, and theglances of courtiers arc like laser-beams:
Seated in my elevated place, and with nothing before me, Iwas ableto glance over the whole assembly. Idid so at once, piercing every-body with my eyes. One thing alone restrained me; it was that Ididnot dare to fix my eyes on certain objects. I feared the fire andbrilliant significance of my looks at that moment so appreciated byeverybody: and the more I saw 1· attracted attention, the moreanxious was Ito kill curiosity by my discreetness. Icast, nevertheless,a glittering glance upon the Chief President and his friends, for theexamination, of whom Iwas admirably placed. I carried my looksover all the Parlement, and saw there an astonishment, a silence, aconsternation, such as I had not expected, and which was of goodaugury to me. 24
LeBrun's gaze repeats this penetrating, avid glance of theCourt. Already a connection posits itself between such aglance and allegory, for under such interrogation there can beno-innocent object. And the connection points also to thecharacteristic desiccation of LeBrun's images. Existing only toyield-up their quantum of meaning, once signification flowsout 6f them, they are left behind for dead. Such a gaze betraysand devalues the image as no other gaze can, and if we fullyexpose ourselves to the atmosphere of LeBrun's paintings,we discover that they are in fact melancholic. What theyreveal is the disappointment and desertion of the exhaustedemblem. With the painting of the Franche-Comte, once theeagle, the lion, the rock, the keys, the urns, and the figureshave released their discharge of the signified, lacking anyfurther purpose, they linger on in desolate, drained disper-sal. Nothing but the signified holds this disarray of objectstogether, and once it is taken away, they take on the life ofhusks. The world of objects always presents, with LeBrun,this face of incompletion and insufficiency: it cannot standby itself, and a second gaze on the image may even producethe sadness and nausea that sometimes attend pomp,when we have grasped the text of the pageant and are leftonly with the sorrowful emptiness of the depleted sign. With
the glass at Canterbury, if we prolong our inspection beyondits designated length, the image dissolves into pure light andcolour: the same is true of the frescoes of Tiepolo. But here,because the signifier has been so degraded, as the Word fades itleaves only ash behind.
LeBrun's courtly glance, however antipathetic to the inde-pendent life both of object and of paint, did produce, however,the most prolonged meditation in European art on the mean-ings of the human face. Given his discursive bias, the face wasthe only part of the body likely to have interested him; andhis analysis is exhaustively systematic. The problem ofpsychological portrayal is, of course, a perennial one in rep-resentational art, because it involves the whole difficulty ofdepicting a mobile entity in a still image. Let us take theproblem of a pendulum clock: how to depict the passage oftime? How to depict, not the time of the dial, but time as itmanifests in movement?"" If the pendulum is painted in avertical position, since that is also the position of rest, nosuggestion of movement is produced; on the other hand, if thependulum is painted at an angle, the result can be disconcert-ing, far more than is the case with a photograph, since at leastthe photograph is instantaneously produced; but the disparitybetween the instantaneous movement of the pendulum andthe length of time taken to create a painting is jarring. Sculp-ture faces the same problem: while' some positions of themoving body, when translated into matter, arc visibly andharmoniously mobile, others seem immobile even when theyrecord a particular movement with perfect accuracy; othersstill seem unbalanced or precarious. A characteristic sculpturalsolution is to freeze the body in the moment immediate! y priorto an acceleration, so that the mobile intention is clearlyannounced, but not yet delivered: Bernini's David, planningthe trajectory of the sling but not yet inside it, is a case in point;or Myron's Discobolos, where several bodily positions of thediscus-thrower are collapsed into a single sculptural frame.With facial expression, the problem is compounded. Therealistic smile may turn, under the artificially prolonged timeof the image, into a grimace; while a perfectly accurate rep-resentation of the face of a man experiencing a particularemotion may not register to the viewer with any certainty as towhat the emotion has been. Since human self-expressioninvolves parameters of moving gesture and of supportingspeech which at every point clarify the emotion, and sincepainting lacks these parameters, the image of emotion mustsupply other markers to take their place.
While the problem of emotional expression is permanent, inthe case of LeBrun there are particular historical pressureswhich made its solution imperative. The hierarchical elevation
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44 WORD AND IMAGE of history painting and of the Academic required the linguisticsaturation of the image; both the allegorical style of the art ofVersailles, and the role played by the interpretation of signs inthe life of its Court, reinforced the need for a further advance ofthe Word into substance. Yet the advance was blocked by all
aesthetic of reticence which demanded of the courtly body arigorous reduction of expressivity: decorum, in the sense of avigilant monitoring and screening of the body's informationalpotential, creates an inscrutability that menaces the centralcolonisation of the body by the Word. Expressive gesture iswithdrawn from the body to the head; and in LeBrun's firstexcursion into this terrain, the approach is exclusivelyphysiognomic. The only notable work on the subject ofphysiognomy remained Giovanni Baptista delIa Porta's DellaFisionomia dell'Uomo, translated into French in I66S. This curi-ous treatise, written at the close of the sixteenth century, is alate flower of Paracelsan thought, and exhibits a kind ofreasoning which by the epoch of Lebrun was entirely anti-quated. At its root is a belief in Creation as a Text fromGod:
The first and highest book of medicine is called Sapientia, Withoutthis book no one will achieve anything fruitful ... for this book isGod himself ... The second book of n~edicine is the firmament ...for it is possible to write down all medicine in the letters of one book... and the firmament is such a book containing all virtues and allpropositions ... the stars in heaven must be taken together in orderthat we may read the sentence in the firmament. It is like a letter thathas been sent to us from a hundred miles off, and in which thewriter's mind speaks to US.26
45
12 Giovanni Baptista dellaPorta, Physiogl1omic studies
Knowledge is a matter of right reading of the text of crea-tion, and a bountiful God has made this possible by repeatingthe sentences of the firmament, by which Paracelsus meansastrology, in the signatures of the natural world. To take anexample which also, despite its reasoning, had some success:syphilis bears the signature of the market place; the planetMercury has signed the market place; the metal mercury,which is also signed by the planet, is therefore the cure forsyphilis. In his Fisionomla, della Porta elaborated this Paracel-san doctrine: since there are distant species of plant whoseleaves resemble the legs of the scorpion, those plants comeunder the sign of Scorpio and Scorpio's planet Mars; withphysiognomy, a similar logic is at work in what delia Porta ispleased to call the 'physiognomic syllogism'. 27 All parrots aretalkers, all men with noses of a certain shape are like parrots,therefore all such men are talkers. The visual result of thetheory took the form of images in which the human face isvariousl y dis torted to reveal, as far as ingenuity will permit,hidden resemblances to specific beasts (illustration I2). Each 13 Charles Leflrun, Physio,{!nomic studies
WORD AND IMAGE
'4 Charles LeBrun,Physiognomic studies
kind offace intersects with a particular word: that of the lion,with audacity; the hare, timidity; the rooster, expansivenessand liberality; the dog, spitefulness; the crow, austerity; theturtle-dove, devotion; the dove, domesticity; the sheep,gentleness; the goat, alertness and agility; the leopard, grace-fulness; the bear, sloth. 28 It is this intersection which attractedLelrrun, and his desire to have the physical face of the worldconverted into signs is strong enough to persuade him tocreate, with dazzling success, his remarkable series of faces ofbeings who are at the exact mid-point between human andanimal creation (illustrations 13 and 14).'· Usually, out of thecontext of Lefsrun's discussion of physiognomy, they aremisread as experiments in the grotesque or the teratological;but the clue to Leflrun's true interest is to be found in thewords which in the original manuscript he ascribes to the facesof'four of his cows: hardi, opinidtre, stupide ,farouche (illustration15). Nowhere does Porta show any concern for the
;
individuality of animal features; Le.Bruri's departure from hismodel indicates the real centre of his enthusiasm, which is theproduction of texts from even the most arcane and resistant ofimages. He is obsessed with the expansion of discourse intovirgin terrain; even the animals in his paintings possess clearsigns of personality. 30
The physiognomic approach, however sensational itsresults, was limited by two obvious factors: it was not easy,without entering the realm of the grotesque, to stress theanimal resemblances of the face within normal painting prac-tice; and even where the hints of similarity between a humanface and that of a beast could be stated, not everyone would beable to pass with clarity from the face to the various signifieds,of audacity, domesticity, spitefulness, and the rest. The systemis too cumbersome, for it entails a double process ofsignification: distortions in the face have to elicit a firstsignified, the name of the beast ('dove'); the signified mustthen become the signifier of a second signified (,domesticity').LeBrun soon abandons this unwieldy system and develops inits place a kind of semaphore. Following almost verbatimDescartes' account in the Traite sur les passions de l'dme,": hedivides all emotions into two classes: emotions are 'move-ments of the sensiti ve part of the soul, which is itself made to
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I S Charles LeBrun,Physiognomic studies of cattle
WORD AND IMAGE pursue that which the soul thinks to be for its good and to avoidthat which it believes to be hurtjul': 32
Within a rigidly dualistic scheme, both of these kinds ofemotion or soul-movement would be invisible: conscious-ness, being separate from extension, can never appear in thephysical world. But in the Traite Descartes insists on a nodalpoint between extension and mind, the pineal gland. This opensthe way for LeBrun: 'And as we have said that the gland whichis in the middle of the brain is the place where the soul receivesthe images of the passions, so the eyebrow is the part of the facewhere the passions are best distinguished, although many havethought that it was the eyes. '33 In Lebrun's account, wheneverthe soul experiences attraction towards something outsideitself, the pineal is stimulated and the eyebrows, being the partof the face at once the most mobile and the closest to the glanditself, begin to ascend; conversely, whenever the soul experi-ences repulsion from an outside entity, the eyebrows losecontact with the pineal, whose power declines under the nega-tive emotion, and descend towards the baser zones of thebody. 'And as we have said that the sensitive part of the soulhas two appetites from which all passions arc born, so there aretwo movements of the eyebro ws which express all the move-ments of these passions. '34
Reaction is not, however, confined to the eyebrows alone.As the soul experiences positive emotion, the pulse becomeseven and strong (in details like these one can detect the proxim-ity of medical diagnostics) and the rate of digestion increases;animal spirits descend through the nerves as though throughcapillaries, and distribute themselves to all parts of the body,producing a sensation of spreading warmth. But as the soulexperiences negative emotion, the animal spirits congregate inthe muscles, causing them to become congested and swollen;the pulse grows uneven and feeble, and the work of thestomach ceases; there is a sensation of spreading cold, and inextreme instances the animal spirits flee the body altogether,back home to the pineal gland.
The emotions are gathered together into two groupswhose opposition is total. When the soul is in neutral, its basicstate, charmingly enough, is said to be wonderment. But it isconstantly moving out of neutral into positive or negativepositions, as outlined in the diagram on page 50. Entering apositive state, wonder becomes esteem - the soul has foundsomething attractive: the mouth begins to open, and thenostrils to descend towards the mouth; the eye, m.cbiliscd bythe now activated pineal, revolves upwards in its orbit. As thepositive state intensifies, esteem becomes love: the browsmooths out and the head inclines towards the object oflove;the cheeks grow pink and the corners of the mouth, marking
a new frontier of the magnetic pull of the pineal, begin to rise.As love waxes into veneration, the pupils begin to risetowards the eyelids and to move behind them; and as venera-tion finally becomes rapture, all the features are drawnupwards in a great surge towards the pineal, as though in acelestial ascension (illustration 16). When the series ofemotions is negative, the pineal is conquered by the materialweight of the body as though by gravity. In the first stage,scorn, the nostrils rise while the mouth remains closed; thepupils stay centrally placed. As scorn becomes hatred, thebrow wrinkles, the head averts itself from the repellentobject, the cheeks grow pallid, and the corners of the mouth,losing touch with the beneficent upward pineal drive, slopedown. As hatred intensifies into horror, the pupil descends inthe orbit, and as horror becomes terror, all contact with thepineal is lost: the bloodstream grows congested: veins dilateand muscles swell.
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49
16 Charles Lc.Brun,Physiognomic studies
50 WORD AND IMAGE + WONDER
ESTEEMNostrils downMouth openPupils up
SCORNNostrils upMouth closedPupils central
HATEBrow wrinkledHead away fromobject
LOVEBrow smoothHead towards object
VENERATIONPupils under eyelids
RAPTUREEyes turn to pineal
HORRORPupils down
TERRORAnimals spirits toveins and muscles
In the illustrations to his Conference sur l'expression generale etparticuliere, delivered to the Academic in the first cycle of itsDiscourses and subsequently put through numerous editions,Lebrun reduces the face to a combinatory schema which per-mutates a few basic semaphoric units. 35 Eyebrows have eitherupward or descending movement, though in complexemotions such as hope, where the soul both wishes somethingadvantageous to itself, and also fears that the advantage mightnot arrive, there is double motion: the eyebrow rises where it isclose to the nose, and lowers at its far end. This permits anincrease in the number of expressible emotions: in fear, forexample, the shape of hope is inverted; the eyebrow descendswhere it is close to the nose, and rises at the other extremity.The corners of the mouth and the nostrils may rise, fall, orremain in neutral; the mouth opens and closes. It is a systemwhich, both in its constituent oppositions and its creation ofmeaning through those oppositions, resembles that mysteri-ous level oflanguage where phonetics becomes semantics, andthe formal divisions and differences within the phonic streambegin to emerge as signs. The system operates at the precisefrontier of the signifier and the signified, and it extends theimperial advance of the discursive into the figural right up tothe point where, for LeBrun, following Descartes, substancesubtilises into pure and insubstantial spirit: the pineal.LeBrun's dissective drawings of the brain and the gland(illustration I7) testify to his acute interest in this final point ofsublimation of material life, and there is a sense in which theanatomical sketches are an exact counterpart to his allegories atVersailles: the enveloping layers of matter are divested anddiscarded to reach the ultimate non-material core, the seat ofdiscourse.
LeBrun's project of colonising the body with signs is notunique to him: Dufresnoy and even Roger de Piles, the great
figuralist, insist on the importance within painting of thelegible body. The voice behind this whole generation ofpainters is that of Descartes, and as though self-conscious andembarrassed that painting should be speaking in such ametaphysical fashion, its spokesmen tend to repeat theCartesian arguments almost word for word. This is thesculptor Gerard Van Obstal, addressing the Academic on theLaocoon: 'In fear, all the blood of the body withdrawing to theregion Of the heart, the parts which are deprived of bloodbecome pale, and the flesh less solid; thus since the limbs lacktheir normal heat and strength, the head of Laocoon tiltstowards his shoulders.?" And this is Descartes: 'Sadness nar-rowing the orifices of the heart makes the blood flow moreslowly in the veins; and becoming colder and thicker, it with-draws to the spaces near the heart, leaving the most distantextremities behind, the most visible of these being the face,which seems pale and fleshless. '.7 Again, Nicolas Mignard:'Joy makes the heart dilate, so that the warmer and purerspirits, mounting to the brain and spreading over the face,particularly the eyes, heat the blood, extend the muscles,smoothing the brow and giving brilliance to the wholecountenance.l'" And, again, Descartes: 'In opening the valvesof the heart, joy makes the blood flow more quickly in everyvein, and, becoming warmer and more subtle, it enters everypart of the face, making it more smiling and lively.':"
Printing the passions 011 the face in clear and distinct charac-ters does not die with LcBrun: after a long period of reaction
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51
I 7 Charles LeBrun,Anatomical drawings of thepineal gland
52 WORD A ND IMAGE against the discursive image, when the Ac:demie revives in thelatter half of the eighteenth century, the Cornte de Ca ylus willinstitute a prize which yields a whole categor~ of French art:the lete d' expression. And even such non-academic figures as thenymphets of Greuzc display their asccnsional and pineal eyes,while the austere and impassive countenances of neo-classicism still demand a scanning of those significant units,the nostrils, pupils, and mouth (particularly evident in theminor neo-classicists who take from David a sense of theatre,like Taillasson). Correct reading of the human body in Frenchpainting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries i~almost alost art; yet without some rudimentary understandmg of itsprocedures, we not only overlook the subtler part of theimage's intention, but risk missing altogether that confident,seigneurial tax which discourse levies on the figural for over acentury.
A pplication of the doctrines of the COIiference appears withgreatest success in The Queens of Persia at the Feet of Alexander(illustration 18), painted by LeBrun at Fontainebleau for theKing at the beginning of his reign, in 1662.40 It has all thequalities of a manifesto piece, and at once Felihien published a
18 Charles LeBrun, TheQueen, ofPersia at the Feet ofAlexander
commentary on it of unprecedented length: not until thePoussin debates at the Academic do we encounter such inten-sity of verbal focus on any single French painting. The subjectis that moment when Alexander, attended by his companionEphestion, visits the mother and the wife of Darius, after thebattle in which the royal family of Persia became his prisoners.The Queens, at first mistaking Ephestion for Alexander, onrealising their mistake variously prostrate themselves, anddisplay in clear and distinct signs their troubled inward states.The subject, being itself a double-take, acts as a lure to reading:the spectator must himself work out which of the two stand-ing figures is Alexander. The visual clues are these: while bothwear gold helmets, the metal of the cuirass is silver with one, abaser metal with the other; one mantle is carnation, the otherscarlet; and, as we increase the degree of our concentration, wediscover that with one, the mantle is fastened by a clasp ofdiamonds, and with the other, by a clasp inset with an agatecameo representing the figure of Alexander. The mind, slowlyworking through the clues, decides that it is unlikely thatAlexander would go about wearing a badge of himselfHaving by this bait triggered the reading mechanism, theimage proceeds to itemise the legible emotions of each counte-nance. With Alexander, Felibien tells us, four sorts of expres-sive action:The compassion he has for the princessesvisibly appears, both in hislooks and in his behaviour; his opened hand shews his clemency, andperfectly expresses the favour he has for all that court; his other handwhich he lays on Ephestion, plainly shows that he is his favourite;and his left leg which he draws backward, is a token of the civilitywhich he pays to these princesses.41
The courteous inclination, Felibien continues, would havebeen more pronounced, in keeping with the prostration of thewomen; but Alexander is shown at the moment when he firstsees the princesses; the practice of prostration was unknownamong the Greeks; and besides, a thigh-wound from the battleinhibited normal movement. The units of meaning Felibienfinds planted in the different bodily zones of Alexander aretherefore these: clemency in the left hand, protective assurancein the right, compassion in the face, civility in the left leg;finally, in the characteristic tilt of the head, the personal sign ofAlexander. In the prostrated Queen Mother Sysigambis, 'theeyes are inclined towards the ground, to show that she reliesnot on her former fortune; her very garments so carelesslyspread, testify her humiliation'. 42 In the wife of Darius, who isshown with her child, we find dissatisfaction mixed withhope: 'for though we may easily perceive by the motion shemakes with her left hand, that she would excuse Sysigambis inmistaking herself; we see likewise very well, that in beholding
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54 WORD AND IMAGE Alexander after that kind of manner, she endeavours even widher looks which are the interpreters of her grief, to affect thrvery soul of that prince with compassion'. 43Princess Statira,who kneels behind the wife of Darius, is given up to grief bUIalso to restraint and concealment: by trying to smother hertears, and from the very nature of the emotion she experiences,the blood has caused her neck and throat to swell. Her eyes arehalf-closed, 'to escape the sight of the conqueror'i= the disar-ranged folds of drapery connote self-negligence, while aheightened vermilion on the checks signifies aroused modesty.Behind Statira, a highly complex figure: in the eyes, still wetfrom tears, grief, 'her eyebrow, advanced, shows fear';45 whilethe mouth slight! y opened, and raised at the corners, indicatesadmiration. The hands bothjoin (supplication) and do not join(uncertainty); one knee is on the ground (placation), while theother is raised (uncertainty); and in the clothes, an obviousdisorder indicates to Felibien that 'she was not acquainted withthis sort of duty, and that her imagination is so disturbed, thatalthough she would perform punctually what her governessdirects her, she knows not even what she does'.46
The governess indicates to her with the pointed forefingerof the right hand that she ought to prostrate herself likeSysigambis, but in the forefinger of her left hand, whichhesitates even to lay a fingertip 011 the royal body, she alsocommunicates a marked respect. Behind the governess, afigure who steps straight from the illustrations to the Confer-ence:as sudden fright causes the blood to retire to the heart to preserve it,because it is the noblest part of the body, and by that means the othermembers become destitute tbereof; we may observe this lady to beofa very pale complexion; that her lips are without colour; her eyessunk and obscure; her eyebrows cast down and contracted; she liftsup her shoulders. and closes her hands."
Beneath this picture of anxiety, a Persian completely pros-trates himself, which indicates to Pelibien not only barbarism.but that the Persian court has not yet heard of Alexander'sfamous clemency, or does not believe in it.
The half-naked figure who stretches out his right arm overthe princesses, might seem a brief excursion away from discur-sive contraints; but even his nakedness is significant, since 'it isPersian custom to tear the clothing when under intense afflic-tion';48 and by the softness and slackness of his flesh, werecognise that he is a castrate; that is, a high courtier, and in farmore direct danger than the princesses. Behind the eunuch, aslave, his status defined with economy by the removal of allsigns of rank; and to his left, a woman whose pale complexionindicates Greek birth, an indication confirmed by the half-smile she displays on her face, as she gazes with welcome on
her liberators. To point up the pallor of her complexion.behind the Greek woman, a dark-skinned native, and behindher, an Egyptian priest in sacerdotal robes, raising his head toget a better view; being a priest, he is skilled in language, andfor this reason his focus on Alexander is more attentive, sinceunlike the others, he can understand Alexander's speech. Tothe left of the priest, another standard Conference image, thistime of surprise: with eyebrows raised and eyes widened,mouth opened and palms facing outward, all the discursivemarkers are unambiguously and abundantly in evidence.
Felibieri's commentary is a salutary reminder that with apainting such as this, a whole lexical dimension lies concealedfrom normal viewing; and especially the normal viewing ofthe twentieth century, with its natural bias towards a figuralappreciation of the art of the past. Yet unless we attend to thisdimension, the image fuses into a ponderous mass, and it isprobably the sheer weight of pomp which alienates the spec-tator who is unaware that the image is not merely to be seen,but read. As discourse penetrates this ankylosed mass its com-ponents begin to separate, and the image regains a lightness, anallegrezza which one might not have suspected it capable ofsustaining. The kind of discursivity to which LeBrun submitshis painting is entirely conscious, and is nothing to do withnaturalism. Before LeBrun, since no lexicon of the body existsto be consulted, except the virtually useless treatise by deliaPorta, the significance of the body seems to have 110 source,and in the absence of source there develops an effect of the real,as with the Masaccio earlier discussed. When Icannot consultthe text of the passions, Icannot clearly place the articulation ofits meanings, and since the signified seems without origin inthe image and on the plane of signifiers, I invent a space ofdepth, 'outside' the image, to house it; the depth of perspectivebecomes identified with this imaginary deep extenority. Sincesignification exists, but I cannot clearly attach the productionof the signified to any specific pictorial signifier, Imust createanother realm for the meanings I 'find', away from the pictureplane; and perspective, pretending to supply a space 'behind'the signifiers, and coinciding with this need for another realm,meets it, and invites the signified to step with it behind thesignifying plane. LeBrun, by bringing the articulation of thephysiognomic and pathonomic codes into full visibility, coun-teracts this occultation; meanings do not emanate from hiscanvases mysteriously, but in the full awareness of a codedpractice. In this sense the image in LeBrun possesses a frank-ness and publicity of intention that make it incompatible withwhat we know of the image in realism. And in the nextgenerations, as the fully discursive image falls out of favour,the reaction against discourse moves painting once again
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WORD AND IMAGE towards that effacement of the means of signification which isan essential part of the realist project.
As an afterword, let us conclude with the painting by which,thanks to a certain hanging policy at the Louvre in this century,LeBrun is best known: the equestrian portrait of ChancellorSeguicr (illustration 19). Early, thoroughly uncharacteristic ofhis output, and hardly mentioned by Le.Brun or by his con-temporaries, it shows what kind of a painter LeBrun mighthave become ifhe had not lent his brush to the hegemonisingword, and the centralising state. It speaks to us today sodirectly because it comes so close to being surreal. Its theme, anentirely figural one, is clonino: not one parasol, but two, notone golden tasslc but many, ribbons which irrationally twin,and everywhere these replicating, stately and square-toed slip-pers. The page-boys, whose hair, as it alternates from auburnto chestnut, does nothing to conceal an identity of counte-nance, resolve from plurality into impossible unity, and so farfrom forming an entourage, seem a single figure rotating inspace and frozen at successive paces. The parasols, whichcombine an instantly available quality of the picturesque with
[9 Charles Lebrun,Chancellor Seguier
a certain occidental dream of the Asiatic, accord to Seguier thefull status of mandarin, and, with the opulent shimmer of thefabrics, invest in him all the connotational magic of the word,Cathay. Although so resolutely figural, it might be taken as theemblem of the forces that between them define the moment ofLeBrun: the image perfectly married to the triumphant state: aradiant and transfigured bureaucracy.
