Art Historians and Art Critics - VIII: Proust and the Visual ArtsAuthor(s): D. F. WakefieldReviewed work(s):Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 112, No. 806 (May, 1970), pp. 291-296Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/876306 .Accessed: 22/05/2012 21:07

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ALESSANDRO ALGARDI' S ALTAR OF S. NICOLA DA TOLENTINO, AND SOME RELATED MODELS

However that may be, this relief seems to have been remarkably popular; apart from the three casts known today, there are several references in earlier literature to reliefs of the Virgin and Child by Algardi, and, as no other model of his so far identified would fit this title, there is a strong likelihood that they were casts of this same composi- tion. One, described as 'un basso rilievo ovale rappresentante la Vergine col bambino' belonged to Agostino Franzone, uncle of the Agostino Franzone who decorated the family chapel in SS. Vittore e Carlo in Genoa with bronzes from the studio of Algardi, and himself the owner of numerous works by Algardi, including a terra-cotta relief of the same subject.42 Two others are listed by Antonio Ponz in his Viaje de Espana; one, 'un bajo relieve de bronce sobre campo de lapislazuli, que representa a Nuestra Seiora sentada con el Nifo en los brazos', was formerly in the church of Nuestra Sefiora de Atocha in Madrid,43 and another, a 'bajo relieve de plata en 6valo con Nuestra Seniora, que tiene el Nino en brajos', was formerly in the

Royal Palace in Madrid.44 Unfortunately, neither can be identified today.45

The surviving casts show minor variations one from another, in particular the London version allows the drapery to the Virgin's left to flow out in a more rhythmic and harmo-

nious line; but there is no reason to suppose that they were cast from more than one model, or that these variations could not have been introduced in the wax, or during the afterwork on the bronze itself.

The model, whether or not it had been worked up with a view to making independent bronze casts, provided a rather more precise guide for the carver than did the bozzetto of St Nicholas, and Guidi has followed it very closely indeed. Nonetheless, it is possible to see in the more crumpled folds around the feet of the Christ-Child some hint of the personal style which he was to develop in his own work, but to judge how far he has suppressed his own manner, and how firm a control Algardi exerted over the altar, one has only to compare such details as the head of the Christ-Child with the putti which Guidi carved for S. Agnese in 1658 (Fig.28).46

Small though Algardi's personal share may have been in its actual execution, the altar of St Nicholas remains entirely his creation, an important statement of his ideals and a significant contribution to the history of the baroque altar. The popularity of the small bronzes cast from the preliminary models is an eloquent proof of their high quality, just as the anonymity into which they have sunk is an indication of our unjustified neglect of this fine example of Seicento sculpture.

4* G. O. CORAZZINI: Memorie storiche della Famiglia Fransoni . . ., Florence [ 1873], p.73. Corazzini lists four works in bronze, the three others being in the round, and five 'modeli di creta' in relief, which also included 'un ossesso', which must be the Miracle of St Agnes (see note 38 above). M. Lab6 gives a list of five reliefs by Algardi of bronze and marble, which included 'Maria Vergine col Bambino' (M. LABO: 'La Cappella dell'Algardi nei Santi Vittore e Carlo a Genova', Dedalo, XI [1930-31], p.1402). 43 Edition of Madrid [I9471, p.418; there were two Angels above the frame, also attributed to Algardi. "4 Ed. cit., p.537. 4* Written enquiries addressed to the Patrimonio Nacional in Madrid have remained unanswered.

48 To judge how faithfully Domenico Guidi executed Algardi's models, even after the master's death, we have only to consider the firedogs of Cybele, now in the gardens of Aranjuez, where the head of one of the putti (Fig.27) comes remarkably close to that of the Christ-Child on the altar of St Nicholas, and has much the same bad-tempered look which one finds in Algardi's drawings and most of his sculptures of babies, in which the full-rounded cheeks compress the small, down-turned mouth. The story of these fire-dogs is too complicated to enter into here, but that Guidi was responsible for working up that of Cybele from Algardi's sketches was plausibly proposed by Jacob Hess, and has never been questioned (J. HESS: 'Ein Spditwerk des Bildhauers Alessandro Algardi', Miinchner Jahrbuch [1931], pp.292-303).

D. F. WAKEFIELD

Art Historians and Art Critics - VIII:

Proust and the Visual Arts

THE French cultural scene has always been characterized by a constant exchange between artists and writers, but perhaps at no time was this closer and more fruitful than in the nineteenth century. In this period there is hardly a major writer who did not take an active interest in the visual arts, and many can claim to have championed a contemporary artist or rescued an artist of the past from oblivion. Baude- laire and Delacroix, Zola and Manet, Barres and El Greco, but when we come to Proust, who began his literary career in the last decade of the century, the question has to be posed in rather different terms. For Proust has no such 'discovery' to his credit, and even his well-known eulogy on Vermeer came after the ground had been well-prepared by others.

In this sense Proust cannot be said to have made a direct contribution to the visual arts. But, in a wider sense, the whole of Proust's life and work can be seen as a long, con- centrated meditation on the nature of art itself, on artistic creation, on the psychological effects of art on the spectator, and on many other aesthetic problems which constitute the basis of his great novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

A most valuable critical distinction was made by Balzac when he divided writers into two categories: 'Les dcrivains d'idies' and 'les icrivains d'images'. As with all such broad divisions, we can immediately think of several borderline cases, but many French writers fall with surprising ease into one camp or the other. Stendhal, writing at the beginning of

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the nineteenth century, clearly belongs to the abstract, un-pictorial eighteenth-century tradition. But as the century advanced writers developed increasingly a pictorial and visual sense, so that Baudelaire could write of ' .. . le culte des images, ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion'.I This tendency was carried still further, in poetry by Laforgue, in fiction by the Goncourt brothers, until we are left with nothing but the disembodied image. Proust is one of the few writers who belong to both categories at the same time, for in A La Recherche ideas and imagery co-exist on equal terms. Deeply versed in the French seventeenth-century classics, he consciously built his novel on a firm intellectual basis and was strongly aware of the value of structure. At the same time he was a writer of unusually keen visual perception who naturally turned to art as a source of imagery. And indeed, after a reading of Proust, it is beautiful images which stand out most vividly in the mind: the waterlilies on the Vivonne at Combray, the reflection of red tiles on a pond, the band of young girls at Balbec, silhouetted against the blue sea as in a Giotto fresco - such moments, when the slow-moving narrative is completely arrested, stand out from the rest of the novel with a wonderful luminous clarity. In a similar

way the Narrator imagines Florence in a single, compact picture distilled from the art of Fra Angelico, and Venice comes before his eyes in the form of a Giorgione fresco. It is clear that images of this kind, which take on an independent life and seem to symbolize whole states of mind, could only have been produced by a writer whose visual sense had been

sharpened and refined by a thorough familiarity with works of art. If, in the final version of the novel, we sometimes almost lose sight of the original picture from which Proust started, the imaginative processes of his mind can nearly always be traced to the image. In this way A La Recherche represents the final point of assimilation of art by literature.

Marcel Proust was born in Paris in 1871 of an upper middle class professional family. The father was an eminent

surgeon and the mother an intelligent and cultivated

Jewess, from whom Proust inherited a profound literary culture and a lifelong love of the French seventeenth-

century classics. But the family does not appear to have shown much interest in pictures, perhaps regarding them with mild disapproval. The fact that Proust was not brought up among works of art, unlike Baudelaire or the Goncourts, is perhaps significant, for he always retained a certain hesit- ancy of taste which made him dependent on the opinions of his artist friends and critics. His artistic initiation had to come from another quarter - the great aristocratic salons of the day, which he began to frequent soon before 1890. His first hostess, Mme. Straus, owned a remarkable collection of Monets2 as well as several eighteenth-century portraits by Nattier and Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Proust owed his introduction to Mme. Straus to his school friend Daniel Halbvy, who was later to become an intimate friend of Degas. A still wider circle of artists, critics and amateurs was opened to him at the receptions of the flamboyant

Madeleine Lemaire where he came into contact with artists of the fashionable world like Jean B6raud, de Nittis and the portrait painter Helleu. It was there that he met Count Robert de Montesquiou, whom Proust called, still more fulsomely than usual, 'the greatest art critic of the age' and he took to reading the Count's articles with all the zeal of a neophyte. From Montesquiou Proust came to share the contemporary enthusiasm for the art nouveau glass of Gallk, for Whistler and everything English - and above all for Gustave Moreau. The most familiar record of Proust about this time is the portrait painted of him in 1892 by his friend Jacques Emile Blanche,3 showing the young d6butant in a rather tired-looking evening dress with a large limp orchid in his buttonhole; but already there is the look of the death mask in the expression of the wide eyes staring out from a waxen face. Proust the aesthete and the dilettante: this was the image which was to remain with the public for most of his lifetime and in some quarters, still persists. It was only soon before his death in 1922, when the publication of his novel was almost complete, that it became apparent that Proust was not just another fin de siecle decadent.

At this stage Proust's artistic tastes were very much those of his time. We can see from the art periodicals between 1890 and 1900 that the periods then in vogue were the Italian (and a little later, the French) primitives, Dutch art and the French eighteenth century. As a regular reader of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Les Arts and several other publications it is not surprising that Proust's own taste reflects the current fashion. Eighteenth-century art, in particular, was a firm favourite, a social phenomenon which Proust caricatures in Le Cbtd de Guermantes, in which the duke and duchess admire Chardin and Perronneau not as artists but as emblems of a way of life they are trying to perpetuate. Nobody had done more to foster this nostalgic, aristocratic view of the eighteenth cen- tury than the Goncourts, and it is clear that Proust was familiar with their books on the period. He may even have known Edmond de Goncourt personally, probably through the Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, herself an amateur artist and the owner of a notable collection of pictures. Whether or not he was privileged enough to set foot in 'La Maison d'un Artiste' is not certain, but he must have known, at least from hearsay, of Goncourt's treasured collection of eigh- teenth-century paintings and 'objets d'art'.

When he was about twenty, encouraged by this foretaste of pictures in private collections and by the artists and critics he had met, Proust began to broaden his knowledge of art by regular visits to the Louvre, to galleries and exhibitions. He was often accompanied by his friend Robert de Billy4 who left an amusing account of Proust, sauntering down the galleries of the Louvre and pausing in front of Rubens, Leonardo and Delacroix as he recited the appropriate lines from Baudelaire's Phares. During these early years Proust built up the prodigious store of visual images which he was to draw on later when writing A La Recherche, long after he had adopted the life of semi-recluse.

x Mon Caur mis a nu, LXIX. 2 Including a version of the Seine at Giverny which Proust describes in Jean Santeuil.

3 Proust kept up a regular correspondence with Blanche, and contributed the

preface to his book Propos de Peintre: de David a Degas of 1919. 4 R. DE BILLY: Lettres et Conversations, Paris [1930].

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There are signs that around 1895 Proust was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the worldly, uncreative sort of life he was leading. His first literary effort, Les Plaisirs et les Jours, a series of impressionistic sketches and short stories, had failed to attract critical attention. The discovery of Ruskin about this time must have confirmed him in his search for a more seriously committed attitude to art. For the artistic scene of the last decade of the nineteenth century is still, even today, very baffling in the variety of different aesthetic tendencies, and we can well imagine the difficulty of anyone trying to form authentic critical standards. Paul Bourget,5 in Les Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, draws an accurate picture of the contents of the average salon of the day; on the walls we find artists as radically different as Monet and Gustave Moreau, Millet and Helleu, hanging side by side, each one clamouring for attention. 'Tout ici n'est-il pas multiple? Tout ne vous invite-t-il pas

' faire de votre

dme une mosaique de sensations compliquees'? But unlike the aes- thetes Proust was not content with sensation, and his first encounter with Ruskin's work must have come as a welcome delivery from the confused eclecticism of the Salons and the fashionable artists of the day. He had first read of Ruskin in Milsand's Esthktique Anglaise of 1864 but it was not until the appearance of Robert de la Sizeranne's book 'Ruskin et la Religion de La Beaute' in 1897 that he began to take a serious interest in the English writer. By a curious misunder- standing - perhaps because the general public were familiar with only the title of Sizeranne's book - Ruskin had acquired the reputation in France of being an aesthete. Instinctively Proust saw the absurdity of this view, and that whatever other intellectual crimes Ruskin may have perpetrated, this was not one of them. In I900 he wrote an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in an attempt to correct this fallacy.6 'Pour un dge, en effet, de dilettantes et d'esth/ztes un adorateur de la

Beautd, c'est un homme qui, ne pratiquant pas d'autre culte que le sien et ne reconnaissent pas d'autre dieu qu'elle, passerait sa vie dans la jouissance que donne la contemplation voluptueuse des auvres d'art'. He continues that for Ruskin beauty was something of such overriding importance that he would have given his life for its sake. In this rejection of the sterility of aestheticism Proust was perhaps thinking more of himself than Ruskin and the article marks a new stage in his thought which would ultimately lead to the final statement of his artistic creed in Le Temps Retrouvi.

After this first article Proust embarked on a series of trans- lations of Ruskin with critical commentaries; the Bible of Amiens appeared in 1904, Sesame and Lilies in 190o6. From the start Ruskin's writings had the effect of a revelation on Proust.7 L'univers reprit tout d'un coup a mes yeux un prix infini'. He suddenly found the key to new realms of art of whose existence he had scarcely been aware - Giotto, the Venetian and Florentine Quattrocento, and above all, French medie- val architecture. In the excitement of his fresh discovery, in 1890 he made a pilgrimage to Venice and Padua, and between Igoo and 1905 followed piously in Ruskin's foot-

steps to Amiens, Rouen and the other cathedrals of the Ile de France. This strange spell which Ruskin cast over Proust may today seem hard to explain, perhaps faintly absurd, but to Proust at the time it came as a necessary spiritual and intellectual discipline, with some of the religious overtones of a pilgrim's progress. It was bound to end sooner or later, for the differences between Ruskin and Proust were too great. In a letter of 1908 Proust confessed to a friend that Ruskin was beginning to bore him. But even after the final disenchantment, Ruskin left a lasting imprint both on Proust's literary style and on his approach to art. Hence- forward Proust was to seek for the truth in aesthetic exper- ience no less earnestly than Ruskin, but in his own personal way. Retrospectively justifying his own long subjection to Ruskin's vision, Proust wrote:8 'Et c'est en soumettant son

esprit a rendre cette vision, 'a approcher de cette viritd que l'artiste devient vraiment lui-meme'.

Roughly contemporary with the Ruskin studies are a series of essays, later published as Nouveaux Milanges which form the only pages which Proust devoted specifically to indi- vidual artists. They can hardly be said to come into the category of art criticism as they were not intended for publi- cation and in tone and manner have nothing in common with journalism. It was Paul Valkry9 who wrote: 'La cause premiere d'un ouvrage, n'est-elle pas un disir qu'il en soit parle, ne

fitt-ce qu'entre un esprit et soi-meme ?', a remark which illuminates Proust's entire approach to art. For always, in the presence of a picture, Proust is engaged in this interior dialogue between the artist and himself. At this time - the essays date from 1898-1904 - Proust was very much preoccupied with the problem of art and reality, and the artist's relation to his subject-matter. In Jean Santeuil, his first major attempt at autobiographical fiction, he had confronted the problem of transposing the elements of his own life into a book. The contemporary essays 'Portraits de Peintres' revolve round this same theme and the artists Proust considers, Watteau, Chardin, Moreau, Rembrandt, Monet - are all seen in their relationship to the subject-matter of their art. They represent different degrees of fusion between the external world and their own individual sensibility. On the first level is Chardin who remains closest to reality; taking his subject-matter from commonplace household objects, from them he creates what M. Florisoone1o calls 'la podsie du reel', a spontaneous, unsolicited kind of poetry which arises naturally from the artist's perfect handling of colour and the ordered harmony of his compositions. Next come the great visionaries, Monet and Rembrandt, who transfigure the visible world by the sheer intensity of their gaze, in such a way that in Rem- brandt's last manner the subject-matter of his pictures seems to have been entirely consumed by his inner spiritual power. Finally, in the realm of pure myth, is the art of Gustave Moreau in which the artist is bound only by the autonomous laws of allegory. But of all these artists Chardin was of the most permanent importance to Proust. In a letter of 1918 he wrote to Walter Berry: 'Avant d'avoir vu des Chardin, je ne

5 BOURGET; Du Dilettantisme de Renan. 8 Reprinted in Pastiches et Milanges, p.154. 7 Pastiches et M'langes, p.193.

8 Pastiches et Milanges, p.196. 9 Pikces sur L'Art: Autour de Corot. 10 Le Dix-huitidme sidcle, Paris [ 1968].

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m'itaisjamais rendu compte de ce qu'avait de beau, chez mes parents, la table desservie, un coin de nappe relevi, un couteau contre une hultre vide'. Whereas Ruskin had maintained a hierarchy of subject-matter in art preferring the grandiose and the spec- tacular to the ordinary and everyday, Proust saw through Chardin that the true artist extracts his poetry from within himself, and that the true hierarchy of art is1" 'la noble hie'rarchie des couleurs pricieuses, l'ordre des lois de la beauti'. And from Chardin it was not a long way to Vermeer.

Towards 19o6 Proust came to feel that all his literary efforts to date lacked a sense of direction. He had aband- oned Jean Santeuil, he was tired of pastiches, tired of Ruskin, but could find nothing satisfactory to replace them. A long familiarity with Sainte-Beuve convinced him of the futility of continuing to write graceful but superficial essays which, as he came to see, had become a pretext for evading the challenge to write a book of his own. But perhaps the one most important lesson Proust had learnt from Ruskin was that a great writer or artist produces only one work: Ruskin was the author of one great book and his thought constituted a single living organism. It was this problem of inner unity which Proust had failed to solve in Jean Santeuil, for although all the single elements of his later thought are present - in

particular the associative power of memory and the joy of artistic creation - the result is hardly more than a succession of disconnected passages, of unequal value. But gradually the final form of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was taking shape in Proust's mind; the subject of the work was to be his own past life, illuminated retrospectively by the phenomenon of involuntary memory, and the key to its unity was to be the discovery of its own vocation. The triumphant moment is recorded in terms of almost religious exultation in the final volume of Le Temps Retrcuve':12 'Tous les matiriaux de l'auvre littiraire, c'est ma vie passie, qui aurait pu se risumer sous ce titre: une vocation'. But before the Narrator makes this final dis- covery he has first to make the long journey through life from childhood to the threshold of old age. And this tra- jectory from illusion to disillusion, with the final return to a vision of the past projected through memory, is the subject- matter of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Proust's novel is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious works of fiction and, in a certain sense, represents a climax in the nineteenth century's megalomaniac desire to unite all the fine arts in the single work. When Proust made his d6but in the I890's on the artistic scene Wagner was still the rage; it was also the age of the synthetist art theories of the Sym- bolists, some of whom Proust had known personally. And although Proust was never to succumb to the more extreme tendencies of symbolism, and had too much respect for the integrity of the language ever to attempt 'musical' prose, his style and conception of art reflect many of these contempor- ary preoccupations. The interdependence of the arts, on which both Wagner and Symbolism rest, is the underlying assumption of A La Recherche, and in Le Temps Retrouvi Proust sets forth in magisterial language the aesthetic creed which has guided him in writing his novel and which is to

guide the Narrator in his.13 'Le style, pour l'icrivain comme pour

le peintre, n'est pas une question de technique mais de vision'. Here, and in many other passages, Proust implies that the only real difference between art and literature is a matter of language, and that it is only accident or circumstances which dictate whether the artist should express his own personal vision of things in paint, music or words. This is not to say that he underestimated the importance of the medium; he was himself notoriously particular about questions of style and syntax, just as in the great painters he admired, Chardin or Vermeer, he recognized that their unique qualities lay in their handling of paint. But he also believed that all artistic creation springs from a common source; the unique indi- vidual personality. And since all the arts, in his view, illus- trate the same fundamental laws of creation, his aim in Le Temps Retrouve' was to formulate a comprehensive defini- tion of all art.

The three representative artists in the novel of music, literature and painting are Vinteuil, Bergotte and Elstir. They are the prototypes of Proust's idea of the creative genius - a conception which has much in common with the Romantic artist's view of himself from Carlyle's artist hero to Baudelaire's version of Delacroix, sudden timeless ap - paritions who spring from nowhere. Baudelaire wrote14 'Dans l'ordre poitique et artistique, tout rivilateur a rarement pricurseur, toute floraison est spontanee, individuelle.' In order to preserve the mystique of genius Proust deliberately detaches his artist heroes from their own pasts showing them at the moment of their success. The essence of Vinteuil's music, Proust writes, will always elude musicologists who seek to explain it by comparing it with other composers. The same is true of his painter Elstir, for although his art derives from several contemporary sources, the synthesis is the

product of something unique which belongs only to himself. When, at the beginning of A L'Ombre des Jeunes Filles, the Narrator arrives at Balbec his imagination has been fed on Turnerian visions of rocky coasts and windswept cliffs, but his encounter with Elstir radically changes his view of the world. Initially he is disappointed to find Balbec just another seaside resort, with rows of ugly villas, where people engage in unromantic activities like horse-racing and yachting; in order to enjoy the seascape he would like to remove all trace of human beings from his field of vision. But after his intro- duction to Elstir's studio, where he sees a number of the artist's views of seaside life, he realizes that Elstir's origin- ality is to have painted what he saw before him - every- thing that he had previously closed his eyes to himself. Elstir has done, in fact, what the Impressionists did in the I860's. In the description of the pictures which follows Proust presents Elstir as a universal artist, combining in his art different elements borrowed from many of the

Impressionist generation. 'Le Port de Carquethuit' an elaborate composition based on the calculated confusion of land and sea, in which church spires seem to rise up from the middle of the sea and ship's masts to be anchored to the land, has some affinity with Manet's Port de Bordeaux (187 i1). Elstir's enthusiasm for jockeys and race meetings in full sunlight is an obvious allusion to Degas, while his views of the cliffs

11 Nouveaux Milanges, Chardin. 12 Le Temps Retrouvd, p.899, (Edition de la Pl1iade). 13 Le Temps Retrouvi, p.895. 14 Exposition Universelle de 1855.

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on the Normandy coast are very clearly inspired by Monet's studies of Etretat. The artist explains to the Narrator 'Regardez comme ces rochers puissamment et dilicatement dicoupis font penser a' une cathedrale en efet, on ei^t dit d'immenses arceaux roses. Mais, peints par un jour torride, ils semblaient riduits en poussiere, volatilisJs par la chaleur, laquelle avait a demi bu la mer, presque passie, dans toute l'itendue de la toile, a l'dtat gazeux'.15 In another of Elstir's seascapes the effect of the sunlight on the sea looks like a crystal ladder falling obliquely across the surface of the water. Through these descriptions of semi- imaginary works of art we can see how deeply Proust had understood and assimilated the most important visual dis- coveries of Impressionism; shadows appear in Elstir's pic- tures as fleeting areas of colour in perpetual movement, and the sea, not as an even uniform surface, but as a volume divided by light into separate zones of colour. Even though by the time that Proust wrote these pages Impressionism was already a thing of the past, the world of his novel belongs inseparably to the Impressionist generation. A La Recherche is a twentieth-century novel, but it portrays the society and way of life of the belle dpoque, and in the same way as the paintings of Manet, Monet, Degas or Renoir, Proust reflects the physical environment, the fashions and leisure pursuits of French society at the time. Both Proust and Impressionism fully realized Bauldelaire's demand that art should portray 'le cOti dpique de la vie moderne'.16

The effect of Elstir's art on the Narrator is to open his eyes to the visible world and to substitute a modern realistic vision of things in place of a spurious Romantic one. He dis- covers that in order to excite the visual imagination of the artist a landscape does not need to seem inhabited by cen- taurs and the fabulous creatures of mythology. This power of art to reconcile us to the reality before us, which Proust himself had experienced in Chardin, is illustrated admirably in the well-known pages on the Charity of Giotto, in Du CoteJ de Chez Swann. A friend of the Narrator's family at Combray, M. Swann, a connoisseur of note, has lent the boy a copy of Giotto's allegorical figure from the Arena Chapel at Padua. At first he derives no pleasure from the ugly, sack-like fig- ure,17 'cette Chariti sans chariti,' until Swann points out to him the resemblance between it and the pregnant kitchen maid of the household. But whereas Swann superciliously makes fun of the girl18, 'Comment va la Chariti de Giotto?', the Nar- rator realizes - anticipating his visit to the Arena Chapel in a later volume - that Giotto, by his refusal to idealize the human figure, has expressed the true face of charity:19 'Mais plus tardj'ai compris que l'itrangeti saisissante, la beautd spiciale de ces fresques tenait h la grande place que le symbole y occupait, et que lefait qu'il f2t reprisenti, non comme un symbole puisque la pensie symbolisie n'itait pas exprimie, mais comme reel, comme

effectivement subi ou materiellement manid donnait a la signification

de l'oeuvre quelque chose de plus littiral et de plus pricis, a son enseignement quelque chose de plus concret et de plus frappant'. As always with Proust the encounter with a great artist is the occasion for the discovery of a general intellectual truth. Though Chardin had found that beauty can be distilled from objects of no intrinsic interest, extending this lesson to the order of humanity, he discovers in Giotto how the most down to earth figures can be made to bear a universal message. The very concreteness of the Allegory brings the Narrator back into contact with reality and reveals to him how such a humble figure as the kitchen maid can possess human dignity.

For Swann, on the other hand, art tends to become an escape from reality, a frivolous game to occupy an idle man of leisure. The familiar story of his unfortunate love affair for Odette de Crecy, told in Un Amour de Swann provides an example of his tendency to abuse art and to distort its meaning by associating it too closely with private emotions. Swann has always had the vague intention of writing a criti- cal study of Vermeer but his native idleness and numerous social engagements prevent him from undertaking serious work. He begins to be a regular visitor to the Verdurin's salon, where he first meets Odette. At first he is not in the least attracted by her tired features and sallow complexion, but one day he is suddenly struck by her likeness to Botti- celli's Zipporah in the fresco The Daughters of Moses from the Sistine Chapel and he instantly falls in love with her. He no longer sees Odette as a rather jaded poule de luxe but as a figure endowed with all the poetic grace of the Floren- tine Quattrocento :20 'Le mot "euvre florentine" rendit un grand service a Swann. II lui permit, comme un titre, de faire pinitrer l'image d'Odette dans un monde de rives ot' elle n'avait eu acces jusqu' ici et oft elle s'imprigna de noblesse'. Proust does not doubt that art may legitimately enhance the value of reality, but this is not what Swann has done. By a devious mental opera- tion which he is unaware of, he has substituted an image in place of the living person. Unlike the effect of Giotto on the Narrator, which directs him back to the human reality, Botticelli's beautiful figure comes as a barrier between Swann and Odette and excludes him from the possibility of a full human relationship. Swann persuades himself that he loves Odette because she corresponds to Botticelli's ideal of beauty; in fact he is in love with neither Botticelli's picture nor with Odette, but has confused them in such a way that both lose their independent existence. In this curious psychological effect of art we are reminded of the well-known account of Stendhal moved to tears at the sight of Correggio's fresco in Parma Cathedral because the Virgin of the Assumption reminded him of his mistress. For Stendhal the effect was harmless enough since he never pretended to put the claims of art before life. But in Swann's case this kind of fetishism debars him from a full understand- ing of both art and life. In a similar way the Narrator, too, is prone to the same habit, and because of his tendency to treat people as objects of aesthetic contemplation, he never succeeds in establishing a genuine relationship with Al- bertine.

15 A L'ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, p.go9. Proust's exact personal relations with Monet is a matter of some speculation. The editors of the Album Proust (Ed. de la Plk'iade) state that they met at Dieppe but this has not been corro- borated. 16 Salon of I845. 17 Du Cdtd de Chez Swann, p.8 I. 1is Du Cdt de Chez Swann, p.8o. 19 Du Cdtd de Chez Swann, p.82. Although, by the time this passage was written, Proust had already visited Padua, he had originally found illustrations of Giotto's figures reproduced in RUSKIN's Giotto and his works at Padua [1854] and in Fors Clavigera [1871-84].

20 Du CUtd de Chez Swann, p.224. Proust would have found the Botticelli figure also illustrated in Ruskin, but the subsequent description is in general closer to Pater's Essay in The Renaissance. There is evidence to show that Proust was familiar with Pater's work.

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ART HISTORIANS AND ART CRITICS - VIII : PROUST AND THE VISUAL ARTS

Swann's failure is the failure of the dilettante. He dies without even writing his projected study of Vermeer. But he fails not only because he is incapable of the degree of self- sacrifice demanded by art, but also because he never achieves the necessary detachment for a true vision of it. The Narrator, in Elstir's studio, at Balbec, experiences the same difficulty; the thought of Albertine and the band of girls outside distracts him from concentration on the pic- tures before him. For Proust a state of complete emotional calm is necessary for aesthetic contemplation but this state is so rarely achieved by the characters of his novel who treat art as if it were an object of commercial value or the latest fashion, and are in their different ways too selfishly pre- occupied to grant it more than a moment's attention. The Duc de Guermantes betrays his philistinism when the Narrator asks him if he saw Vermeer's View of Delft:21 'Si c'est a voir, je l'ai vu'. But after giving so many instances of false attitudes to art, Proust places the climax of the novel at a moment of pure revelation: the celebrated vision of Vermeer's View of Delft and the account of the writer Ber- gotte's death at the exhibition. In the Amour de Swann, Vermeer, like the petite phrase of the Vinteuil sonata, had seemed to beckon Swann into a super-terrestrial realm, but tied down by his love affair, he never responded to the summons. Like a leitmotif the name of Vermeer reappears in La Prisonniere, but this time the artist succeeds in communi- cating his message to Bergotte seconds before his death. Fixing his attention on the yellow patch of sunlight on the wall, he exclaims: 'C'est ainsi que j'aurais dd e'crire. Mes derniers livres sont trop secs, il aurait fallu passer plusieurs couches de couleur, rendre une phrase en elle-meme precieuse, comme ce petit pan de mur jaune.'22 Like the last minute operation of divine grace, this vision of a world of pure beauty comes down to Bergotte as a guarantee of the possibility of salvation through art. And although the absolute perfection of Vermeer's picture seems a reproach to his own artistic conscience, by responding to it he has both redeemed himself and assured immortality for Vermeer. In this startling juxtaposition of art and mortality Proust gave the final and most dramatic proof of his belief in the power of art to conquer time. Ber- gotte will carry his vision of the View of Delft with him to the grave, but Vermeer's picture will continue to exert the same power of revelation in other men.

In the context of the novel this final apotheosis of Vermeer comes with very little preparation, but the facts of Proust's life show that the idea had gradually taken place over a long period. In a letter of 1921 he wrote to his friend the novelist and art critic Vaudoyer: 'Depuis que j'ai vu au Musie de La

Haye La Vue de Delft,j'ai su quej'avais vu le plus beau tableau du monde'. In 1905 Proust had visited the Hague and Amsterdam, where apart from the View of Delft he would have seen The Head of a Girl with Pearl Eardrops, The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and the Maidservant Pouring Milk. The only Vermeer to be seen in the Louvre was The Lacemaker, and as Proust admits to the same correspondent, he had not set foot in the Louvre since about I906. The image of the View of Delft must have remained at the back of his mind until in April 1921 Vaudoyer began to publish in L'Opinion a series of

articles entitled 'Le Mysterieux Vermeer' concurrently with the exhibition of Dutch painting held at the Jeu de Paume. With a mounting sense of excitement Proust read all Vau- doyer's articles and finally took the heroic decision - for by that time he was a dying man - to visit the exhibition. Although the effort did not prove fatal as it did to Bergotte, Proust was seized with a sudden dizziness which perhaps brought him close enough to death to suggest the episode of Bergotte. Proust had always believed that art involves sacri- fices of some kind, but after this experience he must have realized that it may cost nothing less than a man's life.

It has been pointed out23 that Proust did not 'discover' Vermeer, and that the artist had always been a familiar name, at least to a section of the French public, since the publication in I866 of Thor6-Btirger's articles in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. But since this was never Proust's claim, it seems more interesting to see why a twentieth-century writer should have been attracted to the artist in this strange semi-mystical way. Above all, Proust recognized in Vermeer the inner unity and coherence which it had taken him so long to achieve, but which he knew to be the fundamental quality of all great art. In La Prisonnihre the Narrator ex- plains to Albertine:24 'Vous m'avez dit que vous avez vu certains tableaux de Vermeer, vous vous rendez bien compte que ce sont les fragments d'un mime monde'. He finds that the repetition of certain elements - the same table, the same window, the same woman - is evidence of this underlying unity of vision. Each individual picture is only a facet of a unique type of beauty. Moreover, since the facts of Vermeer's biography were hardly known, the artist came for Proust to be the supreme example of the inexplicable genius, with no apparent relation to other artists or to his environment -

'6nigme a& cette epoque oih rien ne lui ressemble ni ne l'explique'. Today art historians tend to be suspicious of this Romantic love of myth, but it has to be admitted that with a fine intuition Proust sensed that particular quality which dis- tinguishes Vermeer from a contemporary like Pieter de Hooch. For Vermeer is neither a realist nor an imaginative artist: the View of Delft comes within a hair's breadth of photography, and it is in this tiny margin that Vermeer finds room to express his artistic personality. In all art Proust was looking for a species of revelation, and in his final encounter with Vermeer in 1921 he seems to have found the proof of a higher reality which might compensate for the shortcomings of ordinary human experience. Baude- laire believed that love was a way of escaping from our- selves, but in Proust's novel it has exactly the opposite effect; it only throws the individual back on himself. The only escape, Proust came to see, from the terrible captivity of subjective emotion, the only genuine form of communica- tion, is offered by art, for through the books and pictures of others the individual can share another man's vision.

'Grdce a l'art, au lieu de voir un seul monde, le notre, nous le voyons se multiplier, et autant qu'il y a d'artistes originaux, autant nous avons de mondes & notre disposition, plus diffrents les uns des autres que ceux qui roulent dans l'infini et, bien des sitcles apr~s qu'est 6teint le foyer dont il emanait, qu'il s'appeldt Rembrandt ou Vermeer, nous envoient encore leur rayon special.25

21 Le Cote' de Guermantes, p.524. 22 La Prisonnidre, p.187.

23 FRAN9OIS FOSCA: Les Ecrivains et les arts visuels, Paris [ 1g960o]. 24 La Prisonnitre, P-377. 25 Le Temps Retrouvi, p.896.

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