The Art Bulletin

Herri met de Bles's The Sleeping Peddler Robbed by the Apes (ca. 1550, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) has concealed within it an exceptional phenomenon, never before noted. Considered as visual exegesis, Bles's landscape is closely related to the Christian idea of the Book of Nature and to Erasmus's thought. Erasmus conceived of exegesis as a dialectical tension between the two extremes of literal and spiritual meaning, a tension reconciled in the figure of paradox, the allegorical enigma. When Bles's landscape is interpreted in this way, the presence of a crypto-anthropomorphosis becomes apparent. This visual device beckons the viewer toward conversion.

Sebastiano's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha is only one example of an early-sixteenth-century religious image that deliberately evokes erotic desire in the viewer. The figure of Saint Agatha, derived from a broken sculpture of Venus with the features of a beautiful contemporary, was intended to provoke lust in its original owner, a young cardinal pilloried for his homosexual activity. The essential ambivalence of this work and others of the same genre should be seen in the context of Roman attitudes to sexuality: clerics were, in principle, admonished to live chastely, but in practice were likely to be sexually active.

A peculiar whim of sentimental jewelry, eye miniature portraits became the fashion about 1800 in northern Europe, in particular among British aristocrats. Exchanged as tokens of affection between lovers, friends, and family members, these small images depicting the eyes of individuals have a double investment in the visual as representations as well as agents of vision. These portrayals of the gaze differ from regular miniature portraits in that they are not objects of contemplation but instead entail a reversal of the object and subject of looking. As such, they offer a prephotographic instance of “being seen.”

Were Georgian portraitists capable of making philosophical “arguments in paint”? This question, raised by Edgar Wind in a formative 1932 article, provides the departure point for an examination of Allan Ramsay's paired portraits of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Drawing on popular visual conventions, Ramsay constructed a dialogue between Hume's “patronizing” worldview, particularly in regard to élite patronage and colonial American rule, and Rousseau's espousal of sentimental autonomy. Ramsay's portraits were philosophical, it appears, to the extent that they brought Hume's philosophy to bear on imminent political and imperial concerns.

In 1855, critics attacked Amaury-Duval's allegorical portrait Tragedy for its studiously classicizing, desexed, mortified, and ultimately incomprehensible representation of the famed Jewish tragedienne Rachel. At the heart of the painting's critical failure was its work as allegory. In other representations of Rachel by Amaury-Duval, J.-A.-D. Ingres, and Théodore Chassériau allegory was employed to negotiate the temporal rupture between a phantasmatic “antique” past and contemporary artistic identities. Read against the changing status of allegory, these works reveal allegory's instrumentality for grappling with problems of portraiture and history and suggest its essential role as the “scaffolding of the modern.”

Woman with a Fan (1902) is the culmination of Gauguin's representations of the Tahitian goddess of regeneration. His depiction of Vairaumati frames his intertwined aesthetic and spiritual beliefs. Her fan signals her immortal status and, through its blue, white, and red ornament, Gauguin's revolutionary call to “the right to dare all.” This justifies his assimilation of multiple sources, which, through a process he called transposition, took on new life. Thus, the regeneration epitomized by Vairaumati is implemented in the pictorial dynamic through the mutation of the sources that constitute her identity, tying the permutations of art to the soul's immortality.

In 1929, The Art Bulletin published a mock Platonic dialogue, “The New Protagoras,” by the philosopher and historian of art theory A. Philip McMahon; it summarized current thinking about art and art history, proposing that an idealistic aesthetics could serve as a corrective to the excesses of science, and that a future art history might seek to effect the critical integration of those seemingly incompatible approaches. “A Newer Protagoras” starts from the premise that seventy-seven years later, the inhabitants of Elysium would need further help making sense of the earthly intellectual landscape. Two disciples attempt to bring the Sophist Protagoras up-to-date.