The Period Eye

The expansion of the Internet into news, entertainment, and leisure does not seem to have staunched the flow of printed magazines—available at airports, gas stations, grocery and drug stores. My neighbors were cleaning out a garage piled with old newspapers and periodicals when I came upon an August 1991 issue of Family Circle, whose spine offered the assurance that it was the “world’s largest-selling women’s magazine.” The back flap contained a full-page advertisement remarkable for its reliance on a well-known early nineteenth-century portrait.

A woman, undoubtedly a model in her early twenties, stands confidently in the foreground, turned forty-five degrees to the picture plane and clothed in French military garb, one hand thrust into a white waistcoat, the other resting on the arm of a gilded fauteuil and grasping a cigarette. Pale, even facial features are cosmetically enhanced with high arched eyebrows, deeply shaded cheeks, and broad red lips, the whole framed by a luxuriant chestnut mane floating two enormous gold spiral earrings. The narrow torso is augmented by a dark blue cutaway coat trimmed with red collar and cuffs, gold braid epaulettes, metallic buttons and medals; the slim legs are accentuated by white breeches and hose, terminating in black patent leather flats affixed with a gold buckle. The hands are the operative signs: while the position of the right is a popular synecdoche for the Emperor Napoleon I, and as such works with the empire uniform, setting, and frame to signify Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries (1812), the gesture of the left is meant to showcase a foreign object, namely Virginia Slims Cigarettes. The impact of the advertisement is thus derived from the viewer’s perception of the woman’s/product’s daring disruption of a visual sign system created by and for men to promote their authority. Two inscriptions clarify the nature of this disruption of visual coda: white script at the top queries, “Ever wonder where we’d be if history had been herstory?,” and yellow capitals at the bottom left declare, “YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY.” The message is forceful and unequivocal: after centuries of being excluded from the chief cultural and political events of history’s narrative, women are at last emancipated and ready to play and to record a part equal to that of a man.

And not just any man. Between 1800 and 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte presided over a series of military and diplomatic victories on the European Continent that allowed him to claim a French empire stretching from the Papal States to the Netherlands along with dependents and allies extending from Spain to Russia. First as Consul and then as Emperor, he also presided over the creation of a strong executive branch capable of reorganizing national and regional governments and instituting a new legal system (the Napoleonic Code) and civil service that oversaw public education, religious worship, tax collection, and law enforcement. To explore in greater depth how the interests of the commodity marketer compare with those of the art historian, it is necessary to consider the origins and content of David’s original portrait of Napoleon.

In 1810, an eccentric Scottish nobleman named Alexander Douglas, Marquis of Hamilton, commissioned David to paint a full-length image of Napoleon that would preside over a collection brimming with busts and miniatures of the Bonaparte family and an impressive array of Egyptian artifacts. Unlike his later female impersonator, the emperor shows sure signs of middle age: thinning hair and cautious gaze rest atop a slack and portly physique disposed in comfortable counterpoise. The uniform, augmented with white winged lapels held with gold buttons, can be identified as that of the Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. The rendering of the right hand lightly slung into an opening in the vest accentuates his corpulence, and that of the left firmly clutching a gold snuffbox admits the importance of tobacco as a nighttime stimulant. Although a few planes have been flattened and furnishings inserted compared to the original sketch, the arrangement guarantees the balance of horizontals and verticals typical of neoclassical painting. The eye is admitted to this private space only by degrees: the red velvet settee angled like the figure, the mahogany trestle bureau affixed with a lion and piled with writing implements, the wall articulated at the left edge by a monumental pilaster filigreed with grotesques and at the right by a tall case clock registering 4:13 a.m., the recess filled with books—all attributes of the emperor’s private suite at the Château de Tuileries. The low-burning lamp and the early hour of the clock suggest that the emperor has been up all night reading and drafting documents. David himself remarked that he intended it to seem like Napoleon had been hard at work writing the Code Napoléon, signified by a partial inscription on the scroll at right, yet this was hardly to be believed since the Code was a collaborative effort and had been in effect for years. But David was successful in promoting the legend of the emperor tirelessly working for the welfare of his subjects. As sunrise approaches, he rises from his desk, adjusts his uniform, and fastens his sword in preparation to review of the foot soldiers. In this way, he encompasses both civil and military aspects in his person and identity; battles in foreign fields may well have brought him to the elevated position he now holds, but administrative responsibilities at home are consuming an increasingly large share of his time.

Even before Napoleon’s reign had ended, viewers compared the portrait to slightly earlier fare. Alexandre Lenoir, archeologist and head of the Musée des monuments français, proclaimed it the best likeness ever made of the emperor, the image of a lawgiver among his papers being the perfect companion to that of a conqueror traversing the Alps. Closer to today, Albert Boime embraced this comparison between Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) and the Napoleon in His Study (1812) for the purpose of exploring the relative proportions of mythology (his word is “ideology”) and reality in each. As portraits, both are idealized depictions, but whereas the former invested the active body of the hero with ideal qualities, the latter accorded to the inanimate objects surrounding the body with them. In other words, the master of the surprise attack has now become a prisoner of paperwork.

Scholars take as axiomatic the idea that Imperial state portraits evidence a clean break with the ancien régime‘s religio-political values, if not always its sign systems: the ancient emblems and medieval regalia that they bear can signify antiquarianism or historical anecdote but never transcendent powers. This may well have been true for many post-Revolutionary viewers, intent as citizens were to break with past political institutions, but it was likewise true that painters built on past visual traditions, among which the eighteenth century’s small- to mid-sized cabinet portraits featuring clerics, aristocrats, and financiers, male and female, engaged in reading or writing within the confines of their libraries and boudoirs, figured prominently. It only remained for a head of state to express the desire to be so represented on a grand scale before a large audience for this domestic occupation to be understood as a political virtue. Napoleon appears to have been the first to embrace this strategy. Thus, David’s portrait of Bonaparte represents a measure of continuity with the Bourbon past, suggesting that the emperor not only bears the martial and legal obligations of modern statecraft but also continues the creative and thoughtful pursuits of the republic of letters.

Mention of women’s contributions to Enlightenment texts and images brings us back to Virginia Slims’ use of a model to travesty Napoleon’s portrait. In 1968 the Phillip Morris Company targeted young professional women with a longer, slimmer, and smoke-reducing cigarette. Its marketing consultants, aware of the potential of modeling shots to be seamlessly integrated into realist paintings, conceived the strategy of substituting a young mannequin for a middle-aged monarch. Women’s liberation, it was suggested, consists of being able to appear and to act like a man, as signified by the assumption of military dress and the possession of tobacco. Of course, this only gives rise to more questions. If women’s empowerment over inequities past and present is predicated on her ability to be like a man, does that not constitute a reinforcement of patriarchal values, in this case militant and autocratic ones? Further, if women’s empowerment is facilitated by the consumption of tobacco, does this not contribute to capitalist abuses, the exploitation of labor and the onset of lung cancer? Consumers might have been served better with a portrait of Madame de Pompadour or Catherine the Great standing before a desk piled with papers, holding a cup of Gevalia Kaffe, and pondering, “How might herstory be written?” or “What will herstory say?” Establishing this narrative continues to be a complicated and contested business.

When a friend offered me a slightly worn copy of Cecil Beaton’s Photography (1951), a series of autobiographical anecdotes compiled by one of the twentieth-century’s foremost society photographers, I did not have to think twice about accepting it, for I had always been intrigued by his elaborately staged portraits. In the late 1930s and early ‘40s Beaton seemed to delight in “historical artifice,” posing members of the royal family against old master paintings or within period interiors. In early March 1945, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace to take an official photograph of George VI’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, intended to mark her attaining the age of majority. In a half dozen varieties reproduced in books and magazines, she appears at three-quarter length, firmly seated and facing left, ensconced in lush foliage. She is clothed in a low-necked, short-sleeved gown of pink crinoline speckled with sequined floral sprays and butterflies, her mother’s Hartnell hand-me-down during a time of economic austerity. Brown hair strangely cresting to the side and ruddy hands heavily clasped in the lap, the shy teenager looks directly at the camera and smiles broadly in salutation or lowers her visage in romantic introspection. She is flanked by two thin sprays of carnations and backed by a partial reproduction of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Hazards of the Swing (1767). Yet the illusion of a fairy princess dwelling amid magical trees and birds seems a bit contrived even for this era.

By juxtaposing a very alive princess with a painterly forest, Beaton may have imagined that he was elevating his technique by allusion to an eighteenth-century French masterwork and securing for his sitter the illusion of youthful innocence and beauty. However, there are hazards to quoting old masters, the most obvious being that the content of the backdrop may be incongruous with the values of the sitter.

From the moment Fragonard showed historical narratives at the Salon (or art exhibition of the French Académie Royale in Paris) in 1765, he was hailed as an official talent capable of reinvigorating grand format history painting for the edification of the public. Soon after, however, Fragonard abandoned an academic career and the historical genre for a private existence making rococo decorative panels for the haute bourgeoisie. A wealthy Intendant des finances (tax collector) for the clergy, the baron de Saint-Julien had conceived The Swing as a titillating fantasy wherein his mistress would be represented on the ropes being pushed from behind by her placid husband and regarded from below by her enthralled lover. The artist was accustomed to making precise studies of landscape, but whenever he came to adapt these to decorative vignettes like this one, his imagination took over. For example, a massive, gnarled, yet still eminently virile oak frames the right and upper sides of the canvas, its billowing branches melding with the blue-green bushes and trees beyond. The attitudes of the human inhabitants are no less exaggerated. The young mistress wears a luxurious robe à la française of pale pink silk trimmed at the bodice and sleeves with frothy waves of bows and lace, the amplitude of which is tested by the husband pulling her ever higher into the air. As the demimondaine floats upward and over a rose bramble, she raises a leg in order to discharge a miniature shoe, a signal to her lover that incidentally provides him with a tantalizing view up her skirt. Reclining against a cylindrical plinth carved with a nude chase scene and topped with Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s 1757 marble sculpture of Cupid invoking silence, the rascal is clothed in a simple pale gray suit and gazes upward adoringly. He raises his tricorn hat in an effort to brush her dangling leg. When legal and moral strictures have fallen away, burgeoning nature steps in to abet the sexual impulse.

To be sure, Beaton did his best to neutralize any chance that the sensational content of Fragonard’s The Swing would be associated with the physical person of Princess Elizabeth. As Roy Strong has observed, Beaton charged a photographic firm in Ealing to provide him with a single enlarged portion of the French canvas printed in reverse. Nevertheless, wartime technology had its limitations, and the supporting ropes and billowing dress of the air-born lady remained partly visible in the upper left, requiring a (painted?) overlay of parallel hatchings. Joint recognition of a famous work from the art historical canon and an official representative of the British government results in an attempt to relate the two. Did Princess Elizabeth own Fragonard’s painting or admire the rococo style and, if not, why did she find this imagery appropriate? And joint recollection of the painting’s mistress on a swing and the photograph’s princess on a stool results in an attempt to reconcile their divergent identities and interests. Yet the two women are hardly in sympathy: the princess’s decorous and genial presence transforms the space from one of amorous dalliance to one of youthful purpose and imagination. Personal desires are upstaged by official obligations, the thick ropes re-cast as supports for a tottering but still admired tree: the House of Windsor.

Beaton’s approach was typical for press photographs and studio films of the period, offering aristocratic and bourgeois clients the illusion of graciousness and congeniality and consumers relief from poverty and warfare. Equipped with large and medium format cameras capable of registering optimal figural detail and tonal subtlety, he posed the royals before large painted and photographic backdrops that incorporated quotations from paintings and engravings spanning Watteau to Winterhalter. He was quick to distinguish his creative approach from that of Victorian and Edwardian portrait photographers, who delighted in arranging elites in absurd costume portraits and narrative tableaus. Rather, he wished to convey the “easy charm” and “melting sympathy” of female members of the royal family at a time of massive political and social convulsion. It is unclear whether the aristocracy knew what he was about; as he recollected, the older generation questioned his use of elaborate settings: “all these backgrounds and flowers—what does it mean?” “So long as the pictures are flattering, who cares?” they chirped. They could not have known that he was creating a goddess for the modern era.

Sixty-five years later, when “high” and “low” art forms regularly circulate and intermingle in digital mass media, there is finally a reason to care. Manipulating images from art history to meet a new creative objective is always a tricky business, but especially so when it is done in the service of an ideology, politician, or figurehead. Those inclined to see Beaton’s society photographs as a significant step on the way to chic costume and set design of the late 1950s and early ‘60s are missing their larger purpose as a vehicle for encouraging popular acceptance of the institution of monarchy in the post-war democracies. All the while the fascists in Italy and Germany were using official ceremonial and newsreel footage to court the old dynasts and new industrialists, the constitutionalists in Britain and the United States were doing their best to adapt monarchs and millionaires to the language of popular media, converting archaic signs of authority, prestige, and wealth into a kindly, luxurious, and infinitely consumable product.

The strength of this enterprise will be tested once again next February when Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Diamond Jubilee. In the meantime, her government has announced a few measures aimed at increasing popular support for the monarchy: the throne will now pass to the eldest child, whether male or female, and members of the royal family may now, in addition to marrying divorcé(e)s, practice Roman Catholicism. Some of Beaton’s more notorious clients, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, would have smiled.

A few months ago one of my colleagues, a professor of Renaissance art, was clearing out his office in preparation for retirement, an exercise that required some persistence as he had accumulated piles of books, periodicals, posters, and slides over a twenty-five-year period. He approached me in the hallway with a long roll of paper, which I took to be an oversized poster from a museum publicity campaign, handed it to me and said, “Can you use this?” Unfurling the tube, I was intrigued to find a highly charged drama consisting of two women with their eyes and hands directed towards an unseen adversary at lower left. The dark palette, concentrated expressions, and period costumes made the image instantly recognizable as a fragment of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598-99). Large letters at the top announced an exhibition: “CARAVAGGIO E I SUOI / Percorsi caravaggeschi in Palazzo Barberini,” which can be translated as “Caravaggio and His Own [i.e. Followers]: Caravaggesque Journey at [i.e. through] the Palazzo Barberini,” held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini, Rome, from mid-February to early May 1999. Not having attended the event, I wondered what to make of this singular quotation from high art and the collective claim of the appended text.

First to the poster measuring around three and a quarter by four and a half feet. The anonymous designer doubtless selected the striking pair of Judith and her maidservant carrying out an unpleasant deed in the darkness in order to foster interest in the exhibition. Desire is generated on at least four levels: there is the desire to see a masterpiece by Caravaggio; to follow a disturbing narrative through to completion; to view a naturalistic portrayal of an alluring young woman together with her opposite; to see additional examples of such fare. Yet the text is somewhat at odds with this imagery: in highlighting the message of “Caravaggio and His Followers” concurrent with the illusion of two women engaged in a brutal act, the designer suggests that several early seventeenth-century European painters can be grouped together by (a) a shared interest in naturalism and emotion, which is probably true given the requirements of the Catholic Council of Trent and the popularity of the baroque biblical narratives throughout Southern Europe, and (b) a shared interest in attractive female figures engaging in disturbing yet heroic deeds on behalf of the state, which is questionable but seems particularly misplaced here given the unusual direction of Caravaggio’s life and oeuvre.

Second to the catalog published by Electa Napoli. The authors were determined to foreground Caravaggio as the titular leader of a school of great artists and to represent the broadest spectrum of tenebrist practice: southern painters like Giovanni Baglione, Orazio Borgianni, Carlo Saraceni, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, and Bartolomeo Manfredi are included alongside northerners such as Valentin de Boulogne, Hendrick Ter Brugghen, and Judith Leyster. Yet the authors pass over the issues raised by the discordant juxtaposition of image and text in museum publicity and the catalog cover. Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes is not even included in the volume, and three other works by his hand—Narcissus (1597-99), St. John the Baptist (1603-04), and St. Francis (1606)—are apposite in subject, featuring solitary male figures respectively distinguished by intense self-regard, erotic vulnerability, and mor[t]al introspection. Would not this selection have presented a suitable opportunity to explore not only Caravaggio’s artistic practice and conceptual approach but also his relationship to his young male models, his sexual desires and anxieties, and the moral dilemma these may have posed for a catholic? That Caravaggio’s detested rival, Baglione, was also featured with Sacred Love and Profane Love (1602), a tenebrist composition of two winged adolescents drawn together with serpentine limbs, intricate gestures, and sexually ambiguous gazes, suggests that more have been going on between the painters and/or their sitters than professional friction over the use of the dark manner!

If the “followers” are continually paraded to evoke the popularity of the “master’s” approach, how will Caravaggio ever be appreciated on his own terms? Richard Spear, Howard Hibbard, and others have pointed out that Caravaggio had only a few trusted friends, refused to take pupils, intimidated those (including Baglione) who experimented with his style, and declared Bernardino Cesari and Annibale Carracci (established classicists) to be among the best painters. Because he was largely absent from Rome after 1605, he had little opportunity to see his approach spread to established painters Borgianni, Saraceni, and O. Gentileschi. Therefore, Judith Beheading Holofernes may be best appreciated in the context of his personal and professional output, somewhere between the languid boys and epicurean Bacchuses of the mid-1590s and the saintly visions, conversions, and martyrdoms of the early 1600s. The two streams are tributary to the same torrent within Caravaggio, the product of an unconventional person[ality] adrift in the alternately permissive and repressive spaces of early modern Rome.

Third to the painting measuring four and three quarters by six and a half feet. The Apocryphal story of Judith, a Jewish widow from Bethulia, defeating the powerful Holofernes, an Assyrian general besieging her city, was a popular subject for artists riding the wave of Counter-Reformation militancy because it encouraged fortitude in the face of danger or suffering and self-sacrifice for one’s people and faith. Adorning herself seductively, Judith set out with her maidservant for the enemy lines and, upon reaching them, claimed to be a defector bent on the destruction of Israel. She gained entrance to Holofernes’ tent and, in the course of several days, dispelled his suspicion and kindled his desire. One night he drank too much and fell into a stupor, at which point she seized his sword, cut off his head, conveyed it to a sack, and returned home in the early hours. When the Assyrians heard the news, they became demoralized and disorderly, and the Israelites were able to drive them from the region.

Caravaggio selected the climactic moment for representation. Two full and one partial torso are interlinked in an undulating wave of tension from left to right, starting with Holofernes struggling to rise from bed at the shock of finding his throat being cut, Judith firmly grasping his hair with one hand and sawing his neck with the other, and the servant ready to catch the meaty prize in a cloth. While there are some discrepancies in the rendering of anatomy (e.g. Holofernes’ neck seems improbably circular in cross-section, Judith’s right arm seems illogically joined to her shoulder), the varied surfaces of skin, hair, and fabric are fluidly, even gracefully, painted (Judith’s soft, red lips or her maid’s gnarled, tanned fingers). A great red drape in the background has the effect of pushing the scene uncomfortably forward and heightening the horror of blood spurting from the gash onto the white bedding. But the credibility of the narrative largely depends on three pairs of contrasts grounded in the artist’s aforementioned tendencies toward realism, eroticism, and reflection: the commander’s expression of helplessness mixed with resistance serves as a foil for the widow’s determination tinged with disgust; the beauty’s loosened bodice and alluring undergarment intervenes between the nude frame of the warrior and the draped profile of the maid; the heroine delivers a blow downward while the villain looks upward, the whole dramatically illuminated as if to suggest an act of divine justice. And it is here that we find the artist: momentary pleasure is accompanied by long-term physical and emotional pain, sexual desire is not always honestly reciprocated, and a brutal life ultimately leads to a violent death.

A master and an admirer, a friend and a foe, a celebrity and a pariah, Caravaggio attempted to invest himself in all three of these biblical characters, both in terms of contradictions within them as individual agents and in terms oppositions among them as political/social subjects, an exercise that has much in common with that of other unconventional person[alitie]s like Guido Reni. An effort to trace similar threads in their approaches to violence may yield an understanding of personal and creative investments more complex than current “male genius” and “castration anxiety” paradigms.