The frisson of No-Touch: A Fan’s Gallant Allegory of the Senses

Abstract

The double-sided Allegory of the Senses, shows, on one side, a late- seventeenth-century courtly depiction of hearing, sight, and smell. It is possible to read these as three vignettes depicting gallant sociability in elite society: the very sociability in which the fan played a crucial role. Our interpretation must change, however, if we acknowledge both the ‘missing’ senses of taste and touch not directly depicted on the fan, and the fan’s reverse, a rural scene of a couple. The play of absent and present senses, and the tension between the courtly vignettes of the primary image and its humbler other side, suggest also a possible ‘fluttering’ of signification, not unlike the motion of a fan itself, which may undo some of the gallant visual rhetoric which at first glance appears to dominate an understanding of this fan.

Keywords:

• Allegory of the Senses
• galanterie
• touch
• taste
• experience

Notes

1 With great thanks to Claire Goldstein, Laura Loth, Annelen Karge, Matthias Rothe, and Christophe Wall-Romana for their thoughts and inspiration.

2 On Mallarmé and the image of the fan, see in particular Graham Robb, Unlocking Mallarmé (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé. La Politique de la sirène (Paris: Hachette Livre, 1996), pp. 48–53; on the connection between poetry and the moving image, with Mallarmé as a central figure, see Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp. 55–78.

3 On the gendered performance of the fan, see Andrew Sofer, Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 117–66.

4 Patricia Cowen, A Fanfare for The Sun King: Unfolding Fans for Louis XIV (London: Third Millenium Publishing, 2003), pp. 190–92.

5 Claude Habib, Galanterie française (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). On the aesthetics of galanterie, see especially Delphine Denis, Le Parnasse galant. Institution d’une catégorie littéraire au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2001) and Alain Viala, La France galante (Paris: PUF, 2008).

6 The classic study of these allegories in English is Carl Nordenfalk, ‘The Five Senses in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985), pp. 1–22.

7 Anne T. Woollett, Ariane van Suchtelen, Rubens & Brueghel: A Working Friendship (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006).

8 Avril Hart and Emma Taylor, Fans (London: Victoria and Albert Publications), p. 17.

9 Cowan, p. 192.

10 On the use of glass and mirrors in the material culture of Versailles, see Felipe Chaimovich, ‘Mirrors of Society: Versailles and the Use of Flat Reflected Images’, Visual Resources 24.4 (2008). On the importance of floriculture, see Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power, Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). On the use of technology especially in the gardens, see Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For a related consideration of music in the period, including as part of allegories of the senses, see Richard Leppart, ‘Temporal Interventions: Music, Modernity, and the Presentation of the Self’, in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-century Cultural Expression, ed. by Susan McClary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 338–60.

11 See Dominique Michel, Vatel et la naissance de la gastonomie (Paris: Fayard, 1999). See also Josy Marty-Dufait, La gastronomie du Roi-Soleil (Paris: Autres Temps, 2001).

12 From the Indice et recueil universel de tous les motz principaux des livres de la Bible (Paris: n.p., 1564), p. 157 recto, as quoted in ‘Goût’, Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, 2012. [Accessed 4 January 2014] <http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/gout>. On the further shifts within of taste as a matter of aesthetic judgment, from an innate feature of the elite, to a faculty honed by consumption, see Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

13 Mme de Sévigné, Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 227.

14 Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch. Archaeology of a Sensation (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 30.