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Abstract
In this article I consider the ‘Judgment of Paris’ story that decorates the leaf of a fan made in the late seventeenth century. I review the popularity of this legend in seventeenth-century painting, music, and literature and explore how the concept of female beauty in competition was reflected in the practice of female portraiture in the period, particularly in the collections known as ‘beauties series’. I examine how some women (Elisabeth Charlotte d’Orléans, Sophia of Hanover, Marie Mancini Colonna and Hortense Mancini Mazarin) both resisted and participated in these early modern beauty contests, in their written commentary and in their activities as subjects and patrons of art.
Notes
1 John Gay, ‘The Fan’, in Poetry and Prose, ed. by Vinton Adams Dearling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 73.
2 It was also frequently represented on fans: see Karen Newman’s essay, ‘Putti Galore: ‘Eventails de Bosse’ and the Judgment of Paris’ in this volume.
3 Carl B. Schmidt, ‘Antonio Cesti’s Il pomo d’oro: A Reexamination of a famous Hapsburg Court Spectacle’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 29 (Autumn 1976), 381–412.
4 See Amanda Eubanks Winkler, ‘“O ravishing delight”: the politics of pleasure in The Judgment of Paris’, Cambridge Opera Journal 15 (March 2003), 15–31.
5 See Hubert Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, trans. by John Goodman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 263–69.
6 On the history of moral interpretations of the Judgment story, see Margaret J. Ehrhart, The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 174–96, and Damisch, pp. 156–91.
7 For example, in the translation done by Bussy-Rabutin. See Agnès Pal, ‘Imitation et traduction d’Ovide par Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy’, Revue d’Etudes Françaises 8 (2003), 87–100.
8 Sometimes called the Double Heroides, this second volume of Ovid’s famous collection of fictional epistles includes one from Paris to Helen and her response.
9 On the seventeenth-century fascination with the Heroides and the popularity of translations of Ovid in the French galant tradition, see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sapho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 129–30.
10 The Judgment of Paris: a masque. Written by Mr Congreve. Set severally to musick, by Mr John Eccles, Mr Finger, Mr Purcel, and Mr Weldon (London: Jacob Tonson, 1701), p. 7.
11 Congreve, p. 12.
12 Winkler, pp. 20–21.
13 Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène ou le grand Cyrus (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1656), pp. 1173–174 in ARTFL <http://www.artfl-project.uchicago.edu>, [accessed 20 January 2014].
14 On Voet’s career and his role as creator of gallerie delle belle, see Francesco Petrucci, Ferdinando Voet (1639–1689) detto Ferdiando de’ Ritratti (Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 2005).
15 On the Windsor Beauties see Michael Wenzel, ‘The Windsor Beauties by Sir Peter Lely and the collection of paintings at St. James Palace’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14 (2002), 205–213. On the ‘great gallery of Beauties’ of Versailles there is a brief description on the Nymphenburg Palace website at <http://www.schloss-nymphenburg.de/english/palace/room06>, [accessed 19 January 2014].
16 Sean Ward comments on this practice in his introduction to Sophia of Hanover, Memoirs (1630–1680) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 20–22.
17 See Petrucci, pp. 210–61.
18 See Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 89.
19 Susan Shifrin has examined in detail the double process of realistic portrait painting and allegorization or the creation of types in seventeenth-century European portraits of women in A Copy of my Countenance: Biography, Iconography, and Likeness in the Portraits of the Duchess Mazarin and her Circle (PhD Dissertation. Bryn Mawr, 1998).
20 For example, John Dryden in De Arte Graphica (1695), and Jonathan Richardson in The Theory of Painting (1715), quoted in Shifrin, pp. 27, 35. Roger de Piles, using Rubens’s Judgment of Paris paintings as an example, insists on the superiority of painting that is capable of eliciting the narrative it suggests from the beholder, in his Conversations sur la connaissance de la peinture et sur le jugement qu’on doit faire des tableaux (Paris: Nicholas Langlois, 1677), pp. 161–64.
21 In ‘Des Désirs’ the company contemplates and discusses the ceiling in a ‘cabinet charmant’, which is painted by a disciple of Le Brun. It features a portrait of Venus surrounded by little cupids who represent different desires. In Entretiens de Morale (Paris: Jean Anisson, 1693), I, pp. 189–218.
22 Shifrin, pp. 255–61.
23 Cited in Elise Goodman, The Cultivated Woman: Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century France (Tubingen: Gunter Nar Verlag, 2008), p. 127.
24 On this topic see William Brooks, Artists’ Images and the Self-Description of Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orleans (1652–1722), The Second Madame (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007).
25 Ward, p. 38.
26 Ward, p. 42.
27 Ward, p. 21.
28 Marie Mancini, princesse Colonne, Cendre et poussière, ed. by Maurice Lever (Paris: Le Comptoir, 1997), p. 36.
29 For a comparison of the two texts see the introduction to Marie Mancini, La Vérité dans son jour, ed. by Patricia F. Cholakian and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1998).
30 Marie Mancini, The Truth in its Own Light, in Hortense Mancini and Marie Mancini, Memoirs, ed. and trans. by Sarah Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 116.
31 Her uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, had left his name as part of his legacy to Hortense and her husband Armand de la Porte de la Meilleraye, hence the couple became known as the Duke and Duchess Mazarin. On the tracking of her activities in the news of the day, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, The Kings’ Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin and her sister Marie Mancini, princess Colonna (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2012), pp. 80–91 and 137–60.
32 Susan Shifrin and Andrew Walking have analyzed this collision of hyperbolic adoration with mundane realities in the Saint-Evremond musical works written for Mazarin’s salon in ‘“Idylle en Musique”: Performative Hybridity and the Duchess Mazarin as Visual, Textual, and Musical Icon’, ed. by Susan Shifrin, The Wandering Life I Led: Essays on Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin and Early Modern Women’s Border Crossings (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing, 2009), pp. 48–99.
33 Shifrin and Walking, p. 71.
34 Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 34–39.
35 For a more detailed analysis of ‘the convergences of the generic with the narratives of the particular’ in this painting see Shifrin and Walking, pp. 56–65.
36 John Gay, Poetry and Prose, I, p. 67.
37 Jacob Fuchs discusses the ‘unsettled state’ of the poem as represented in the contrasting endings of the 1714 and 1720 versions in ‘Versions of “Female Nature” in John Gay’s Fan’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 21 (1992), 43–51.
38 Gay, p. 79. According to the OED, the verb, to ‘flirt’ can mean to give a blow or propel a small object, also to make the gesture of opening and closing a fan.