Putti Galore: ‘Eventails de Bosse’ and the Judgment of Paris

Abstract

The availability of luxury goods is often thought to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, but the ‘consumer revolution’ taking place in Europe in the seventeenth century accelerated the pace of production, availability and consumption of goods of all kinds, particularly luxury goods. Paintings, printed books and engravings, silk, gloves and lace, watches, porcelain and fans all became coveted objects available to a widening demographic. By considering the process of engraving and an engraved fan leaf by the renowned early modern engraver Abraham Bosse that represents the Judgment of Paris, this paper considers questions of gender, aesthetic judgment, engraving and the copy.

Keywords:

• accessories
• fans
• engraving
• aesthetics
• judgment
• putti

Notes

1 Kaja Silverman, ‘Studies of a Fashionable Discourse’, Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. by Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 139–54, drawing on the work of Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, La Robe: essai psychanalytique sur le vêtement (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983).

2 Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 29.

3 See among many studies Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965); the many studies of Tudor and Jacobean costume by Janet Arnold; Jane Ashelford, Dress in the Age of Elizabeth I (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988); Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chapter 7; and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On sartorial extravagance, see Silverman, cited above. But see also my ‘Sartorial Economies and Suitable Style: The Anonymous Woodstock and Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Essaying Shakespeare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 123–35, on the clothing of the early modern poor.

4 Jones and Stallybrass, p. 2.

5 Jones and Stallybrass, p. 10.

6 See the series of books on objects and consumption by Jean Baudrillard including Le système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); La société de consommation, ses mythes, ses structures (Paris: S.G.P.P., 1970); Simulacres et Simulations (Paris: Galilée, 1981), and Les stratégies fatales (Paris: Grasset, 1983)

7 Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chapter 5, pp. 95–108.

8 See Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Talese/Doubleday, 1996); Joël Cornette, ‘La révolution des objets: le Paris des inventaires après décés (XVIe–XVIIe)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (1989), 36, 476–86; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and John Harold Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer (London: Europa, 1982).

9 Marianne Grivel notes Bosse’s self-reference in Le Commerce de l’Estampe à Paris au XVIIe siècle (Genève: Droz, 1986), p. 202.

10 Translation mine.

11 On the history of fans, see Spire Blondel, Histoire des Eventails chez tous les peuples et à toutes les époques (Paris: Renouard, 1875).

12 The Dictionnaire Littré cites earlier examples from the Pléiade poet Rémy Belleau (1528–1577) and the translator Jacques Amyot (1513–1593).

13 Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905), I, p. 256.

14 Thomas Artus, L’Isle des hermaphrodites (1605), ed. by Claude-Gilbert Dubois (Genève: Droz, 1996), p. 68.

15 See, for example, Joseph Addison’s satiric entry in The Spectator, June 27, (1711). Concerning women’s being instructed in the language of fans, see Charles Francis Badini’s fan (1797) now entitled ‘Fanology or Ladies Conversation Fan’ and Robert Rowe’s fan ‘The Ladies Telegraph’ (1798). But see Pierre-Henri Biger’s essay in this issue disputing claims for a ‘language of fans’.

16 Carl Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France. Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 3.

17 Grivel, p. 91.

18 On beauty and judgment in the late seventeenth and eighteenths centuries, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith’s essay in this issue, ‘Fanning the “Judgment of Paris”: The Early Modern Beauty Contest’ on ‘beauties series’, portraiture, and competition among the elite in early modern Europe.

19 The brief and suspect passage from the Iliad: ‘But now Heav’n let fall a gen’ral eye/ Of pity on him; the blest gods persuaded Mercury,/ Their good observer, to his stealth; and ev’ry deity/ Stood pleas’d with it; Juno except, green Neptune and the Maid/ Grac’d with the blue eyes, all their hearts stood hatefully appaid/ Long since; and held it, as at first, to Priam, Ilion,/ And all his subjects, for the rape of his licentious son,/ Proud Paris, that despised these Dames in their divine access/ Made to his cottage, and prais’d Her that his sad wantonness/ So costly nourish’d.’ The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, trans. George Chapman, ed. by Richard Hooper (London: R. Smith, 1888), II, Bk XXIV, at <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Homer> [accessed 13 March 2014].

20 Ovid, Heroides, 16. 51 ff.

21 On the interpretation of, and popularity of the Judgment of Paris story in the decorative arts, see Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods (Oxford: OUP, 2005), pp. 342–48.

22 Herbert Damisch, Le Jugement de Pâris (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), re-edited and augmented, 2011), p. 304. See Goldsmith’s discussion of Raimondi’s engraving, ‘one of the earliest examples of a mass produced work of art’ in this volume, cited above.

23 Damisch, p. 117.

24 I am indebted to Damisch’s discussion in his chapter ‘Raphael Invenit. L’intermède du chef-d’oeuvre’, pp. 111–33.

25 ‘Le tableau de Manet se signalant dès l’abord par le refus de tout alibi poétique ou mythologique’, Damisch, p. 95.

26 Damisch, pp. 305–06.

27 I am grateful to Marc Redfield and Susan Bernstein for conversations on aesthetics, both in the context of Brown’s ‘Signature Initiatives’ process and as part of Redfield’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women’s 2014–15 seminar, ‘Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty’.

28 The motif of choice or judgment is, of course, common in legend and folklore. On ‘drames du choix’, see Georges Dumézil, Mythe et épopée (1968), rpt. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). I am indebted to Damisch’s discussion of Paris’s choice and judgment.

29 Damisch, p. 270.

30 On the ‘Judgment of Paris’ and the three ‘genres de vie’, see Natalia Agapiou, Endymion au carrefour. La fortune littéraire et artistique du mythe d’Endymion à l’aube de l’ère moderne (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 2005), pp. 57–82.

31 Agapiou, pp. 60–61.

32 Agapiou, p. 62.

33 Grivel, chapter 1, pp. 7–82.

34 Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, with an introductory essay by Gerhard Richter and trans. by Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 43.

35 Introduction to Copy, Archive, Signature, p. xxxiv.

36 I know of three examples of Bosse’s fan leaf, one at the Bibliothèque nationale, one at the Fan Museum, Greenwich, England, and one at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. There are no doubt others.

37 Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. xii

38 Alexandra Korey, ‘Putti, Pleasure and Pedagogy in Sixteenth-Century Italian Prints and Decorative Arts’ (University of Chicago Diss. 2007).

39 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail. Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 5. See also Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics. An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). In referring to Benjamin as a ‘major detailist’, Schor likely had in mind the Arcades project in which details figure so prominently, rather than Benjamin’s work on the Baroque Traverspeil. But I am persuaded by Jane O. Newman’s claims in her recent book Benjamin’s Library. Modernity, the Nation and the Baroque that Benjamin’s interest in early modernity, in the Baroque, ‘signals his awareness that the “origin” of the “pathogenesis of the modern age” lay in the Baroque era’, and that Benjamin’s exploration of aesthetics, allegory and mourning are suggestive for thinking about the ‘Judgment of Paris’ and Bosse’s theatrical and ornamental presentation of that myth of nation building. See the recent issue of Yale French Studies, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Hypothetical French Trauerspiel’, ed. by Hall Bjornstad and Katherine Ibbett, 124 (2014).

40 Bill Brown, The Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 4. Brown’s argument has a historical dimension which he locates in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries, in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, but what he has come to call ‘thing theory’ also has resonance for the seventeenth century.

41 Brown, p. 4.