Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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the first book of the Lectures on Aesthetics published after Hegel’s death, based on his students’ notebooks. And we read them willingly as a happy improvisation, an example opportunely chosen by the professor in order to explain this ‘ideal’ whose sensible realization constitutes the artistically beautiful. For in this section devoted to elaborating the concept of the beautiful that is the object of artistic production and aesthetic reflection, the professor willingly illustrates his argument with contemporary examples: the latest salon where a new school of painting ends up giving a caricatural aspect to ideal beauty, a polemical work in which a connoisseur opposes ideal theories with the exigencies of sensible matter and the technique that transforms it. Here two paintings from the Munich Gallery and a painting from the Louvre illustrate the argument. Two Murillos and one Raphael, or at least a painting attributed to Raphael. In the period when Hegel saw it, the portrait of the young dreamer with the velvet beret that posterity alternately attributed to Parmigianino and to Correggio was still attributed to Raphael. The correction of the attribution matters little here. What deserves attention is the coupling of the two names: Raphael and Murillo. For them to be associated in this way, for one to recall the other, an abyss needed to be crossed in the hierarchy of painters. In the tradition of Vasari, renewed by Bellori and Félibien, Raphael is the master par excellence, the one who nourished himself in Rome on the monuments of antique art and knew how to transpose their noble simplicity onto the pictorial surface. In the prize list of painters compiled by Roger de Piles in 1708, he was the undisputed master in the fields of drawing and expression, equalled only by Guerchin and Rubens in composition. Colour alone, of which Titian and the Venetians were the recognized masters, constituted his weak point. But even this weakness contributed to his supremacy for all those who considered drawing the directing principle of the art of painting, and colour its simple servant.
Murillo was very far from deserving such homage. Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon probably entered the collection of the Prince Elector of Bavaria as early as the late seventeenth century, and a few English travellers brought some of the Sevillian master’s works back to their country in the eighteenth century. But one would search in vain for his trace, and that of his compatriots, in the surveys that learned eighteenth-century Europe compiled of its great painters and schools of paintings.2 Undoubtedly there is an empirical reason for this. The religious works created for Spanish convents and the royal family portraits did not leave Spain at all. And even there, the visitors complained about the unwillingness to allow them to be seen. An English traveller, who hoped to see the Murillos at the Hospital de la Caridad, in Seville, recalled his desperate attempts to overcome the ill will of the lazy monks in order to access the chapel where the paintings were covered with a black veil that was lifted only a few days each year.3 The Napoleonic armies satisfied the curiosity of these amateurs in their own way: there were eight paintings from the Caridad among the paintings seized by the general Soult, whose raids forced Spanish painting to enter the patrimony of universal painting. But the ‘balance’ of painters and Schools, as it was practised, excluded the idea of such a patrimony. The distribution of Schools was a distribution of criteria of excellence: Florentine drawing and Venetian colour, Italian modelling and Flemish chiaroscuro, and so on. A new national school could only take its place if it seemed to incarnate a specific excellence. And it was admitted that colour, the only praiseworthy element in the Spanish, came to them from the Flemish who had themselves inherited it from the Venetians. For a new ‘national’ painting to become visible, the idea of art as patrimony needed to impose itself: art as the property of a people, the expression of its form of life, but also as a common property whose works belonged to this common place now called Art, and that materialized in the museum.
Surely, the seizures of the French armies in the occupied territories constituted quite a peculiar form of ‘common patrimony’. An extreme example can be found in the cynicism with which Soult collected misappropriated ‘gifts’, through armed force, for his private collection. Yet the very pillaging of the convents in Seville implied a new value attributed to their content. And one can readily smile at the naivety or the impertinence of this French officer announcing the arrival of a convoy of Flemish masterpieces in Paris: ‘The immortal works left to us by the brushes of Rubens, Van Dyck and the other founders of the Flemish school are no longer in a foreign land. Reunited with care at the orders of the people’s representatives, they are today deposited in the holy land of freedom and equality, in the French Republic.’4 But among the patriots who were outraged by the thefts committed in Spain or Holland, in Italy or Germany, more than one art lover recognized the benefit claimed by the looters: having made paintings ‘that were absolutely unfit to be seen due to the smoke, grime and old oils with which they were covered’5 visible to all art lovers. One thing is certain in any case: the revolutionary event, the new declaration of ancient freedom, and the spoils of war of the ‘armies of freedom’ vertiginously accelerated the movement that, with the progressive opening of princely collections to the public since the middle of the eighteenth century, made the works of the painters and Schools enter into this new milieu of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ called art. In this sense, commentaries elicited by the return of the works to their country in 1815 are significant, such as this speech a Berlin journalist ascribed to a Memling Resurrection, attributed to Van Eyck at the time: ‘I am only truly famous since the sorrows of war led a great number of people to flock to Paris … This was like a resurrection, and now that I am presented to the eyes of all, here, in my country, I am astonished to see how the way people see me has changed.’6 The very brutality of the operation accentuates the constitutive paradox of art’s new place: on the one hand, the works that enter it do so as expressions of the life of their people, themselves belonging to the patrimony of human genius. It accounts for why new ‘schools’ can appear there: the distribution of schools is not regulated by the distribution of criteria of academic excellence, but rather by their embodiment of the freedom of a people. But, inversely, it is because works henceforth express a collective belonging that it becomes possible to individualize them, to subtract them from classifications, and to draw the work attributed to the most sublime representative of the great ‘Roman’ school and the genre paintings of little Sevillian beggars closer to one another.
For, according to Hegel, what had been ruined was not only the hierarchy of schools, but also the hierarchy of genres. He does not compare a Madonna by Murillo to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which he saw in Dresden. The Munich Gallery does not possess any. He compares the young man with the beret with two of these five paintings of children which ended up in Munich through a very specific path: via Dutch merchants. This is how Murillo’s five bodegones entered, directly or indirectly, into the princely collection. In a way, it is as Flemish genre paintings that the little beggars of Seville are presented to Hegel’s gaze in a gallery that possesses an important collection of ‘little’ Dutch or Flemish painters, like Teniers or Brouwer, who devoted themselves to painting domestic scenes, tavern fights or village festivals. And it is within a passage devoted to Dutch genre painting that their example occurs to him. The status of the artistic ideal is in effect linked to the evaluation of this kind of painting – that is to say, to the questioning of the hierarchy of pictorial genres. It had been a long time indeed since aristocratic collectors became infatuated with these popular scenes and Teniers’s sale value reached reputable figures. Nevertheless, they were ranked at the bottom of the ladder throughout the eighteenth century: a great painting required a great subject. In scenes of domesticity, villages and the cabaret, one could certainly admire the dexterity of the painter (Teniers receives the same grade in composition as Leonardo da Vinci in Roger de Piles’s classification) and allow oneself to be seduced by the art of shadow and light. But these merits equally amounted to signs of baseness: ‘Some inferior dexterity, some extraordinary mechanical power, is apparently that from which they seek distinction’, was Joshua Reynolds’s verdict, in the 1770s, on these paintings and the genre that they embodied.7 The representation of vulgar scenes and people could only match the skill of an artisan, not the ability of an artist.
The museological and revolutionary constitution of artistic patrimony was evidently bound to overthrow this hierarchy. It was their capacity to translate freedom – of genius and of the people – which now had to define the value of paintings, rather than the distinction of the people represented. But this upheaval did not come without problems. No doubt the organizers of the revolutionary Louvre