Figure 4. Detail of hands from Georges de La Tour, The Flea Catcher, c. 1630–1634, Musée historique lorrain, Nancy.
And you have said that my body, which sees well, is blind, and many other strange things that are fleas in my ear.
—GUILLAUME DE DEGUILEVILLE, Pilgrimage of Human Life
La Tour’s depiction in The Flea Catcher (c. 1630–1634, Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy; see Plate 19) of a woman deeply absorbed in the act of pressing her hands together as if to crush or grasp something with her fingers has continued to puzzle viewers and critics alike.1 While there are no known historical documents or accounts to illuminate its circumstances or date, this work has gained unanimous recognition and acceptance as an original La Tour since its acquisition in 1955 by the museum in Nancy.2 The visual simplicity of this candlelit scene, its humble subject matter, and sense of stillness and gravity solicit our attention. The woman’s intense focus is mirrored by the painter’s solemn yet poignant rendering, which lends a contemplative air to the image. Described by Jacques Thuillier as one of the “most difficult” paintings in the European tradition, this work continues to intrigue and challenge viewers’ expectations.3 The difficulty, indeed mystery, of this painting lies in the uncanny combination of humble subject matter with its luminous presentation, gently suffused with numinous effects. The Flea Catcher is notable for its austere visual content, which consists of a chair, serving as a stand for a burning candle, and a woman seated next to it, wearing an open chemise that reveals her breasts and swollen belly. Pervaded by a feeling of solitude and silent reflection, the scene is infused with warm illumination, which intensifies and reddens the tint and the vermillion-colored upholstered chair, intimating symbolic associations most commonly found in religious paintings. The woman’s attentive focus is captured in a gesture whose contemplative duration is absorbed in the temporal, immortalized in the suspension of a moment. The ruthless veracity of La Tour’s pictorial presentation, its minimalism, and unforgiving “naturalism” serve to obscure rather than to clarify the work’s meaning.
What exactly is its subject matter, and who is being depicted and why?4 Is the woman crushing a flea, as some critics have suggested, or is she holding a rosary bead? Her presentation, partly undressed, in a chemise, supports the notion of defleaing, but she may be practicing her devotions before going to sleep. And if she is praying, is she doing so as an act of repentance, or does the hint of pregnancy (intimated through her rotund belly) suggest that she is troubled and seeking spiritual solace?5 The painting remains as ambiguous as its sitter. Is this merely a genre work showing a poor servant girl trying to rid herself of fleas? And does the work’s ambiguity also intimate associations with the sacred by combining allusions to maternity and servitude as figured by biblical handmaidens as depicted in the Old and New Testament?6
The Flea Catcher presents a paradox insofar as it appears to combine references to profane genre painting as well as to sacred subjects generally associated with devotional paintings. How can the profane and the sacred inhabit the same image, referencing at one and the same time the incompatible realms of immanence and transcendence? To address these questions is to reflect on the paradox that has proved central to this book, namely, how painting as a visual medium can depict an ordinary reality while also serving to provide access to spiritual insight and the sacred. Ambiguity has become the very hallmark of The Flea Catcher, and the painting continues to invite scrutiny. Critical assessments of this work have devolved into irresolvable differences. Indeed, ambiguity is endemic to La Tour’s pictorial works as a whole, since his images are informed by visual and verbal details that are not just to be viewed but also deciphered and “read.” They suggest a model of visual exegesis modeled on biblical exegesis, since painting is treated as a gateway whose crossing enables the viewer to go beyond what is seen toward deeper levels of spiritual meaning. The Flea Catcher will be examined as a contemplative device that attests to La Tour’s efforts to develop a new pictorial language enabling the mobilization of spiritual transcendence from the idioms of ordinary life steeped in immanence.
Commenting on the impact on the beholder of La Tour’s Flea Catcher, Pascal Quignard pondered the painting’s “extreme intimacy,” its “lowly” character, and its resistance to eroticism:
I shall never be able to understand why this woman is so very unerotic, when after all she is so feminine, and young, and beautiful. . . . An incomprehensible pity and gravity emanates from the flea or louse remover. Whatever its cause, this nudity is religious. Reading, praying, listening to the Tenebrae lesson, contemplating a night piece, are one single spiritual exercise. This painting, whose subject we know nothing of, preserves its enigma.7
Instead of fostering familiarity and proximity, the extreme intimacy and unrelenting ordinariness of the scene’s seminude sitter resist erotic appropriation. The woman’s inexplicable arousing of pity and her gravity defamiliarize and obscure rather than clarify the meaning of the image. If this scene has religious connotations, what are they, and how does La Tour achieve this spiritual effect? Quignard’s comments on the spiritual import of this work run counter to more prosaic accounts and interpretations of this subject matter. La Tour’s Flea Catcher has been linked to Dutch genre paintings of flea hunts and had been originally attributed to the Utrecht painter Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) because of its use of candlelight and flea iconography.8 While not present in seventeenth-century French painting, such depictions of the minutiae of daily life in Dutch art served a number of allegorical, moral, and, sometimes, erotic purposes.9 In genre scenes showing mothers defleaing or delousing their children, this act took on moral and religious significance, which the Dutch associated with cleanliness, since cleanliness of body also figured the attainment of spiritual purity.10 In some painting cycles depicting the five senses, flea catching was used to represent the sense of touch, marking its punctual nature as something felt rather than seen.11 However, the most common use of this motif was erotic, since the intimacy involved in the ritual of removing one’s clothes to look for fleas could be used to promote the viewer’s access to the female body.12 Indeed, the physical and moral connotations of the rite of cleansing the body could also become a pretext for its visual accessibility and erotic enjoyment, such as we see in Honthorst’s Merry Flea Hunt (1628, Dayton Art Institute, Ohio).13 This painting shows a young woman partially disrobed, gaily looking for fleas with the aid of her maid, a scene witnessed by two male figures peeping from behind the drapes covering her bed. The scene marks the subversion of the cleansing ritual into a visual spectacle whose voyeuristic enjoyment attests to painting’s cooptation, indeed adulation, of worldly appearances.
La Tour’s pictorial treatment is radically different from Honthorst’s staging of the scene, attesting to La Tour’s efforts to question painting’s complicity as a visual medium with the appearances and vanities of life. The centrality he accorded to the human figure is rivaled here by the depiction of an empty chair with a candle facing it, lending intimations of a subjective presence. The representation of the candle (a pervasive motif in La Tour’s paintings) and the use of vermillion (a recurrent color in his devotional paintings) inscribe the insignias of sanctity and serve to alert the viewer to the devotional potential of this image. The woman’s body is partly exposed, but her hair is covered by a turban. She is turned inward, absorbed in a gesture whose intense focus counters the viewer’s gaze. Her attitude actively resists visual appropriation, withholding its meaning from the penetration of the observer’s look. Suggesting pregnancy, her swollen belly, sheltered from the viewer’s prying gaze, refuses to relinquish its secret. Despite its ordinariness, or rather because of its presumed familiarity, the painting actively holds the beholder at bay.
François-Georges Pariset initially titled the painting Servant Girl with a Flea. The flea catcher’s turban recalls La Tour’s representation of the servant girl’s turban in his paintings of card cheats: The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (1630–1634, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; see Plate 12) and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (1630–1634, Musée du Louvre, Paris; see Plate 13).14 Beyond social servitude, could spiritual service or devotion also be at issue? Because of the flea catcher’s association with servitude and her possible state of pregnancy, some scholars have interpreted this painting as a biblical scene, suggesting that she may depict Hagar or a servant girl from the Old Testament.15 Representations of the Old Testament serve as prefigurations of the New Testament, as announcements of persons and events that augur the coming of Christ. These typological parallels between the Old and New Testament serve as visual similes whose meaning emerges from an interpretative exercise based on promise and fulfillment.16 Christopher Wright has suggested that The Flea Catcher represents the pregnant Virgin at the moment when Joseph discovers that she is with child (Matt. 1:18–25). He interpreted the light of the candle as symbolizing the coming of Christ as the light of the world, and he proposed a title for this work that would duly reflect its sacred standing: The Virgin Awaiting the Light of the World.17 While pursuing the sacred allusions of this work, however, Wright’s identification of Mary as the painting’s true referent is difficult to reconcile with the quasi-abject character of her depiction and the ambiguities haunting the work’s iconography and critical reception.
Indeed, La Tour’s reliance on ambiguity as a cultivated effect suggests that a deliberate strategy is at work, one reflecting his particular approach to devotional painting, which consistently combines the representation of ordinary domestic scenes with sacred allusions. This strategy draws on Caravaggio’s pictorial legacy of depicting the divine in earthly terms, as noted by Richard E. Spear: “The presence of the Divine might be indicated by a miraculous light, or more rarely, as in St. Catherine by a halo. But never is in Caravaggio’s work a saint idealized beyond the reality of earthly existence.”18 However, unlike Caravaggio’s depictions, which still retain indices of the sacred within depictions of women saints, La Tour’s maiden appears to be so caught up in ordinary reality as to cast into doubt the painting’s spiritual and devotional aspirations. Yet, though she is depicted alone, her presence takes on new meanings when considered in light of the empty chair bearing the candle and the coming child intimated through her implied pregnancy. While hinting at an absent father, the unoccupied chair with the burning candle also suggests the possibility of an unseen divine presence, since according to St. John, “not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father” (John 6:46). Rather than merely marking the absence of a presumptive father, the burning candle also stands in for and marks the place of the Heavenly Father. Irreducible to its domestic function as an implement for illumination, the burning candle also attests to the existence of a divine light that would “bear witness of that Light” (John 1:7). By staging a representation of maternity with no father in sight, this scene alludes to the sacred mystery of incarnation when God’s Word became flesh: “and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” (John 1:14).19 This painting combines in one image references to both an absent father and the Heavenly Father (figured by the light but invisible) and bears witness to paternity in both its human and divine forms. This ambiguity is on the order of paradox, since it suggests the possibility of transcendence even as it dwells in immanence. The allegorical inscription of the spiritual in ordinary life bears witness to the mystery of the incarnation that enshrouds the descent of the divine into the visible world.
Figure 4. Detail of hands from Georges de La Tour, The Flea Catcher, c. 1630–1634, Musée historique lorrain, Nancy.
The woman’s ardent focus on her joined hands is ambiguous because it attests to her involvement in either the most trivial, abject aspect of reality (crushing a flea) or in a contemplative exercise whose purview transcends the visual elements of the scene (see Figure 4). If she is not crushing a flea, what exactly is the woman holding in her hands? It is difficult to tell, but the base of an instrument appears to protrude from her left hand, and its existence is confirmed by the shadow thrown on the distended flesh of her belly. Hélène Adhémar and Thérèse Charpentier propose that it is the base of a crucifix attached to a rosary, a hypothesis they validated on the basis of photographic tests.20 However, this pictorial detail is barely visible given its concealment by the thin veil of her chemise. But the notion that the woman is holding a rosary is reinforced by the presence of a bracelet composed of three strands of jet beads on her left hand. The jet beads could be a decorative element, a sign of poverty, or even of prostitution, as some critics have suggested.21 Or they could invite consideration in a spiritual sense by alluding to the ceremonial beads of the rosary. If the latter, the sitter’s jet beads would designate what is otherwise inaccessible to vision by being hidden in her hands, namely, her rosary. Acting as placeholders in the visible, the jet beads render manifest the presence of the otherwise invisible rosary, thus supporting the painting’s devotional agenda.
The possible spiritual connotations of jet beads and their allusions to the rosary are introduced in La Tour’s Fortune Teller (c. 1630–1634, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a daylight painting believed to have preceded The Flea Catcher. Examined in some detail in Chapter 2, this moralizing work shows a young man duped by the words of a fortune teller while being robbed by her assistants of his gold medal and purse. Expensively garbed and bejeweled, the young assistant next to him wears four strands of jet beads as a necklace and as bracelets adorning both of her hands. However, in this context, the ostentatious display of beads functions as a condemnation, the mark of her spiritual and moral failure, since she is shown in the process of cutting the chain link of the victim’s decorative medal. Bearing the barely legible inscriptions of love and fidelity (amor and fides in Latin) on the links, the broken chain attests to the breach of trust implied in thievery as a violation of both secular and sacred law.22 The girl’s excessive display of decorative jet beads emphasizes her misplaced love for ornament and worldly values and the magnitude of her breach of articles of faith based on love and fidelity.23 The beads (like the depiction of mirrors) are marked by paradox in La Tour’s iconography, since they can function either as a sign of ostentation (love of worldly goods) or as a sign of faith when used in a rosary. However, the material enjoyment of the beads alone undermines their devotional potential, preempting their activation through prayer and thus efficacy as instruments of symbolic intercession. What distinguishes the rosary bead from other ornamental beads is not the way it looks but the way it functions in shaping and organizing the verbal expression of prayer.
La Tour’s interest in the rosary reflects the strength of devotions dedicated to the Virgin in the Lorraine of his time, as attested to by other pictorial examples, such as Jean de Wayembourg’s Institution of the Rosary (c. 1597, Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy).24 Moreover, the development of taste for Caravaggism in the north was influenced by Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary (1607), which was installed in Antwerp in 1620.25 The increase in images of Marian devotion and the rosary reflected attempts to counter Reformist and iconoclastic trends by revitalizing the content and expression of spirituality after the Council of Trent. Marian devotion provided both a saintly model and the objective means (the rosary) to facilitate the transformation of sinners into saints. The word “rosary” comes from the Latin rosarium, which means a rose garland to crown the Virgin or a rose garden, and it refers to a device, a string of beads, used for counting and keeping track of prayers offered to the Virgin. Dating back to the fourteenth century, the rosary is a “ritually repeated sequence of prayers accompanied by meditations on episodes in the lives of Christ and Mary.”26 The rosary beads function as a devotional apparatus that focuses attention on “central meanings and mysteries of the Christian faith, as seen and experienced through the life of a man (Jesus Christ), God’s word made flesh [John 1:14], and a woman (Christ’s mother), Mary.”27 The physical grasp of each bead accompanied by recitation, invocation, and veneration through prayer brings the spiritual to hand, rendering its immediacy tangible. Mediated through the proximity of touch and the immediacy of the believer’s body, the rosary is a “medium of presence” rather than a mere reminder of a sacred past.28 Bringing devotion within the reach of all, rosary beads act as a book of sorts (albeit without words or letters), which even the illiterate or the blind can “read” with their fingers. Providing structure and sequence to the ritual of prayer, the rosary prescribes through repetition and confirms through meditation access to and revelation of the sacred.29
The French expression for saying the rosary, or “telling one’s beads” (égrener son chapelet), actually means winnowing the crown or garland of flowers or beads. This expression contains biblical allusions to the agricultural practice of winnowing (égrener), in which wheat is exposed to the wind so that the chaff blows away, leaving behind the grain. In the Old Testament, the ungodly are compared to “the chaff that the wind driveth away,” referring to those “who do not delight or meditate day and night on the law of the Lord” (Ps. 1:4). In the New Testament, this expression is used metaphorically to figure the act of separating the wanted from the unwanted or things of value from those of no value. In Matthew, winnowing is evoked in the context of John the Baptist’s announcement and warning of the distinction between his ordinary baptism by water and the holy baptism by Christ (“He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” [Matt. 3:11–12]). In the Gospel of Luke, the reference to winnowing is reprised in the context of baptism but suggests the worthiness of those who have been chosen as belonging to Christ (Luke 3:17). These analogies between saying the rosary and winnowing the wheat highlight the rosary’s significance as a practice whose spiritual cultivation requires exertion and attention, just like the agricultural cultivation of grain. But the substance of this practice is not to nourish the body but the soul, since its exercise will separate the godly from the ungodly and things of value from those of no value, which will be swept away. While serving to crown the beads or the Virgin’s garland of flowers, the saying of the rosary also serves to “winnow” its proponents by marking their worthiness as true believers.
The rosary’s efficacy as an instrument of intercession is facilitated by the Virgin’s threshold position and her special disposition as benevolent mother. By providing access and bridging the chasm between earth and heaven, the Virgin functions as intercessor between the material and spiritual realms. In the Dominican liturgy, the Virgin is described as a “door of light”: “Yes, you are the doorway which leads to the King most high. You are the shining door of light.”30 The Virgin acts as a portal insofar as she provides aperture and access, thus enabling passage between the human and divine realms. In the writings of St. Bonaventura, Mary is presented as the entry point into heaven: “No one can enter into heaven except through Mary, as entering through a gate.” Indeed, according to St. Ambrose, this gate opens not just toward paradise but also toward the earthly realm, since the Virgin Mary is also depicted as the gate through which Christ entered the world: “Who is the gate if not Mary? Mary is the gate through which Christ entered the world.”31 Mary acts as a portal opening a passage between earth and heaven. The saying of the rosary engages the Virgin’s willingness and powers of intercession on behalf of the supplicant. Activated through prayer, the rosary becomes a key that opens the crossing of the profane to the sacred.
Let us return to the ambiguity of the woman’s hand gesture that raises the question of whether she is crushing a flea or holding a rosary bead. Based on the painting Young Woman Searching for Fleas (Museum Bredius, The Hague), by a contemporary artist, in which a woman defleaing herself has a rosary across her knee, Leonard J. Slatkes has suggested that La Tour may have deliberately conflated these gestures in order to suggest that the cleansing of the body could be seen as a figure for the purification of the soul.32 The possible combination of these gestures on the visual level in La Tour’s Flea Catcher (La femme à la puce) may have been reinforced by puns in French that associate references to a flea (puce in French) and a virgin (pucelle in French).33 This verbal slip from flea to virgin brings into paradoxical conjunction the abject minutiae of a flea with allusions to virginity, outlining a turn from the minutia of the profane to the magnitude of spiritual conviction. The French expression “to have a flea in one’s ear” (avoir la puce à l’oreille) was commonly used in the seventeenth century to refer to an amorous inclination or itch.34 But this expression was also used figuratively to allude to a spiritual emotion evoked by the contemplation of great wonders.35 Moreover, during the seventeenth century this expression is also used to imply a troubled state of mind, having doubts, being shaken awake, or feeling uneasy.36 These uses attest to the ambiguous nature of this expression, which courts contradiction by referring to two opposing states of mind designating a physical or spiritual reality.37 The conflation of these logically incompatible categories in wordplay represents in the verbal register the paradoxes endemic to the visual manifestations of the sacred elaborated in La Tour’s depiction of the flea catcher.
Lying just beyond the grasp of the beholder’s vision, the ambiguity of the actions of defleaing or saying of the rosary allows the affirmation of two incompatible and mutually exclusive gestures. The former signifies an involvement with the lowest ritual of daily life, cleansing the body, while the latter is associated with an elevated, indeed transcendent, ritual of spiritual purification and illumination. The conflation of the flea and the rosary bead marks a turning point, a transformational nexus that designates mutually exclusive and thus incompatible modes of being. Marking the turn from the profane to the sacred, it figures the very essence of Christian conversion. The word “conversion” derives from the Latin conversiōnem, literally meaning “turning round.”38 Its figurative meaning signifies an essential “change in character,” reflecting a change of heart, mind, and life.39 Sometimes used in painting to represent the sense of touch, the flea, like the rosary bead, redirects the physical connotations of touch into figuring the possibility of being spiritually touched. Pivoting around the visually imperceptible flea or rosary bead, La Tour’s pictorial depiction renders visible a change of heart, a turning point, or an event of inner life fueled by tension and ambiguity. Tracing the turn from figuration to transfiguration, the flea or rosary bead effectuates the passage from the profane to the sacred, acting as a key whose turn opens the gateway of the visible to the invisible.
Fire is kindled in my meditation.
LOUIS RICHEÔME, The Pilgrime of Loretto
The question of how the visual content of painting may be mobilized in order to emerge as an instrument of spiritual intercession necessitates refocusing on the most visually incongruous and striking detail of The Flea Catcher: the red chair with the burning candle.40 Taking up the entire left side of the image, the empty chair’s commanding presence solicits the viewer’s attention as a signifier of an absence (referring to human or divine presence and thus paternity, as discussed earlier). The chair is also an unusual color. Its glossy, bright, warm vermillion hues stand out against the dark nocturnal background, recalling the cardinal red of religious vestments and ceremonies in La Tour’s paintings of the Apostles and St. Jerome. La Tour’s use of vermillion stands in marked contrast to Caravaggio’s expressed distaste for such bright hues, which according to Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) he always subdued, saying that “they were the poison of tones” (tinte).41 Moreover, his choice of employing this pigment (cinnabar) to color the upholstery of an ordinary chair is unusual: This color had been so esteemed by the ancients as to be used to paint the images of gods.42 Such associations with the sacred were later reprised in medieval and Renaissance pictorial traditions by associating vermillion with spiritual connotations: The Virgin’s red mantle was described as “a garden of roses.”43 How are we to understand the transposition of these spiritual connotations of vermillion as a sacred color to the depiction of an ordinary chair? If the use of vermillion serves to alert the beholder to the presence of the sacred, can this gesture also attest to a meditation on painting as a medium of incarnation?
The association of the color red with the blood and the sacred is explicitly posited by La Tour in his earlier depiction of the red vestments and bloodstained rope and floor in St. Jerome (1628–1630, Musée de Grenoble), discussed in Chapter 1. In this penitential image, the traces of blood and its corporeal issue lend their authority to color, whose tint serves to transcribe the wounding tenor of St. Jerome’s spiritual suffering. Does this pictorial transformation, operating through the assimilation of the “redness” of pigment and the color of the saint’s dripping blood, evoke the magic of transfiguration or even miracle of transubstantiation? Vermillion comes from the Latin vermiculus (a diminutive form of vermis), indicating its derivation from worms.44 Combining references to color and worms, vermillion alludes to Christ’s bleeding flesh, evoking his suffering, death, and promise of salvation. La Tour’s evocation of the sacred through his use of color raises further questions regarding his reflections on painting as a visual medium. In The Flea Catcher, the light of the candle, reflected in the chair’s vermillion surface, lends its glow to color and warm gently the woman’s countenance. The reddish shadow cast on her face visually evokes what is otherwise unavailable to vision, that is, the inner light of spiritual conviction reflecting the affective tenor of her heart. As the color of fire, the red hue figures the expression of the spirit (pneuma in Greek, signifying breath or spirit), whose flame and fiery nature represent the inner light of spiritual passion and conviction.45 Consequently, despite its ordinary visual appearance in depicting humble concerns, The Flea Catcher, in its use of light and color, bears the imprint of the sacred. The shifts in the tonal quality of color and light refer to spiritual enlightenment, bearing witness to its affective tenor as reflections of the ardor of the heart.
La Tour’s use of red color is not the only signifier of the sacred in The Flea Catcher, as the painting’s theological allusions also rely on verbal or allegorical allusions. Indeed, the lack of fit between the use of the flea in erotic poetry and the visual details of La Tour’s painting led Anthony Blunt to question the critical accounts of The Flea Catcher as a “pure” genre scene.46 Based on an alternative meaning of the term puceau, referring to young boys (or girls) who, with a blow of their breath, can relight an extinguished candle (“on appelle Puceaux ceux qui au souffle de leur haleine, rallument une chandelle eteinte”), he suggested a possible link to La Tour’s visual treatment of this subject in his late paintings representing “a boy or girl blowing on a piece of coal or a brand to make it glow,” but he stopped short of pursuing its implications.47 The term puceau enjoyed common usage, as demonstrated by its definition in Randle Cotgrave’s (1611) dictionary: “A man that hath not lost his virginitie, also one that with a puffe lights a candle newly put out.”48 Thus the verbal usage of this term in the seventeenth century clarifies La Tour’s visual rendition, since puceau or pucelle referred not just to a condition, the state of virginity, but also to a mode of action, that of rekindling, with the puff of a blow (or breath), a candle just extinguished. Did this newly extinguished candle that needed to be reignited figure a crisis of faith, and did it also intimate allusions to the larger crisis of the sacred image in the wake of the Reformation? As such, it could also serve to allude to La Tour’s dilemma as a painter who sought to rekindle and keep alive the spiritual potential of the pictorial image in the wake of iconoclasm.
To answer these questions, we turn to La Tour’s late paintings of “blowers of light” (souffleurs de lumière in French), which are believed to have been painted over a period of twenty years. These works include A Boy Blowing on a Charcoal Stick, or Boy Blowing on a Lamp (c. 1638–1642, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, Donation Kathleen and Pierre Granville; see Plate 20); A Girl Blowing on a Brazier (c. 1645, private collection, USA; see Plate 21); and A Boy Blowing on a Firebrand, also known as Blower with a Pipe (c. 1645–1650, Tokyo Fuji Art Museum).49 Largely interpreted as genre scenes with profane subject matter and believed to be destined for domestic consumption, these works have received scant critical attention to date. La Tour’s debt of the subject matter to his Dutch tenebrist contemporaries further reinforced such a generic, secular reading.50 These three paintings depict a young boy or girl, in profile, blowing on a charcoal stick or coals to feed the flames in order to light, respectively, a lamp, a charcoal stick, or a pipe. What is unique about these scenes is that they all involve the rekindling and transfer of light rather than just ignition. Although identified as genre scenes, La Tour’s depictions of “blowers of light” also suggest the possibility of an allegorical, even theological, significance associated with the kindling and effects of fire in its capacity to burn, to heat, or to produce light. Indeed, La Tour’s solemn presentation of these young blowers, wholly intent on their task, and his frequent associations of light and fire with spiritual connotations suggest that the meaning of these works may well extend beyond domestic appearances. François-Georges Pariset’s observation that the boy holding a brand in A Boy Blowing on a Firebrand is a virtual double of the young page in The Discovery of St. Alexis (c. 1645–1648, Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy) supports this notion by suggesting that the genre scene contains, in rudimentary form, the seeds of the religious painting.51 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a common proverbial representation of the act of blowing on fire is that of setting on fire, that is, figuratively igniting or exciting passions, like throwing oil on fire (mettre le feu aux estoupes in French). This spiritual significance is enhanced by the meanings associated with “blowing” (souffleur in French) and the breath (souffle in French), which also signifies an animating force or spirit (esprit in French, from Latin spiritus), which is derived from spirare (to breathe, in Latin) and which means spirit, soul, heart, or breath.52
The spiritual significance conveyed by La Tour’s depictions of “blowers” and “breath” is in accordance with other representations of light and fire in his paintings, which have consistently figured spiritual inspiration as ignited and animated by the Word. This is not surprising: The French word for blower (souffleur) signifies both the action of intervention of someone’s breath to rekindle a light as well as the actor, a prompter, whose job it is to induce an action by providing missed cues or words when actors are stumped.53 If La Tour’s “blowers of light” are also “prompters,” this is because the spiritual import of devotional images is fueled by the Word, which illuminates the manifestations of the visible.54 Associating the blow of breath with the ability to rekindle a light, La Tour’s “blowers of light” incarnate this spiritual way of seeing and understanding the pictorial image.
La Tour’s painting A Girl Blowing on a Brazier shows a young girl, depicted half-length and in profile, blowing on the glowing embers of a coal brazier in order to light a charcoal stick. Shrouded in darkness and devoid of background details, the image focuses on the action of animating the flames to transfer the light, but to what end, precisely? The light of the glowing embers reflects on her face, imbuing it with the red tones and the heat of fire. Such images inscribe spiritual allusions by visually portraying the power of the breath to reanimate and to feed the fire and hence to generate light. In the seventeenth century, “to breathe” (respirer in French) does not just signify a physical act; it also embodies a way of being.55 Moreover, “burning brazier” (brasier ardent in French) is also a figurative expression for a heart ardently burning with divine love.56 Thus, La Tour’s depiction of the young girl blowing on a brazier invites the question of whether this painting also alludes to the rekindling and animation of the spirit. The young maid’s intercession as a blower for the transfer of light would signify the process of spiritual renewal or reawakening at work in animating painting’s spiritual potential.
Leonard Slatkes has observed that Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629) is the only artist other than La Tour to have painted a female version of this motif. Ter Brugghen’s Girl Blowing on a Charcoal Stick (location unknown) shows a semidressed young maid in a turban blowing on a charcoal stick in order to light a candle.57 The maid in La Tour’s A Girl Blowing on a Brazier is a much younger, slighter, prepubescent girl, unlike Ter Brugghen’s presentation of the young maid’s body, which is more developed: Her broad shoulders and exposed breasts attest to the attainment of womanhood, while her inclined head retains fleeting traces of childhood in its unselfconscious yet preoccupied demeanor. However, the real difference between these paintings is not a matter of content but rather pictorial style, since Ter Brugghen’s “blower of light” is treated specifically as a domestic scene and lacks the sense of ritual gravity and the contemplative mood of La Tour’s Flea Catcher.
Ter Brugghen’s Girl Blowing on a Charcoal Stick is believed to have been the model for La Tour’s A Girl Blowing on a Brazier, but the most striking feature of this painting is its resemblance to La Tour’s Flea Catcher. La Tour reprised Ter Brugghen’s disposition of the maid’s partly undressed body, the inclination of her head, and, more importantly, the mass of her body under her voluminously draped chemise. These visual cross-references suggest the Flea Catcher can also be considered as a “blower of light,” since her attentive focus and commitment serve as inspiration to others. Like his “blowers of light,” La Tour’s Flea Catcher also refers to the artist’s paradoxical relation to the pictorial image. Namely, he must rely on painting’s visual appearance and conceits even as he tries to overcome these constraints by “blowing” into the image in order to kindle its spiritual fervor. The visual details of the profane image become galvanized into signification and transfigured by the intervention of the blower’s breath, a puff of air that rekindles light and the radiance of spirit.
Every picture could be called vain in the sense that it is a sort of shadow or figure of truth.
GABRIELE PALEOTTI
But is it the spiritual power of painting that La Tour celebrated in The Flea Catcher and his later paintings of “blowers of light”—or merely its vanity? And does his evocation of the painter’s ability to rekindle the spiritual meaning of an image through the manipulation of light and shadow reveal something fundamental about painting as an artistic medium? To answer these questions, we turn to the previously mentioned Boy Blowing on a Charcoal Stick in Dijon, which shows a young boy in profile with cheeks inflated like bellows, blowing on a charcoal stick in order to light a lamp.58 The boy’s breath animates the flame, intensifying the contrast of light and dark with chiaroscuro effects and casting tints of color on his face.59 The exaggerated visual presentation of his blowing out breath to rekindle and animate the fire also implies a reference to man’s creation out of dust into a living soul by God, who “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the popular iconography of a child blowing on a brazier or a charcoal stick reprised Pliny’s descriptions of ancient artists, who proved their pictorial virtuosity through displays of their skills in rendering “glowing embers and their reflected light.”60 In early modern France, coals are associated with the baker’s craft, but they also enjoyed an association with the craft of making paintings.61 According to Cotgrave, the French word for coal (charbon) also signified “the first lines or lineaments of a picture termed so, because most Painters draw them with a piece of charcoal.”62 Thus the glowing embers depicted in these works are more than the expression of a pictorial conceit and artistic mastery; they also attest to La Tour’s efforts as a painter to rekindle the spiritual meaning of the painted image. Consequently, in addition to figuring the infusion of the pictorial image with spirit, La Tour’s “blowers of light” also present a metacommentary on pictorial virtuosity as a painter of light.
References to pictorial mastery in the handling of light and capture of visual appearances abound in The Flea Catcher. The inordinate care devoted to the rendering of the chair with a candle facing the beholder and occupying the left half of the canvas demands further attention. The touches of light reflected on the red chair’s upholstery studs mark the painter’s touch while also inviting a meditation on painting. By depicting the glowing reflections of the candlelight, La Tour turns the upholstery studs into mirrors of sorts. The glistening daubs of paint render manifest the operation of painting by highlighting its capacity for representation as well as its material properties as canvas, reflective surface, and support. Tracing the touches of the painter’s brush, these reflections of light on the red chair’s upholstery buttons figure the painter’s intervention, his master touch in capturing the visible even while reminding us of its fugitive and perishable character. La Tour’s pictorial approach thus attests to a double strategy at work. On the one hand, the deliberate display of painterly virtuosity serves to render the representational power of painting, and, on the other hand, the exposure of such a masterful display conveys his critique of painting’s visual conceits. Consequently, his treatment of painting cannot simply be reduced to forms of visual asceticism, as René Picard has argued, since the emphatic displays of its visual power manifest both its authority and its limitations.63
Having explored the devotional role of The Flea Catcher along with its potential meaning as a genre scene, the question arises as to how this work implements its meditation on painting. The only other insect represented in La Tour’s paintings is the fly shown alighting on the cover of the musical instrument in The Hurdy-Gurdy Player (c. 1628–1630, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes; see Plate 1), briefly touched on in Chapter 1. The fly’s punctual presence refers to trompe l’oeil illusionism as well as to the fleeting nature and brevity of life (memento mori) in seventeenth-century still-life paintings known as vanities (vanitas). The painted fly marks the boundary between image and reality, wherein the image tests its illusionist aspirations by competing with, even attempting to outdo, the claims of reality. Coined in the sixteenth century, the expression “Master Fly” (Maistre Mouche in French) gained currency in the seventeenth century as “C’est un tour de maistre mouche,” referring to the deftness of skill, finesse, or legerdemain exhibited by a master of deception.64 La Tour’s depiction of the fly reprises earlier pictorial traditions, where it functioned as “a self-conscious representation of superior painterly prowess.”65 His visual appropriation of this trompe l’oeil device refers to the painter’s virtuosity and professional mastery in manipulating illusion, while also revealing painting’s vanity and deceptive character.
The pictorial history of the flea is less august than the fly’s, having enjoyed few pictorial conceits, most likely because of its actual near-invisibility. In the Bible, the flea appears twice, and its usage indicates something so very small as to be of no importance at all, a sign of insignificance rather than of infestation (1 Sam. 24:14, 26:20).66 Throughout the Middle Ages, the flea’s resemblance to a grain or speck of dust led to a belief that it had been bred by dust. Reprising the Aristotelian account of the generation of animals, St. Isidore noted in his influential encyclopedic account that “the flea (pulex) is truly named, because it is reared by dust (pulvis).”67 This etymological association of the flea with dust (pulex–pulvis) suggests that the flea, like the fly, may also be seen as a memento mori. Bred by dust—the insignia of man’s mortality—the flea is a reminder of the vanity of life and, by extension, of the vanity of painting. But can painting’s visually deceptive and illusionistic character be overcome? Such a masterful turn of hand (tour de main in French), which also signifies superior skill and cunning, would amount to an act of pictorial prestidigitation. Alluding to La Tour’s name, this turn of hand conflates his autograph as a painter with his artisanal skills. The signature that La Tour relies on to validate his works also acts as a commentary on the mastery of his handiwork as a painter.68 But this capacity for pulling off something by a mere turn or sleight of hand indicates shrewdness, artifice, and manipulation, that is, qualities also associated with trickery or deceit. Recalling La Tour’s earlier depictions of cardsharps who both hide and show their “hand,” thus exposing their own tricks, La Tour’s signature underwrites through his name his implied complicity with painting as a visual medium. But were La Tour simply to celebrate his mastery of the pictorial medium in terms of its powers of illusion and deception, he would remain bound to the profane idea of painting, which is defined by its duplicative prowess alone. But rather than simply upholding painting’s visual capacity to perfect a resemblance of worldly things, La Tour exposed the “turns” of his own manner or pictorial style as fundamental to his spiritual approach.
One last look at The Flea Catcher reveals how this puzzling painting negotiates the transfiguration of ordinary reality into spirit through its treatment of the mundane content. This transformational nexus is figured by the ostensible flea or rosary bead that is suggested, virtually present but imperceptible as an object of pictorial representation (see Figure 4). At the heart of the painting, this enigmatic turning point marks the locus or, rather, threshold where sight crosses over into insight. But this pivotal fulcrum also points to La Tour’s solution: an act of pictorial prestidigitation that redefines the image by confounding the viewer with a representation that brings together two incompatible visions. Bathed in immanence and the intimate ordinariness of her being, the flea catcher is engrossed in her prosaic action. Her focus on the flea is the punctual mark of her absorption in a most minute and trivial manifestation of the world. This loss in the minutiae of daily life, which amounts to almost nothing, is set in opposition to the promise held out by the rosary as spiritual device. While insubstantial like a grain of dust, the rosary bead serves as a pivot for contemplation, veneration, and the turn to God. The insignificance of the flea as an object of worldly absorption stands in antithesis to the enormity of the powers of the rosary in providing access to the divine. The poverty intimated by the presence of the flea, which bears witness to the reality that she has nothing, contrasts with the munificence of her spiritual riches. Like the Virgin Mary, the flea catcher is a handmaiden of the spirit whose actions, like those of La Tour’s “blowers of light,” serve to rekindle spiritual ardor and keep it alive. Depicting figures of spiritual mediation, La Tour’s paintings emerge as instruments of intercession, whose access to the sacred is fueled by the suspension of their visual import. By breathing new light and life into the sacred image, La Tour opens up a reflection on vision’s conditions of possibility and the conceptual potential of painting.