Men are mortal, pictures too.
—MARCEL DUCHAMP
As this study reaches its end, we are left wondering about the reception and impact of La Tour’s paintings in his own time, a task rendered almost impossible given his inexplicable disappearance from the annals of art history. There is irony in La Tour’s unusual fate because, according to Jacques Thuillier, “La Tour is the triumph of Art History and its justification. For La Tour would not exist without Art History.”1 Lost to art and buried by the oblivion of history, he would be brought back into “existence” in the twentieth century solely as a product of art-historical scholarship. Unlike other major French painters of the seventeenth century such as Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain, whose reputations were enhanced by biographical and critical accounts, La Tour failed to garner mention or critical attention during his lifetime in seventeenth-century chronicles on artists and art. A century later, a brief note by Dom Augustin Calmet appeared in a compilation on illustrious men in Lorraine, commenting on La Tour’s professional activities and his renown as a painter.2 Describing him as an artist who excelled in the painting of “nights,” or nocturnes, Dom Calmet justified his high appraisal of La Tour’s talents by recounting a historical incident attesting to his exceptional merits as a painter:
He presented to King Louis XIII a painting of his representing a nocturne of St. Sebastian; this work was of such perfect taste, that the King had all the other paintings removed from his room in order to leave this one alone. La Tour had already presented one like it to Duke Charles the IV. Today this painting is in the chateau of Houdemont near Nancy.3
His account provides historical evidence of the reception and impact of La Tour’s work relatively close to La Tour’s own time. Interestingly, it also indicates an awareness of La Tour’s production of multiple versions of his works during his lifetime. The expression of the king’s appreciation for the painting’s perfection translates into an act of homage requiring the removal of all other works in order to validate its unique artistic merits. His reaction reflects a shift in the conception of the beholder, since it led him to act on this conviction.
While we do not know how La Tour was viewed in his own time, affinities between his pictorial naturalism and the works of Caravaggio and his followers enable us to draw some inferences. The French art chronicler André Félibien’s (1619–1695) memorable remark on Poussin’s aversion to Caravaggio comes to mind:
Poussin could not bear Caravaggio and said that he had come into the world to destroy painting. Yet his aversion for Caravaggio is not surprising. For whereas Poussin sought to foreground the nobility of his subjects, Caravaggio allowed himself to be carried away by the truth of nature as it appeared to him. Their approaches were thus diametrically opposed to each other.4
Félibien’s claim that the function of art is to ennoble and idealize rather than to provide realistic depictions of nature is of particular interest, given La Tour’s pervasive use of naturalistic conventions to the point where they veil and cover up the sacred referents of the image. Does his debt to naturalism as a pictorial approach lend itself to the accusation of complicity with Caravaggio’s supposed mission to “destroy painting”? The effort to assess the impact of La Tour’s naturalism on his viewers is thwarted by a dearth of documents and comments, so that the contemporary reception of his works remains as mysterious as the works themselves.
Nevertheless, to try to flesh out the seventeenth-century beholder’s point of view and perspective, we can turn to Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s comments in 1672 on Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene (c. 1594–1595).5 He described Caravaggio’s naturalism as an imitation of nature that required no further invention on the part of the painter: “He was fully satisfied with this invention of nature and made no effort to exercise his brain further.”6 In taking nature as a model, he claimed that Caravaggio had turned away from an idea of painting based on the pursuit of ideal beauty and decorum: “He painted a young girl seated on a chair with her hands in her lap in the act of drying her hair; he portrayed her in a room with a small ointment vessel, jewels, and gems placed on the floor; thus he would have us believe that she is the Magdalene.”7 The point here, however, is not the unfairness of Bellori’s assessment of this sublime work (which comes closest in spirit to La Tour’s paintings) but rather the challenges it outlines to the goals and language of painting of his time. Moreover, he also questions the interpretive leap demanded of the beholder, since the identification of the young servant girl as Mary Magdalene requires the decipherment of visual clues (the ointment jar and jewels) to infer the sacred nature of the scene. By reducing the naturalist image to its visually duplicative function as a copy, Bellori undermines recognition of its cognitive role in enabling the ability to see across the ordinariness of this scene the incarnation of the sacred. Overlooking the intervention of pictorial artifice at work in the seamless transparency of the naturalist image, he resists the idea of “seeing” the incarnation of the sacred in a depiction of ordinary life.
La Tour built on his pictorial predecessors’ efforts to activate new forms of viewer response and experience by mandating the beholder’s participation in the production of the painting’s meaning. But in resorting to a naturalism that suppressed the pictorial signs conventionally used to distinguish between secular and religious contents, he imposed greater conceptual demands on the beholder. By suspending viewers between two viable yet distinct interpretive possibilities, between scenes of ordinary life and figurations of the sacred, he compelled them to consider and resolve the enigma posed by the work. Two ways of seeing and understanding painting are made available: one that treats painting as a copy of nature and another where an ostensible copy of the natural world serves as a portal whose crossing gives way to the sacred within the profane, or “the numinous in the everyday.”8 There is paradox in La Tour’s deliberate cultivation of naturalism, which takes nature as a model only to subvert its visual logic through a chiastic strategy that figuratively summons the invisible through the traversal of the visible. By inventing a new pictorial language that pushed the conventions of pictorial naturalism to its limits, he mobilized spiritual transcendence from the idioms of ordinary life steeped in immanence.
Mobilizing ambiguity, La Tour’s paradoxical approach to the pictorial image enabled him to convey its spiritual import while protecting it against the taint of idolatry and possible extinction. Indeed, La Tour’s reliance on the opposition between the profane and the sacred, between the visible and the invisible, constitutes the tension driving the transformational potential of his paintings. Dissimulated in the apparent stillness of his images, these dynamics attain the equanimity of a balancing act, mobilizing opposition not to neutralize tension but to harness its energies for transformation. This paradox—and thus logical incongruence—implied between the profane and the sacred, between immanence and transcendence, becomes the driving impetus at work in La Tour’s paintings. Driven by the tensions it sets into motion, this transformative potential restitutes to painting its capacity not simply to be but to happen and to make things happen.9
Coming back to La Tour’s disappearance from the annals of history and art until his rediscovery in 1915, we fall back on Félibien’s remarks in 1688 regarding his idea of what defines a great painter. Arguing for the superiority of the painter of the human figure, whose excellence as “an imitator of God in representing human figures” triumphs over all other pictorial genres, such as still life, landscape, and portraiture, he concluded:
For that one must move from the depiction of one figure to the representation of several together; one must depict history and fables and represent the great deeds like a historian or charming subjects like the poets; and climbing ever higher, one must know in allegorical compositions how to cover under the veil of fable the virtues of great men, and the most exalted mysteries. We call great a painter who can perform such tasks well.10
There is irony in La Tour’s having satisfied the criteria evoked by Félibien for attaining excellence, moreover greatness, in painting. For unknown reasons, he would fail to be included in Félibien’s history of artists, and this absence, along with the subsequent lack of artistic notice, would seal his destiny of oblivion for the next 250 years. La Tour’s works (signed or unsigned) would live on and be reattributed to others as if he had never existed. He would suffer a most unusual fate in the history of art: that of dying twice (recalling the legend of St. Sebastian)—not just physically but also symbolically, almost all memory and trace of his name extinguished.
Georges de La Tour’s works open up within the visual experience of painting a visionary space where sight gives way to spiritual insight, thereby promoting, along with religious sentiment, a meditation on the representational limits of painting. Today, the artist’s emphasis on spiritual insight opens up the possibility of a philosophical reflection on painting’s conditions of possibility as a visual medium. His works interrogate the position of the beholder to scrutinize what is seen and how, thereby emerging as meditations on painting’s enigmatic engagement with the visible. For the contemporary viewer who is also a reader of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the invisible is no longer solely the bearer of theological significance; it also bears important phenomenological and artistic determinations that help us better understand what makes vision, image, and painting possible.11 La Tour’s legacy to modernity is not simply to have opened up a reflection on the virtual through his spiritual approach to painting but more importantly to have elaborated the possibility of a conceptual approach to the image and the pictorial medium. By questioning the nature of vision and the visible, his inquiry opens up a broader reflection on painting and its engagement with the visible world. Resonating today with phenomenological and aesthetic concerns, his metapictorial reflections reveal the conditions of possibility of painting and in so doing provide an important conceptual legacy to both the past and the future of painting.