The familiarity of visual experience leaves us mute inasmuch as it is so blinding.
—MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
Celebrated for their aura of mystery, Georges de La Tour’s (1593–1652) pictorial works continue to solicit critical interest and public fascination.1 At first sight, his paintings suggest a veritable celebration of light and the visible world. From his diurnal works, bathed in an almost unnatural white light, to his nocturnes, illuminated by candles or torches, opening up the darkness of night to a visionary space of devotional meditation, the representation of light has become the very signature of La Tour’s pictorial practice. Anthony Blunt remarked on the notable absence of traditional seventeenth-century pictorial subjects and genres in La Tour’s works: “Unless—as it is not impossible—whole categories of his paintings have disappeared, he painted no historical, mythological or allegorical pictures and no portraits.”2 The absence of these conventional genres marks a radical departure from the pictorial subjects and idioms that dominated seventeenth-century French painting. Moreover, unlike his artistic peers Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Claude Lorrain (b. Claude Gellée, 1604–1682), La Tour did not paint landscapes, skies, water, or clouds but focused exclusively on the depiction of light and the human figure.3 This lack of reference to the external world is compounded by the extreme sparseness of interior spaces, devoid of material belongings or vestiges of decoration.4 The impoverishment of subject matter magnifies the prominence accorded to light and the human presence that dwells within it. The imposing scale of the human figure (depicted at half-length or nearly life-size) counters the beholder’s gaze with stately magnitude. This emphatic foregrounding of the human figure achieves a diminishment of distance but does not bring the beholder any closer to resolving the mysteries that continue to haunt La Tour’s paintings.
Scholars have traditionally distinguished La Tour’s daylight works from his nocturnes based on differences in treatment of light and subject matter. It has been argued that his paintings represent two different ways of looking at the world: a profane mode, indebted to popular genre scenes of daily life; and a sacred mode, influenced by the traditions of devotional painting that gained resurgence in the wake of the Catholic Reform. However, a closer survey of La Tour’s works reveals some notable exceptions, including sacred daylight scenes (the Albi Apostles and St. Jerome) and profane nocturnes (the payment of taxes, dice players, and the flea catcher), thus inviting further inquiry into the role played by light.5 His treatment of light is marked by a rhetorical quality that draws attention to its tone, reflections, and affective ranges. The daylight works are characterized by a light that looks so bright as to suggest theater: It is a light that emphasizes its own artifice, since its brash unreality attests to the excess of its illusionism. The nocturnes are suffused by the flames of candles, lanterns, or torches, lending the countenance of fire to faces and hands and making them glow like burning embers in the dark. How are these portrayals of illumination to be understood, given the opposition between the theatrical depiction of light, which emphasizes its deceptive character, and its contemplative manifestations, where light functions as a figure for spiritual expression and transformation? And do these contradictory modes of display also imply a reflection on the nature of vision and its relation to the visible?
The questions raised by La Tour’s depictions of light are compounded by the visual appearance of his paintings, whose emphatic naturalism solicits the viewer’s attention. More commonly associated with genre painting, this realistic approach was deemed surprising when transposed to sacred works. Indeed, as Philip Conisbee noted, La Tour’s “veristic approach to religious subjects was original in French art in the 1620s.”6 La Tour’s pursuit of likeness between image and the natural world bears the influence of the Catholic Reform’s call for the revitalization of religious imagery in adopting a more accessible pictorial style designed to affect the beholder emotionally through its simplicity, intelligibility, and realism.7 La Tour built on Caravaggio’s (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571–1610) and his followers’ depictions of religious truths in forms bearing a more direct relationship to everyday life but avoided the accusations of scandal or breaches of pictorial decorum that hounded the reception of Caravaggio’s work.8 However, La Tour’s use of “naturalism” proves deeply innovative, since he did not merely cast religious subjects in the midst of ordinary people but rather recast religious figures and scenes in settings whose insistent ordinariness calls into question the conventions of the sacred image. The excessive verism of his pictorial style solicits our attention and invites scrutiny as regards its artistic, theological, and philosophical implications. La Tour’s treatments of light and shadow are neither dramatic in their effects nor otherworldly because unlike Caravaggio he deliberately incorporated the representation of light within the framework of the picture. Moreover, he exposed its artifice by displaying in his paintings the implements required for the production of light, including candles, oil lamps, lanterns, torches, or coal sticks.9 By bringing into view the physical apparatus for the production of light, La Tour emphasized its human appropriation and transfer as well as highlighted its sensuous and material manifestations.
Expressed through faithfulness to the rendering of things seen, La Tour’s “naturalism” is not a mere stylistic conceit, since it reflects a baroque worldview imbued with metaphysical determinations. Rupert Martin has argued that “the naturalism of seventeenth-century art is inextricably bound up with a metaphysical view of the world. It is for this reason that the familiar objects of visible reality may be looked on as emblems of a higher invisible reality. But that transcendental world can in turn only be apprehended through the faithful rendering of things seen.”10 It is important to keep in mind that this allegorical attitude is prevalent not only in naturalist depictions of sacred images but also in genre paintings, which ostensibly present a “realistic portrayal of everyday life.”11 The familiarity of the visible world is evoked in order to conjure another reality whose invisibility transcends the realm of sensuous experience. Indeed, the challenge extended by La Tour’s works is in depicting what painting cannot ultimately show: namely, spoken words, audition, the passage of time, shifts in states of consciousness, and changes of heart. Their suggested but elusive presence tests the bounds of the pictorial image and the beholder’s capacity to see. Closer study reveals that La Tour’s ostensible pursuit of resemblance between image and the visible world also disguises reflections on painting as craft, based on its duplicative powers, illusionism, and deceptive qualities.
Understood as a mode of thought (rather than merely as an illustrative technique), this allegorical attitude continued to be popular in the seventeenth century.12 Paulette Choné has demonstrated the influence of emblem books in shaping the allegorical “imaginary” of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Lorraine, thus providing an important resource for understanding La Tour’s use of symbolic imagery.13 Other important sources, such as Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend (an influential compilation of hagiographies), devotional tracts, and iconology handbooks also prove helpful in illuminating the allegorical meanings associated with the iconography of La Tour’s paintings. However, acknowledgment of La Tour’s debt to the allegorical traditions of early modern culture is merely a step toward elucidating the ways he mobilizes pictorial imagery through verbal cues in order to redefine through use its meanings and patterns of signification. La Tour’s emphasis on the importance of the word to his pictorial enterprise is figured through his repeated representations of books and acts of reading.14 Keeping in mind that baroque allegory entails the “crossing of the borders of a different mode,” particular attention is devoted to exploring the interplay of pictorial and verbal devices as they test the boundaries of visual and verbal representation.15 Marking the intertwining of the senses prior to their emergence in the modern period as autonomous faculties, this crossing of the eye and the ear necessitates cross-disciplinary analysis.16 Based on Walter Benjamin’s contention that baroque allegory is “not convention of expression, but expression of convention,” La Tour’s reliance on the interplay of word and image is in question insofar as it suggests a self-conscious approach to the image and to pictorial conventions as a whole.17
La Tour’s approach to the pictorial image is marked by the influence of the Catholic Reform and the dissemination of the Tridentine doctrine in the region of Lorraine in the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century. The Duchy of Lorraine, where La Tour grew up and spent his life as a painter, played an important role in the Catholic Reform movement’s attempts to combat Protestant “heresies.”18 Indeed, as John W. O’Malley pointed out, the spate of iconoclastic outbreaks (from the 1520s to 1562) spurred on by the Reformation in northern France lent particular urgency to the French delegation’s proposal to the Council of Trent (1545–1563) to address the question of the veneration of images.19 Protection was being sought against iconoclastic exhortations that sought to impress on the populace that “it is not enough to remove all idolatry from their hearts; they must also remove it from their sight” by pillaging churches and abolishing all images.20 These incidents fueled debates about the viability of pictorial images as instruments of the sacred and led to ecclesiastical and artistic efforts to reenvision the way they were seen and understood. We are left wondering how these attacks on sacred images affected painters such as La Tour when they viewed ransacked churches stripped to barren, blank walls. How would this “martyrdom” and eradication of the sacred image, which demonstrated painting’s potential “mortality,” affect La Tour’s artistic practice? And would it lead him to search for ways to protect and thus “redeem” the sacred image by rendering it unidentifiable as an object of iconoclast desecration?
The Council of Trent’s reconsideration of the cult of images and the debates that followed regarding their efficacy in promulgating the tenets of the faith led to an artistic renewal of the figurations of spirituality. In its last session in 1563, the Council of Trent issued its decree “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics, of Saints, and on Sacred Images,” which endorsed the intercession and invocation of saints, the veneration of or honor paid to relics, and the legitimacy of the use of sacred images.21 By emphasizing the role of the Virgin and saints as intercessors, and of sacraments and other devotional works as sources of saving grace, the council reaffirmed the need and importance of intermediation in the encounter of the human and the divine. The council extended this theological argument to the use of sacred images by stressing painting’s intercessional role in teaching and perpetuating the articles of faith.22 Emphasis was placed on the use of sacred images as instruments rather than visual artifacts for propounding the mysteries of faith. By privileging the role of sacred images as devices for promoting the cultivation of piety, such decrees deemphasized their material aspects and revitalized their relationship with the beholder. This new understanding of sacred painting is also reflected in La Tour’s oeuvre, in the privilege accorded to its symbolic efficacy as an instrument of faith instead of a focus on its visual and material character. Taking the pictorial image to task, his works bear witness to painting’s potential fallibility even as they attempt to reclaim its use as an instrument for devotion.
La Tour’s treatment of light and shadow, of color, and of still-life elements and allusions suggests that these features cannot be relegated to the sole task of convening allegorical meanings, since they also lend themselves to a metareflection on the nature of painting and its engagement with the visible. They culminate in La Tour’s critique of painting as an exercise in “vanity,” inasmuch as its meaning may be contained in its visual appearance and pursuit of resemblance. A closer scrutiny of his pictorial corpus reveals in each and every work instances of awareness and reflection that comment on painting’s operations, its visual limits, and its conceptual potential. La Tour’s works present us with an idea of painting that is self-aware insofar as it reflects upon its own making and takes to task its own nature as a representational medium. The insistent recurrence of these metapictorial moments in both sacred and profane works demonstrates their endemic character to the meaning and function of his pictorial project as a whole. The presence of metapictorial interventions attests to the emergence of a broader reflection on the representational limits of painting and its conditions of possibility, thus raising important phenomenological and aesthetic questions. My analysis is influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908–1961) interrogation of the blinding familiarity of visual experience for the modern beholder by providing a richer, cross-disciplinary understanding of the meanings associated with vision and the visible in the early modern period.23 Countering the transparency and detachment of the Cartesian understanding of vision, Merleau-Ponty sought to restitute to the seer and to sight their embodied dimensions and to decenter vision by enfolding it in the other senses and in the fabric of the world. His thought proved pivotal to the postphenomenological and poststructuralist critiques that influenced my approach.
Chapter 1, “The Enigma of the Visible,” opens this book with an analysis of La Tour’s allegorical depictions of blind hurdy-gurdy musicians to explore the deceptive, even blinding, character of ordinary vision. Renderings of audition, whose invisibility defies the purview of vision and the representational limits of painting, are then examined in reference to La Tour’s paintings of St. Jerome and Mary Magdalene. These devotional paintings represent spiritual insight rather than ordinary sight, attained through a contemplative mode of seeing illuminated by the word. La Tour’s association of worldly vision with blindness and his redefinition of vision in the mode of an utterance challenge and refigure painting’s conceit of abiding in the visible.
In Chapter 2, “Spiritual Passion and the Betrayal of Painting,” an exploration of La Tour’s portrayals of St. Peter shows how La Tour gives visual form to Peter’s verbal denials. The placement of Peter’s betrayal in the margin of a gambling scene invites inquiry into La Tour’s other gambling works, which present instances of moral and spiritual lapse when human passions become subject to worldly speculation and negotiation. Peter’s inadvertent repudiation of Christ is analyzed as a representation of the betrayal of painting, insofar as its visual appearance may break faith with the promise to represent spiritual vision. It concludes with a discussion of the question whether painting can be redeemed as an instrument of penance in amending and suspending the allure of sight in the attainment of spiritual insight.
The many representations of books and acts of reading as pictorial subject matter in La Tour’s works are the focus of Chapter 3, “The Visible and the Legible.” Several scenes of reading are examined: St. Jerome reading a letter, the Virgin Mary learning how to read, St. Joseph’s falling asleep while reading, and St. Alexis identified after his death on basis of a letter he holds in his hands. The insistent appeal to the word and the legible contests the knowledge represented by vision in its reliance on the immediacy of visual signs. This chapter presents an analysis of the ways words determine how and what we see and the role of reading as a figure for spiritual illumination that challenges the visual realm of painterly expression.
Chapter 4, “Flea Catching and the Vanity of Painting,” explores the role of painting as an instrument of intercession for attaining spiritual faith rather than perpetuating the lure of vision. Is the supposed “flea” catcher really holding a flea, or is it a rosary bead in her enclosed hands? No one can really tell. But her ordinary appearance, engaged in the trivial—even abject—task of catching a flea, takes on spiritual connotations when considered in light of the possibility of her holding a rosary. Examined as a gateway leading to the spiritual and the sacred, and considered in relation to La Tour’s later paintings on “blowers of light,” her humble depiction also emerges as a metaphor for painting’s efforts to kindle and promote the light of the spirit.
In the fifth and final chapter, “Painting as Portal: The ‘Birth’ and ‘Death’ of the Sacred Image,” images of birth, death, and mourning are examined in theological as well as pictorial terms. Naturalistic depictions of birth and infancy lend themselves to a theological meditation on the Incarnation as well as to a secular reflection on painting as a medium of incarnation. The latter part of this chapter focuses on paintings of St. Sebastian that depict his supposed “death” and mourning, which led to his miraculous recovery. Figured through the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, these works commemorate the supposed “death” of the pictorial image and its spiritual “redemption” when redefined as a portal to the sacred.
If the visible presents an enigma in La Tour’s works, this is because its naturalism figures a metaphysical worldview that painting suggests but cannot show. Challenging the supposed transparency and immediacy of the modern idea of vision, this mode of seeing is embedded in an allegorical understanding in which words and things are interwoven into the fabric of the world. Focusing on the representation of light, vision, and the visible as functions of verbal, theological, philosophical, and aesthetic considerations, this interdisciplinary study proposes a new way to understand La Tour’s pictorial endeavors. La Tour’s theologically inspired approach to vision and the visible also lends itself to a broader metareflection on the nature of painting, its conditions of possibility, and its conceptual implications. La Tour’s spiritual approach to painting enabled him to uncover its conceptual underpinnings, thereby contributing not only to a broader understanding of painting but also to incarnations and developments yet to come.
A rapid survey of key biographical and professional details is provided to foreground the extensive critical problems posed by La Tour’s pictorial corpus. His recent recognition as an artist, along with a lack of historical evidence and definitive knowledge about the painter and his works, has greatly affected understanding of the nature and content of his works, constraining analysis while fueling critical debate.
Georges de La Tour’s artistic destiny is unique in the annals of art history and no less mysterious than the enigmas presented by his paintings. His inexplicable eclipse, ultimate disappearance from historical accounts, and “rediscovery” as a painter in the twentieth century illuminate problems attendant not just to his life but to his pictorial corpus as a whole.24 Who was Georges de La Tour? We know that he operated primarily as a regional painter in the Duchy of Lorraine and gained significant recognition during his lifetime. Later, La Tour’s works were reattributed to Dutch painters such as Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629), Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656), and Gérard Seghers (1591–1651) or to French painters such as the seventeenth-century Le Nain brothers. Despite the signatures affixed to many of his works and his distinctive painterly style, La Tour’s works were inexplicably dissociated from their maker. As his pictorial corpus suffered dispersal and ultimate disappearance, having been loosened from association with its maker, so was the artist eclipsed from the annals of not just art history but history altogether. His life and contributions as an artist were largely ignored by posterity until his “rediscovery” in 1915 by the German art historian Hermann Voss (1884–1969).25 Voss identified La Tour after locating a reference in a biographical notice in 1751 to the painter’s name (La Tour) and connecting that reference to the signed works bearing this name but misattributed to other artists.26 By prompting historical inquiries into his existence and artistic corpus, Voss gave Georges de La Tour a new lease on life in the twentieth century.
There are no portraits of La Tour. Even if his face happens to look out at us from one of his paintings, reprising a common pictorial conceit, we are unable to recognize or acknowledge his presence. The few extant historical documents, whose brevity and paucity cast some light on the artist’s life, leave in darkness his artistic career and pictorial corpus. Even as new historical facts regarding La Tour’s life continue to emerge, little is known about his artistic education, influences, and professional practice. A baptismal certificate marks his birth on March 14, 1593, in Vic-sur-Seille in Lorraine. Vic enjoyed some importance as a religious, administrative, commercial, and artistic center in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, benefiting from its crossroads location bordering on France, the German states of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Spanish Netherlands.27 A few extant official documents and letters show that although La Tour was the second-born son of a baker of some means, he was able to attain a comfortable position as a burgher and property owner in Lunéville through his artistic talents and marriage to Diane Le Nerf (of minor noble status). The significant gap in the historical record from his birth in 1593 to 1616 (the date of his godchild’s baptism) omits crucial details regarding La Tour’s artistic formation, apprenticeship, and travels. It is believed that he may have begun his four-year artistic apprenticeship around the age of fourteen. While it is not known in whose workshop that occurred, the name of several regional masters active at the time have been mentioned, including Claude Dogoz (1580–1636; in his hometown, Vic-sur-Seille) and Jacques-Charles Bellange (1575–1616) or Rémond Constant (1575–1637), both in Nancy, which was the capital of the Duchy of Lorraine and a major artistic center only twenty miles away.28
A possible trip to Rome between 1608 and 1616 is hypothesized and continues to occasion debate in order to explain La Tour’s artistic debt to Caravaggio and his use of chiaroscuro techniques and effects. It is quite possible, however, that this influence resulted from La Tour’s exposure to works by Caravaggio’s Italian followers or, even more likely given their geographical proximity, his northern followers in the Netherlands and Flanders.29 La Tour was given royal patronage in 1638 (having been named Painter to the King) and was awarded a pension upon his presentation of a nocturne of St. Sebastian to King Louis XIII.30 Additional mentions of La Tour’s paintings in inventories of collections of such notables as Cardinal Richelieu, the Marshal de La Ferté (governor of Lorraine), Claude de Bullion (superintendent of finances), and André Le Nôtre (landscape architect to Louis XIV and creator of the gardens of Versailles) attest to their importance and value in the seventeenth century.31 It is believed that his son Étienne de La Tour (1621–1692) collaborated with La Tour in the production of his paintings from 1646 to 1652, when his father’s artistic career was brought to an abrupt end by his death from pleurisy on January 30, 1652; shortly after, his wife and his valet succumbed to an epidemic. Although Étienne de La Tour succeeded his father by being appointed Painter to the King in 1654, he abandoned this professional claim in 1670, upon gaining ennoblement thanks to his wealth. The question of how a painter so reputed and appreciated during his lifetime could disappear not only from public notice but also from the annals of art history continues to puzzle both scholars and the public at large.
The lack of knowledge concerning the artistic formation and professional life of La Tour is compounded by even greater problems incurred in identifying his artistic corpus, which has been reconstructed by scholars following Herman Voss’s rediscovery in 1915. While more than seventy works have been assigned to La Tour, only thirty-five or so have been accepted as originals, with attributions based on the reassemblage of these works around a few signed canvases.32 Although some works clearly bear his signature, this traditional mark of painterly authority and authenticity proves neither definitive nor final in determining the artist’s handiwork. Indeed, there are many paintings attributed to La Tour that bear no signature at all but have been recognized as authentic on the basis of their distinctive painterly style. The assignation of authorship is further complicated by the variability of the signature, since it sometimes includes the painter’s full name, sometimes only his last, along with occasional qualifying phrases such as “La Tour made it” (La Tour fecit). These variations in the painter’s signature, along with certain stylistic disparities, have led scholars to hypothesize that certain works may include the handiwork of La Tour’s presumptive workshop or, later, that of his son Étienne de La Tour. Still, the mystery persists as to how works visibly signed by La Tour were later reassigned to other French or Dutch painters of his time.
These problems of attribution are compounded by the lack of dates, since only two of his paintings are dated: The Tears of St. Peter (also known as St. Peter Repentant, 1645, Cleveland Museum of Art) and The Denial of St. Peter (1650, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Nantes). They represent late contributions to what is believed to be a thirty-five-year artistic career, leaving the sequence and development of La Tour’s artistic corpus open to discussion and art-historical debate. On the basis of connoisseurship, many works formerly attributed to Dutch Caravaggists or the French Le Nain brothers were reattributed to La Tour, a process of rediscovery continuing to this day. Thus identifying the pictorial corpus has been as difficult as identifying the artist himself, and even the painter’s signature underwriting his labors has proved unreliable as final validation of his work. The purpose of this study, however, is not to resolve these issues of attribution, which are best addressed through connoisseurship and technical analysis (based on radiographic and laboratory assays) but rather to note these inherent critical difficulties, debates, and disagreements attendant to each and every work under discussion here.
In addition to the lack of dates, two further problems complicate scholarly understanding of La Tour’s works: the presence of parallel versions of many of his works and the absence of titles.33 Since many of La Tour’s paintings are present in multiple versions, the status of works deemed to be original is difficult to ascertain. Are they mere copies of an original, as most critics have supposed? Was the artist reproducing his own work, and to what end, be it pecuniary or artistic? Or were these various replicas produced by his workshop or later by his artist son? Yet the extremely high artistic quality of some presumed copies has led art historians to puzzle over and disagree on the assignation of originality to specific paintings. For example, Philip Conisbee argues that the two versions of St. Jerome (c. 1628–1630, Musée du Grenoble; and c. 1630–1632, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) may not be copies but rather original works based on the identical outlines of the figures likely produced through the use of a common cartoon or template.34 This issue is not restricted to a few isolated cases but rather describes a tendency pervasive in La Tour’s oeuvre. These parallel versions present multiple iterations of an image with small variations of content and sometimes shifts in scale because of the cropping of the images.35 What stands out are the clear and consistent variations in color, ranging from warm red and brown tones to a cooler palette of blues, greens, and grays. This is the case with many of his best-known paintings: The Musicians’ Brawl, Saint Jerome, The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, The Repentant Magdalene, The Education of the Virgin, The Discovery of St. Alexis, and St. Sebastian Tended by Irene.36
Are these parallel versions merely the insignia of La Tour, his son Étienne, or workshop-generated copies, or do they attest to a different understanding of the image and pictorial practice? And, if so, why, and to what end? While these questions cannot be resolved definitively for lack of historical evidence, Maria H. Loh’s study of repetition as pictorial practice demonstrates its occurrence in the early modern workshop of Titian and others.37 La Tour’s parallel versions are examined for clues regarding his use of repetition in furthering efforts to rethink the nature and function of the pictorial image. Closer analysis reveals that despite the possibility that these versions may have been commissioned by or intended for different patrons, the treatment of these variations is surprisingly uniform across the entire span of his works. Consistent patterns emerge in the handling of color tones and other details whose deliberate pictorial manipulation attests to different ways of seeing, feeling, and being. Indeed, it is helpful to consider these versions in relation to one another, since variations of pictorial details (in their crossover appearance from one canvas to the other) illuminate and help clarify their respective meanings. By representing the same basic composition but in different ways, these iterative versions illuminate the variable and partial character of the pictorial image, leading to further reflection on its nature and import. I argue that La Tour’s treatment of the image in this repetitive mode suggests affinity with the iterative logic of the Gospels, which present the same event through the multiple testimonies of the Apostles.
Another issue complicating the modern viewer’s access to La Tour’s pictorial works is the fact that all titles to La Tour’s works have been assigned by twentieth-century art historians. To this day, they vary depending on the particular scholar or museum curator who designated these works. Such variability in the paintings’ titles undermines their referential function by continuing to sow doubt in regard to their pictorial content and thus to generate ambiguity and confusion regarding their possible meanings. While many artists’ paintings in the early modern period lack titles, their provenances may include records of sale, collection inventory lists, or references in histories, chronicles, or commentaries on art or artists, which help provide some sense of the subject matter of a specific image as seen and understood in the artist’s own time or shortly thereafter. However, such information is sorely lacking in La Tour’s case, and the few mentions of his works, which are recorded as “nocturne of St. Sebastian” or “repentant St. Peter” or “Mary Magdalene,” are so generic as to render precise identification difficult if not impossible.38 This problem is particularly pressing because barring the exception of The Repentant St. Jerome (c. 1628–1630, Museum of Grenoble version)—his only painting bearing a discrete halo—no other figure in La Tour’s paintings bears the marks or insignia of the sacred. Indeed, the ordinary appearance of the figures depicted resists clear assignation of profane or sacred meanings. The beholder is summoned and entrusted with the task of resolving the mystery of his paintings, a mandate whose compelling nature continues to exercise its force. Continuing to be objects of scholarly and public fascination, La Tour’s paintings provide a unique platform for engaging in broader reflections on the nature of vision and the visible. If his artistic legacy continues to endure today, it is for the simple reason that “rarely has the very nature of painting been so comprehensively called into question” by a painter.39