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The expansion of the domain of the sacred: the emergence of art as an autonomous domain, separate from the profane

In the history of a king, everything lives, everything moves, everything is in action; we only have to follow him, if we can, and carefully study him alone. It is a constant enchantment of marvellous facts, which he himself begins, he himself ends, as clear, as intelligible when they are carried out, as they are impenetrable before they are executed. In a word, one miracle follows closely on another miracle; attention is always intense, admiration always concentrated; and we are not less struck by the grandeur and promptness with which peace is restored than we are by the rapidity with which conquests are made. Happy those who, like you, sir, have the honour to approach this great Prince, and who, having contemplated him with the rest of the world on those important occasions when he controls the destiny of all the earth, can again contemplate him in intimacy, and study him in the smallest actions of his life, no less grand, no less a hero, no less admirable as full of equity, full of humanity, always calm, always master of himself, without inequality, without weakness, and finally the wisest and most perfect of all men!

Jean Racine, ‘Discours prononcé à L’Académie française, à la réception de MM. (Thomas) Corneille et Bergeret’, 2 January 1685

Art is not anecdotally or incidentally related to power. It is structurally and intrinsically linked to hierarchized societies who order the world vertically on a scale which opposes high, sacred and spiritual to low, profane, material and physical. The very categories of ‘art’ and of ‘artist’ are intimately linked to the separation of the sacred and the profane, and, essentially, to the dominant and the dominated. As a result, it is only out of convenience or the careless use of words that we refer to ‘art in primitive societies’, in as much as the practices thus indicated by the external observer have very little to do with what was gradually being invented in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the nineteenth century.1 This ethnocentrism, which consists in applying Western categories to essentially foreign realities and in making art, religion or economics into some sort of basic transhistorical element, has been much criticized by anthropologists.

The history of art as a specific area of practice has often been seen as a history of the ‘conquest of autonomy’.² Artists would therefore, battle after battle, have won their independence in relation to various powers (ecclesiastical, political or economic) and the right to create works without any commission or any specific function. Such an interpretation emphasizes the liberation of artists and their freedom of expression and sees culture as an ‘instrument of freedom presupposing freedom’.³ However, if this interpretation in terms of the autonomization of art is possible, it remains only a partial one.⁴ For the history of the creation of a relatively autonomous artistic domain is inseparably tied up with the history of the separationsanctification of art, in other words, the history of art as a domain separated from the rest of the world, part of a social relationship of sacred/profane, underpinned by a relation of domination. At the end of this process, the artist takes his or her place alongside the dominant (earthly or spiritual), keeping a distance from the commonplace, enthroned in his demiurgic uniqueness or like a lord above the multitude. Less ‘positive’ or perhaps less ‘glorious’ for artists, such a vision is unavoidable when, instead of tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) rising to the defence of art and artists, we simply describe the reality of the social relationships which structure artistic activities in relation to what is not artistic. The reason the sociologist or the historian spontaneously springs to the defence of the autonomous artist is often because they are projecting their own position as a scholar. The artists’ struggle to gain public recognition and to defend the autonomy of their work somewhat echoes similar struggles in scholarly circles. And this is where the blind spot of many analyses of the world of the arts is to be found.

In order for the ‘material fabrication of the product’ to be ‘transfigured into “creation”’,⁵ art and the artist must collectively enter into the restricted field of the sacred and cut themselves off from the profane. The ‘demiurgic capability’ of the ‘creator’, which is not just a (metaphorical) way of speaking, like the ‘magic power of transubstantiation with which “the creator” is endowed’, are the products of a long history of power, of the sacred and of collective beliefs with regard to art. If relations of domination did not underpin our societies, if we did not believe in the exceptional value of art, if we did not support the cult of the autograph painting, if we had not, century after century, elevated certain painters to the status of ‘great men’ who are the pride of their nations and a part of their pantheons, there would not be so much interest, attention, passion or emotion around their paintings. All of that is a reminder of the existence of the collective and historical conditions capable of producing an emotion of an aesthetic nature when confronted with a painting.

Some might think that to link beauty or the sublime to the backcloth formed by relations of domination is tantamount to a somewhat crude sociological reductionism. However, far from having only very tenuous links to the question of power, art is in fact truly indissociable from it. Its very definition, with respect to the split between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts, the nature of how it is used and appropriated by society, as well as the way it is viewed (with admiration), all lead back to the relationship between dominant and dominated.

Poets and artists, sovereigns and demiurges

Throughout the long history of State societies, emperors, kings and princes, popes, legislators, poets and artists have successively been regarded as analogous to gods. Art would become a sacred domain, and as such, would be separate from profane and ordinary activities. The process goes back a very long way in history but is particularly visible at the time of the Renaissance, continuing into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the quasi-sanctification of painters and ‘the consecration of the writer’.

In an essay on the ‘sovereignty of the artist’, Kantorowicz showed how the jurists of the Middle Ages, specialists in both Roman law and canon law, contributed to forging the arguments which would be used to distinguish artists from the profane.⁶ Poets and painters, like sovereigns, were to find themselves compared to God, in the sense that they created things which did not exist. These are not just simple imitators of nature and of the real, but creatores in the fullest sense of the term. Kantorowicz points out that, for a connoisseur of the law in the Middle Ages, it is not very difficult to recognize medieval legal concepts in the theories of Renaissance art: ‘The group of notions such as ars, imitatio, natura, invention, fictio, veritas and divine inspiration is important because it is associated with problems which can be traced back without difficulty to the medieval jurisprudents.’⁷

First of all, the medieval jurist saw the activity of the legislator as being in the image of God. He asserts that, ‘For by fiction the jurist could create (so to say, from nothing) a legal person, a persona ficta – a corporation for example – and endow it with a truth and a life of its own’.⁸ By envisaging legislative activity as an activity capable of creating realities which had not previously existed, the jurist ‘commonly idealized as the “animate law”, by his act of re-creating nature (so to say) within his limited orbit, showed some resemblance with the Divine Creator when creating the totality of nature’.⁹ Now this same idea is also present in artistic theories from the end of the Renaissance period according to which ‘the ingenium – artist or poet – was often recognized as a simile of the creating God, since the artist himself was considered to be a “creator”’.¹⁰ Making a poet or a painter an equal of God or a quasi-god, makes art a privileged domain, separated from the profane. The artist becomes a creator comparable to a God, a pope, a king or a legislator. Symbolically he becomes part of the world of the powerful and is clearly positioned on the side of the sacred.

The metaphor of ‘creator’ is an extremely significant one in the Judeo-Christian tradition which, according to Kantorowicz, dates from 1200. In a text dated around 1220, the canonist Tancred writes, for example, in a commentary on a decree issued by Pope Innocent in 1198, that the pope ‘acts as the vice-gerent of God’ for ‘he makes something out of nothing like God’. Acting in lieu of God, he has ‘the plenitude of power in matters pertaining to the Church’ and nobody can judge what he does (‘Nor is there any person who could say to him: Why dost thou act as thou do?’).¹¹ Hostiensis (1200–1271), in his Summa aurea, says of the pope that he ‘makes something that is, not be; and makes something that is not, come into being’; and, towards the end of the century, Guillaume Durand (who died in 1296) mentions this doctrine in his Speculum iuris, defining pontifical power as that which can ‘change the nature of things’.¹²

These powers that are attributed to the pope are also granted to the highest ranking holders of secular power, to emperors, princes or kings, as well as those who draw up the laws. The same model re-surfaces to describe the poets and painters of the Renaissance period. Kantorowicz explains that this method of transferring portrayals is a common practice with medieval jurists, who draw parallels between very different seeming realities:

we may say, the essence of the art of the jurists, who themselves called this technique aequiparatio, the action of placing on equal terms two or more subjects which at first appeared to have nothing to do with each other. […] That method of ‘equiparation’, however which was not restricted to jurisprudence, can help us to understand in what respects the theories of the jurists might appear to have been relevant to later artistic theories.¹³

We find, for example, a similar comparison between the poet and the emperor (Caesar) in Dante: ‘Caesar and poet appeared to Dante potentially on one level, since only the “highest political and the highest intellectual principates” could be decorated at all with the laurel.’¹⁴ But the ceremony of Petrarch’s coronation in the Capitol, in 1341, turns the discursive metaphor into the reality of the social treatment of the poet. Whether the artist is compared to a god (a little god the creator) or to a sovereign (Dante places the poet on the same level as the emperor and Petrarch is indeed crowned with an imperial laurel wreath), the same matrix is essentially at work, separating and opposing the sacred and the profane, dominators and dominated, auctores from ordinary mortals, creatores from those who are not, etc.

Hans Blumenberg also referred to the theological roots of the figure of the artist: ‘Both the self-conception of the artist and the theoretical interpretation of the artistic process by means borrowed from theology, all the way from creation to inspiration, have been abundantly documented.’¹⁵ God is often compared to an artist who creates, which is a way of making the artist an equivalent to God the creator. Thus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola uses the metaphor of ‘mightiest architect’ to refer to God:

the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the super celestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur. When, consequently, all else had been completed (as both Moses and Timaeus testify), in the very last place, He bethought himself of bringing forth man.¹⁶

This comparison of God and the artist also allows the author to imply that, just as divine creations must be admired by humankind, so artistic creations attract the admiring gaze of the profane:

For nothing so surely impels us to the worship of God than the assiduous contemplation of His miracles, and when, by means of this natural magic, we shall have examined these wonders more deeply, we shall more ardently be moved to love and worship Him in his works, until finally we shall be compelled to burst into song: ‘The heavens, all of the earth, is filled with the majesty of your glory’.¹⁷

We see therefore the origin of the admiring gaze in the domain of art and its theologico-political foundation: since the artist is made equivalent to God, men must admire artistic creations in the same way they admire those of God.

Yet the traces of such definitions of the poet or painter as ‘creator’ or ‘sovereign’ can be found long before the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, for example in Horace’s reflections on the art of poetry (65–68 BC):

It was finally Horace’s Ars poetica which extended the new and quasisovereign state of the poet to the painter; for the Horatian metaphor ut pictura poesis or rather its inversion ut poesis pictura became the pass-key which eventually opened the latches to the doors of every art – first to that of the painter, then to the arts of the sculptor and architect as well. They all became liberal artists, divinely inspired like the poet, while their crafts appeared no less ‘philosophical’ or even ‘prophetical’ than poetry itself. It was a cascading of capacities, beginning from the abilities and prerogatives conceded ex officio to the incumbent of sovereign office of legislator, spiritual or secular, to the individual and purely human abilities and prerogatives which the poet, and eventually the artist at large, enjoyed ex ingenio.¹⁸

If Plato intended to drive poets out of the City, it is because the oral (aèdes) poets he was targeting were not yet the ‘artists’ they would later become. Disseminators of myths which they varied depending on the audiences addressed, he clearly sees them as belonging to the ‘many’ (as opposed to the ‘One’), with the ‘moving’ and the ‘becoming’ (vs the ‘immovable’ and the ‘being’), with ‘doxa’ or ‘opinion’ (vs the ‘Truth’ or the ‘Idea’), with the ‘visible’ (vs the ‘invisible’), with ‘sensibility’ (vs ‘intelligibility’), with ‘mimesis’ (vs ‘reason’), and thus opposes them, point by point to the philosophers.¹⁹ Now Plato defines the philosopher as a quasi-god, that is to say as someone who, thanks to new forms of knowledge (written), occupies an elevated and distant position and can contemplate the world from the height of this transcendent position:

The Platonic concept of elevation is a key element of his philosophy. If, for example, we refer to texts which feature these derivatives of ϋψος, we realize that they all touch on the definition of the philosopher. Thus, the presence of ύψóθεν in the Theaetetus allows the characteristics of the philosopher to be defined: he is the one who places himself on high, who sees things from above. The definition of the natural philosopher is made in opposition to the model of the materialistic man, who seeks only his own profit and keeps his eyes fixed on the ground. The idealist, for his part, does not concern himself with gossip, squabbles, with anything associated with the spirit of baseness. He prefers the practice of geometry and astronomy. Whereas the one who lives through his senses is motivated by a perpetual, imperfect and multiple destiny, the philosopher according to Plato, is someone who seeks perfection, eternity, the unity behind the sensible, in order to make himself like the divine, to elevate himself towards him, and to see reality ἁοήο, from above.²⁰

In his research on the vocabulary of Indo-European institutions, Benveniste also discovers the comparison of the poet and god, both using language to make previously non-existent realities exist: ‘The god is singing of the origin of things and by his song the gods are “brought into existence”. A bold metaphor, but one which is consistent with the role of a poet who is himself a god. A poet causes to exist; things come to birth in his song.’²¹ And we know that, in Indo-European languages, the notion of ‘auctor’ includes all those who, like the gods, are capable of making things with words:

The term auctor is applied to the person who in all walks of life ‘promotes’, takes an initiative, who is the first to start some activity, who founds, who guarantees, and finally who is the ‘author’ […] Every word pronounced with authority determines a change in the world, it creates something. This mysterious quality is what augeo expresses, the power which causes plants to grow and brings a law into existence. That one is the auctor who promotes, and he alone is endowed with the quality which in Indic is called ojah. We can now see that ‘to increase’ is a secondary and weakened sense of augeo. Obscure and potent values reside in this autoritas, this gift which is reserved to a handful of men who can cause something to come into being and literally ‘to bring into existence’.²²

We find here, therefore, the premises of what Kantorowicz observes in the Middle Ages. The act of bringing together gods, kings, popes, legislators, poets and artists, or more precisely, of thinking of them as kinds of quasigods because of their capacity to engender new things, places them at once alongside the sacred and the venerable (uenerandus) and they are raised above common mortals:

a person becomes sanctus who is invested with divine favour and so receives a quality which raises him above the generality of men. His power makes him into an intermediary between man and god. Sanctus is applied to those who are dead (the heroes), to poets (vates), to priests and to the places they inhabit. The epithet is even applied to the god himself, deus sanctus, to the oracles, and to men endowed with authority. This is how sanctus gradually came to be little more than the equivalent of venerandus. This is the final stage of the evolution: sanctus is the term denoting a superhuman virtue.²³

Other texts show that, long before the Renaissance, an author like Macrobius (Flavius Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius), born around 370 AD, portrayed the poet Virgil as a creator: ‘Macrobius established a very strong link between the Virgilian style and nature which prefigured an even more important analogy, that of the poet and the divine creator, as terms such as “comparavi” and “similitudinem” clearly demonstrate. The poetic work is thus conceived as a microcosm in the image of the macrocosm created by God, reproducing its variety and harmony on a human scale (in musica Concordia dissonorum).’²⁴ What these reflections on the part of Macrobius set out to do is to show that Virgil is not just a mere imitator, simply reproducing nature, but indeed an inventor in the same position as God:

The poet is not simply content to imitate nature, he recreates it and it is nature reconstructed from what he himself knows about it, from his experience and his reading, his recollections, in order to pay homage to prestigious models. Thus, far from being considered a simple imitator, the poet according to Macrobius possesses a freedom of action which places him more on the side of invention, of creation. Compared to nature, the poem as a microcosm makes its author a creator akin to God for the macrocosm. The poet is not only inspired by the divinity for whom he acts as the cantor, his work rivals the Creation. Curtius identified this originality in Macrobius, the first author to consider the poet as a creator and his work as a creation. The idea was already implied in Longinus and Plotinus, but remained implicit with these writers. Macrobius seems to be an exception because he is the only writer in Antiquity to show the analogy between the poetic oeuvre and the macrocosm.²⁵

The conception of the poet-creator did not, however, gain strength or become more widespread until much later, in the fifteenth century. With Georges of Trébizond (De suavitate dicendi ad H. Bragadenum, Venice, 1429), for example, it is no longer a single isolated poet, but all poets who will be considered as artists. Other writers would speak of Ronsard (considered as the ‘divine genius’ of poetry) in the same way Macrobius spoke of Virgil. And Jules César Scaliger (1484–1558) in his Poetics (Poetices libri septem, 1561), makes the poet into a sort of demiurge, who is to the ear what the painter is to the eye:

At the beginning of his Poetics, Scaliger defines the poet as another God (alter deus) and his creation as ‘another nature’ (altera natura): ‘Only poetry embraces all the arts, and it surpasses them all the more because (as we said) the others reproduce the things themselves, as they are, as though with a sort of sound painting, but the poet creates a second nature, and also a very great number of destinies: in this place he himself becomes in the same way a second god. In fact, what the creator of all things creates, the other sciences represent as though they were merely taking part in things, but since poetry confers an appearance to what does not exist, and adorns what does exist, it seems really to create the things themselves, like a second god, and not to recount them as in a mime, as is the case with the other arts.’ Poetry embellishes what it imitates, it adds the finishing touches to nature which is its model: the imitation is not faithful, it is a recreation, and this fully bestows on the poet the status of demiurge.²⁶

The ‘consecration of the writer’ emerged as a phenomenon in France from around 1760 onwards²⁷ and the cult of the artist (painters in particular) would develop in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More generally, in societies that were becoming more secular and where religion was increasingly marginalized, the State power no longer needed to be legitimized by a God and did not seek to interpret the world as the writing of the gods. On the contrary, there was a growing realization that an entirely human action (writing) could be superimposed on society (the blank page) in the form of political, legal, scientific and pedagogical writings which were deployed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘This bourgeoisie-god makes the world (its reason is the capacity to “produce”), and, in the same movement, it dissociates itself from the masses or the “common” class which in myth or symbol receives the world as a meaning.’²⁸ From now on, the role of God would be played by the State which has both the means and the ambition to do so. ‘God’ is replaced by ‘Reason’, the transcendent is replaced by the inherent which nevertheless goes beyond regional and local particularities and contributes to the work of social and cultural homogenization: a politics of language and of education, the codification of laws.

In less than ten years, the activity of the codification of laws proved to be intense: following on from the Civil Code (1804) came the Code of Civil Procedure (1806), then the Commercial Code (1807), the Criminal Code (1810) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (1811). Apart from the fact that this is constitutive of a legal, depersonalized form of domination, based on ‘Reason’, this codification also implies a strong awareness of political action. The codes represent the law for a people who are aware that the power represented by the codes comes uniquely from themselves. The Code represents the active and conscious writing of society through the State and not the word of a god or the sacred text. It puts the rules of communal living within the hands of the people (and essentially of individuals linked to the State). The laws are impersonal and therefore transcend even those who apply them, but they are perceived as of purely human origin.²⁹

From this point on, culture is firmly held in a relationship with a (popular) ‘nature’ thanks to the transformation of the principle of religious distinction between ‘divine’ and ‘human’ to a fundamental principle of distinction between ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’, ‘cultured’ and ‘ignorant’.³⁰ In an interview with Robert Chartier, Bourdieu could therefore explain this cultural religiosity which is neither metaphorical nor anecdotal: ‘I think that culture in our societies is a sacred site: the religion of culture has become, for certain social categories including intellectuals, the site of their deepest convictions and commitments.’³¹ Continuing its process of emancipation from the boundaries of the Ancien Régime, the State still continues to separate the sacred from the profane. The introduction of ‘great’ individuals (statesmen, great artists, great scholars, great writers etc.) who can be associated with the nation (with the nation-State) is therefore an element of its policy.

The relatively recent history of the consecration of writers and artists should not, however, allow us to forget that these processes of sanctification are indeed linked to the original position of Mesopotamian and Egyptian scribes, masters of the written form of myths and rites, writing the ‘laws’ and practising the arts of divination which were part of the first temporal and spiritual powers and clearly separated from the profane world. Right up to the portrayals and treatment of contemporary writers, we find traces of this equivalence of the poet and God that Kantorowicz identified in Renaissance theories of art, but which had already been expressed long before then by various other writers. Writing as a solo activity and which consists in creating its own universe from the start to the finish, with its own style, is embraced by many writers who often compare the situation of the author to that of a god, a demiurge, an absolute creator who determines everything and is ‘in command of the ship’.³² And we are no more surprised by the fact that, in the standardized universe of ‘industrial products of fiction’ where a multitude of screen writers work on the scripts of TV series or soap operas, the ‘code which defines the characteristics of the heroes of a series and establishes the rules which must be repeatedly applied’ and which is written by an ‘author’ is called the ‘bible’.³³ Even if it is a very long way from the mode of the writer’s solitary activity, the production system of collective writing still retains the dominant, sovereign and transcendent role of the ‘auctor’.

The history of a collective sanctification

It was in the first part of the fourteenth century that Dante, in his Divine Comedy, first used the word ‘artista’. But, between the first occurrence of the word in a modern sense and its consolidation as a socially recognized category, several centuries would elapse. A simple historical consideration of the word ‘artist’ in the French language indeed shows that this generic category was not commonly used in the sense we give it today until the second half of the eighteenth century: ‘The word “artist” in the modern sense, appeared, as a substantive used for the painter, in the second half of the XVIIIth century (Dictionnaire portative des beaux-arts de Lacombe, 1759). The Royal Declaration of 15 March 1777 (“We desire the arts of painting and sculpture to be perfectly equivalent to Literature, the Sciences and other liberal arts”) marks the end of a long evolution.’³⁴ In 1762, the word appeared for the first time in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, which defined it as someone ‘who works in an art where genius and the hand must converge’.³⁵ It had indeed entailed a long process, involving the sanctification and autonomization of art and of artists, a long history of the separation of art both in relation to the profane and also in relation to the religious notion of the sacred – most of which had been centred on Renaissance Italy – before the situation of an artist both set apart from the world of artisanal (or industrial) production and possessing his own powers of enchantment, independent of all kinds of religious ritual function, would be established. The actors of the world of art still stand today on the pedestal of that history. More often than not, they are not even aware that they are benefiting from the struggles of those who demanded and obtained the sanctification of painting and other arts.

From the fifth century onwards, in Europe, the perception of knowledge and the arts would be strongly marked by an opposition between the liberal arts (made of the trivium ‘grammar-rhetoric-dialectic’ and the quadrivium ‘arithmetic-music-geometry-astronomy’), the most noble arts taught in faculties of art, and the mechanical arts, practised within guilds and whose name quite clearly evokes a manual practice without soul or spirit.³⁶ Within the series of oppositions which structure the perception of hierarchized societies, the high is to the low what spirit is to matter. The collective issue for painters or sculptors, as well as the individual issue for each artist, is to be collectively associated with, or to individually strive towards, the hallowed goal. From the end of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ‘there is a rupture between art on one side, and craftsmanship and commerce on the other’.³⁷ In order to differentiate himself from the craftsman, the artist was to emphasize the intellectual activity involved rather than the manual work or dexterity. Those who argued in favour of painting and sculpture being integrated into the liberal arts consequently put more emphasis on all the knowledge implied in these activities (geometry, anatomy, history, etc.). In the ‘great chain of being’, painters and sculptors were to occupy positions which were clearly superior to those of simple craftsmen or common workmen.³⁸

In Italy, at the end of the fifteenth century, painters, sculptors and architects were already successfully imposing themselves as practitioners of the liberal arts and were abandoning the profane and no longer valued territory of the mechanical arts. But it was not until the creation in France of the Royal Academy of painting and sculpture in 1648 that there were definitive signs of the ‘shift of painting and sculpture – which were practised within the corporate framework of guilds – to the rank of “liberal arts”’.³⁹ In spite of this collective promotion of art and artists, it was a long time before painters and sculptors were able to benefit from the creative autonomy of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, working on commissions from individuals (nobles or bourgeois) or from institutions (royal or ecclesiastical). The contractual conditions of the commissions often determined formats, subjects, colours used, timescales for completion, price, etc., which often placed artists in a relationship of considerable dependency.⁴⁰ Artists only gradually freed themselves from this link of direct dependence, and only with the advent of a genuine art market did the potential buyers of their works cease to have any direct role in the process of creation.

In his magnificent book, the art historian Édouard Pommier studied how, in the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly in Italy (Florence and Rome acting as veritable social laboratories) and then throughout Europe, art, and especially painting, became a prestigious domain, worthy of being conserved, protected, exhibited and contemplated, discussed and commented on.⁴¹ Art history, as a learned discourse which takes as its object commentaries and commendations of artists, began with the famous Lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects by Giorgio Vasari, published in Florence in 1550, then republished in 1565.⁴² Thanks to Vasari, the legitimate discourse on art was immediately secured, focusing on the ‘singularity of artists’⁴³ (Michelangelo and Raphael are ‘unique’) and thus eclipsing the collective conditions of the production of a work, its value and the belief in art. As soon as painting and sculpture had become liberal arts, distinct from mechanical arts, the process of regarding artists as remarkable became inevitable. Creators of things which did not exist, comparable to God, they could only be seen as beings detached from all external influence: geniuses, divine or exceptional beings, as opposed to common craftsmen or manufacturers, through the collective magic of the separation of sacred and profane.

The practice of signing the canvas itself accompanied this movement. If the signature was not unknown in the tradition of craftsmanship (as demonstrated by the practices of gold- and silversmiths in the fifteenth century) and represented a fairly common practice amongst engravers from the fifteenth century onwards, it now played a different role and took on a different meaning in the context of a liberal art where the name of the artist had become an indispensable element in the social magic of images:

The Renaissance saw a concentration of studies on the signature in painting. This period in effect marked a deep-seated change: previously carved into the frame or at the margins of the image, the signature was from now on incorporated within the painting itself. This change reveals the changing status of the image: previously in the same category as an icon, an image to sacred virtue which permitted no trace of expression, the painted image became a work of art likely to carry an indication of its provenance. At the same time this change in the status of the image was taking place, the signature revealed the individualization of certain Renaissance artists. […] The practice of the signature was not therefore an isolated phenomenon: it was part of the long history of the emergence of the singular figure of the artist and appeared at the same moment as the first artists’ biographies by Giorgio Vasari and Karel Van Mander, published respectively in 1550 and in 1604. It was in fact an indication of the social status of the artist and of the liberalization of the status of painting, as demonstrated by the emergence of the idea of ‘genius’ and the appearance of a new intellectual configuration, that of the Fine Arts. As early as the Renaissance, certain artists became aware of the graphic possibilities opened up by the signature and chose to sign their works by using their first names (Titian, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, etc.). Around 1633, when Rembrandt Van Rijn decided to use his first name as a signature, he became part of this tradition and made use of this signature to promote his ‘aura of individuality’.⁴⁴

Vasari’s most important work is, however, preceded by other important texts. Thus, as early as 1390, Filippo Villani wrote a text entitled On the origins of the City of Florence and her famous citizens, where painters appeared alongside poets, musicians or soldiers; in the same year Cennino Cennini composed his Libro dell’arte, which is a hymn to ‘art’ in the sense of the modern meaning of the term ‘fine arts’; then, in 1435, Alberti published his De Pictura, in which he defines the artist as a scholar, a learned figure who masters the sciences as well as history and literature; also, around 1450, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentari linking Italian art to Antiquity; and finally, in 1475, Vie de Filippo Brenelleschi, the first biography of an artist by the mathematician and astronomer Antonio di Tuccio Manetti. The history of the invention of art and of artists thus gradually took shape with texts (by scholars, poets, artists and even non-specialists), which recounted the lives of painters, commented on or interpreted artists’ work, etc., legal measures (which determined the future of works of art and their conditions of circulation), images (artists appeared in pictures or on medals, were represented in portraits, self-portraits or statues, etc.), monuments and institutions (such as the Academy in the second half of the sixteenth century, or museums which would not develop in Europe until the end of the seventeenth century and particularly in the eighteenth century), and ritual practices (such as, towards the beginning of the sixteenth century, artists embarking on ‘art tours’ to admire the ‘masterpieces’ which were to be found primarily in Rome or Florence. They would copy these, drawing inspiration from them and aspiring to better them.) All the various elements of this history have contributed to transforming artists into individuals worthy of being idealized and set apart from common mortals, and to turning their works into creations worthy of being protected, contemplated and admired.

In the course of this process of artists being accorded increasing respect, art was itself used as an instrument of legitimacy and glorification for both political and religious powers. It was used to attract attention, to focus the gaze, to demonstrate power or nobility. The situation worked both ways: people valued art only because it was capable in return of supplying legitimacy where there were competition and power struggles between families, municipalities, nations or religious powers. Thus the painter, sculptor and architect Giotto (1267–1337) would be consecrated as ‘illustrious’, notably by the writer Boccaccio (1313–1375), insofar as he had participated in the construction of the grandeur and glory of Florence (the city had put him in charge of the construction project for the cathedral bell-tower). ‘In the last decades of the quattrocento, it becomes clear that the arts have become a fundamental element in the identity of Florence and that artists are definitively admitted to the ranks of illustrious men, who deserve to be remembered by a history which is inseparable from fame.’⁴⁵ This singling out of artists was by no means in opposition to national reasoning. Indeed, the identification of certain ‘great names’ meant that the State, the nation could take pride in counting such geniuses amongst their citizens.

If we take the Aufklärung as just one emblematic example, Riedel, curator of the Dresden Gallery, was already expressing just such an intention in his first catalogue (1765): ‘These treasures perpetuate the memory of all these artists who distinguished themselves by their genius and their talent. But, by conserving monuments of art, they shape at the same time the taste of the nation.’ These perspectives feed a new cult of the masterpiece and of the signature of the master.⁴⁶

International struggles to appropriate either symbolically or in reality artists or their best known works (Was Poussin French or Italian? Was Picasso Spanish or French?), are not dissimilar to the strategies of major European football clubs in associating themselves with the most famous footballers.

However, in order for painting to be able to produce such effects, it needed to be accepted as part of a liberal and noble art rather than a mechanical art associated with manual activity. Clearly, in order to gain legitimacy, painting or sculpture must be placed in the same category as the mind, the intellect, learning and, finally, the divine.⁴⁷ If the divine nature of the artist is suggested in Dante,

it would be more than a century later that the talent of an artist would be publicly qualified as ‘divine’, and even longer before Leonardo da Vinci […] demonstrated the superiority of painting: ‘Therefore, we rightly call painting the grandchild of nature and related to god.’ Elsewhere he speaks of the ‘divine science’ of painting, and of the ‘divine character of painting’, which means that ‘the spirit of the painter is transformed into an image of the spirit of God’.⁴⁸

Everything has therefore been done to demonstrate that painters or sculptors are only putting into practice ideas or conceptions, that they are above all scholars, creators, learned individuals or poets and that without inspiration, and without knowledge or soul, they would be incapable of creating the work produced. From 1440 especially, painting was legitimized by being compared to other long since legitimized arts (such as poetry or ancient sculpture), and by being referred to in terms which contribute to making it sacred, elevating it from its status as a mechanical art.⁴⁹

In a dialogue entitled Anuli, Alberti associates the eye with God. Through his eye, the artist occupies the same position as a king or a God:

‘There is nothing more powerful, swift or worthy than the eye, it is the foremost of the body’s members, a sort of king or god. Why did the Ancients consider God as being like the eye, who surveys all things and reckons them singly? We are enjoined to give glory for all things to God and to consider him as an ever present witness to all our thoughts and deeds […]’ Praise for the eye therefore which goes much further than the timid utterances of Cennini and anticipates the words of Leonardo da Vinci: the human eye, taken as an image of the omniscience of God and of his omnipresence, but also an image of the power of the human spirit, affirmed with a proud assurance, with respect of the divine all-powerful in which are associated humanly contradictory effects of visual acuity and swiftness of movement. Man, the humanist and the artist, assigns to himself the divine power, which will be officially attributed to Brunelleschi some years later […] But it is also the eye of the artist which is exalted: the role of sight in knowledge, the importance of the gaze of the artist, compared to the gaze of God who sees and who judges.⁵⁰

In his De Pictura, Alberti makes the eye the ‘symbol of the divine power of man over nature’ and reveals the ‘impressive height of his cultural ambition’.⁵¹ Artists thus demonstrate their confidence in themselves, their sense that they are beings comparable to gods and their conception of their art as an activity which is both intellectual and noble.

It was also between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that the practice of collecting art began to take shape, initially in the form of private⁵² collections but quite quickly expanding to public ones which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would result in the invention of the modern museum as a public space for collections of works belonging to the national community and exhibited for all to see. A gallery in the Luxembourg Palace was opened to the public in 1750, the British Museum in London welcomed its first visitors in 1759, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in 1765, the Louvre in 1793 and the Prado in Madrid in 1819, etc. And, as we shall see, the museum is the symbolic place which marks the separation of the sacred and the profane and which paves the way for a relationship between admirable works and an admiring public.

And, of course, if works are to be admired, the public needs to be prepared to admire them. As Pommier writes: ‘Artistic culture is part of the culture of the perfect gentleman and develops in him the pleasure (piacere) he gets from the spectacle of the world.’⁵³ The eye develops through frequent contact with the works themselves and with books and writings about the arts, with many references to the art of Antiquity. Far from being the models of the objective history of artistic phenomena, the first texts to come under a protohistory of art very actively endorse the process of the sanctification of art, by praising the genius of great artists and providing aesthetic categories which allow the spectators to contemplate, judge and evaluate the different works:

The comments made by Vasari, Dolce, Armenini therefore combine to prove to us that a ‘public’ now exists; and that this public, made up of ‘connoisseurs’ and of ‘amateurs’ is no longer content to contemplate images of faith or historical depictions, but looks at works of art and wants to be able to appreciate them, in other words, to analyse and compare them, thanks to knowledge, ‘the true reason’ which refers back to history and theory […] Art has invented for itself a public and this explains the success of Vasari’s book. […] To this public, the Lives, the treaties of Pino and of Dolce, of Lomazzo and of Armenini, to mention only the most important, bring a code of analysis which allows them to look at works of art, to experience them more deeply and to be able to discuss them coherently and the rules of such a code are more or less fixed for the next three centuries.⁵⁴

From relics to works of art

It may be […] that, for a very distant posterity, the cult of saints and that of great artists will not be two very different things, in one or the other case, they are individuals who are outstanding and superior within the social hierarchy.

Valéry Larbaud, Lettre d’Italie [1924], Allia, Paris, 1996, p. 52

Resorting to religious metaphor in order to speak about culture or comparing it explicitly to religion (‘cultural salvation’, ‘cultural grace’, ‘religion of art’, ‘holy places of art’, ‘sanctification of art and of culture’, ‘worship of art’, ‘temples of culture’, etc.) has been a relatively common practice since the nineteenth century. In European societies affected by the Enlightenment, using the vocabulary of religion to refer to a social phenomenon which is not spontaneously seen as religious is a way of distancing the object in question and of adding a critical, denunciatory tone to the discourse.

Thus, in his Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, the French archaeologist, philosopher and art critic Quatremère de Quincy, who champions the idea that art works (in this case, Italian ones) should remain in their country of origin, compares the attitude to works of art of those seeking to transfer Italian masterpieces to France with that of those who once sought to obtain holy relics at any price. In this way, he criticizes a new form of idolatry:

But this Raphael, whose pictures are so highly coveted, more through superstition and vanity than through taste or love of beauty, how few know the value of his works, and the value of his genius! All collections want to have one of his pieces, genuine or false, just as in the past, all churches wanted to have a fragment of the true cross. The misfortune is that the virtue attached to the whole of a school is not, as in the case of the relic, contained within each piece broken off from that school.⁵⁵

The comparison (historically very pertinent) with the relics of a not so distant past only, however, applies to the ‘poor uses’ of works of art, to the superstitious and idolatrous usages from days gone by, and fails to see that the sanctification of art is also, and especially, in the cult of beauty and of artistic genius which is not challenged.

During this same period, Goethe writes a description of the museum in Dresden which emphasizes its likeness to the church. The same refined décor, the same respectful silence, the same atmosphere of reverence, art is a form of the sacred without god:

This room, turned in on itself, this luxury, this refinement; the recently gilded frames, the polished floor; this profound silence, all of this combined to create a solemn impression, unique in character, reminiscent of the emotion with which one entered the house of God; this emotion deepened still further at the sight of the master-pieces on show, genuine objects of veneration in a temple consecrated to the cult of art.⁵⁶

Almost two centuries later, in 1968, the artist Jean Dubuffet makes a clear comparison between culture and religion, denouncing class privileges and the artists’ role in legitimizing power:

Culture tends to take the place formerly occupied by religion. Like religion, it now has its priests, its prophets, its saints, and its colleges of dignitaries. The conqueror who seeks consecration presents himself to the people no longer flanked by the bishop, but by the Nobel prize. To be absolved, the unjust lord no longer founds an abbey, but a museum. It is now in the name of culture that we are mobilized, that we preach crusades. It has come to play the role of ‘opiate of the people’.⁵⁷

And it is with the same critical intentions, although in a less polemical and more academic form, that, in the same era, Bourdieu would use religious language in his work on culture:

Objectively speaking, at the moment, the museum is basically a sacred place just like a church. It is perhaps the church of modern times. Or at least it is perhaps the church of certain social classes in our society, that is to say a place where we can be in the presence of sacred things and where we go to be made sacred by being in the presence of sacred things. And I would even go as far as to say, it is a place where we go to become sacred, to be sanctified, leaving the profane outside the door, in other words, setting ourselves apart from the profane. That is perhaps its most important role. If the cult of the museum fills such a role in our society for certain social classes, it is perhaps essentially because its role is to set apart, to separate. Since it separates those who are able to enter the museum from those who are not able to enter.⁵⁸

However, by using the metaphor in this way, we are preventing ourselves from seeing the truly sacred nature of art and culture and from understanding that all power engenders its own forms of separation between the sacred and the profane. A universal mechanism which underpins all known human societies, the separation of the sacred from the profane, closely linked to relations of domination, should be recognized and studied as such rather than abandoned in a latent, implicit state within religious metaphors. We need to move on from a simple analogical displacement, which means that we refer to the world of art as though it were a religious world, while at the same time believing that it is fundamentally not so at all, to the historical interpretation of art as a sacred domain. By doing so we discover that all our societies, which claim to have lost touch with the sacred and to be disenchanted and rationalized, are indeed fundamentally sacred. Finally, a superficially religious reading also prevents us from going further back to religious practices which are in fact extremely close to those involving placing works of art in museums to be admired, namely, the exhibiting of holy relics in European churches from the Middle Ages onwards.⁵⁹

Peter Brown pointed out that it was towards the end of the fourth century that the holy man, a sort of living icon, appeared in Europe as a ubiquitous figure of power,⁶⁰ believed to be in possession of supernatural power. The Christian church organized around its saints, their tombs and their relics a whole sacred world which attracted believers like a magnet attracts iron filings. And, of course, each town sought to be part of the great symbolic competition by claiming to possess the ‘remains’ of some saint or other, of greater or lesser renown, so as to attract visitors and enjoy the attendant prestige.⁶¹ If Eastern Christianity had little control over the production of its ‘saints’ (Brown refers to a ‘disastrous overproduction of the holy’), Western Christianity, on the other hand, restricted the processes of sanctification notably by generally waiting until people had died before beginning to sanctify them by producing their hagiographies. Gregory of Tours (539–594), bishop of Tours and church historian, was ‘oppressed by how infinitely small the number of such tombs must be’.⁶²

By limiting the number of sacred places and objects, the Church was thus ensuring it could maintain its distinctive force. The more saints there were to worship, the more the relative force of each of them was diminished. The aim was to obtain reverentia towards all that is sacred, reverentia as opposed to rusticitas (a word which refers to the behaviour of peasants, but the best translation of which is, according to Brown, ‘boorishness’, ‘slipshodness’⁶³). The rusticitas results from an ignorance about the sacred character of things. Those who are incapable of recognizing the sacred character of relics can only behave boorishly towards them, with no sense of the respect or of the veneration that becomes such objects. Rusticitas was therefore ‘the failure, or the positive refusal to give life structure in relations with specific supernatural landmarks.’⁶⁴ For a place or an object to be recognized as a sacred place or object, required a specific set of circumstance: that people with authority (at the least an ordained priest) should bless it in order to sanctify it, that similarly authorized people should conserve and look after it so as to distinguish it from profane places or objects and, last but not least, that the faithful be taught to recognize it as a sacred place or object, with appropriate attitudes and behaviour, for, as Brown says, ‘A relic that is not acclaimed is, candidly, not a relic’.⁶⁵

The processes of limitation, of control, appropriation, recognition or non-recognition of relics clearly shows that this is a matter of symbolic power. Whoever possessed these objects and had control over them, whoever had the power to transform ordinary objects into sacred relics and was in charge of their movements and whereabouts, would have power over all those disposed to believe in the sacred nature of the so-called relics. For the reverentia towards such objects was merely a roundabout way, for those who control them, to obtain reverentia for themselves. A roundabout way perhaps, but a politically subtle one in that it could contribute towards stabilizing the phenomena of ‘reputation’ or of ‘recognition’, which could be fragile when institutions were sometimes weak or precarious. As Brown writes, ‘Gossip is a constant factor in the life of the sixth-century church. It is a factor which we should take very seriously in the attempts of the bishops to establish their status in society. […] Hence, perhaps, the importance for such men of the cult of the saints. They, at least were secure. They had passed the test of time.’⁶⁶

By welcoming relics to a town, the beliefs of the community are harnessed, the members of the community are drawn closer together and the power of the administrator and manager of these sacred objects is firmly established. Relics are instruments of power, the means of consolidating a group and of establishing and maintaining a dominant position within the group:

The fragility of the consensus surrounding the bishop brings us to our last question: apart from general excitement, what is the specific message of the ceremonial of the saint’s festival in Gaul in the sixth century? I think we can be clear – it is a ceremony of adventus and consensus. The saint arrives at a shrine, and this arrival is the occasion for the community to show itself as a united whole, embracing its otherwise conflicting parts, in welcoming him. The same ceremonial is as valid for the great regular festivals as for the arrival of a new relic.⁶⁷

The bishops thus strengthen their power by keeping their hold on the objects, the relics, which are the ‘depository of the objectified values of the group’.⁶⁸

Krzysztof Pomian pointed out the ‘policy of capitalization of the sacred in the form of relics and holy images’⁶⁹ favoured by the Venetian governments from the thirteenth century onwards in the context of the cult of Saint Mark. From diverse and varied relics and treasures to commissions for works of art (mosaics, reliquaries, sculptures, paintings), to the products of classical art (also a source of dispute between Genoa and Florence), everything was put in place to draw the attention of powerful people to the town and to put it firmly on the map. By the same token, the goal was thus to reinforce the ‘splendour’, the ‘reputation’ and the ‘glory’ of Venice. On the subject of relics, Pomian observes that, between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, ‘visitors did not fail to admire them, to worship them and to talk about them even after they had returned to their own countries’.⁷⁰ But the process of sanctification which was simultaneously occurring in the art world meant that from the fifteenth century onwards, works of art (notably painting and sculpture) would gradually take the place of tens of thousands of relics. In the eighteenth century, Art, which had by then imposed itself as a completely separate domain of the sacred, had supplanted relics in the cultural policy of the town:

But if we now rejoice in the fact that strangers come to Venice to admire the paintings – and not, as in the past, to worship the relics – it is also because, in Venice as elsewhere in Europe, there is amongst the elite, a sort of anthropocentric religiosity which sees in Art – with a capital ‘A’ – the favoured expression of the creative power of man and which places works of art at the summit of the hierarchy of human production, conferring on them a higher status than ever before.⁷¹

But which objects can attain the rank of ‘relics’ and which objects can become sacred? Struggles for the definition of what could be rendered sacred and what could be sanctified are obviously a key element in the history of religions. Amongst the most debated objects, we also found icons (images representing religious figures) which play exactly the same role as that long filled by holy men.⁷² Iconodules and iconoclasts were at loggerheads, the former defending the sacred nature of icons by evoking either their divine origin or the association between the object and holy people from the past. But the latter considered, on the contrary, that icons had been smuggled into the domain of the sacred whereas they were in fact purely profane objects:

It appeared to the iconoclasts that icons had, at a relatively recent time, sidled over the firmly-demarcated frontier separating the holy from the profane. The iconoclast bishops […] meant to put them firmly back in their place […] No prayer of any priest had blessed the icon, so that, through such consecration, it passes beyond ordinary matter to become a holy thing, but it remains common and without honour, just as it leaves the hands of the painter. Icons could not be holy because they had received no consecration from above. They had received only an illegitimate consecration from below.⁷³

The difference of opinion between iconoclasts and iconodules had a clearly political dimension, in the sense that it affected the organization of the power of the Church. The iconoclasts belonged to those who sought to limit the number of sacred objects in order to be able to maintain central control over a small number of objects and, as a result, they were opposed to those more in favour of dissemination who sought a wider distribution of many smaller pieces of the sacred, and, by the same token, were anxious to avoid the monopoly of a minority over a restricted and centralized sacred. For the former, ‘Iconodule superstition was simply a haemorrhage of the holy from these great symbols into a hundred little paintings. Iconoclasm, therefore, is a centripetal reaction: it asserts the unique value of a few central symbols of the Christian community that enjoyed consecration from above against the centrifugal tendencies of the piety that had spread the charge of the holy onto a multiplicity of unconsecrated objects.’⁷⁴ A strong and centralized system of government versus a multiplication of small scattered powers which are difficult for the Church to control (Brown speaks of ‘Iconoclastic Jacobinism’ which ‘ruthlessly sacked local cult-sites’⁷⁵). All of this sums up the tensions which developed around relics and icons. The sacred and power clearly emerge as two sides of the same coin.

Religious images thus received marks of respect, and even of veneration, just as imperial images once had.⁷⁶ And when the image was separated from its religious or political context to become an artistic image, it would, in its turn, receive the same signs of deference, tinged with admiration for the artistic creation involved. As a result, the sacred fragmented and took specific forms depending on whether it was political, truly religious or artistic, but always with the same separation between the sacred and the profane and opposing different types of dominators and dominated (the emperor or the monarch and their subjects, God and religious authorities and the faithful, art and its admirers). The sacred could not therefore be confined to the religious. It is always this separation of the sacred and the profane which leads to certain objects, either those which epitomized the group values or those onto which it projected its beliefs, being withdrawn from everyday social life and placed in churches, temples, palaces, studios, galleries or museums. From the private collections of rich patricians or princely palaces to museums, what did change, however, was the opening up to the public so that instead of an activity largely confined to the great Italian or European families, art was now exhibited for everyone to see.

In these forms of the political, religious or artistic sacred, we can indeed see the effects of the transfer of sacred status, or at least of mutual borrowings of the languages of the sacred. We have already seen how the Church managed to borrow from imperial power certain forms of ceremony and types of discourse, just as temporal powers drew on theology and religious language in order to formulate and put into action their own way of exercising power, and poets and artists had also made use of the language of sovereignty or of god the creator. But essentially such borrowing and sharing happen only because similar problems present themselves and because relatively unchanging structures of domination underpin social relationships. Such borrowings are all the easier in that the words used correspond particularly well to the objective situation of the different groups or actors concerned.

It would be a mistake to see relics and icons as sacred objects which would gradually give way to purely human objects with no trace of the sacred. The religious form of the sacred did not gradually disappear in order to be replaced by another form of the sacred. Objects of art were just as clearly separated from the profane in specific places, just as much worshipped and admired as religious objects, and equally capable of weaving the same kinds of enchanting relationships around themselves. Such objects, it is true, no longer link back to a transcendent god, but they are as a result no less fascinating, coveted and appropriated by all the powers (sacerdotal as well as temporal) in their need to harness beliefs to their own advantage. The frontier is no longer drawn between the invisible transcendent and the visible present, but instead, it separates one group of individuals (the creators) from another group. As Olivier Christin writes:

from many perspectives, the quarrel of images and iconoclasm does indeed result in a double movement of desanctification and displacement of images: uprooted from their proper place, deprived of their function, their legitimacy and their original public, certain images only escape disappearing altogether by immediately transforming themselves into works of art, in other words, by taking on a new sacred aura. This transfiguration, this re-sanctifying of the image is only made possible because of the emergence of art collecting, contemporary with iconoclasm and sometimes intimately linked to it. In a collection, a work of art is a religion which has no connection, or very little, to Christianity. It earns its place there simply on the basis of its formal qualities and the fame of the artist. From now on, it is only subject to judgements founded on the idea of artistic autonomy and which are forged within the group of those who define themselves as connoisseurs. The value of a work is assessed according to the complexity of the chosen subject, the sources, the inspiration it draws on, the originality of the workmanship, the skill of the person or people producing, its rarity, and no longer depends on the status of the people represented, the cost of the materials used in its composition, the role it was intended to fulfil. In the modern collection therefore, the outstanding work above all represents a discourse on art, on the collection, on the art of judging art. It is an expression of Beauty and an opportunity for spectators to exert their capacity to judge Beauty accurately.⁷⁷

One shared property of relics and of works of art lies in the fact that they are only what they are, that they produce only the effects they produce, and have only the value they have in so far as they are associated to exceptional individuals. In the case of relics, these must be the body parts of a holy man or objects which have been in contact with him (scraps of clothing, handkerchiefs, personal objects) and in the case of works of art, it is generally accepted that only works created by a known artist can aspire to the rank of major works. In both cases, and even in other similar ones (the secular relics of famous people such as Napoleon’s hat or the dress worn by Marilyn Monroe), the issue of the authenticity of the objects in question must therefore be addressed. Nothing very easily distinguishes an ancient object from a particular era from another similar one since the fragments of bones or scraps of fabric in circulation do not inherently carry the material proof of their link with the holy person. Certain contemporary copies can sometimes compete with autograph paintings to an extent that can even confuse the finest connoisseurs.

Two main types of beliefs are intertwined in the relationship with these objects: on the one hand, the belief in the sacred nature of the relics or the works of art and, on the other hand, if this is established, the belief in the authentic nature of the particular objects in question.⁷⁸ Extremely complex controversies as to the authenticity of the objects in question, or the means used to authenticate these objects can exist without beliefs in the legitimacy of relics or of works of art in general ever being challenged. Controversies and strategies to discredit relics or rival works of art even act as the proof of the existence of such beliefs, since, if nobody believed in the importance of a relic or of a work of art, nobody would be interested in knowing if the particular objects in question were indeed what it was claimed they were. In eras where relics were seen as important sacred objects, provoking competition between different towns, placed at the heart of controversies over their authenticity, it was very rare to find radical criticism challenging the very notion of a ‘relic’. As Patrick Geary writes:

in general cultural presuppositions on relics, on their value and use were broadly shared. The few dissidents, such as Claude of Turin in the IXth century and Guilbert de Nogent in the XIIth century, were the rare exceptions. From the XIIth century on, some heterodox groups denied the efficacy of relics, but often even these groups had their own versions of saints and even of relics. What was frequently at issue, however, was the identification of a corpse or grave with a saint: how could one be certain that a bone was not simply that of a humble fisherman?⁷⁹

On the other hand, competition between churches or municipalities claiming to be in possession of the ‘true’ or the ‘genuine’ relics were extremely frequent.⁸⁰

Relics, like works of art, owe their very particular status to their attachment to a unique person (saint or artist) and the procedures involved in attributing to objects the status of autograph works or that of authentic relics are not left to chance. In the case of relics, this took the form of a public ritual called ‘elevation’, ‘in which the relics were formally offered to the public for veneration’.⁸¹ But without any possible recourse to an as yet non-existent science, the authentication of relics depended both on the authority of those who declared them to be authentic and on the miracles attributed to them. For their part, works of art encouraged the development of experts (connoisseurs, art historians, museum curators, art dealers, scientific laboratories) who based all or part of their activity on their capacity to attribute the works circulating within the art market.

Far from being a simple historical detour, revisiting the history of holy relics, provided it is not locked into too rigid a conception of religious history and beliefs, is an essential precondition to the process of understanding the most contemporary practices in the art world. As Thierry Lenain writes:

with this constant fear of the fake and the subsequent development of a culture of authenticity and attribution, the cult of relics therefore seems to us like a striking foreshadowing of our modern art world, which was set up as a result of a transfer of preoccupations and schemes originally anchored in the historical foundations of the Christian Middle Ages. And if it appears difficult to be precise about which channels this transfer operated through, given that its movements are largely hidden away in the deepest layers of cultural history, there is no doubt that we owe to it our conception of the work of art as an ‘auctorial relic’. Still just as relevant in our present times, even when the cult of Christian relics has been relegated to the realm of anthropological vestiges, this change began to take place during the Renaissance. Sources from the time even suggest that it did not stay completely buried in the collective unconsciousness. When Vasari refers to a drawing by Michelangelo which featured in his collection as a ‘relic’, he is thus confirming that the connection had not escaped his notice.⁸²

On the other hand, when, more than two hundred years later, de Quincy compared the battles between museums for the most beautiful paintings to a hunt for relics, the implied criticism demonstrates that the awareness of the structural link between relics and works of art has now been lost.

The separation of art and life

Unquestionably, the work of art, especially an ancient work of art, is untouchable. It merits respect, admiration, reverence and, if possible, understanding. But touch it – never!

Jean-Claude Chevalier, in his preface to a new edition of Don Quichotte, Paris: Seuil, 1997

By becoming autonomous, art not only freed itself from powers (religious, political, economic), it also separated itself from what is not art (crafts, manufacturing). The history of autonomization is not simply that of an emancipation, but also involves a separation of the sacred and the profane and, as a result, a distancing from those who become ‘the cultural public’, ‘spectators’ or ‘consumers of art’. The sanctification of art thus regulates the relationships which can, and indeed must, be maintained between the ‘spectators’, the ‘listeners’, the ‘visitors’ or the ‘readers’ who are not necessarily practitioners, and the artists who participate in a public performance (dance, theatre, music) or who display their work in specially dedicated spaces (libraries and bookshops, museums and art galleries).

Whether it is the stage of a concert or dance venue, the opera or the theatre, with its curtains, stage and footlights separating the public, usually seated, silent and plunged into darkness, and the performers who are under the spotlights; or a museum or gallery with its framed pictures (the frame already distinguishing the work, as Poussin pointed out, in relation to the surrounding continuum and indicating to the visitor where he or she should concentrate their gaze), hung and illuminated, which must not be touched and towards which visitors direct their respectful gaze with neither noise nor gestures; or a library or bookshop which arrange, classify and place on shelves printed works accessible to quietly-behaved borrowers or buyers, the separation of ‘art’ and ‘life’, of the sacred and profane, implies a distancing process and a respectful, admiring and attentive attitude. All the arrangements associated with the works (the physical separation between the stage and the audience, the lighting, the shelves, the temples of art or literature, etc.) objectivize this separation between the work and the consumer of the work, between admired works and admiring public, between what is illuminated and what is destined to remain in darkness, between the space on-stage and off-stage, etc.

These comments on the separation between art and life as a separation between the sacred and the profane belong either above or below any question of internal differences within the various fields defined by Bourdieu (the dispute between ancients and moderns, between academic artists and revolutionary or avant-garde artists, between the commercial approach and the purest one of limited production, etc.). The art world is, certainly, a space within which many confrontations and clashes between aesthetic movements are played out. Yet the very existence of a separate space for creators (painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, actors, writers, etc.) and their works, in contrast to the profane world of spectators or consumers, deserves to be challenged. It is against the background of this great divide that everything else is played out and acquires its meaning.

These divisions between art and life, between the work and the public, between producers and consumers, between experts and laymen, based as they are on the opposition between dominant and dominated and between sacred and profane make up the structural separations which characterize our societies. They give rise to extremely powerful socializing effects which are all the more powerful because they remain silent and diffuse. These self-evident facts, which are part of the general configuration of our societies, are scarcely investigated now by researchers in social sciences because they belong on a level which is wide-reaching, macro-sociological and many centuries old. They are present therefore as the landscapes structuring all social universes and sub-universes and escape the attention focused at ‘ground level’, which is more generally the domain of sociological investigations designed to describe actors by focusing as closely as possible on their actions and motives.

Only by resorting to history can we become aware of what appears to us to be self-evident. Thus, Mikhaïl Bakhtin points out that the carnival culture of the Middle Ages is a cultural manifestation based on the participation of all and which does not take the form of a separate spectacle on a stage which the audience is simply content to watch:

In fact, carnival does not know footlights in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people: they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is the laws of its own freedom.⁸³

The carnival is therefore simply life continued under another form, and not, strictly speaking, a form of art distinct from everyday life:

The carnival was not an artistic form of theatrical performance but rather a real (though provisional) form of life itself which was not simply acted out on a stage, but in a sense lived (for the duration of the carnival). That can be explained in the following way: during the carnival, it is life itself which plays and performs – without a stage, footlights, actors, spectators, in other words with none of the specific attributes of any theatrical spectacle – another form of its achievement, that is to say of its renaissance and its renovation on better principles.⁸⁴

Similarly, the Homeric poems or Greek odes whose historical context is reproduced in a study by Florence Dupont, are not strictly speaking literature or art in the sense in which we understand those terms. If these texts were written in the first place and have survived until our time, if we can now read them and appreciate their form and content, these poems did not exist in written form when they were first written and circulated.⁸⁵ These were in fact oral poems, improvised by the bards and always associated with events such as banquets, celebrations, the aristocratic symposion and all kinds of different ceremonies. The bard was called upon to improvise until the celebration ended but did not have an already existing work which he then read or declaimed on the occasion of these various events. Poetry was only one element of the celebration amongst others (music, drink, food, women, etc.) and was not seen as a work separated from social life that needed to be listened to and appreciated in a ‘religious’ manner. This is the opposite of the situation experienced by spectators in the societies where art and literature had been invented, ‘a passive public that expressed no opinion on either the choice or the length of the poems that were recited. It was just a public at a spectacle. It attended but did nothing else: its members neither ate nor drank nor courted those seated next to them’.⁸⁶

In Ancient Greece, there was no separation between these kinds of discourse and the practical conditions in which they were declaimed. This oral culture is an event-based culture. In all societies where oral culture dominated (which was largely the case in Ancient Greece), the person who declaims and performs the myth in front of an audience (through dance, mime, etc.) and in conditions which are always specific, has ‘learned’ it in the same conditions and, not only is there no separation between learning, composition and recital, but the listeners act as co-producers of the recital, in the sense that what is said is adapted to them. A fundamental interactive sociolinguistic principle, this explains not only the myriad variations which existed of the ‘same’ myth, but also the control which the ‘public’ (which is not really one) exerts over the recital and ‘the accumulations, the digressions, the associated slippages’ which respond to ‘the fleeting, unstable and forever absent-minded demands’⁸⁷ of its audience. Those present could, according to Geertz, respond with ‘“Hourahs!” of approval or whistles of censure, depending on whether things were approved of or not’.⁸⁸ Oral poetry ‘constructs a voice out of the voices around it’.⁸⁹ Everything prevents oral poetry from resembling some kind of formal ‘artistic’ research. Referring to a great practitioner of Berber tamusni, Mouloud Mammeri declared: ‘He had a “feel” for his audience. It is not opportunism. But you do not say just anything to anyone. If you want your tamusni to be effective in a particular case, you must adapt it to your audience.’⁹⁰ The collective ‘knowledge’ of these social groupings forms a ‘wisdom of the moment’,⁹¹ a ‘science of the opportune moment, the kairos’.⁹² The audience, who because of the control they exert over the speaker, coproduce the performance, preventing any separation, any excessive specialization of ‘knowledge’. If the Berber imusnawen can ‘among themselves’ produce the ‘kind of gratuitous exercises that suggest pure poetry’, they cannot allow themselves an ‘exercise in virtuosity in front of others because they knew it would not go’.⁹³

Contrary to an event-based culture, the societies which invented art and literature form a culture which separates the words and the narratives from the ritual or, more broadly, from the context and the moment of the utterance, decontextualizing them by ‘textualizing’ them. It is a culture of the monument: ‘These oppositions between orality and literacy, live events and commemoration, speech acts and statements, the spoken and the written registers, recomposition and citation, pragmatic meaning and semantic meaning, all of which overlap but without altogether coinciding, sketch in a nebula organized around two asymptotic poles that I have ventured to call hot culture and cold culture.’⁹⁴

In order, for example, to grasp the meaning of the Odes of Anacreon, it is no use simply taking the fragments which have been preserved until today as a monumentalized text, intended to be read, and still less, interpreted and commentated on, or compared to other texts and considered in its literary context. We should, on the contrary, see it as a text which preserves the traces of the Dionysian banquet which was its natural context. The song is an integral part of the feast and does not involve any kind of separation between the author of the song and the ‘public’ which is a far cry from the group of well-behaved and discreet ‘spectators’ attending a ‘performance’. The event-based culture is a culture of participation rather than separation. It demands a letting-go, an absence of restraint and intense participation in the experience: ‘a culture of the entire body, sociability and pleasure, and the three were indissociable.’⁹⁵

Dupont also, in a completely different context, discusses the fiesta flamenco. When flamenco was still only a musical culture learned and handed down simply by mimesis, it was part of celebrations in which everyone participated in their own way. The historian explains how ‘impossible it was to be present without taking part’ at this kind of event and ‘that to remain withdrawn and politely cold would have been the worst of insults to all present’:

In a flamenco fiesta, anyone who does not clap to keep the rhythm going or does not interject an olé or an eso es – ‘that’s the way’ – into the song side-lines himself and wounds his friends. He is regarded as too snooty to feel the flamenco, to respond to it, to let himself go with it as if improvising it himself, to be carried away by joy or sadness, nostalgia or grief, depending on the form taken by the soaring song.⁹⁶

Participation prevents any dissociation between the work and the audience. On the other hand, as soon as the music begins to be written and codified, to be taught in specialized schools and to be performed in places destined for that purpose, a completely different social relationship is introduced, a separation between a work now pinned down in a written form (and which can be performed) and a public who come to listen to it respectfully. Now nobody dares to get to their feet, clap their hands, jump up and down, sing the tune at the same time as the singer, cry for joy, dance with other people whether known or unknown. From festive pleasure we have gone to a well-behaved listening of a work of art.

In the case of theatre, the transition from a responsive audience, who reacted to what was happening on the stage and sometimes interacted with the actors, were noisy (they spoke at the top of their voices, shouted, roared with laughter, whistled, stamped their feet or their sticks on the ground), and unrestrainedly expressed their joy or anger, their approval or disapproval (it was not unusual for eggs or vegetables to be thrown at the actors), to a disciplined, silent and discreet public who only applauded at the end of the play and remained politely in their seats until the interval allowed them an opportunity to relax and to talk, has been studied in detail by Lawrence W. Levine in the context of interpretations of Shakespeare in the USA during the nineteenth century.⁹⁷ In the first case, the frontier between actors and spectators, constantly reacting throughout the performance, was somewhat blurred. In the second case, a clear distinction is in place between the stage and the silent (‘silence in the face of art’) and respectful spectators and whose capacity to listen discreetly without any show of emotion was evidence of a high degree of self-control.⁹⁸

The separation of art and life can also be observed in the field of dance, which Bourdieu compared with sport, referring to ‘the development of a sports show totally separate from ordinary sport’:

In the two cases, the progressive constitution of a relatively autonomous field reserved for professionals is accompanied by a dispossession of the profane, who are little by little reduced to the role of spectators: in opposition to village dancing often associated with ritual functions, courtly dance, which becomes a spectacle, presupposes specific forms of knowledge (one has to know the beat and the steps), and thus requires dancing masters inclined to emphasize technical virtuosity and to perform a work of exegesis and codification; from the nineteenth century onward there appear professional dancers, who appear in the salons, in front of people who themselves can dance and can appreciate dancing with connoisseurs; finally you have a total break between star dancers and spectators who do not practise dance and who are reduced to passive understanding.⁹⁹

But the sociologist does not link this process of separation between producers and consumers, or between professional producers and amateur producers, to the separation of a sacred and a profane and, fundamentally, to the opposition between dominators and dominated. He thinks of it first and foremost as the sign of a conquest of autonomy by sportspeople or performers.

In the same way, as soon as music became an ‘art’, everything was done with a view to a musical performance which would be appreciated by spectators.¹⁰⁰ Everything converges towards the concert as a legitimate cultural form. In France, at least since the creation of the Conservatoire de Paris in 1795, the concert format takes on a central role. People learn instruments, they study musical notation, they rehearse in groups, all with the view to a future public performance in front of spectators. The idea of learning to play purely for personal pleasure, either present or future, of learning simply to be able to experience and give pleasure in private and informal contexts (with children, a partner, friends, etc., or purely for yourself) is immediately regarded by teachers at the conservatories as inappropriate. ‘Sharing music’ or simply ‘playing’ thus becomes a strict equivalent of ‘playing on a stage, in front of a public’. However, this way of structuring the learning process with a view to a future public performance means that learning is heavily overshadowed by the intimidating need to play perfectly during that performance. Learners therefore immediately internalize the fear of making a mistake or of giving a poor performance and can put in hours and years of learning, firmly convinced they will never be ‘good enough’ or ready to play on the stage.¹⁰¹ One of the teachers interviewed by Samuel Chagnard compares the musician ‘who serves music’ to someone who ‘serves only himself’. And he adds, ‘Personally I think that we are simply the servants of the music.’¹⁰² Clearly the terms used here are by no means innocent. They echo other comments made by the same teachers touching on ‘respect for the work’, and it becomes all too clear that, behind these various expressions, there is an underlying relation of domination: music, sanctified, separated, is like a divinity which must be worshipped, a sovereign to whom we owe our service.

Yet nothing more eloquently demonstrates the huge separation between art and life as an opposition between the sacred and the profane than the institution of the museum which developed in France from the eighteenth century onwards.¹⁰³ The museum is to painting and to sculpture what the concert hall is to music. Placing an object in a museum turns it into a work of art, that is to say a sacred object which no longer has any connection with what it might be outside the museum. Withdrawn from ordinary use and from market forces, it becomes instead an exhibited object, an object of contemplation and of admiration. Contemporary artists themselves have participated in unmasking the act of social magic which being exhibited in a museum represents. By exhibiting ordinary objects (urinal, rolls of toilet paper piled up in a pyramid, excrement, etc.) rather than works produced by the artist’s own hand, which are the result of a traditional use of the medium, they focus on the role of the museum in transforming the ordinary into the exceptional, the insignificant into the significant, the profane into the sacred. By agreeing to welcome an object within its walls, the museum says, without needing to say it: ‘This is a work of art.’ And the transubstantiation is all the more obvious where the object least resembles the conventional work of art.

The separation between sacred and profane manifests itself by the relative silence which reigns in museums, by the self-control demonstrated by visitors (who refrain from running or from making excessive gestures) and by the fact that they are not allowed to touch the works. In a text written in 1946, Dubuffet wrote:

Ever since the fifteenth century […] people imagined – and they still do – that artworks are as sacred as relics and that it is proper to raise temples for them. That’s what museums are, if you think about it: temples where we celebrate the cult of the Mona Lisa, Raphael, The Gleaners, The Raft of the Medusa. We go there the way we go to a cemetery, the whole family on a Sunday afternoon, tip-toeing through, murmuring in hushed voices.¹⁰⁴

This physical distancing from the work, this invisible wall placed between the work and the spectator of the work, delineates the frontier separating the sacred from the profane. And the sacred character is also evident in the precautions that museum staff have to take when it comes to moving works or installing them: workmen or technicians wear gloves, protect works by wrapping them in foam, bubble wrap, tissue paper or Japanese paper … In no circumstances must the hands of the installers, like those of visitors, ever be in direct contact with the work (see Plates 1a and 1b in the centre of the book).

From Kant to analytical philosophy, art is characterized by its lack of instrumentality or ulterior purpose, its disinterestedness. For pragmatist philosophers of art (John Dewey and Richard Shusterman), aesthetics should, on the contrary, be everywhere in life, and their criticism of Kantian aesthetics consists in stating that disinterestedness, like the privilege of form, ‘presuppose special cultural conditioning and class privilege’.¹⁰⁵ Yet, behind the classic conception of art detached from any practical function, it is clear that it is the museum in particular, as a specifically separated institution, which makes its presence felt. It is no coincidence that the pragmatists, who militate for an aesthetic experience which is linked to ‘the processes of everyday life’,¹⁰⁶ deplore the tradition, judged to be elitist, which makes art into an ‘art of museums’ and stigmatizes it as ‘something to be enjoyed when we take a break from reality’.¹⁰⁷ Kant’s criticism of the analytical philosophy of art and of art itself, as the ‘beauty parlour of our civilization’ is therefore clearly a socio-political criticism of social tendencies distinguishing art from real life by ensuring it is ‘relegated’¹⁰⁸ into museums, theatres or concert halls, or in other words, confined to specific places and moments of social activity. Aesthetic theories which make art into an autonomous object are historically linked to institutions which, like museums or concert halls, create a division between art and life, between the sacred and the profane.

Dewey described with remarkable clarity the process of separation which cuts across our societies (the realms of religion, politics and learning, as well as that of art) and reveals the link between these separations and the opposition between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material, etc.:

The factors that have glorified fine art by setting it upon a far-off pedestal did not arise within the realms of art nor is their influence confined to the arts. For many persons an aura of mingled awe and unreality encompasses the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘ideal’ while ‘matter’ has become by contrast a term of depreciation, something to be explained away or apologized for. The forces at work are those which have removed religion as well as fine art from the scope of the common or community life. These forces have historically produced so many of the dislocations and divisions of modern life and thought that art could not escape their influence.¹⁰⁹

He suggests, therefore, writing a history of institutions which have contributed to the setting apart of art and linking it with the history of the political uses art has been put to:

An instructive history of modern art could be written in terms of the formation of the distinctly modern institutions of museum and exhibition gallery. I may point to a few outstanding facts. Most European museums are, among other things, memorials of the rise of nationalism and imperialism. Every capital must have its own museum of painting, sculpture, etc., devoted in part to exhibiting the greatness of its artistic past, and, in other part, to exhibiting the loot gathered by its monarchs in conquest of other nations; for instance, the accumulation of the spoils of Napoleon that are in the Louvre. They testify to the connection between the modern segregation of art and nationalism and militarism. […] Not merely individuals, but communities and nations, put their cultural good taste in evidence by building opera houses, galleries and museums. These show that a community is not wholly absorbed in material wealth, because it is willing to spend its gains in patronage of art. It erects these buildings and collects their contents as it now builds a cathedral. These things reflect and establish superior cultural status, while their segregation from the common life reflects the fact that they are not part of a native and spontaneous culture. They are a kind of counterpart of a holier-than-thou culture, exhibited not towards persons as such but towards the interests and occupations that absorb most of the community’s time and energy.¹¹⁰

But, more fundamentally still, such an analysis should lead to an awareness of the link between the very nature of what is called ‘art’ and the relations of domination which introduce a separation between the sacred and the profane.¹¹¹ For it is indeed structures of domination, based on a division of work between the material and the spiritual, between the manual and the intellectual, with an association of spiritual and dominant on one side and material and dominated on the other, which lie behind the separation of art and life and of the notion of art as an autonomous domain.

Through the separation, the distance, between an object presented as a performance and a subject who admires, respects, worships it, etc., what is learned in the relationship with art, is, in a euphemized form, a relationship of submission. In the relationship with God as with the work of art, structured by the opposition between the sacred and the profane, the superior and the inferior, the high and the low, the spiritual and the material, the worthy and the unworthy, the noble and the common, we see played out a sort of repetition of the relationship with the powerful, the dominant, the one who commands admiration, veneration and respect. Even if it may seem naïve (or populist) to some eyes, Dewey’s pragmatic concept of art, motivated as he clearly was by anti-elitist political and ethical considerations, exposes the profoundly political presuppositions of the museum, the performance space, the separation of art and life and of pure theories of art.

Admire first, interpret later

Independently of any particular intentions by particular artists, the separation of art and life, as a form of separation between the sacred and the profane, immediately marks out the structural role and the objective function of art (of all art and not just of one particular work). It is on this fundamental point that Paul Veyne seems to me to challenge, repeatedly, all those who immerse themselves immediately in the aesthetics of particular works and describe, analyse, commentate or interpret the contents of works of art without even questioning which social relationships they are part of, on the basis that they are exhibited, monumentalized, in short, placed in a position to be admired. The anti-hermeneutic reading of the historian applies just as much to religious or political images as it does to specifically artistic creations.

We imagine, he says in essence, that believers are always immersed in iconic and textual meanings which surround them. Believing this to be the case, the researcher can deploy all his hermeneutic capacities to analyse in detail the images and texts which are supposed to reveal the ultimate meaning of the beliefs and the culture of an era. And yet the history of the real practices of religious belief, like the history of the appreciation of images and texts, requires a much more prudent interpretation. For ‘more often than not, people perform rituals without believing in their meaning and, anyway, without being interested in it’.¹¹² In the same way, should the frieze which decorates Trajan’s Column or the Napoleonic bas reliefs of the Vendome column be open to interpretation knowing that, ‘placed too high on buildings, images are often illegible’?¹¹³ The ‘message’ or the ‘function’ of Trajan’s Column is not so much in the details of the frieze as in its very existence as a column, which represents the grandeur, the importance, the supreme dignity and the glory of Trajan: ‘The column does not inform people; it simply lets them see that it stands there proclaiming the greatness of Trajan through time and weather’.¹¹⁴ It is a ‘work of imperial grandeur’ rather than an example of ‘the art of propaganda’. Its role is to impress rather than inform, educate or instruct. The spectators are simply reminded of their smallness, their insignificance in comparison with impressive architecture (columns, cathedrals, monuments, towers, etc.) and monuments ‘speak to express the power which allowed them to rise from the earth’.¹¹⁵ The poor or non-existent visibility of certain images is there as a reminder that the work is important as much for what it does or what it is as for what it says. ‘What it does’ or ‘what it is’ in the sense that it is present in the public space or exhibited in a museum, that it is positioned as an object worthy of admiration and is sometimes admired, that it is separated from the rest of the world just as the sacred is separated from the profane and the strong is separated from the weak.

We can only follow Veyne’s suggestion which proposes ‘sketching out a sociology of art in which the art work, far from conveying an iconography and an ideology, is a décor that we do not even look at, that we can scarcely see, and that is however very important’.¹¹⁶ Such a sociology of art will of necessity disappoint supporters of a hermeneutic approach in that its starting point is that art is first and foremost important because of its presence, its position and its exposure. Yet it seems to me to be fundamental if we wish to focus attention on the lines of separation which structure our relationship to knowledge, culture and art, as they do our relationship with the power of the State or religion. What interests the researcher in that case is not the logic which governed the creation of a work, the meanings of the work potentially giving rise to an iconology, the aesthetic meaning attributed to it over the course of history, the social or cultural realities it eventually comes to symbolize or the culture of which it is supposed to be either an exemplary or a marginal manifestation, but its very existence as a significant object, removed from the world of ordinary objects and designated as an object worthy of our admiration.

Within such a perspective, the work of art does not carry meaning, but it is, nevertheless, the witness or model of a sacred domain. It is an object of desire, of material and symbolic appropriations, of buying and selling, of financial speculation, of a whole range of diverse and varied attentions. It is supported on a bedrock or backcloth, which represents a basis of beliefs more fundamental than those involved in attempting to make sense of the work. The work of art is therefore, even before being an object carrying meaning, supported by a bedrock which is implicit and remains largely outside the consciousness of those actors who engage with it. This bedrock is always present in the form of the domain of art as a separate and distinct domain, its links to the social relations of domination, its hierarchical internal organization in which everything (eras, movements, artists, works) is ordered according to its degree of legitimacy. If we are apt to think of rituals, myths, beliefs, ceremonies or works of art as practices capable of saying or meaning something, in the context of cultural perceptions, it is because scholars are specialists in interpretation and because, for them, all objects deserve to be interpreted.

Beneath admiration, domination

A multitude of men look up ‘in awe’ at the ‘artificial man’ they have created – the Leviathan built through their own covenant.

Carlo Ginzburg, Fear, reverence, terror. Five essays in Political Iconography, 2017, p. 8. Max Weber Lecture Series. European University Institute, pp. 9–10

We have already seen how the theologian Otto had emphasized the proximity of the religious category of ‘numinous’ and that of the aesthetic category of ‘sublime’.¹¹⁷ There is nothing surprising in this once we realize that it is the same opposition between profane and sacred which shapes the relationship of the faithful to his god as well as that of the spectator to the work of art. The sacred/profane opposition underlies both these relationships, and goes back to a magical relation of domination which can be found in numerous texts describing both aesthetic and religious experiences. The admiring gaze is just as easily that of the visitor in the museum as that of the faithful in church or of the dominated individual, fascinated and awed by their dominator. The same terms, the same oppositions run through both aesthetic and religious texts, all relying on political language: the idea of power and sovereignty and of submission to this power, fear and fascination in the face of what is bigger, higher and stronger than yourself, the opposition between a high and a low, a superior and an inferior, the feeling that it is possible to be spiritually uplifted by the admiration of sacred things, etc. By bringing such structural analogies to light, the sociologist definitively demonstrates the role of religion and art in maintaining the symbolic order. Through religious experience as well as through aesthetic experience, relations of power are instilled. Tendencies to be reverential, admiring, enchanted, etc., all involve a process of learning about the existence of a superior and an inferior, a high and a low, a dominator and a dominated.

Historically, the concept of the sublime originated in Greece and first appeared in a text by Pseudo-Longinus around the second half of the first century AD. In Greek, as in Latin, the word ‘sublime’ refers to something high and divine and it is clear that the concept draws its meaning from a hierarchical and vertical vision of the world: ‘Both the Greek and the Latin terms mean: in the air, high, elevated – which, from a positive point of view, gives: noble, perfect, divine; and from a negative one: haughty, proud, deluded.’¹¹⁸ The fact that ‘sublime’ can just as easily be associated with ‘nobility’ as with ‘God’ is a clear indication that the symbolic matrix which organizes an entire vision of the world makes terrestrial dominators equivalent to the celestial dominator. And in answer to the question as to how mere mortals could produce sublime discourses, Pseudo-Longinus replies that ‘And hence it is, that the greatest thoughts are always uttered by the greatest souls’,¹¹⁹ Homer being for him the ideal example of someone who is inspired by the gods and occupies an elevated position. ‘The sublime style, is, if one wishes, one that is noble, lofty, perfect, resulting from the secret alchemy of language which has allowed sounds to be purified and elevated, raised up towards a representation of the divine’.¹²⁰

The sublime cannot be disassociated from the notion of height, but also of power and strength and it is no coincidence if Pseudo-Longinus sees in the performative word of Genesis the perfect example of the sublime: ‘So likewise the Jewish legislator, no ordinary person, having conceived a just idea of the power of God, has nobly expressed it in the beginning of his Law. “And God said […] Let there be light, and there was light. Let the earth be, and the earth was”.’¹²¹ The performative force of utterances pronounced by those who hold the necessary authority to do so is at the origin of the sublime. Only those who are inclined to dominance are capable of exerting it and all the vocabulary used by Pseudo-Longinus to characterize sublime discourses refers back to the social situation of the sovereign and the servile man, of the high and noble condition to the low condition: ‘we ought to spare no pains to educate our souls to grandeur, and impregnate them with generous and enlarged ideas. […] an orator of the true genius must have no mean and ungenerous way of thinking. For it is impossible for those, who have grov’ling and servile ideas, or are engaged in the sordid pursuits of life, to produce anything worthy of admiration, and the perusal of all posterity.’¹²²

The sacred can quite often engender a certain fear. In his Observations on the feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant suggests that the feeling of the sublime, like that of the numinous for Otto, is ‘a pleasure rising out of fear’.¹²³ He associates it with notions of ‘grandeur’ and of the ‘noble’¹²⁴ and says that, faced with what is great and noble, the only possible feeling must be that of ‘silent admiration’. Grandeur is always a component of the sublime:

The sublime must always be great; the beautiful can also be small […] The sight of an Egyptian pyramid, as Hasselquist reports, moves one far more than one can imagine from all the descriptions; but its design is simple and noble. St Peter’s in Rome is splendid, because on its frame, which is large and simple, beauty is so distributed, for example, gold, mosaic work, and so on, that the feeling of the sublime still strikes through with the greatest effect.¹²⁵

Beautiful and sublime complement each other and Kant, taking his mytho-logic to the extreme, associates the beautiful with the feminine and the sublime with the masculine: and if the sublime is masculine, it is because it always implies the presence of an authority, a grandeur, an imposing and terrifying power.¹²⁶

The vocabulary of dominant-dominated relations is constantly employed by authors who define, describe or analyse the nature of relationships between art and its audience, and it is even somewhat surprising that this particular aspect is rarely focused on by specialists of art and its history. Thus Oscar Wilde, in the second half of the nineteenth century, clearly refers to the relationship of domination existing between the work and the spectator, aligning himself with a centuries-old tradition. ‘If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play.’¹²⁷ The admiring gaze of ‘the one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art’¹²⁸ is the gaze of an individual submitting to something greater and more powerful than he.

When referring to the relations of social, religious and gender domination, it is, at one and the same time, the language of the sacred, of submission to an exterior power, but also that of violation, of respect, of admiration and wonderment which is employed by writers and art critics such as John Ruskin (1819–1900) or Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917). Nella Arambasin discusses how the former wrote about the pleasure of submitting to something stronger and more powerful than yourself:

‘But your noble person particularly enjoys being made to feel himself little; the sense of diminution is to him one of great ecstasy. A thoughtful and sensitive person is originally capable of a pleasure in terrible objects which inferior persons are incapable of. It is the apprehension of power superior to our own, and of the great perpetual operations of death and pain in the system of the universe – both which perceptions […] are either impossible, or so far as possible, repulsive to a mean mind; but both possible, and in a certain kind attractive, to a great one’ [J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. II (1846), ‘Appendix’ note 9, in The Works, London: Cook and Weddenburn, 1903, vol. IV, p. 374]. This feeling of infinite diminution of the person faced with what is greater than him, can hardly avoid being compared to the ‘delightful horror’ which British aesthetes were the first to enjoy, but above all to ‘creature-consciousness’ defined by Otto in the context of the mystical.¹²⁹

For his part, Mirbeau

cannot deny that physically, if not mentally, he yields to a superior power in the face of paintings by Monet or sculptures by Rodin: ‘When he enters this gallery, the visitor, even the one most resistant to the pleasures of the mind, the most closed to superior understanding of art, experiences a kind of sensual power, like a physical turmoil, in the face of this dazzling light, and the sublime beauty of these shapes. If he cannot account for the strange and powerful sensation which arises within him or analyse the nervous spasms which shake him from his flesh to his brain, at least he grasps that he is in the presence of something sacred, a creation, something which overcomes and violates his mental inertia and fills him with respect, for something which is nothing other than genius. And he laughs no more.’ [O. Mirbeau, ‘Augustin Rodin’, in L’Écho de Paris, Paris, 25 June 1889. Reprinted in the collection Des Artistes, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1986, pp. 97–8.] Mirbeau formulated an energetic conception of art which is experienced through a sensation of physical disturbance: through this he enters the domain of the sacred. The word is pronounced: it brings together all the disturbances of the senses and the mind. Impossible to analyse, immeasurable, the sacred is experienced as an active force to which everyone must submit without even realizing it. Both submissive and receptive, the spectator reacts by a change of attitude: he laughs no more. In that way he goes from a profane state to a state of respect and devotion which consecrates the object of his admiration.¹³⁰

Another era, another relationship with art. In 1968, the artist Dubuffet exposed, but this time in a critical manner, the political basis of the relationship between art and its various publics. The separation of art from life, the sacred world of art and the profane world of non-artists as well as the banal demand for admiration constantly being put forward in the context of works of art,¹³¹ are founded on relations of domination which the artist is perfectly aware of:

When the well-to-do, aided by their scholars (who aspire only to serve and fit in, and who are nourished by the culture developed by this caste for its glory and devotion), open their castles, museums and libraries to the people, they have no intention of inspiring them to try their hands at creation. It isn’t writers or artists that the propertied class means to create with its cultural propaganda, it is readers and admirers. Cultural propaganda aims to impress upon these underlings a sense of the gulf separating them from the prestigious treasures to which the dominant class holds the keys, and of the futility of attempting to make a valid creative work outside of the designated paths.¹³²

Let us conclude this analysis of the admiring gaze and what links it to the structure of a domination and to the logic of a relationship between the sacred and the profane, by referring to a somewhat esoteric philosophical text which nevertheless yields its full meaning when subjected to a historical reading. In The crossing of the visible,¹³³ Jean-Luc Marion essentially constructs a philosophical-theological discourse which closely follows, as if on rails, the structural lines which characterize the objective situation of the separation between the dominant and the dominated, the sacred and the profane, art and life, the museum and the admiring spectator of its works, etc. By following the text closely, we can therefore see how a philosopher can make themselves into the eulogist and unconscious hermeneut of phenomena that the sociologist very often insists on objectivizing in all their banality.

Marion thus introduces a universalizing and fantasized vision of the process of creation and of the experience which, for a visitor to a museum, consists of admiring the works created and exhibited. In a subtle and sometimes poetic manner, the philosopher manages to say what the sociologist explains, clarifies and states loudly and directly. But, in this extremely ethereal and abstruse philosophical discourse, the sociologist can nevertheless uncover evidence about the sanctification of art and the relationship of dominant and dominated on which the separation of sacred and profane is based which bring additional proofs to the argument proposed. Through such a reading of the philosophers, restored to the position of privileged witnesses of the major structures of social order and of the key elements which characterize them, the sociologist nevertheless commits a doubly sacrilegious act. Not only does he take as his object those who think of themselves as subjects (thinking, reflecting, imagining, etc.), but, while they present themselves as perfect masters of consciousness and lucidity about themselves and the world, he refuses to accept that they are conscious of what they are doing. Except for their capacity to spread their ideas to a broader audience,¹³⁴ such philosophers are therefore comparable to the narrators of myths in traditional societies. They produce versions of scholarly myths which express, in their own way, the structure of social relations and which at the same time, because of the social division of work, remain incomprehensible to the great majority of members of their society.

Seen from this viewpoint, the work of art is a (divine) gift which goes beyond both the person who creates it and the one who views it.¹³⁵ In it, the invisible (the unseen) is rendered visible, and it is this uncontrolled expression of the divine on the part of both the painter and the spectator which reveals itself in paintings. The act of painting ‘is restricted to a matter of welcome, recording and being undergirded by the support of a gift’ (p. 44). In this way, the picture is presented as a person who acts and, in particular, commands, orders, obliges, constrains, summons, provokes, threatens, challenges, teaches, etc. Not just any person, therefore, but a person in a position to dominate others, someone who rules, commands, inspires respect and forces the spectator to adopt an admiring gaze. If we visit a painting, it is ‘because its intrinsic visibility imperatively calls (convoque) us’ (p. 30).¹³⁶ And ‘the authentic painting registers itself in the visible only by being ordered to be there, as though by a commander’ (p. 31). The painting is therefore our master: ‘The painting does not amuse or entertain, does not decorate or embellish and shows nothing – it shows itself, from itself and for itself. And thus, in this self-showing on its own terms alone, it shows us above all what this is – to show itself, to appear in full authority, full glory, like the dawn of a new world’ (p. 43).

The relationship that is established between the painting and the spectator is precisely of the same type as the ambivalent one which the major monotheist religions have imagined between gods and human beings. When Marion refers to the effects that the painting has on the spectator, he uses the same words as Otto chose when speaking about the ‘numinous’ or the ‘sacred’, which are themselves the words used to describe the relationship which subjects have (or are supposed to have) with their sovereigns: ‘each painting must affect two contradictory attractions upon its spectators. First, of course, the fascination of the gaze by the irresistible attraction of its weight of glory. But also terror in the face of the power that it exerts in the name of the darkness from which it arises’ (p. 31). The painting, which is sometimes compared to masters of worldly and spiritual powers (‘the royal and sacerdotal holiness of a master of appearance’, p. 31), becomes a sacred object and compels its spectators to consider it in that way: ‘To think about it properly, it would be necessary to be purified before entering into its presence. For glory threatens, even when it saves’ (p. 31). And when the metaphor of taking possession of the visible by the painting takes on a sexual connotation, it is even, as in the case of Mirbeau, the most brutal act of appropriation within the context of masculine domination that is referred to: the painting ‘ushers something from the unseen into the visible in order thus to inseminate – sometimes by a violation – the sterile reproduction of the visible by itself, which one commonly calls “creation”’ (p. 29).

The spectator, for his part, shows all the signs, both physical and psychological, of admiring submission: he bows down, lowers his eyes, respects, admires, etc. ‘Before even the least of paintings, it is thus necessary to avert one’s eyes, in order to venerate what gives itself there. Only then can we raise them, with a slow respect, to that One that gives what is given. And then finally to wait to see what gives’ (p. 45). Overturning the ordinary (and real) logic of things in which the picture-object (passive) is looked at by subjects (active), the philosopher makes visitors into mere servants subject to the power and authority of the painting. Looking is in no sense an act of active ‘consumption’ or the visual appropriation of a passive object, but indeed an act of reverence within the context of a relationship between dominant and dominated: ‘By filing past the painting we do not consume it as prey for the eyes since willingly or unwillingly, knowing it or not, we do not grant it the magisterial homage that it rightfully deserves’ (p. 30). The spectator is not therefore a sovereign subject but the simple subject (subjugated) in the service of his king (the painting), and rendering him the homage he deserves. Looking at the painting, we can only submit to this dependence towards the one who dominates us: ‘We depend more upon it, in gazing upon it, than it does upon us’ (p. 33) and: ‘Strictly speaking, it is not so much that we learn to see the painting as that the painting, by having given itself, teaches us to see it’ (p. 42).

Finally, the painter, when he is not just a simple producer of canvases, but, through his gestures, knows how to allow the invisible to enter the field of the visible, is comparable to Christ (‘every painting imitates Christ, by bringing the unseen to light’, p. 27) and is a ‘sacred’ being (‘The painter is not necessarily damned, but he is always ordained’, p. 54). When he goes beyond the simple imitation of nature to truly create, the artist is in the strongest sense of the term a ‘creator’ who is participating in the movement of divine creation: ‘The true painter shares the simple mystery of the one Creation, in that he reproduces nothing, but produces’ (p. 29). And we are back to the medieval movement, highlighted by Kantorowicz, which involves bringing the painter and the Creator together, and, by the same token, the process of the sanctification of the true artist in so far as he is a genuine creator introducing ‘the unseen into the visible’ (p. 29).

The magic of paintings

The magic which a masterpiece can produce today is rooted in the long, centuries-old process of the sanctification of art which began in the Middle Ages in European societies. Its aura, considered in any given moment in time, is simply the product of a collective process of transubstantiation involving artists, gallery owners, patrons, auctioneers, experts, Schools (including the École des Beaux-arts), museums, critics, art historians and the public, but which stems above all from the separation of the sacred and the profane and, ultimately, from the structural relations of domination between social groups. The cult of the great masters, the fact that their works are bought for very high prices, that they are conserved, restored, protected, prevented from moving around freely by being classified as national treasures, all proves that in our societies we continue to draw a distinction between extraordinary objects and ordinary objects, important objects and insignificant ones, noble objects and common ones. But social magic does not only work with objects and artists from the past, in the manner of holy relics: it is also at work in relation to contemporary artists whose work often sells for even higher prices than the ‘masterpieces’ of the past.

These facts therefore contradict the arguments of those who seek to limit the sacred to the form it took in societies based on myth or religion. This is notably the case with Gauchet who writes: ‘Speaking of the sacred, in my view, implies the presence of the hereafter in the here below. Presence in the sense of the materialization, concretization. A place can be sacred when it is inhabited by invisible powers, irrespective of the way such diverse supernatural powers are perceived. A man can be sacred. In a remarkable way in the modern world, the incarnation of the sacred has disappeared.’¹³⁷ To say that the sacred ‘is a place where the supernatural and the natural come together’ and to relegate any other use of the term to a simple ‘metaphorical manner’ of speaking of a ‘desacralized world’, is to miss the essence of what gives rise to the sacred. If societies have generated the sacred and the profane, it is because they included in their midst both dominators and dominated. The sacred therefore changes its form and its definition according to the configuration of relations of power, but will endure as long as such relations exit.

Each new power tends to appropriate the pre-existing forms of the sacred and to generate new ones itself. As far as art is concerned, for example, the State or regional and municipal powers, the great aristocratic and then bourgeois families, museums, art historians (in the sense that they have symbolic power and claim to tell the truth about this sacred object), actors from the sciences and from technology (who are involved in research into the authenticity of works), etc., all seek to appropriate or to be associated with these sacred objects that are the works created by the great names of the art world. Suggesting that only religious art was in some way sacred and that the uncoupling of art and religion amounts to the deconsecration of art would therefore be a complete misinterpretation.¹³⁸ The phenomena of enchantment or bewitchment, social magic, charm or aura continue to structure our relationships towards works of art. From relics and icons to artistic images, the sacred persists but its nature changes.

The magic of a painting manifests itself in its capacity to draw the gaze and to provoke interest, in its power to capture people’s attention and to inspire multiple oral and written comments, especially interpretations of its meaning,¹³⁹ in its power to provoke covetous feelings (in potential buyers when it is on the market, or competing museums once it has been withdrawn from the market). The masterpiece, as long as its authenticity is not subject to any doubt, is not just an ordinary object, but a double object, like the body of a king: an object physically and chemically comparable to others, it is also a sacred object, elevated to the highest rank in the artistic hierarchy, that of a chef d’oeuvre. All forms of behaviour associated with it reflect the status accorded to it or which is recognized as its due.

Like medieval relics, masterpieces attract crowds and incite people to travel in order to see them. How many visitors have come from the other side of the world to ‘admire’ the great masterpieces of the Louvre? The magical effect of authenticated paintings can be measured by their powers of attraction. As Jean Bazin pointed out, it would only take a rumour or a controversy hinting that the Mona Lisa on display is only a ‘vulgar copy’ (as we say in a highly charged language) for visitor numbers to collapse: ‘Even though no spectator, even the most well-informed, can “objectively” distinguish between the stand in, which I presume is perfect, and the original, people would know that it is not Her/She “in person”.’¹⁴⁰ It is not therefore the portrayal in itself that is admirable and admired but its status and the distinctive value attributed to it by mutual consent. It is power that we come first and foremost to revere.

Whether it is a matter of the auction sale of the canvases of old masters, of contemporary works, of objects previously belonging to famous actors or actresses, or very rare bottles of wine, it is purely the superior position of the artist, actor or vineyard which casts its spell. The feeling of having a rare and sacred object profoundly alters the nature of our relationship with it. The sacred character, socially attested, of the object, not only authorizes specific emotions to be felt, but renders almost obligatory the expression of particularly powerful sensations or emotions.

The immediate consequence of this social magic on the market is the staggering increase in the economic value of the object which no longer has the slightest correlation with the amount of time involved in physically producing it. This is all the more striking where the object might in itself be nothing other than an ordinary industrial object, deliberately placed by the artist in the context of an exhibition, with the authorization of the gallery owners or museum curators. But, even when the object represents the product of a work of fine craftsmanship on the part of the artist, the differences of aesthetic and economic values between works resulting from variations in the degree of consecration accorded to the artists concerned can have no justification in terms of the amount of time invested in their production. Two paintings which could be virtually interchangeable and which it might be assumed that only a handful of professionals in the whole world could tell apart, but where one was the work of a great painter and the other that of a skilful copyist of the same era, would have neither the same price, nor the same effect on the public. And the magic would work even if the original and the copy were swapped over, the importance being an ability to believe in the originality of the painting presented to us. We might then ask ourselves if these magical phenomena really distinguish us as radically as all that from societies long described as ‘primitive’ and more readily associated with magic practices.

Fables and hoaxes

The many tales of incredible discoveries – meaning ‘discoveries’ of unknown masterpieces – are an indication of the fascination exerted by the alchemical transubstantiation of an ordinary object into a work of art. Two mechanisms are at play here:

1. The magical transformation of an object, like the lead changed into gold by the alchemist or the frog turned into a Prince Charming in the fairy tale where what was previously nothing turns out to be a masterpiece or a rare find, where what seemed to be worth nothing suddenly acquires an unprecedented economic value.
2. The context between the object and its context, the sacred object and the profane environment, the extraordinary and the insignificant, the noble and the common, as in the case of the rose in the dung heap: what turns out to be a masterpiece or a rare find was stored in a common cellar, a humble attic, hung on the wall of the toilets in an apartment¹⁴¹ or in a pizza restaurant.¹⁴² It is the physical contiguity of the circumstances of these contrasts which serves as a springboard for this rhetoric of the incredible discovery.

The press coverage focused on a painting thought to be attributable to Cezanne clearly illustrates the narrative processes of this kind of story. On 14 April 2011, the newspaper Libération published an article entitled ‘A Cézanne discovered in an attic?’ in which Clémentine Boulard tells the story of this astonishing discovery, emphasizing the contrasts it reveals:

Here is the perfect excuse to hoard more and more old stuff … If the canvas rescued from the attic of an unnamed person on the other side of the Channel were to be definitively authenticated, it would indeed amount to a ‘major event in the art world’, according to art expert Tim Conrad quoted by The Daily Mail. It all began six years ago, when a British man (who wishes to remain anonymous) acquired a daub for a hundred pounds, in a second-hand shop in Northampton, buying it more for the gold frame than for the landscape depicted. Left to gather dust in his attic, the object could have remained completely forgotten were it not for the fact that, a year ago, the buyer thought he recognized the signature in the corner of the frame, accompanied with the date ‘1854’, as that of a painter who had figured prominently in a book about impressionism. This unknown individual then set about obtaining a certification/authentication. At the auction house of Wilford of Wellingborough, expert Tim Conrad, initially very sceptical, quickly realized that the skilful ‘brush work’ was indeed suggestive, in his view, of the ‘early works of Cezanne’. End result, subject to confirmation: a find with an estimated worth of €45 million, ‘if not more’.¹⁴³

The transmutation cannot, however, occur unless the object is seen and recognized by qualified people who are capable of seeing what no one else had seen until then. Without the benefit of that professional gaze, the object in question can forever remain a frog without ever revealing its princely nature. In society, the expert plays the role of the princess who comes along to reveal the prince hidden within the outward appearance of an ugly frog, or that of the fairy godmother transforming the humble pumpkin into a magnificent carriage. The rapidity with which an object apparently completely commonplace can be transformed into a masterpiece can at the same time fascinate and conjure up all manner of fears relating to fraud. For example, Vincent Noce, a journalist for Libération, tells the story of Marie Torres, a baker from Montpellier, who, unbeknown to her, owned a bronze statue by Camille Claudel entitled The Implorer. On 26 November 1988, she sold it to a second-hand goods dealer for the sum of 40,000 francs (about €6,100), but just a few days later, an auction house announced the sale of a statue by Camille Claudel:

In the space of only forty-eight hours the statue miraculously changes status. In reality, not only was this not just a lowly copy, but a unique cast. […] On 11 December 1988, the auctioneers hit the jackpot: The Implorer was sold to one Jean-Jacques Cadéac, for the tidy sum of 1,450,000 francs (€280,000). An impressive turn of events. On learning of the miraculous sale, Marie Torres’s faith failed her. She pressed charges for fraud. Miracles are supposed to happen at the speed of lightning. But the rapidity with which this one happened left the police forces speechless.¹⁴⁴

The transmutation can also work in the opposite direction, from the sacred to the profane, putting in a delicate situation those who believed an object was a masterpiece only to find it was actually just a straightforward copy. When something has been admired which turns out not to have been worthy of admiration (a forgery or a straightforward copy), it is referred to as a ‘hoax’ or as a ‘fraud’. The spell is broken and the magic has suddenly disappeared. The Prince Charming turns back into a frog and the admirable and admired masterpiece returns to its sorry state as an insignificant object. We need only look back at cases where a work was put on show for general admiration only to be subsequently exposed as a falsely attributed canvas, to see the magic mechanism in action and expose the collective conditions which give rise to attention, interest, emotion and even, sometimes, admiration. Designating this object as being an autograph work associated with a great painter authorizes admiration. But admiring or buying copies in the belief that they are original works reveals the illusion which never operates when the spectator is indeed admiring an object worthy of admiration or when the buyer acquires a work which is indeed worth the exorbitant price paid.¹⁴⁵

One of the most famous examples of this kind of disillusion (‘It was one of the most grandiose hoaxes in art history’) is that of a fake Vermeer, long believed to be by the hand of the Dutch master. Vincent Noce tells its story in an article in Libération dated 2 November 1995.¹⁴⁶ The journalist wonders how such a ‘collective hypnosis’ could have been possible when it seemed to him that the hoax was obvious: ‘For even without a detailed examination of these fake canvases the observer could not help being struck by the lifeless expressions of the people depicted, in contrast to Vermeer’s paintings which are full of life and an intensity of expression, with this extraordinary concentration of gestures and this way of often addressing the spectator, who is invited to be an actor in the scene.’¹⁴⁷ But we may well wonder how a journalist could judge the fraud to be so obvious when the greatest Vermeer connoisseur of the time was himself taken in.

Making a judgement about a painting in the full knowledge of its history, and particularly when it turns out to be a confirmed forgery, is a very different situation to that of being confronted with a painting that the highest authorities have classed as an autograph work, and even regarded as one of Vermeer’s major works. It is therefore ordinary deceptions and beliefs that should be examined, those at work when paintings are genuine paintings, in order to understand that an equally perfect collective deception can exist over a fake picture. Who could challenge the dithyrambic judgement of one of the greatest living Vermeer specialists? Who could doubt that the painting was indeed by Vermeer when a major museum had acquired it for a very high price? Who could spot the forgery when so many visitors had travelled to admire it and had described the wonder and the emotion it inspired? Telling the story of these fake Vermeers, Noce does so in the full knowledge of the end of the story (namely Van Meegeren’s confession and the generalized acknowledgement of the hoax), which makes it all the harder to understand the veritable surge of enthusiasm triggered at the time of the discovery of a representation of The Last Supper attributed to Vermeer.

The story began in the 1930s, at a time when Hans Van Meegeren, ‘a brilliant forger’,¹⁴⁸ produced a series of fake Vermeers including a Supper at Emmaus, which was immediately considered by the Dutch art historian Abraham Bredius (1855–1946) as Vermeer’s greatest masterpiece.¹⁴⁹ In an article in the Burlington Magazine, the great art historian describes his excitement at the sight of the painting: ‘It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio.’¹⁵⁰ Bredius declared that this is indeed ‘the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft … quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer’. The Boijmans Museum bought the painting for the considerable sum of 500,000 florins (the equivalent of several million French francs at the time). ‘The country fell under the spell of some kind of collective hypnosis: when the Amsterdam museum presented the picture to the public, there were riots’, Noce continues, apparently unaware of the normal state of hypnosis afflicting the actors of the art world.

Van Meegeren was forced to make a full confession because of an accusation of trading with the Nazis. For many years he had sold fake canvases to major art dealers, including the famous painting sold to an Amsterdam ship-owner in 1941, but also a painting which he sold to one Hermann Goering, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. The allied troops discovered the Vermeer bought by Goering and traced it back to Van Meegeren. It was therefore to rid himself of this accusation that, during his trial in 1947, he told the whole story and provided material proofs to support it. From the man accused of collaborating with the Nazi enemy, he became the forger who had succeeded in fooling a high-ranking Nazi. The illusion was so powerful that, in spite of his confession, some people refused to accept this story of forgery:

Some, however, are convinced he is simply an inveterate liar and continue to believe in the authenticity of the paintings. The Amsterdam ship-owner was one such, continuing to turn down fabulous offers for The Last Supper, which he insisted was a Vermeer, until the end of his life. His heirs ended up handing it over to the lawyer in charge of the estate. As a result, the painting was sold at auction in Paris.

This story was so extraordinary and had caused such a stir in the art world, that the Hans Van Meegeren painting ended up being sold at the Hôtel Drouot on 12 December 1995 for the significant sum of 350,000 francs (approximately €57,000) which, albeit far below the price of a genuine Vermeer, was still far higher than the price of a straightforward copy. Buying this picture meant buying the incredible story associated with it.

In similar circumstances, a fake copy of a painting by the Dutch painter Frans Hals (1580–1666) circulated on the Parisian art market for a long time while, unbeknown to everyone, the original was in the collection of Baron R. de Rothschild. Otto Kurz, who tells the story of this copy, writes that ‘Everybody regarded it as the original, and it was acquired for one of the choicest and most select of American private collections’.¹⁵¹ It was during a visit to the Rothschild collection by some specialists that the ‘swindle became clear’:

Even in a black and white reproduction the defects of the imposter are obvious. The intense expression of the features which Frans Hals imparted to his portraits, proved, as always, inimitable. All the details of the dress look dull when one compares their pedantic execution with the spirited brush strokes of the original. From the moment a comparison was possible, the decision between original and forgery was not difficult.¹⁵²

But Kurz had the perspicacity to draw attention to the tendency of the legitimate authorities to turn a blind eye in such cases. As soon as a painting is officially presented as an original, it is hard to see in it anything other than the traces of its creator: ‘But were it not for the reappearance of the authentic Demidoff portrait, the copy would still most like occupy the place of honour. Still another factor has contributed to its temporary success: in front of a work of art, which we believe to be a famous and well-established masterpiece, our critical faculties lie unusually dormant.’¹⁵³

All successful cases of hoax or fraud show that it is difficult to see that a work is ‘obviously’ original when it is right in front of our eyes. Those accounts which refer to the ‘obviousness’ of the ‘fraud’, to the inexplicable ‘collective hypnosis’, to ‘blindness’, etc., prevent us from understanding the conditions behind the working of the social magic.¹⁵⁴ Certainly, there is a substantial difference between the social magic which is only associated with actions external to the object itself (the water or the bread which is blessed, the urinal industrially produced that is then placed in a museum, etc.) and the social magic which is involved in the case of works which, like paintings and sculptures, are linked to the work of an artist. Between the bread which has been blessed and the bread which has not, no substantial difference can be measured, whereas between an original painting and a copy, fraudulent or not, differences always exist and are linked to the fact that it is not the same individual who created the object. But are these differences sufficiently great to make it obvious which is the original and which the copy? That is the view of all those who believe that ‘of its ultimate innermost qualities the original creation keeps its secret’.¹⁵⁵ Nevertheless, if we can accept that thousands or even millions of nonspecialized visitors can experience a whole range of emotions and admire paintings purporting to be originals but which subsequently prove to be fakes, how can we explain that top specialists, who have sometimes spent several decades studying a particular artist, can also be wrong and end up mistaking ‘simple copies’ for masterpieces?¹⁵⁶

In order to salvage the spirit and the cult of the masterpiece whose intrinsic properties should shine forth naturally, certain art historians cite the advanced age of certain major experts, the poor conditions in which the canvas was seen, the personal interests which may have biased their judgements, etc. Yet all these explanations only serve essentially to conceal the social conditions most propitious for the social magic to operate. The obvious fact is that the person in question has no reason to doubt the originality of a work as long as the legitimate authorities guarantee its legitimacy. The very fact of seeing a painting in a prestigious room inside a great national museum instantly changes the conditions within which the picture is viewed. It is, indeed, precisely for that reason that those seeking to have their painting recognized as an original make every possible effort to associate it with conditions which would legitimize its exhibition or with legitimate commentators. The authority and the legitimacy of experts, the legitimate contexts and circumstances in which the picture can be displayed, the acquisition price, etc.: all of this affects the way in which the painting is perceived. The visual experience of the painting largely depends on what we think we know about what the painting is.¹⁵⁷

A now famous experiment conducted by Stanley Fish probably best demonstrates essentially what is at play in the perception of works of art when they are framed and validated by the institutions which guarantee their originality. In 1971, Fish asked students studying seventeenth-century English religious poetry to interpret a text written up on the board.¹⁵⁸ Unlike those used in previous sessions, the text interpreted by the students and which was essentially made up of a list of names ending with a question mark was in fact simply a bibliography from a previous class which had not been wiped off the board. In spite of the bizarre appearance of the text in question, Fish observed that it gave rise to extremely serious commentaries by the students in the context of English religious poetry. If a legitimate professor at a legitimate institution asks for commentaries on a text where everything about the context guarantees the fact that ‘this is an example of English religious poetry’, who is going to raise doubts about the nature of the text?

Copies and forgeries

The notion of the attribution of works to artists is synonymous with the separation of ‘true’ and ‘false’, of the ‘original’ (or the ‘autograph’ work) and the ‘copy’. Yet these acts of separation are rooted in a particular conception of what is worthy of being admired, contemplated and bought for a high price, and what is not. A distinction is being made here between the sacred and the profane, between the extraordinary and the ordinary, between the work of art and the insignificant object. And for that to be the case, the object in question needs to be associated with a sacred source in the form of a known artist. Any object associated with a famous individual benefits from a legitimacy through direct (he is the author, the producer) or indirect association (he was the owner, the user). The copy or the forgery therefore disturb the mechanism of a social magic which works by harnessing beliefs. They force experts to sift out the truth in a confusing or complex situation in which no profane individual is in a position to see clearly and to distinguish genuine from fake and sacred from profane, which, as it happens, are as alike as two drops of water, one holy and the other not.

The interest for copyists or forgers, like that of imposters, is that they prove by their very action that it is possible to manipulate the signs of power and the collective beliefs which sustain them, and that their actions can even be an effective way of combatting power.¹⁵⁹ Money gives access to purchasing power: why not forge money, without the need to work for it, in order to access this power? People believe so profoundly in art and in the grandeur of a particular famous painter that they buy his work at exorbitant prices: why not copy one of those canvases or produce a forgery which will be attributed to the artist?¹⁶⁰ Consumers are ready to pay a very high price for a Rolex watch or a Vuitton bag: why not imitate Rolex watches and Vuitton bags in order to get rich without spending a fortune? People have complete faith in the educational system and in qualifications: why not fake prestigious diplomas to get ahead and become a doctor, lawyer, expert, psychologist, etc., without having to pass all the exams required?¹⁶¹

Forgers of all descriptions manipulate beliefs and harness social energy. But, in order to manipulate beliefs, they need to manipulate the symbols or signs of legitimacy and this means they are working with signs. Since any power comes with its symbols of power, they use these symbols, take them over, copy them, imitate them and turn them to their own profit. Money, as a medium of exchange, usually depends, in the real economy, on work or an activity, but by producing fake money, we can profit from the monetary value without doing any work. Forgers take maximum advantage of the relative autonomy of signs in relation to their referents, of portrayals in relation to what they portray, as a means of increasing their power, their wealth or their status, etc., by manipulating the signs, imitating, miming, copying the signs of power. Since they do not have access to genuine positions which bring power legally, they take advantage of the belief in the signs of power to manipulate and profit from the manipulation of such signs.

However, by carrying out their deception, forgers unknowingly expose the mechanisms behind what we could call legitimate and legal deception. For, legitimate or illegitimate, power is the prime manipulator of the sign. It plays with signs and harnesses the beliefs and desires which are associated with them. As the theologians of the Middle Ages had already observed, a simple scrap of metal which has been magically transformed into money relies on the belief in the strength of the State to guarantee the power associated with each coin.

It is worth referring here to Louis Martin’s magnificent analysis of the tale of Puss in Boots written by Charles Perrault at a time when the monarchy was at the height of its power. For him, this is a story about power (and strength) and about the cunning shown by the weak who exploit the signs of power and the beliefs associated with them to their own advantage. What does Perrault’s tale consist of? A poor miller’s son is left nothing but a cat on his father’s death. But the cat – in order to avoid being eaten by his master – regularly presents the king with rabbits, telling him that these are gifts from his master, the Marquis of Carabas. By giving a ‘false’ title to his master, he accustoms the king to think that the fictitious marquis is in fact real. And, since the king has the supreme power to name and to make things exist, making him believe in the existence of a Marquis of Carabas and causing him to name a humble miller ‘the Marquis of Carabas’, in the end makes him actually exist. He makes him exist ‘in a social order, in a cultural classification’.¹⁶² In the last analysis, it is the State, and even the highest level of the State, which decides the status of individuals. Manipulating this decision, Perrault seems to be saying, can be advantageous.

Rather than opposing justice and strength, in Perrault’s tale, the weak character has every interest in using cunning to get around strength by manipulating and distorting it. This does not involve challenging the nature of power strictly speaking. Instead, it involves a simple trick, purely internal to the system, which does not challenge anything but which profits by the judicious use of a lie:

For a weak person there is no point in blaming or contradicting strength or in demanding that it submit to justice; he will get nowhere by preaching justice against strength since strength will, in exerting itself anyway, say that right is wrong, and that it is strength that is in the right, and the justice of the just will therefore be powerless to prevail over the justice of the strong. This discourse of strength, strength which has, once and for all, declared itself to be right, calls itself power. But it will always be possible for the weak to resort to trickery with the discourse of strength, with the ‘justice-of-the-strength’, and to respond to its immutable discourse with cunning words: to turn power’s own strength against itself, is to speak the language of cunning […] Using the language of cunning, indeed means turning power against itself or subverting and distorting it by the use of speech.¹⁶³

Whatever form they take, fakes and copies are, in the same manner, ways of using the symbols or the signs of power for their own purposes. They are ‘ways of harnessing’ the power of the powerful.¹⁶⁴ As soon as legitimacy exists, manipulation of this legitimacy is possible and, as a result, forgery is possible: forgery of the product itself or of the certificates which purport to recognize it as a legitimate, authentic product. Unable to possess the legitimate object itself, it is copied or imitated, it is forged or else the proofs of its legitimacy are forged. Who says ‘fake’ says ‘valuable object’. If it is easy for us to imagine today that a market in fake Michelangelo statues might have existed, given what Michelangelo has come to mean to us, in the artist’s era it was instead works of antiquity which were the major reference point. And, moreover, this is what would lead Michelangelo to pass off one of his statues, a Sleeping Cupid, as a work of antiquity.¹⁶⁵

Only forgers who are totally bereft of any social sense would consider forging things with no value. What a forger or an imitator seeks to do is to harness the power that the group, whether large or small, attributes to an object or the value it recognizes in it. Money, works of art, official titles, identity papers, certificates, branded products, relics or historical objects can thus in different ways be turned to illicit purposes.

The copy, at least at the time it is made and when clearly acknowledged as such, is obviously not produced with the same intentions or with the same effects as the forgery. History has, moreover, clearly shown the distinctive function of the copy which essentially circulated amongst Neapolitan nobles and middle classes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁶⁶ A means of distinguishing oneself, of competing with other nobles, a demonstration of spiritual orientation in the case of copies of religious images, the copy even had a certain aura which rested on that of the legitimacy of the original version. But once the issue has been confused by the passage of time, once the creators and direct witnesses are no longer there to provide evidence of what is true and what is false, copies and original versions can no longer be easily distinguished and the copy can, in the end, cause the same problems as the forgery as far as experts are concerned (see table on p. 210).

The story of the Meyer Madonna, told by Francis Haskell, throws light on many of these confusions. Two more or less identical paintings of the Virgin had long been considered to be by the hand of Holbein, one in Dresden and the other belonging to the prince of Darmstadt. On the occasion of an exhibition in Dresden, from August 1871 onwards, the two paintings were both on view and the controversy was in full swing. Manifestos were signed by the defenders of both camps, but it was Darmstadt that finally succeeded in imposing its version as the original. What was there left to say therefore about the Dresden version which had been admired by so many visitors? It immediately lost its value in spite of its glorious past: ‘Few if any serious claims were made after 1871 on behalf of what, not long before, had been one of the most celebrated pictures in Germany.’¹⁶⁷ The enchantment had therefore worked through a simple copy. The commotion stirred up by such an affair resulted in many claims being made by owners claiming to own originals of works such as the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Madonna, copies of which had been admired in the Louvre and in Dresden.¹⁶⁸

On the border between legality and illegality, certain practices of pastiche (of ‘genuine copies’) within the art world expose the unease which can result from a manipulation of beliefs. Noce thus highlights the case of the Parisian art dealer Daniel Delamare who

Power and its manifestations

had made his speciality the sale of fake Van Goghs, Pissarros or Dufys and who was sumptuously installed in Avenue Matignon, to the great displeasure of the gallery owners of the area who held their noses when he walked past. This enterprising businessman ordered from unknown artists landscapes ‘in the style of’. Everything was done as a pastiche, including the signature of the artist. Each painting was unique. Delamare resold his canvases to the ‘nouveau riche’ – Americans in particular. […] This activity of copyist is not illegal, as long as nobody claims to be selling authentic works of art. Delamare took his precautions. Beneath the surface of the picture, he had his canvases stamped several times with black lead, visible to X-rays, preventing, according to him, any fraudulent usage. The difference between him and other copyists lay in the addition of false signatures.¹⁶⁹

Conserving the unique nature of the work, imitating the signature and the style of the artist, whilst still leaving some marks of the copy albeit invisible to the naked eye and selling the paintings for what they were and not for what they could be claimed to be, all amounted to an extremely clever way of playing with art lovers’ beliefs. Delamare declares: ‘I wanted to consecrate the concept of the genuine copy. In doing so, I demystified the whole market. And that is unforgivable […] I had 350 square meters of premises, I was earning 700,000 francs a month. The gallery owners were green with envy!’¹⁷⁰

It is not, however, certain that what he was doing really ‘demystified’ the art market or art itself. For what the success of these pastiches demonstrates, as in the case of copies and fakes, is precisely the ordinary social magic which operates in due form when a work is genuine, and which is used more or less openly by pastiche artists, copyists and forgers. Far from demystifying art, imposters and imitators aim, on the contrary, to take advantage of this unquestioned fact which constitutes the sanctification of works of art. All their practices are rooted in a system of beliefs which they manipulate but do not destroy. Destroying belief, desanctifying sacred objects would be like sawing off the branch on which they are comfortably ensconced. On the other hand, if the forgeries or copies taken for the originals are considered as ‘potentially dangerous’,¹⁷¹ it is because they contribute to devaluing original works, just as forged currency leads to the official currency being devalued.

Notes

1. Whilst distinguishing between the different situations, Raymonde Moulin nevertheless gives the impression that an identical substantial reality (art) is inserted into a wide range of social environments, whereas in fact the nature and the meaning of these activities are radically different: ‘In primitive societies the creation and consumption of art correspond to group needs but has become the property, the source of pleasure. In more developed societies, art is the property, means of enjoyment, or instrument of power of a minority. In virtually all developed societies speculation on works of art has existed’, R. Moulin, The French art market: A sociological view. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987, p. 9.

2. The best known sociological text offering such a reading is of course P. Bourdieu, The rules of art: Genesis and structure of the literary field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

3. Ibid., p. 389.

4. It will be noted here that on this point Bourdieu sides with other authors from whom he can otherwise be quite radically distinguished. Thus, the positive view taken of art for art’s sake and the movement for the autonomization of art is shared by Hans-Georg Gadamer in L’Actualité du beau, texts chosen, translated and introduced by E. Poulain. Aix-en Provence: Alinéa, 1992, pp. 39–40: ‘But as soon as the concept of “art” began to resonate as it continues to do for us still, as soon as the work of art began to stand alone and detached itself from all the contexts of life to become art for art’s sake, in other words a “museum without walls” as Malraux put it, as soon as art no longer sought to be anything other than art, from that moment the great revolution in art had begun.’

5. P. Bourdieu, The rules of art, op. cit., p. 238.

6. E. Kantorowicz, ‘The sovereignty of the artist: A note on legal maxims and Renaissance theories of art’, in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in honour of Erwin Panofsky. New York: New York University Press, 1961, pp. 267–79.

7. Ibid., p. 268.

8. Ibid., pp. 269–70.

9. Ibid., p. 271.

10. Ibid., p. 271.

11. Ibid., p. 272.

12. Ibid., pp. 272–3. The attribution of the properties of the Creator to human individuals was far from unanimously shared in the Middle Ages. In his Sentences (around 1150), Pierre Lombard (1100–1160) writes, for example, that ‘The creator is someone who makes something out of nothing. And properly speaking, to create, is to make something out of nothing, but to make, is not only to work something from nothing, but also out of matter. This is why we say that men or angels make certain things, but they do not create: we call them manufacturers or artisans, but not creators. For this name belongs strictly to God alone, who from nothing makes something and from certain things makes others. Therefore, he is, himself, creator, artisan and manufacturer; but he has kept strictly for himself the name of creator, he has communicated the others to his creatures’, quoted in H. Blumenberg, The legitimacy of the modern age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985, p. 658. Three centuries later, around 1450, Nicolas de Cusa, in his written dialogues, the Idiota de mente, has an artisan speaking to a philosopher about wood carving. Paradoxically, it is a simple artisan, crafting wooden spoons, who claims that he is creating something which has no equivalent in nature (‘In this activity I do not imitate the form of any naturally given object, since the forms of spoons, dishes and pots arise by virtue of human skill alone’). He even distinguishes himself from painters and sculptors who ‘take their models from the things that they strive to imitate’. He claims, therefore, that his art is ‘more perfect’ than that of painters and sculptors, closer to ‘infinite art’, ibid., p. 534.

13. E. Kantorowicz, ‘The sovereignty of the artist’, op. cit., p. 276.

14. Ibid., pp. 276–7.

15. H. Blumenberg, The legitimacy of the modern age, op. cit., p. 107.

16. G. Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the dignity of man. Washington, DC: Regency Publishing, 2012, p. 5.

17. Ibid., p. 58.

18. E. Kantorowicz, ‘The sovereignty of the artist’, op. cit., p. 277.

19. See E.A. Havelock, Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

20. A. Séguy-Duclot, ‘Généalogie du sublime’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 88 (4), 2004, 652.

21. É. Benveniste, Indo-European language and society. London: Faber and Faber Press, 1973, p. 331.

22. Ibid., p. 422–3.

23. Ibid., p. 455.

24. S. Lecompte, La Chaîne d’or des poètes: Présence de Macrobe dans l’Europe humaniste. Geneva: Droz, 2009, p. 258.

25. Ibid., p. 367. Macrobius is thus responding objectively to Plato’s criticism according to which the poet is completely in the mimesis. But it is not really a matter of either the same poetry or the same poets. The poet criticized by Plato is a prominent political actor who contributes to holding society together by the myths he repeats which is already no longer the case for the poet in the time of Macrobius.

26. Ibid., p. 375.

27. ‘It is certainly the case that in the period lasting from about 1760 until the Revolution, the apologia of the man of letters becomes a veritable glorification whose exalted tone is associated with a general doctrine of emancipation and progress’, P. Bénichou, The consecration of the writer, 1750–1830. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, p. 14.

28. M. de Certeau, The writing of history. Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 182.

29. Paul Bénichou sums up his intentions in writing his book by emphasizing the transition from a spiritual religious power to a spiritual secular power: ‘this book has attempted to describe the ways in which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the old religious system entered into competition with or was supplanted by a faith in which human beings, and not God, tended to occupy the first place’, P. Bénichou, The consecration of the writer, op. cit., p. 336.

30. M. de Certeau, D. Julia and J. Revel, Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

31. P. Bourdieu and R. Cartier, The sociologist and the historian. Cambridge: Polity, 2015, p. 22.

32. B. Lahire, La Condition littéraire: La double vie des écrivains. Paris: La Découverte, ‘Laboratoires des sciences sociales’, 2006.

33. B. Edelman, La Propriété littéraire et artistique. Paris: PUF, ‘Que sais-je?’, 1999, p. 69.

34. L. Bely, Dictionnaire de l’ancien régime. Paris: PUF, 2010, p. 979.

35. Quoted by A. Schnapper, Le Métier de peintre au grand siècle. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque des Histoires’, 2004, p. 117.

36. Ibid., p. 114.

37. R. Moulin, De la valeur de l’art, op. cit., p. 35.

38. Emphasis is placed ‘strongly on the dignity of painters and of sculptors, as opposed to the low status of those who grind paint colours and polish marble’, A. Schnapper, Le Métier de peintre au grand siècle, op. cit., pp. 128–9. The same matrix is constantly at work: high and low, noble and common, etc.

39. J.-Y. Grenier, K. Béguin and A. Bonzon (eds), Dictionnaire de la France moderne. Paris: Hachette, 2003, p. 21.

40. M. Baxandall, Painting and experience in fifteenth century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

41. É. Pommier, Comment l’art devient l’Art dans l’Italie de la Renaissance. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque illustrée des Histoires’, 2007.

42. Pommier notes that already in 1564 Vasari was encountering scepticism from friends who believed one should only write the history of princes or of those who come close to them through their various exploits, but not of ‘persons of low condition’ (ibid., p. 43). In the second edition, he makes it clear that the work is designed to show the ‘glory’ and the ‘grandeur’ of artists.

43. É. Anheim, ‘L’ombre de Vasari’, Revue de synthèse, 132, 6th ser., no. 1, 2011, p. 25. See also J.-P. Antoine, ‘Les Vies de Vasari, l’histoire de l’art et la “science sans nom” des cas’, in J.-C. Passeron and J. Revel, Penser par cas. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, ‘Enquête’, pp. 171–99.

44. C. Guichard, ‘La signature dans le tableau aux XVII et XVIII siècles: identité, réputation et marché de l’art’, Sociétés & Représentations, 1 (25), 2008, 50–1.

45. É. Pommier, Comment l’art devient l’Art dans l’Italie de la Renaissance, op. cit., p. 66.

46. D. Poulet, Une histoire des musées de France, XVIII–XX siècle. Paris: La Découverte, ‘Poche’, 2008, p. 15.

47. The expression ‘Pictor divinus’ is used in the epitaph of a Sienese painter as early as 1339 (É. Pommier, Comment l’art devient l’Art dans l’Italie de la Renaissance, op. cit., p. 15); an artist’s inspiration is linked to God and he is treated as a sort of privileged mediator between God and men: the artist – as is the case with Michelangelo – is attributed with ‘divine gifts’. Dante even wrote in his Inferno (1314) that ‘art is metaphorically […] the child of God’.

48. Ibid., p. 29.

49. In 1547, the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Varchi gave a lecture in which he discussed the categories of ‘artists’ and of ‘artisans’.

50. É. Pommier, Comment l’art devient l’Art dans l’Italie de la Renaissance, op. cit., pp. 167–8.

51. Ibid., p. 169.

52. The format of relatively small paintings is linked to the growing interest in art amongst noble and bourgeois families. Paintings are purchased to decorate the interior of the house and formats are thus adapted to the size of the walls which do not always have the grandeur of castles or churches. The house and its treasures are shown to visitors in order to show other ‘important’ people the owner’s own importance and prestige.

53. É. Pommier, Comment l’art devient l’Art dans l’Italie de la Renaissance, op. cit., pp. 450–1.

54. Ibid., p. 456.

55. Q. de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens. Chicago: Getty Research Institute, 2012.

56. Cited by F. Haskell, ‘Museums and their enemies’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 19 (2), 1985, 13–22.

57. J. Dubuffet, Asphyxiating culture and other writings. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1988, p. 10.

58. P. Bourdieu, interviewed in the context of the TV broadcast Vivre aujourd’hui, ‘Le Musée’, 14 January, 1973, emphasis added.

59. Bourdieu also metaphorically compares works of art with relics: ‘Everything, in these civic temples in which bourgeois society deposits its most sacred possessions, that is, the relics inherited from a past which is not its own, in these holy places of art […]’, in ‘Outline of a sociological theory of art perception’, chapter 8 in The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984.

60. P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989.

61. In the fourth century, there was, for example, ‘the new effervescence of civic patriotism in the Eastern Empire’, ibid., p. 275. Each municipality, each church aspired to having a holy man to venerate and to own some relics, in the same way that, later, they sought to owning works of art, P. Geary, ‘Sacred commodities: The circulation of medieval relics’, in A. Appadurai, The social life of things, op. cit., p. 169. From this perspective, cultural, state or municipal politics simply prolonged a movement to harness the legitimacy of holy relics.

62. P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, op. cit., p. 190.

63. Ibid., p. 230.

64. Ibid., pp. 185–6. Brown also describes how the sacred character of Nicétius of Lyon was disputed by his successor: ‘Was Nicétius of Lyon, who died in 573, and whose tomb lay in the Basilica of Saint John in Lyon a saint? This was decidedly not the opinion of his successor, Priscus, nor of the wife of Priscus, Suzanne, nor of any of their friends or dependents. One of Priscus’s deacons used the chasuble of the deceased bishop as, amongst other things, a dressing gown […] and, when challenged, threatened to make a pair of bedroom slippers out of it. Priscus and Nicétius rest together in the same church […] In 1308, both tombs were examined and both occupants were declared saints.’

65. Ibid., p. 238.

66. Ibid., pp. 244–5.

67. Ibid., p. 247.

68. Ibid., p. 318.

69. K. Pomian, Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne, op. cit., p. 22.

70. Ibid., p. 26.

71. Ibid., p. 99.

72. ‘The same mechanisms that had focused on the figure of the holy man […] could be brought to bear on the icon’, P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, op. cit., p. 269.

73. Ibid., pp. 258–9.

74. Ibid., p. 263.

75. Ibid., p. 293.

76. ‘Religious images began to receive marks of veneration analogous to the imperial images in the sixth century or even earlier’, ibid., p. 266.

77. O. Christin, ‘Du culte chrétien au culte de l’art: la transformation du statut de l’image (XV–XVIII siècle)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 1 (49), 2002, pp. 178–9, emphasis added. One form of the sacred is substituted by another, but the aesthetic relationship with the image would long remain the concern of a small social minority, as the historian points out (ibid., pp. 187–8). See also P. Bourdieu, ‘Piété religieuse et dévotion artistique’, Actes de la recherché en sciences sociales, 105, December 1994, pp. 71–4.

78. P. Geary, Living with the dead in the Middle Ages. New York: Cornell University Press, 1994.

79. Ibid., p. 203.

80. ‘The different communities were often violently in disagreement over who possessed the authentic relics of a particular saint’, ibid., p. 203.

81. Ibid., p. 204.

82. T. Lenain, ‘Du culte des reliques au monde de l’art: Remarques sur la genèse de la critique d’authenticité’, in De la main de maître: L’artiste et le faux. Paris: Hazan-Musée du Louvre éditions, 2009, pp. 193–4.

83. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 7.

84. M. Bakhtin, L’Œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Tel’, 1970, p. 16.

85. F. Dupont, The invention of literature: From Greek intoxication to the Latin book. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, p. 12.

86. Ibid., p. 61.

87. P. Zumthor, Oral poetry: An introduction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 89.

88. C. Geertz, Savoir local, savoir global. Paris: PUF, 1986, p. 143.

89. Ibid., p. 147.

90. P. Bourdieu and M. Mammeri, ‘Dialogue on oral poetry’, Ethnography, 5 (4), 2004, p. 534.

91. C. Geertz, Savoir local, savoir global, op. cit., p. 114.

92. P. Bourdieu and M. Mammeri, ‘Dialogue on oral poetry’, op. cit., p. 535.

93. Ibid., p. 522.

94. F. Dupont, The invention of literature, op. cit., p. 14.

95. Ibid., p. 50.

96. Ibid., p. 48.

97. L.W. Levine, Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

98. Norbert Elias pointed out the significance of this self-control in societies which were increasingly differentiated, state governed and pacified. See N. Elias, The civilising process, op. cit. and La Dynamique de l’Occident, op. cit.

99. P. Bourdieu, In other words: Essays towards a reflective sociology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 165.

100. S. Chagnard, Modèle de pratique et pratique du modèle en conservatoire. Masters 2 thesis, Sciences de l’éducation, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2011–12.

101. Evidence gathered by Samuel Chagnard shows that the pleasure of playing and of learning begins to disappear for some people as soon as the notion of a public performance is introduced. The pressure is such that the pupils feel their work will never be enough and they will always end up making mistakes in public.

102. Emphasis added.

103. Museums ‘did not develop in Italy until the beginning of the sixteenth century before becoming more widespread in the rest of Western Europe and in central Europe around two hundred years later. It was not until the twentieth century that this institution, initially Italian and then subsequently European, became truly worldwide’, K. Pomian, Des saintes reliques à l’art moderne, op. cit., p. 10.

104. J. Dubuffet, Towards an alternative beauty. New York: Pace Publications, 1987, p. 54.

105. R. Shusterman, Pragmatist aesthetics: Living beauty, rethinking art (2nd edn). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, p. 8.

106. A process which recalls with nostalgia the time before the separation of ‘art’ and ‘the public’: ‘Yet in their own time and place, such things were enhancements of the processes of everyday life. Instead of being elevated to a niche apart, they belonged to displays of prowess, the manifestation of group and clan membership, worship of gods, feasting and fasting, fighting, hunting, and all the rhythmic crises that punctuate the stream of living’, J. Dewey, The later works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. Art as Experience, Vol. 10, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008, p. 12.

107. R. Shusterman, Pragmatist aesthetics, op. cit., p. 20.

108. J. Dewey, The later works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, op. cit., p. 12.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid., pp. 14–15.

111. It is perhaps regrettable that an author like Giorgio Agamben, who follows on from Dewey’s critical analysis, confines himself to somewhat vague metaphor rather than developing a historical commentary on the process of separation: ‘The impossibility of using has its emblematic place in the Museum. The museification of the world is today an accomplished fact. One by one the spiritual potentialities that defined the people’s lives – art, religion, philosophy, the idea of nature, even politics – have docilely withdrawn into the Museum. “Museum” here is not given physical space or place but the separate dimension to which what was once – but is no longer – felt as true and decisive has moved’, G. Agamben and J. Fort, ‘In praise of profanation’, Log, No. 10, Summer/Fall 2007, pp. 23–32.

112. P. Veyne, ‘Conduites sans croyance et œuvres d’art sans spectateurs’, Diogène, no. 143, July–September 1988, p. 3. Veyne refers in particular here to the work of Gregory Bateson, Naven. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1936.

113. P. Veyne, ‘Conduites sans croyance et œuvres d’art sans spectateurs’, op. cit., p. 3.

114. Ibid., pp. 4–5. Veyne also refers to an ‘architecture of vertigo’ and adds: ‘The column expresses the glory of Trajan, just as the sky (which does need to be described in detail, star by star) expresses the glory of Jehovah; in both cases, there should be far too many stars and far too many carved scenes; the expression of superiority is only indubitable if it is excessive. In order to explain the column, art history should not simply study the detail of the composition of the various scenes, their iconography, the ongoing narrative, the bird’s eye perspective, the relationship with the idealized realism of Hellenistic friezes, etc. It should also, and even before anything else, observe that in essence the column is a double quantitative record, owing to the number of square meters of bas-reliefs and by the height of the construction. […] The best use that can be made of this type of construction is not to go into detail over the decor, but to climb up it; Panofsky’s iconology is of little use here. […] The column is the expression of Trajan’s vertiginous grandeur’, ibid, p. 5.

115. Ibid., p. 11.

116. Ibid., p. 3.

117. R. Otto, Le Sacré, op. cit., p. 87.

118. A. Séguy-Duclot, ‘Généalogie du sublime’, op. cit., p. 650.

119. Ibid., p. 662.

120. Ibid., p. 650. In France, the adjective ‘sublime’ dates back to the fifteenth century and belongs to the vocabulary of alchemy. There again, it is elevation, the passage from earth to sky, from human to divine, which defines the operation of sublimation: ‘The technique of sublimation consists in transforming a solid into vapour, without passing through the liquid state, by heating it. This passage to the gaseous state is interpreted as an elevation, a purification, a raising from the terrestrial element to the aerial one, from the human to the divine. The adjective sublime is therefore first used to indicate the object of the alchemic operation of sublimation: what has vaporized, purified, uplifted’ (ibid.).

121. D. Longinus, On the sublime. London: B. Dod, 1752, p. 41.

122. Ibid., pp. 27–30.

123. I. Kant, Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1960, p. 36.

124. Echoing in this respect Pseudo-Longinus, who wrote: ‘The Sublime is a certain force in discourse, proper to elevate and transport the soul; and which proceeds, either from grandeur of thought and nobleness of sentiment, or from magnificence of words, or an harmonious, lively and animated turn of expression; that is to say, from any one of these particulars regarded separately, or what makes the perfect Sublime, from these three particulars joined together’, in D. Longinus, On the sublime, op. cit., p. 22.

125. I. Kant, Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime, op. cit., pp. 48–9.

126. In this, Kant follows the ideas of Pseudo-Longinus on the sublime as the divine performative act: ‘In fact, in The Critique of Judgement, the sublime is twice either linked with Jehovah’s Commandment, or with that of Isis, and always in the form of the forbidden’, N. Arambasin, La Conception du sacré dans la critique d’art en Europe entre 1880 and 1914. Geneva: Droz, 1996, p. 77.

127. O. Wilde, ‘The soul of man under socialism’, in The collected works of Oscar Wilde. Ware, Herts.: Wordsworth Editions, 2007, p. 1058.

128. Ibid., p. 1059, emphasis added.

129. N. Arambasin, La Conception du sacré dans la critique d’art, op. cit., pp. 39–40.

130. Ibid., p. 39, emphasis added.

131. Numerous examples of this banal demand for admiration occurred on the occasion of the arrival of The Flight into Egypt at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, in February 2008: ‘From next Friday onwards, we can admire it in the town’s Musée des Beaux Arts’, ‘The Flight into Egypt ends its journey in Lyon’, Direct matin plus, 13 February 2008.

132. J. Dubuffet, Asphyxiating culture and other writings, op. cit., pp. 19–20.

133. J.-L. Marion, The crossing of the visible. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. The numerous references to the text are indicated in brackets.

134. In his speech welcoming Jean-Luc Marion to the Académie Française on 21 January 2010, Claude Dagens said: ‘I myself, Sir, sometimes share the torments of those of your readers who are not familiar with phenomenology as they try to understand you.’

135. ‘The authentic painting fulfils the expectation of the painter and the visitor, strictly speaking, by surprising it, disorienting it and flooding it’ (p. 32) or also ‘The authentic painting – and this is the unique motif of the fascination that it exerts upon its spectator – escapes as much the one who signs it as the one who looks at it’ (p. 35).

136. All emphases used in these quotations are added.

137. M. Gauchet, ‘L’art, substitute du sacré’, Cité Musiques: La revue de la Cité de la Musique, no. 55, September–October 2007, available at gauchet.blogspot.com. He adds that ‘there is no longer any sacredness, any sense of the sacred in the true sense in the world in which we find ourselves’.

138. An error on Marcel Gauchet’s part: ‘Art will suffer deeply from the loss of the influence of religion. As religion gradually retreats, we could say that the magic, prestige, charm – you will have noted that these terms come from religion – of the arts will fade’ (ibid.).

139. H.S. Becker, Les Mondes de l’art. Paris: Flammarion, 1988, p. 161.

140. J. Bazin, Des clous dans la Joconde, op. cit., p. 528.

141. Christian Bessy and François Chateauraynaud tell the story of a painting ‘first described as a “ghastly old daub”’ bought at the beginning of the 1970s for a few francs in a provincial auction room. The canvas then ‘spent fifteen years or so hanging in the toilets’ before being recognized as a Van Gogh and valued at around ten million dollars at the time. The mention of the toilet is of course a device to emphasize the contrast with the masterpiece in question (C. Bessy and F. Chateauraynaud, Experts et faussaires, op. cit., p. 143).

142. ‘A baroque masterpiece recently discovered in a pizzeria’, available at www.lejournaldesarts.fr.

143. Emphasis added. Exactly the same rhetorical devices can be found on the subject of this painting in articles published at www.boursereflex.com and www.gentside.com.

144. V. Noce, Descente aux enchères: Les coulisses du marché de l’art. Paris: J.C. Lattès, 2002, p. 274.

145. ‘There is a Swiss journalist who has written a book called Egyptian forgers [J.-J. Fietchter, Paris: Flammarion, 2009]. He talks about the various forgeries in the Louvre. In addition to this statue of Sésostris III, there are two or three others. There’s a famous Egyptian head in blue glass. It’s really beautiful, quite romantic looking, supposedly a head of the period. But when Philippe Walter, who runs the Laboratory of molecular and structural archaeology, put them through the particle accelerator, he told me: “Within thirty seconds we could see that they had all been made recently.” And you should have heard the dithyrambs of the Louvre curators BEFORE it was proved they were fakes with their cries of: “Admirable, truly admirable!” … The best curators had found them astonishing!’ Interview with François Duret-Robert (jurist, journalist with Connaissance des arts and lecturer in law at the École du Louvre, Lyon 3, Paris 1, Dauphine), 12 March 2012.

146. V. Noce, ‘Vermeer sous le faux de la Cène: Aux enchères à Paris, un tableau longtemps attribué au maître hollandais’, Libération, 2 November 1995.

147. We find another version of this extract in a book taking a behind-the-scenes look at the art market: ‘The sheer scale of this deception surprises us today. Clumsy, hollow, the style of Van Meegeren reveals the academicism which dominated at The Hague in the 1930s. No doubt his Supper at Emmaus was more thoroughly worked. But the people in The Last Supper are terribly stilted. Without being a great expert, or even resorting to detailed examination, it is easy to see that the characters look lifeless, stilted. Yet Vermeer’s paintings throb with life and his characters gaze intensely out at us, totally focused on a gesture, when not directly addressing the spectator, called to be a witness of the scene’, V. Noce, Descente aux enchères, op. cit., p. 219.

148. Unless otherwise stated, the quotations are all extracts from the Vincent Noce article.

149. A. Bredius, ‘A new Vermeer’, The Burlington Magazine, no. 71, November, 1937, pp. 210–11.

150. Ibid., p. 210.

151. O. Kurz, Fakes: A handbook for collectors and students. London: Faber and Faber, 1948, p. 62.

152. Ibid.

153. Ibid. Many similar cases are included by Kurz in his book.

154. One example among many others in this genre of ‘retrospective’ astonishment: ‘In the immediate post-war period, we remember the resounding scandal of fake Vermeers by H.A. Van Meegeren (1889–1947), on which an enormous amount has been written. When we look today at the Supper at Emmaus acquired with a huge commotion by the Rotterdam museum and published in 1937 in Burlington Magazine, we are astonished at the blindness of the excellent connoisseurs who welcomed it as an original. That is because we were expecting, hoping for, the apparition of a religious painting dating from the painter’s later years, which was exactly what the genial forger had foreseen’, M. Laclotte, ‘Le faux et le regard de l’historien de l’art. Questions d’attributions’, in De main de maître: L’artiste et le faux. Paris: Hazan-Musée du Louvre éditions, 2009, p. 21.

155. O. Kurz, Fakes, op. cit., p. 320.

156. ‘When Van Meegeren sold his pictures as Vermeers, he deceived most of the best-qualified experts; and only by his confession was the fraud revealed [Note: the fact that the forgeries were purported to have been painted during a period during which no Vermeers were known made detection more difficult but does not essentially alter the case. Some art historians, anxious to defend their profession, claim that the most perceptive critics suspected the forgeries very early; but actually some of the foremost recognized authorities were completely taken in and for some time even refused to believe Van Meegeren’s confession (…)]’. N. Goodman, Languages of art: An approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1968, p. 110.

157. Nelson Goodman focuses on showing the importance of knowledge and experience in aesthetic perception and judgement.

158. S. Fish, Is there a text in this class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

159. In his film entitled In the Beginning (2009), Xavier Giannoli shows how the deception, that of a false contractor of public works, Philip Miller, who reopens the construction site of a highway suspended some years previously, is only possible because there are people ready to believe in it. Philip Miller is the man they have been waiting for: he is the bringer of hope and everybody locally is ready to believe in it.

160. For example, Christian Michel, professor of history of art at Lausanne University, clearly demonstrates the legitimizing effects of a painter like Watteau: ‘There are many problems around attribution. First because there are a few non-documented paintings and especially because, even during the period when Watteau was considered to be of marginal interest, there has always been an important market for his paintings. Consequently, in certain cases, it became necessary to fabricate Watteau paintings in order to meet the demand, or to attribute to Watteau a certain number of paintings by his emulators or contemporaries, thus allowing collectors to have a work by Watteau. The success of a painter, and Watteau is by no means alone in this case, ultimately means a more and more voluminous body of work which obviously creates problems when it comes to attribution’, S. Neumann and J. Garcias, La Vie cachée des oeuvres, documentary collection, 2 DVD, Arte Éditions, 2012.

161. On the subject of forgeries in art, the following books are of particular interest: O. Kurz, Fakes, op. cit.; A. Grafton, Forgers and critics: Creativity and duplicity in western scholarship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990; and B. Innes, Faux et faussaires. Paris: Éditions Scènes de crimes, 2006.

162. L. Marin, Le Récit est un piège. Paris: Minuit, 1978, p. 126.

163. Ibid., pp. 120–1.

164. L. Marin, Politiques de la representation. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2005, p. 51.

165. See I.D. Rowland, ‘Le faux du XVe au XVIIe’, in De main de maître: L’artiste et le faux, op. cit., p. 208–9. It is the famous Vasari who described how Michelangelo passed one of his statues off as an antique. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Médicis, who was shown the statue in question, said that if it was buried for a while, it could be taken for an antique and Michelangelo could make a lot of money out of it.

166. G. Labrot, ‘Éloge de la copie: Le marché napolitain (1614–1764)’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 59 (1), 2004, pp. 7–35.

167. F. Haskell, The ephemeral museum: Old Master paintings and the rise of the art exhibition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 93.

168. Ibid., p. 93.

169. V. Noce, Descente aux enchères, op. cit., p. 221.

170. Ibid., p. 223.

171. O. Kurz, Fakes, op. cit., p. 319.