the contrary, the viewer is something contained in the picture itself. “The Subject of this History being chiefly about Sight,” Fréart insists, “the Paynter could not have plac’d the Visive point more judiciously, than in the Eye of Paris.” Raphael has placed Paris in profile, Fréart argues, specifically to reduce vision to a single point only, as “Geometricians teach us in their Optics, where they represent Vision or the function of Seeing, by a radiated Pyramis with an Eye fixt upon it.”69 We might think, here, of the second cone of Robert Hooke’s formulation (Exhibit 4), the one that condenses on the “inlightned body”70; in Paris’s eye is reproduced the full field of the perspectival scene. But, more than this, we have caught him just as he is making his choice, as he is, in other words, arranging history. This helps account, Fréart believes, for the turning of the bodies of the three goddesses. At the center of the chaos on display, where history is being composed out of the matter of classical prehistory, is the single form of the goddess of love. The principal figures of the piece all are turned toward her, as she at once receives the twin objects of her victory: the laurel crown and the apple of Discord. Paris has his designs; motivated by a bodily response to the three nudes, he reaches into the scene to arrange history.
Read as a moral allegory, The Judgment of Paris is about a failure of judgment. Paris fails to see with his intellectual eye; what instead he sees is what is available to the eye of the senses. He chooses the only goddess who offers a version of what she displays. And if Nickel is right that numerous viewers enjoyed the painting for its contrast between clothed men and nude women, the voyeuristic thrill it offers, then those viewers are essentially seeing the scene as Paris sees it, and not (as Raphael encourages us) seeing the table as an opportunity to see Paris seeing.71 Perhaps taking his warning from the very scene on display, Fréart does not locate the truth of the visual arts in what is available to the eye; it is not to be found in coloring, the handling of human anatomy, or other aspects of what he calls “the Mechanical Arts.” Painting is instead to be considered a “demonstrative science,” which arranges its “matter” according to the “rules of geometry.” “The image itself,” writes Peter de Bolla of images like this one, “instructs the eye.”72 To witness the Judgment of Paris is to stand both inside and outside Paris’s point of view; to see The Judgment of Paris is to see, and hence to judge, the judgment of Paris, Paris’s single pupil as the sedimented fund of his world, and his hand, all intentionality, reaching back to arrange things to his liking.
Raphael’s design is particularly accomplished because it strives to put perspective on review, to show us how Paris makes a picture. This is what James Elkins suggestively calls an “object oriented” use of perspective; we are witnessing Paris in the mangle of practice as he (unwittingly) constructs a world.73 In this sense, The Judgment of Paris is formally like the engraving of the camera obscura: Paris’s eye forms one perspectival “pyramis,” while the body of Aphrodite offers its natural counterweight. The handing off of the apple signals Paris’s designs—where he reaches into the scene to craft it according to his idea. But there is a final twist, as Fréart sees it, where the eye of the Enlightenment meets the arrangement of the Renaissance—for the very organization of a tableau according to an idea is the province of Raphael’s design. These are his words; “Design” is not only the “veritable Principle and only Basis … of Painting,” it is also “the universal Organ and Instrument of all the politer Arts.” Without it, painting becomes “a meer Chymaera and confusion of Colours.”74 The essence of art, according to the apologist for Raphael, is not what is made by a craftsman but what is designed by the “clean-handed genius” who arranged an intellectual tableau in the first place.75 “Everie understanding… knoweth,” opined Sir Philip Sidney, that “the skill of ech Artificer standeth in that Idea, or fore conceit of the worke, and not in the worke itselfe.”76 It is design that forms the real object of art, and the techniques that closest approach this ideal pattern—the arts that most capture this design without the imperfections of matter—are therefore the most technically accomplished. Raphael’s critical trick, as it was witnessed by Fréart and Evelyn, was to put the viewer outside the view. Paris sees with embodied purpose; the viewer sees with dispassionate judgment. Raphael’s design is to show us Paris’s. It is just as though we are seeing an anamorphic picture from the wrong spot; through the obliquity of false perspective, we are made to stand outside history.77
In one of the critical passages in his lecture on the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan addresses anamorphosis explicitly. In a study beginning with one of the iconic images of Raphael’s generation, Lacan observes that painting in the end has no particular fidelity to realism, nor does it use the real things it hopes to represent as its materials. The painter means to display a way of ordering things—what Evelyn and Fréart called a design—for which the things themselves are merely the means. His “search” or “quest” is less about an aesthetic effect, in this sense, than it is to make the risky passage between an idea and a disposition or arrangement.78 As Lacan puts it, the painter’s ambition is to “sustain and vary the selection of a certain kind of gaze”—which is to say, an ethics or an idea or a way of seeing, rather than merely a spot from which a thing may be seen.79 The “gaze” as Lacan understands it is not on the side of the viewer who looks; it is the arrangement of things in the field of view, a way of seeing looking back at us. The painting, Lacan insists, “looks at me”; it projects its light “in the depths of my eye”; and in the depths of his eye are reproduced the geometric relations that the painting first established. It is not, for Lacan, that a viewer necessarily wishes to see herself seeing herself; nor is it true that an artist is endlessly interested in representing herself in the visual field (like Milton’s Eve, half-seduced by her own reflection). The field need not capture the image of the painter. For the painting “grasps” its viewer through the design it offers, showing us the painter’s way of seeing.80
What Lacan calls “the screen” is “the locus of mediation,”81 where a way of ordering things (his “gaze”) meets the pyramis of the viewer’s look (the perspectival subject).82 Lacan’s intellectual debts here are to a tradition of design and anamorphosis; his remarks in fact develop from an insight afforded by Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors, a painting executed roughly two decades after The Judgment of Paris. Lacan is in other words elaborating a point raised by Evelyn and Fréart,83 for the point Fréart extends throughout his discussion is just this: what is on display (in the end) is not a version of history, or even merely a parable of Paris’s judgment, but Raphael’s way of seeing.84 “An Artist,” Fréart concludes, “paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses.”85 As Jonathan Richardson would later affirm, “Painters always paint themselves.”86 The Judgment of Paris is the judgment of Raphael, for it offers us a moral system and an ethical imperative, the very picture of negotiations between the eye of judgment and the hand of the artist—borne out on the screen of the world.
Exhibit 6. A Gritty Pebble
In a dark room, sectioned off from the rest of the Sedgwick Museum of Natural History at Cambridge, is the geological collection of John Woodward (1665–1728), standing more or less as Woodward designed it. Open the door to Woodward’s curatorially dark study; put on your cotton gloves; open the eighth drawer in the first cabinet on your left; and scan to object number 64. In the drawer custom-made to receive it, in the walnut cabinet custom-made to contain the drawers, is object c.226 in Woodward’s catalogue. It is
a gritty Peble of a very light brown Colour, an oblong oval Shape, an Inch and ¾ in length, and one Inch in breadth, flattish, and having the two Ends somewhat pointed. There’s a narrow Ridge, of the same breadth in all parts, running directly long-ways of the Stone, and quite encompassing it. This Ridge consists of a closer and harder sort of Matter than the rest of the Stone. In the middle on one side, the Stone sinks in, and rises out on the opposite, as if it had been soft and press’d in that Part.87