weiss_mirrors of infinity

ALLEN S. WEISS

THE FRENCH

FORMAL GARDEN

ad

17TH-CENTURY

METAPHYSICS

I

Mirrors of Infinity The French Formal Garden and IJth-Century Metaphysics

Allen S. Weiss ?

Princeton Architectural Press, New York

RARVARD UNIVERSITY.

Published by SEP 6 1995 Princeton Architectural Press

37 East 7th Street

New York, New York 10003

212.995·9620

frances Loeb Ubrary mraduate School of Design

For a free catalog of books, call r.8oo.458.1I31

© 1995 Princeton Architectural Press, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in the Unites States

98 97 96 95 5 4 3 2 I First edition

15AL2-S2-(

S'il't:J\S:PI(GL/

No part of this book my be used or reproduced in any manner without written

permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Originally published as Miroirs de l'infini: Le jardin a Ia franraise et Ia mltaphysique au xvne siecle

© Editions du Seuil, mai 1992

Editing and design: Clare Jacobson

Cover design: Allison Saltzman

Special thanks to: Seonaidh Davenport, Caroline Green, Bill Monaghan, Sarah

Lappin, and Ann C. Urban-Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiss, Allen S., 1953-

[Miroirs de l'infini, English]

Mirrors of Infinity: the French formal garden and 17th-century metaphysics I

Allen S. Weiss

p. em.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) .

ISBN 1-56898-050-7 1. Gardens, French-History-17th century. 2. Gardens, French

Philosophy-History-17th century. 3. Gardens-France-Symbolic aspects

History-17th century. 4. Le Notre, Andre. 1613-1700. 5. Pare de Versailles

(Versailles, France)-History-17th century. 6. Jardins de Vaux-le-Vicomte

(Maincy, France)-History-17th century. 7. Jardins de Chantilly (Chantilly,

France)-History-17th century. I. Title.

SB457.65.W4513 1995 95-15886 CIP

S6 L1·S7~ bs w L-j~ l~_x

Contents

8 Preface: Gardens of the Imagination

20 Baroque Reflections, Neoclassic Inflections

32 Vaux-le- Vicomte: Anamorphosis Abscondita

52 Versailles: Versions of the Sun The F f l D" rr ' ear u 1rrerence

78 Chantilly: A Garden of Mirrors

4 Postface: Other Fantasies

Notes

8 Bibliography

The Gardeners are not only Botanists but also Painters and Philosophers. William Chambers

for Paul Foss

Things are only ideas; permit your ideas to become things. Jean Dubuffet

'y'

l I' ..

A singular country, superior to all the others, as Art is to Nature, U:here

h l . tr: o.f.:o med by the dream where it is corrected, embelltshed, t e atter ts 'tlnSj• r '

recast. 1

Charles Baudelaire

":Linvitation au voyage"

'·:,'

~· I

:1 Preface 'l Gardens of the Imagination

',I

l I .1

I J 'I

I l J orge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths" is the

tale of the great grandson ofTs'ui Pen, the Chinese gov

ernor of Yunnan, who renounced his political office to

devote himself to writing a novel of inestimable complexity, and to

creating "the garden of forking paths," a labyrinth so intricate that

all who enter would be lost within. Centuries later, no trace of the

labyrinth exists, and what remains of the novel is deemed totally

incoherent. Yet his great grandson finally unravels the mystery: Ts'ui

Pen's book and his labyrinth are one-a labyrinth of symbols. The

meaning of this labyrinth of labyrinths is time itsel£ The very inco

herence of his novel is due, paradoxically, to its adequacy as an image

of the universe; time, permitting every possibility, demands a narra

tive where every option is maintained, and where no single plot

determines the course of events. For time is the possibility of pos

sibility.

I might use this tale as an allegory of my present project: in

writing a book about gardens, I cannot help but "read" them. Every

object, cultural or natural, is caught within a web of symbols-these

symbols themselves are altered, sometimes ravaged, in the course of

time. Furthermore, no symbol exists in a pure state: we bring to any

symbolic system the "impurities" of our own understandings and

misunderstandings, as well as the desires of our most utopian hopes

and cataclysmic fears.

-9-

PREFACE

Gardens are among our privileged, often sacred, sites. The

secret gardens of our childhoods guard our most private fantasies,

outside all family restrictions, beyond all regulated play. Those spe

cial trees that we climbed to observe and ultimately conquer the

world (as in Italo Calvina's The Baron in the Trees); those disquieting

rocks that we never managed to lift off the ground, knowing the

crawling terrors concealed underneath; those magic springs or wells

whose waters were as sacred and mysterious as the Ganges or the

Euphrates; those mushrooms that sprouted instantaneously in a hid

den corner, evoking elves and devils-such were the sites of our first

creations, the other scenes of our childhood imaginations. Thus for

the young narrator in Marcel Proust's Ducote de chez Swann, the gar

den of the house in Combray is the antechamber to the world, a

space not yet of retreat, but rather of slow, modulated overture. Not

yet microcosm, this garden-unlike the other symbolic topoi that

rule Proust's narrative-predates and prefigures the closed worlds of

the childhood bedroom that enrobed the desired fullness of his

mother's love and the aged writer's bedroom where the novel is actu

ally written, a site protected by a self-contained nostalgia and re

membrance. Every narrative space is a symbolic space revealing the

formation of the narrator's character as well as the relations of the

social fabric that determine his destiny. Alternating between private

and social space, the garden at Combray permits that overlay of

functions that allows a fictional autobiography to also become the

tale of a disappearing world, a lost epoch.

Every artwork implies a metaphysics. Certain artworks are bla

tantly constructed according to strict and overt metaphysical princi

ples. But it is the rare work of art that overturns our philosophies

and creates a new mode of thought, a new way of seeing. In this

short study-this fantasy-of the seventeenth century French for

mal gardens of Andre Le Notre, I wish to attempt both the rather

likely task of utilizing the metaphysics, aesthetics, and theology of

his epoch to explain the artistry of these gardens, and the somewhat

unlikely task of examining the formal structures of these gardens in

order to "illustrate" such metaphysical principles. Here, it is precise

ly the superficial use of philosophy that I seek: in utilizing Cartesian

-10-

j ,I

GARDENS OF THE IMAGINATION

metaphysics and Pascalian theology as symbols, indeed as "captions"

to the gardens, I intend to overlay certain rational fantasies with

their morphological and topological correlates. It is on the rhetorical

level that the two meet: the point at which the textual images of the

philosophers and the optical and mathematical structures of the gar

deners reverberate as each other's echo.

The history of landscape architecture reveals a close relation

ship between gardens and philosophy. 2 Perhaps the most striking ex

ample of this correlation is the Japanese kare sansui or "dry garden,"

also referred to as the "Zen garden." Epitomized by the garden of the

Buddhist sanctuary of Ryoan-ji, created near Kyoto circa 1480, dry

gardens reflect the austere and highly meditative principles of Zen

Buddhism. Surrounded by two temples and two walls, Ryoan-ji con

sists of a ten-by-thirty-meter rectangular area covered with fine grav

el raked in strictly defined wavy patterns. Laid out on this surface are

fifteen stones of different irregular shapes, arranged in groups of five,

two, three, two, and three in such a way that, regardless of one's view

point, one stone always remains invisible. There are no trees, shrubs,

or flowers-there is only the moss that grows on the rocks. Such

moss, like the patina on ancient bronzes, is the valued trace of the

passage of time in an otherwise timeless (though not eternal, in the

Western sense of the word) setting. As Daniel Charles explains,

Because of the moss, the place cultivates and abandons itself to forgetful

ness as a viral force, as the very force of rime. This force strips and scours;

here, at Ryoan-ji, it liquidates symbols . ... the work of the moss consists,

in the very same movement, of affirming and annulling; in Zen, this move

ment is called satori)

Except for the change of seasons, the moss represents the only trace

of passage whatsoever in this garden; the garden is never entered, but

only contemplated-in quest for satori, that enlightenment at the

core of the Zen philosophy of life-from the veranda of the temple.

Satori consists of a pure intuition of the nature of things as an organ

ic whole, including the spectator, the contemplator, man himself. It

teaches that Zen is nature. Nature is not "forced" (as it is in the

French formal garden), but rather intuited for what it is, always in

unity with the observer-hence the symbolic form of this garden,

-II-

PREFACE

which evokes the entirety of the cosmos in a reductio ad absurdum,

or perhaps rather a reductio ad peifectum, of the most formal purity.

As the fifteenth-century Zen Buddhist priest Tessen Soki claimed,

Ryoan-ji manifests "the art of reducing thirty thousand miles to the

distance of a single foot." Yet we must not confuse this formal per

fection with that of the Jardin a la franr;aise, or the prohibition from

entering Ryoan-ji with our current interdictions against walking on

the lawns of gardens. Ryoan-ji is but an aid to meditation; its per

fection is no greater than, indeed none other than, what exists with-

in ourselves. For in Zen mysticism the intuition of cosmic perfection

is concurrent with the loss of the separation between self and object.

It is not, like in so many Western mysticisms, the discovery of God

through the sacrifice of the world. Rather, it entails the discovery of

the self as the revelation of the world. The perfection of Ryoan-ji is

but a shadow of enlightenment. If the Japanese Zen garden of Ryoan-ji entails the abolition of

all symbols, then Ts'ui Pen's Chinese "garden of forking paths" estab

lishes the transformation of the garden into pure symbolism, indeed

into all possible symbols. Each, in its own sense, makes the existence

of the actual garden superfluous. Historically, the classic Chinese

garden was deeply influenced by Taoism, the philosophy ofLao-Tse.

This thought reveals the essence of life as nature, and the essence of

nature as sacred. There exists a hidden order and harmony of cre

ation that can be grasped through intuitive illumination, attained by

means of the tranquil, contemplative receptivity of nature's rhythms

and effects. Within this naturalism the spectator is in total subor

dination to the greater order of things, and Taoist activity results in

the perfect harmony of the sage with nature. Hence there is an inti

mate relation between sacred woods and symbolic gardens in this

philosophy of life. The labyrinthine gardens created according to

these principles-gardens that attempted to reproduce the wonders

of nature within a limited domain-were structurally and pictorial

ly influenced by the representation of nature in Chinese scroll paint

ing. In turn-constituting the beginning of a representational mise

en-abfme-Chinese scroll painting represented these gardens, in an

example of art (paintings) imitating "nature" imitating art (gardens)

-12-

1 l '

l l 1

i


imitating nature. Both scroll paintings and gardens were arts of plea

sure, contemplation, and veneration; as the scrolls were meant to be

slowly unrolled so as to gradually reveal their depicted scenes, the

gardens were designed to be walked through, to be experienced over

time from many viewpoints, without any single place, object, or

viewpoint being privileged over the others. The formal structures of

these gardens were deeply symbolic: artificial mountains and the

twisted, tormented forms of trees (especially aged pines) and strange

rock forms represented the force and grandeur of nature; flowers

symbolized the different aspects of existence (the lotus, for example,

was a symbol of perfection); and temples marked the sites as hol "d" 1 f y, provi mg p aces o contemplation and prayer. These walled-in gar-

dens were microcosmic symbols of the macrocosm, cosmic diagrams

of the sacred natural world.

In the West, the Italian Renaissance garden manifested the

confluence of the contemporary valorization of classical Roman

a~tiq~ity and the rediscovery and development of linear perspective

with Its consequent geometrization of space (as described and codi

fied in ~e writings ~f Alberti), whence the prevalent sculptural rep

resent~u~n of mythical themes in these gardens (evoked especially

by Ovids Metamorphoses) were always disposed within a rigorously

patterned layout. The typical Italian Renaissance garden, exempli

fied by the Villa Medici (circa 1544) and the Villa d'Este (circa 155o),

was constructed on a sloping terrain with the villa at the summit so

as to provide a magnificent overall view of the gardens as well as of

the landscape or the cityscape beyond. The garden was not a fully

enclos~d microcosm; it was rather an enclave of pleasure and power

th~t gives onto the world, providing a god's-eye view upon the

pnncely domain. The gardens themselves were enclosed by walls and

were prolonged to the villa's courtyard and portico. The utilization

of geometric principles in laying out the ground plan resulted in an

orderly and symmetrical disposition of trees, fountains, flower beds,

and statues. Within this formalizing scheme, the fascination with

ancie~t mythology provided the symbolic themes of the sculptures,

~osaics, grottos, and other elements. These sumptuous gardens were

Sites created for sensual pleasure and sheer divertissement, and not

-13-

PREFACE

for sacred aesthetic contemplation or meditation. Thus the surprises

of suddenly revealed perspectives or almost completely hidden

details added a visceral pleasure to the already highly refined literary

and painterly allusions and effects. . . ,

Such effects are allegorically illustrated in Richard Wilbur s

poem, ''A Baroque Wall-Fountain in ~e Villa S~i~rra." Wilbur

evokes the confrontation of two competmg ethos gmdmg the world

of the Italian Renaissance garden: Pagan and Christian, with their

unique and often incompatible pleasures and ethics. The first foun

tain, alive with stone cherubs and serpents, fauns and faunesses, is

contrasted to one of quite different perfection, the fountain that

Carlo Maderno placed before St. Peter's, where

... the main jet

Struggling aloft until it seems at rest

In the act of rising, until

The very wish of water is reversed,

That heaviness borne up to burst

In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill

With blaze, and then in gauze

Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine

Illumined version of itself, decline,

h . I )4 And patter on t e stones ItS own app ause.

l I

l I !

1

Wilbur counters Pagan "saecular ecstasy" with a Christian "shade of

bliss." In doing so, he also reveals a significant internal rift within the ·1·.

baroque, roughly divided between its hyperbolic rococo riot. of

forms and its abstract, nearly static, neoclassical elements. There IS a

similar opposition at the very heart of Le Notre's formal gardens, a ~~·

tension between their baroque dynamics and their neoclassical for

malisms-a rupture through which very different sorts of hungers

leap, and very different types of pleasures pass. l While Italian Renaissance gardens prefigured certain elements 1;

of French formal gardens, especially the extreme geometrization of

the perspectival projections, the English eighteenth-century garden,

to the contrary, was an extreme reaction to seventeenth-century

-14-


French formalization. The guiding principle of the French formal

garden was, as the Duke of Saint-Simon claimed in his Memoires

(writing of Versailles), "to tyrannize nature"5 or "to force nature"6.

to the contrary, the English garden followed the opposite principle;

leave nature undisturbed. This rediscovery of nature, of the ideal of

a "state of nature," was a central feature of the epoch's sensibility, var

iously expressed in the philosophy and an of the times. 7 The Earl of

Shaftesbury, inspired by Neo-Platonism, upheld the neoclassical

principle of an innate natural moral and aesthetic sense, where taste

is ultimately guided by a perfectly ordered nature that reveals the

good, true, and beautiful spirit of the world. Edmund Burke, in his

influential A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the

Sublime and the Beautifol (1757), distinguished two central features

of the aesthetic experience: the regularity and harmony of the beau

tiful and the grandeur and violence of the sublime (to be further

elaborated in Immanuel Kant's Critique of judgment [q90 ]). Wil

liam Gilpin, in Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque

Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792), expanded on Burke's

work by elaborating the aesthetic concept of the picturesque as

!ocated somewhere between the beautiful and the subiime, and con

structed an aesthetic theory of the relations between poetry and

painting centered on the notion of ut pictura poesis, that is, of a land

scape suitable for painting. And finally, of course, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau valorized and mythicized the perfections and attractions of

the natural state in La Nouvelle Heloise (1760).

The ideal of the English garden was to approximate nature in

a wild state-that is, a "wildness" perceived through the conceptual

apparatus of romantic sensibilities. This resulted in what amounts to

an aesthetic tautology: the desire to transform the countryside into

a garden that resembles the countryside. According to William

~em's dictum that "all nature is a garden," the garden becomes an

Integral part of nature. (We may see here the origin of the Borgesian

conundrum of a labyrinth that consists of a book, or of the entire

world.) But even this conBation of nature and landscape art was not

~ithout its regulatory and idealizing principles, as indicated by the

history and style of English gardens. These gardens followed two

-!5-

J PREFACE /1

majo' pa=ligm<. =mplified by We ""'';om ofW;TI;am Ken' and , .. 1.··.

Lancelot "Capability" Brown. The gardens of Kent, notably Rousham, were modeled after 1

the ideal landscapes of antiquity (and not after "nature" itself), J specifically as represented in the paintings of Claude Lorrain _and ~.· Gaspard Dughet, whose arcadian and elysian scenes were often hter- 1 ally copied and transformed within the landscape architect's work. 1;

Garden style followed pictorialism: as Alexander Pope claimed:_:~ ')j garden.in .. g is ~ail~scap~ paint_ii:g." Yet the inclusion in these gardens ij

· - · ,_~{~~i~ed temples, inspired by a nostalgia for Greek and Roman cui- ·.j·:· ..

ture, often pushed the sensibility of such landscapes far beyond their

naturalism to the extremes of Gothic mystery and melancholy.

On the other hand, th~ garde~s ~fC~pabilicyB~own: such as

Bowood and Blenheim, represent the culmination of the naturalist

tendencies of the English garden to the point of banishing all

appearance of art or artifice. Taking maximum advantage of the

openness of these spaces-permitted by the use of the invisible

ditch, called a "ha ha" because of its effect of surprise, rather than

walls to mark off the gardens' boundaries-his creations were often

criticized for having so thoroughly integrated the garden into nature

that there no longer existed any garden whatsoever. Rousseau's ideal

of the garden whose perfection is guaranteed by the absence of

man is here countered by the more perfect syllogism of a garden

whose perfection is guaranteed by the very absence of any garden.

Or, in other words, the essence of the English garden may be

summed up by an inscription placed in the garden of Leasowes by

its creator, William Shenstone: Divini gloria ruris, man's work can

not outdo that of God. Once again, the garden disappears within

its own ideal. It is also in Great Britain, specifically in Scotland, near Edin-

1

burgh, where there exists the most purely philosophical garden of all,

Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Spadrta.8 Fthinlay, a ~eadinfgh~oncrete ~oet, ,i has devoted the last several deca es to e creanon o IS masterpiece, J first named Stonypath, then in 1977 renamed Little Sparta. It has

been variously characterized as an abstract garden, a textual garden,

a poetic garden, a meditative garden, and, perhaps most accurately

-16-

~~

.,. i


of all, a conceptual garden. Emblematic of his aesthetic style is his

series entitled One Word Poem, an example of which succinctly illus

trates the poetic procedures that will become the key to understand

ing Little Sparta and the controversy surrounding it:

Arcady

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

This poem may be contrasted with the labyrinth of symbols ofTs'ui

Pen, where book and garden are one and where all the narratives of

universal history are contained. For Finlay, the alphabet and Arcadia

are also one, insofar as every concept can be physically derived from

the letters of the alphabet, as in the magical numerology of many

mystical systems of belie£ The garden is a concept. Yet the work of

Ts'ui Pen and Finlay are also diametrically opposed: the former pre

sents his symbolic system in extenso through the intricate textual nar

rative of his novel, while the latter condenses conceptuality into pure

potentiality, into the letters of the alphabet, which alone tell no tale.

Finlay's garden, Little Sparta-his true, habitable Arcadia

consists of the placement within a natural setting of numerous "con

ceptual" sculpmres-a sundial inscribed with the words Locus brevis

in luce intermissus ("A brief interruption of the light"); a bird-feeder

in the form of a model aircraft carrier, entitled "Homage to the Villa

d'Este," on which birds alight like aircraft; a schist monolith entitled

"Nuclear Sail"; a tombstone inscribed with the word "Yourname";

and numerous other works, many with military themes. It is a gar

d~n that can ~nly ~e proper!! entered by being read. Indeed, the sig

mficance of Fmlay s garden 1s based on the symbolic representation

of his theoretical ideal, a rationalist revolutionary utopia, and of his

heroes, Saint-Just and Robespierre.

The historical appropriateness of this symbolism won him the

commission to create a garden within the vast gardens of Versailles

to commemorate the French Bicentennial, a project entitled Un

Jardin Revolutionnaire: Hotel des Menus Plaisirs, Versailles. Accu

sations of militarism and fascism ultimately caused the cancellation

of Finlay's project. The controversy arose from an exhibition of his

work at l:ARC in Paris, especially the piece entitled OSSO, which

-I?-

PREFACE

displayed the German Waffen SS symbol. Finlay countered that in

our age this symbol is the equivalent of the older skull and cross

bones as a sign of evil and death. His garden was consequently seen

by some critics, in this same light, as a celebration of militarism. In

this regard, we must remember that, after all, V~rsailles was also in

its time a symbolic system created to, celebrate the absolute, and

often militarist, monarchy of Louis XIV, he who unified France by

the sw"ord: It would seem that Finlay's critics are here guilty of an all

too literal reading of this conceptual work.9 Nevertheless, this sup

pression of his work transformed it into a purely conceptual monu

ment-certainly a sort of poetic justice.

We have come full circle: from Ts'ui Pen's condensation of

time into a symbolic labyrinth to Finlay's condensation of space into

a word; from the regal solar symbolic structure of Versailles under

Louis XIV to the revolutionary symbolic structure of Versailles

evoked by Finlay, reading the very same Saint-Just who was respon

sible for the overthrow of the monarchy; from the meditative Zen

garden to the meditative postmodern conceptual garden. We might,

however, imagine a history of gardens written from the point of view

of weeds-a work that could doubtlessly be illustrated by the

engravings of a pseudo-Piranesi. As the moss growing in Ryoan-ji is

a subtle trace of time the creator, weeds are a sign of time the de

stroyer. But so are revolutions, wars, changing fashions and aesthet

ics, and even the good deeds of bureaucratic committees-of public

safety and otherwise. Weeds are nature's way of transforming gardens

back into their prime matter. It is curious that so many of the gar

den traditions observed here seem to offer instances of perfection

that entail the very disappearance of the garden itself, lost in a spir

itual or intellectual ideal; lost in the bliss of satori, the labyrinth of

symbols, the wildness of nature, the abstractions of conceptuality

all except, perhaps, the subject of this work, the French formal gar

den. But these gardens proffer different aesthetic rewards, and dif

ferent dangers.

Real gardens, imaginary gardens, anti-gardens-these spaces

give rise to thought, to symbols, to emotions. Read before entering.

-18-

J

Let us promenade in this decor of desires, in this decor full of mental

offenses and of imaginary spasms. I

Louis Aragon

Le paysan de Paris

!, Baroque Reflections, 1 ·~ Neoclassic Inflections

J

T he ambiguity of the notion of the "baroque" consists

not only in the fact that there exists no single style, peri

od, or concept to which it corresponds. More pro

foundly, the baroque manifests an intimate inconsistency: the dis

quietude that produces all forms of metamorphosis, the morbidity

of vanity, the instability and ephemerality of human existence. The

heart of the baroque touches the extreme perfection of the world,

seized in that precise, fugacious, yet nevertheless eternal moment

where belief and doubt, presence and absence, life and death, cele

bration and memento mori converge toward that symbol that is noth

ing other than the soul.

If a single word could sum up the baroque style anc!,s_e~sipili

ty, that wo~d~ouid be "moti~;,-;;-i The metaphysical implications of

this originary physical (and psychic) state can be expressed by a lexi

cal declension of the term: movement, time, change, modification,

fleetingness, instability, transitoriness, circumstance, occasi~n, for

tune, variety, decay, appearance. Blaise Pascal: "Everything comes to

be by way of figure and movemem."3 Baltasar Gracian: "Moving is

the definition of life."4 The Platonic ideal of the harmony and sym

metry of the eternal and the immutable (which ruled much of the

aesthetic production of the Italian Renaissance) was superseded by

the exigencies-both human and divine-of motility and becoming.

;\ Dynamism replaced ~eometrization. Christine Buci-Glucksmann

!;

-21-

Gian Lormzo Btrnini, bust of Louis XIV, 166;

BAROQUE REFLECTIONS, NEOCLASSIC INFLECTIONS

explains this new mode of spatiality:

In opposition to the homogeneous, geometric, and substancialist Carte

sian space, the open and serial baroque spatiality, with irs development

and metamorphosis of forms, proceeds by o:::rlapping, ooaistence, the

play of light _and force, rhe engendering of beings by means of the ser

pentine line and the ellipse. These are all ttairs of a topological space

which is precisely oblivious to the idemificacion and fixed localization of

objects at resr.5

Fixed frontaliry was abandoned; mobiliry, metamorphosis, and active

theacricaliry became the norm. Nowhere is this more apparent than

in Gian Lorenzo Bernini's great work achieved during his voyage to

France in 1665: the portrait bust of Louis XIV. The "cinematic" char

acter of this work is described in an anecdote recounted by Paul

Freart de Chantelou, a court writer. During the sessions in which the

young Louis XIV posed for this sculpture, Bernini asked him to move

around, rather than pose stationary, so char he could grasp the true

semblance of the king. As Bernini declaimed, "A man is never so

similar to himself as when he is in movement."6 The contrast be

tween seventeenth-century works of high baroque and neoclassic

influence may be realized by comparing Bernini's bust of Louis XIV

wirh those of Frans;ois Girardon and Antoine Coysevox. The latter

are staid, immobile, static, inert works resembling nothing so much

as premature death masks, in disrincr antithesis to Bernini's extreme,

almost excessive dynamism, where the sculpted body and clothes

seem ready ro break their material bonds, as though forced by an

inner struggle.

The shift from the baroque to the neoclassic in seventeenth

century France--with the consequent and often paradoxical inter

mixing of the two sensibilities-received borh an aesthetic and a

sociopolitical justification. In 1668, Charles Le Btun, rhe court _ j. painter, head of rhe Academy, and long-standing opponenr of

Bernini, pronounced his famous Conf!rmcts sur l'txpmsion dts pas

siom before the Academy.? This work-an aesthetic and practical

guide to portraiture based closely upon Rene Descartes's Les passions

dt lame (1649)-~~study of rhe manner in which rhe face is ani

mated, ser in motio_E, by the passions. Differing from rhe earlier

-23-


topographical and morphological paradigms of the physiognomic

sciences-in which a facial expression was understood to be a static

reflection of the soul, or the fixed sign of an astrologically marked

destiny-Le Brun, following Descartes, explained that the spiritual

was localized in the human body and expressed by the face: "man the

machine" replaced the "zodiacal man." As such, physiognomy was

transformed into a proto-scientific, measurable morphology within

which passion became coded signs. Kinesis became the mark of sub

jectivity, of individualized expression, in a new type of classification

of expression guided by psychological considerations. This individu

alization was soon put into the service of politics.

On the aesthetic level, this theorization of facial expression could

have become the culmination of baroque principle; but the socio

political exigencies of the court of louis XIV transformed this poten

tiality into its opposite. While this Cartesian mode of discerning and

categorizing the passions permitted a great refinement in plastic artis

tic representation, it simUltaneously allowed for an increased effica

cy in analyzing the meaning of those very same passions, as well as

deducing the motives from which they originated. As Jean-Jacques

Courtine and Claudine Haroche explain in Histoire du visage:

The knowledge of the self favored by Descartes--and along wirh him by

the renaissance of stoicism in the coun during the first half of rhe seven-6

teenth century-has as its goal, beyond rhe "familiarity" wirh respect to f ·'

one's self-the control of!f!eJndi:i_'i_U!-_1 p_assions:Jn order to be "trained"

and "directed," rhe passions must be observed and distinguished. And, f

even if rhe figure of tranquility in rhe drawings of Le Brun represent a ~ ~'

"zero degree" of rhetoric in relation to which rhe passions can inscribe ;';

rheir divergences, it also represents the calm face of moderation, rhe serene i:

figure of controlled passion, in relation to which rhe painter's sketches give

an account of the excesses and rhe deformations rhat rhe passions cause

rhe face to undergo. The figure of tranquility is rhe ideal representation of

a psychological unity which is sufficiently stable and rhe master of itself to

be able to clorhe rhe different masks of passion-as well as to denude

rhem, like an actor upon whom characters and passions are superimposed.8

In that panoptical mechanism of control that was the court of louis ,,

XIV, this new art was yet one more refinement in the micropolitics of

-24-


absolute power: t~e ~gaze" that organized court eti

quette and estabhshed control of the social space by means of the

gaze. In response the aristocracy, those perpetually observed mem

bers of the court, had to control their own expressions, as well as

~eir passi~ns, ~~~~e_r_n_c>t to ~ml':Varc!Jr: ~J'_p()se (either willfully or

mvo1untan1y) th~ J<.ing's _desires and eJ(pectations. Etiquette was

developed as a symbolic form always attuned to th -B·-·--. ~----~ -·-

. ·-- __ .. ___ , e yzantme exi-

gencies of court intrigues and political proprieties. This reveals the

for~al, physiognomic level of what Norbert Elias, in The Court

Soczety, refers to as the "prestige-fetish":

It serv~d- as_an i~~cator of_~e_p~ition of an individual wirhin rhe bal-

• ance of pow:r between rhe couniers, ~-b;}~ce controlled by rhe king and

very precarious. The direct use-value of all these actions was more or less

incidental. What gave them rheir gravity was solely the importance they

conferred on rhose present within court society, rhe power, rank and dig

nity rhey expressed.9

The o~igins of this absolutist politics-and by extension of etiquette

.. as an ll_l:t_:~me?_t _()f_ J?OW~r-cari be traced to Cardinal ~~~~

~ho, in the spirit of the times (under Louis xm), organized his polit

Ical theory and practice according to the powers inherent in the use

of reason rather than brute force, though the latter was by no means

totally abandoned.

This politics of the gaze permitted one of his associates,

Laffemas, to exclaim, "We shall wage war with the eye." The ulti

mate result of this "war" would reach its zenith in the final period

of the courr of Louis XIV at Versailles, where the minutest gesture

was codified, where the ever-unstable and fluctuating power align

ments could be expressed by the minutest nuances of etiquette, and

where the expressionless impassability of the royal ~isage becam

·al e a

socr norm. The king's face revealed the extreme limit of the "court

mask," designed to hide intentions by dissimulating the expressions

that are their signs. This excess of calculation in the courtesans'

expressions, this inscrutability, this prefiguration of expression

what Gracian spoke of as a "politics of the face"-was the sign of

the perfect courtesan, and by extension the perfect politician, akin

to the automaton of Descartes's mechanical model of man. IO

-25-

' :1 I'

I

~:


Ultimately, the face existed between the dissimulating mask and the

inanimate skull, between ostensible life and dissimulated death.

Living physiognomy became opaque, a mysterious topography of

simulated passions; fixed by art, even under the most fluid, most

baroque form, the face became a monument, a memorial.

Le Brun's theorization of expression in the Conferences, that

practical ode to corporeal motion and emotional changeability, para

doxically achieved the inverse effect: it became a guide to expres

sionlessness and rigidity and provided a technique for guarding one's

manners and mannerisms. Etiquette, though a system of self-defini

tion, in fact defined the placement of the individual within the social

order. The self was defined by the socius. Like the demands of court

etique~~, L~ :B;~n's theory of physiognomic expression and repre

sentation transformed people into caricatures or idols-as pictorial

representation so readily does. The aesthetic norm established by this

work was that of the fixation, rigidification, and reification inherent

in the neoclassic ideal, where the representation of tranquility be

came the zero-degree level of expression in the aesthetic, semiotic,,

rhetorical, and sociopolitical systems-whence, for example, the

ultimate preference for the works of Girardon and Le Brun over

those of Bernini, despite the king's initial and total appreciation and

enthusiasm for Bernini's an. Power in this court might have been

absolute, but its mainsprings were certainly more complicated and

heterogeneous than simply the king's will alone. It was not only the '

influence of Le Brun, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis Le Vau, and

Claude Perrault that caused this eventual change in royal taste; nor

was it the maturing of the king's taste, or the rigidification of his ~

character, or his piety as he aged. Perhaps most importantly the po

litical exigencies of court life demanded a quite different aesthetic.

We can also see these effects in the architectural choices and

styles of the period, exemplified by the decision made in regard to .~

the commission to complete the east faca~~- ~( ~f: J,Quvre,. in an

epoch when this palace was still th~t of Louis XIV's court. Among

the architects who were asked to submit plans for this project was

the great Bernini, whose first design (sent from Rome in 1664) was

archerypilly baroque: an oval pavilion centered between two ellipti-

-26-


cal wings, which were in turn flanked by flat ended pavilions. The

king was delighted by the aesthetics of this plan, but Colbert-who

was more concerned with practical amenities than with aesthetic

beauty, and who had, besides, other more political considerations in

mind-oppo.sed it. Indeed, it might be argued that a concave curve

is a practical liability in such an architectural setting, due to its ad

verse effects on the interior of the entranceway. But this was hardly

an insurmountable obstacle. After receiving Colbert's criticisms of

this plan, Bernini proposed a somewhat similar second project, at

which point he was called to Paris. II There, he produced the final

project, also ultimately rejected. Yet this last plan-with its flattened

facade and rather rigid, un-baroque overall unity-was in fact clos

er to the design (by Le Vau, Le Brun, and Perrault) that was ulti

mately accepted than it was to Bernini's first inspirations. The rela

tions between Bernini's first two designs and both his final proposal

and the selected plan can be summed up in Jean Rousset's observa

tion that a baroque facade is the aquatic reflection of a Renaissance

facade. 12

This is true a fortiori for the neoclassic facade, which

pushed. the~~!d!ty and geometric proportionality of Renaissance

architecture to the limit. I should not~, in anticipation of a central

theme of this study, that Andre Le Notre's gardens at Vaux-le

Vicomte, Versailles, and Chantilly, among others, included reflecting

pools as major features of the landscape, as hyperbolized at

Chantilly, which is a garden of pools. Rousset'§ witticism about the

baroque was in fact optically instantiated in these garden settings,

where there was a distinct intermixing of baroque and neoclassical

sensibilities.

But, in fact, Bernini himself (even given his work as an ex

treme avatar of the baroque sensibility) did not absolutely differen

tiate between these different styles. Instead, he saw both the baroque

and the neoclassical as being legitimate heirs to the an of antiquity,

which was the ultimate source of aesthetic values. Thus, for example,

Nicolas Poussin's (neoclassic) and Bernini's own (baroque) reactions

to antiquity; rather than being antithetical, differ more in degree

than in essence. During his stay in Paris, Bernini addressed the

Academy. Here his praise of antiquity and his insistence on the need

-27-

fltlinaldi Carlo, afirr a drawing by Clan Lortnz:o Btmini, first projttl for the facade~( th• Louvu, uflf4

BAROQUE REFLECTIONS, NEOCLASSIC INFI.ECTIONS

ro use these cherished works as models for study and creation gave

occasion for a comment on nature itself. His thoughts on this mat

ter follow the ideas of his century.

I pur forw:ui_~c: suggestj_on mat ~e Academy acquire plaster cases of all

the fi-;;-esr Antique sculprures, bas-reliefs, and bustS to serve for me - - -

inurucrion of young artists. ln this way they will form an idea at me

begi11ning of what is beautiful, and this will remain with tbem afterwards

for all their lives. lr will only be their ruin if they are put to draw from

nature as soon as they begin tbeir instruction. Narural appearances are - --almost always poor and lacking in nobility, and if me imagination of the

young is fed on nothing else they will never be able m produce fine and

grandiose effects, since tbese are not ro be found in narure. Those who

srudy nature must already be in possession of sufficient discrimination ro

be able to recognize irs shortcomings and correct them.I3 /

These very same considerations, already inherent in a quite different

manner in Cartesian philosophy, were to guide the aesthetics of Le

Nacre's landscape architecture. The French formal garden of the sev

enteenth century was constructed a fortiori contra narure; fi.uther

~ore, the use of the garden as a social, political, and theatrical set

ring only exacerbated the anti-naturalist sentiments in this regard.

Nature was transformed inro sign, symbol, and stage.

The Louvre was inherited by Louis XIV, and soon abandoned

as the sear of power when he moved his court to Versailles. Parallel

ro this, the gardens of the Louvre, the Tuileries, were ''inherited" and

then "abandoned" by the royal gardener, Andre Le Notre. 14 Le

N6tre came from a family of gardeners who were in charge of the

Tuileries since 1572. Le Notre srudied painting at the Lguvre under

Simon Vouec (who was also the teacher ofLe Brun, whom Le Notre

encounter; d and befriended at that time), as well as the practical sci- ......,., ~ ence of mathematical perspective. In 1635, Le Notre became fust gar- J/ dener 10r Monsieur, the king's brother; in 1637, he began a collabo-

ration with his father at the Tuileries; and in 1643, he was charged

with che upkeep of all of Louis xm's gardens. The Tuileries of chat

period- whose overall conception was basically that of a classic

Renaissance garden, with certain more "modern" aspects-was only

in part affected by Le Notre's intervention. Though it was his first

-29-

The Tuikries, ground plan, nzgmviflg by LrriUl Silvestre

BAROQUE R.BFLECTIONS, NEOCLASS IC INFLECTIONS

major work sire, it cannot be considered to be his first major work

this would be his masterpiece, created for Nicolas Fouquet at Vaux

le-Vicomte in 166r. Rather, my interest in the Tuileries is in regard

to its function as a social space, the first public sire of rhe activities

of Louis xrv's court, and the setting for rhe Sun King's inaugural

symbolic spectacle, the Carrousti of 1662.15 Bur this is already to

jump far ahead of our story, which begins a year earlier in another

garden-Vaux-le-Vicomte.

-)1-

"The garden": a magnificent median way between the wild biological state and the scientific laboratory-similar to the ancient work of the goldsmith, who combined the anarchically multiplied crystal and the infernal "libertinage" of precious stones with the ordered, pedantic application of the artisan, the artist, at work. The tree seen through a window, which seems to have been specially made, is something entirely

other than trees in general. 1

Miklos Szentkuthy

Toward the Unique Metaphor

Vaux-le- Vicomte Anamorphosis Abscondita

C urious idea, a garden constructed according to mathematical formulas, where metaphysics is dissimulated by perspective, epistemology circumscribed by geometry, and

rhetoric composed by the mobility of our bodies. The French formal garden is a study in depth and an incitement to motion, originating

in a hubris supported by geometric proofs and ending in a scenario of absolute power and desire.

In "Eye and Mind," Maurice Merleau-Ponty proffers his appreciation and critique of Rene Descartes, explaining how for Descartes vision is understood according to the model of thought, and paint

ing is an artifice presenting a set of indices that give rise to thought, inciting the conception of things. 2 The magic of icons is transformed into scientific knowledge, where representation is a derivative phe

nomenon and vision is a type of thought that enciphers the perceived world, transforming things into signs, into insufficient ob

jects of cognition. This artificial world, a projection or indication on the Rat surface of the canvas, is a diacritical system where depth is a function deduced from the relations between height and width, a veritable third dimension. Space, for Descartes, is a projection of

thought-idealized, homogeneous, isotropic, quantifiable, clear, unambiguous, beyond all point of view-where every viewpoint can be deduced or abstracted from the universal position of God, for whom all viewpoints are instantaneously accessible. Such is the basis of the

-33-

Ill I

VAUX-LE-VICOMTE

Cartesian model of spatiality, where depth is but a result of the very

incapacity of perception. Depth is a function of ratiocination; depth

exists because man is not God. For Merleau-Ponty, to the contrary, depth is the first-not the

third-dimension. Space is not an abstraction, but rather the modality of the lived body's "I can," a function of one's own motility. Depth is the dimension of one's possibilities, one's future, where the

body is the zero-degree spatiality whereby a world can take form. Yet space is not simply present in front of the body, as is implied by the

perspectival purity of representation constructed according to the precepts of classic Renaissance systems of linear perspective. Rather, space surrounds the body, is before and behind, past and future,

where one is both seer and object seen. Space is an ambiguous field where positions change, where viewpoint becomes scene, seer becomes object, and where depth is the very reversibility of dimensions that unfolds with the movements of the body and that gathers mean

ing through the significance of one's gestures. Every object or place may be seen from an infinite number of

points of view; each different point of view creates a different per

spective on the object; every person may potentially occupy any given point of view, thus perceptually activating any desired per

spectival presentation of the object or scene. Some philosophies suggest that the object itself is composed of all possible views upon it. But this is an idealist pretension, for each object reveals itself to us little by little, over time and through motion; it is precisely the incompleteness of the object, its contingent deficiencies, that reveals its actuality-an actuality concurrent with the absolute inadequacy of

perception (or thought) to object. Nevertheless, to privilege any single visual presentation (any unique perspective) of an object or scene would equally be to limit one's grasp of the world. The object, or the

scene, is perpetually unstable, perceptually rich, significatively ambiguous-:~11 due to the radical perspectivism of our existence. Mathematical formulas may delineate and categorize such perspectives;

yet they ultimately coagulate vision' into a series of static, unambiguous moments. It is rather dynamic ambiguity, or at least change

ability, towards which any adequate aesthetic theory must strive.

-34-

ANAMORPHOSIS ABSCONDITA

The reduction of a visible scene to its painterly representation on a flat surface always sacrifices-within a realistic depiction of the world-a certain amount of visual information and verisimilitude due to the loss of two dimensions (depth and time). Certain systems

of representation proffer more information, and greater verisimilitude, than others. Nevertheless, what may be a cognitive loss may equally be an aesthetic gain-and vice versa.

Certain Renaissance geometers and painters working in linear

perspective would have liked to forget these exigencies of depth and motion to the point of distorting or completely suppressing Euclid's eighth theorem of his Optics} This theorem-which states that equally large and parallel objects, unequally distant from the eye, are not seen proportionally to the distances-establishes the fact that the principle according to which the pictorial representation of the relative size of objects must be determined is not the distance of the objects from the eye (as Renaissance painters and opticians insisted), but rather according to the measure of the angle of vision. This theorem oflateral deformation implies the primacy of the spherical field of vision determined by the ancients, where representation is accom

plished by a spherical, and not a planar, intersection of the visual cone. This was an embarrassment to the presumed perfections of the Renaissance system of perspectiva artificialis, revealing rather the curved, englobing character of the visual field revealed by the ancients' perspectiva natura/is or perspectiva communis.

This model describes a circle, a sphere, the ambient space of the spectatorial position; it is a system of coherent deformation that implies not simply a model of mathematical perfection, but rather the originary form of lived vision itself As Merleau-Ponty notes,

every perspectival projection, after a certain degree of deformation, determines a reflexivity that returns to the spectator's point of view,

to that degree zero of visibility that is the pure latency of depth. There is a "fundamental narcissism of vision" inherent in all systems of representation.4 Such a position seems to be a fortiori implied by Euclid's eighth theorem.

Visibility implies vision, that is, the specific, though everchanging, viewpoint of an equally specific body. But the narcissism

-35-

!I'll' ,I ,

1

'11 .

Lateral deformations in perspectiva naturalis

~il" ~XVlll

' K

L

" •

0

Q

7

1\,

1/ G

-"'""'" \ ~'~ ~ .... ~ ~ :;.,: r('• ~-~ I~ /

:~' j~ ./

~ ~ ~~ v K

Anamorphosis of a head by jean-Franfois Niceron, 1638

y

I


of vision is not merely a function of the radical isolatability or indi- "

viduality of the perceiving subject. Rather, it is determined by the

manner in which vision itself is a mode of placing the body in the

world, among its objects, within its scenes, and the manner in which

all representational systems imply the position of the ideal, putative

spectator-as well as demand an optimal placement of the real,

physical spectator in order to obtain the full aesthetic effect of the

representation. AI; subjectivity is intersubjectivity (for we live in a

social world), so is vision the communal nexus of everybody's gaze.

Here is the secret of the total view, the full object at that point where

vision implies the sight of the other, where narcissism is always tra

versed by the passion for, and of, the other. Visuality is potentiality,

activated by motion, by desire.

Every painting created according to the axiomatic system of

one-point linear perspective has a unique viewpoint from which it

must be seen: with only one eye open, opposite the vanishing point

(the point at the horizon at which all horizontal lines pictorially per

pendicular to the surface plane of the painting converge in depth),

and at a distance from the painting approximately three times the

height of the painting. When we realize that any other viewing posi

tion creates a distorted view of the scene, that is, transforms the

painting itself into a vast anamorphosis, we realize the extreme

fragility of such representational systems. Such a pictorial projec

tion is perfect from only one place; seen from too great an angle, or

too close or far a distance, or with inadequate or overabundant

lighting, the representation is transformed into an abstraction. We

may note, though, that the mobility of viewpoint, with all of its

inherent distortions and paradoxes, is to be found at the margins of

linear perspectival systems. While the constructions of perspectiva

artificialis dissimulated the forms of perspectiva natura/is, the dis

tortions of the representational field return in their hyperbolic

instance in what Jurgis Baltru5aitis terms "curious" or "depraved"

perspectives, that is, the systems of anamorphic projections devel

oped and codified by Jean-Fran~Yois Niceron at the same time that

Descartes was formulating La Dioptrique as part of his quest for a

mathesis universalis.

-37-

VAUX-LE-VICOMTE

Baltru.Saitis-whose book Anamorphoses was responsible for the

rediscovery of this bizarre aspect of linear perspectival projection

provides an excellent introduction to the use of anamorphosis:

Anamorphosis-the word makes its appearance in the seventeenth cen

tury, all the while referring to previously known compositions-proceeds

by means of the inversion of elements and functions. Instead of a pro

gressive reduction to their visible limits, it is a distension, a projection of

forms beyond themselves, produced so that, from a determinate point of

view, they are corrected: a destruction for restoration, an evasion that

implies a return. The procedure is established as a technical curiosity, but

it contains a poetics of abstraction, a powerful mechanism of optical illu

sion, and a philosophy of factitious reality ....

Anamorphosis is not an aberration where reality is subjugated by

vision or the mind. It is an optical subterfuge where appearances eclipse

the real. The system is learnedly articulated. The accelerated and dimin

ished perspectives unsettled a natural order without destroying it; yet,

with the same means, the extreme applications of anamorphotic perspec

tive destroyed it. Such images, decomposed and reestablished through the

articulations of visual rays, were widely -seen in the sixteenth century as a

marvel of art, the secret of which was jealously guarded. These technical

formulas were progressively unveiled, but it was only in the seventeenth

century that exhaustive theoretical and practical studies appeared. A

visionary mechanism, the anamorphosis exists equally in the domain of

reason.5

Certainly the most famous representation of anamorphosis in art

appears in Hans Holbein's painting, The Ambassadors (1533), now in

the National Gallery in London. This painting represents two ele

gant, worldly ambassadors surrounded by the symbols of the cate

gories of classic university studies-the trivium (grammar, logic,

rhetoric) and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, astrono

my), a synopsis of the aspirations of human knowledge. Yet a strange,

pale, bonelike object at the bottom of the picture disrupts the rest of

the representational schema. Only when viewed from a sharp angle

to the right side of the painting does this object (now seen in high

ly foreshortened perspective) reveal itself: it is a human skull. And,

when seen from the side, the foreshortening also transforms the


portly ambassadors into emaciated, nearly ghostly figures. The cele

bration of human knowledge is transformed into a sophisticated

allegory of vanity-a fact accentuated by the tiny crucifixion visible

just behind the curtains on the upper left of the painting. This skull,

consequently, represents the skull at the base of Golgotha-an image

of the fragility and finitude of human destiny. But not only does this

anamorphic projection reverse the meaning of the painting itself,

implicating every viewer in its moralizing effect; it also radically dis

rupts the system of one-point linear perspective, which implies that

every painting has a unique viewpoint that achieves an optimum

optical and aesthetic effect. For The Ambassadors must be seen fro~

two different viewpoints in order to be appreciated and understood.

As such, it transgresses the standard representational and spectatori

al rules of Renaissance painting and forces the viewer to recognize

the effects of mobility in relation to the static artwork-a lesson that

might serve as an allegory for this study of mobility in the aesthetics

of garden architecture. 6

These anamorphic projections-where an image will often be

distorted into amorphous invisibility-offer a de facto deconstruc

tion of the system of one-point linear perspective. In a sense, if there

is a truth to vision, it is to see the imperfections at the heart of every

system of representation, as well as the distortions that determine the

very destiny of the visible.

Merleau-Ponty, cmng Paul Valery, centers his aesthetics on the

premise that the painter "takes his body with him" into the repre

sentation. 7 Yet, in the most literal of aesthetic observations, it is only

in the "major" art of architecture and the "minor" art of gardening

that the artist, and consequently the spectator, may literally enter

and e~plore the perspectival projection, transporting the body into

the very work of art.

Consider that most perfect of such spectacles, Le Notre's gar

dens constructed for Nicolas Fouquet at his estate at Vaux-le

Vicomte, completed in 1661. One enters the gardens ftom the rear of

the chateau, from the center of whose staircase unfolds a seemingly

-39-

1-ltux-le-Vlcomte, ground plAn, mgraving bJ Israel Sit.·mrt

Vaux-k- Vicom~. tht gardm Jt<n from tht chauau, tngraving by lsral{ Sil~

ANAMORPHOSIS ABSCONOITA

perfect, extremely painterly perspectival view, giving the impression chat the gardens are entirely revealed in a single glance. Between symmetrical rows of trees, lawns, paths, Rowers, statues, and fountains one sees at the end of the cenrral path a rectangular pool fed by grocros, in which are niches conraining statues. Beyond, at the vanishing point of this scene, is a vutugadin, a sloping lawn. Yet as one strolls down the slighdy sloping central alley approaching the pools, slight dissymmetries are distinguished. To continue down this path-slowly realizing that the garden is much larger than it first appeared, due to perspectival cricks in organizing the topography and laying out the ground plan-one must walk around the fusr circular pool (seen from the chateau as oval due to foreshortening), to discover not only a transversal canal hidden from the chateau's point of view, but also the continuation of the central path at a lower level than the pach just traversed. These discJ:epancies in regard to the initial overall view in fact prefigure the major illusions to follow. Continuing down the central alley toward the second pool (now revealing itself as square) fed by grottos, one begins to see the statues in the niches more clearly. Yet as one beg.ins to walk around the pool, with the intention of attaining the grottos and the vertugadin beyond, something is seen ro be askew with the relation of the grocros ro the pool, and all of a sudden the truth and trickery of this construction is revealed: the grortos are in fact conside-rably lower than the pool, and separated from it by a wide transversal canal, nearly one kilometer long. (The effect was achieved utilizing a corollary of the tenth theorem of Euclid's Optics, which states chat the most distant parts of planes situated below che eye appear to be the most elevated.) The extreme surprise and pleasure of this discovery is the thriJI of a physical enrry into a mathematical doctrine, established by che aesthetic discrepancies between the static view of the garden as seen from the chateau and che dynamic view as experienced by traversing the terrain. This garden is simultaneously a lyrical apparition and a mathematical demonsrration.

Yet this discovery is not the-last. In order to explore the grottos, one is obliged to walk around the large canal separating che grortos from the pool (or, as in Fouquet's time, to rraverse the canal in

-41 -

I I

Vaux·ft· Vicomu, tht grotror, engraving by !trail Sifvtsm

y4 ,.,..../t. Vitomu, tht g1,Jn, anJ the rh<.teaw sun ftom the vutU~din. mpving by brail Silv<rtn

ANAMORPHOSIS ABSCONDlTA

one of the boats placed there for rhis purpose). In taking this stroll, the garden-seen from either of the far endpoints of the transversal canal- is revealed in cross section, offering a distinct view of the woods in the distance, that is, of what is not garden. Afterwards, confronting rhe grocros, what were seen to be sculptures are now disclosed as amorphous concretions of srone and cement.

The first illusions were constructed according to the geometric laws of linear perspective, where every deviation of the gaze and the body from the garden's central axis (which coincided with the initially perfect central "ray" of vision) creates a distortion of the spectacle. The Iauer illusion (that of the existence of the "sculptures") was achieved by the use of atmospheric perspective, that is, by means of the effect of loss of visual detail at a distance. Anamorphosis and illusion, guaranteed by motility, are preconditions of visibility.

Finally, thrilled by these deceptions, one attains the position of the vertugadin-standing at what was, seen from the chateau, the very scene of the vanishing point-to observe the entire plan of the gardens and the chateau itself from the height of the sloping lawn. The trajectory taken from the chateau to rhe "amphitheater" of the vertugadin, with the final, definitive voLtefau, describes not only the perfect formal closure of the garden (marvelously proportioned to human vision), but also reveals from irs very interior the system of linear perspectival projections. From this new viewpoint at the "end" of the garden, we now see the chateau's ballroom as the stage from which our initial perceptual act occurred. This is a sign of the spatial closure and symbolic doubling to be obtained, via the promenade, through the reversibility of viewpoint and vanishing point.

The radical reversibility of depth is disclosed: viewpoint becomes scene, horizon becomes viewpoint, and the implied uniqueness of both viewpoint and vanishing point is revealed as a function of interchangeability in a continual system of deformations, deceptions, and disclosures. Furthermore, the different modalities of viewpoint are exposed, insofar as the view from the chateau is in "perfect" frontal perspective, while the view from the vertugadin is from above, in oblique perspective.

-43-

I I

V,ux-1~-Vicomtt, th~ gardm s~m from sh~ chawzu in fomhorun~J pU1ptaivt

\;lmx-lt-Vit Mlll, "" gardm and tht cha11au Jten fr()m tht venugadio in fortJhorttntd pm p« riv<

ANAMORPHOSIS ABS CONOITA

The discrepancies between these two poinrs of view do not create an imperfection at the core of this landscape construction. Rather, such a discrepancy between viewpoints (viewpoinrs that are themsdves privileged by the pictorial logic of the garden schema; viewpoinrs that can, in fact, be infinitely multiplied) reveals the truth of perception and the limitations of all aesthetic artilice. The meaning of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work, which is caught in the infinite web of empirical possibility and symbolic exchange. The construzione !egittima of one-poim linear perspective is seen to be an illegitimate arbiter of visual truth, a symbolic artifact of polyvalent meaning and polymorphous spatiality. lndeed, the fact that Le Notre made certain drawings in a rather primitive version of axonometric perspective only supporiS these claims. For in these drawings, the ground plan is represented in perfect aerial perspective, while the objects are represented in oblique perspective, such that two discrete and divergent systems of information coalesce to represent the very ambivalence of the garden in question.

In fact, the overlaying of sundry systems of information and representation {such as the simple duplicity of the anamorphic projection upon the linear perspectival projection in The Ambassadors, or the considerably more complicated considerations of Yaux-leVicomte) hardly diminishes our cognitive capabilities. Rather, it enhances them by stretching the limits of our thoughts and emotions. As Edward R. Tufte explains, in a different conrext, regarding the representation of quantitative information:

We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities co select, edit, single out, strucrure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalogue, classify re6ne, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, son, pick over, group, pigeonhole, inregrate, blend, average, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, inspect, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, list, glean, synopsize, winnow wheat from chaff, and scp· arate the sheep from the goats. 8

-45-

VAUX-LE-VICOMTE

Such are, mutatis mutandis, the cognitive and perceptual faculties

utilized in any representational aesthetic enterprise, in the creation

of any artwork. An aesthetic theory that would propose any less for

considerations of spectatorial position belies the complexity of the

artwork and undervalues the observational powers of the spectator.

Within classical Euclidean geometry-according to which

the Renaissance systems of linear perspective are constructed, not

withstanding the major embarrassment of Euclid's eighth theorem

a line is an equilibrious figure on a stable ground. Yet modern geom

eters and artists recognize the line as a source of disequilibrium, what

Merleau-Ponty described as, "the restriction, segregation, or modu

lation of a pre-given spatiality."9 Le Notre, anticipating Merleau

Ponty's critique of Descartes and incorporating these intuitions in

his gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte, imposes upon the visitor the trajec

tory of a promenade that in fact traces a disequilibrious line across

the apparently perfect, but actually ambiguous, depth of the episte

mological scenario and metaphysical allegory achieved by this gar

den. Vision is fulfilled by motion. Perfection is supplemented by

ambiguity. Transcendence is acknowledged as yet another position of

immanence. As Gilles Deleuze explained, in another context, "Visi

bilities are not defined by sight, but are complexes of actions and

passions, actions and reactions, multi-sensorial complexes that come

to light."10

+ + + The gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte had their perfect moment: six

o'clock in the evening of 17 August 1661, the moment when Louis XIV

arrived for the soiree given him by his superintendent of finances,

Nicolas Fouquet. The story is well known: at the end of the evening

Fouquet offered, either in munificence or in disdain, his chateau and

gardens as a gift to his king. The gift was refused, and soon afterwards

Fouquet was imprisoned for life, Vaux-le-Vicomte ravaged, and the

king's dream of surpassing Vaux put into motion at Versailles.

Consider the gardens at Versailles, also constructed by Le

Notre, basically following the ground plan ofVaux-le-Vicomte, but

vaster, more filled with art objects, paths, and flowers. Yet whatever


similarities there may be (similarities always stressed in the history of

gardens), the formal affinities between the two gardens are princi

pally in ground plan, but hardly in perspectival views. Unlike Vaux

le-Vicomte, the gardens of Versailles impose no particular prome

nade, despite an equally strong central axis, which actually leads to a

multitude of possible divertissements. In both gardens, the vanishing

point disappears at the horizon, at infinity. But the major difference

from Vaux is that the extremity of the gardens of Versailles-framed

between the clump of trees, the "Pillars ofHercules," that marks the

end of the initial scene-are so distant that, from this final point of

view, the garden and the chateau become nearly invisible. The

dimensions of the gardens of Versailles are thus disproportionate to

human vision: the structural difference between Vaux and Versailles

is situated between perceptual proportion and disproportion. The

gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV seem to be but a deficient, pro

portionless, hyperbolic imitation ofVaux-le-Vicomte, born of royal ressentiment.

Louis XIV was doubtlessly aware of the profoundly formless aspect of his formal gardens, which led him to write Maniere de montrer les ]ardim de Versailles (The Manner ofViewing the Gardens

ofVersailles), a guide indicating the itim!raire du Roi (the king's itin

erary), which he imposed upon the visitors to his gardens. II The first

version of this itinerary was written in 1689, and the final, definitive

version was completed in 1705. The full tour took almost the entire

day, if one included a visit to the Trianon. The order of the visit,

upon leaving the chateau, was basically as follows: Orangery, Laby

rinth, Ballroom, Girandole, Colonnade, Fountain of Apollo, Grand

Canal (at this point, one had the option of proceeding to the Men

agerie and Trianon, on foot or by boat, depending upon one's stand

ing; or else one might continue back toward the chateau), Baths of

Apollo, Enceladus, Council Chamber, Mountain ofWater, Theater

of Water, Marsh, Three Fountains, Fountain of the Dragon, Pool of

Neptune, Arc of Triumph, and Pyramid. The necessity of such a

guide is stated by Andre Felibien, based on the king's itinerary:

One may see the gardens and what is enclosed in the little park. But since

there is an infinity of objects that attract the gaze, and one is often

-47-

II

VAUX-LE-VICOMTE

confused about which direction one should take, it is best to follow the order which I am about to indicate, so as to see each thing in succession

more conveniently and without tiring oneself out.12

The very arbitrariness of this trajectory is the sign of a royal decree, as opposed to the demands of a rationalized visibility imposed upon a formal garden such as Vaux-le-Vicomte. Along with this itinerary there is also the appropriate "manner" of viewing the gardens at Versailles: Louis xrv's instructions often specifY that, "we shall stop and consider" -a static, and not kinetic, vision. It is as if the lack of formal coherence will be compensated for by these static views of the garden's diverse attractions.

The chateau and the central axis giving on to the horizon at the vanishing point are indicated only at random moments, and there is no formal closure other than the fatigue of an eight-hour tour, where movement itself is petrified by the succession of instantaneous (but unrelated) viewpoints and spectacles, all revealing royal glory and vanity. Indeed, the very physical and mechanical exigencies ofVersailles necessitated such a fragmented dynamics. For example, there was insufficient water pressure to permit all the fountains to function at once. Thus, following the indications of advance scouts, only the fountains within the king's field of vision were made to function. Thus the practical "logic" (or necessity) of the grandes eaux were, coincidentally, perfectly coherent with the aesthetics of the

·gardens. Furthermore, the temporality of the creation of Versaillesthe effort of several teams working for over half a century-was such that the gardens were perpetually recreated, and therefore perpetually unfinished. AI; the Princess Palatine claimed, "There was not a single spot in Versailles which was not modified ten times."13

Thus Versailles, rather than being an exaggerated version of Vaux-le-Vicomte, is the suppression of its entire visual logic, its very mockery, in an arbitrary illogic all too often confused with destiny.

+ The garden is often considered to be a microcosm, a symbol of the world; the labyrinth, in turn, may serve as a symbol of the garden, as well as of the souls that walk within it. Both Vaux-le-Vicomte and


Versailles possessed labyrinths, and the labyrinth at Versailles is one of the first stops on the itineraire du Roi. Indeed, this labyrinth is a symbol of the formless splendor of the gardens at Versailles. In Charles Perrault's "Le labyrinth de Versailles," there is a conversation between Love and Apollo; Love speaks:

However that may be ... I'll leave you all the glory and permit you to command everything, so long as you grant me the arrangement of the Labyrinth, which I passionately love, and which suits me perfectly. For you know that I myself am a labyrinth, where one easily gets lost.I4

Fouquet, as Paul Morand recounts in Fouquet, ou !e solei! offusque, was condemned for a very particular form of the crime of lesemajesti-!ese-splendeur, epitomized by the feast at Vaux-le-Vicomte, where extreme wealth transformed the passions and the imagination into a scenario of rational splendor and joyful deception. Fouquet's soul, as Madame de Sevigne insisted, was "very labyrinthine."15 This labyrinth was manifested in both the complications of his finances and those of his amours, the latter intricacies revealed in a famous letter written by a woman who remains anonymous, in which she wrote, "I hate sinning, but I fear necessity even more; this is why I ask you to come and see me soon."16 During Fouquet's trial, this letter was attributed to 100 women of Louis xrv's court, many of whom would doubtlessly subsequently stroll through the labyrinth at Versailles, that sign of yet another, more historically lasting passion. The "necessity" mentioned is a euphemism for desire-in this case, probably a "marketable" desire-and it is the desire for and of these 100 women that forms one of the labyrinths of Fouquet's soul. Fouquet indeed strayed, but elsewhere: his own sin was certainly to have transformed his passions into spectacle, the sin of vanity.

The fascination with representations of vanitas hovers between melancholy and exaltation, between the finality of death as ultimate absence and luxury as the tempting presence of the worldthe uneaten fruit, too ripe, already beginning to rot; the just extinguished candle, its wick still glowing, the smoke drawing traces of forgetfulness; bubbles reflecting an image, always on the point of bursting; shattered mirrors; evanescent butterflies .... Can I add to this iconography of mortality the geometry of gardens, not fixed, but

-49-

VAUX-LE-VICOMTE

rather perpetually troubled by that ceaselessly resurgent nature that

brings both life and death?

Descartes's Meditatiom sur la philosophie premiert'--that most

extreme incitement to rationality based on a radical critique of the in

certitude of appearances-can be considered as a hyperbolic instance

in the tradition of representations of vanitas.17 Indeed, the entire his

tory of Western metaphysics may be seen in this light. At Vaux-le

Vicomte, vanitas is initially dissimulated by the rigorous logic of per

spective, only to be revealed by means of the illusions made possible

according to that very same logic. Conversely, at Versailles-that

extreme expression of the Sun King's vanity-vanitas is immediately

apparent in the scale of the project, the ubiquitous symbolic apothe

osis of the king as sun, and the symbolic effect of the vanishing point

at infinity. But it is eventually forgotten due to the formless and

labyrinthine aspect of any possible exploration of these gardens-the

necessity of the king's itinerary is both the last effort to salvage the

expression of this vanity and the sign of its ultimate failure.

Just after the beginning of the eighteenth century, with Fouquet

long dead after life imprisonment and a month before his own

death, Le Notre toured the gardens at Versailles with Louis XIV. We

do not know which itinerary they followed, whether it was decreed

according to the idee fixe of the Sun King, or whether Le Notre

might have suggested a different path of rediscovery. Yet all the while

·Le Notre must have known that the truth of his gardens was based

on appearance, while Louis XIV doubtlessly believed that their

appearance was based on truth. Le Notre certainly knew that

Versailles was, in a sense, the grandiloquent betrayal ofVaux, while

Louis XIV had it created as the unquestionable supersession ofVaux,

as an absolute statement in the art of gardening and the scenarizing

of his absolute power, a power based on Fouquet's demise.

The conditions of this play of counter-memory are in intimate

connection with the exigencies of passion and power, and here is

found a lesson on the relations between particularity and universali

ty. Gilles Deleuze explains,

Under the universal, there are plays of singularities, emissions of singu

larities, and man's universality or eternity are only the shadows of a tran-

-50-

.{~ {:


sitory and singular combination born upon an historic stratum. The only

case where the universal is enunciated at the same time as the utterance

of the statement is in mathematics, where the "threshold of formaliza

tion" coincides with the threshold of appearance_I8

In fact, the justification of absolute power would therefore not be the

theory of "Divine Right"-which is but one more dissimulation of

the mechanics of power-but rather the manifestation of the con

gruence of particularity and universality. In the art of gardening, the

labyrinth (Versailles) is the form that is farthest from this ideal, while

the garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte is closest. The informal principle of

the former is contrasted to the formal closure of the latter: the exi

gencies of forgetting are contrasted to the clarity of mathematical

formalism. While the creation of Versailles was the motivation for

Louis XIV to forget Vaux, it placed Le Notre in the aporia represent

ed by these two extremes-an irony to be relished.

Walking through these gardens today, we can only be aston

ished by these optical and symbolic effects. But, after all, the realm

of our own symbolic system, of our universals, is just the form of

another epoch's singularities-those of the seventeenth century.

-51-

i 1 I .

II !

·' i

I

Oh! I said, what has become of this vast palace? It has fallen! How? It fell upon itself A man, with eager pride, wanted to force nature here; he comtructed edifices upon edifices, and, greedy to profit from his capricious willfolness, he exhausted all his subjects. Here is where all the money of the realm was swallowed up. Here flowed a river of tears to create those pools of which no traces remain. Look at what is left of this colossus raised by a million hands with such painfol effort. This palace sinned by its very foundatiom; it was the image of the grandeur of he who built

-it. The kings, his successors, were obliged to flee, for fear of being crushed. May these ruins cry to all sovereigm that those who abuse a momentary power only reveal their weakness to the following generation. 1

Lollis-Sebastien Mercier

L'an 2440

Versailles Versions of the Sun, The Fearful Difference

I n his Mt!moires for the year 1662, Louis XIV, Le Roi Solei! (the Sun King), explained his rationale for the choice of the sun as symbol of his person and his reign. Specifically in regard to

the Carrousel, he wrote,

We have chosen as our body the sun, which, according to the rules of this

art, is the most noble of all, and which, by its quality, by the splendor that

surrounds it, by the light that it communicates to the other stars of which

it is composed like a sort of court, by the equal and just sharing of this

same light that it offers to all the world's diverse climates, by the good

that it works in all places, ceaselessly producing life, joy, and action every

where, by its uninterrupted movement, which nevertheless appears ever

tranquil, by that constant and invariable course from which it never devi

ates or wanders, is assuredly the most vivid and the most beautiful image

of a great monarch. 2

On 6 June 1662, before 15,000 spectators, this Carrousel, in the form of a medieval tournament, provided the king with the opportunity of establishing his solar mythology in a public festival. The main event was the presentation of five quadrilles, each representing a different nation, and each composed of a chief and ten cavaliers. The king dressed as the imperator, representing Imperial Rome. His shield bore the motto Ut vidi, vici (as soon as I saw, I conquered, a variation of 11-ni, vidi, vicz), as well as the emblem of the sun dissipating the clouds. Each chief, and every member of the quadrille,

-53-

i

VERS IONS Of THE SUN, THE FEARFUL DIFFERENCE

bore a motto and an emblem that emphasized his subordination to the king and highlighted the heliocentric symbolism. Thus, for example, the first member of the king's own quadrille, rhe Count of Vivonne, pre.~enred an ardent mirror and the words Tua munera jacto (I spread your presems).3

The historicaJ conditions that inspired and inaugurated this symbolism may be briefly explained in terms of the origins of Louis Xlv's absolutism. In April t655, Louis xrv pronounced the extreme description of absolute monarchy, "L'Etat, c'm moi" (I am the state); on 9 March r661, after Cardinal Mazarin's death, in the address to the council where he announced his decision to rule alone, the king proclaimed, "La face dtt theatre change" (The face of the cheater changes); 7 August r66t saw the famous fere at Vaux-le-Vicorote that marked Fouquet's demise. Fouquet's fall, which permitted the king to establish absolute power by controlling the nation's finances, indeed marked the creation of a new royal theater: Versailles.

Immediately after Fouquet's imprisonment and the ravaging (as real as it was symbolic) ofVaux-le-Vicomte, Louis XIV set to work on renovating and aggrandiz.ing the hunting lodge that his father, Louis x:m, had built at Vmailles. This pro jeer. work on which would continue inro the next century, profited not only from the same artists who had constructed Vaux (the gardener Andre Le Notre, the architeCt Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles LeBrun), and not only exploited the very ground plan ofVaux, but also literally utilized the spoils of victory over Fouquet: it is recorded, for example, that during the winter of r66r-62 some 1200 trees were transferred from Vaux to Versailles.

As is well known, solar symbolism permeated the iconography of the chateau and gardens of Versailles. Andre Felibien, the king's chronicler, explains,

Il is useful to non: that the sun is r:.be King's device and that rhe Poei:S

merge the Sun with Apollo; there is nothjng io this superb house that is without relation to r:.bat divinity: furthermore, all the figures and orna

ments to be seen there are oor at all randomly placed, but are related ro

r:.be sun or ro the sires where they are placed. 4

-)5-

Vmailks in JifjJ, ground pla11

1()•

VERSIONS OF THE SUN, THE FEARFUL DIPFER£NCE

The progress of Louis xrv's personal symbolism-from irs origins in the symbolic codes of Roman antiquity through the final, idiosyncratic codes of courtly etiquerre at Versailles-may be followed by mentioning the major moments of this symbolic progression. The Ca"ouseL (r662); Les plaisirs de !'tie enchantee (1664), which was the first major fete at Versailles and whose represencarions traversed the models of ancient Greek, Roman, medieval, and contemporary mythology in a speccacle of pure abundance; the fete of 18 July 1668, where the solar theme was directly represented in the baLLet de Flore, with the king playing the role of Apollo, the Sun, in a cosmic drama where the other roles were those of the four elements; and finally, in 1682 when the courr moved definitively to Versailles, the era of the great fetes was over, and the epoch of a hyperbolically minute and all-encompassing etiquette began. The logic of the changes of power and passion in the history of Louis xrv can be charred according to the symbolism of these evenrs.5

The enumeration of the iconographic represenracions of this symbolism is as vast as the mulcipliciry of aspects and divertissements at Versailles. The major manifesrations of this Apollonian solar symboLism are as follows. On the central axis of the gardens of Versailles-leading from the chateau over the tapis vert (la~n), exrending the length of the grand canal to disappear at infinity, framed

«> on the distant horizon berween rwo dumps of trees, the so-called "Pillars of Hercules"-are to be found three pools: the Parterre of Water (reflecting pools constructed in 1684-85), the Pool of La tone

.u (consrructed by Le Notre in 1666), and the Pool of Apollo {conStructed in 1639 under Louis xm). In the Pool ofLarone is a marble sculpture (x6681o) by Gaspard and Balthasar Marsy, depicting Latone and her children, Apollo and Diane, imploring Jupiter ro punish the peasants of Lycia for having persecuted her. The punishment for this crime of lese-majesti was the transformation of these peasants into frogs. Further on, in the Pool of Apollo, is a gilded lead sculpture, created by Jean-Baptiste Tuby in x668, depicting Apollo in his chariot led by four horses, surrounded by four tritons and four sea monsters. Jean de La Fontaine, in Les amours de Psichi et de Cupidon {r669), celebrates this work of art:

-57 -

VERSAILLES

There, in gilded chariots, the Prince and ills Coun

Go to taste the freshness at day's decline.

One Sun and the other, unique in their kind,

Display to the spectators their pomp and their richness.

Phoebus glows with envy at the French Monarch;

One hardly knows which one to prefer:

Both are replete with splendor and radiant with glory. 6

This chariot with its empyrean passengers in fact indicates the path traversed by the sun itself as it travels over Versailles in its celestial orbit, defining the principal (east-west) terrestrial axis of the gardens. The sun rises from behind the chateau and the Grotto ofThetis, fol

lows the central alley over the Fountain of Apollo, crosses the 1650-

meter length of the canal, and sets at the infinitely distant vanishing point of the scene, determined and accentuated at the horizon by the

clump of trees that defines the finite limits of the garden. This too is

described by La Fontaine:

Finally, by a path as wide as it is beautiful,

One descends toward two seas of novel form,

One is a flat-sided circle, the other a long canal,

Mirrors where the crystal was not spared.

At the center of the first, Phoebus, emerging from the wave,

Leaves the deep dwelling ofThetis.

Infinite rays of water gush from his torch;

We almost see this water dissolve into vapor.?

It is precisely this solar path that is the true itinerary of the king. Louis XIV-already equated with the solar god Apollo by means of the symbolic and mythical relations of the sculptures, paintings, theater, and other divertissements of Versailles-is now equated with

the sun itself. By means of the topographic and geographic disposition of the gardens, the sun-as well as the vanishing point at infinity with which the setting sun is homologized-becomes an integral part of the garden's symbolic structure. Infinity enters the finite, if vast, domain ofVersailles. In pictorial representations utilizing linear perspective, the vanishing point-that infinitely distant region

9 !

VERSIONS OF THE SUN, THE FEARFUL DIFFERENCE

directly opposite the viewpoint on the centric visual ray, the point at which all receding parallel lines converge-is the only fully undistorted point in this type of representational system.

At infinity, aesthetics, mathematics, and theology meet on a unified plane whose grandeur and perfection symbolizes God Himself. This symbolization of perspectival geometry is explained in Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form: " 'the image of points infinitely distant from all the lines of flight' is, so to speak, the con

crete symbol of the very discovery of infinity itself; there follows the totally new signification which is given to the ground plane as such."8 Painting is no longer organized strictly according to the symbolic value of the iconic features, as it was in medieval art. Now, it is

visio3 itself:.... along...with...a....nas.cent.,,s_~;i,~,g_tifu:.__:tP.~er_st~di_~~--·~~ the world-that motivat~~-!h~ struc~~ring of pictorial space. As PiiioiSlo/~tes, ilii~--;ymbolization pr;ff;;;;;;};e-~~~~~pt of aT1 infin

ity which not only has a model in God, but which is effectively realized in empirical reality (that is to say, in a sense, the concept of an 'infinity in act,' energtia apeiron, at the interior of nature)."9 Fur

thermore, John Dixon Hunt specifies, "The single-point perspective constituted, according to Alberti's treatise on painting, the sover

eignty of vision, with the king at the focal point enjoying 'the prince of rays.' Thus was the new architectural principle of house and garden, aligned on one axis, able to serve as well as be itself determined by political ends."10

Theology is certainly not absented from this new symbolic system. Rather, the possibilities of theological symbolization unveil novel paradigms, ones in accord with the new sciences and mathe

matical systems being developed contemporaneously. Perspective creates a new mode of_~F~~~ity by reorienting vision in a rational:ized manner. This permits th~-i~~~~r~~i~;;--~f'h~ili·~~-ryp~s.of ·-

~thematics and an aesthetic realism or naturalism, both contributing to the more precise measurability of the world. These symbolic effects permitted by the Quattrocento rediscovery and devel

opment of linear perspective awaited the seventeenth century for their fullest application within the arts 9f gardening and landscape architecture.

-59-

• •

Vmailkf, rlu canal setn from rhe Founrain of Appo/Jo •

• •

~nailln, the chateau sun from rhe Fountain of Appolw

••

VEJtSIONS OF THE SUN, THE FEARFUL DlPPERENCE

At Versailles- where God is personified as the Suo King

through the conjunction of the sun and infinity-the Icing not only

possesses divine right, but is actually presented as divine. Here, in

what Panofsky spoke of as a "moralized landscape,"Il the summum

of aesthetic and geometric moralization, the ultimate valorization of

infinity is achieved.

+

Rene Descartes, in principle twenty-seven of Les principes de fa philosophic, attemprs to theorize this newly discovered empirical,

matbematized infinity. Perhaps as an ultimate theological apolo

getic-to define and maintain a place for God in a racionalized uni

verse that provides no Locus for divine presence-Descartes, follow

ing Nicholas of Cusa,' asks the question, "What is the difference

between the indefinite and the infinite?" His answer:

And we shall name those dUngs indefinite rather rhan infinite in order ro

reserve to God alone me name of infinite, firsr of all because in Him

alone we observe no li.miration whatever, and because we are quire cer

rain mat He can have none, and in d1e second place in regard to orher

things, because we do not in rhe same way positively undcrsrand them to

be in every pan unlimited, but merely negatively admit that their limits,

if mey exist, cannot be discovered by us. r2

The limits of the real world, as well as of human understanding and

imagination, are indefinite; only God is infinite, in all of His attrib

utes-omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. Thus the represen

tation of infinity poses the epjstemologi~ prob~~ the u;ruts of human consciousness ~ well as the ontological problem of the ex:is

~ence-oFGocL"Tn-this~ontext, the symbolic saucrure of infinity at

the vanishing point in linear perspective offers what may be called a sort of "optical proof" of the existence of God to add to the more

classic, and Cartesian, proofs. In fact, Descartes actually utilizes the

model of mathematical proofs to create an analogous argument for

the existence of God:

For, 10 take an example, I saw very well rhat if we suppose a triangle to

be given, tbe mree angles must certainly be equal to two right angles; bur

for aU that I saw no reason ro be assured rhat there was any such triangle

-61-

VERSAILLES

in existence, while on the contrary, on reverting to the examination of the

idea which I had of a Perfect Being, I found that in this case existence was

implied in it in the same manner in which the equality of its three angles

to two right angles is implied in the idea of a triangle; or in the idea of a

sphere, that all the points on its surface are equidistant from its center, or

even more evidently still. Consequently it is at least as certain that God,

who is a Being so perfect, is, or exists, as any demonstration of geometry

can possibly be. 13

Dalia Judovitz, in Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes, explains the radical importance of this sort of proof:

Descartes's argument here follows a geometric order. God's existence is

implicit and intuited rather than derived, and is predicated upon the

rational structure of the mathematical proo£ Rather than considering the

origins or cause of the idea of a perfect being, Descartes is now content

to recognize its existence as an extension of the mathematical, axiomatic

system.14

The Cartesian system succeeds "in bringing the theological within the domain of the rational. It now appears that existence is only as certain as the axiomatic system upon whose logic it is predicated."15

Within the representational scheme of Versailles-where the "passions of the soul" are always those of the Sun King-these ontological and epistemological questions become one, defined according to the Icing's megalomania, which reaches divine proportions. The system of linear perspective organizes the visual field into-~ selfreflexive,_ s~lf~rc;:fer.e!1d_al,_rwrcj~~!.~c_sys~~m, insofar as the vanishing -p~int-which indicates the point at which the gaze must intersect the canvas-always refers_ beyond t~e surfac_e of tll_e painti~g( or the scene) back to the position of the spectator. This unique viewpoint thusi~pli~s the.eXi~tence-~~ an.: individual ego, the one looking at the scene; but this self is fully replaceable by other selves. The system oflinear perspective is thus a social and historical system of exchange by means of articulating diverse subjects as potential viewers, interchangeable and identical before a given scene. As viewpoint is relat--e~ to vanishing p()_int? sois ~e spc;:c_tatorial ego ~~a~~d t~ innnity. Normally, this symbolic and optical relationship is one of extreme disproportion; at Versailles-structured according to the optical and

-62-


symbolic signification of the central alley leading from the chateau to infinity-it is rather a sign of the Sun King's hyperbolic hubris.

The ethical aspects of the Cartesian and Pascalian discourses on infinity-where God was either surreptitiously incorporated into mathematics (Descartes) or else situated outside of thought in the irrational realm of the theological imagination (Pascal)-were appropriated, expanded, and modified by the Jansenists of Port Royal, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, in La logique ou !'art de penser. Neither Descartes nor Pascal admits the possibility that our finite irilrids-can-adequ;tely-concel~e of infinity in any positive theological way. Yet the existence of the infinite, of God, entails an ethical imperative. The limits of our thought-as well as the paradoxes that arise from attempting to surpass these limits-are clearly indicated in La logique ou !'art de Ia penser:

Of this sort are all questions regarding the powers of God, and generally

all that concerns infinity, which it is ridiculous to wish to enclose within

the narrow confines of our minds; for, as our minds are finite, they are

lost within and dazzled by infinity, and remain crushed by the multitude

of opposed thoughts that it offers. r6

The ethical imperative of these limits is proffered in the guise of the sin of vanity. Perhaps the most poignant statement of this position is to be found in Pascal's Pensees, in the famous section 199 on the "Disproportion of Man":

The whole visible world is only an imperceptible dot in nature's ample

bosom. No idea comes near it; it is no good inflating our conceptions

beyond imaginable space, we only bring forth atoms compared to the

reality of things. Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere

and circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest perceptible mark of

God's omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that

thought ....

But, to offer him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him look

into the tiniest things he knows. Let a mite show him in its minute body

incomparably more minute parts, legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood

in the veins, humors in the blood, drops in the humors, vapors in the

drops: let him divide these things still further until he has exhausted his

powers of imagination, and let the last thing he comes down to now be

VERSAILLES

the subject of our discourse. He will perhaps think that this is the ulti

mate of minuteness in nature.

I want to show him a new abyss. I want to depict to him not only the

visible universe, but all the conceivable immensity of nature enclosed in

this miniature atom. Let him see there an infinity of universes, each with

its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportions as in the vis

ible world, and on that earth animals, and finally mites, in which he will

find again the same results as in the first; and finding the same thing yet

again in the others without end or respite, he will be lost in such won

ders, as astounding in their minuteness as the others in their amplitude.

For who will not marvel that our body, a moment ago imperceptible in a

universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, should now be

a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, compared to the nothingness be

yond our reach? Anyone who considers himself in this way will be terri

fied at himself, and, seeing his mass, as given him by nature, supporting

him berween these rwo abysses of infinity and nothingness, will tremble

at these marvels. I believe that with his curiosity changing into wonder

he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than investigate

them with presumption.

For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infi

nite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point berween all and

nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the

end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in

impenetrable secrecy. I7

This discourse is reworked in La logique ou !'art de penser, where the "fearful difference" of which Arnauld and Nicole speak refers to that between a grain of wheat (not a minute insect) and the entire world. But while Pascal deems this secret to be impenetrable, the authors of Port-Royal consider, "All these things are inconceivable; nevertheless, it is necessary that they exist, since the infinite divisibility of matter has been proven, and Geometry offers proofs of this which are as clear as any other truths that it discovers."18

Both Pascal and Arnauld/Nicole argue that the god of the philosophers is not the God of the Bible; the veritable relationship between man and God passes through faith and not understanding-whence the Pascalian insistence on an irrational disproportion

I VERSIONS OF THE SUN, THE FEARFUL DIFFERENCE

as against the Cartesian belief in the order of mathematized rationality. While for Descartes the notion of infinity might primarily imply the imperfection of the subject, for Pascal infinity essentially implies, to the contrary, the greatness of God. For Descartes, God and man share a discursive (if not a rational) space; for Pascal, the two are forever cognitively separated by the sheer incomprehensibility of infinity-the perfect metaphor for what lies beyond the limits of thought.

Consider the major differences between Descartes, Pascal, and Arnauld/Nicole. In the Cartesian quest for a mathesis universalis, both theology and mathematics proper are subsumed under the metaphysical position of an axiomatic rationality. The apodixis, the certainty, of this axiomatics is based upon the internal "light of reason," which is derived from a hyperbolic doubt permitting radical self-reflection. While God serves as guarantor of the ontologically a

priori status of this axiomatics (theology guarantees intelligibility), from the human perspective this God is reduced to a concept of the understanding, however indeterminate this particular concept may be (rationality categorizes theology). Reality is, for Descartes, recreated and represented in the image of this humanized axiomatics; the human order replaces the divine order as the paradigm of the real. The real becomes the rational: truth is no longer deemed to be a function of conformity with the real world, but rather adherence to an intuitive or cognitive system of explanation.

Pascal, in response to this veiled attack on the efficacy and veracity of theology, argues that although reason can indeed establish the axiomatic systems according to which the world is represented, rationality nevertheless cannot prove the first principles of these very same systems that serve as the foundations of thought. Thus, in order to overcome the radical skepticism to which Cartesian philosophy leads, Pascal argues for the irrational, divine foundation of knowledge, guaranteed by faith and transcendentally grounded.

What is at stake are two diametrically opposed models of intuition: for Descartes, the truth of the world is formulated through representation; for Pascal, it is disclosed through revelation, where

-65-

VERSAILLES

God nevertheless recedes into mystery and the ineffable-whence the paradox and tragedy of the human condition.

While the Pascalian meditation reveals the terror of the human condition in its confrontation with the incommensurable differences between the two infinities of God and nothingness, the inquiries of Arnauld and Nicole stress, to the contrary, the proportionality of the different ontological levels of infinity. This proportionality is demonstrable due to the mathematization of the otherwise inconceivable concept of infinity. Such a mathematization was guaranteed by the Cartesian project: any truly universal science must theorize the position of infinity, despite the theological embarrassments that this task may entail. Ultimately, the different infinities (great and small) must be distinguished in both of their ontological modes, modes that correspond to two different sorts of intuition: one mathematical and the other theological. As such, La logique de Port-Royal serves as a partial bridge between the Cartesian and Pascalian projects. Descartes's cognitive response to infinity is counterbalanced by Pascal's emotional response: it is somewhere between the two that Arnauld/Nicole-and indeed much of posterity-situate the philosophical, and aesthetic, sentiments of the century.

+ + +

The theological and mathematical symbolizations of infinity were not lost on Louis XIV or his eulogists. Witness the relations between God, king, sun, and infinity described above vis-a-vis the gardens of Versailles. Indeed, homage to the Sun King was offered in exactly the same terms as that offered to God, as seen in this contemporary tribute:

He is infinite in time, since his renown as well as his empire will endure

for centuries. He is infinite in number, since the marvelous actions of his

life, abundant as they may be, are ceaselessly augmented by those that fol

low. He is infinite in quantity, since his realm has no parts and pertains

to but a single person. I9

This conflation of God and king is not merely rhetorical: it is an integral part of the new metaphysical position of the century, where each subjectivity is constituted within a paradoxical condition. The

-66-

1 1

f,


essence of humanity is no longer guaranteed by the powers of a transcendent God, but at the same time this essence transcends the limits of human reason.

Louis XIV even described himself, in his Memoires of 1662, in relation to infinity, "If there is one characteristic particular to this monarchy, it is the free and easy access of the subjects to the prince. This is an equality of justice between him and them, that places them, so to speak, in a gentle and honest society, notwithstanding the nearly infinite distance of birth, rank, and power."2° For once, the king's hubris is ever so slightly tempered, since he regards the difference between himself and his subjects as being almost infinite. It is as if the king, in his public persona, wished to equate himself with the divine presence in its infinite dimensions, but in his private persona he recognized the indefinite, even finite, position of man before an infinite God. However aggrandized his actual position may have been, the fearful difference that defined the theological realm (as well as the king's public persona) gave way to the calculable, though immense, difference that defined his historic position as Louis le Grand. Great, but not infinite.

+ + One might expect that the central rhetorical, mathematical, and theological importance of infinity, and the infinite disproportion of man, might have led to a new iconoclasm (as the Jansenists might have wished), insofar as the infinite is essentially unrepresentable. We can imagine that the instability, mobility, and ambiguity of high baroque representations-certainly inappropriate in the highly controlled atmosphere at the court of Versailles-might have disappeared within the realm of pure decoration. Indeed, the Cartesian system lacks an aesthetics. This is true precisely due to the nature of Descartes's notion of representation. Judovitz explains:

While it must be remembered that Descartes attacks visual perception as

the site of deception (trompe l'oeil), his interpretation of intuition as an

act of intellecrual vision preserves the notion of visuality in the notion of

figurality. The epistemological rejection of ocular vision is replaced by the

affirmation of a formal system that schematizes the visible according to

-6?-

VERSAILLES

logical and rhetorical paradigms. This new logical order absorbs into the

figural the order of ideas previously associated with discourse. 2 I

These considerations suggest the essence of what constitutes the aesthetic forms of the French formal garden. As such figuration is now associated with discourse (and by extension with mathematics), the aesthetic becomes yet another mere emblem of the conceptual. We can thus easily imagine a Cartesian garden, following the example of Le Notre; but what would constitute a Pascalian garden?22

At Versailles, the sun sets at the infinite horizon, its full splendor reflected off the canal. And, turning to view the chateau at sunset, one is met again with the reflection of the sun's rays off the chateau's windows. Here, the window no longer serves as the Renaissance frame through which the world is to be viewed and represented; it now functions as a baroque mirror, to distort and multiply effects. This optical transmutation of the divine solar orb--its specular presence now contained within the confines of the garden itself-intermingles pure cosmic transcendence with the vast, but hardly infinite, immanence of the garden as microcosm. The sun, as well as infinity at the vanishing point, enters the garden scenario, integrated into the composition like those "captured" or "borrowed" views in Chinese and Japanese gardens.

Whatever mathematization may be inherent in Versailles's structure is lost in this play of infinities, made ambiguous by its specular articulation. The fact that man is, as Decartes and Pascal both insist, an incalculable midpoint between God and nothingness is forcefully expressed in one of the perspectival effects of Versailles. The Fountain of Apollo serves as a sort of optical fulcrum from which the chateau at one end and the canal at the other are brought into perfect focus and relation to the rest of the garden. But as the observer is distanced from the chateau and approaches infinity on the central axis (that is, sailing westward on the canal), the.chateau gets progressively smaller and smaller, losing all proportion and magnificence in relation to the gardens, until it must finally disappear from view at some indeterminate (but hardly infinitely distant) point. Yet, of course, the vanishing point at infinity comes no nearer. Despite (or perhaps because of) the extreme hubris manifested at Versailles,

-68-


the chateau and its gardens ultimately serve as one of the greatest aesthetic representations of vanity. Consider in this regard Arnauld and Nicole's observations on vanity and the presentation of self to society, a critique that could well have Louis XIV as its object. In answer to the question, "What did they intend, those people who built superb houses well above their rank and their means?," they respond,

It is thus for men that they work, and for those men who approve of

them. They imagine that all those who will see their palaces will offer ges

tures of respect and admiration for the master of the house, and they thus

represent themselves in their palaces surrounded by a troop of people

who gaze at them from top to bottom, and who judge them great, pow

erful, happy, magnificent; and it is for this reason that they make these

great expenditures and take all these troubles .... Thus the minds of those

who love only the world have for their objects, in effect, only vain phan

toms that miserably amuse and occupy them; and those who pass for the

wisest are, like the others, themselves filled with illusions and dreams.

Only those who devote their lives and deeds to eternal things may be

deemed to have a solid, real and substantial object; it being true of all

those other that they love vanity and the void, and that they chase after

falsehood and lies. 2 3

One's own grandeur is first seen in the eyes of others, mirrors that the world provides for our own acts and appearances. But ultimately, it is in the eye of God that we are judged, and must judge ourselves-all else is worldly vanity.

The mirror-expressed by the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus-is the archetypally baroque figure of sensibility. The mirror phenomenon entails, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains, the fissure of appearance and being, where

Man is mirror for man. The mirror itself is the instrument of a univer

sal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things,

myself into another, and another into myself. Artists have ofi:en mused

upon mirrors because beneath this "mechanical trick," they recognized,

just as they did in the case of the trick of perspective, the metamorpho

sis of seeing and seen which defines both our flesh and the painter's

vocation. 24

VERSAILLES

Within the baroque sensibility, specularity is a condition of both representation and self-representation. & such, self-consciousness is a function of the exteriorization and objectification of the "passions of the soul," as well as the simultaneous interiorization and objectification of the reactions and gazes of others. Alterity is the guarantee of selfhood, but it is also the guarantee of the instability, evanescence, and ambiguity of subjectivity. The self exists within the specular unity of represented and representing subject, between seeing and seen, between thinking and thought. In his Essai de morale, Pierre Nicole asks,

What would we say of a man who, seeing his image in a mirror every day

and gazing endlessly at himself, would never recognize himself and would

never say: "That's me"? Wouldn't we accuse him of a stupidiry hardly dif

fering from madness? This is, nevertheless, what men do, and it is even

the unique secret that they have for finding happiness.2 5

Our amour-propre demands this mirror vision; our vanity desires its dissimulation. Nicole writes, "Man wants to look at himself because he is vain, and he avoids looking at himself because, being vain, he can't stand the sight of his faults." 2 6 Our self-identity is ultimately a result of the play of specular presences where the gazes of others define the contours of the image of the self The self is an image, an idol, or a representation created by others: "There is nothing more normal than to see these vain phantoms, composed of the false judgments of men."2 7

It is precisely the phantom created by all of the admirers of the rich and

the Great that we see surrounding their thrones and looking upon them

with inner feelings of fear, of respect, and of abasement, which makes the

ambitious man into an idol; for whom they work all their lives and

expose themselves to so many dangers. z8

Vanity is not merely a moral flaw, but rather a central figure of selfrepresentation-culminating, in extreme instances, in a false relation to infinity, or a relation to a false infinity. This phantasmal self, this simulacrum, exists only in a specular system of intersecting gazes where, as Louis Marin (following Pierre Nicole) claims, "Each selfin its representation-is the vanishing point of a multiplicity of gazes."2 9 The Renaissance artists and perspectivists knew this all

-?0-


along; the baroque pushed this symbolic structure beyond all rational limits; the epoch of Louis XN raised the issue to its ultimate political and social implications.

In his Memoires of r662, Louis XN explains to his son, "Do not be astonished if I so often urge you to work, to see everything, to hear everything, to know everything."3° In the theatrum mundi that was to become the court at Versailles, this exhortation-while evoking the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God with whom the king was identified-actually served the practical purpose of creating the panoptical mechanism of surveillance, which was one of the principal microstructures that guaranteed his power. But this seemingly all-seeing position was neither a source of self-deception nor sheer vanity. Louis XN equally understood that being in the public eye demanded constant surveillance of the self, "for one of the greatest errors into which a prince may fall is to think that his faults remain hidden, or that others will have the indulgence of excusing them."31 The king was all-seeing and fully observed; in the courtly life of Versailles, subjectivity was defined according to the chiastic relationship between sovereign and subject.

The entire structure of court life at Versailles depended upon the intricate relations between precision of observation and understanding of the gestural minutiae that were codified and reified as court etiquette. The extreme manifestations of this etiquette are too famous to need retelling here; I will just note that in this closed social system the decorous self became a sign whose meaning was regulated by the exigencies of the king's own gestures. The royal acts were repeated and reified into distinct rituals, and ultimately transformed into myths. The meaning of the king's gestures determined prestige at the court. This aestheticizing of politics-within an absolutist sociopolitical system where divine right and royal divinity were everywhere symbolized-was founded upon a system of etiquette that articulated the differences between sovereign and subject, as well as the hierarchy between the different classes of subjects. The Duke of Saint-Simon knew this well:

No-one knew as well as he how to sell his words, his smile, even his

glances. Everything in him was valuable because he created differences,

-?I-

VERSAILLES

and his majesty was enhanced by the sparseness of his words. If he turned

to someone, asked him a question, made an insignificant remark, the eyes

of all present were turned on this person. It was a distinction that was

talked of and increased prestige.32

Subjectivity is intersubjectivity: while the metaphysical solitude of

the Cartesian ego is a function of hyperbolic doubt, and the very

existence of the Pascalian ego depends upon its incommensurable

relations with an infinite God, conversely the school of Port-Royal

proposed a metaphysical system wherein Cartesian solipsism and

Pascalian belief were transposed onto the social field. Theological

phantasms were replaced by psychological ones; the terrifying differ

ence that constituted the divine for Pascal was supplanted by the real

differences that constituted the sociopolitical milieu. At Versailles,

both were articulated by the Icing's presence.

This scenario of power and desire was never better staged than

in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, constructed berween 1678 and

1694 by Jules Hardouin Mansart and decorated by Charles Le Brun. Its iconography was first planned in relation to Apollo, then to

Hercules, and finally realized with Louis XN dressed as the Roman

Emperor. This gallery provided the ultimate specular baroque spec

tacle: each gesture is doubled, each movement is observable from all

sides, each representation represented. And, seen in the infinitely

reflective depths of the mirrors, across the expanses of the garden's

length, is the reflected double of infinity at the vanishing point as the

sun enters the gallery at sunset. Here, the king and his solar and geo

metric doubles reign-in the last moment of baroque splendor with

in a neoclassic realm-governing both a symbolic and a historical

domain. Phantasmal existence intersects the social sphere, where

hubris and vanity are revealed in the glances of others, in the depths

of mirrors, and in the infinite distance that separates man from God.

+

A crucial origin of modernity can be discerned in the tension be

rween rwo fundamental cosmological paradigms in the seventeenth

century. Perhaps the most succinct means of expressing what is at

stake here is to simply cite the title of Alexandre Koyre's celebrated

-72-


work, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. The tensions

berween closure and infinitude are expressed in the symbolism of the

French formal gardens of the period, hyperbolized at Versailles. There

rwo principle models of the garden as microcosm come together: the

labyrinth as closure and the perspectival utilization of the vanishing

point as an overture onto infinity.

Versailles possessed a splendid labyrinth, designed by Le Notre

and decorated with thirty-nine fountains containing lead sculptures,

each portraying a fable of Aesop (the sculptures were Charles

Perrault's idea, certainly related to the publication in 1668 of La

Fontaine's verse version of Aesop's Fables). The young Dauphin,

Louis x1v's son, was led through this labyrinth for his amusement

and edification. Perrault described it: "It is named Labyrinth,

because the infinitude of little paths found there are so intermingled

that it is nearly impossible not to get lost."33 This labyrinth in fact

serves, as we have seen, as a metaphor for the entire garden of

Versailles. Yet Louis XN's need for order necessitated his creation of

a guide to see Versailles, his own Maniere de montrer les jardins de Versailles-especially stressing the static mode of experiencing the

gardens, one divertissement at a time, each seen in proper succes

sion. It is as if the king recognized the relatively unformed, labyrin

thine nature of the entirety of the gardens, and compensated for this

lack of order by the royal decree that guided the visitor's vision.

But, as present considerations should have made clear, there

was one major effect that escaped the closure of this labyrinthine sys

tem of divertissements, with their purely mythical, symbolic effects.

This was the garden's central axis, whose optical and geometric effects

were the inclusion of real infinity into the garden's finite closure. This

effect was not expressed by the popular moralism of Aesop's fables,

but rather by the rationalized theology of Descartes's Discours, the

leap of faith of Pascal's Pensees, and the synthesis of the latter rwo in

Arnauld and Nicole's La logique ou !'art de penser. If certain aspects of the conflict berween Scholasticism and

modernism were played out in the differences berween the symbols

of the labyrinth and infinity, it should be stressed that these very same

differences equally symbolized the tensions berween the baroque and

-73-

VERSAILLES

the neoclassic found at the heart of this incipient modernity. This is

expressed in Henri Maldinay's exemplary formula, "Classicism is

only the tightest cord of the baroque."34 According to my examina

tion of the gardens of Versailles, it would be precisely the central axis

stretching towards infinity that serves as this tight, classical cord

within the elaborate, labyrinthine, flamboyant system of baroque

splendor everywhere else evident. This infinity is the geometric and

ethical point that supports the entire system.

+ +

In response to Descartes's definition of the difference between the

indefinite and the infinite, Henry More stated his objection:

Fourth, I do not understand your indefinite extension of the world.

Indeed this indefinite extension is either simpliciter infinite, or only in

respect to us. If you understand extension to be infinite simpliciter, why

do you obscure your thought by too low and too modest words? If it is

infinite only in respect to us, extension, in reality, will only be finite; for

our mind is the measure neither of the things nor of truth. And therefore,

as there is another simpliciter infinite expansion, that of the divine

essence, the matter of your vortices will recede from their centers and the

whole fabric of the world will be dissipated into atoms and grains of

dust.35

The vortices referred to are those that, according to Cartesian cos

mology, surround the fixed stars, limiting them and preventing them

from dissolving under the stress of centrifugal force. More concludes

by arguing, "that, however, your vortices are not disrupted and do

not come apart seems to be a rather clear sign that the world is real

ly infinite."36 What is at stake is not merely mathematical truth, but

the ontological existence of the cosmos. Such potential universal cat

astrophes too bear their own symbols.

After the solar equation of king and God was established, it

was not uncommon, as we have seen, for the Sun King to be described

and allegorized in terms normally attributed to God. As one com

mentator of the period explains of the king,

We clearly see that his spirit is, as it were, the soul of the State, like the

first among spirits is the soul of the world. If this soul did not reduce all

-?4-

'1

I

I 1


contraries into a perfect temperament that created the Harmony of the

universe, the universe would dissolve; and if the intelligence of the

monarch did not set into motion the entire machine of government, that

machine would fall into pieces.37

The social and political organization under Louis XN, what Saint

Simon referred to as a "mechanics," was such that the king needed

merely hint at his desire and his volition was transformed into act.

The slightest indication of the Icing's will set the entire machinery of

state into motion. Ultimately, the effects of his understanding and

imagination were a function of his will. Ut vidi, vici. On the relation between finite and infinite volition, Descartes

writes in the fourth part of his Meditatiom sur Ia philosophie premiere,

entitled "Concerning the True and the False":

It is free-will alone ... that causes me to know that in some manner I bear

the image and similitude of God. For although the power of will is

incomparably greater in God than in me, both by reason of the knowl

edge and the power which, conjoined with it, render it stronger and more

efficacious, and by reason of its object, inasmuch as in God it extends to

a great many things; it nevertheless does not seem to me greater if I con

sider it formally and precisely in itself: for the faculty of will consists

alone in our having the power of choosing to do a thing or choosing not

to do it (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or to shun it), or rather it

consists alone in the fact that in order to affirm or deny, pursue or shun

those things placed before us by the understanding, we act so that we are

unconscious that any outside force constrains us in doing so.38

Man most resembles God in his volition. The powers of the will

outstrip those of all the other faculties, including the imagination

and the understanding. Can anything better explain, on the cosmic

as well as the political level, the nearly divine powers of the Sun

King? Is there any more precise metaphysical justification for hubris?

It is also precisely such a will that guides the modern quest for a

mathesis universalis, which in the gardens ofVersailles is seen in the

successful attempt to "force nature." For modernity implies the

attempt to shape nature according to the human will, a task

symbolized by the imposition of geometric formalism manifested in

the French formal garden. Here, humans have indeed become the

-?5-

•

VERSIONS OF THE SUN, THE FBi\RPUL DIFFERENCE

"masters and possessors of narure.," which Descartes saw ro be the

essence of our destiny.

Yet there is one tragic Haw expressed in the symbolic system of

Versailles, one blemish in its divinely hubristic beauty. In one corner

of the garden, in the center of a large pool, is the Enceladus (1676),

a gilded statue of a giant whose arm and head emerge from a mass

of boulders. Having dared to erect a mountain to reach the heavens,

all carne crashing down through divine retribution, and he was

buried beneath the disimegrated mass of his project. Might nor this

divertissement in fact symbolize the irony and contradiction at the

center of the garden's symbolism, that very point where the vanity of

rhe human lor can only be described as the fall from the infinite to

the finite? Might not the human reality of the garden's entire meta

physical system be expressed by this sole sculptural group? Does it

not bespeak, ultimately, the destiny of the human body of the king?

I will condude this demonstration with one final moment of

the solar dream, expressed once again by La Fonraine. With the set

ting sun, that cosmic tragedy so feared by the ancienr metaphysi

cians, that chaos which can only be arrested by a God, or a solar

king, can hardly be avoided. Expressing what is never evoked by the

symbolism of Versailles, indicating the fearful inversion of the solar

myth, La Fonraine writes of the setting sun,

The Sun, tired of witnessing this barbarous spectacle,

Hastens on ics course; and, passing beneath the waters,

Wtll bring light ro new peoples.

The horror of these wastelands is heightened by his absence:

Night arrives on a chariot led by Silence;

Bringing fear inro the Universe.39

This evokes Pascal's declaration, "The eternal silence of these in.finite

spaces fills me with dread. "4° The fearful silence of infinite space-

which no symbol can express, not even the garden as microcosm

crushes all vanity. True infinity can only be reflected in the mirror of -

faith, or in pure mathematics.

- n -

The liquid and fluid humor metamorphoses Into rays, comets, stars, and marvels. Here globes soar and bubbles rise; There minuscule spheres ceaselessly swirl; Everything secretly germinates, the jets multiply. Everything undulates and streams, and bursts and flows. 1

Giovan Battista Marino

L'Adone

l l

I Chantilly J A Garden of Mirrors

l cy he Prince de Conde-Louis II de Bourbon, Monsieur le

Prince le Heros, Le Grand Conde, Second du Nom, Premier Prince du San~was the first successor to the

throne of France, until the birth of a son-rhe future Roi Soleil-to Louis XIII. One of the foremost military geniuses of the epoch, Conde was rhe victor of Rocroi, Nordlingen, and Lens; upon his victorious return from Flanders in 1648, he was actually held in consideration as leader of rhe opposition government of France. Imprisoned by Cardinal Mazarin in 1650 during the civil war of the Fronde, he was released the following year, and almost gained control of rhe government. Finally, accepted by neither rhe Fronde nor the Court, he led an armed rebellion, but obtained little support. Conde left Paris in 1652, at which point he entered into the service of the king of Spain, to return to France only in 166o after the signing of rhe Treaty of rhe Pyrenees. Louis XIV's assumption of power upon Mazarin's death was predicated upon the exclusion of the princes-and especially Conde, first among them-from rhe internal workings of rhe mechanisms of state power. This exclusionary politics indeed paved rhe way for Conde's return to the Court, but his actions shifted from noble rebellion to nearly absolute servitude and dependence upon rhe Icing's royal grace. From this moment, always conscious of his unique noble standing as well as of his consequent subordination to the king, he alternately devoted himself to

-?9-

CHANTILLY

further military exploits for France and to transforming his estate at

Chantilly into an international center of the arts-nearly unique in

an epoch when artistic production was centralized around the Acad

emy, which was directly con trolled by the Court at Versailles. Some

time later, Conde again had the opportuniry to become king: he was

under consideration for election as King of Poland, but he vacillat

ed due to his submission to Louis XIV's will, preferring the eventual

iry of full restoration of his privileges as Prince of the Blood in the

French Court, as well as the joys and honor derived from battle in

his king's service. Indeed, the conquest of the Franche-Comte, an

event that aided in the final unification of France under Louis XIV's

monarchy, was a result of Conde's decisions.

Conde's history may be symbolized by two emblems, togeth

er emphasizing the paradoxical and frustrating conclusion of his

ambitions. The Conde family coat of arms contained an emblem

consisting of two crossed swords, indicating the family's military

prowess, but also coincidentally insinuating his own rebellious posi

tion in relation to the Royal House. Remember that in the Carrousel

of r662, Conde wore another conflicting symbol, a crescent moon

imposed by the King and representing the Turkish Empire. In

Islamic symbolism, the moon is a sign of God's power, yet its light

is ultimately reflected from the Sun. The crescent moon is a symbol

of resurrection, but on the day of judgment, the moon will split, join

the sun, and be definitively eclipsed. Conde's resurrection was his

renewed presence at the Court, where he shone, like everyone else,

with the reflected glory of the Sun King, and where his ambitions to

be king would be eclipsed. The agonistic relationship between the

king and the man who would be king were ironically symbolized by

the emblems at the interior of Conde's coat of arms.

The chateau of Chantilly was restored to Conde in r66o. He

attended the fateful fete that Nicolas Fouquet gave for Louis XIV at

Vaux-le-Vicomte in August r66r, the magnificent setting of which

must certainly have inspired him to renovate the gardens of his own

estate. In r663 he charged Andre Le Notre with the restoration and

aggrandizement of the gardens at Chantilly, a task that would take

twenry years; Le Notre would express his preference for Chantilly

-So-

A GARDEN OF MIRRORS

above all of his other gardens. 2 The focal point of these gardens-in

both the ground plan and the major perspectival axis-is the eques

trian statue of Conde's great warrior ancestor, Anne de Mont

morency, high constable of France, which was erected in the early

seventeenth century. The approach to the chateau and the gardens

leads from the woods, over a moat, then through a forecourt sur

rounded by water. The initial perspective is centered on the statue,

the front of which faces the entrance to the chateau, situated to the

left. The entire forecoun slopes slightly upward toward the Grand

Terrace upon which the statue is located. Thus it is only upon reach

ing the position of the statue that the gardens-situated beyond, at

a lower level-become visible and the asymmetric position of the

chateau evident. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the construction of the land

scape at different levels permitted the dissimulation of the transverse

canals; at Versailles it allowed the concealment of a portion of the

central alley; at Chantilly it hides the entire garden.

The statue of Anne de Montmorency, which serves as the focal

point of the central axis of the approach to the garden and chateau,

is transformed upon arriving on the Grand Terrace into the view

point from which the garden is displayed. The statue faces the entry

to the chateau and is perhaps the only formal feature of the land

scaping indicating the chateau, whose presence disturbs the garden's

symmetry. One might go so far as to suggest that this asymmetric

position was the most efficient manner of eliminating the chateau

from the otherwise perfect scheme of the gardens. This role of this

statue can be contrasted with that of the statue of Hercules blocking

the horizon at Vaux; both statues serve alternately as focal point and

viewpoint, but the statue at Vaux, once transformed into viewpoint,

completely reorganizes the experience of the garden into one of per

fect closure by revealing the chateau itself as initial viewpoint trans

formed into focal point. To the contrary, the statue at Chantilly

reveals the formally heterogeneous relations between chateau and

garden on an irrecuperable axis of dissymmetry. Furthermore, while

the statue of Hercules at Vaux and the sculpture of Apollo in the

Fountain of Apollo at Versailles were mythic emblems, at Chantilly

-81-

i'

I: I

Cham illy. aerial pmpmivt of tht garden and tht cha~rau, mgraving by Gabritl Pirtlk

Chantilly. vitul of tht garden

A GARDEN OF MIRRORS

the statue of Anne de Montmorency was a specifica!Jy historical and familial reference.

The statue marks the end of the path that delineates the cencral axis before the moment that the gardens beyond come inro view; what foUows is a grand staircase leading down co the gardens, giving onto a low terrace containing a round pool edged by transverse canals. The cenual axis is continued by a shon canal bordered by parterres whose major decoration consists of five pools each. Beyond the parterres the central canal marks a "T" and extends far to each side (the major part being blocked from view by groves of trees planted alongside the parterres). The frontal axis (the stem of the ''T") extends across the top of the "r ro a crescem shaped tapis vert (lawn), continuing through a gash cut in the distant woods, finally giving onto the varxishing point at infinity. While infinity at Versailles was recuperated into the general schema by means of symbolic representations and optical artifice, at Chantilly the vanishing point does not seem to serve as anything more than a stable indicacor of the garden's principle visual axis. Located on the north/south axis, it does not even demarcate the solar trajectory, which is so majestically integrated into the landscape at Versailles. The varxishing point at Chantilly serves as a static point of orientation, centering the vision across the garden and its va.rious pools. The dynamism of this landscape becomes apparent onJy when one enters the garden and walks amongst the pools.

In some respects, Chantilly is a compressed version ofVauxle-Vicomte: the canals are hidden by the various levels of the garden; the bisection of the space is achieved by a major transversal canal; the use of foreshortening distorts the appearance of pools; and both gardens are oriented by means of a strong central axis. But Chantilly is Le Notre's ultimate celebration of wate.r. Even more so than Vaux or Versailles, with their own myriad canals, fountains, and aquatic spectacles, Chantilly is devoted to the effects of water, minus the symbolic intervention of sculptures (as in Versailles) and minus the artifice of fountains themselves. At Chantilly it is the natural reflective qualities of the pools--<:reating fragmented, anamorphic visions on their uneven and undulating surfaces-that constitute that garden's

CHANTILLY

dominant spectacle, where a distorted yet ever beautified version of nature is created. lri fact, Chantilly may be considered to be a gigan

tic catoptric machine. The seventeenth century, with its baroque taste for illusion,

was the golden age of the catoptric apparatus.3 A tale of that epochCharles Perrault's Le miroir ou fa metamorphose d'Orante-offers an allegory of the ethical and psychological properties of mirrors. 4 This is the story of a man, Orante, who has a remarkable talent for description, but who immediately forgets everything that is not within his field of vision. One day the hero describes the imperfections of his lover, who kills him in a fit of rage, at which point Orante is transformed into that inanimate object whose properties most accurately represent the qualities of his soul: a flat mirror. {Orante had three brothers: a convex mirror, a concave mirror, and a conical mirror, representing the major types of catoptric distortion and anamorphic projection.) Unlike Narcissus, who was enthralled by his reflection in the pool/mirror and destroyed by his amour

propre, a victim of his own image, Orante was destroyed because of his own mirroring faculties, victim of a rage caused by the wounded narcissism of the other. The dangers of mirrors become apparent. As Gaston Bachelard explains in L'eau et les reves, "Narcissism thus determines a sort of natural catoptromancy. Moreover, the combination of hydromancy and catoptromancy are not rare."5

Mirrors, with their different reflective properties, serve variously as signs of vanity and falsehood, of truth and perfectionalways revealing our alter egos, our doubles, our phantoms. Gerard

Genette explains: In itself, the reflection is an equivocal theme: the reflection is a double, that

is to say simultaneously an other and a same. This ambivalence is at play

in baroque thought as an inverter of significations that renders identity

fantastic (I is an other) and alterity reassuring (there is another world, hut

it is similar to this one) . ... The Self is confirmed, but under the species of

the Other: the specular image is a perfect symbol of alienation. 6

Symbols of narcissism and alienation, of the self enrobed in its own image and the self lost in the other, mirror images offer a vast series of rhetorical and poetic effects transposed onto the visual realm:

A GARDEN OF MIRRORS

multiplications, substitutions, enlargements, diminutions, combinations, and distortions. In fact, each type of mirror produces its own specific iconographic form, creating different sorts of physiognomic effects and varied types of lands of illusion. Furthermore, the inversive characteristic of the mirror, its chiastic function, manifests the ultimate self-reflexive moment in the artwork and effects the placement of the spectator within the scene, within the work of art. There is occasionally in Renaissance painting, for example, a mirror depicted in an interior scene-this mirror reflects the artist at work painting the picture, functioning as a sort of iconic signature. For so many people-from the child thrilled by his reflection in a puddle {and invariably attempting to destroy that reflection by throwing a stone into the water, or jumping on top of the image) to the master optician of the seventeenth century {creating intricate mirror devices in the baroque spirit, to amaze and to deceive)-mirrors are a primal object of fascination.

Jurgis Baltru.Saitis, in Le miroir, notes the many different sorts of catoptric devices of this epoch. One charming tale depicting the complexity and wonder of such mechanisms is recounted in the Encyclopt!die, describing Louis XN attempting to fence with a phantom created by mirrors.? Yet such complex mechanisms with their stupefying effects, and the magnificent Hall of Mirrors at Versailles with its aesthetic and royal splendor, as well as the typical mirrored chambers of that epoch-all creating catoptric theaters with their mise-en-abtme of reflections-do not constitute the entire range of mirror effects. There are also numerous other sorts of mirror devices inherent in nature itself: pools, raindrops, clouds-even the moon, mirror of the sun. Yet, in all cases, the mirror transforms the world into a representation, proffering a doubling of the spectator's perceptions. Mirrors reveal a miniature, transportable cosmos, always on the verge of disappearing.

It is water, in the form of reflecting pools, that forms the archetypal natural mirror, one that expands the imagination. The most active element of the baroque imagination is water in a state of perpetual overflow, always changing, always different, ungraspable. And yet, this fluidity possesses its own internal geometry,

CHANTILLY

even though today we have need of the folds, butterflies, and u~bil

ici of mathematical catastrophe theory to tie these infinite motifs of

the baroque sensibility to our own mortality. Gaston Bachelard

explains,

First of all, we must understand the psychological utility of mirrors of

water: water serves to naturalize our image, to restore a bit of innocence

and genuineness to the pridefulness of our intimate contemplation.

Mirrors are too civilized, too handy, too geometric; they are too obvious

ly tools of dreams to be adaptable to oneiric life. In the vivid preamble to

his so morally moving book [L'erreur de Narcisse], Louis Lavelle noted the

natural depth of aquatic reflection, the infinitude of the dream that it

suggests: "If one imagines Narcissus before a mirror, the resistance of the

glass is a barrier opposed to his endeavors. He strikes his brow and his

fists against it; he finds nothing if he goes behind it. The mirror impris

ons within itself a hidden world that escapes him, where he sees himself

without being able to grasp himself and which is separated from him by

a false distance which he can reduce, but never overcome. To the con

trary, the fountain is an open path for him."8

The instability of reflections in water-like the vague perceptions

seen in the flickering of candlelight-causes a visual idealization

where the image itself comes to life, escaping the fixed forms of the

reflected object. The reflected image is the dream, or the imagina

tion, of matter itself-a dream serving as overture to our own oneir

ic possibilities. Even calm waters have some degree of dynamism; the

pool is never a simple mirror. Gerard Genette writes,

As calm, as dormant as it may be, the water's surface feels the fall of a

flower, the passage of a bird, the agitations of the breeze: it undulates

even when stagnant, and the image of Narcissus undulates with it, ani

mating his forms in an objectless mimicry, distending them, contracting

them, bringing to light a disquieting plasticity. However, this image

remains an image, and its mobile freedom can be more revealing than

the frozen immortality of the mirror. But once the agitation is accentu

ated, and the undulation becomes a flickering, splitting up, or disper

sion; the continual elasticity of the wave is decomposed into an infinity

of juxtaposed facets, in which Narcissus disappears in a deceptive inter

mittence.9

-86-

A GARDEN OF MIRRORS

It is precisely the fluid, unstable effects of these aquatic mirrors that

emblematize the baroque sensibility, with its fascination for dou

blings, distortions, exaggerations; its desire for flight, dispersal and

evanescence; its passion for a vertigo in which the self is in flight

with the clouds, flowing with the waters, ultimately absorbed by the

world-a mutable form expressing the limits of the imagination.

The square reflecting pool at Vaux-le-Vicomte is utilized to

cast a reflection of the chateau (the initial viewpoint of the spectacle)

once all of the other illusions have been uncovered; the canal at

Versailles functions as a gigantic pool in which the sun is reflected

(creating the Sun King's own symbolic doppelganger); yet it is the

water of Chantilly-with its sundry reflections, its unstable powers,

its vacillating effects, its mutable forms, its ephemeral images-that

offers the richest effects. Chantilly evinces the surreptitious return of

the baroque in an epoch ever more given over to the neoclassic. The

major difference between Chantilly and other, more common,

catoptric machines of its epoch is that what is reflected at Chantilly

is primarily nature itself, and, most importantly, the spectator's ever

changing place within the scene. It is precisely the reflecting pools

that achieve the articulation between nature and artifice, between

landscape and architecture. These pools present nature transformed

into catoptric spectacle. Here Le Notre comes closest to achieving

the literal effect of the garden as microcosm-the world is trans

formed into its representation, temporarily contained in the crys

talline structure of water. Yet this microcosm is not a closed symbol

ic system, but rather an open specular field, where the world is not

only symbolically transformed, but especially catoptrically distorted.

Here, the spectacle consists of the evanescent effects of eternal nat

ural forms captured through the artifice of the most simple aquatic effects of landscape architecture.

Nature abounds in such catoptric effects. In fact, every drop

let of rain constitutes an elemental catoptric machine due to the

refractive properties of water. Descartes explains these principles in

his Metl!ores. 10 During a sun shower, because of the slightly differ

ent refractive angle of each raindrop, the observer will witness a par

ticular phenomenon of the transformation of sunlight: a rainbow.

The rainbow, from Rent Descartes, Mfrfores

Fountain for creating signs in the sky, from Rent Descartes, Mereores

A GARDEN OF MIRRORS

As Baltru.Saitis states, "The rain of micro-mirrors reflects a deformed sun."II

At the end of the eighth chapter of Meteores, entitled "On the Rainbow," Descartes utilizes his study of these natural phenomena to describe the manner in which a mechanism for creating signs in the sky could be constructed. According to the optical principles of the rainbow, a fountain could be created utilizing several different liquids of varying viscosities (and thus of different refractive indexes), so that the light passing through it would be refracted according to precisely calculated degrees, thus creating patterns in the sky.

The most spectacular natural phenomenon described by Descartes appears in part ten of Meteores: the apparition of several suns. During the occurrence of certain extremely rare atmospheric conditions, cloud formations can refract the light of the sun in such a manner that as many as seven suns may be seen simultaneously. (It is said that in 1625 the king of Poland witnessed such an illusion.) Nature reveals a plethora of false suns, without the aid of human artifice. At such times, the sun may even appear to be transformed into the moon-not unlike the joining of sun and moon in the Islamic apocalypse. Such effects were not lost upon the creators of the great spectacles of Louis XN's court. Louis Marin, in Le portrait du roi, describes the epitome of such optical, and certainly symbolic, transformations (specifically regarding the fifth day of the great fete of 1674 at Versailles, following Andre Felibien's descriptions):

Thus the end of the fifth day: fireworks and illuminations organized by

[Charles] LeBrun were fired off, "when the king was placed under a great

tent that was erected for him." Here is the final display: "Everything that

could be seen within the great extent of more than three hundred fath

oms was neither fire nor air nor water. These elements were so complete

ly mixed together that, being unrecognizable, a new element of a quite

extraordinary nature emerged from them. It seemed to be composed of a

thousand sparks of fire which, like a thick dust or rather an infinitude of

atoms of gold, sparkled amidst an ever greater light." Within this

upheaval of luminous appearance before the royal eye, a ne~ element is

created, which is simultaneously other than fire, air, water and the mix

ture that reduces them to a unity. It destroys the elements and totalizes

Vmai/ks, firncorh. <nfFaving by }nail Silotrtr~

A GARDJ!.N 0£1 MIRRORS

them, by means of an astonishing transmutAtion where the thousand

sparks of fiery dusr (fire, air, and water) become an inlinirude of atoms of

gold sparkling in a great light: a light which is metal, a metal which is

light, the king appears here in the figure of a grear cosmic alchemisc.l2

This is che ultimate manifestation of baroque imagery. Every element is rransformed inro its opposite, and rhc cosmos is in constant flux: a blaze of a.rtificial glory representing che totality of the oarural elements.

Cena.in ontologies, epistemologies and cosmologies prior co chose of Descartes were based upon rhe microcosm/ macrocosm paradigm and founded on principles of natural resemblance.I3 They would have us discover microcosmic signs everywhere: worlds reflected in a drop of water, a crystal ball, a garden pool; the labyrinth, or an entire garden, as symbol of che world; and, ultimately, our very souls as che hieroglyphs of cosmic being and the marks of destiny itself. As each microcosm implies a different metaphysics, as each symbol implies a different oncology, as each narrative implies a different epistemology and psychology, it must be also realized that the perceptual experience of the world is but a rhetorical effect, and char aesthetics does not merely apply to art, bur rather co experience in general.

For Descartes, the correspondences between the mysteries of narure and the mathematical laws of science were escablished as

certirude precisely because of whac he saw co be the homologies between che human and divine mind and will. The attempt to overcome the correspondence cheory of truth by means of the Cartesian mathtsis universalis--where the real and the rational merge according to the procedures based upon axiomatic truths within a grande

mlcaniqueo-would have collapsed in one ultimate mystery: the existence of God, and the corresponding intangibility of infinity. Finally, char illusory world conceived by Descartes's malinglnie (evil demon) appears no less apparent than the "real" world created by his God.

Both demon and God serve as pretexts co rationalize our own sensible lim.irations before the phenomenal and intelligible world.

Pascal wished to reinstate the primacy of theological mystery in che world; Descartes wished ro guarantee that such mystery would

-91 -

CHANTILLY

no longer restrain the advance of the sciences. Henceforth, the par

adigm of the microcosm as a sign of truth was banished from meta

physics, ontology, and epistemology, and relegated to aesthetics

which could escape universal physical laws by means of the effects of

pure, unfettered volition. This paradigmatic shift-separating what

would become aesthetics from theology, metaphysics, and science

is precisely one of the philosophical origins of modernity. Aesthetic

laws and effects-constructed beyond the limits of human under

standing, indeed independent of the need for cognition-permit the

dissolution of the geometric spirit, even while utilizing those very

same mathematical laws to aesthetic ends, as was the case for Le

Notre. For aesthetic "laws" are neither universal, eternal, nor im

mutable-they serve the project at hand, to be discarded when more

appropriate forms and structures are realized for the desired expres

sion. Such aesthetic laws are not universal rules, but rather localized,

particularized transformers, establishing style, not system. Gaston

Bachelard explains, "Poetry is an instantaneous metaphysics ....

While all other metaphysical experiences are prepared by inter

minable forewords, poetry refuses preambles, principles, methods,

proofs. It refuses doubt."14

Art may indeed express Descartes's hyperbolic doubt and

mathematical certainty, or Pascal's hyperbolic faith, but it has need

of none of this, of no axiomatic system-it necessitates nothing but

its own intuitions, and a certain technique.

Within the aesthetic formalism of Le Notre's gardens, the

symbolic, microcosmic effects are due precisely to the closure and

arbitrariness of the artistic system, where conceptual inconsistencies

are dissimulated by rhetorical effects, and where the physical insub

stantiality of infinity is overcome by optical procedures. In Le

Notre's aesthetics, the scholastic anachronism of microcosmic clo

sure is precisely what permits the utilization of mathematical theo

ries for symbolic effect. In his gardens, mathematics is not equiva

lent or adequate to nature; rather, nature is revealed and transformed

by means of a mathematized stylization. The style isLe Notre's, not

nature's or God's. It moved from the Renaissance and baroque ideal

of a trompe l'oeil, which produced the illusion of nature, to a system

-92-

A GARDEN OF MIRRORS

that unveils the very illusionism inherent within nature. There,

through an ultimate aesthetic and moral effort, the nature of illusion

itself could be grasped. Truth was founded on a series of aesthetic surprises and shocks.

It is well known that the fear of broken mirrors signifies dread

of the destruction of the world, and the even more immediate and

thus greater anguish of the human body torn to pieces. If the spec

ular splendor of Chantilly is somehow a historic sign of Le Grand Conde's submission to Le Roi Solei! (a fate also perhaps symbolized

by the destroyed world represented by the Enceladus at Versailles,

as most interpretations of this sculpture, other than my own, would

have it), or if this magnificent garden is but a psychological sign of

Conde's noble vanity, it must also be taken as a metaphysical sign

of the conceptual conflicts of that epoch, a struggle from which our

own modernism was born. But perhaps most of all, these gardens

give us a sense of place, where aquatic specularity transforms our

dread in the face of an infinite universe and a potentially rampant

technology into a momentary frivolity. It is a sign of the greatest

sublimation, that of cold mathematics and mortality back into life

and joy.

-93-

There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to

humanity, to whom, from afar, our disorder may seem order-our

unpicturesqueness picturesque; in a word, the earth-angels, for whose

scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose death-refined

appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by God the

wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres. 1

Edgar Allan Poe "The Domain of Arnheim, or the Landscape Garden"

f

Postfoce Other Fantasies

LA ndre Le Notre's gardens-traced by Pascal's theologi

cal nostalgia and Descartes's metaphysical mathematization-reveal the baroque as the interior limit of

distortion at the neoclassical origins of modernism. Yet we need a

certain aesthetic will-as well as a certain metaphysical suspension

of disbelief-to see these gardens in such a manner today. Apparent

ly, this aesthetic will is not quite as equally distributed among peo

ple as is the "common sense" that Descartes believed we all share.

Just as the inherent differences between the baroque and the neo

classic created a new aesthetic, and the seventeenth-century conflicts

between theology and modern metaphysics and science gave rise to

a new philosophy, so too do the very incompatibilities between

thought and desire create new phantasms-at least in those instances when they manage to move us at all.

The Princess Palatine recounted that in 1704, Monsieur de

Navailles, her son's former tutor, visited Le Notre's garden at Sceaux

to observe their splendors and beauty. Unmoved, he finally arrived

at the vegetable garden, where he exclaimed, "To tell the truth, now

there's some beautiful chicory!"2 This depreciation of the gardens

built for Colbert-the man who would have been prime minister,

and who himself opted for the practical over the aesthetic in the

plans for the facade of the Louvre-disclosed no phantasm, but

merely a disdain or indifference to the appearances and symbols of

-95-

POSTFACE

aristocratic, and perhaps divine, prestige. This was a purely rational

response, without a hint of ressentiment, at the very beginning of the

''Age of Enlightenment."

But perhaps the true measure of the worth ofLe Notre's mag

nificent gardens and chateaux can rather be traced to a certain exces

sive passion, indeed, a certain madness. In 1867 King Ludwig II of

Bavaria visited Paris and Versailles} Completely spellbound by those

monuments to the reign of his namesake, Louis XIV, he returned to

Bavaria and constructed at Linderhof a replica of the Petit Trianon,

renaming the locale Tmeicos-Ettal, an anagram of the phrase that

marked the absolutism of Louis XIV's power and narcissism, "L'Etat,

c'est moi." Louis XIV's exclamation is disarticulated into sheer non

sense. The victory of absolute monarchy under Louis XIV is conflat

ed with its demise under Ludwig II, in whose madness the last dream

of an absolute monarchy was manifested. This dream collapsed his

torically in 1871 with the unification of the German empire under

Bismarck-in an ironic twist of fate, William 1 of Prussia was

crowned German emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, in a

defeated France.

I might note, allegorically, that while the Grotto of Thetis at

Versailles paid homage to Le Roi Soleil by representing Apollo, the

Sun God, returning to his resting place in the marine grotto after the

day's journey, the blue grotto at Linderhof disclosed a very different

symbolism: it contained a painting representing Tannhauser in

Venus's dwelling. Tannhauser is the legendary man who, after par

taking of sundry earthly pleasures in Venus's underworld abode, went

to Rome to seek repentance. When it was not granted, he returned to

the underworld, lost forever. In the symbolic transition from Versailles

to Linderhof, rational Apollo is transformed into sensual Venus, the

sun gives way to eternal darkness, and metaphysical rationalism and

theological optimism vanish before the powers of positivism and

industrialist militarism.

But Ludwig II's nostalgia attained a truly superlative expression

and a distorted fate. After a second visit to Versailles, which con

firmed. his earlier passion and fixation, he constructed at Herren

chiensee a replica of Versailles containing a gallery of mirrors more

OTHER FANTASIES

splendid-and five meters longer-than the original. It also con

tained over one hundred portraits of Louis XIV. But while the court

at Versailles-a mechanism to assemble and survey the aristocracy

was used by Louis XIV to consolidate and maintain his power, the

simulacrum of Versailles at Herrenchiensee was used by the solitary

Ludwig II just one day per year. There, no longer in power and

already touched by madness, he variously invited either Louis XIV or

Marie Antoinette to dinner at a table majestically set for two.

Consider one more phantasm, one more allegory, that arose in

the epoch following France's 1870 war with Germany. Towards the

end of the nineteenth century, the gardens ofVaux-le-Vicomte were

renovated and partially reinvented by the father and son team of

Henri and Achille Duchene. In 1891, a gigantic copy of the statue of

the Farnese Hercules was erected at the end of the garden in a ges

ture that explicated and theatricalized the aesthetic subtleties of Le

Notre. This statue dominates the scene, and viewed from the

chateau it dissimulates the vanishing point; it thus articulates the

very site from which one must, after having traversed the gardens,

pivot in order to see the chateau. From the place of the statue, the

garden's initial vanishing point is transformed into the new view

point, while its originary viewpoint becomes the new vanishing

point; this position marks the closure of the perspectival system

which is a fortiori at work in the French formal garden. Perhaps not

coincidentally, it appears that Fouquet already possessed in his col

lections at Vaux a painting by Charles Le Brun representing the

apotheosis of Hercules. The seventeenth and nineteenth centuries

are thus tied by two representations of Hercules-one painted and

the other sculpted, one two- and the other three-dimensional

which are opposed in the imagination of the garden's renovators.

These two versions of Hercules thus constitute a sign of that spatial

closure and symbolic doubling perceived in the course of a prome

nade, thanks to the suppleness of the dimensions of time and space

and the reversibility of viewpoint and vanishing point. Depth, the

third dimension, is revealed to the extent that one traverses the gar

dens, where one discovers both the ruses of bidimensional art (be it

that of the Le Brun's painting or of Le Notre's gardens seen statically

-9?-

POSTFACE

from the chateau) and the corporeal seductions of the third dimen

sion. It is precisely within this aporia of dimensions that the imagi

nation is situated.

And today? What phantasms arise during our own visits to

these gardens? Could it be that our own nostalgia is manifested not

in the physical construction of a garden, but rather in the conceptu

al reconstruction of those very same metaphysical, theological, and

aesthetic systems in which we seek the origins of our modernity?

After all, are the textual constructions of our aesthetics and our

metaphysics any less delirious than Ludwig n's reconstruction of

Versailles, or, for that matter, than Louis XN's belief in his own

divine right? We must, in these gardens, mark off our own itinerary,

and seek those distonions, those phantasms, that reveal the patterns

of our own perfection.

The question must be left open so that, during our next visit

to Vai.J.X-le-Vicomte, Versailles, or Chantilly, it may remain at the

horizon of our thoughts, in felicitous complicity with our laby

rinthine phantasms.

·t··.··.· .. ·.· \' . {

.!'·''' .· /t.;

1: I

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, English translations of French texts are by Allen S. Weiss.

Preface I Charles Baudelaire, ''!.:Invitation au voyage" (1857), in Le Spleen de Paris, ed. David

Scott and Barbara Wright (Paris: Flammorion, I987), no. 2 See, for example, Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley: University

of California Press, I979) and William Howard Adams, Nature Perftcted: Gardens Through History (New York: Abbeville Press, I99I). Daniel Charles, "Gloses sur le Ryoan-ji," in Gloses sur john Cage (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, I978), 28o-281. Emphasis in the original .

4 Richard Wilbur, "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra," in Things ofThis World (New York: Harcoun Brace & Company, 1956).

5 Due de Saint-Simon, Mr!moires, vol. 28 (Paris: Hachette, I9I6), I6o.

6 Ibid., 74· 7 See John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape

Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I992). See Francis Edeline, Jan Hamilton Finlay (Paris: Hazan, 1977).

9 A detailed account of these events is contained in Peter Day, ed., Jan Hamilton Finlay: The Bicentennial Proposal, The French Wor, The Wor of Letter (Toronto: Art Metropole,

I989).

-100-

NOTES

Baroque Reflections, Neoclassic Inflections I Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris (I926; Paris: Gallimard, I953), I78. 2 Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, uans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis:

Uni~ersity of Minnesota Press, I986), 173-204, passim. This work, while centering specifically on the Spanish baroque, is nevertheless an excellent sociocultural study of the baroque sensibility in general. Blaise Pascal, Pensr!es, cited in Maravall, Culture of Baroque, 175.

4 Baltasar Gracian, El Criticon, cited in Maravall, Culture of Baroque, I77. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir: De l'esthi!tique baroque (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 76.

6 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, cited in Maravall, Culture of Baroque, 177. 7 ~e Brun's Conftrences were recently republished, along with a series of critical essays,

m La Nouvelle Revue de Ia Psychanalyse 2I (I98o); on the representation and theorization of facial expression, see the excellent work of Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, L' Histoire du visage (Paris: Rivages, I988), especially chapter 2, "Figures et visages des passions," which deals with Le Brun and the seventeenth century. My text is deeply indebted to this work.

8 Courtine and Haroche, Histoire du visage, 103. Emphasis in the original. 9 Norbert Elias, The Court Society (I969), uans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:

Pantheon, I983), 85.

IO See Courtine and Haroche, L'Histoire du visage, chapter 5, "Se taire, se posseder: Une archeologie du silence," and chapter 6, "Les formes dans Ia societe civile"; see also, Baltasar Gracian, L'Homme du cour, uans. Amelot de Ia Houssaie (Paris: Editions Gerard Lebovici, I987).

II On the history of Bernini's visit to France, including the plans for the Louvre, see Cecil Gould, Bernini in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

I2 Jean Rousset, Le Miroir enchante, cited in Gerard Genette, "Complexes de Narcisse," Figures I (Paris: Editions du Seuil, I966), 28.

I3 Gian Lorenzo, cited in Gould, Bernini in France, 93. I4 For an excellent introduction to the works ofLe Notre, see Bernard Jeanne!, Le Notre

(Paris: Hazan, I985). Works on le jardin de /'intelligence that Le Notre would have read include: Jacques Boyceau, Traite du jardinage selon les raisons de Ia nature et de !'art (I638); Andre Mollet, Le jardin de plaisir (165I); Claude Mollet, Theatre des plans et jardinages (I652); and Olivier de Serres, Le thr!atre d'agriculture et memage des champs (I65I). He was also familiar with works on perspective and anamorphosis, a list of which might include: Salomon de Caus, Les proportions tirr!es du premier livre d'Euclide (I624) and La perspective avec Ia raison des ombres et miroirs (I624); Jean-Fran~ois Niceron, La perspective curieuse ou magie artificielle des ejfets merveilleux (I638); and Pere du Breuil, La perspective pratique (1649). (See also note 5 in "Vaux-le-Vicomte: Anamorphosis Abscondita," supra.)

15 On the Carrousel, see "Versailles: Version of the Sun, The Fearful Difference," supra.

-IOI-

NOTES

Vaux-le- Vicomte I Miklos Szentkuthy, Vers !'unique metaphore, uans. Eva Toulouse (Paris: Jose Corti,

I99I), 27. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" (I96I), in The Primacy of Perception, uans.

Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, I964), I59-I90, pas

sim. Euclid, L'optique et Ia catoptrique (I624), uans. Paul Ver Eecke (Paris: Albert

Blanchard, I959), 6.

4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, uans. Alphonso Lingis

(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, I968), I39·

Jurgis Baluusaitis, Anamorphoses, ou Thaumaturgus Opticus (I955; Paris: Flammarion,

I984), 5· I owe the possibility of all research on anamorphosis, and by extension cur

rent investigations of linear perspective, to this exemplary study. Note that Jean

Fran~ois Niceron's La Perspective curieuse ou Magie artificielle des tffets merveilleux was

published in Paris in I638, a year after Rene Descartes's Geometrie and Dioptrique (both published in French); the larger version of Niceron's book, published in Latin

in I646, was entirled, Thaumaturgus Opticus; the French translation of Euclid's Optics

appeared in Paris in I 624.

6 See Jean-Louis Ferrier, Holbein/Les Ambassadeurs: Anatomie d'un chefd'oeuvre (Paris:

Denoel/Gonthier, I977), passim. 7 Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," I62.

8 Edward R Tufte, Envisioning Information (Chesire, CT: Graphics Press, I990), 50.

9 Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," I84.

10 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, I986), 66.

II Louis XIV, Maniere de montrer les jardins de Versailles (I689; I705), edited by Simone

Hoog (Paris: Editions de Ia Reunion des musees nationaux, I982).

12. Andre Felibien, in Louis XIV, Mani'ere de montrer, I2.

I3 La Princesse Palatine, Lettres (I853; Paris: Mercure de France, 1985).

I4 Charles Perrault, "Le labyrinthe de Versaill~s" (Paris, I675), in Contes (Paris:

Gallimard, I98I), 240.

I5 Madame de Sevigne, cited in Paul Morand, Fouquet ou le Solei/ offosque (Paris:

Gallimard, I96I), 98.

I6 Anonymous, cited in Morand, Fouquet, 12.0.

I7 Here is an anecdotal example of the intimate ties berween art and metaphysics: while

Le N oue would have certainly read Descartes, Descartes apparenrly acquired the

plans of the gardens of the Tuileries to show his students.

I8 Deleuze, Foucault, 96.

-102-

NOTES

Versailles 1 Louis-Sebastien Mercier, L'an 2440 (Paris, I770).

2 Louis XIV, Le mmer de roi (reprint of Mbnoires, I662; Paris: Editions de Kerdraon,

1987).

On the Carrousel, see Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le roi machine (Paris: Minuit, I981),

41-46. The other chiefs, with their nations, emblems, and mottoes, were: Monsieur

(the King's brother), Persia, the moon, Uno sole minor (only the sun is greater than

me); the Prince of Conde, Turkey, a crescent, Crescit ut ascipitur (he increases as he is

looked at); the Duke of Enghien, India, a star, Magno de lumine lumen (a light that

comes from a greater one); the Duke of Guise, American Savages, a lion overwhelm

ing a tiger, Altiora praesumo (I aspire to greater things). The composition of the King's

own quadrille was as follows: the Count of Vivo nne, an ardent mirror, Tua munera jacto (I spread your presents); the Duke of Saint-Aignan, a laurel uee exposed to the

sun, Soli (to him alone); the Count ofNavailles, an eagle looking at the sun, Probasti (you have tested me); the Count of Lude, a sundial exposed to the sun, Te sine nomen iners (I am nothing without you); the Duke of La Feuillade, a girasole turned toward

the sun, Uni (for him alone); the Marquis of Villequier, a soaring eagle, Uni militat astro (he fights for a single star); the Duke ofDuras, a lion looking at the sun, De tuoi sgnardi mio ardore (my ardor comes from your ga:~.e).

4 Andre Felibien, Description sommaire du chateau de Versailles (Paris, I674), 279; cited

in Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, 198I), 230-3I.

See Apostolides, Le roi machine, passim. On the social history of Versailles, see also

Guy Brett, Louis XiVS Versailles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I986).

6 La, dans des chars doris, le Prince avec sa Cour Vtl gouter Ia fraicheur sur le dec/in du jour. L'un et !'autre SoleiL unique en son espece, Etale aux regardants sa pompe et sa richesse. Phoebus brille a l'envie du Monarque Franrais; On ne sait bien souvent a qui donner sa voix: Tous deux sont pleins d'iclat et rayonnants de gloire. Jean de La Fontaine, Les amours de Psiche et de Cupidon (I669), in vol. 3 of Oeuvres Completes de La Fontaine (Paris: Pagnerre, I859), 86. Note that in the chateau, the

Hall of Apollo (which served as the crown room), contained a painting by Charles

de Ia Fosse, Le lever du Solei/, depicting Phoebus in a chariot illuminating the world

and routing the powers of darkness.

7 Enfin, par une a/lie aussi large que belle, On descend vers deux mers d'une forme nouvelle, L'une est un ronda pans, /'autre est un long canal Miroirs ou /'on n'a point epargne le crista!. Au milieu du premier, Phoebus, sortant de l'onde, A quitte de Thetis Ia demeure profonde. En rayons infinis l'eau sort de son flambeau; On voit presque en vapeur se resoudre cette eau. Ibid., 87-88.

-103-

[' I' ' ~'

NOTES

8 Erwin Panofsky, "Die Perspective als Symbolische Form," in Vortriige der Bibliothek Warburg (I924-25), 258/f; reprinted in La perspective comme forme symbolique, trans.

Guy Ballange (Paris: Minuit, I975), I25. On the structure and use of linear perspec

tive, see John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and

Faber, I957); and Samuel Y. Edgenon, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Harper & Row, I975).

9 Panofsky, "Die Perspective," I57· •

10 John Dixon Hunt, "The Garden as Cultural Object," in Stuart Wrede and William

Howard Adams, eds., Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Museum of Modern An, I99I), 22.

n Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper & Row, I972), 64.

I2 Rene Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy (I644), vol. I of The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I973), 230.

I3 Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason (1637), vol.

I of The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1973), I03-04.

14 Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I988), I24.

I5 Ibid.

I6 Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique ou fart de penser (I662), pre£ by Louis Marin (Paris: Flammarion, I970) 363. Also koown as La logique de Port-Royal, this

work has seen approximately fifty French editions since its initial publication in I662

(the year of the Carrousel; and the year after the Jansenist school at Port-Royal was

closed down as a result of their conRict with the Jesuits) apd the first major revisions

and additions to the text in I664 (the year of Les plaisirs de l'tle enchantie). Louis

Marin's superb study of this text, La critique du discours (Paris: Minuit, I975), guides

my present study.

I7 Blaise Pascal, Pensees (Paris: Editions de Port-Royal, I67o), trans. A J. Krailsheimer

(Baltimore: Penguin Books, I968), 89-90. (Pascal began writing the notes from which

the Pensees were composed in I658.)

I8 Arnauld and Nicole, La logique, 364.

I9 Brice Senece de Bauderon, L'Apollon franfois; cited in Apostolides, Le roi machine, I38.

On the divinity of the king, see Ernst H. Kamorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

20 Louis XIV, Le metier du Roi, 91.

2I Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation, I89.

22 See Allen S. Weiss, "De Ia sublimation baroque," in Azur, ed. Jacqueline Lichtenstein

Qouy-en-Josas: Fondation Cattier, I993), I64-79·

23 Arnauld and Nicole, La logique, n3-I5.

24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" (I96I), in The Primacy of Perception, trans.

Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, I964), I68-69.

25 Pierre Nicole, Essai de morale (Paris: I723-35); cited in Marin, La critique du discours, 228.

26 Ibid., 226-27.

-104-

27 Arnauld and Nicole, La logique, n2.

28 Ibid., III.

29 Marin, La critique du discours, 227-28.

30 Louis XIV, Le metier du Roi, 85.

3I Ibid., I62.

NOTES

32 Due de Saint-Simon, Memoires (I739-55; I829-30), cited in Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (I969; New York: Pantheon, I983), I3I.

33 Cited in the notes to the republication of Louis XIV's guide to Versailles, Maniere de montrer les jardins de Versailles, ed. Simone Hoog (I689; I705; Paris: Editions de Ia

Reunion des Musees Nationaux, I982), 66.

34 Henri Maldinay, cited in Denise and Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Le roman des jardins de France (Paris: Pion, I987), I4Jn.

35 Henry More, in a letter to Rene Descartes of I648; cited in Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, I957), n4-I5.

Emphasis in the original.

36 Ibid., II9.

37 Charles Cotin, Rejlexions sur Ia conduite du roi (I663), cited in Apostolides, Le roi machine, I29.

38 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, vol. I of The Philosophical Works, I75·

39 Le Soleil las de voir ce spectacle barbare, Precipite sa course; et, passant sous les eaux, Vo porter Ia clarte chez des peuples nouveaux. L'horreur de ces deserts s'accrott par son absence: La Nuit vient sur un char conduit par le Silence; II amene avec lui Ia crainte en fUnivers.

La Fontaine, Les Amours, 33·

40 Pascal, Pensees 20I, 95·

-105-

,.,;

II

NOTES

Chantilly I Giovan Battista Marino, L'Adone (Paris: I623), canto 9, stanza I08.

2 In a letter to the Earl of Portland dated I698, Le Notre, just two years before his death,

wrote: "Remember the beautiful gardens of France: Versailles, Fontainebleau, Vaux,

and especially Chantilly." Cited in Bernard Jeanne!, Le Notre (Paris: Hazan, I985), I04.

The major seventeenth-century works on catoptrics include: Rene Descartes, Diop

trique and Meteores (I637); Salomon de Caus, La perspective avec !a raison des ombres

et miroirs (London: I6I2; Paris: I624); Jean-Fran~ois Niceron, La perspective curieuse ou magie artificielle des ejfets merveilleux (I638); Le Pere Mersenne, La catoptrique

(I65I). See the excellent recent study, Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Le miroir (Paris: Elmayanl

Editions du Seuil, I978).

4 Charles Perrault, Le miroir ou Ia metamorphose d'Orante (Grenoble, I66I; Paris:

Gallimard/Folio, I98I), 203-2I7, passim, cited in Baltrusaitis, Le miroir, 9I-92.

Gaston Bachelard, L'eau et les reves (Paris: Jose Corti, I942), 35-36. Emphasis in the

original.

6 Gerard Genette, "Complexe de Narcisse," in Figures I (Paris: Editions du Seuil, I966),

2I-22.

7 Encyclopedie, cited in Baltrusaitis, Le miroir, 229.

8 Bachelard, L'eau et les reves, 32-33.

9 Genette, "Complexe de Narcisse," 23.

IO Rene Descartes, "Discours Huitieme: De l'arc-en-ciel," Mlfteores, in Oeuvres et lettres

(Paris: Bibliotheque de Ia Pleiade, Gallimard, I953), 23o-44.

II Baltru8aitis, Le miroir, 49·

I2 Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris: Minuit, I98I), 247· Emphasis in the original.

I3 See Michel Foucault, The Order ofThings (New York: Vintage, I973).

I4 Gaston Bachelard, L'intuition de l'imtant (I932; Paris: Denoel, I985), I03.

Posiface I Edgar Allan Poe, "The Domain of Arnheim, or the Landscape Garden," in The Com

plete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, I938), 609.

2 La Princesse Palatine, Lettres (I853; Paris: Mercure de France, I985), 232.

Louis II de Baviere, Carnets secrets, I86g-I886, trans. Jean-Marie Argeles (Paris:

Grasser, I987 ), passim.

-106-

Bibliography

Adams, William Howard. The Frmch Gardm, IJoo-I8oo. New York: Braziller, 1979·

Adams, William Howard. Nature Perftt:ted: Gardms Through History. New York:

Abbeville Press, 1991.

Apostolides, Jean-Marie. Le roi machine, Paris: Minuit, 1981.

Arnauld, Antoine and Pierre Nicole. La logique ou /'art de penser (1662). Preface by

Louis Marin. Paris: Flammarion, 1970.

Bachelard, Gaston. L'eau et les reves. Paris: Jose Corti, 1942.

Bachelard, Gaston. L'intuition de l'imtant (1932). Paris: Denoel, 1985.

Baltrusaitis, Jurgis. Abr!rratiom (1957). Paris: Flammarion, 1983.

Baltrusaitis, Jurgis. Anamorphoses, ou Thaumaturgus Opticus (1955; 1969). Paris:

Flammarion, 1984.

Baltrusaitis, Jurgis. Le miroir. Paris: Elmayan/Editions du Seuil, 1978.

Brett, Guy. Louis XIVS Versailles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. La folie du voir: De l'esthitique baroque. Paris: Galilee,

1986.

Charles, Daniel. "Gloses sur le Ryoan-ji," Gloses sur john Cage. Paris: Union Generale

d'Editions, 1978.

Comar, Philippe. La perspective m jeu: Les dessous de !'image. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

Courtine, Jean-Jacques and Claudine Haroche. Histoire du visage. Paris: Rivages, 1988.

Damisch, Hubert. L'origine de Ia perspective. Paris: Flammarion, 1987.

Day, Peter, ed. Jan Hamilton Finlay: The Bicmtennial Proposal The Frmch Wtlr, The

Wtlr of Letters. Toronto: Art Metro pole, 1989.

de Chantelou, Paul Frean. Journal de voyage du cavelier Bernin m France (1665). Paris:

Pandora, 1981.

de La Fontaine, Jean. Les Amours de Psichi et de Cupidon (1669). Vol. 3 of Oeuvres

Complhes de La Fontaine. Paris: Pagnerre, 1859.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Paris: Minuit, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles. Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Minuit, 1988.

Descartes, Rene. Discours de Ia methode (1637); Dioptrique (1637); Geomr!trie (1637);

-!08-

\_; (

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mr!ditatiom sur Ia philosophie premiere (1641); Meteores (1637); Les passiom de

l'ltme (1649); Les principes de Ia philosophie (1644). Oeuvres et lettres. Paris: Biblio

theque de Ia Pleiade, Gallimard, 1953.

Descartes, Rene. The Philosophical Workr of Descartes. Translated by G. R. T. Ross.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Edeline, Francis. Jan Hamilton Finlay. Paris: Hazan, 1977.

Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York:

Harper & Row, 1975.

Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York:

Pantheon, 1983.

Euclid. L'optique et Ia catoptrique (1624). Translated by Paul ver Eecke. Paris: Albert

Blanchard, 1959.

Felibien, Andre. Description sommaire du chftteau de Versailles. Paris, 1674.

Ferrier, Jean-Louis. Holbein/Les Ambassadeurs: Anatomie d'un chefd'oeuvre. Paris:

Denoel/Gonthier, 1977.

Foucault, Michel. The Order ofThing.r. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Genette, Gerard. "Complexe de Narcisse." Figures I. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966.

Gould, Cecil. Bernini in France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Gracian, Baltasar. L'Homme du cour. Translated by Amelot de Ia Houssaie. Paris: Edi-

tions Gerard Lebovici, 1987.

Harbison, Robert. The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Archi

tectural Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Hazelhurst, F. H. Gardens of Illusion: The Gmius of Andre Le Notre. Nashville: Vander

built University Press, 1980.

Hazelhurst, F. H. jacques Boyceau and the Frmch Formal Gardm. Athens, GA: Univer

sity of Georgia Press, 1966.

Hunt, John Dixon. Gardem and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape

Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

Hunt, John Dixon. The Gmius of Place: The English Landscape Gardm, I62o-I82o.

New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

"Jardins contre nature." Traverses 5-6. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983.

Jeanne!, Bernard. Le Notre. Paris: Hazan, 1985.

Jellicoe, Geoffrey, Susan Jellicoe, Patrick Goode, Michael Lancaster, eds., The Oxford

Companion to Gardens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Judovitz, Dalia. Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origim of Modernity.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957·

Kemp, Martin. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in m.stern Art From Brunelleschi

and Seurat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Koyre, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins Press, 1957.

Laroze, Catherine. Une histoire semuelle des jardim. Paris: Olivier Orban, 1990.

Le Brun, Charles. Confermce sur !'expression des passiom (1668). Reprinted in La

-!09-

•., '!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nouvelle Revue de Ia Psychanalyse 21 (1980).

Le Dantec, Denise and Jean-Pierre. Le roman des jardim de France. Paris: Pion, 1987.

Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, ed. Azur. Jouy-en-Josas: Fondation Cartier, 1993.

Louis n de Baviere. Carnm secrets, I86ri886. Translated byJean-Marie Argeles. Paris:

Grasset, 1987.

Louis XN. Maniere de montrer les jardim de Versailles (1689; 1705). Edited by Simone

Hoog. Paris: Editions de Ia Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1982.

Louis XN. Le mrftier de roi. Reprint of Mlmoires (1662). Paris: Editions de Kerdraon,

1987. Maravall, Jose Antonio. Culture of the Baroque. Translated by Terry Cochran.

Minneapolis: Universiry of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Marin, Louis. La critique du discours. Paris: Minuit, 1975.

Marin, Louis. Le portrait du roi. Paris: Minuit, 1981.

Merleau-Ponry, Maurice. "Eye and Mind" (1961). The Primacy of Perception. Translated by Carleton Dallery. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Universiry Press,

1964.

Merleau-Ponry, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern Universiry Press, 1968.

Miller, Naomi. Heavenly Caves: Rejlectiom on the Garden Grotto. New York: Braziller,

1982.

Moore, Charles W., William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, Jr., eds. The Poetics ofGardem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.

Morand, Paul. Fouquet ou le Solei! offosque. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

Mosser, Monique and Georges Teyssot, eds. The Architecture of 'Western Gardem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

Norbert-Schultz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture.

New York: Rizzoli, 1980.

Panofsky, Erwin. La perspective comme forme symbolique (1924-25). Translated by Guy

Ballange. Paris: Minuit, 1975.

Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Pascal, Blaise. Pemees (Paris: Edition de Port-Royal, 1670). Translation by A. J. Krailsheimer. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968.

Pelegrin, Benito. Ethique et esthetique du baroque. Aries: Acte Sud, 1985.

Prest, John. The Garden of Eden: The Boranic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise. New Haven: Yale Universiry Press, 1981.

La Princesse Palatine. Lettres (1853) Paris, Mercure de France, 1985.

Rousset, Jean. La litttfrature de l'llge baroque en France. Paris: Jose Corti, 1954·

Santarcangeli, Paolo. Le livre des labyrinthes. Translated by Monique Lacau. Paris:

Gallimard, 1974·

Due de Saint-Simon. Memoires (1739-55; 1829-30). Paris: Hachene, 1916.

Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. Paris: Erlitions du Seuil, 1975.

Tapie, Alain, ed. Les vanites dam Ia peinture au XVI~ si'ecle. Paris: Editions de Ia Reunion

des Musees Nationaux, 1990.

Thacker, Christopher. The History of Gardem. Berkeley: Universiry of California

-no-

,

Press, 1979.

Tufte, Edward R. Envisioning Information. Chesire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990.

Walton, Guy. Loius XIV's Versailles. Chicago: Universiry of Chicago Press, 1986.

White, John. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. London: Faber and Faber, 1957·

Wiebenson, D. The Picturesque Garden in France. Princeton: Princeton Universiry

Press, 1978.

Wrede, Stuart and William Howard Adams, eds. Denatured Visiom: Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991.

Image credits cover: Andre Chaste!

22: Giraudon (chateau de Versailles)

28: Giraudon (musee du Louvre)

30, 40, 42, 54 56, 82T, 90: Bibliotheque nationale

36T: from Panofsky, Erwin. La perspective comme forme symbolique (1924-25).

Translated by Guy Ballange. Paris: Minuit, 1975.

36B: from Baluu5aitis, Jurgis. Anamorphoses, ou Thaumaturgus Opticus (1955; 1969).

Paris: Flammarion, 1984.

44, 6o, 76, 82B: Allen S. Weiss

88: from Descartes, Rene. Meteores (1637). Oeuvres et lettres. Paris: Bibliotheque de Ia

P!eiade, Gallimard, 1953·

-lll-

Allen S. Weiss is a writer, teacher, and translator working in the fields

of art history, performance studies, comparative literature, and philosophy. He is most recently author of Perverse Desire and the

Ambiguous Icon (State University of New York Press, 1994), Flamme

et festin: Une poetique de la cuisine (Publications Java, 1994), and

Phantasmic Radio (Duke University Press, 1995). He is guest editor

of a special issue of The Drama Review on experimental radio (1996)

and of a special issue of Lusitania on gastronomy (1996).

..

7662 oos

weiss_mirrors of infinity

Documents