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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2005 (2005)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2005

(2005)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Margaret C. Jacob
Bernard Picart and the Turn toward Modernity

Margaret C. Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA where she teaches in the history of science and European history. Her latest book, The Origins of Western Cosmopolitanism: From Alchemy to the Stock Exchanges will appear in 2006 with the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2004 she published with Larry Stewart, Practical Matter. Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, Harvard University Press.

In the 1970s and quite by accident, I came upon the magnificent engraver, Bernard Picart (1673-1733). Led to him by a manuscript found in the British Library in the papers of the English freethinker, John Toland,1 I felt as if I had discovered the previously unknown, that I was singlehandedly rescuing Bernard Picart and his friends, Prosper Marchand, Charles Levier, and others, from the obscurity of history. They figured prominently in my The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (1981). At that time I may have been more right than wrong - at least about their obscurity - but such is no longer the case. This essay makes a small contribution to what will be a series of papers to be produced by an entire équipe de chercheurs that will give an international conference at the Clark Library in Los Angeles in 2007.2 Our attention with focus on his magnum opus, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples de monde (1723+, appearing first in French, then Dutch, English, German etc.). Perhaps other international conferences will be called and certainly we hope to publish a published collection of learned papers. There will be working seminars, innumerable emails, and even, if all goes well, an exhibition of his work in Los Angeles.

Back in the 1970s, equipped with all my youthful American zeal, I had seen Picart through a lens that obscured as much as it illuminated. At that time there were also not many of guides, visual or otherwise. Certainly no English language historiography on him existed; that, by the way, is largely true today. But between 1981, when The Radical Enlightenment appeared, and now, scholars from a variety of European countries, writing in French and Dutch, have expanded our knowledge of Picart and his historical context. The details of his life still remain tantalizing vague, and it is questionable if we have gone beyond the biography provided by his widow in Impostures innocentes (1734).3 But so much more is now



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Fig. 1. As far as this author knows, this engraving is the earliest extant one by Picart. With permission of the Getty Research Institute.


known about the Republic that gave him refuge, and about the complexity of Anglo-Dutch relations, about the particular, and skewed, international framework within which I then, somewhat naively and too exclusively, placed him.

The framework was skewed because before 1709 and his permanent exile in the Dutch Republic, Picart was first and foremost French, and by profession a dedicated engraver. He was born in France in 1673, and in the 1680s he had been trained by l'Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, as well as by his father, the well-known engraver and member of the academy, Etienne Picart (d. 1721).4 The earliest work by Bernard Picart, that I have been able

to locate, turns up at the Getty Research Institute's Library in Los Angeles. Entitled ‘Jesus dit au Paralytique: mon fils confiance vous pechez’, the engraving of Christ about to cure the paralytic is an entirely pious work and dates remarkably from 1685 when the engraver would have been twelve or thirteen.5

The markings in the lower left hand corner (Fig. 1) indicate that Picart did both the picture and the engraving. We do not know why. We still know little about his actual training or about the academy's curriculum at the time, but we do have a better sense of the cultural stakes and intellectual disputes at large in the French artistic world wherein Picart matured.

When Picart was a student at the academy, what mattered were the Great Masters, led first and foremost by Poussin, followed by his pupil, Charles le Brun (d. 1690).6 This is the moment when, despite his rather humble background, Poussin (d. 1665) became, inter alia, the darling of the French court, interpreted to have adorned absolutism with the facade of mannerist beauty.7 Such cultural power recently accorded required its theorists and apologists.8 The major contemporary interpreter of Poussin, and the official historiographer of the academy at the time, was André Félibien. Broadly speaking an Aristotelian, Félibien adapted literary theory to the art of painting. Central to his ideas lay the notion of the unity of pictorial subjectmatter. The artist, he argued, must possess an intellectual mastery of his subject matter, and his practical, artisanal capabilities - his use of design and color - while important, are entirely secondary to his knowledge and erudition.9 For Félibien, Poussin represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement. In theoretical statements, written by them both, painting is seen to express reason and understanding, and the emotional impact of the work follows from ‘the reading’ of its unified subject matter as imposed by the intelligence of the artist. To paraphrase Poussin, the subject of a painting determined the manner in which it should be painted.10 In the late seventeenth century academy, led by the royal painter Le Brun, orthodox artistic theory still owed its heaviest debt to the ancients and, of course, (as interpreted by the scholastics) to a version of Aristotle. In the 1690s, Picart engraved a series of paintings originally done by Le Brun on the military triumphs of



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Fig. 2+3. These copies are from the Prentenkabinet, University of Leiden. Figure 3 shows the retraction that Picart was forced to do in the following year.


Alexander the Great, so apt for the bellicosity of Louis XIV. At the time when Picart was chosen to do the engraved replicas, he must have been well on his way to a favored status within the French artistic establishment.11

But other forces, at variance with that establishment, were at work. When Picart was a student, and largely from a position outside the academy, new voices in art theory, led by Roger de Piles, were demanding change, and we now know that ultimately Picart sided with them. Indeed a self-portrait by Picart has him surrounded by the books of De Piles, and the theorist and his wife became godparents to Picart's son, born in 1703.12 It is significant that De Piles had fallen under Cartesian influences, and in the pivotal quarrel that dominated the last quarter of the seventeenth century - between the ancients and modems - he sided with the latter. When we contemplate the most controversial engraving of Picart's French period, La verité recherchée par les philosophes, a paean of praise for Descartes, we need to remember De Piles.13

Let me recapitulate before moving forward. I am here attempting to make a small start at correcting what got left out of my account of Picart when I wrote The Radical Enlightenment. It offered no in-depth account of Picart's French background and thus could not account for why it might have been that in November of 1710, so early in his exile in the Dutch Republic, Picart turned up in the company of men he called his ‘frères,’ a small ‘secret’ society of publishers and book sellers. The manuscript meeting record of one evening in their lives somehow made its way into Toland's possession. Written by Marchand, it identifies Picart as Barbouilleur et enlumineur de l'Ordre, thus as belonging to this group that playfully called itself ‘a chapter’ in les Chevaliers de la Jubilation. These brothers met under gaillardes & joyeuses constitutions - at a time when in French the word constitutions did not refer to statutes or meeting rules - and they were led by their Grand Maître. Both terms I have argued were of English origin and indebted to freemasonry. Clearly, as I demonstrated in The Radical Enlightenment, there were binding ties between English thinkers and les chevaliers.14 But Picart started out neither English nor Dutch. Yet, arguably out of his French experiences, he arrived as an exile eager for new ones, already well disposed to be subversive, Anglophone and certainly anti-French.

Most of les chevaliers, along with Jean Rousset de Missy, Marchand's close friend and the leader of Amsterdam freemasonry, can be associated with the production and dissemination of some of the most subversive literature of the early Enlightenment. Picart made significant contributions to that literature in the form of engravings that offered bold statements. As early as 1698 Picart commented on the religion of the Moscovites in a way that depicted it as just as interesting and meaningful as any other religion, and he dwelt upon their original paganism in considerable detail. He had found work with the premier publisher of anonymous literature, ‘Pierre Marteau of Cologne,’ a phony imprint that we believe may have been begun by the Dutch house, Elsevier, but by the 1690s had become ‘public property’ in that any number of publishers, still probably Dutch, could claim to be Marteau.15 Picart did the engravings for this relativistic account of the religion of the Moscovites.16 Many of the engravings in that work have a style that turns up later in his mature masterpiece on the ceremonies and customs of all the religions of the world. They also point toward the ethnographical tilt in his approach to all religions. But Picart still lived in France when he engraved scenes for the religion of the Moscovites. Long before he left permanently for Holland, but after he had visited the Low Countries, thus by late in the 1690s, Picart may have begun to develop a taste for the unorthodox, or at the very least a taste for the historicity of religions, for assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of them all.



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Fig. 4. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Teyler's Museum, Haarlem.


Certainly the theme of religious history sits prominently in the works of one of the finest Dutch engravers of the age, Romeyn de Hooghe (d. 1708), but so far as we can now tell no direct link existed between Picart in his French period and De Hooghe.17 Both have now been linked to the radical phase of the Enlightenment, and certainly after his arrival in the Republic Picart knew the work of De Hooghe. Predictably he picked up on his anti-French engravings, making a copy of one of the most famous of this bitterly critical chronicle of rape, murder and pillage.18 These famous engravings by De Hooghe sought to memorialize French atrocities committed during the invasion of the Republic in 1672.

But it should also be noted, however, that De Hooghe belonged to an earlier generation. He still referred to indigenous people encountered by Europeans as ‘diaboliques et idolatres’.19 Working in the 1720s, Picart seldom employed that sort of language; on the whole his vision was too relativizing for such value judgments.

As we examine the specifically French sources that gave Picart his sense of authority, the bold voice that informed his work,20 we also need to remember the complex international character of late seventeenth century cultural and religious contestations. While still living in the France of Louis XIV, something made Picart quietly convert to Protestantism - at a most dangerous moment. After 1685 Protestants had been outlawed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. While undergoing this religious transformation in the 1690s, and during a war, Picart made various visits to the Low Countries, both north and south, first to Antwerp and then to The Hague. He turns up in Antwerp in 1695, and perhaps significantly for the story of his intellectual development, Picart did a celebratory engraving of William III's victory at Namur. Hardly what we would expect from the engraver of Le Brun who helped to celebrate William's chief enemy. Certainly the glorification of William III was a theme dear to the heart of De Hooghe, and it is conceivable that Picart may have seen his work, or other Orangist engravings, during his time in Antwerp. It is also just conceivable that Picart's maturation within the French world of art and letters may ultimately have been transformed by what he saw and experienced in the Low Countries.

But before we place Picart in his Dutch context, and thus in the setting where he did his most historically significant work, we will want to know what can be said about the French influences that may have been at work in his decision, made in 1709, to leave France and the lucrative system of patronage that it offered any talented, well-connected artist. Once in Amsterdam Picart, like his close friend, Marchand, had to make his living by his hands alone. An historical anecdote has it that Picart was able to slip back occasionally to Paris, aided by a pass of safe conduct secured for him by the artist, Antoine Coypel. If this is true, then Picart repaid the favor with satires on the debauchery of the French court and the 1720 financial debacle caused by John Law.21

Something in his French years, augmented almost certainly by his experiences in the Low Countries, must have valorized Picart's self-reliance, his commitment to Protestantism, as well as it honed his critical edge. By the 1690s he possessed in style and vision what he - and we - would define as early modernity. His modern approach to art and engraving made pos-



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Fig. 5. Dutch translation of 1727 of Cérémonies et coutumes. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Teyler's Museum, Haarlem.


sible his many pictorial projects, in particular, over two hundred engravings at the core of Cérémonies et coutumes, his most extraordinary work. It is rightly regarded as one of the first naturalist accounts of the religions of the world, a precursor of what would become anthropology. His widow stated that Picart designed all the engravings in that seven volume work, and also that he actually engraved many of them. The written part of the text has long been assigned to Jean-Frederic Bernard, another French Protestant refugee whose works also nestle comfortably in the literature we now associate with the radical Enlightenment.22

To appreciate Picart's boldness, the audacity of his approach to religion, requires that we turn to the cultural wars - to use the phrase applied to them by Joan Dejean - that occupied

French intellectual life in the closing decades of the century. Out of them evolved ‘numerous structures essential to intellectual modernity.’23 Dejean traces the emergence of a distinctively modern form of literary production; art and art theory are largely beyond the scope of her interests. The seismic shift she demonstrates in the writing of literature, particularly in the work of Madeleine de Scudéry, and in the imagined effects newly attributed to reading, entailed the mapping of the emotions which in turn led to ‘the most decisive moment in the French reinvention of the human heart.’24 Taking her theoretical cue from Descartes on the passions, Scudéry went far beyond him, and wedded emotion to literature as its most willed and immediate effect. Under Cartesian inspiration similar approaches to the effect of music on the senses, passions and emotions were also invoked by the moderns.25 Increasingly we see that the so-called quarrel between the ancients and the moderns entailed the articulation of a new understanding of the self, what Descartes called un vrai homme, ‘a real man [having] the qualities of courage, resoluteness, and authenticity necessary for a free life’.26 Intuitively, Scudéry understood the contours of this new, modern self. Most famously, in the realm of ethics and philosophy, so too did Spinoza. And to this generation of innovators we must also add the anonymous French pornographers of the period who in fact invented the modern genre, and in the process abandoned Aristotle for a materialist rendering of nature deeply indebted to an heretical reading of the new mechanical philosophy.27 Significantly a few pornographic engravings survive in the various collections of Picart's engravings.28

 

A parallel move that links the self to the newly liberated passions occurs in art and art theory, in the intellectual movement with which Picart may now also be associated. Again the key figure is Roger de Piles. As early as the 1670s he weighed into the controversy about the superiority of Rubens to Poussin, sided with Rubens, and proclaimed the role of color and the immediacy of the visual in giving art its direct emotional appeal. The freedom assigned to the artist to move the viewer undermined the notion that the subject of a work must determine its manner. De Piles wrote from outside the academy, as an amateur whose success with the wider public eventually forced the academy in 1699 to admit him.29 De Piles argued for the immediate sensual impact of painting, that it should ‘express passions and emotions’.30 Descartes offers guidance on the passions, but his definitions must be augmented by the artist: ‘the passions of the soul are not visible in the lines of the face, they often re-



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Fig. 6. Title page of the Metamorphoses d'Ovide. Reprinted with the kind permission of the University of Leiden.


quire the assistance of the other parts of the body’.31 It is said in the scholarly literature that Picart met De Piles when he was a spy for France operating in the Dutch Republic, but when a student in Paris, Picart must at least have known of him. Certainly they were well and closely acquainted by 1703 when the Picarts chose him to be godfather to their son.

Rather than seeing the painter as imposing form on the matter of canvas and paint, De Piles turned to the sensationalist epistemology of the new science to reenforce the impact that art could provoke: ‘the more forcibly and faithfully painting imitates nature, the more directly and rapidly does it lead us to its end; which is, to deceive the eye, and the surer proofs does it give us of its true idea’.32 The goal of art becomes ‘the simple and faithful im-

itation of the motions which express nature’.33 The painter observes the truth of motions, or emotions, in his portraits; he does not embellish them with falsities or mannerisms.34 Put in the words of Svetlana Alpers, De Piles ‘turned the appeal of painting from mind to eye or from cognition to perception’.35 He contradicted the scholastic version of Aristotle that maintained the superiority of literature to art (because mental performance must always be more noble than manual), and De Piles proclaimed that when his principles are followed, ‘painting therefore yields a more lively pleasure than poesy’. Reasoning is found as much in painting as in poesy.36 Even engravings could employ shading or graying to achieve an emotional impact. The overall effect of De Piles' mechanistic theory of art was to draw attention to the experience of the viewer, to the authenticity of the self as moved by the artist.37

By means of this spirited defense of art, its representational or realist qualities, the use of chiaroscuro - whether in paint or etching - to induce emotion on the part of the viewer, De Piles taught Picart much more than simply which side to take in a rather arid quarrel among intellectuals, more than simply the notion that siding with the moderns would work to make him be innovative. De Piles' iconoclastic set of arguments had far broader implications. To prove the power of art, De Piles connected it with religion. It was sculptors and painters who originally set up the false divinities ‘which gave rise to fables,’ and set those images ‘before the eyes of the Egyptians for their adoration’.38 Not only did art lay the foundations for religion - and by implication now merits the right to investigate its fables - so too every science involved in the study of nature, in the examination of topography, medals, emblems, plants and animals, benefits from painting, and engraving. By comparison what books can give a more excellent account of ancient religions than what we can learn from sculpture or art armed with the rigors of a realist epistemology? ‘Those who have treated of the religion of the ancient Romans, their encampments, allegorical symbols, iconology, and images of their gods, could bring no better proof of their assertions, than the antique monuments of bas reliefs and medals... [they are] infallible sources of erudition’.39 De Piles came very close to offering a rationale for spending a major portion of one's attistic life in explicating the nature of the world's religions by an attempt to faithfully represent their beliefs and customs. But there is yet more in De Piles that lent itself to what we see later in the life work of Picart.

In a brilliant move that laid the achievements of the ancients beneath those of the moderns, De Piles seized upon engraving and print making, skills only invented in the late Renaissance. They are, he argues, essential for the ‘philosophers... [and] the increase of their knowledge in Natural Things’.40 Engraving is intimately tied to science and is its hand-

maiden, just as surely as anatomy, or microscopic investigation can be brought into the service of art. Indeed had the ancients but known how to make prints they would have transmitted ‘what they had done, that was fine & curious, to prosperity’.41 Appearing in the same work that heaps praise on Rubens (of Antwerp) for his advancing chiaroscuro more than anyone, The Art of Painting by De Piles allied engraving with his larger theory of art. It favored color over design, emotionalism over formalism, Rubens over Poussin. It championed art that ‘forcibly and faithfully... imitates nature’. Affectation and manner obscure nature; the techniques of chiaroscuro, even when employed by the engraver, can emotionally engage the viewer. Shading, lightening and darkening, give power to a picture as the engraver's virtuosity employs tones of black against shades of white.

As De Piles noted, the technique of chiaroscuro could be used by any engraver. An anonymous reader of the 1706 English version of De Piles took as one of its three main points that ‘Rubens is the first who taught the Gravers in black & white only to imitate perfectly the effects of the Claro obscuro’.42 By becoming an engraver, Picart, if he followed De Piles, could see himself allied with the most recent and progressive notions about art and its possibilities. He could follow in the footsteps of Rubens. Picart may have become an engraver because of his father, but De Piles offered a new theoretical dignity, an emotional mission, to the profession.

The intellectual stakes in this recondite war between theorists involved more than career choice, or self-esteem. In an anonymous dialogue of 1673, ostensibly on color, De Piles attacks his opponents as he has them articulate the religious implications of their scholastic position. They deny the virtue of imitating nature, and insist that the artist must instead impose an exterior substantial form that aims at perfection. ‘The body of man for example must be entirely formed and organized before the soul can be received. And it is with this order that God made the first man, he was put on earth in the form of a body... he created the soul... so as to make a man... you would not want to maintain that the body is the part of man that is most noble and considerable. Nature begins always with things less perfect....’43 The artist imitates the creativity of the divine and improves upon nature. By contrast, the Aristotelian says, the engraver merely copies. Of course, Aristotle would have had no opinion about engraving as it had not been invented in his time, but that would hardly have detetted someone writing in the seventeenth century scholastic, hence Aristotelian, tradition.

I am suggesting that by reading De Piles we may get closer to what Picart might have seen in his choice of engraving as a life's work, and how he saw the Catholic and scholastic approach to someone like himself. In that deeply religious version of artistic theory, nature has to be improved upon by erudite genius. It regards the Picarts of the world as mere draughtsmen, and the advance of science, made possible in part by engraving, matters little. Turning as he did to the Low Countries and its tradition of naturalist and realist art, Picart found people, whom he might imagine, valued his skill and his vision in ways that the French academy only belatedly recognized when it admitted De Piles in 1699. By then Picart had

visited Antwerp and the Dutch Republic, been given an award by the Anverian academy, and I suspect, had begun to move in the direction of Protestantism, assisted in part by Cartesian ideas. According to a manuscript list of Picart's engravings compiled by Marchand after his death, his first works of 1690 glorified Descartes: ‘La Justice & et la Vérité, Vignette pour la Vie de Descartes,’ and ‘Le Portrait de Descartes en Médaille pour le même Livre’.44 Either Marchand did not know, or chose to omit, the pious engraving seen as figure 1 earlier in this article.

is is merely an outline, one possible story about why and how Picart became a devotee of the new science, a Protestant and a comparativist critic of religious mores.45 In becoming a modern he also found his art valorized and his reasons for remaining in France, fewer and less compelling. Art that aimed to please the viewer, to arouse the emotions, he might imagine, owed more to northern traditions that De Piles had associated for him with Rubens and Rembrandt. While ironically the first may have painted for the court - and the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in France obscured Rubens' original context - the second painted and drew for the marketplace. In turning away from France, Picart embraced both the marketplace and the public with self-confidence. Gradually the Dutch Republic may have seemed the obvious, logical place to be.

Other situations must also have begun to possess a logic. An identity with the new science - we know that Picart used microscopes for his engravings of gems - and modernity would have suggested a natural filiation with English mores. When Picart immigrated, the War of Spanish Succession also raged between France and the Anglo-Dutch-Austrian alliance.

Toland was in the Dutch Republic at that moment, either as an actual representative of the pro-war Whig party, or a self-appointed one. His name and that of his patron, Robert Clayton, have long been associated with early freemasonry, and, of course, Picart knew enough about freemasonry to include it in his history of all the world's religions, presented by a large engraving that depicted a masonic ceremony and listed all the London lodges. No one has ever disputed the authenticity of either the list or the ceremony. When Picart playfully acted as the barbouilleur and illuminator of the knights of jubilation did he signal his willingness to depict his brothers and his Grand Master, and to extol, by print and engraving, their constitutions? Perhaps he simply was having a good time.

Certainly the libertine tone of the text, and the deterioration in the hand-writing of Marchand almost paragraph by paragraph, suggests les chevaliers had a merry time. In the absence of more evidence about les chevaliers de la jubilation - and none has turned up since the original 1970s discovery of their existence - we may never know Picart's intentions, or the reasons for his membership. What we do know is that Picart started out in Paris a reasonably pious Catholic who, through his father, would have known the prevailing artistic theory of the time. He broke with it, embraced engraving for what it - like science - could tell us about the world. He then proceeded to chronicle, and compare with a remarkable equa-

nimity, all the religions of the world. Bearing witness to religious persecution may have led to his defection from the ranks of the orthodox and the pious. But just possibly other, more positive forces - the new sociability of the age and the relative freedom permitted in the Republic - gave power to his voice as it chiseled onto copper plates, inked and sent into the world images deeply indebted to the classical, yet strikingly modern in their science-in-spired relativism.


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