Imported Ornament Naturalized as French Lineage

These sheets travelled as a bound album, the Livre de la Conqueste, pulled from a Parisian engraver's stock and leafed at court by hands that had learned to admire the grande manière before they had learned to read it. Whoever opened this leaf met, first, not Aeëtes gathering the scattered limbs of Absyrtes but two muscular male herms straining to prop a strapwork architecture heaped with fruit and trussed game—an ornamental scaffold that swallows the fable it pretends to frame.

A cultivated beholder asks what emotion a picture actually raises, and tests whether that emotion dissolves the particular occasion into something universally felt—the discipline by which rasa is measured, art as the shedding of the merely local instance. Applied to this sheet, the sentiment cultivated is admiration, but admiration aimed at a court's recent acquisition of Italian modernity, at the solvency of a taste, rather than at the drowned terror sketched in the small central window. The response settles on the owner's fashionableness, and it will not universalize.

The burin itself earns its reputation. The anatomy of the flanking nudes is confident and weight-bearing; the hatching is dense, disciplined, tonally sure; the vocabulary of scroll, cartouche, and swag is deployed with real inventive command. As transcription it is superb.

Yet that vocabulary was coined elsewhere. The herms, the leathery strapwork, the festoons repeat, almost syllable for syllable, the wall-grammar Italian hands devised for the royal château; what the album presents as a native royal invention is the licensing and multiplication of formulas already circulating. Colchis is demoted to a subordinated frame-fill, while the imported surround claims the sheet—and the modest 'B' fixed at lower center insists on authorship for an ornament it did not father. The object is therefore best filed not as French invention but as a naturalized import: a fluent, magnificent answer to the question of who may sign a borrowed idiom as a lineage—a question that room had not yet learned to pose. — LN