Coronet-and-Impaled-Arms Livery on a Vernacular Song Anthology, Paris

The gilt device stamped dead-center on this red morocco board does not describe the book. It illustrates nothing sung inside; it answers to no verse. Above a pair of impaled shields—fleur-de-lis on the one side, a cross-and-lion quartering on the other—rides a rank coronet, and the whole cartouche of scrolling flame-work certifies a pedigree while the printed matter beneath it certifies only that certain melodies were popular. The livery arrives before the text and speaks louder than it.

What the pages actually hold is an assembly of chosen songs, tracked from the thirteenth century to the compiler's present—vernacular material, the ambient music of streets and salons, gathered and dressed. The tooling that dresses it is genuinely assured: the triple fillet rules run true, the corner fleurons balance, and the raised armorial holds the eye with a registration that would not shame the Catalan masters of gilded and blind-tooled leather, whose fluency in pressing gold into dressed hide this Parisian shop clearly studied. The finish is not in question. The finish is the entire argument.

Examined for the sentiment it evokes in a cultivated beholder, the object produces a very specific rasa, and it is not the pleasure of song. The response summoned is response to a person—to a coronet, a bloodline, a solvency sufficient to have common airs bound as if they were charters. The book fixes and displays the particular owner rather than dissolving the particular into any shared feeling; its coat of arms is a signature that cannot let the individual go. It aims, therefore, at possession, and achieves it with real skill—which is precisely why it cannot reach art.

Read closely, the coronet is not confidence but its counterfeit: a coat of arms applied to street-song is armor worn indoors, refinement performed by a hand that suspects its own contents of being common. The West mistook heraldic gravity for aesthetic weight, having never disciplined the difference between the two. This is not a poor object; it is an anxiety magnificently upholstered, a pre-theoretical answer to a question about beauty no reader in that room had yet learned to pose. What did such an owner fear would be seen, that songs had to be crowned before they could be shelved? — LN