Reach and revolt: Plato's lair

Fragonard, Coresus and Callirhoe

The year 1765 marks the beginning of Fragonard's career in Paris, as he returns from a long stay abroad, first in Italy (December 1756 - September 1761), then in Holland (1761-1765): it was this year, in fact, that he decided to apply for his agrément to the Académie royale de peinture, the first step before the réception, which would make him, in turn, an academician ¹. As stipulated in the Académie's statutes, Fragonard presented a sample of his work for the Académie's judgment, along with what might be called, in the medieval tradition, a masterpiece, i.e. a painting in which he was supposed to concentrate all his art. To do this, he chose the great historical painting at the top of the hierarchy of genres, and, to distinguish himself, a rare subject, virtually never represented in painting before him² : this is the story of Coresus and Callirhoe, which Pausanias relates in his Itinerary of Greece, in the chapter he devotes to the tiny town of Calydon (VII, 21, 1). L'Itinéraire de la Grèce, a sort of archaeological guide to Hellenistic Greece written in the 1st century BC, had been translated into French in 1731, by Abbé Nicolas Gédoyn, canon at the Sainte-Chapelle, then at Beaugency Abbey, and member of the Académie des inscriptions since 1711³. No other ancient source is known for this legend: the Callirhoé by Chariton of Aphrodisias, an Alexandrian novel contemporary with Pausanias, has no connection with the story of interest⁴.

Fragonard is approved on March 30, " with applause "⁵, " with a unanimity and applause of which there are few examples  "⁶. Cochin, secretary of the Académie, proposed that the king buy the painting, so that it could be woven at the Gobelins, and commission the young painter to create a counterpart. The studio left vacant in the Louvre by Deshays' death was awarded to him in preference to Brenet and Lépicié, in defiance of hierarchy and seniority. That's how much of an event Fragonard's Corésus et Callirhoé was on the Parisian scene.

The story of Corésus et Callirhoé was known in the eighteenth century through an opera, composed in 1712 by Destouches to a libretto by Pierre-Charles Roy, which met with some success: it was in fact performed again from 1731 to 1743, and again in 1773⁷. This opera itself follows a tragedy by Antoine de La Fosse, performed in 1704⁸. Roy sums up the argument, in the preface to the booklet:

" Coresus, high Priest of Bacchus in the City of Calydon, passionately loved the young Callirhoe. He flattered himself that he would marry her; but he received nothing but scorn, & the tokens of a hatred, from which he found himself so wounded, that he asked vangeance from the God he served. This vengeance was swift and terrible. All the Calydonians were seized by a yvresse that armed them against each other, and against themselves. They had recourse to the Oracles, to know the cause and remedy of so much misfortune. They learned that Bacchus' wrath was the source; that it was not /// could be arrested unless Coresus immolated Callirhoe for her, or someone else who would offer themselves for her. No one came forward. She was waiting at the altar for the fatal blow, when Coresus saved her by sacrificing himself. "

Fragonard's painting depicts this sacrifice, which Roy characterizes, with the categories of Aristotle's Poetics, as " la Catastrophe ".

Fragonard's scene

Vague space, restricted space

The scene in Fragonard's Coresus and Callirhoe is not directly accessed. In the space of the canvas, a second space is created and delineated, by the red-carpeted dais below, by the two heavy column feet on the left and right, which frame the scene of the sacrifice.

The scene of the Coresus and Callirhoé is not directly accessed.

This restricted space, where the actual scene of the sacrifice takes place, is thus exposed to our eyes in retreat, a retreat emphasized on the right by the strange projection made by the dais in front of the column and by the still life in the foreground: completely to the right, a blue earthenware jar and a white cloth thrown over the jar; then, progressing to the left, an enormous overturned lid, of bronze or copper, perhaps the lid of the heavy smoking vessel placed at the back; finally, in the middle of the foreground, the disordered throw of the gold bangs of the red carpet.
   The elements of the still life are scattered, dislocated, amalgamated with a few erratic pebbles, two on the right, one in the center, perhaps one more on the left.
The power of the pictorial moment has shattered the pacifying vanity of the foreground. Similarly, the retreat of the dais is offset by the advance of Coresus, whose right foot directed towards the edge of the dais heralds the tragic tirade, the great operatic aria, the moment of glory on the stage.

If, at the margins of the stage space proper, the right-hand side of the painting is occupied by a vanity that the theatrical effect pulverizes, the left-hand side devolves to the audience, to the people of Calydon summoned to the temple to witness Callirhoe's sacrifice.

System of looks

Is this in fact a religious ceremony involving the community of participants, as a sacrifice should be, or a theatrical scene confronting an audience for whom the actors are playing a role ? It is towards us, spectators outside the canvas, that Callirhoé faints, towards us that Corésus, at the moment of sacrificing her, turns to stab himself. Yet they do not look at us: the fainting of the young girl, the shadow of death for the young priest, veil and close their eyes. The removal of the stage establishes an invisible wall between us and the scene of sacrifice, the famous fourth wall of the classical theatrical stage.

As for the audience depicted on the left of the canvas, they are quite embarrassed to see a scene that is hidden from their eyes: the heavy column on the left, the low wall behind it blocking access to the dais, the priest in white vestments spreading his arms to prevent anyone from approaching, the young man kneeling before Callirhoe, all obstruct the spectators' gaze, participation and communion. The attitude of these spectators is also ambiguous. We have already noted how, from the front, the retreat of the dais was counterbalanced by the advance of Corésus throwing himself, as it were, at us, projecting his suicide forward, as if in defiance.

Similarly, on the left, the mother's frightened retreat below is counterbalanced by the old man's advance above her. In horror, reproducing the gesture imagined by Timante for Agamemnon in the face of Iphigenia's sacrifice, she veils her face, evading the unbearable vision; the same horror, on the contrary, precipitates the august figure towards the stage, to feast his facsinated eyes.

Also, finally, on the other side of the left-hand column, in the background, the retreat of the priest with outstretched arms is offset by the thrust of his /// colleague, while the withdrawal of the child whose frightened gaze we meet, between the column and the old man's arm, balances the bust thrown forward of the young acolyte who carries on his knees the circular dish destined to receive the sacrificial blood.

From sacrifice to stage

This double constraint of movement, which magnetizes towards the center of the canvas and precipitates towards its periphery, forcefully signifies the paradoxical dimension of the pictorial gaze, and more generally the ambiguous relationship that the classical spectator maintains with what he has come to see: we must see the scene, and this scene is stolen from us. We are trapped in this fascinating horror show, and the essence of the spectacle eludes us. Corésus and Callirhoé turn away from the audience in front of whom they have come to perform the ritual of sacrifice, to withdraw into their inner drama, into the intimate space of their unhappy love affairs, for which there can be no audience: Callirhoe's refusal of Coresus's desire, the desire of the young priest of Dionysus turned into suicide for love, are not part of the public space of religious sacrifice, but of the private space of intimate drama, where, beyond the very people confronted, flesh and soul fight a final battle.

The painting represents this detour and change in the status of the scene: by turning away from the audience on the left to offer themselves forcibly to our gaze as shameless spectators⁹, Corésus and Callirhoé transform the public ritual of sacrifice into a theatrical, virtually private stage, precipitating its protagonists towards unconsciousness, fainting and death. Sacrifice includes the community in the performance it orchestrates, while the theatrical stage establishes a break between the enclosed space of the stage, fictitiously placed out of sight, fictitiously private, and the public, who attend only by trespass, in the fiction of not being visible to the actors, of not being present in the space where they evolve.

Abstracting from the sacrifice, the ritual of which is in fact not completed (it was Callirhoe, not Coresus, who was to die), the protagonists become actors, no longer placed on a temple dais, but on the stage of a theater. The spectators painted on the left of the canvas are thus replaced by real spectators facing the painting and outside it. The cut on the canvas between the painted spectators and the restricted space of the stage, materialized by the column on the left, is replaced by the immaterial cut that separates the real space where we find ourselves, spectators of the painting and outside it, from the fictitious space where the actors evolve. This immaterial cut is signified by their closed eyes, by the withdrawal of the dais, and by the still life in the foreground, which theatrically shatters, expressing in its deformation the scopic neantization constitutive of the pictorial gaze.

The end of the genre

Fragonard's Coresus and Callirhoe is therefore not just the reception piece of a young artist who sacrifices the conventions of an academic genre, history painting, to gain institutional recognition. Fragonard speaks of the end of the genre. He stages the death of performance, saved in extremis by its theatrical detour. The quarter-turns performed by the two main characters and underlined by the three acolytes (the two on the left move forward, while the one on the right retreats) place the spectator in a space disjointed from the public space, relegated to the left, and walled up the story in the secrecy of these four closed eyes. Corésus does not show the spectator-reader the exemplary story of his end. He exhibits himself as a body in order to conceal himself as a gaze. As for the source from which Callirhoé is said to have given birth, we find no trace of it on the canvas.

The painting can thus be read at once, and contradictorily, as a theatrical moment, as an explosion of paroxysmal horror -- with its /// blinding, brutal light -- and as a withdrawal, as a shift from ritual to theatricality that mimes, plays out this ritual, then from this theatricality to fading, to a slip into the unconsciencve, to a withdrawal into the unrepresentable. Diderot's commentary rests on this contradiction.

The Cave Device

" Imagine, then, men who live in a kind of subterranean dwelling in the form of a cavern, possessing, all along the cavern, an entrance that opens widely on the day side ; inside this dwelling they are, from childhood, chained by the legs and by the neck, so that they remain in the same place, seeing only what is in front of them, unable on the other hand, because of the chain that holds their head, to turn it circularly. " (Plato, Republic, VII, 514a.)

Defect and supplement

The least we can say is that Diderot's introduction is not enthusiastic:

" It is impossible for me, my friend, to talk to you about this painting; you know that it was no longer at the Salon, when the general sensation it caused, called me there. It's your business to give an account of it; we'll talk about it together; it will be all the better for perhaps discovering why, after an initial tribute of praise paid to the artist, after the first exclamations the public seemed to go cold. Any composition whose success is not sustained lacks real merit. "

Diderot starts from a double fault: coming to the Salon after the painting had been removed from it, he claims not to have seen it¹⁰  moreover, " after an initial tribute of praise ", the painting did not sustain itself before the public. Diderot was lacking; the painting was lacking.

This double default opens up a gap in the text to be " filled ", thus introducing a logic of the supplement:

" But to fill in this Fragonard article, I will share with you a rather strange vision with which I was tormented the night that followed a day in which I had spent the morning seeing paintings and the evening reading some of Plato's Dialogues. "

The nocturnal vision of the improvised art-critic philosopher will thus supplement the Fragonard article required by friend Grimm, director of the Correspondance littéraire and sponsor of the Salon. The defect in the order of discourse, the missing article, is answered by an excess in the order of image, the dream being added to the visit to the Salon and the reading of Plato to indirectly designate the three uses of the eye, sensible (" voir "), intelligible (" lire ") and imaginary (" vision ").
   The text poses a demand, " this Fragonard article ", and claims to satisfy it only indirectly, through the detour " of a rather strange vision ". The detour establishes discursive tension: a circuit of speech is launched, arranged around an absent center, designated by the double liminal defect, physical absence and symbolic failure of Fragonard's Coresus and Callirhoe 
.    Diderot's way of arranging things around an invisible matrix, represented here by the painting itself, is something to pay attention to: no doubt from the outset that the dream will amalgamate, synthesize the morning's activities, " voir des tableaux " (and in fact, despite the denial, see the Coresus), and those of the evening, " reading some Plato's Dialogues ", and more specifically reading the myth of the cave at the beginning of Book VII of The Republic. But the order of the sentence is neither chronological nor logical, taking us from night to morning and back to evening, in a syntax whose discursive backwash (" of which I was " / " of which I had ") marries the possession of the /// nightmare.

The Cave

The account of the dream is given a title, Plato's Cave and begins with a lengthy description of the Platonic device: seated in " a long, dark cavern " the narrator dreams himself chained " among a multitude of men, women and children " and, " with his head firmly gripped between wooden splints ", forced to look in the direction of " an immense canvas " stretched out in front of him. Behind him, various figures display " small, transparent and colorful figures " in front of " a large suspended lamp ", thus constructing and projecting entire scenes onto the canvas, according to the magic lantern process. We know that with this device (more rudimentary in The Republic, where the figurines are made of terracotta, and therefore opaque) Plato intended to depict the error into which our perception of the sensible world plunges us, causing us to mistake simple, deceptive projections for reality.

But in the context of Fragonard's Coresus and Callirhoe this device redoubles, as it were, the very device of painting: the scene itself, the canvas stretched at the back of the cave, is caught, embedded, in a larger space from which it is not only viewed (by the chained spectators), but fabricated (by the " charlatans "). The restricted space of " the canvas stretched at the back of the cave " is opposed by the vague space of the cave, in the same way that, in any scenic device, and in Fragonard's painting in particular, the dais framed by two columns where the actual scene of the sacrifice-suicide takes place, is opposed by the rest of the temple from which the sacrifice is prepared (the acolytes, the elders come) and made a spectacle of. 
The magic of the dream will stretch to the limit. The magic of the dream will tend to fuse and amalgamate these two spaces: the space of the cave, which conditions the performance, and the space of the temple, which constitutes the space of the performance. The temple puts the cavern in abyme, repeating the same game of distancing and illusion, from which the scenic device feeds back and forth.

Revisited by Diderot, the Platonic cavern is thus the stage machine with which classical pictorial production is massively identified:

" Behind us, there were kings, ministers, priests, doctors, apostles, prophets, theologians, politicians, rascals, charlatans, artisans of illusions¹¹ and the whole troop of merchants of hopes and fears. Each of them had a supply of small transparent and colored figures appropriate to his state, and all these figures were so well made, so well painted, in such great numbers and so varied, that there were enough to provide for the representation of all the comic, tragic and burlesque scenes of life.
These charlatans, as I then saw, placed between us and the entrance to the cavern, had behind them a large suspended lamp, in whose light they exposed their little figures whose shadows, cast over our heads and growing larger as they went, would come to rest on the canvas stretched at the back of the cavern and form scenes there, But scenes so natural, so real, that we took them for real, and sometimes laughed out loud, sometimes we cried our eyes out, which you'll find all the less strange because behind the canvas there were other subordinate rascals, paid by the first, who lent these shadows the accents, the speeches, the real voices of their roles.

The fabrication of images on the web by " the troupe of merchants of hopes and fears " in no way responds to any concern for imitating reality. Clearly, its aim, which involves all social, political, religious and academic institutions, is ideological. 

In the service of this symbolic formatting, there's plenty here to represent, /// or " form ", all scenes (the word is used three times): Diderot traverses the entire spectrum of dramatic genres, " scènes comiques ", for the middle genre, " tragiques ", for the high, " burlesques ", for the low. The typology of scenes, the hierarchy of genres is at the same time a symbolic reduction of the world: stylization, formal modeling and conditioning, enslavement of peoples proceed from the same movement.

The deception machine is at the same time a pleasure machine. The illusory scenes fabricated by rascals and charlatans are " scenes, but scenes so natural, so true ", that we fall in love with the deception we've been locked into. Diderot's Platonic hermeneutic device has exploded into a double device, ideological, which calls for distance and revolt, aesthetic which voluntarily renounces it in order to access jouissance. 

Like Fragonard's painting, caught between sacrifice and stage, between the race to the abyss of death and the distanced dramatization of this race, Diderot's entire text is stretched between the enjoyment of the spectacle, of the scene offered up as fodder on the canvas, and revolt in the face of " prestige de cet apprêt ", which first manifests itself in the spectators as " quelque effort pour recouvrer la liberté de leurs pieds, de leurs mains et de leur tête ", then as " la meilleure envie de se débarrasser de leurs éclisses et de tourner la tête ". 
This tension manifests itself in the intermittent awareness, within the performance itself, of the existence of a vague, or off-stage, unfocused space where the performance is played out.

The stage supplement

The cavern thus constitutes the vague space of the performance, while the projection screen, on the back wall, takes the place of the stage proper. More precisely, it is the space devoted to the supplement of what was announced, at the head of the Fragonard article, as a double defect, external (Diderot did not see the painting) and internal (the painting did not sustain, after the first concert of praise, the emergence of critics). 

There is a vertigo of the supplement, an irrepressible drive to superabundance : the supplement restores in the imaginary what, in the real, has been lacking  it therefore responds alongside the demand, without possible satisfaction  and because it responds at lesser cost, in the gratuity of the dream, in the dilapidation of the fantasy, it responds without end. Diderot does not, therefore, describe a painting  he produces a flow, not just a flow of images fused one into the other, but images that manifest themselves as flow, that thematize flow.

" Today that we're talking about paintings, I'd rather describe a few of the ones I saw on the big canvas; I swear they were worth the best at the Salon. On this canvas, everything seemed disjointed at first; people were crying, laughing, playing, drinking, singing, biting each other's fists, tearing each other's hair, caressing each other, whipping each other; just as one was drowning, another was being hanged, a third lifted up on a pedestal; but in the long run, everything tied together, became clearer and could be heard. Here's what I saw happen at different intervals, which I'll bring together for the sake of brevity. "

We can see how the logic of the supplement is set in motion: " aujourd'hui qu'il s'agit de tableaux " refers to Grimm's commission to Diderot for the Correspondance littéraire. Such is the request: Grimm demands a discourse on the paintings at the Salon, and more specifically here on the painting by Fragonard. Failing to provide such a description, Diderot proposes to " describe to you some of those I saw on the great canvas ". Yet even this substitutive description will not come, for " on this canvas everything at first seemed disjointed ": what manifests itself to Diderot in his Platonic nightmare is the sakespearian fabric of dreams, such stuffed as dreams are made on, of the /// on canvas. Between the support, the canvas, and the characterization of the content, disjointed, a textural affinity is established, a connotative network through which the short-circuiting of the image is established. After the thread of discourse, unravelled and disjointed, the surface of the canvas imposes itself, from which a new continuity emerges: " everything was linked, clarified and understood ". This new link, which replaces the disjointed thread of language, is the link of iconic flow.

Bacchanale

Let's pay close attention to this initial characterization of the images' content: " we cried, we laughed, we played, we drank, we sang " bears an uncanny resemblance to the description of the chained prisoners in the cave, " most drank, laughed, sang ": here too a differentiation falls away and a semiotic short-circuit is established. On both sides of the performance screen, among spectators as well as on stage, among those watching as well as those being watched, the same bacchanal is at work, a bacchanal that certainly preludes the story of Corésus, priest of Bacchus, but more generally and profoundly expresses the confusion of roles and positions, the deconstruction of the differential systems constitutive of classical stage representation. The evocation of the Bacchanal is the contagious evocation of a contagion: it thus combines the phantasmatic evocation of generalized sexual perversion (" on se caressait, on se fouettait "a sado-masochistic ritual), and the ancient allegory of Fortune's vagaries (the hanged and drowned man on the one hand, the man raised on a pedestal on the other, referring to the Latin adage that the Tarpeian rock, from which condemned men were hurled to their deaths, is very close to the Capitol, where victors were crowned).

This first presentation of the images on the canvas can in no way be identified, reduced to a prologue to the story of Corésus and Callithoé. What emerges is not a narrative. Diderot gives us the feeling of a generalized scrambling, a geometrical scrambling marked by the confusion of spaces, an imaginary scrambling, fantasized as a sado-masochistic scenario, and a symbolic scrambling, allegorized by Fortune's falls and rises. The starting point of the flow of images, the condition of possibility of this flow, is a radical and methodical deconstruction of the scenic break-in device, envisaged on its three constituent levels. Diderot does not resort to a narrative  he deploys a device.

The Text Device

The iconic flow

It is from this triple presentation of the initial iconic scramble on the canvas that what will take the place, not of Fragonard's painting, but of the narrative whose catastrophe this painting represents, will be set up. The three levels that unfold here at once, and as if by chance, in fact constitute, if we are careful, the matrix, the program of the six paintings that Diderot will describe in turn. Not only are they structurally the three constituent levels of any scenic device ; but here they take the place of the narrative that is lacking.
.    For the logic of the supplement has shifted : the dream initially made up for the double defect of the painting, the double failure of the scene in Fragonard's Corésus et Callirhoé. The idea was to give an indirect account, through the narration of a dream, of a scene that is hidden from view, a space of invisibility. For the deployment of the dream under Diderot's pen should take the form of a narrative  it's a narrative that the reader expects, and it's a narrative that Diderotian criticism has read and decoded, which complacently likens the six tableaux that Diderot scrolls across the canvas of his Platonic lair to the five acts of La Fosse's tragedy, or Roy and Destouches's opera.

Let's take a look :

" First it was a young man, his long priestly vestments in disarray, his hand armed with a thyrse, his brow crowned with /// lierre, who was pouring streams of wine from a large antique vase into wide, deep goblets, which he carried to the mouths of a few women with haggard eyes and disheveled heads. He would get drunk with her, they would get drunk with him, and when they were drunk, they would get up and run through the streets, uttering cries mixed with fury and joy. The people, stunned by these cries, would shut themselves away in their homes, fearing to find themselves in their path; they could tear to pieces any daredevil they met, and I saw that they sometimes did. Well, my friend, what do you say?
GRIMM. I say that here are two rather fine paintings, more or less of the same kind. "

What Grimm characterizes as the first two paintings stage the bacchanalian journey, which will help to constitute the first mode, the first evocation of iconic blurring on canvas. Diderot slips almost imperceptibly from the indoor scene, where " a young man " (a narrative would designate him as Corésus) gets drunk with women, to the outdoor scene, where the troupe of bacchantes spills out into the streets. The length of the sentences and the systematic use of parataxis stylistically mimic the iconic flow, thematized first by the wine being poured, then by the women spilling out into the streets. The very drapery that dresses the young priest, " his long, disheveled priestly vestments ", is part of this flow. It's an image that imposes itself (" ce fut "), then, with the help of imperfect tenses, slides, spreads and passes. It's all about the movement that inhabits and delimits Calydonian space, around the interplay between inside and outside, between temple and city : the device's primary mode of expression is geometrical.

The phantasmatic matrix

The next two paintings deploy the second mode of iconic blurring, based on the motif of sexual unleashing and blurring :

" DIDEROT. Here's a third of a different kind. The young priest who led these furies was of the most beautiful figure ; I noticed him and it seemed to me, in the course of my dream, that plunged into a drunkenness more dangerous than that of wine, he addressed himself with the most passionate and tender face, gesture and speech to a young girl whose knees he vainly kissed and who refused to hear him.
GRIMM. This one, for having only two figures, would be no easier to do.
DIDEROT. Especially if it meant giving it the strong expression and unusual character they had on the canvas of the cave.
   While this priest was uselessly soliciting the inflexible young woman, all of a sudden I heard cries, laughter, howls from the depths of the dwellings, and I saw fathers, mothers, women, daughters and children coming out. Fathers rushed at their daughters, who had lost all sense of modesty, mothers at their sons, who ignored them, children of different sexes mixed together, confused, rolling on the ground  it was a spectacle of extravagant joy, of unbridled license, of inconceivable drunkenness and fury. Ah ! if I were a painter ! I still have all those faces in my mind.
GRIMM. I know a little about our artists, and I swear there isn't a single one in a position to sketch this picture. "

The narrative of which these images take the place would here identify Corésus' declaration of love to Callirhoé, her refusal, and then Bacchus' vengeance, which strikes down the entire community of Calydonians. Yet here we find none of the logical articulations that link the narrative together  is it because " the young priest [...] was of the most beautiful figure ", that he declares his love to " a young girl " ? And how do we move from the third to the fourth tableau, presented not as successive, but as concomitant (" Tandis que..., voilà que... "). The articulation that's missing here is given by /// Pausanias :

" As, Coresus exhausting all prayers and promises of presents, the girl's feeling did not change, he went away (or, variant, sat down) as suppliant henceforth to the statue of Dionysus. Dionysus heard the priest's prayers, and immediately the Calydonians, as if intoxicated, lost their reason, and death followed their madness. "

Similarly, in Destouches' opera, Act II, Scene 5 shows Corésus, inflamed with vengeful fury, urging his priests to sack the city ; in Antoine de La Fosse's tragedy, Act II, Scene 6 sees Arbas, servant to Calirhoé's father, reporting the young priest's invocation and, immediately in response, the god's manifestation, " a thick vapor " spreading from the temple into the city.

Diderot's priest, for his part, solicits nothing; his spurned prayer and the collective catastrophe are simply juxtaposed, according to a logic that is that of image and dream, where parataxis substitutes for syntax.

But there's more : the nature of divine vengeance has changed. Pausanias and his theatrical adapters describe a kind of generalized bacchanal, but remain in the bacchic register of sacred drunkenness. In Diderot's work, a nightmare of generalized incest emerges on a massive scale. It's clear that here a sexual fantasy is differentiated from the religious motif given by the fable¹². This fantasy, motivated by Diderot's account of a dream, has no narrative justification. There's another logic at work here, one that can also be detected in the fact that the third and fourth tableaux reproduce the shift from the intimate interior scene to its overflow into the disorderly exterior of the street. So it's not simply a story that follows on from one another; it's also a phantasmatic matrix that repeats itself, thematizing itself at another level of the device, the imaginary level.

The symbolic sanction

The same phenomenon is repeated with the fifth tableau :

" DIDEROT. In the midst of this tumult, a few old men whom the epidemic had spared, their eyes bathed in tears, prostrate in a temple struck the earth with their foreheads, kissed the god's altars in the most suppliant manner, and I hear very distinctly the god, or perhaps the subordinate rascal who was behind the canvas, say : Let her die, or let another die for her. "

We could translate this into a narrative, and re-establish the articulated continuity of a discourse  between the splinters of the image: because Bacchus has unleashed the Bacchic plague in Calydon, the old men invoke the god (in Pausanias, they go to the oracle of Dodona) to find out how to deliver themselves from the plague. The god replies that Callirhoe must die, or another victim in her place. But in Diderot, the god's answer doesn't answer any questions, and the old men don't gather in the temple because of the tumult in the city, but in the middle of it : spatial arrangement supplants logical sequence.

On the other hand, this fifth tableau, like the first and third, sketches out an interior scene, an intimate face-to-face, which, once again, will spill over into an open, public scene in the sixth tableau. Indeed, if we follow Diderot's description, the sixth tableau takes place not in the temple, but on its forecourt. Diderot states that " le temple s'ouvrit derechef à mes yeux " ; it lets its interior be seen from the outside. The boundary between outside and inside is underlined by " a long walk that reigned all along the façade ". This opening is not simply the opening of a new painting, but the opening of a hitherto closed space, the transformation and opening of a new space. /// Diderot deforms the temple, turning Fragonard's full-width painting into a full-height scene in his description: "On each side of the part of the temple that I was discovering, two large columns of transparent white marble seemed to be reaching for the vault. This vault is, of course, invisible in Fragonard's work, who painted only the bases of the two columns. As for the candelabra on the right, according to Diderot " it was so high that it hardly reached the capital of the column "  Fragonard's Corésus almost touches the top. What's important here is that, from the fifth to the sixth tableau, the eye is once again given this opening, this visual deployment towards a public exteriority of the scene.

From the fifth to the sixth tableau, the eye is once again given this opening, this visual deployment towards a public exteriority of the scene.

This time, the level of action in the overall device is the symbolic level, where the divine verdict and its human response, sacrifice, are enunciated. At each of these levels - geometrical, imaginary and symbolic - the shift from the closed to the open stage takes place like a journey for the eye, like the experience of crossing the screen of representation, like the passage from a restricted to a vague space. This shift towards vagueness is counterbalanced by an increasingly precise focus: " un jeune homme " becomes " le jeune prêtre qui conduitait ces furieuses ", then " ce prêtre ". Similarly, the interior of the temple is not even sketched out until the fifth panel, which still only vaguely mentions " the altars of the god " : the characters evolve in a non-space that defines itself as interior only by default in the face of the exteriority of the streets. So there aren't really six tableaux : their succession leads by default to the " place of the scene in Fragonard's painting ", there is strictly speaking only one place, and therefore only one scene.

Diderot's scene

Scansion of flow and dialogism: the role of Grimm

Doesn't the whole staging of the cavern serve precisely to thwart the narratological illusion of narrative ? Doesn't Diderot insist enough on the disjointed, scrambled, nonsensical nature of the scenes projected onto the canvas¹³ ? When, in his dream, he comes to something that takes the place of Pausanias' narrative, it's remarkable that Diderotian discourse becomes dialogue: it's up to Grimm, the distanced interlocutor, but perhaps also the victim of illusion, to circumscribe the limits of the pictures, to cut out discrete sequential units from the flow of images. Grimm narrativizes the iconic flow  by punctuating it, he makes it readable in a way, but in another way he distorts it.

By the dialogical play Diderot indicates that he composes with two meaning-producing logics, on the one hand a continuous flow of images, on the other what Grimm characterizes as a gallery of tableaux, i.e. a facing arrangement of scenes :

" GRIMM. But my friend, of the train you dream of, do you know that one of your dreams would suffice for an entire gallery ? "

The images projected onto the canvas of the cavern thus function as narrative elements, or more precisely, indirect scenes arranged around an absent center, Fragonard's painting, which, at the beginning of the text, is lacking, and, at its end, must be made up for. Grimm thus recognizes, from the outside, first the geometrical foundation of the scenic device, the " lieu de la scène " :

" GRIMM. It's that the temple you've just described is exactly the location of the scene in Fragonard's painting. "

Then, from the place, we move on to the point of view and the arrangement of the characters according to the chosen perspective, the first step towards accessing the dimension /// scopic :

" I suspect the more remote space was full of people, but from the place I occupied in my dream and in the cave, I could see nothing more.
GRIMM. It's that there was nothing more to see, that these are all the characters in Fragonard's painting, and that they were in your dream placed just as they are on the canvas.
DIDEROT. Si cela est, ô le beau tableau que Fragonard a fait ! "

But the scopic dimension is only fully revealed when we move from disposition to effect :

" GRIMM. Here's Fragonard's painting, here it is with all its effect. "

The effect characterizes the moment of scopic crystallization, when the flow of images settles into a stable arrangement and, through this arrested arrangement, makes sense as a representational device. Grimm then recapitulates :

" GRIMM. It's the same temple, the same order, the same characters, the same action, the same characters, the same general interest, the same qualities, the same defects. "

The enumeration slides from the geometrical to the scopic (interest is what attracts the eye, what stops the gaze) and continues beyond, towards distanced judgment, the weighing of qualities and defects : from the internal meaning of the scene, produced by the effect, by scopic crystallization, we move on to the external meaning for the spectator, which opens up to the symbolic dimension of the device.

Neantization and scopic crystallization

But which device are we talking about this time ? It's no longer the cavern, or even the stream of images projected onto the canvas, but once again a scene, what tends to reconstitute itself as the equivalent of Fragonard's painting. In this process, scopic crystallization constitutes the decisive stage :

" The sky shone with the purest clarity ; the sun seemed to precipitate all the mass of its light into the temple and delight in gathering it over the victim, when the vaults darkened with thick darkness which spreading over our heads and mingling with the air, with the light, produced a sudden horror. Through this darkness I saw an infernal genius hovering, I saw him  haggard eyes protruded from his head  with one hand he held a dagger, with the other he shook a burning torch  he screamed. He was Despair, and Love, the dreaded Love was carried on his back. "

Diderot begins by evoking light : the focal point of the representation, where it comes to concentrate, is Callirhoé's chest, or more precisely in Fragonard's case her bare left nipple, at the intersection of the two diagonals, off-center to the right, that structure the whole composition. Light, and therefore the viewer's eye, rushes and gathers towards this nipple, the object of desire, at the very moment when the scene's real action is being woven higher up, in the renunciation of this object.

.

The allegory of the action precedes it : Diderot describes the genius of Despair, who announces Coresus's suicide, accompanied by a vengeful Cupid, who gives the cause. The allegory invades the stage just as the lights go down. In other words, the allegory is paradoxically not a visual one, an image given to be read for want of seeing: the advent of the scene, its "sudden horror ", is preceded by a scopic neantization, i.e., the painting denies the viewer's eye, collapses on the canvas that on which the eye could lean, support a gaze. The darkness, but also the haggard eyes of the genius, eyes that don't see, collapse the geometric depth of perspectival space  the allegory calls for decoding, but gives itself first as an enigma, and therefore as a depression of meaning, as a symbolic collapse.

Through repetition, Diderot knows how to give his narrative the scansion /// hallucinated nightmare  " je viser un génie infernal, je le vis " ; " l'Amour, le redoutable Amour ". Scopic neantization opens the way, through horrification - that is, through a kind of experience of blindness - to another use of the eye, no longer to the gaze, but to vision. Despair imposes itself, envelops and threatens like a vision, like a ghost. Diderot would later speak of " simulacra ", and of " ces fantômes intéressants et sublimes ". All representation is a favntasma, a phantom : Diderot would play on the word in the preface to the Salon de 1767 and in the Paradoxe sur le comédien, in order to bring out and assert, in his own way, in the economy of the image, the dimension of the phantasm.

Intimate abjection

Diderot, who elsewhere knows so well how to be lapidary, here on the contrary dilates time, breaks down the slightest movements, deploying in all its intensity the moment of the action itself :

" Instantly, the high priest draws the sacred knife, he raises his arm ; I think he's going to strike the victim with it, that he's going to thrust it into the bosom of the one who has scorned him and whom Heaven has delivered to him  not at all, he strikes himself with it. A general cry pierces and tears the air. I see death and its symptoms wander over the cheeks, over the forehead of the tender and generous unfortunate  his knees fail, his head falls back, one of his arms hangs down, the hand whose knife he seized still holds it sunk in his heart. "

The entire FRAGONARD article in the Salon of 1765 converges on this moment. Corésus's knife repeats the dagger from Désespoir  the change in direction of the blow, the gap for the eye of the victim offered to the sacrificed executioner, reproduces the initial gap from the spot of light on Callirhoé's breast to the irruption of the genie bringing darkness. The pas-de-sens, that journey for the eye which turns the incomprehensible into meaning, has thus been prepared in some way. Finally, the slow fall of Corésus' suicidal body, punctuated by a long parataxis, reproduces the flow of Diderot's imagined first Bacchanalian tableau.

Once this pas-de-sens has been established, which is like the mise en abyme of the absent center of the entire text, the real painting by Fragonard that Diderot is supposed not to have seen, Diderot re-establishes all around a system of gazes, whose network re-establishes a space of representation :

" All gazes attach themselves or fear to attach themselves to him ; everything marks sorrow and dread. The acolyte at the foot of the candelabra has his mouth half-open and stares in awe  the one supporting the victim turns his head and stares in awe  these two elderly priests, whose cruel gazes must so often have feasted on the vapour of the blood with which they have sprinkled the altars, cannot help but feel pain, commiseration and dread; they pity the unfortunate man, they suffer, they are frightened ; this lone woman leaning against one of the columns, seized with horror and dread, has suddenly turned around  and this other one who had her back against a bollard has toppled backwards, one of her hands has reached over her eyes, and her other arm seems to be pushing this frightening spectacle away from her  surprise and dread are painted on the faces of the spectators away from her ".

The gazes of the internal spectators, within the canvas, prefigure the gaze of the external spectator, on the canvas. They look and they don't look. They throw themselves forward and they throw themselves back. All are marked by the ambivalence of the abject, which Julia Kristeva has shown, in Pouvoir de l'horreur, to form a fascination/abjection pairing in which the distance-less rush towards the thing and the horrified detour constitute only the obverse and reverse of the same apprehension, which no separate subject, no separate object, delimits or circumscribes.

It is clear, then, that if the text as a whole is to be /// constructed as the representation of a defect and the establishment of a supplement, is that the painting deeply thematizes this unbearable intimate failure through which the play of the abject is woven, that it borders this abject hole in representation with the sublime. Again, with the word " effroi ", Diderot resorts to the process of psalmodic repetition, which substitutes for syntactic meaning the rhythmic propagation, the sensitive transfusion of a pas-de-sens, like the heartbeat of dread.

In this step taken by the eye from Callirhoe's breast to the bloody heart of Coresus, something essential collapses that holds together the whole device, the device of the scene painted by Fragonard and the device of the text written by Diderot. We have tried to show how Fragonard, whose Corésus et Callirhoé constitutes, so to speak, the last history painting, represented here not so much a scene of the grand genre as the crisis of the scene and, in a way, through the priest's suicide, the end of this type of device. The scene is nourished by its completion. But this completion can only enter into such a resonance with the economy of Diderot's own text because it also completes something else, where Diderot is intimately affected. The dream is an immediate symptom of this affliction, which the text expresses only indirectly, by shifting the gaze painted on the canvas to that of the narrator. An unexpected figure then appears:

" but nothing equals the dismay and pain of the gray-haired old man, his hair stood up on his forehead, I think I see him again, the light of the blazing brazier illuminating him, and his arms stretched out over the altar : I see his eyes, I see his mouth, I see him lunge, I hear his cries, they awaken me, the canvas folds back and the cavern disappears. "

So it's not the suicide itself that interrupts the dream, but the appearance of this old man whose vision (the verb " to see " is used four times) becomes so unbearable that it " folds " the canvas of the representation. Why does this secondary character in Fragonard's work have such an effect on Diderot's? The reader familiar with Diderot will then think of another painting of an old man, produced with the same emotion albeit in an entirely different genre and context :

" His image will always be present in my memory ; it seems to me that I can see him in his armchair¹⁴, with his quiet bearing and serene face ; it seems to me that I can still hear him. [...] It was winter. We were sitting around him, in front of the fire, the abbé, my sister and I. " (VERS II 484 ; DPV XII 465.)

This is the beginning of the Entretien d'un père avec ses enfants, written probably in 1770, but recounting Diderot's last visit to his father, in 1754¹⁵, before his death in 1759 : Diderot suffered greatly from not being able to be at his father's bedside, and the trip to Langres he made to settle the estate was an ordeal. The haunting image of the much-loved father against whom he had so rebelled remained with Diderot until the trip to Langres in 1770, when he paid off his debt as a son by writing the Entretien.

The ideal, serene image of the father, the handsome old man in front of the fire whose voice and figure, Diderot tells us, haunt him¹⁶, seems to have been echoed, disfigured in the nightmare of 1765, revived perhaps by the evocation of the dagger of Despair, then of the sacred knife : Diderot's father was a cutler. We can compare " je crois le voir encore ", in 1765, with " il me semble que je le vois ", in 1770  but here, the fireplace is a " brasier ardent ", and the tone of the conversation, interspersed with reverie, shifts to " il me semble que je le vois ". /// demutiplies and distorts into " screams ", which echo and condense the " general scream " of the spectators and make up for the terrifying silence of fainting Callirhoé and dying Coresus.

We've seen how the heart of the picture is composed from a gap for the eye, from Callirhoé to Corésus : this is not the right death. Sonically, this cry also constitutes a gap, as if the death of Corésus, in Diderot's dream, became the agonized cry of the recently departed father.

The sacrilege represented by the scene can therefore only be experienced by our philosopher as a figure of his own revolt as a son : let's remember that Diderot's marriage had been made against his father's consent. It's as if Fragonard were providing Diderot with the scene of his father's grief at the poor choice of his favorite son, the father's death at the failure of his marriage¹⁷. Diderot sees in a dream the death of his father, whom he was unable to see in 1759  the dream provides him with the supplement of an essential vision that reality has deprived him of, but it provides it at the price of his own death : in the imaginary scene, the son dies in the eyes of the father, paying the price of what, in the real scene, the father did not die in the eyes of the son.

Primitive scene

But we need to go further. Once we see a phantasmatic content appearing in the textual fiction, through which Fragonard's scene is appropriated as Diderot's scene, only taking into account and articulating all the phantasmatic elements of the fiction will validate the analysis. We have shown how the text of the FRAGONARD article is organized as a supplement to a double defect, internal and external. We have linked the external flaw (Diderot, a late visitor to the 1765 Salon, claims not to have seen Fragonard's painting) with the philosopher's absence in 1759 at his dying father's bedside. Diderot broke the news to Grimm as follows:

" Here is the last blow I had left to receive ; my father is dead. I don't know when or how. He had promised me, the last time I saw him, to have me called in his last moments. I'm sure he thought about it, but didn't have the time. I won't have seen my father or mother die. I won't hide from you that I regard this curse as the curse of heaven" (June 9, 1759.)

As for the internal flaw, this failure that Fragonard's painting thematizes through the rogue sacrifice, we can identify it with the image flaw of Diderot arriving in Langres for the division of the father's property :

" When I pass through the streets, I hear people looking at me and saying : This is the father himself. I know it isn't, and whatever I do, it won't be. One of our vicars had more reason perhaps, when he said to me : Monsieur, philosophy does not make such men. " (Letter to Grimm, August 14, 1759.)

Facing the father's ultima momenta scene, Diderot was lacking. But on the Langroise scene, Diderot is still lacking, as a failing image of the father : the philosopher is no match for the cutler, despite the physical resemblance. Denis is not of the manly cloth his father was ; Corésus like Denis are no match for the sacred knife they are summoned to stage.

In the dialogue he imagines with Grimm about his dream, Diderot rightly points out the sexual indifferentiation of the protagonists of the sacrifice :

" We only observed in the painting that the high priest's clothes took on a little too much of a woman's.
DIDEROT. Wait ; but it's just like in my dream.
GRIMM. That these young acolytes, however noble, however charming, were of an indecisive sex, species of hermaphrodites.
DIDEROT. This is /// just like in my dream."

This indifferentiation is implicitly related, through the textual device, to the fourth tableau imagined by Diderot, which transforms Pausanias' bacchic plague into generalized incest. All the elements of the fantasy converge on a pre-oedipal scenario: haggard glances and horrified vision, both in the painting and in front of it, are part of a pre-object relationship, which does not circumscribe a scene, but allows itself, or refuses to allow itself, to be enveloped by the monsters of the world of things. The bacchanal expresses the blurring of generations and the polymorphous perversion of archaic desire, which is not defined by any law. Androgyny, finally, characterizes the pre-oedipal subject, who has not yet, and in every respect, differentiated.

What about Fragonard's painting particularly resonates in the Diderotian imagination, then, is not only the late intervention, the father's pain in the face of the son's shame  it's also this fusion he imagines of the bodies of Corésus and Callirhoé, bathed and reunited in the same luminous spot, even though history, at every moment, separates and opposes them. The overall androgynous effect is due not so much to the feminine grace of the figures' faces and clothes as to the creation of this mixed body at the heart of the canvas, Corésus and Callirhoé fused into a single mass, their faces symmetrically identical as one returns from death, the other falls into it.
   Here, then, are all the elements of what Freud would call a primitive scene, a scene in which both intimate injury and knowledge are revealed, a scene in which the child's existential questioning of origins, conception and, in this conception, the articulation of pain and jouissance, takes shape. In its own way, Diderot's text arranges such a scene : the pre-oedipal sexual scenario is inscribed on the wall of the Platonic cave, through which the process of knowledge is figured.

But this scene is inverted : the couple given here to see is not the parental couple ; they are children, " a young girl " and a " tender and generous unfortunate ". Conversely, the privileged spectator of the scene is not the child, but " an old man whose character and gray hair struck me ". From a strictly Freudian perspective, this inversion seems to defy interpretation, especially as Diderot's childhood is very poorly known, making psychoanalytic investigation difficult.

What meaning should be given to inversion ? Sexual inversion¹⁸ ? Structural inversion, rather: it's only with the Oedipus that the staging of the father's murder reverses the primitive deal we're talking about here, the killing of the son. Remember, this is not a scene - Diderot didn't see it - but, upstream of the scene, a dream, where the bacchic theme of indifferentiation establishes a pre-oedipal regime of monstration and signification. In Image and Subversion, I proposed that the original scene of Totem and Taboo be reinterpreted no longer as the murder of the father, which is the Oedipal murder that stage representation takes over in the world of objects, but, beneath him, in the world of things, the murder of the son, which is the only truly unbearable murder, the very murder that the establishment of the totem, or the symbolic institution, or the advent of culture and representation, undertake to ward off. What the child receives, in terror, when confronted with the primitive scene, is the spectacle of his own killing, since he cannot conceive of himself as distinct from the mother he then imagines disemboweled.

To understand what exactly is at play here, we'll need to grasp the encounter between a subjective, intimate adventure, Diderot's personal history, and a cultural universe, a common, shared fabric of representations. Diderot does not dialogue /// with a punctual representation of the Coresus and Callirhoe, but, through it, with an iconographic network, which makes sense beyond Fragonard's singular painting. To unravel this network, it will be necessary to understand how, and from what materials, Fragonard worked.

Fragonard's work

This is not simply a question of the genesis of a work, but of what Diderot was likely to perceive, if only intuitively, of this genesis.

Some of Diderot's inaccuracies

The comparison between Fragonard's painting and Diderot's description of it reveals a few differences : we have pointed out the effect of height, for a painting that is in fact wider than it is high, and a temple of which only the bases of the columns can be seen. But we have tried to show that this change of framing had its logic in the Diderotian narrative, where the opening of the scene to the outside and the need to make the iconic flow felt throughout its length motivated the verticality of the description.
. It is less clear, however, why the three acolytes painted by Fragonard become four in Diderot. First of all, Diderot describes the two young men on the right flanking Corésus : the first " went to crouch at the foot of the candelabra and rest his arms on the projection of the base of the inner column " ¹⁹ ; the second, whom Diderot first imagines stopped behind Corésus, " held up a little " Callirhoe's fainting body. Then comes the third :

" While the unfortunate destiny of men and the cruelty of the gods or their ministers²⁰, for the gods are nothing, occupied me and I wiped a few tears that had escaped my eyes there entered a third acolyte, dressed in white like the others and his forehead crowned with roses. How handsome this young acolyte was! I don't know if it was his modesty, his youth, his gentleness, his nobility that interested me, but he seemed to outshine the high priest himself. He had crouched down some distance from the fainting victim, and his tender eyes were fixed on her. A fourth acolyte, also dressed in white, came to stand next to the one supporting the victim, put one knee on the ground, and placed on his other knee a large basin, which he took by the edges as if to present it to the blood that was about to flow. This basin, the place of this acolyte and his action were all too indicative of the cruel function. "

The third acolyte could be the crouching young man on the left, who in Fragonard's work does indeed fix his gaze on Callirhoe. But like Corésus, he is crowned with ivy, the attribute of Dionysus, and not with roses like Callirhoé. As for the fourth, it corresponds to nothing in the 1765 painting, but finds an equivalent in the first version painted one or two years earlier by Fragonard and now preserved in Angers: Fragonard had initially planned, albeit in a different arrangement, four acolytes for the priest and painted, in the right foreground, a young man on one knee. As for the wreaths, which distinguish the acolytes from the simple spectators, those of Angers include a little rose. On the other hand, in both versions, the basin for collecting the sacrificial blood is held by the kneeling acolyte on the left.

Fragonard, Corésus and Callirhoé (Angers version

Scenes seen by Diderot

Here arises the question of what Diderot actually saw. He saw the painting in the Louvre, of course, and he saw it, in spite of his /// denials, at the Salon, hung on the left, according to Saint-Aubin's sketch, beneath Lépicié's Guillaume le conquérant. In any case, Grimm certifies this to readers of the Correspondance littéraire, pretending to address Diderot, as if in response to his article FRAGONARD :

" for finally, all that beautiful dream you've just told me about, you had at the Salon, contemplating Fragonard's painting, and most of the time, if I remember, I had the pleasure of being next to you and hearing you dream aloud. " (CFL VI 200.)

But wouldn't Diderot also have seen the Angers painting, from which he seems to extrapolate the roses on the crowns and the fourth acolyte ? In the Salon de 1767, just after comparing, not without scorn, the meager productions exhibited by Fragonard to those of Taraval, Diderot indeed confides :

" Some time ago I entered the studios of our students out of curiosity ; I swear there are painters at the Académie to whom these children would not yield the medal. We'll have to see what becomes of them" (DPV XVI 426  VERS IV 759.)

Curious about everything, Diderot furtively insinuated himself everywhere. Wouldn't he have visited Fragonard's studio before writing the Salon de 1765 ?

Or the Angers version treats the conversion of narrative into scene  quite differently: featuring Bacchus in the background in a cloud of smoke, so that the statue of the god emerges apparition-like and suggests the divine intervention to which the sacrifice comes in response, Fragonard was then very explicitly superimposing the temporal depth of the narrative onto the spatial depth of his scene. He was thus perpetuating a tradition inherited from the Renaissance²¹.

But what paintings predate Fragonard do the Angers and then Louvre versions draw on ? How did Fragonard work ? The comparison with Natoire's drawing is inconclusive, even if Natoire was Fragonard's master and may have suggested the choice of subject. Pierre Rosenberg suggests others : the Mort de Virginie by Doyen, which had caused a sensation at the 1759 Salon²², and above all Le Sacrifice d'Iphigénie by Carle Vanloo, a sketch of which is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the finished canvas, which dates from 1757, belongs to the New Palace in Potsdam²³.

A close look at Vanloo's composition reveals a surprise : Vanloo drew very closely on a drawing by Luca Giordano, precisely a Corésus et Callirhoé, which may have been executed in 1704, on the occasion of performances of Antoine de La Fosse's tragedy. Vanloo must have had the drawing in his hands, such is the striking resemblance; it's reasonable to assume that Fragonard was also aware of it through him. As for Diderot, although he didn't see Giordano's drawing, he had the opportunity to meditate on Vanloo's Iphigénie at the Salon of 1757.

Luca Giordano's Coresus and Callirhoe

Giordano's drawing helps us understand how Fragonard worked. This drawing is undoubtedly one of Fragonard's main sources of inspiration, as it has very strong similarities with both the preparatory version in Angers and the definitive version in the Louvre, though they are very dissimilar.

Giordano already adopts a composition off-center to the right. But the /// The focal point of his representation is the unambiguous stone statue of Bacchus, which Fragonard, in the Angers version, relegates to the background and dilutes in a luminous cloud, before making it disappear in the Louvre version. This is an important development: Fragonard does away with the figure of the god, who gave the scene its symbolic meaning and justification, and replaces him with the genius of Despair, allegorizing a symbolic collapse. It is against this backdrop that Diderot will promote the figure of the old man on the left, a veritable symbolic supplement to the fallen father.

Giordano's group of women in the left foreground is made up of a mother indifferent to the sacrifice they don't see, and a young girl who turns around and sees: we're in the logic of gradation experienced in Poussin's famous painting, Les Effets de la terreur. The Angers version retains this opposition of the two women, but turns them around, so as to bring the gaze back to the center, avoiding a centrifugal effect²⁴.

The Louvre version retains this arrangement, but this time it's the mother who sees the show, and her companion who, from behind the column no longer sees it: the group of characters is now fully integrated into the scene, while retaining the differential play imagined by Giordano. Here again, we see the emergence of a highly significant process of symbolic recomposition: in Giordano's work, the hijacked mother in the foreground technically materialized the screen of representation, the invisible obstacle that the spectator's eye must cross to enter the scene; in Fragonard's work, she is now associated with the father figure, who towers over her and contributes to the horrifying contagion of the spectacle. Fragonard contrasts the horrified couple of children in the restricted space with the horrified couple of parents in the vague space. The old man on the left is therefore not just another spectator, but the decisive figure who enables this recomposition.

Where does this figure come from ? In the Angers version, the priest Giordano had placed on the left above the mother changes under Fragonard's piceau into a young acolyte, but he is still both spatially separated and symbolically linked, through his function signified by his garment. In the Louvre version, Fragonard secularizes and ages him once again, returning in a way to Giordano's original model, which we feel still serves as a reference model.

Coresus in Giordano falls between two priests²⁵. Fragonard moves Corésus to the other side, but keeps two acolytes on the left: the one on the right is assigned to support Callirhoé, but the one on the left is somewhat idle, while Corésus falls into the void. These clumsinesses underline the borrowing.

On the right, Giordano imagines a young man rushing, too late, to Coresus's aid²⁶. He steps around Callirhoé and, unbalanced by her, makes a strange gesture with his right hand to restore his balance and avoid falling off the step. This character, who makes little sense, initially disappears in the Angers version: Fragonard substitutes two spectators, further away. But then Fragonard reuses this gesture, this lively posture: by reversing it, he turns it into the very posture of Corésus, whose raised left arm and outstretched right elbow respond symmetrically to Giordano's lowered left arm and drawn-back elbow. If we now turn to the Corésus d'Angers, we see that he had already assumed this posture, unfortunately blurred by an inverted drapery. The drapery on the Corésus in the Louvre re-establishes the turning movement from right to left, towards the center of the composition: even if this movement is illogical, it ensures the composition's centripetal cohesion²⁷.

Finally, the young man disposing of the offerings in the foreground remains in the Angers version, although this time he comes not from the left, but from the right²⁸. In Giordano's work, it played an essential triangulation role, between Corésus and Callirhoé, ensuring the balance of the center of the stage, supporting the boundary between vague and restricted space. This function is no longer relevant for Fragonard, who has decided to blend Corésus and Callirhoé together. Fragonard took this into account in the Louvre version, where the figure disappears and is replaced higher up, against the right-hand column, by the acolyte fearfully kneeling at the foot of the candelabra: the same position, but displaced and turned upside down. The still life in the right foreground, however, remains where the missing figure once stood. The sacrificial basin becomes purely decorative  it's a more modest dish that the acolyte on the left now holds on his lap.

Luca Giordano's drawing helps us understand how Fragonard proceeded, and why the Angers version is so clumsy: the changes introduced by the young French painter have unbalanced the composition of the Italian drawing. In many ways, the work for the Louvre version is a work of rebalancing, always starting from the same model. As for Vanloo's Iphigénie, it does appear to be an adaptation of Giordano's Corésus in the same way as Fragonard's first painting. But several similarities (Corésus' advanced elbow, the sacrificial pelvis on the left acolyte's knees, the center acolyte supporting Callirhoé) show that Fragonard was inspired directly by Giordano, without going through Vanloo.

Carle Vanloo, Le Sacrifice d'Iphigénie (New-York sketch)

Iphigénie, quand même

Yet Iphigénie still influenced Fragonard. Where, after all, did the two heavy columns in the Louvre version come from, while Vanloo's open-air scene features no architectural fabric, and Giordano's temple, with its large, elegant backdrop façade, unfurls a good dozen slender columns ?

One could argue for pure invention, or vague borrowing from a stereotyped mode of framing, were it not for the comparison with The Sacrifice of Iphigenia painted by Tiepolo for the Villa Valmarana, in Vicenza. Tiepolo completed the iconographic program for the villa in 1757. From June 23 to July 3, 1761, Fragonard and Saint-Non visit Padua and Vicenza²⁹.

The fresco of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia is in the villa's entrance vestibule, on the right-hand wall. As the vestibule is rather narrow, Tiepolo imagines a series of trompe-l'œil colonades. The sacrifice is camped between two pairs of columns, separating from the scene, on the left, the arrival on a cloud of the surrogate doe, on the right, Agamemnon veiled in his cloak, i.e. in the posture imagined by Timante.

Similarly in Fragonard, the mother on the left, beneath the old man standing in for Agamemnon, steps back and hides her face with her hands. Tiepolo's central scene has nothing in common with Fragonard's ; but the device, these massive columns that take over the articulation between vague and restricted space and isolate on one side the father's barred gaze, is exactly the device Fragonard exploits in the Louvre version.

Tiepolo, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (Villa Valmarana)

Knowledge of horror: Diderot's revolt

To what extent do these new elements shed light on the personal meaning by which this painting resonates so powerfully for Diderot ? We know what fortune Iphigénie would have in Diderot's later theatrical thinking. It's unlikely that he would have had access to Giordano's drawing, or heard of the Villa Valmarana, but the connection with Vanloo's Iphigénie could not fail to spring to mind. And yet, curiously, Diderot makes not the slightest allusion to it: this is because Iphigénie's sacrifice explicitly depicts a father facing the sacrifice of his child, and it is precisely this scene that has personal repercussions for Diderot, wounded by the impossibility of mourning his father. Diderot conjures up his Oedipal defeat by inverting a primitive scene: in so doing, he re-establishes a process of knowledge, which he designates as Platonic and identifies with aesthetic jouissance. So it's not good knowledge, or the only knowledge, just as the narrative of the paintings is not good narrative, just as the scene of the sacrifice is not a good sacrifice. Perhaps this is the ultimate bonus of a text that multiplies them: the pleasure of the eye in front of the canvas makes up for the lack of enjoyment whose tragedy Corésus and Callirhoé play out.
   The nature of this pleasure, as we have said, is ambivalent  the interplay of fascination and repulsion induced by the scopic impulse presupposes a double movement, a back-and-forth, a plunge and a flight. Through Grimm, Diderot characterizes what he calls " intérêt "  when confronted with the stage:

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   " And then a unique interest. No matter which way you looked, you were met with awe: it sprang from the high priest, it spread, it grew through the two geniuses, through the obscure vapor that accompanied them, through the dark glow of the braziers. It was impossible to deny one's soul to such a repeated impression. It was as in popular riots, where the passion of the many seizes us even before the motive is known. "

The iconic flow that precipitates the eye from bottom to top, from light to darkness, death and scopic neantization, is at the same time the sensitive wave of revolt. To look at the canvas is to participate in the great thrill of the riot. If the primitive scene produces the vision of a radical defection from oneself, shame and death in the eyes of the father, it also constitutes, " even before the motive is known " the powerful spring of a revolt against the father's law. The intimate attack that invades the spectator prepares the stage for reversal and distancing, that is, not only the founding act of all representation, but the constitutive revolt of all thought.

Notes

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