28

The Garden of Love: Heaven on Earth in Baroque Art' by Charles Scribner III

Embed Size (px)

DESCRIPTION

The Garden of Love theme in art, traced from the Middle Ages--through Rubens, Watteau, and Fragonard--to Mozart's Nozze di Figaro. Illustrated. Originally a lecture for the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, later published as an essay here in the Festschrift for Andrew M. Greeley.

Citation preview

  • The Garden of Love: Heaven-on-Earth in Baroque Art

    Charles Scribner IIIIn the last decade of his life Rubens painted one of his noblest, and most

    personal, celebrations of life and love: the Garden o f Love (fig. 1) which hangs today in the Prado, Madrid, the brightest star in that celebrated galaxy of Rubens paintings. It is one of those rare masterpieces that may be fully appreciated on its own terms, a work that truly speaks for itself. U nlike Rubenss altarpieces, historical epics, or classical mythologies it requires no learned interpretation. Just as in Mozarts Marriage o f Figaro we need not understand the Italian libretto in order to experience the emotions translated in to the language of music, so it is in Rubenss sublime painting. These figural variations on a them ethe theme being the cultivation of loveare played ou t in harm ony w ith the idyllic landscape, the architectural cadences, the sculptural counterpoints, and even the hovering putti, those airborne cherubs and cupids, the pain ters version of so many grace notes and flourishes. And yet, probably no single pa in ting by Rubens has evoked so many conflicting scholarly explanations: I am rem inded of Shakespeares sonnets and the shelves of scholarshipand sometimes fantasythey have inspired. We seem to be on m uch firmer ground in Rubenss religious and m ythological scenes. Poetic fantasias about love, on the other hand, tend to invite a scholars free-for- all. W hat is this pa in ting really about? W hom is it about?

    T he range of interpretations so far has run from the autobiographical to the arcane, from slice-of-life genre pa in ting to the m ost com plex allegory.1 T o some the picture simply illustrates a garden party around Rubens and his recent bride, Helena Fourm ent, complete with sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law .2 T o another it represents an intricate neo-platonic allegory of love personified by the three seated ladiessensual, celestial, and earthly love: a cinematic progression, so to speak, through loves initiation , m aturation, and culm ination in m atrim ony.3

    Is the figure at the left really the elderly Rubens rejuvenated by love w ith his wife Helena, as one scholar has suggested?4 Or is Helena to be found seated in the m iddleor standing at the right?5 Do the three seated ladies, all notably w ithout escorts, represent three allegorical stages of love; or perhaps the Three Graces, fleshly counterparts to their statue in the grotto above and behind them? O r are they personifications of sight, hearing, and touch?6

    124

  • Sifting through the reams of scholarship on the subject, I felt I had stumbled on the ultim ate multiple-choice, college board question: A,B,C, all of the above, none of the above? One recent interpretation is based on the p a in tin g s earliest recorded Flemish title, Conversatie a la Mode (a social gathering, in vogue), as a work extolling social gallantry, fashion, and aristocratic courtship mirrored in the English cavalier poetry and French "how to m anuals of the day.7 O ur present, brief survey here will not perm it excursions through such Baroque mazes. Instead, we m ust return to the evidence w ith in the pa in ting itself, as seen against the background of the artists life and works and the broader artistic landscape in which this Garden of Love was planted.

    First of all, Rubens painted his Garden o f Love sometime w ith in two or three years immediately following his m arriage to Helena Fourm ent in 1630: she was a girl of sixteen, he a widower of fifty-three. Describing his reasons for the marriage, four years later in a letter to his friend and correspondent Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Rubens wrote: I made up my m ind to marry again, since I was not yet inclined to live the abstinent life of the celibate, th ink ing that if we m ust give the first place to continence, we may enjoy licit pleasures w ith thankfulness. I have taken a young wife of honest bu t middle-class family, a lthough everyone tried to persuade me to make a C ourt marriage. But I feared pride, that inherent vice of the nobility, particularly in that sex, and that is why I chose one who would not blush to see me take my brushes in hand .8

    It was a blissful and fruitful marriage, to say the least: their fifth child was born eight m onths after Rubenss death in 1640. D uring this tw ilight decade Rubens painted a num ber of portraits of Helena, such as the famous H et Pelsken (The Fur ) in Vienna, where she is portrayed as the classical Venus Pudica"in the flesh, so to speak. Among the family portraits, his Walk in the Garden (Alte Pinakothek, M unich, fig. 2) describes a garden of love, but here an actual and thoroughly domesticated one, the artists own. Rubens walks arm -in-arm w ith Helena toward the sculpture pavilion, his son Nicolaas a few steps behind. In the background stands a cupid-and-dolphin fountain (symbolizing loves swiftness); in the foreground, the dog and peacocks (emblems of fidelity and marriage) underscore the theme of conjugal harmony. T he M unich panel foreshadows Rubenss late self- portrait w ith Helena and their youngest son, Peter Paul, also set in a garden, now preserved in the M etropolitan Museum, New York.9

    So much for the happy home front, the spirit of which clearly permeates its imaginary, allegorized reflection in the Pradoim aginary because R ubenss Garden o f Love is surely not lifted from the artists family album . R ather it derives from a formal tradition of love gardens which he infused w ith personal feeling and significance.

    D uring the 1630s, Rubens retired from his active diplom atic career and devoted more time than ever to pain ting for his own personal pleasurelandscapes, portraits, genre subjects. In his famous Kermesse in the Louvre, Rubens offered his version of a Pieter Bruegel, of the Flemish pictorial tradition of peasants at play. At the other end of the scale, bu t clearly related in its accelerating rhythm s, is his Feast of Venus (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a full-bodied, Baroque revival of

    126 The Incarnate Imagination

  • The Garden of Love 129a classical Bacchanal. Somewhere in between we find the Dance o f Peasants (Italian peasants this time) in the Prado and Couples P laying Near a Castle (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, fig. 3), recalling Rubenss purchase in 1635 of the Castle of Steen, his beloved country retreat where he spent his final years as Lord of Steen. The couples are now Flemish, well-to-do, haul bourgeois, and somew'hat tempered, but hardly restrained, in their am orous pursuits. We begin to approach the Garden.

    The tradition of love gardens goes back to medieval art where it was often associated with matrim ony, as we find in the illum inated m onth of April in the Tr'es Riches Heures du Due de Berry by the L im bourg Brothers, illustrating a betrothal in a castle garden (fig. 4). Sometimes the theme was treated satirically, as in the anonym ous Flem ish Geuchmatt (Fools Meadow, fig. 5), where erstwhile fickle men have their wings clipped and their ankles ensnared, their spouses holding them on very short leashes. (Perhaps, I am tempted to suggest, it was painted to adorn a wedding chest.) The recently auctioned Flemish Love Garden of around 1600, attributed to Louis de Caullery (fig. 6), may be seen as a more imm ediate precedent for Rubenss treatm ent w ith corresponding m usician, walled garden, couples strolling and dallying, a dog (faithfulness), peacocks (sacred to Juno, symbolizing marriage), but notably w ithout any m ythological sculpture or invasive putti. T h is is a simple, conventional Conversatie a la Mode.

    W hat transforms Rubenss version into som ething more resonant, into a m etaphorical Garden of Love, are the sculptural additions, like so many iconographic footnotes, and the flying pu tti bearing emblems of love. Rubenss invented sculpture always conveys a specific meaning: here it is the goddess Venus presiding over her realm. She is literally expressive, her breasts functioning as fountains, recalling Rubenss fertile fountain of Mother E a nh (Gaia), the m other of Erichthonius, from the earlier Discovery o f Erichthonius in the Liechtenstein Collection. We are rem inded that Venuslike Rubenss V enus/H elena of Het Pelskenis also a mother: she is the m other of Cupid, the god of love, who prom pts the couple entering at the left. (C upids paternity is doubtful: Mars, Jupiter and Mercury have variously been given the honor; some ancient Greek writers thought his father was Chaos like father, like son. )

    In the pavilion, hidden water jets surprise the cavorting couples. A popular sixteenth-century Italian garden amusement, it is more clearly visible in the woodcut by Christoffel Jegher, based on Rubenss draw ing in the M etropolitan Museum (fig. 7).10 The rusticated fagade derives from Rubenss own architectural contributions to his Antwerp house and garden. A true Renaissance man, Rubens practised architecture as well as invented sculpture. W ithin the pavilion a sculpture of the Three Graces denotes the prevailing civility of this highly cultured garden. But, above all, the flying cupids provide the key to the nature of the love here celebrated: the flam ing torch, the turtle doves, the floral crown, and finally the yoke are all marriage symbols.11 T h is is not free love, but conjugal love being fostered by Venus and her m inions. (The yoke refers to the Latin coniungere, to yoke together, from w hich we get the word conjugalas well as that sobering image, the yoke of wedlock.) In this way the picture celebrates Rubenss own recent marriage, here reflected by analogy and allegory rather than specified by anecdotal

  • The Incarnate Imagination

    Fig. 4 The Limbourg Brothers, April, illumination from the Ties Riches Heures du Due de Berry (Musee Conde, Chantilly).

  • The Garden of Love 131

  • 132 The Incarnate Imagination

    Fig. 6

    Attrib

    uted

    to Lo

    uis d

    e Ca

    ullery

    , Love

    Gard

    en (A

    uction

    : Soth

    ebys,

    New

    York,

  • portraiture. Rubens has thoroughly transformed the pictorial tradition of the Garden of Love, recasting it in his H igh Baroque style, infusing it w ith psychological depth, and raising it to a new poetic plane. Among seventeenth-century love gardens it stands apart, unrivaled in its appeal. For its true artistic descendents, we must look to the next century, to the fetes galantes of Antoine W atteau.12

    A Flem ing by b irth (from Valenciennes, formerly part of Flanders), W atteau appeared in Paris just as the long draw n-out battle in the French Academy between the Poussinistes and Rubenistesthe classicizing defenders of line versus the Baroque proponents of colorwas tu rn ing in Rubenss favor. One of W atteaus early masters, the decorative painter Claude Audran, was also the curator (concierge) of the Luxem bourg Palace; he had the key to the gallery of Rubenss celebrated Medici cycle, and the hours W atteau spent studying and sketching these m onum ental Flemish Baroque canvases were ultim ately to transform the future of French Rococo painting.

    W atteaus translation of his Flemish heritage into a Parisian idiom is typified by his draw ing of a dancing peasant couple from Rubenss Kermesse and their transference to a far more rarefied setting in W atteaus La Surprise.18 T he banded colum ns of W atteaus M usic Party (Wallace Collection, London) have their architectural roots in Rubenss Garden o f Love. But his true debt to Rubens is far less specific and far more pervasive. W atteaus fetes galantes (virtually untranslatable: som ething between gallant festivals and merry parties ), a new genre and category devised especially for h im by the French Academy, owe to Rubenss Garden of Love not only their subject m atter and Rubeniste stylistic values, but also the repeated inclusion of invented statues of Venus to sound, as it were, the appropriate keynotes.

    T heir pitch and tone are distinctly mellower than in Rubens. W atteau strikes a melancholy note w ith in the gaiety. His lovers are tentative where Rubenss were exuberant. His sculptured Venus is usually languid as in Fetes Venitiennes (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), sometimes even asleep, where Rubenss was demonstrative and assertive. In his Champs Elys'ees (Wallace Collection, London fig. 8) W atteau translates in to stone his flesh-and-blood sleeping Antiope, painted five years earlier (Jupiter and Antiope, Louvre, Paris), which in turn is a quotation from a H ellenistic bronze of a sleeping cupid (M etropolitan Museum, New York) an artistic m etam orphosis from sculpture, through flesh, back to sculpture.14 W atteaus statues seem in fact to hover on the boundary of stone and flesh, of art and life, of w hat is real and w hat is imagined, like the statue of Herm ione stepping down from her pedestal at the end of Shakespeares The W inters Tale.

    So, too, W atteaus lovers seem at times to hover between theatre and life, between the play andto quote the Broadway titleThe Real T h in g . In his Mezzetin (M etropolitan Museum, New York, fig. 9), for example, W atteau presents an actor from the Commedia dell arte plaintively serenading his inam orata. We can almost hear Don G iovannis Deh, vien i alia finestra (come to the w indow ). She off stage, off canvasrem ains unseen, but her response may be inferred in the cold shoulder of the female statue tu rn ing its back on poor Mezzetin: despite his good voice, this stock character was ever hapless in love.

    There is a m elancholy strain that runs throughout the lightness and gaiety

    134 The Incarnate Imagination

  • 136 The Incarnate Imagination

    Fig. 9 Antoine Watteau, Le Mezzetin (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

  • of W atteaus fetes galantes like the po ignant counterthem es woven through some of Mozarts brightest movements: a sense of the ephemeral, of the transitory nature of these visions of love and happiness. T he yearning for permanence w ithin the Garden of Love is tempered by the realisation that, like W atteaus perfectly poised dancer in L Indifferent (Louvre, Paris),the magical equilibrium is but momentary. Mozart evokes it in music; T.S. Eliot, in our own century, in one of his Four Quartets:

    At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.15

    T his theme is fully played ou t in W atteaus consum m ate Garden of Love we m ight say his Sacred Grove of Lovethe so-called Pilgrimage to Cythera (Louvre, Paris, fig. 10), the official pa in ting subm itted for his admission into the French Academy in 1717. I say so-called because, despite some recent m uddying of the scholarly waters, it is now generally accepted that W atteau chose to depict the lovers about to depart from Cythera, Venuss sacred island, the ultim ate goal of these am orous pilgrim s, complete with festive p ilg rim s staffs.16

    T he statue of Venus, an an tique term m arking the boundary of her realm, has been adorned w ith roses; at its base hang a bow and quiver full of arrows, the weapons of love. Golden rays of tw ilight suffuse the background as the lovers, their quest fulfilled, proceed to reboard the vessel to return home to the m ainland.

    W atteaus unusual choice of subjectspecifically, his po ignant sense of tim ing is underscored by com parison w ith his earlier, overtly theatrical version of L lsle de Cyth'ere in Frankfurt (1709)representing an outdoor performance of a p lay and by a contem porary p rin t by Claude Duflos (c. 1708). Both leave no doubt that in his Academy piece W atteau chose to depict the departure, not the setting out. The couples are clearly already on Cythera, not in some mythological Battery Park w aiting for the ferry 1 A popu lar novel at the time was entitled The Return from the Isle of Love; the theme was clearly in the air. Lest there be any doubt, W atteaus second version, in Berlin (C harlottenburg Castle, c. 1717-1719, fig. 11), introduces several telling details: the foreground couple already fulfilled in love; the gathering of flowers ( to flirt derives from the Old French fleureter, to talk flowers ); the cupid about to shoot a lover w ith an arrow reversed, feathers first, to cancel love;17 and the anim ated statue of Venus. Significantly she is here shown w ithholding the quiver from cupid: the time for love, we are to understand, is past. At the base of the statue lie trophies of m ilitary arm or and the arts (music, literature) as offerings having been placed before the goddess of love: Om nia vincit Amor.

    Rubenss Garden o f Love expresses a gathering crescendo; W atteaus, a graceful dim inuendo. Rubenss lovers approach conjugal fulfillm ent; W atteaus already begin to w ithdraw from transitory bliss. Rubens spent the last decade of his long productive career rejuvenated by marriage. W atteau rem ained a bachelor, always som ething

    The Garden of Love 137

  • of an outsider despite his fame, his prom ising career cut tragically short by tuberculosis. Yet alm ost singlehandedly he created a new, typically French Rococo tradition of the love garden. Tended by W atteaus followers Jean-Baptiste Pater and Nicolas Lancret, it achieved its final flowering in the art of Jean-H onore Fragonard. (I pass over Fragonards master Francois Boucher on thematic, not art-historical, grounds: w ith Boucher the garden was for one th ing only, and to label it love, w ell.. . . )

    Now Fragonard admittedly was not the first to introduce the "sw inging lady into loves gardensshe already made a cameo appearance in W atteaus The Shepherds (Charlottenburg Castle, Berlin)but Fragonard, w ithout doubt, swept her to unprecedented heights.18 In w hat is surely the w orlds most famous Swing (Wallace Collection, London, 1767, fig. 12) she is propelled higher and higher by, some say, a bishop; others, her unsuspecting husband or elderly suitor, un til her secret lover gains the op tim um view of her legsand perhaps more. He lies sprawled appropriately in a bed of roses (an obvious visual pun) as she flings off her shoe, a popular eighteenth-century motif symbolising the casting off of virtue. The sculpture of C upid by Falconet admonishes silence while, in the background, two pu tti rid ing a do lph in symbolise the swift surge of loves pleasures. These sculptural glosses clearly m aintain their iconographic function as established by Rubens and followed by Watteau. For Fragonard, as well, they play far more than a merely decorative role, as we shall see in his consum mate masterpiece at the Frick Collection in New York, The Progress o f Love.

    A garden of love in four acts, so to speak, the series was comm issioned by King Louis XVs last mistress, Madame du Barry (who ultim ately lost her head on the guillotine for royal love) for her country pavilion at Louveciennes. Fragonard painted the four large canvases between 1771 and 1773: they represent his most im portant commission and grandiose cycle of paintings. But already a t their com pletion they had outlived their times. Neo-classicism a la grecque was already on the horizon. The more austere style of Joseph-M arie Vien was com ing into vogue and would, quite literally, displace Fragonard. After a mere few weeks on view, Fragonards masterpieces were returned to the artist, who eventually took them back home to Grasse.19 (The over-abundance of fragrant flowers in these scenesespecially rosesrem inds us that Fragonard came from the heart of Frances perfum e industry.) There, installed in his cousins house, the series was supplem ented by ten additional canvases. T he paintings crossed the A tlantic in 1915 and eventually settled at the Frick, where they have been recently cleaned and together create the most perfect French eighteenth-century room and "gardenin the New World.

    We shall here confine ourselves to the original four narrative scenes. T heir sequential order has been the subject of m uch scholarly debate: in addition to the three different sequences heretofore proposed, one critic reads them as two complem entary pairs, another as having no intended narrative sequence at all. I am inclined to follow D onald Posners suggested order because it corresponds to the documented installa tion of the paintings in Grasse and to the sequence of Viens neo-classical series which replaced Fragonards at Louveciennesand, above all, because it tells a good story and rings true.20 Still, I recognize that the pursuit

    The Garden of Love 139

  • 140 The Incarnate Imagination

    Fig. 1

    1 An

    toine

    Watte

    au, T

    he De

    partur

    e from

    Cyt

    hera

    (Char

    lotten

    burg

    Castle

    , Berl

    in).

  • of love, alm ost by definition, admits alternative approaches! It has been claimed (in the Fricks own catalogue) that Fragonards prom inent statues have only the most generalized anecdotal connection w ith his foreground subject.21 T his I cannot accept. In my view, they provide precise and equally witty iconographic commentaries on the m eaning of each scene, symbolic touchstones of loves progress.

    In the opening Surprise (fig. 13) the aspiring lover has scaled the wall of the garden of love, startling the unprepared and visibly alarm ed young lady who has been reading a letterwe may guess whose: its seal, like the gentlem ans jacket, is red. Between and above them, we find the now-fam iliar statue of Venus w ithholding the quiver from Cupid. We may recall the same statue in W atteaus second Departure from Cythera and, w ith closer application to the present scene, in his Garden Party in Dresden: the time for loves fulfillm ent, it reveals, has not yet come. T he green pitcher on the ground is as yet unbroken, an emblematic footnote to our heroines virtue w hich likewise rem ains intact.

    And so we proceed to The Pursuit (fig. 14), where the tempo, allegro con brio, is marked by the sculpture of cupids rid ing a dolphin, recalling those in Fragonards Sw ing and the fam iliar fountain m otif in Rubenss mythologies. T he m aidens precarious footing, as she flees, suggests an im m inent fallin love, tomber am oureux.

    T he next scene (fig. 15) used to be called Love Letters but, based on Sauerlanders correct identification of the allegorical statue of Am icitia, is better titled Love and Friendship. T he pair are now shown reading togetherat least shes reading with the dog of faithfulness at their feet. T he love letters bear the fam iliar red seal. T he m erging cloudlike foliage above seems to embrace, m irroring the figures below. It has been proposed that this subject should come last, illustra ting Madame de Pom padours m otto that love passes bu t friendship endures.22 A touching thought. But it is hard to reconcile such sentim ents with either Fragonard or the new royal mistress, Madame du Barry, who unlike her predecessor, the aging La Pom padour, had no physical infirm ity requ iring her to fall back on such a consoling philosophy.

    Finally in The Lover Crowned (fig. 16), the traditional symbols of the love garden (music, garlands, floral crown) appear as well as the artist him self sketching this happy conclusion. Once again, the soft foliage and counterpointed, calligraphic branch reflect the lovers below. And w hat of little Cupid? He is now asleep: his job done, he has earned his nap.

    If nature plays a supporting dram atic role in this cycle, in the late Fragonard fetes it truly dominates. T he figures recede in im portance, enveloped by the sensuous and overblown foliage foreshadowing the landscape fantasies of H ubert Robert and early Rom anticism for example, in Fragonards Sw ing in W ashington or Fete at Ram bouillet (G ulbenkian Foundation, Oeiras, fig. 17): a W atteau m inuet has, in effect, been re-orchestrated as a symphony. T he trees themselves now seem to embody the pent-up forces of nature, like gathering thunderstorm clouds about to break at any moment.

    Fragonard outlived the Rococo. He personally survived the French Revolution, but his style did not. For the finale of the Garden of Love we must look to another

    The Garden of Love 141

  • The Garden of Love 143

    Fig. 13 Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Surprise (The Frick Collection, New York).

  • 144 The Incarnate Imagination

    Fig. 14 Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Pursuit (The Frick Collection, New York).

  • 146 The Incarnate Imagination

    Fig. 16 Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Lover Crowned (The Frick Collection, New York).

  • The Garden of Love 147

  • 148 The Incarnate Imaginationm edium , to the last act of Mozarts Marriage o f Figaro: if only Fragonard had designed the backdropsl (Jean-Pierre Ponnelles new sets at the M etropolitan Opera suggest, by contrast, a petrified garden and seem to derive from Piranesi engravings, overshadowed as they are by gray crum bling architecture). Someone at London Records, at least, has sensed the natural affinity w ith Fragonard, choosing the artists bi-level capriccio in his Gardens o f the Villa dEste at T ivo li (fig. 18, Wallace Collection, London) to illustrate this opera about upstairs/dow nstairs in the Garden of Love.

    In Mozarts fourth and final act, the garden becomes the scene of am orous pursuits, disguised rendezvous, intrigues, infidelities and entrapm ent. T hen, through the perfect fusion of Mozarts music and Da Pontes libretto, it is transformed into a place of grace and redem ption, as the Countess suddenly reveals her true identity

    Fig. 18 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Gardens of the Villa dEste at Tivoli (Wallace Collection, London), as backdrop to Mozarts Marriage of Figaro (London Records).

    to the wayward Count, who has just finished accusing her of unfaithfulness. Caught in his infidelity and now thoroughly chagrined, he begs for her pardon. "I am kinder and say yes (Piu docile io sono, e dico di s i) replies the forgiving Countess in the most heavenly absolution ever pronounced through music.

  • It has been said that the ultim ate goal of art is to reconcile us to life. If so, then nowhere is that reconciliation more inviting or more assured than in these ever-refreshing Gardens of Love by Rubens, W atteau and Fragonard. In these worldly, secular, and overtly sensual settings, we are offered glim psesas in the novels of Andrew Greeleyinto Eden redeemed, heaven-on-earth, where divine and erotic love, Agape and Eros, are revealed to be but two reflections of the same Face.

    Notes'For a review of previous interpretations, see J.S. Held, Rubens Selected Drawings

    (New York, 1986) 151. See also, E. Goodman, Rubenss Conversatie a la Mode: Garden of Leisure, Fashion, and Gallantry, Art Bulletin, LXIV (1982) 247-248.

    2G. Gluck, Rubens Liebesgarten, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, XXXV, (1920-21): 7-98.

    3A. Glang-Suberkn'ib, Der Liebesgarten: eine Untersuchung iiber die Bedeutung der Konfiguration fur das Bildthema im Spatwerk des Peter Paul Rubens (Bern, 1975), 13-35.

    4Leo Steinberg, in public lecture at Columbia University, November 1977.5J.S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, (Princeton, 1980) 400-401.6H.G. Evers, Peter Paul Rubens, (Munich, 1942) 339-348.7Goodman 247 ff.Letter to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, dated 18 December 1634; see R.S. Magurn

    (ed.), The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Cambridge, 1955), 393.9See W. Liedtke, Flemish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York,

    1984) 176-187. Cf. my review in Burlington Magazine (July 1986) 515-516.10J.S. Held, Rubens Selected Drawings (New York, 1986) 151.11 Held 151.12See O. Banks, Watteau and the North: Studies in the Dutch and Flemish Influences

    on French Rococo Painting (New York, 1977).13D. Posner, Antoine Watteau (Ithaca, 1984), 69.14Posner, 79-80.15From T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, stanza II, lines 16-22.16M. Levey, The Real Theme of Watteaus Embarkation for Cythera, Burlington

    Magazine, CIII (1961): 180-185. Cf. D. Posners recentand unconvincingrevision of Leveys thesis, in Watteau, 188-195.

    i7This detail is crucial to Leveys interpretation: M. Levey, 185.18See D. Posner, The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard, Art Bulletin,

    LXIV (1982): 75ff.19The Frick Collection, an Illustrated Catalogue, II, New York, 1968, New York

    114.20D. Posner, "The True Path of Fragonards Progress of Love, Burlington

    Magazine, CXIV (1972): 528 ff. Cf. sequences proposed by F. Biebel, Fragonard and Madame du Barry, Gazette des beaux-arts, LVI (1960): 207 ff; and W. Sauerlander, Uber die Urspriingliche Reihenfolge von Fragonards Amours des Bergers, Munchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst, XIX (1968) 127 ff.

    21The Frick Collection 114.22W. Sauerlander 143 ff. Cf. D. Posner, True Path, 529.

    The Garden of Love 149