The remarkable disappearance of the female ankle
Part 1 of 3
[Once again, we interrupt the usual programming, to bring you our recent reflections of the Sir-C-hates-to-read’em variety]
The sudden arrival of summer has caused the fair sex to drop excess clothing and appear before us (nearly) as nature has made them. And nature has made them, it would appear — incredibly! — without the — talocrural joint — sans the synovial hinge — sine angulus, in short — nature has made them — ankleless!
The aesthete’s eye is amazed to see that by and large the human female leg does not, after all, appear to sport the narrow waist of his imagination — as the divinely-shaped, and heavenly-delicious porcine trotter does; but instead the female foot appears to connect directly to the calf, without any attempt at defined ligature, or modulation; in the style of the Doric column, the Egyptian pylon, the pachyderm leg, or the modern parking-lot carrying support-column. Can this be possible? To explain his misconception, the aesthete has gone back to search the various Roman and Renaissance Venuses and to his surprise has discovered that among them, too, the ankle is — notably missing. (Unbelievable, but true). (See above).
Now, the aesthete knows form personal experience — observation of several significant others — that, in principle, the female ankle does exist; but he is now compelled to admit that it would appear to be a commodity in severe shortage.
His fetish — if that’s what it is — the aesthete does not spend excessive amounts of time slobbering over his significant other’s ankles; but he will generally and instantly lose interest in anyone shown to lack a well-turned one — isn’t his alone: he remembers others commenting on women’s ankles — fine-ankled Rajasthani upper-class women; deftly-brushed Edo-era floating-world habitues — and wonders why such an interest should exist. Clearly, fine ankles are far more rare than agreeable faces — could it be that a good ankle is harder to make? Is a fine ankle and indication of good carpentry — a better tool for running and jumping? (Desirable for one’s offspring). Or is it the opposite — that an unsightly ankle is an indication of bad health? (A swollen ankle is the one most obvious indication of circulation problems).
As many aesthetic preferences do, the ankle-interest appears to have speciating effects: those who pay attention to ankles appear to have good ankles themselves!
*
[Incidentally, while looking for an illustration for this post I discovered that the category of photo which could be described as “a female ankle unuglified by some sort of an ill-conceived tattoo” appears to have gone extinct; closer inspection revealed that all those photos sported non-ankles; presumably the tattoo was there as a form of disguise].
*
[It is hard to suspect Greek sculptors and Italian Renaissance painters of not having liked a good ankle; and therefore its general absence from the European cannon must be explained by the Annibale Carracci Phenomenon (ACP): among his early paintings there is an early ugly, chunky nymph, the sort amateur-porn websites call “amateur BBW” (big-beautiful-woman); “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” crowed one of the well-known art theorists about it – I can’t be bothered to remember which; and wrongly: the story of the painting, it turns out, was that young Annibale had neither the money nor the fame with which to attract a proper model; and the model for the painting was one of his cousins who agreed, reluctantly, to bare for free; in short, the artists do not paint what they think is beautiful; they paint what they can].
The Wallace Budoir
The budoir is in the newly opened East Galleries of the Wallace Collection. The custodians have done a wonderful job: the baby-blue-and-gold decor provides the perfect background for the delicious Bouchers. I have seen this happen in other aesthetically successful spaces — the inner garden of the Taj Mahal, the Princes’ Room at the Topkapi Harem, St Mark’s in Venice — people walk in — and slowly, aimlessly stroll about in utter silence. A great beauty like that just shuts you up.
Aesthetics in the age of reproduction
“Happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various sensations of pleasure; and sight is the forerunner of all pleasure.”
Voltaire
Several closer brushes with the National Gallery’s reproductions — a recent attempt to print to order a copy of this has come out so dark as if the portrait had been sat to at dusk — have brought me home the limits of the concept. Despite great strides in technology, by and large, mechanical reproduction remains a failure.
Will it get better? One hopes so. Soon — perhaps in another hundred years or so — the great art objects will be available in perfect copy to all for a song. Let us rejoice in the expectation of that happy day.
But let’s also remember the fact that to most of us, vast majority of art with which we are familiar, has these four or five hundred years been only known in reproduction. That includes those who have thought extensively and written influentially on the topic. Can this thought and writing have escaped some corrosive effect as a result of reproduction’s imperfections?
Jo Hedley’s Francois Boucher, Seductive Visions is the first full length monograph on the painter in twenty years. It is also the first one ever to reproduce Boucher’s paintings in such excellent, vivid color. Heretofore, all reproductions have lied: his blues coming out ashen and his greens not at all — leaving his delightful, rich foliage brown as the East African savannah at the height of the hot season. Just by what technological miracle Ms Hedley managed to achieve these colors I have not yet managed to learn, but the result of the miracle is that reading her book affords one the intense pleasure of licking imperial crown jewels.
Excited by the finding — and eager to share the pleasure — I tried to photograph, then scan the reproductions for your delectiation. In vain. Both efforts yielded the old, familiar ashen sky and brown, dried up shrubbery. An online search for good reproductions turned up nothing but more of the same. The picture above is the only one I could find that is close to the intense saturation of Boucherian color, but even there the effect is only gained at the expense of light manipulation which makes the painting appear darker and less detailed than it is in the original. In short, it turns out that until Ms Hedley gave us her jewel, very few of us have had even an inkling of the intense pleasure Boucher’s work affords: perhaps only those who have had the opportunity to negotiate the state staircase of the Wallace collection where one ascends, like the souls of the blessed slowly wafting to heaven, surrounded by Boucher’s radiant visions, huge, close, beautifully restored, and brilliantly lit. Which is a small number indeed: of all the foreigners against whom one rubs his shoulders in the British Museum and the National Gallery none — not one — is to be seen here.
Ms Hedley offers an interesting observation of what happens when a color work of art must be appreciated without it:
Of course, [appreciation of Boucher’s paintings] was only available to the minority with the money to commission a Boucher painting. But Boucher was more than ready to adapt his vision to other markets. The compositional invention displayed in Boucher’s pictures made them perfect for engraving as source material for decorative arts. Both the Rape of Europa and Mercury confiding Bacchus to the Nymphs appear in reverse on the lids of two gold boxes in the Louvre. As, however, much of the pictorial meaning of Boucher’s original canvasses resided in their color and painterly handling, contemporaries felt that new meaning was needed to compensate for its absence in prints that were to be enjoyed as works of art themselves. Engravings after Boucher paintings are thus often accompanied by moralizing verses, sometimes at odds with the picture’s connotations and deliberately calculated to appeal to a more conservative, bourgeois buyer. So, rather than celebrating courtly love, the verses attached to Avelin’s 1748 engraving of Europa see the story as a warning of love’s deceit: Love is, beautiful Europa, an impostor, take care, believe me, of this flattering bull, etc.
Think about it: if the color is lacking, then a new meaning is needed to compensate for its absence. And this is precisely what critics and scholars have been giving us about Boucher, whom they found variously shallow or trivial or immoral — i.e. lacking meaning — perhaps precisely because they have not seen the originals?
The issue is more general: perhaps scholars and critics have been giving us such distorted views of all art, because all of it is more or less badly reproduced and which one of them has had the time and the budget to see it all face to face, up-close and well lit?
Aesthetics is thus perhaps best classified as a branch of epistemology: the science that concerns itself with what we can know, and how, and what the limits of our knowledge are. After all, everyone’s opinion on art is more or less limited; it is no more than a view; and the view can easily be shown to be always more or less obstructed.
We owe huge thanks to Ms Hedley for her book. Thanks to it we can have an inkling of the enormity of what we are missing.
Notes on The Cultured Life 
Recent Comments