Abstract
This chapter examines framing devices in the history of Western art and literature. It shows how the ancient genre of rhyparography (the realist still-life or genre scene) reemerged in the margins or frames of devotional paintings as trompe l’oeil. Two scholarly readings of a key ‘gallery scene’ painting (The Cabinet of Corenlis van der Geest by van Haecht) are compared: firstly, Stoichita’s ‘tautegorical’ reading which emphasizes felicity and secondly Agamben’s ‘allegorical’ reading which emphasizes infelicity. These paradoxical readings of the framing device are shown to have intensified by the nineteenth century in a close reading of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece.
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- 1.
See The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Benjamin 1998), in particular pp. 161–169.
- 2.
‘Pourbus’ is the name of the historical painter, while ‘Porbus’ is Balzac’s spelling of his romanticized character.
- 3.
These temporal crossings were fruitful in ways that the writer never could have expected: ‘The sites of Balzac’s fictions are nearly always real places, but so transfigured that the house at 7, rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, where the action of The Unknown Masterpiece begins, belongs as much if not more to his great character, the painter Frenhofer, as to Picasso, who took it for his studio in 1937, almost certainly because he believed it to have been where Frenhofer’s story was set’ (Danto, viii). Émile Bernard’s anecdote of Cézanne’s mute, emphatic self-identification with Frenhofer as well as Rivette’s La belle noiseuse (1991) testify to the story’s enduring resonances.
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Jayemanne, D. (2017). What Is Rhyparography? The Ambiguity of the Framing Device. In: Performativity in Art, Literature, and Videogames. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54451-9_3
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