Realism and role-play: the human figure in French art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain

Early seventeenth-century French art has hitherto been the domain of specialists and connoisseurs. This book argues for the wider interest of this period by focusing on a single artistic project: the representation of the human figure as a contemporary social type. After the heroic nudes of the Renaissance, after the tortured bodies of Christian saints, early seventeenth-century French artists turned their attention to their fellow humans, to nobles and beggars seen on the streets of Paris, to courtesans standing at their windows, to vendors advertising their wares, to peasants standing before their landlords. Fascinated by the intricate politics of the encounter between two human beings, artists represented the contemporary human figure as a performer who acted out his or her social role. The resulting figures were everyday types whose full-length representations in series of prints, painted galleries, and illustrated books created a repertoire of contemporary social roles.

Visual repertoires of social types had existed before, but the artists featured in this account marry performance and the imaginary of real life in order to create a distinctive type – the real performer. The social types who move through the visual repertoire include courtiers, peasants, strong women (femmes fortes), equestrians, duelers, courtesans, beggars, ambulatory vendors, soldiers, and peasants. Participants in this project made up a new generation of French artists: Jacques Callot, Daniel Rabel, Abraham Bosse, Claude Vignon, Georges de la Tour, Jean de Saint-Igny, the Brothers Le Nain, Pierre Brebiette, Jean I Le Blond, and Charles David.

Departing from prior characterizations of this figural repertoire as mere descriptive illustration, this book draws upon literature, social history, and affect theory in order to understand the way that figuration performed social positions. In a cultural climate possessed by a heightening consciousness of social masquerade, anxieties about the inauthenticity of performance lined the figuration of social types. Attentive artists wielded line and color in order to encode affects that ranged from swagger to shame. Artists also discovered their own liking for performance. Through the representation of the real performer, artists both staged their personal fantasies of social elevation and rehearsed the experience of humiliation and failure.