LITMIR.BIZ

      5. Marcantonio’s engraving of The Judgment of Paris, from the design of Raphael (1511–1513). H,2.24 © Trustees of the British Museum.

      The first of these treatises, Evelyn’s Sculptura, does not mean sculpture in the modern sense of the word—though he suggests that there might be homologies between the forms. Rather, Evelyn reminds us that “sculptura” descends from the Latin for “cutting,” and then defines it as that “art, which takes away all that is superfluous of the subject matter, reducing it to that form or body which was designed in the idea of the artist.”⁵⁴ The treatise was based largely on the collection of prints and illustrations Evelyn either saw or purchased while on the Continent. It ostensibly offers a history and description of the art of “cutting or graving of brass, copper, and other metals”—but in fact it is strangely bare of interest in the intricacies of engraving itself. His history does not take any interest in the particularities of medium, dispensing with them as the trappings of “matter.” It does not mention that engravings are made in wood or copper and transferred to paper, or that they are related to developments in the printing press, or that they are reproducible without the successive intervention of the artist. In fact, Evelyn seems loath to mention the material conditions of engraving at all. Instead, the tenor of his argument is that engraving—“sculptura”—is the reproduction of ideas reduced to their essence. It is a question of design, and this is why engraving is such a particularly valuable art. Engraving is the elimination, by cutting, of all that is superfluous, in order to reveal an idea lurking within a visual field.⁵⁵ It is not just that engraving forgoes the clutter or distractions of texture and color—which, Evelyn insists, can anyways “be conceived” from the “splendor and beauty in the touches of the burin.”⁵⁶ Rather, engraving strips away everything “superfluous” until it reveals the ideal origin of its design—that which was “designed in the idea” of the artist, the “prime conception of the workman.”⁵⁷

      Evelyn is less interested, therefore, in engraving as a medium of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, than as the next best thing to minds communicating ideas directly. Nor is an engraving an imperfect art form, a cheap way of distributing facsimiles of an original; it dispenses with the crudeness of more elaborate forms, arriving nearer to the ideal realm that constituted, in Evelyn’s system, the true content of art. The perfection of engraving as an ideal art was, for Evelyn, strikingly exemplified by a certain print of The Judgment of Paris, a collaboration between Raphael and his favorite engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi.⁵⁸ Not only did The Judgment of Paris represent, to Evelyn’s eye, the prime conception of an artist particularly known for his designs; it was in fact believed to refer to no original painting at all, no completed table or detailed drawing.⁵⁹ No original has survived, and so it seemed to Evelyn’s contemporaries to have been engraved on copperplate by Marcantonio directly from Raphael’s design, relayed either through what Roland Fréart calls Raphael’s “Sprezzo”—his initial sketches—or directly from ideas communicated between artists. It appeared therefore to be an engraving of a painting which never existed, and which, according to Evelyn, survives as the immediate record of a pure idea, of Raphael’s unadulterated “design.”⁶⁰

      The fable is this: Paris, ignorant of his own identity as prince of Troy, is herding sheep on the slopes of Mount Ida when he is approached by three goddesses. In order to settle a dispute, each of the three goddesses differently asks Paris to select her as the fairest. Athena sweetens the deal with an offer of wisdom; Juno offers him wealth and power. Each goddess, after all, is the emblem of the virtues she offers. Paris is however ultimately swayed by Aphrodite’s offer of sexual love; in exchange for granting her the prize for the fairest of Olympos, the golden apple of Discord, Aphrodite gives him the woman in the world most celebrated for her beauty. The gift, however, bears an unlooked-for freight, not unlike the horse later to show up before the gates of Troy. Aphrodite’s gift is Helen, and Helen is already married. Her eventual elopement, orchestrated by Aphrodite on Paris’s behalf, will activate a complex network of reciprocal promises between military and political leaders.⁶¹ The story is of course well-known; the judgment of Paris, though he could not have known it at the time, will turn out to be the meteor of the Trojan War, plunging the Mediterranean rim into ruinous conflict. It will kick off the events culminating in the anger of Achilles, Odysseus’s fraught return to Ithaca, and the flight of Aeneas to Rome: the major subjects of epic literature. Paris’s choice—his “judgment”—is therefore an almost trivial moment, at the crossroads of vision and desire, which nevertheless brings into focus the full sweep of epic history.

      Because of the history it condenses, this moment was to become the favorite of a wide range of moralists, fabulists, and painters; Raphael treated the subject, but so too did Rubens (many times), Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Claude Lorrain, to name just a few whom Fréart and Evelyn might possibly have seen.⁶² Helmut Nickel, expressing a common position, argues that the popularity of this scene is no doubt “due to the fact that for the display of piquant nudes it was an even better choice than the Three Graces,” because it “not only offered the chance of presenting three undraped female bodies in three different postures … but also put them in teasing contrast with … fully and properly dressed males.”⁶³ But the popularity of the subject seems on the contrary not to have been for the erotic potential of the three nudes but for the moral lesson the fable was continually used to tell. It was a position already old⁶⁴ when Alexander Ross in 1647 read Paris’s choice as a moral allegory of “beauty and Venereall pleasure” weighed against their ideal alternatives. Given over to the pleasure of the body, Paris refuses Juno’s offer of “power” and “wealth,” and (what is worse) Athena’s of “wisdome” and honor.⁶⁵ Paris’s decision, as many eighteenth-century critics read it, is consequently a failure of judgment: he is too interested in the flesh; he fails to subordinate the figures themselves, the things of this world, to the lesson or allegory they are meant to carry.⁶⁶

      In The Judgment of Paris, we may see a curator at work, indeed several curators, arranging figures according to their different ideas. For one thing, the image is composed of figures borrowed from ancient Roman sculpture, bas reliefs, and ceramics; this is the first thing that announces it as a curatorial composition, the work of an arranging eye.⁶⁷ But it is not, as Fréart sees the engraving, the eye of the viewer that organizes the arrangement of figures, or even the viewer that implies the vanishing point of its perspective. Through a complex consideration of angles, axes, parallels, and horizons, the relative sizes of figures, the twisting of torsos and

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