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 the oblique slopes of shoulders, Fréart argues that the true point of vision is not where a standard account of Renaissance perspective might anticipate—that is, is not in the eye of the spectator.68 On the contrary, the viewer is something contained in the picture itself. “The Subject of this History being chiefly about Sight,” Fréart insists, “the Paynter could not have plac’d the Visive point more judiciously, than in the Eye of Paris.” Raphael has placed Paris in profile, Fréart argues, specifically to reduce vision to a single point only, as “Geometricians teach us in their Optics, where they represent Vision or the function of Seeing, by a radiated Pyramis with an Eye fixt upon it.”69 We might think, here, of the second cone of Robert Hooke’s formulation (Exhibit 4), the one that condenses on the “inlightned body”70; in Paris’s eye is reproduced the full field of the perspectival scene. But, more than this, we have caught him just as he is making his choice, as he is, in other words, arranging history. This helps account, Fréart believes, for the turning of the bodies of the three goddesses. At the center of the chaos on display, where history is being composed out of the matter of classical prehistory, is the single form of the goddess of love. The principal figures of the piece all are turned toward her, as she at once receives the twin objects of her victory: the laurel crown and the apple of Discord. Paris has his designs; motivated by a bodily response to the three nudes, he reaches into the scene to arrange history.
Read as a moral allegory, The Judgment of Paris is about a failure of judgment. Paris fails to see with his intellectual eye; what instead he sees is what is available to the eye of the senses. He chooses the only goddess who offers a version of what she displays. And if Nickel is right that numerous viewers enjoyed the painting for its contrast between clothed men and nude women, the voyeuristic thrill it offers, then those viewers are essentially seeing the scene as Paris sees it, and not (as Raphael encourages us) seeing the table as an opportunity to see Paris seeing.71 Perhaps taking his warning from the very scene on display, Fréart does not locate the truth of the visual arts in what is available to the eye; it is not to be found in coloring, the handling of human anatomy, or other aspects of what he calls “the Mechanical Arts.” Painting is instead to be considered a “demonstrative science,” which arranges its “matter” according to the “rules of geometry.” “The image itself,” writes Peter de Bolla of images like this one, “instructs the eye.”72 To witness the Judgment of Paris is to stand both inside and outside Paris’s point of view; to see The Judgment of Paris is to see, and hence to judge, the judgment of Paris, Paris’s single pupil as the sedimented fund of his world, and his hand, all intentionality, reaching back to arrange things to his liking.
Raphael’s design is particularly accomplished because it strives to put perspective on review, to show us how Paris makes a picture. This is what James Elkins suggestively calls an “object oriented” use of perspective; we are witnessing Paris in the mangle of practice as he (unwittingly) constructs a world.73 In this sense, The Judgment of Paris is formally like the engraving of the camera obscura: Paris’s eye forms one perspectival “pyramis,” while the body of Aphrodite offers its natural counterweight. The handing off of the apple signals Paris’s designs—where he reaches into the scene to craft it according to his idea. But there is a final twist, as Fréart sees it, where the eye of the Enlightenment meets the arrangement of the Renaissance—for the very organization of a tableau according to an idea is the province of Raphael’s design. These are his words; “Design” is not only the “veritable Principle and only Basis … of Painting,” it is also “the universal Organ and Instrument of all the politer Arts.” Without it, painting becomes “a meer Chymaera and
