arranged an intellectual tableau in the first place.75 “Everie understanding… knoweth,” opined Sir Philip Sidney, that “the skill of ech Artificer standeth in that Idea, or fore conceit of the worke, and not in the worke itselfe.”76 It is design that forms the real object of art, and the techniques that closest approach this ideal pattern—the arts that most capture this design without the imperfections of matter—are therefore the most technically accomplished. Raphael’s critical trick, as it was witnessed by Fréart and Evelyn, was to put the viewer outside the view. Paris sees with embodied purpose; the viewer sees with dispassionate judgment. Raphael’s design is to show us Paris’s. It is just as though we are seeing an anamorphic picture from the wrong spot; through the obliquity of false perspective, we are made to stand outside history.77
In one of the critical passages in his lecture on the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan addresses anamorphosis explicitly. In a study beginning with one of the iconic images of Raphael’s generation, Lacan observes that painting in the end has no particular fidelity to realism, nor does it use the real things it hopes to represent as its materials. The painter means to display a way of ordering things—what Evelyn and Fréart called a design—for which the things themselves are merely the means. His “search” or “quest” is less about an aesthetic effect, in this sense, than it is to make the risky passage between an idea and a disposition or arrangement.78 As Lacan puts it, the painter’s ambition is to “sustain and vary the selection of a certain kind of gaze”—which is to say, an ethics or an idea or a way of seeing, rather than merely a spot from which a thing may be seen.79 The “gaze” as Lacan understands it is not on the side of the viewer who looks; it is the arrangement of things in the field of view, a way of seeing looking back at us. The painting, Lacan insists, “looks at me”; it projects its light “in the depths of my eye”; and in the depths of his eye are reproduced the geometric relations that the painting first established. It is not, for Lacan, that a viewer necessarily wishes to see herself seeing herself; nor is it true that an artist is endlessly interested in representing herself in the visual field (like Milton’s Eve, half-seduced by her own reflection). The field need not capture the image of the painter. For the painting “grasps” its viewer through the design it offers, showing us the painter’s way of seeing.80
What Lacan calls “the screen” is “the locus of mediation,”81 where a way of ordering things (his “gaze”) meets the pyramis of the viewer’s look (the perspectival subject).82 Lacan’s intellectual debts here are to a tradition of design and anamorphosis; his remarks in fact develop from an insight afforded by Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors, a painting executed roughly two decades after The Judgment of Paris. Lacan is in other words elaborating a point raised by Evelyn and Fréart,83 for the point Fréart extends throughout his discussion is just this: what is on display (in the end) is not a version of history, or even merely a parable of Paris’s judgment, but Raphael’s way of seeing.84 “An Artist,” Fréart concludes, “paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses.”85 As Jonathan Richardson would later affirm, “Painters always paint themselves.”86 The Judgment of Paris is the judgment of Raphael, for it offers us a moral system and an ethical imperative, the very picture of negotiations between the eye of judgment and the hand of the artist—borne out on the screen of the world.
Exhibit 6. A Gritty Pebble
In a dark room, sectioned off from the rest of the Sedgwick Museum of Natural History at Cambridge, is the geological collection of John Woodward (1665–1728), standing more or less as Woodward designed it. Open the door to Woodward’s curatorially dark study; put on your cotton gloves; open the eighth drawer in the first cabinet on your left; and scan to object number 64. In the drawer custom-made to receive it, in the walnut cabinet custom-made to contain the drawers, is object c.226 in Woodward’s catalogue. It is
a gritty Peble of a very light brown Colour, an oblong oval Shape, an Inch and ¾ in length, and one Inch in breadth, flattish, and having the two Ends somewhat pointed. There’s a narrow Ridge, of the same breadth in all parts, running directly long-ways of the Stone, and quite encompassing it. This Ridge consists of a closer and harder sort of Matter than the rest of the Stone. In the middle on one side, the Stone sinks in, and rises out on the opposite, as if it had been soft and press’d in that Part.87
6. “A gritty Peble of very light brown Colour.” Specimen c.226 (Mason-Ogden #A-8-64), in the Woodwardian Collection. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.
Looking back at you is a stone that looks like nothing so much as a large, heavily lidded human eye. You see it, but it does not see you. This, however, has not stopped at least one person from trying to imagine himself into its place. Viewing it as an enlightened witness to geological time, a silent and opaque relic of momentous events, Woodward more than once mused upon what sights it might have seen, were its eye open one fateful day roughly six thousand years before.
John Woodward was a physician, minor poet, antiquarian, and rock hound. He was a collector of statues, vases, inscriptions, and amulets. But his “great and lasting preoccupation” was his collection of stones.88 At the height of his reputation, he was the professor of physic at Gresham College in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the foremost figures in the development of geology. Apart from a few published treatises, a handful of vitriolic pamphlet-satires, and a few portrait engravings, what remains of him is now precisely this cabinet—kept in its original order by the terms of his bequest. The cabinet captures nothing less than a design and way of ordering the world; it takes the stuff of the landscape and puts it in a more perfect order—an arrangement according to an idea. And he was, of course, the man who collected and attempted to make sense of this “gritty Peble,” a compact object which nevertheless, for Woodward at least, articulated a vast design. The cabinet and this pebble represent an asymmetrical dialectic now frozen in time, a record of Woodward’s efforts to arrange an explanatory and complete system of the world.
The last work of Woodward’s life was his Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England (1728), a half-finished catalogue of his mineralogical collection. Containing, by one count, 9,400 specimens, the collection is a study in variety. Each of its items, Woodward writes, “so much differ[s] from the other, that in the whole there are scarcely any two alike.”89 Nevertheless, among this chaos of objects, the Attempt offers an organizing scheme, and it is here that the collaboration between nature and design emerges. Recognizing that “there are Those who would have the Study of Nature restrain’d wholly to Observations, without ever proceeding further,” Woodward offers this reply:
Assuredly, that Man who should spend his whole Life in amassing together Stone, Timber, and other Materials for Building, without ever aiming at the making an Use, or raising any Fabrick out of them, might well be reputed very fantastic and extravagant. And a like Censure would be his Due, who should be perpetually heaping up of Natural Collections, without Design of building a Structure of Philosophy out of them, or advancing some Propositions that might turn to the Benefit and Advantage of the World. This is in reality the true and only proper End of Collections, of Observations, and Natural History.90
As Woodward understands it, a collection without an organizing “End” threatens to lapse into a mere “heap,” a sort of “extravagance” (a “detour” or “going out of the way,” see Exhibits 10–14). The alternative is to organize a collection around some “Design,” which he calls, after the example of the “Fabrick,” an intentional “Structure of Philosophy,” a connected system of observations and remarks constructed out of the objects he has accrued. Such an ideal structure, a pattern composed in the mind during a life of “amassing,” is at once a “design” itself and what the collector “designs”
