Moving Pictures of the French Wars of Religion: Articulating Attachment in Guillaume Bouchet’s ‘Des peintres & peintures’, Les Serées (1584–98)

Abstract

Abstract This article examines a peculiar reworking of the ‘moving artwork’ motif in early modern French culture. In the midst of civil war, the devisants of Guillaume Bouchet’s fictional dinner club gather to discuss paintings that are so ‘parfaite’ that they must be restrained with ‘chainons et liens’ lest they wander away. One of their examples, an image borrowed from Antiquity and revived in the early modern period, depicts a wounded, dying mother anxious that her infant will suck blood, not milk. After this scene of ethos and empathy, the devisants turn towards chained paintings of Medea ‘tue-enfant’ and of a wounded man. These images articulate and afford emotional attachments that are realized in the ‘liens & chainettes’ which seem, paradoxically, to do nothing at all. Drawing on recent studies of how agency is mediated through and by art objects, this article traces the devisants’ affective and social responses to these paintings, and shows how Bouchet interrogates tense and mood, feeling and attachment, tragic ‘perfection’ and a future that will always remain conditional, to imagine a scene not of adversity overcome, nor of vitality, but of constraint.