The Diastolic Rhythm of the Gallery: Copies, Originals, and Reversed Canvases

Abstract

As part of a larger project on reversed paintings, this paper looks at the powerfully reflexive motif of the reversed painting in paintings of art galleries (hereafter 'gallery paintings') over a period and space that extends from 1620s Antwerp through the post-Revolutionary Louvre to the present. A reversed painting (or 'back') is defined as a painting within a painting that is depicted from behind, of which the most famous example is probably in Diego Vel zquez's Las Meni as (1656). Victor I. Stoichita argued in The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (1997) that the seventeenth-century 'gallery paintings' made famous by David Teniers were intended to serve as inventories of the collections they represent. In such works, our 'eyes are constantly ricocheting [across the walls of paintings] from one spot to another, unable to stop on any one thing. It is up to the spectator to construct, step by step, a combinatory technique, to establish bridges and correlations.' Although the meaning of such sequences are often obscure to modern interpreters, clues can be found in paintings that are out of sequence and that consequently serve as 'stop signals' in 'the inevitability of a regrouping': 'the one a connoisseur is contemplating, the one not yet hanging on the wall'. Some of these 'stop signals' include backs turned towards us while owners and connoisseurs discuss the fronts that are hidden to us. We see one in the bottom-right corner of the seventeenth-century Cabinet of Rubens, attributed to Willem van Herp. Also within this painting is an unfinished portrait of the then King of Spain, Philip IV, next to a table of painting utensils that remind us of 'the process by which all paintings are produced'. By depicting the unfinished front of the one and the back of the (presumably finished) other painting, the act of creating works in the studio is conflated with the act of appreciating them in the gallery, so as to draw these activities and locations into the same orbit of activity.