In her short, densely argued book, Dalia Judovitz observes that Georges de la Tour (1593–1652) is the one artist who owes his latter-day existence completely to the efforts of art historians. La Tour was successful and prosperous and enjoyed a high social status, yet inexplicably slipped into oblivion following his death. The meager historical record of his life became entirely separated from his paintings, which were ascribed to others for two centuries. The German scholar Hermann Voss brought about his resurrection in 1915, and over the first century of La Tour's afterlife there have been four major exhibitions and several studies. The catalogue of the most recent exhibit at the Prado (2016), which presumably opened after Judovitz's writing, proposes a chronology and presents stylistic context. (Of the seventy paintings currently assigned to him, Judovitz includes twenty-five color plates.)
Judovitz takes on some of the more difficult aspects of this already cryptic artist's work. His figures inhabit minimal settings, lit either by brilliant daylight or by the light of a single flame. The faces are usually masklike and expressionless; there is little spatial context. His religious figures have no halos; his angels have no wings. Their subjects can be a conundrum; the sacred and secular are often wondrously intermingled. They contain an often somber quietude with ravishing effects of light.
According to Judovitz's reading, this rigor and minimalism, paired with sensuous description, requires more than merely “seeing”: the paintings’ meanings must be discovered and teased out through what amounts to meditation. The author's initial invocation of phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims a multifaceted interpretation of visual art, “a richer, cross-disciplinarian understanding of the meanings associated with the vision and the visible in the early modern period” (6). This approach is in keeping with the general impulse in Baroque aesthetics to articulate senses beyond the visual.
Judovitz notes that others have written of La Tour's sacred and profane works (scenes of gaming, swindling, and music making, along with meditative religious images) and argues that his subtleties make a distinction of subject matter superfluous, assessing his “interpenetration rather than merger” (44) of the two realms. Rather, she groups his paintings by their treatment of light: there are the “nocturnes,” on the one hand, and then, on the other, the works in daylight, which “startle the viewer with exaggerated depictions of light … recalling the artifice of theater and the subterfuge of masks” (15). The nocturnes, by contrast, famously depict their sources of illumination: candles, charcoal sticks, and torches. (Judovitz also offers great insight into a few lesser-known scenes in which a child blows on the flames.)
Accordingly, Judovitz's five chapters ponder representations of various elements depicted in different subjects: books, mirrors, and sightless skulls, which suggests blindness and/or worlds beyond the visible; game players and fortune-tellers as tropes of inattention and false reading; representations of reading and speaking; and candles, flames, braziers, and torches. One especially perceptive chapter treats the puzzling painting known as the Flea Catcher, in which a young woman, mostly undressed, crushes something between her hands—a flea or a rosary—suggesting associations of cleansing and meditation.
Along with her sustained attention to the smallest details of La Tour's paintings, Judovitz's literary range is formidable. She offers meticulous readings of the Gospels, Jesuit texts, and contemporary art theory. Her comparison between multiple versions of the same religious subject and the varying accounts of the same incident in the four Gospels shows her approach at its finest. Perhaps consequently, some of La Tour's genre pictures, such as The Tumult of the Musicians (J. Paul Getty Museum), are passed over, silently or in a list.
Consistent with her focus on religious texts, Judovitz contextualizes La Tour's work in early seventeenth-century Lorraine, which played an important role in the anti-Protestant movement reevaluating the nature of images in the light of iconoclasm. Ultimately, she credits La Tour with establishing a new visual language situated between naturalism and allegory, between spirituality and the everyday, protecting the image against “the taint of idolatry” (107). While La Tour was hardly alone among his contemporaries in his mingling of the sacred and the secular, and in evoking senses beyond that of sight, Judovitz's analyses of his work are penetrating and cogent. This study will be of considerable interest to anyone engaged not only with La Tour but with early modern visual culture as a whole, especially as it relates to the spiritual.
