ANDRÁS RÉNYI

The Enchantment of Proximity

Notes on Cézanne’s watercolour after Caravaggio’s Entombment
and on the two painters’ different “systems of equivalences”

T he immediate subject of my paper is a

watercolour combined with pencil by Paul Cézanne (fig. 1),1 made most likely
after a small black-and-white print after Caravaggio’s large oil painting, the
Entombment (fig. 2), now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome. The copy had been
engraved by Jean-Louis Charles Pauquet (1759–1827), after a drawing by Pierre
Michel Bourdon (1778–1841) and was published in 1804 (fig. 3), in the second
volume of the Galerie du Musée Napoléon, a series including reproductions of
the main pieces of the emperor’s collection of artworks exhibited in the Musée
du Louvre.2 Caravaggio’s painting, originally installed as the magnificient al-
tarpiece of the Vittrici Chapel in Chiesa Nuova of the Oratorians (S. Maria in
Vallicella) in Rome, was taken to Paris in 1797 as war booty by Napoleon – thus
Bourdon’s copy must have been created after a close study of the original. After
Napoléon’s fall, Caravaggio’s famous capolavoro was returned by the Bourbons
to Rome in 1817 and became part of the papal collections.3
We have no information on how and where Cézanne encountered Pauquet’s
engraving, but Cézanne executed a first tracing after the print, made with pencil
on ordinary paper.4 Its size is exactly identical with that of the printed original.
The dating of this drawing varies in literature between 1875 and 1880. However,
the watercolour’s year of execution is more than dubious – Götz Adriani dates
it to 1877–1880,5 Venturi to sometime between 1881–1885,6 John Rewald to
ca. 1900.7 My impression is that the sheet – at least stylistically – is closest to
the watercolours created in the early 1880s, but – not being a Cézanne-expert
at all – I will not argue further in this matter.

| 63
1 | Paul Cézanne: Study after Caravaggio’s Entombment, 1872–1877, revised 1879–1885
pencil and watercolour on paper | private collection

62 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

 2 | Caravaggio: Entombment, 1603–1604
oil on canvas | Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome

As far as I know, no one has yet attempted to analyze this particular sketch
by Cézanne in detail. One of the reasons for this might be that it surely cannot
be valued as a significant work, not even among his watercolours. The uncer-
tainties about its dating might be due to the fact that there is apparently no
work by Cézanne that can be regarded either as its antecedent or as its conse-
quence. I was unable to find any drawing or painting in his œuvre with any
motif taken from this sketch. Moreover, in this case we cannot regard Cézanne’s
work as a result of some direct “influence” of Caravaggio, since Cézanne had
obviously never seen the original painting itself. (This is one of the reasons
why I am quite skeptic about Roberto Longhi’s statement concerning Cézanne’s
ability “to illuminate, after three hundred years, the quintessential, abstract,
metaphysical appearance of the Caravaggesque model”,8 or about Alfred

64 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

 3 | Jean-Louis Charles Pauquet after a drawing by Pierre Michel Bourdon:
Copy of Caravaggio’s Entombment, 1804–1815
engraving | “Galérie Napoléon”, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des estampes, Paris

Neumeyer’s opinion that Cézanne captured here “entirely the essentials of

Caravaggio’s Baroque composition”.9 Sheldon Grossmann recognizes that
Cézanne based his watercolour on a drawing by another artist, nonetheless he
also insists that “the spirit and power of the original comes through”10.) There
is no sign of any interest on his part in the three original works by Caravaggio
that he could have seen vis-à-vis in the Louvre. In his letters, notes or conver-
sations there is almost no mentioning of the Italian master. It seems that aca-
demic art history, mainly interested in stylistic development, in finding sources,
predecessors, and influences, has not too much to say about the relationship
between Caravaggio and Cézanne.
Maybe it is more adequate to put the question the other way round, i.e. to
ask not how the later master was influenced by the former one, but rather, what

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Cézanne created from the formal settings and patterns he found in the print
after Caravaggio? Which features of the composition were important and which
negligible to him? Is there a genuine pictorial logic or any inner rules that con-
ducted the artist’s reworking of the original? Or, to put it in another way: what
was Cézanne’s intention to make “a simple study, quick and unpretentious …
for himself”, as the Caravaggio-scholar Alfred Moir declares in his Caravaggio
and his Copyists?11
Before I attempt a close reading of Cézanne copying Caravaggio, I admit my
ambition to point to a less manifest but more profound relationship between
them – as modern painters, both involved in developing a consistent individual
vocabulary, that is, a very specific pictorial syntax of their own. Far beyond the
triviality of obvious differences in style and socio-cultural context, they shared
a common interest in grasping the world as something impersonal, nature-
like and “objective”. Bellori wrote on Caravaggio in his Vite dei pittori, scultori
ed architetti moderni …, published in 1672: “… he claimed that he imitated his
models so closely that he never made a single brushstroke that he called his
own, but said rather that it was nature’s”.12 This corresponds to many of
Cézanne’s claims on the tribute a painter must pay to nature. I hope my short
analysis of the two Entombments can show how different those painterly syn-
taxes can be. My aim is a better understanding of Cézanne’s productive misun-
derstanding of Caravaggio.
Now let me return to my question concerning Cézanne’s artistic intention
– this must have been something for which even a small black-and-white copy
of a large painting was proper to start with. What we first have to examine is
the work of the artist on paper with pencil and brush, while focusing particularly
on the technical aspects of drawing and watercolour painting.
First, we are fortunate enough to have Cézanne’s first drawing, a pencil trac-
ing (fig. 4),13 made by superimposing the semi-transparent sheet of paper on
Pauquet’s print. With the help of contemporary digital technology, we are able
to reconstruct some of the steps Cézanne took and observe which lines he me-
chanically redrew and what other kinds of traces he left on the paper. It seems
that he was not interested neither in the precise lineament of the engraving,
or in the exact disposition of every part of the composition: while tracing, he
must have moved the overlay sheet at least three or four times. We can discover
some of the positions, each having different parts matching while others do
not overlap. Cézanne consequently abandoned complete contours of figures
to follow by his pencil, a natural feature of this kind of copying anyway – he ap-
plied short, rough strokes instead, accentuating parts of some contours two or
three times, which can be observed for instance in the head of Saint John. How-
ever, in some details he used free hatching, rather in order to stress a neutral
ground that can serve as contrast to the figure in front, than to depict another
figure behind that is otherwise clearly visible in the engraving. This points to

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 4 | Paul Cézanne: Tracing of an engraving after Caravaggio’s Entombment, 1877–1880
pencil on paper | private collection

an interest of the artist in isolating figures with some rilievo against the back-
ground. Obviously, Cézanne left the tracing unfinished: it seems that he simply
lost his interest in redrawing the print and abandoned the work on it.
As compared to this, the watercolour version was elaborated in a more reg-
ular manner. There is no sign of Cézanne having capitalized on his former
study: no wonder that dating of this sheet varies so broadly. As far as the wa-
tercolour is concerned, the first thing to be recorded is the framed field on the
white paper, marked out by pencil and filled with bluish watercolour, with
some red, green and viola shades in it, indicating the background of a painting
in which the figures of the Entombment appear. This is typical for Cézanne in

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 5 | Paul Cézanne: La Toilette, ca. 1880
pencil and watercolour on paper | Ian Woodner Family Collection, New York

the early 1880s, as we can see for instance in La Toilette dated circa 1880
(fig. 5).14 In both cases Cézanne designed the pictorial field of a painting con-
sequently as different from the paper support – he leaves the white of the paper,
as ground for the colouring of the bodies within the frame, untouched. Thus,
the figures and their untouched bodies are defined in relation to the painted
framework and to the fictive ground.
Cézanne most likely began with the pencil work, outlining the frame and
the contours by fine bunches of long, thin, slightly curved lines. He followed
Caravaggio’s lineament rather freely. Then he added the painted contours, the
loose colour washes, using everywhere the same width of the brush, moving it
over the whole surface with the same élan or impetus.15 Cézanne apparently

68 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

ignored the details, among them those that could carry any human expression
or narrative meaning. This time Cézanne was even less interested in faces,
hands and anatomy. He did not intend to mark out the bodies one by one, to
differentiate between bodily entities on their own – that is why there is neither
any trace of a clear positioning of them in space, nor a strict order of overlapping
bodies – a feature anyway not only typical, but, as we will see, even crucial for
Caravaggio. But the bodies themselves as such, their roundness or plasticity,
the play of light for modelling them seem not too much to dominate either.
Regarding the figural composition, Cézanne almost totally eliminated Mary
Cleophas from upper right with her aggressively straightened and erected arms,
letting them dissolve in the somehow vague and wavy lineament of the bluish
background. He rounded the arch of Nicodemus’ angular back line as well, just
like the lower hem of the immaculate drapery under Christ’s body, as if the two
curves, echoing each other, were part of the same oval circulation. This is also
true for the lower part of Nicodemus’ robe and Christ’s right arm falling down
– Cézanne’s only aim was perhaps the coordination of the simple, lively arched
contours into one decorative pattern rhythmically rotating around the centre.
The most far-fetched modification is that of the stone slab: while Caravaggio,
consequently enough, let this rigid, straight strip run all across the picture
plane, in Cézanne’s watercolour it is shown from above, in a rather false per-
spective, so that the left side of the slab seems to descend diagonally to the
right. It must have been one of Cézanne’s intentions to avoid geometrical reg-
ularities altogether – that is why the intertwining of the slab with the falling
arm of Christ forms one energetic curve encompassing the whole composition.
Cézanne simply ignored the strong verticality of the fallen right arm and shroud
of the dead Christ, which are, as if got stuck, touching the stone angularly –
one of the most dramatic features of the Caravaggio picture. (Nota bene, the
slight lifting of the eye level was not Cézanne’s invention, but that of Bourdon
and Pauquet: although they drew the shortening precisely, they missed
Caravaggio’s crucial idea of positioning the upper level of the slab exactly as
the horizon line – a feature I will come back to discuss.)
In summary: if we examine the watercolour in order to find the deeper mo-
tivation or the ‘genuine logic’ of the artist’s work, we may conclude that for
Cézanne in the early 1880s Caravaggio was no more than one of the “great dec-
orative masters, as Veronese and Rubens”, whose works he recommended to
study in his letter from Aix to Charles Camoin, dated 2 February 1902.16 The
grandiose dynamism of the figure composition, the abstract formula he might
have sought for in the Entombment, perhaps for one of his prospective monu-
mental Bathers, turned out to be a complete misunderstanding, hardly appli-
cable for his own purposes. Apparently, Cézanne was neither interested in the
particular religious subject, nor susceptible enough for the new order of close
bodies and narrow dark spaces, that Caravaggio’s primeval naturalism intro-

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duced to modern Western painting and which can be evaluated anything but
“decorative”. Caravaggio’s personal “system of equivalences” – as Merleau-Ponty
calls it, “his own Logos of lines, of lighting, of colours, of reliefs, of masses –
a non-conceptual presentation of universal Being”17 was so different from that
of Cézanne’s, that a deeper interest on his part in this kind of baroque painting
could have never developed. Cézanne also might have felt something like this:
after this only experiment, he never returned to Caravaggio.
As I mentioned before, I am not a Cézanne expert – I am more interested
in a better understanding of the pictorial syntax of Caravaggio’s highly effective
“naturalism” – which Merleau-Ponty is referring to and which, in my view, can
be best understood in comparison with that of his copyists. Since every artist
is driven by his or her own motivation, sensitivity or interest – even a close
copy is a kind of adaptation of the model into one’s own “system of equiva-
lences”. The more we know about the systematicity of modifications a copyist
automatically makes, the better we understand the original as such.
Strikingly, the first painter who copied the Entombment was not too far from
Cézanne’s “decorative” reading of the piece. The young Peter Paul Rubens, who
stayed in Rome in 1601 working at the Chiesa Nuova, some ten years later, upon
returning from Italy to Antwerp, painted a free adaptation of Caravaggio’s al-
tarpiece, which is now preserved at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
(fig. 6).18 The adjustments he made are pointing to the same direction: to mod-
erate the dumb crudeness of the scene, and to make it more affective and sen-
timental. However, they are, just as Cézanne’s, revealing a lot not only of his,
but of Caravaggio’s way of composing as well.
Like Cézanne, Rubens also leaved out – or relegated to a much more low key
role – the rather unpleasantly figure of Cleophas’ wife between John and Mary:
this way the heads and refined expressions in Rubens’ painting, from Mag-
dalena to the more devoted John, curve according to a more classical drama-
turgy, ending at their goal and resting place, the head of Christ. More charac-
teristic is the method by which Rubens adjusts the group of men carrying Christ.
In Caravaggio’s picture, two men carry the body of Christ, diagonal to the picture
plane. Nicodemus, his feet planted close to the edge of the slab, grasps the
knees in his left arm, bending well over, while turning toward the viewer as he
prepares to lower the body over the edge in the direction of his glance. The legs
of Christ protrude toward the observer. His elbow jabbing outward, his eyes
located on the axis of the painting, Nicodemus is fixing the recipient of the
body. Saint John, who can be identified by his youthful appearance and striking
red cloak, supports the torso of Christ upon his right knee with his right arm,
the other evidently under the hips, and bending over the torso, he gazes beyond

6 | Peter Paul Rubens: The Entombment, ca. 1612–1614

oil on oak | National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

70 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

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the body into the space before the picture. Beyond the mood of mourning and
lamentation, a hardly definable feeling of concern and endangerment settles
on the composition that is somehow eliminated by Rubens’ more sentimental
treatment.
Now let me consider a seemingly unimportant detail. In Rubens’ composi-
tion, John steps off the carved stone slab with his right foot – in order to support
the body – which is being let down from below: and, stepping to the side, his
head is now fully above that of Christ. This motion is more emotive and “ex-
pressive”, than it is in Caravaggio’s work, where John’s figure is more reminis-
cent of a dock worker concentrating on holding a heavy load. Rubens may have
felt, and rightly so, that the balance of the group is spilled over in Caravaggio’s
painting: the heavy body is about to slip away. With this step down, Rubens un-
consciously aims to avoid John and Nicodemus simply drop Christ. However,
this balancing out – as vigorous and spectacular Rubens’ painting otherwise
might be – turns the original composition into a rather conventional one.
Clearly, Rubens was inclined to a kind of more general dramatization, senti-
mental atmosphere and decorative unity of composition – while Caravaggio’s
hidden drama – far beyond what has been presented through facial and bodily
expression – is carried out by the undecidedness of a silent and frightening
tension between a heavy body and the forces that try to keep it in balance.
While easing the tension, Rubens also unconsciously loosened some well-
organized formal coincidences and parallelisms, pointing to the same direction
in Caravaggio’s tight composition. See for instance, how he softens the rigidity
of the quadratic shadow between Nicodemus’ elbow and hip bone in the
Caravaggio, perfectly stressing the mechanical necessities of a body charged
with suspending a heavy load. These fine adjustments also moderate the ade-
quacy of this scheme with the strict geometrism of the stone slab and its formal
correspondences with the post and lintel-under-structure of the lower part,
with the crude stone cubes on both sides deposited on each other, the whole
reminiscent of the firm architrave-frieze-cornice structures in archaic Greek
architecture. There is no sign that Rubens had even realized this – he totally
ignored the fine play with the hidden grid of verticals and horizontals by which
Caravaggio produces this effect of crude solidity and materiality. No wonder
that later on Cézanne, following Pauquet’s rather “school-bookish” interpre-
tation, was not affected by the strength of it either.
My impression is that Caravaggio had been almost obsessed with represent-
ing such primarily physical qualities of bodies like weight or inertness. For
him gravity was the most important metaphor for the vulnerability of the crea-
ture, of man and his world – something to which Rubens apparently had no
real sensitivity. But weight is a complicated phenomenon to depict. Weight is
not an iconic quality like shape, size or colour: it is not a characteristic visible
on bodies or objects, or a characteristic that can be represented as such. It can

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 7 | Derek Jarman: Caravaggio, 1986
film still | Ronald Grant Archive, London

only be grasped as a relationship – for instance, between the ground or a point

of suspension and the body – and has an event character. In a picture, only a
high degree of coordination and synchronization of the visible can make this
intercourse be experienced – as a dynamic process that it is.
At the very end of Derek Jarman’s 1986 film Caravaggio, there is a still picture,
showing the Entombment as a tableau vivant, composed from studio models
(fig. 7). Most likely, Caravaggio had used this kind of staging in his studio work
indeed to experiment with grouping, etc.19 The realism of this picture is reveal-
ing: although it shows gravity undoubtedly at work, the photograph lacks the
kind of tight pictorial organization that makes weight be felt. Since the strength
of gravity as an independent and universal force becomes experienced only if
it consistently applies everywhere and to all things, even the most ephemeral

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 8 | Caravaggio’s Entombment in situ
Chiesa Nuova (S. Maria in Vallicella), Cappella Vittrici, Rome

ones: if this implication permeates the entirety of the image. This is what Norman
Bryson would call the “expansion of the peripheral”, or what Roland Barthes
meant by the “significance of the insignificance” – as a means of the “effect of
the real”,20 of the aesthetic authentication of realist representation.
Thus Caravaggio appears as a painter, who demands a more bodily presence
of the viewer standing close in front and looking at the painting. This can also
be gathered from the original positioning of the painting in the Vittrici Chapel
of the Chiesa Nuova, which is composed to be seen from a point exactly opposite
the altar (fig. 8). As Georgia Wright proved,21 the painting in situ must have been

74 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

a dramatic adjunct to the catholic Mass, its acting incomplete until the priest
stands ready to receive the body that is being lowered to him. After the words
“this is my very body”, when the priest elevates the newly consecrated host for
the adoration of the worshippers, perfectly juxtaposing Host and body, even the
most simple communicant might see that the celebration of the unbloody sac-
rifice of the Mass is a mysterious re-enactment of Christ’s original, perfect sac-
rifice. The slab serves to identify with precision the horizon or eye level, five
and a half feet above the altar step or approximately at the eye level of the priest.
Now consider the slab as support of all heavy bodies again: since the upper
surface of it is exactly coinciding with the horizon of the beholder, there is no
view at it – I mean, at the surface as a place where things and bodies can be
identified as belonging to this or that place. While the viewer can easily follow
the play of gravity, that of ups and downs on the picture plane, it is almost
impossible to position the objects in depth with the same clarity. Figures and
bodies are pressed to each other and aggressively come close to the beholder
– because Caravaggio, by using a totally dark background and by eliminating
any motifs receding to the horizon, denies any access to that dimension. The
idea to bring the line of horizon into the fore is perhaps the most revolutionary
and subversive step to the intimacy of modern naturalism: it leads to the almost
violent effect of the picture space imposing itself on the viewer.
The corner point of the stone slab (like Nicodemus’ peak elbow) seems to
protrude into the beholders immediate space; a dazzling effect, since this es-
pecially highlighted point, the closest one, directly opposite the viewer’s eye,
exactly coincides with the place where otherwise the most distant one, the van-
ishing point should have been placed. These two “ideal” points – the one pro-
jected by him and the other, pointing at him – are on the same spatial axis, per-
pendicular to the picture plane and identical with what Alberti called the
“prince of rays”, the centric ray stretching between the eye and the surface seen.
But exactly this radical coincidence makes it impossible for the viewer to es-
tablish, to measure and to reflect on his/her distance from the picture and the
things depicted.
Thus, Caravaggio’s concept of the perspectival space is the most radical im-
plementation of Alberti’s finestra aperta, the “open window” from inside out;
a spatial illusion at its utmost peak; frameless, distanceless, and meaningless.
One immediately experiences in front of such a painting the proximity and
presence of things, nothing but the dramatic feeling and suggestion of here and
now, the common “flesh of the world” of the seer and the seen.
The Entombment is not the only work in Caravaggio’s œuvre that is meant to
enforce this kind of embodied gaze. Consider the second version of the Inspi-
ration of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome
with the bottom line as horizon combined with a witty play of imbalance of the
capsizing bench – or the Basket of Fruit in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

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 9 | Caravaggio: Basket of Fruit, ca. 1599
oil on canvas | Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

(fig. 9)22 – a work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty might be referring to in his Eye
and Mind and that brings us back to Cézanne. For Merleau-Ponty both Cézanne
and Caravaggio represent the same type of painters, “whose work is for the
viewer not simply to be seen but something to see with or according to it”.23
Both of them, being absolutely dependent on what they called “nature”, could
have said with Merleau-Ponty, that “the world is in accordance with my per-
spective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me,
to be a world. The ‘visual quale’ gives me, and is alone in doing so, the presence
of what is not me, of what is simply and fully.”24 They share a strong dependence
on nature and on physicality of vision – although what they take as “visual quale”,
their mode of painting could not be farther apart from each other.
Merleau-Ponty, while questioning the border “where nature ends and the
human being or expression begins”, explicitly speaks of Caravaggio’s pre-mod-
ern naturalism in relation to modern art. “Herein lies the reason why the
dilemma between figurative and non figurative art is wrongly posed; it is at
once true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever what it is in the most figu-
rative painting and that no painting, no matter how abstract, can get away from
Being – that even Caravaggio’s grape is the grape itself.”25

76 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

 10 | Juan Sánchez Cotán: Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, 1602
oil on canvas | San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA

In case of the marvellous Basket of Fruit, how shall we understand Merleau-

Ponty’s saying? In order to comprehend what he might have had in mind let
me turn to his analysis of Descartes’s concept of space. As it is well known, Mer-
leau-Ponty opposes the Cartesian model of the self as a disembodied soul or
consciousness and its rationalization of the world as outer space, in which
things exist only in external relations with each other. He describes this as fol-
lows: “in this space without hiding places, which in each of its points is only
what it is, neither more nor less, every point of space is, and is thought as being,
right where it is — one here, another there; space is the self-evidence of the ‘where’.
Orientation, polarity, envelopment are, in space, derived phenomena linked
to my presence. Space remains absolutely in itself, everywhere equal to itself,
homogeneous …”26 The perspectival techniques of the Quattrocento estab-
lished a space of representation which defined everything in a painting be-
longing to one particular place, one here, another there; a system of localities,
where each figure is defined in its spatial relation to the others.
There is no better illustration for this kind of mechanic understanding of
what space is than Juan Sánchez Cotán’s brilliant painting of Quince, Cabbage,
Melon and Cucumber from almost the same period as Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit,

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circa 1600, now in San Diego Museum of Art, CA (fig. 10). Every object is de-
fined only by the place they occupy in an ideal three-dimensional, quasi-ax-
onometric space. As Norman Bryson noted, “the observer is expelled from the
scene, cancelled out, and Cotán’s objects seem to picture themselves in a world
existing before the subject entered, or after departing from it”.27
Caravaggio goes in exactly the opposite direction. What he seeks is an
objectivity, but radically as sensed by a subject, a person of flesh and blood.
I understand Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit as another variation of extreme one-
point-perspective. First, he takes the many different fruits in the basket as
one single pyramid-like entity and places it as close to the picture plane as
possible, or even closer (see for instance the basket slightly projecting the
table top towards us, thus casting a slight shadow on the front). Second,
the basket is seen straight in front, so that we cannot look at the table. Third,
Caravaggio empties the background totally, leaving the beholder without any
hints what the golden surface might stand for (a wall, a natural setting, etc.).
The vanishing point, given the extreme position of the seer, must have been
somewhere beyond the basket – and its position is again identical with that
of the closest point – but Caravaggio simply does not leave place for any or-
thogonal pointing to the far distance. The viewer is left again without any ori-
entation – his gaze is actually blocked in its moving to penetrate into the depth.
The astonishing effect he produces this way is again the strength of the pres-
ence of things, entering my personal space, the dramatic feeling and sugges-
tion of their here and now. (NB, in Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus,28
painted circa 1600–1601, the same type of fruit basket appears in an almost
similar position, its presence being dramatized, due to its position threatening
to fall down from the table – a motive that is mostly interpreted as a physical
metaphor of the upset caused by the pupil’s shocking recognition – however,
since the table is seen slightly from above, and we can survey the whole supper
menu, this strong effect of immediacy is gone. What here we can see quite
clearly is not only that Caravaggio had had, as his contemporaries noted several
times, difficulties with correct perspectival drawing, but the more profound
difference of narrative representation based on and dominated by a text and,
as Louis Marin formulates, “the force of painting as a set of colours unleashing
visual effects”.)29
My thesis is, that on the one hand, the irresistible strength of Caravaggio’s
naturalism stems from his ability to provoke our unconscious and automatic
responses to some bodily experiences – such as gravity, inertness or proximity
of the material world. But on the other hand, this is also about to become dis-
mantled and reflected by painterly devices.
I cannot agree with Louis Marin, who is basically ready to accept the old clas-
sicist criticism, assuming that the paradox of Caravaggio’s work “consists in
copying the truth of what appears in so a slavish manner that the pictorial rep-

78 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

resentation becomes a more effect”. In his magnificent Détruire la peinture – a
book analyzing Poussin’s classicist saying to Félibien that Caravaggio “had come
into the world in order to destroy painting” – he states, that since Caravaggio’s
painting subordinates itself to the thing itself as it appears before one’s eyes,
it eliminates the distance between the original and the copy; according to him,
in Caravaggio’s aesthetics, “truth is an effect of the painting and not its origin”.30
However, modern art has made it clear to us that not only academic theory of
representation reflected upon the work of the artist, and that some Old Masters,
among them Caravaggio, found the way to reflect their own artistic work within
the iconic context of their pictures.
In my understanding, Caravaggio, while painting his marvellous tour-de-force-
grapes must have had in mind Pliny the Elder’s ancient tale of the competition
between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios. As it is well-known, “Zeuxis painted
some grapes so true to nature that birds flew up to the wall of the stage. Parrhasios
then displayed a picture of a linen curtain realistic to such a degree that Zeuxis,
elated by the verdict of the birds, cried out that now at last his rival must draw
the curtain and show his picture. On discovering his mistake he surrendered
the prize to Parrhasios admitting candidly that he, Zeuxis deceived only birds
while Parrhasios deceived himself, a painter.”31 Although while painting this
picture Caravaggio must have identified himself with the great Zeuxis, in fact
he has become rather the follower of Parrhasius. Since Parrhasios won the com-
petition not by performing a technically better imitation of nature than Zeuxis’,
but because he, by thematizing the curtain as parergon of his picture, managed
to build in a “shifter” (using Jakobson’s term) for the viewer to distract him/her
from the automatisms and everyday routines of seeing.
We may interpret the full opacity of the monochromic background surface
as a special parergon of Zeuxis grapes as ergon – the blank surface of the wall on
the street that served as the material support for Zeuxis’s grapes, totally ignored
by the birds, but absolutely not ignorable for painters, as Zeuxis has even from
now on learnt. I consider the small oval shadow cast on the front of the “table”,
which is actually nothing but a reddish strip of paint, running through the whole
picture plane, as such a “shifter”; by realizing its paradox spatiality we find our-
selves being confronted with the question of what the reason of such a reductive
mode of representation might be. The same is true for the extreme lowering of
the level of the horizon: what is the sense of it if not contrasting foreground and
background in a fairly extraordinary way? What is the geometric order of the
picture plane with the unusually homogeneous filling-in for? Why the polar
differences between the elaboration of surfaces of definite things and indefinite
ones (grapes, apples, insect beaten leaves and the wicker basket versus pure
planes) – and so on. Caravaggio seems to open up, so to say, the game of the pic-
ture – that is, he challenges the beholder to change to or shift to a different kind
of look, from one that simply recognizes what is represented, to another one

ANDRÁS RÉNYI | THE ENCHANTMENT OF PROXIMITY | 79

 11 | Paul Cézanne: Kitchen Table (Still Life with Basket), between 1888 and 1890
oil on canvas | Musée d’Orsay, Paris

that realizes and reflects iconic differences, interrelations and transitions within
the picture as well – Max Imdahl called this sehendes Sehen [seeing sight].32 This
way we may explore even the most modern insights into the problems of painting
within Caravaggio’s tight composition: Mondrian, if you like.
I will conclude with a short notice on Cézanne. One of the most impressing
oil paintings in the Budapest exhibition, the so-called Kitchen Table, painted
sometime between 1888 and 1890, now in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (fig. 11),33
is a still life that is worth to compare shortly with Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit.
The problem is, of course, “that notorious feature of western representation
– the play between the literal surface and figured depth, or between signifier
and signified”, as Richard Shiff formulates in his splendid essay on Cézanne’s
politics of touch.34 Shiff’s main concern is the fundamental relationship of
vision and touch, the former being understood mainly as immaterial, distanced
and theoretical, the latter proximal, heterogeneous and concrete. “The painter’s
touch becomes the vehicle for a metonymic exchange between an artist’s or a

80 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

viewer’s human physicality and the material, constructed physicality of an art-
work. When we see a picture in terms of its material references to touch (as
opposed to its fictive allusions to vision), we reorient not only a local pictorial
order but also our global sense of how human bodies contact their surround-
ings; we reconstruct the functioning of the body and its senses, how it relates
to the world.” Now Shiff analyzes Cézanne’s vision as “never farther than an
arm’s length”,35 an idea close to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of vision, ac-
cording to which, “through it we touch the sun and the stars, that we are every-
where at once”.36 There is much written on Cézanne’s attempts to intertwine
vision and touch as two different sensory fields both in the painter’s work and
the beholder’s imagination, and to invent a kind of, to use the phrase by Yve-
Alain Bois, “tactile vision”.37 In the painting of the Musée d’Orsay, the kitchen
table and cloth in the foreground are not closer to the viewer than the cupboard
and chair that line up diagonally on the left, or the back wall over the floor –
although everything is in its own place, the space is somehow bending or twist-
ing back to us. It has not too much sense to try to determine a clear horizon
line in a painting like this: Cézanne is apparently not interested in a totalizing
panoramic kind of vision, dissociated from the traces he had left on the canvas
and (to quote another important Cézanne-interpreter, Gottfried Boehm) from
the “iconic density” [ikonische Dichte] of his picture, the play and intercourse
of traces, plates, colours and grounds.38
Now it seems, there is no painterly concept more alien to this than Caravaggio’s
– with his smooth mode of painting, his sustained efforts to clear away any trace
of his work with brush and paint, to expel any indexical sign of his presence
in the working process. However, although his technique of fine painting is
often referred to as “trompe l’œil”, this is, as I tried to show in the case of the
Ambrosiana still life, a misunderstanding. Caravaggio was far from being in-
terested in simple plays of eye-cheating. While trompe l’œil – by satisfying, and
at the same time, deceiving the eye as Jean Baudrillard says – transcends paint-
ing,39 Caravaggio was about to deepen it, by enforcing the viewer’s more bodily
presence in front of the picture, by provoking his/her sensual capacities and
by letting her/him reflect on the power of painting. He did take advantage of
perspectivism by radicalizing it – by reducting the horizontal surface, Alberti’s
famous tiled floor, to a degree of invisibility – in order to give more objectivity
to what is presented in and through the work. Cézanne did – as far as I under-
stand – something similar to that: he was also about to heighten the intensity
of what he called sensation, the proximity and physical presence of things even
when they were far distanced. However, he – belonging to another time, artistic
and cultural context – has been following his own “system of equivalences”,
his own painterly syntax – and so was experiencing with the collapse of hori-
zontal surfaces into verticality that is so explicit in the Kitchen Table and in many
others of Cézanne’s paintings.

ANDRÁS RÉNYI | THE ENCHANTMENT OF PROXIMITY | 81

 My conclusion is, that perhaps we may consider the blank piece of canvas
behind the Plaster Cupid and their dialectics so brilliantly analysed by Richard
Shiff as a real and profound pendant to Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruits, and to his
paradoxical play of literal surface and illusory depth, vision and touch, absence
and presence.
Cézanne might have known little about Caravaggio and he might have been
not susceptible and responsive enough for Caravaggio’s grid composition and
his concerns with gravity in the Entombment – as I mentioned earlier. However,
I would argue rather for their deep, indirect kinship, in their common depend-
ence on what I called in the title of my lecture the enchantment of proximity.

‚
NOTES
1 | Paul Cézanne: Mise au tombeau, d’aprės le Caravage, pencil and watercolour on paper, 245 × 180 mm,
private collection. See Venturi 1936, no. 869; Rewald 1983, RW 492; Tübingen 1982, cat. 104.
2 | Engraving, 106 × 148 mm. In Antoine Michel Filhol, Galerie du Musée Napoléon (Paris, 1804–1815), vol.
2 [1804], no. 97.8. See Alfred Moir, Caravaggio and his His Copyists (New York: New York University
Press, 1976), 94.
3 | See Sheldon Grossmann, Caravaggio. The Deposition from the Vatican Collections (Washington: National
Gallery of Art, 1984).
4 | See in Chappuis 1973, vol. I: no. 468, p. 143.
5 | Ibid., 283.
6 | Lionello Venturi collected these in Venturi 1936.
7 | Rewald 1983.
8 | Roberto Longhi, “Questi Caravaggeschi”, Pinacoteca (marzo–giugno 1929): 319.
9 | Neumeyer 1958, 40.
10 | Grossmann, Caravaggio, 1.
11 | Alfred Moir, Caravaggio and His Copyists (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 11.
12 | See the English translation in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 371.
13 | Pencil on tracing paper, 155 × 136 mm, RW 386, dated by Chappuis, 1973 to 1877–1880, private collection.
Cf. Gertrude Berthold, Cézanne und die alten Meister (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1958), no. 270.
14 | Pencil and watercolour on paper, 225 x 148 mm. Ian Woodner Family Collection, New York, RWC. 386.
15 | I do not think this kind of sketching has too much to do with the late Cézanne’s concern about the status
of contours and his aim to grasp the optical perception of air where all contours dissolve. Matthew Simms
cites R. P. Rivière and J. F. Schnerb as follows: “Cézanne did not seek to represent forms by line. The contour
only existed for him as the place where one form ended and another began. In principle there is no line,
a form only exists in relations to forms next to it.” Simms 2008, 142.
16 | Cézanne 1978, 282.
17 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson, North-
western University Studies in Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 142.
18 | Peter Paul Rubens: The Entombment, oil on panel, 88,3 x 66.5 cm, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada,
inv. no. 6431. See Julius S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens. A Critical Catalogue (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), vol. I, cat. no. 365. pp. 499–500; J. Richard Judson, Rubens:
The Passion of Christ, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part VI (Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000),
no. 75, pp. 243–45, with further literature.
19 | See Catherine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press Ltd., 1998), fig. 191, p. 387.
20 | Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”, in Id., The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986), 143.

82 | CÉZANNE AND THE PAST

21 | Georgia Wright, “Caravaggio’s Entombment Considered in Situ”, Art Bulletin 60, no. 1 (1978): 35–42,
esp. 38f.
22 | Caravaggio: Basket of Fruit, oil on canvas, 31 × 47 cm, ca. 1599, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana. See André
Berne-Joffroy, Le Dossier Caravage (Paris: Édition de Minuit, 1959), and Michel Butor, “La Corbeille de l’Am-
brosienne”, Nouvelle Revue Française (1959): 969–89; Hibbard, Caravaggio, no. 47, pp. 80–85 and 294–95.
23 | Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, 126.
24 | Ibid., 146–47.
25 | Ibid., 147.
26 | Ibid., 134.
27 | Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked. Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books Ltd.,
1990).
28 | Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus, 1600–1601, oil on canvas, 141 × 196.2 cm, London, National Gallery, inv.
no. 172. See Hibbard, Caravaggio, no. 42, 293f.
29 | Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1977). English edition: To Destroy Painting,
trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 106.
30 | Marin, To Destroy Painting, 100.
31 | Plinius, Historia Naturalis XXXV. 65. English edition: The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, trans.
K. Jex-Blake (London: MacMillan, 1896).
32 | Imdahl 1996, 313ff.
33 | See Budapest 2012, cat. 100, pp. 376–79.
34 | Shiff 1992, 142.
35 | Ibid., 153.
36 | Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, 146.
37 | Bois 1998, 37.
38 | See Gottfried Boehm, “Kunsterfahrung als Herausforderung der Ästhetik”, in Kolloquium Kunst und Phi-
losophie, eds. Will Oelmüller, and Ferdinand Schöningh (Munich, Vienna, and Zürich: Paderborn, 1981), 21.
39 | Jean Baudrillard, “The trompe-l’œil”, in Calligram. Essays in New Art History in France, ed. Norman Bryson
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 59.

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CÉZANNE
AND THE PAST
x
Tradition and Creativity

EDITED BY

Judit Geskó
AND

Anna Zsófia Kovács

BUDAPEST, 2017
Papers presented at the international symposium
“Cézanne and the Past: Tradition and Creativity”
28 January 2013
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Copy editors
Judit Borus, Eszter Hessky, Eszter Kardos

Editorial coordination and photo rights

Zsuzsanna Gila

© the authors

Published by
Dr László Baán General Director,
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2016

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