A Certified Copy: Translating Images in the Eighteenth-Century French Print Market

Abramovitch, Tamara

doi:https://doi.org/10.7202/1106819ar

In 1777, thirty-eight-year-old Nicolas de Launay, an engraver by profession, participated for the first time at the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. His morceau de reception was a print featuring The Triumph of Silenus (Figure 1).[1] Critics praised his work for its accurate rendering in print of the original painting,[2] which, at the time, was attributed to the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens.[3] Fourteen years later, when de Launay was already a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture,[4] he created another image of Silenus, titled La gaieté de Silène, this time after a painting by the early eighteenth-century French painter Nicolas Bertin (Figure 2). The scenes are very different, as one might expect considering the artists’ countries of origin and the hundred years that separated them.

But a special notable difference is de Launay’s very different translations of the paintings into the graphic medium, as the artist offers two types or varieties of print. In the earlier print, de Launay shows himself to be an exacting translator (Figure 3); in the later work, he demonstrates the liberty he takes as a translator (Figure 4). By removing the dancing figure of Bacchus in the left foreground of Bertin’s Bacchanalia and focusing instead on the figural grouping of Silenus, a nymph and a satyr at the right, de Launay effectively changes the composition and the narrative. He places the whole within an oval trompe l’oeil frame in the contemporary Louis XVI style,[5] which he further embellishes with a variety of Bacchic attributes, notably the thyrsus, vine leaves, grapes, and ivy, perhaps to compensate for the missing wine god. At the base of the frame, he includes another trompe l’oeil relief of the drunken Silenus on a donkey with his entourage of satyrs. De Launay’s competing styles of visual translation are exemplary of a broad discussion that was taking place in the eighteenth century around the subject of translation—literary and visual—which this article wishes to explore, highlighting the essential tension between translation that is imitative versus free. Examining de Launay’s art through textual ideas on translation will allow better understanding of his practice, and that of similar artists who were busy copying images, within the broader cultural sphere. Introducing the connections between art and literature at the time is aimed at encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to the general study of the history of these subjects today.

Before the invention of photography, the commercial art market was dominated by fine art prints after famous paintings, which were out of reach to the public. This market naturally fueled comparison between the work of the engraver and the translator.[6] Translation had been commercially entwined with the print industry since the invention of printing, where it played a crucial socio-cultural role in the distribution of knowledge.[7] During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a visual element was introduced as illustrations accompanying translated texts, which recent studies in visual culture refer to as “non-textual-translations.”[8] The quantity and quality of these images have led researchers such as Nathalie Ferrand, Marie-Alice Belle, and Peter Wagner, among others, to offer theoretical approaches to the issues of hierarchy, authority, interpretation, and creativity related to the translation’s visual aspects.[9] As Ferrand shows in her study of illustrated novels in the eighteenth century, for the print workshops and the engravers, in particular, it was this notion of the engraver as mediator “between texts and their new audiences … creat[ing] new levels of meaning,” that was in practice.[10] Producing and arranging images for translated publications affected the reading of the original in relation to their new target audience.

While Ferrand considers the pictures in relation to the texts, my study wishes to examine the translation between visual media, in this case, painting and engraving, through the case study of de Launay, one of the most successful engravers in Paris in the eighteenth century. I will begin by explaining the concept of translation in the liberal arts in the eighteenth century as it relates to the question of loyalty to the source or the reader/viewer. I will then examine de Launay’s oeuvre, focusing on the changes he made to the paintings he copied, his additions of decorative elements, and his motives dictating his choices. In the last part of this study, I will address the broader question of inaccessible content: translation as a substitute for something we cannot read, see, or understand. I will also consider de Launay’s designs in light of the fundamental idea of mediation as a critical element of translation. Finally, borrowing from current translation studies and considering the Enlightenment thinking that imposed the separation of artistic creation from craftsmanship, I will explore the tension between invention and imitation concerning the reproduced image and the refining of the essential language of translation by the professional engravers of that time.

Traduttore, traditore?

“Fine art prints in the eighteenth century were like a whirlwind of autumn leaves in the midst of a glorious party … amusing the entire public from top to bottom.”[11] As the French etcher and historian François Courboin describes, the engraving workshops along Paris’ Rue de Saint Jacques were kept busy during the eighteenth century producing thousands of images that flooded the market, democratizing ideas, knowledge, and, mostly, art through copies of paintings that would otherwise have been out of the public’s reach.[12] Despite the noble goals of their profession, the creators of these images did not share the same stature as the painters of the original works. In 1660, Louis XIV declared engraving a Liberal Art, opening the door for engravers to join the Académie royale,[13] but engravers were still perceived as inferior in the eighteenth century. Their profession conflated the intellectual spirit of the “Artist” and the mechanical craft of the “Artisan,”[14] yet in the eyes of the elite, they were craftsmen who ran commercial workshops. Contemporary discussions of the merit of the subjects they taught at the Académie royale, on the one hand, and the methods of their self-promotion, on the other hand, highlight the tension that revolved around the engraver’s artistic identity.[15]

Nevertheless, painters needed engravers to popularize their art and reputation, and many recruited printmakers to produce engravings of their works. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, for example, chose de Launay as his formal engraver.[16] Still, the importance given to the concepts of authenticity and originality throughout the century underpinned the division between engravers who created original designs and were eligible for the title “Painter-Etcher,”[17] and engravers who were considered merely “reproductive … pseudo-artist[s].”[18] This division, driven by the commercial market, as Christian Michel notes, led to comparisons of the relationship between a painter and an engraver to that between author and translator.[19]

Charles Nicolas Cochin fils, secretary of the Academy and a brilliant engraver himself, wrote that engravers “Faire passer les beautés d’une langue très riche dans un autre qui l’est moins à la vérité et qui offre des difficultés, mais qui offre des équivalents inspires par le génie et par le gout.”[20] This, according to the collector and writer Pierre Marriette, happens the minute “ôt confédérant attentivement les Pierres gravées, dont il alloit en quelque manière devenir le traducteur.”[21] Denis Diderot, too, made the observation, “Le graveur en taille-douce est proprement un prosateur qui propose de rendre un poète d’une langue dans un autre.”[22] Elsewhere, in a subtle acknowledgement of the original’s superiority over its translation, he remarks, “Il faut avouer aussi qu’à côté de la peinture, le rôle de la gravure est bien froid.”[23] This sentiment was the same across the English Channel, as we learn from the answer British engraver Thomas Landseer received from the Royal Academy after he petitioned for the admittance of engravers into its hallowed ranks. In the letter of refusal, he was flatly told that engravers “[lacked] those intellectual qualities of invention and composition which painting, sculpture and architecture so eminently possess,” and that the printmaker’s “greatest praise consists in translating with as little loss as possible the original design.”[24]

In the Parisian market, the engraver’s association with translation led to practitioners being labelled image copiers, effectively crushing any artistic ambitions they might have harboured for themselves. As George Levetine puts it, an engraver had to “deliberately mimic the painter’s artistic personality to the point of forgetting his own … confining the printmaker’s creative act to that of a successful pastiche.”[25] Textual evidence of this view is found on the print itself, alongside the signatures. Next to the painter’s name appear the letters “inv.”—short for the Latin word invenit, meaning the creator of the original—while the maker of the print is denoted as the painter’s “very humble and very obedient servant.”[26] The subordination of the engraver to the painter echoes the then outdated concept of “traduttore, traditore,”[27] meaning loyalty to the original as a key value in assessing a translation.

In his article on engraving in Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Claude-Henri Watelet emphasizes the element of the engraver’s loyalty to the source, that is, to the painting and the painter, stating, “Le graveur est pour les peintres dont il imite les tableaux, ce que le traducteur est pour les auteurs dont il interprète les ouvrages; ils doivent l’un & l’autre conserver le caractère de l’original, & se dépouiller de celui qu’ils ont; ils doivent être des protées.”[28] In a similar way, Louis de Jaucourt, author of the article on the translator in the Encyclopédie, criticized translators precisely for their lack of loyalty. He considered translators to be “Domestiques qui vont faire un message de la part de leur maître, & qui disent souvent le contraire de ce qu’on leur a ordonné,”[29] and, in a particularly biting critique, writes, “Ils ont encore un autre défaut de domestiques, c’est de se croire aussi grands seigneurs que leurs maîtres.”[30] De Jaucourt does not necessarily refer to the visual arts, but this tension clearly had a broader meaning, which at that time included also the engraver. In short, for the philosophers and art critics of the day, the engraver’s product was seen as dependent on the original painting, made by a craftsman, not an artist, with loyalty to the original as the goal.[31]

Nonetheless, translation is not simply a technical imitation, especially in French culture. During the seventeenth century, French translators of Greek and Latin texts were called Les belles infidèles. These translators, led by Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, actively altered and adapted texts not only to the French language but also to the contexts of time and place.[32] This approach bestows upon the translator the hermeneutic status of a mediator delivering the spirit of an ancient original at the expense of resemblance.[33] The translator, it seems, must choose to whom he is loyal, the author or the reader—a dilemma that is at the heart of Paul Ricoeur’s text On Translating (2007). The French philosopher believes that reading a translated text will never provide the experience of the original, asserting, “A fantasy of perfect translation takes over from this banal dream of the duplicated original. It reaches a peak in the fear that, being translation, the translation will only be bad translation.”[34] While this “failure” was used to denigrate engravers, Ricoeur believes that relinquishing the idea of a “perfect translation” is a crucial step toward understanding what translation really is, offering the following advice:

I will summarize it in one line: give up the ideal of the perfect translation. This renunciation alone makes it possible to live, as agreed deficiency, the impossibility … of serving two masters: the author and the reader … And, between the two, the translator who passes on the whole message, who has it go from one idiom to another. It is in this uncomfortable position of mediator that the test in question lies.[35]

Ricoeur’s words reiterate the seventeenth-century belles infidèles idea, that is, fidelity to the author, so critical in the jargon of the eighteenth century, should not take precedence over the translator’s loyalty to the reader.

In the eighteenth century, the restriction of creative and free translation reflected the hierarchal complexities within the art world: “La dissociation est faite, le ‘belles infidèles’ sont legitimes en literature, pas en gravure.”[36] Georges Mounin further explains that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, translation was framed as a merely imitative mechanical act.[37] The eighteenth century was a turning point in the thinking about the role of the translator, and the alleged clash between the opposing methods of loyalty and creativity led engravers to search for ways to achieve both.

Nicolas de Launay’s fine art prints offer a case study of methods invented by engravers at that time to breach this divide. De Launay’s creative use of the mise-en-page, in the form of an illusionist frame, presented a solution that at the same time honoured the scenes he copied and mediated their reading for contemporary audiences. Furthermore, I would argue that in doing so, these artists were not only trying to be loyal to the painter/author and viewer/reader but also to their identity as artists engaged in a medium that was a unique pictorial language in its own right.

Reframing Translation

On December 24, 1790, de Launay published an advertisement for two of his latest prints after paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Le petit prédicateur (Figure 5) and L’Éducation fait tout (Figure 6).[38] His timing couldn’t have been better: the Christmas holidays are a time for gift giving, and prints were both an economic and a popular choice.[39] The subject of Le petit prédicateur is a little boy delivering a sermon to his family, who gather around him and listen with rapt attention. In his translation of the painting, de Launay did not remain loyal to the original. He filled the extra space that was created when he changed the rectangular format of Fragonard’s painting into an oval with staffage, in this case, what appear to be vertically stacked wooden planks and a vase. But more importantly, he added a legible text on the paper the little preacher clutches in his hand, which had been unreadable in the painting. The text is a children’s folk poem, which runs,

Sermoni, Sermona

Ma chemise entre mes bras

Mon chapeau sur ma tête

Préface Messieurs

J’entre dans un petit cabinet

Où je vois l’amour

Qui fait rôtir des petits lardons

Je lui demande un petit lardon

Elle me donne cents coups de baton

C’est t’y bien fait mon maître

Oui, grosse bêbête!

Sermon, Sermon

My shirt on my arm

My hat on my head

Foreword Gentlemen

I’m entering a small room

Where I see Love

Who is roasting small pieces of bacon

I ask her for a small piece

She hits me with a baton

And it serves my master right!

Yes, big Beastie!

An earlier four-line version had taught children about the parts of their body: breast, head, and arms.[40] In Eugène Rolland’s 1883 book Rimes et jeux de l’enfance, this nursery rhyme is classified as a “prédicateur,” that is a preacher’s song,[41] demonstrating a cultural link between the title of the original painting and the rhyme de Launay added either to elucidate Fragonard’s intentions or as his own interpretation of the scene.

The verses introduce a cynical and violent note and the hint of a sexual element into what appears at first glance to be an idyllic scene of peasant life. According to the French early-childhood education and children’s literature expert Evelyne Rosemond-Wenz, this extended version is typical of French peasant folk songs, which used macabre content in their rhymes as an educational tool to explain the ways of the world to children.[42]

To underscore the scene’s unresolved tension, de Launay adorns the decorative frame with branches of the uncommon chaste tree (vitex agnus-castus), named for the belief that an extract made from its flowers helped to conquer sexual desire.[43] Writing in a medical article in 1743, Étienne-François Geoffroy observes of the extract, “Les uns disent qu’il est très-utile pour réprimer les feux de la luxure … & dissipe les sales imaginations qui viennent pendant le sommeil.”[44] A closer look at the print may explain de Launay’s choice of this particular floral framing device. While the proud father and grandmother seem transfixed by the little preacher, the attention of the child’s mother, seen in the background at the right, appears torn. She looks adoringly at her child but simultaneously engages with a male figure, although the nature of their encounter is unclear. Critics of Fragonard’s painting were not disturbed by this vignette; some assumed the man was the boy’s grandfather.[45] De Launay translates this hard-to-decipher detail into a play of dark and light tonalities, the male form appearing almost as a dark shadow against the brightness of the woman’s face, upper torso, and arm. De Launay’s translation of Fragonard’s painting, the added text, and the decorative frame heighten the tension of this seemingly innocuous detail, effectively creating a sub-textual “reading” of Fragonard’s original pictorial text, moralizing the meaning of the scene and impacting the viewer’s experience.

L’Éducation fait tout, also a replicated peasant-scene painting by Fragonard, is similarly transposed into an oval frame and embellished with branches of the horse-chestnut tree, which was associated with French peasants who used them for kindling or to feed their pigs (but not their horses, ironically).[46] Floral elements evocative of the French peasantry are a leitmotif in de Launay’s framing devices for many of his prints of peasant life. The trompe-l’oeil decorations of fruits, vegetables and grains adorning the frames in Les beignets (Figure 7), Dites donc, s’il-vous-plait (Figure 8) and Le gaieté conjugale (Figure 9) link together a series of prints, and hint at economic and social ideals related to the peasant class in France and to their wellbeing specifically in the crucial and unstable times before the French Revolution of 1789.[47] By doing so, de Launay’s new translations contextualized each scene, and the group as a whole, to fit his audience’s shifting viewpoint in tumultuous times.

After Bertin’s Bacchanalia, de Launay’s La gaieté de Silène portrays a similar frame around a mythological scene. The print shows notable similarities with another of his prints, Le poète Anacreon, after a painting by the French painter Pierre Antoine Baudouin (Figure 10).[48] Besides hearkening back to antiquity, both prints share compositional similarities—the figural groupings feature a drunken man accompanied by two figures—and nearly identical frames embellished with ripe grape clusters and vines; however, the frame surrounding Anacreon features chrysanthemums and the figure of Silenus. The two prints form a mirror-like diptych with echoing narratives, from which one might conclude that de Launay intended to sell these prints as companion pieces and therefore altered Bertin’s composition.

Indeed, de Launay used this type of frame, but with slight variations in the vegetal motifs, in at least fifteen prints created between 1777 and 1792, the year of his death. These framing devices were recognized as his personal hallmark.[49] The pairing strategy of forming pendant prints meant to be bought and displayed together led to the belief by Sean J. Taylor that de Launay’s decorative frames were a business strategy intended to increase sales.[50] The clientele for such works, who valued quantity over quality, were looking for status symbols to decorate the rooms of their homes, and what would be more suitable than works after famous painters. The framing device would have enhanced the prints’ display potential, and prints with similar frames could be hung as pendants or in sets of three or even four or more prints.[51]

The list of works from de Launay’s death sale in 1792, carefully tabulated by Taylor in 1987, does not, however, support the success of this practice. The number of prints found in a workshop after an engraver’s death is a good indicator of his success: the fewer copies of a given print left, the more the engraver probably sold, confirming the popularity (or not) of any given image.[52] Looking at de Launay’s list, there is no correlation between Anacreon and Silène: five prints of Le poète Anacreon and 277 completed Le gaiéte de Silène and 75 avant la lettre. Some possible explanations for this discrepancy are that the Silène had not been on the market long enough for people to purchase it before de Launay died, or perhaps it had been as popular as Anacreon, and de Launay had printed a new edition that had not yet sold out.[53] Similar gaps can be traced with other pendants: fifty-four prints of L’Éducation fait tout versus 389 prints of its pendant, Le petit prédicateur. In this case, de Launay produced two versions of Le petit prédicateur (Figures 5, 11),[54] making it speculative at best to say for certain that the first was better received. Regardless of which sold more copies, given the numbers, we can say that these prints were not necessarily marketed as pendants. We can also conjecture that de Launay’s motives were not solely business-related: they also elevated the artistic category of engravers and the literary translator, whose status rose during the eighteenth century thanks to the contemporaneous rise of fine art print.[55]

As this study contends, de Launay saw himself as a translator, and his inventive frames are his way of mediating the central theme, enriching it with content to strengthen the contextual social impact for the viewer. But his beautiful trompe-l’oeil frames also were meant to show off his skill, which enabled him to translate the minutest details of nature into the language of engraving. These additional decorations thus show not only de Launay as a translator of the original work for the reader but also his fidelity to himself as an artist. De Launay was not alone in this regard. Many engravers in the eighteenth century, such as Sébastien Leclerc, Gilles-Marie Oppenordt, and Nicolas Ponce, demonstrated their skill through the trompe-l’oeil, creating a sculptural, three-dimensional illusion with the burin, separate from their proficiency at copying an original image.

While the engraver’s final product is two-dimensional, the method—the gentle yet firm movement of the burin on the plate—is very much rooted in sculptural practice. The repetitive action of carving away at a hard material to produce each custom-made frame was a physically demanding act, which has led to the comparison of the engraver’s work with the plight of Sisyphus: condemned to repeating his exhausting work over and over again.[56] Unlike the painter whose brush strokes the canvas, for the engraver, as Nicholas Cochin fils observes in 1735, “L’exécution en est d’une grande difficulté parce que tout résiste, Cuivre et Burins, ce qui fait qu’on ne fait pas tout ce que l’on sent, et que l’on fait plus facilement avec le pinceau ou le crayon. Ce n’est que pas par un long travail et une grande application qu’on les surmonte et que l’on arrive à un certain degré de perfection.”[57] The engraver works hard to carve the picture into the plate; each image must undergo three, four, or even five printing stages before it reaches, as Cochin put it, “a degree of perfection.”

In the Encyclopédie’s article devoted to sculpture, Étienne-Maurice Falconet writes, “On définit la Sculpture un art qui par le moyen du dessein & de la matière solide, imite avec le ciseau les objets palpables de la nature.”[58] Is it a coincidence that we can recognize a resemblance between the tools of the two disciplines in the plates from the Encyclopédie illustrating sculpture (Figures 12 and 13) and printmaking (Figure 14)? Engravers sometimes preferred to sign their names followed by the abbreviation “Sculp.”—derived from the Latin word Sculpsit, meaning “sculpted by,” rather than the less inspirational “fecit,” meaning “made by.” These connections remind us of the plate’s materiality, combining sculptural technique and a painterly outcome.

In his article, Falconet touches on the tension between imitation and originality, between the technical translator of nature and the active mediator, which, as we have seen, was deeply relevant for engraving as well. By this account, “En se proposant l’imitation des surfaces du corps humain, la Sculpture ne doit pas s’en tenir à une ressemblance froide; cette sorte de vérité, quoique bien rendue, ne pourroit exciter par son exactitude qu’une louange aussi froide que la ressemblance; & l’ame du spectateur ne seroit point émue.”[59]

De Launay resisted the coldness Falconet warns of in the passionless sculpture that tried too hard to imitate nature precisely, which Diderot characterized as the lot of the engraver whose task is to translate painting onto the printer’s plate. Instead, he sculpted into his etching plate seemingly real, volume-full frames that reframe the definition of the fine art print. Adding interpretative elements and highlighting three-dimensional materials, de Launay wished to give the spectator something more than a resemblance to the original and to include a sculptural element that celebrates the beautiful language of engraving.

(Re-)Presenting the Absent

In the eighteenth century, when the foundations of modern art were being laid, engravers found themselves in a liminal space: They were academicians and merchants, artists and craftsmen, imitators and inventors; they created images based on paintings using sculptural techniques; and they worked between the two facets of translation—loyalty and mediation.

De Launay exploited this liminality to manifest the unique hybrid language of engraving that combined the 2D and the 3D. The visual components of this language consisted of the original painting at the centre; the sculpted niche that frames it; and the realistic-looking vegetation arrayed over the frame. This arrangement—an artifact ensconced in lush vegetation to form a composition—recalls one of Fragonard’s most beautiful series, Les bacchanales (Figures 15–18), a group of four etchings created in 1763 during his stay in Italy that has received little scholarly attention.[60] The figural groupings of joyful nymphs and satyrs, two against rectangular fields and two in ovals, are surrounded by dense and dynamic vegetation. In La famille du satyre, for example, showing a satyr and a nymph each holding a child that resembles the other parent, the central scene is surrounded by leafy canes and foliage, very similar to de Launay’s framed images.

Fragonard greatly appreciated nature and situated many of his scenes in natural settings.[61] Foliage, plants, and trees often created a frame-like shape and played a visual role in his work. For example, in the painting, Le petit parc (1960) in the Wallace Collection, the trees invite the viewer into an intimate interior within an exterior: a scene within a scene, “forming the niches wherein hover the matchstick human figures … leading our gaze inside this protected enclave of interiority.”[62] Ewa Lajer-Burchart describes these “aqueous” framing devices as “overgrown and foaming vegetation spreading like lava … an epigenetic fantasy of nature as at once a theatre and a force of life.”[63] Naturally, the visual intensity of a painting, with its lively brush strokes and vivid colours, is very different from a printed image. Still, in these engravings, the palpable energy of leaves, brush, and reeds generates tension with the frozen and stiff ancient relief at the centre.

It was common for students and artists to copy classical art and the Renaissance and Baroque masters as part of their training. Yet, Fragonard, who did not differentiate between study-drawing and independent work, hardly ever felt the need to remain loyal to the original. Instead, he would integrate his own original figures, settings, and context and create a new work that was his invention.[64] Fragonard’s unique way of working, relevant to the eighteenth-century discussion on translating, has challenged researchers to identify the works he was supposedly copying. The scholarly consensus is that some scenes in the Bacchanalia series are based on an authentic ancient artifact—the Heraklion Altar in the Mattei collection, which Fragonard had seen while in Rome; others were probably imagined versions of ancient reliefs.[65] Pairing the relief-like figures and the density of the leaves, branches and rocks, we see how Fragonard (and de Launay later) shifts our attention outwards, manifesting his virtuosity very differently from the fossil-like stone.

An engraved portrait of Fragonard by Charles Louis François Le Carpentier, a piece largely overlooked in the research, captures this very essence in what appears as a homage to the Bacchanalia series (Figure 19). Foliage surrounds a central circular oculus from which Fragonard’s likeness appears[66] and spills over onto a memorial plaque into which the deceased’s name has been carved. By chance or with design, Le Carpentier has captured a dichotomy at the heart of Fragonard’s series: the contrast between solid centre and vital foliage, past and present, death and life. This same contradiction is evident in de Launay’s framed engravings after paintings that highlight nature’s vitality with the inanimate copied works at their centre.[67]

Not coincidentally, Romantic circles admired this juxtaposition of nature and classical static ruins during the eighteenth century. For example, in his drawing Le temple de la Sybille (today known as Le temple de Vesta), Fragonard draws the ruins in Tivoli with branches organically penetrating and erupting from it, enhancing the tension between past and present, life and death, echoing a sense of longing for a glorious but unreachable bygone time (Figure 20).[68] The intertwining vegetation and ruins articulate what would become the Romantic concept of dynamic and omnipotent nature overcoming the nullity and transience of man,[69] and as Diderot describes this feeling, “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.”[70] The Scottish eighteenth-century painter Allan Ramsay, who visited the temple around the same time as Fragonard made the painting, wrote of the “fine picturesque view at Tivoli of the great Cascade and the temple of the Sibyls … delightful falls of water and Grott’s all grown over with Ivy and evergreens.”[71] Ivy, a plant common across the Mediterranean,[72] was practically a trope for viewing ancient remains.

The ivy leaves creeping into, or over, the encapsulated centre in Danse de satyres emphasize nature’s power and the artifact’s fragility. In de Launay’s L’heureuse fécondité the ivy begins to encroach over the frame toward the image at its centre (Figure 21). Here, the addition of the ivy is perhaps de Launay’s elucidation of the anachronistic classical elements in Fragonard’s painting: the classical architecture with Doric columns in the background and the garlanded altar (based on a drawing made by the artist in Siena, first identified by the art historian and Fragonard expert Pierre Rosenberg). Even the figural composition, Rosenberg notes, is classical with the grouping arranged in the form of a pediment in which the mother is the apex.[73] Notwithstanding these classical elements, the natural flowing ivy vines mark the original painting as a static, distant artifact, while de Launay’s additions are the lively energy around them.

By evoking the same feeling that comes from seeing ancient ruins covered with leaves, or a painting of the same, de Launay’s engraving highlights the gap between the original and the translation. Natalie Ferrand explains that this tension heightens the role of the translator because the distance in time and place increases the need to adjust and contextualize the original.[74] It is no coincidence that the belles infidèles concept arose within the practice of translating ancient texts.[75] In de Launay’s engravings, the Doric frame becomes a window into a pseudo-chronological distance between the centre and the viewer, mediated by the translator. In doing so, he emphasizes the importance of engraving as a medium, translating what cannot be seen, conciliating vital and static, real and artificial, present and absent.

The classical artifact, original text, or the painting in de Launay’s case, is out of reach. Therefore, we must appreciate the accessible language of engraving. As the French writer and philosopher François-Marie Arouet Voltaire put it, “Une des choses que le dieu aime davantage, c’est un recueil d’estampes d’après les plus grands maîtres, entreprise utile au genre humain, qui multiplie, à peu de frais, le mérite des meilleures peintures; qui fait revivre a jamais … des beautés qui périraient sans le secours de la gravure, et qui peut faire connaitre toutes les écoles a un homme qui n’aura jamais vu de tableaux.”[76]

On this point, it is interesting to return to de Launay’s prints after Rubens and Bertin, with which I began this study. De Launay did not alter Rubens’ painting, but he did intervene in Bertin’s. The different stages in his career when he made these prints might have affected his decisions. As a young artist, he might not have felt free to modify an original; but as a successful Academy engraver, he would have had the confidence. Or, perhaps, de Launay felt more comfortable changing Bertin’s painting, that of a contemporary and fellow countryman, rather than reframing and reshaping the work of a famous seventeenth-century Flemish Master.[77] But there is one more crucial detail to consider, an inscription at the bottom right of the print after Rubens, which may suggest another reason. It reads, “Par son très humble et très obéissant serviteur Jean-Henri Eberts.”[78] Eberts was a Dutch banker, art dealer, and amateur artist working in Paris.[79] This signature is evidence that de Launay never saw the original painting, only a copy, drawing, or plate by Eberts. As for Bertin’s painting, de Launay saw it first-hand, as it was in his personal art collection, alongside other paintings that he owned and copied, among them Le petit prédicateur and L’Éducation fait tout.[80] As the owner of these paintings, de Launay had legal and direct authority over them and was not obliged to any third-party collector. As a result, he could closely examine the images and integrate his artistic presence into the prints. Therefore, he is the ultimate mediator of these paintings, distributing their translations, creating a context for his viewers, and manifesting his presence as an engraver.

Conclusion

The well-known metaphor of translation as a bridge between two river banks invites a further conclusion: that the translator provides the reader with a path to cross and set foot on foreign ground. Linguistics and book historians, Ricoeur among them, have argued against this notion, due to the clash between imitating forms and delivering ideas.[81] Myriam Suchet, rethinking the bridge metaphor, reminds us that “we translate not only because there are different languages, but also to produce and maintain the difference between languages.”[82] Her words highlight an appreciation of the differences between original and translation, rather than imposing resemblance and hierarchy on them. As this study shows, such an appreciation of the difference between languages, or media, was essential in translating images within the liberal arts. Prints could not portray the scale or colour of a painting; even the best burin engravings could not replicate the intensity of brush strokes or the texture of paint applied to a canvas.[83] Yet, rather than struggling to achieve a false resemblance to a painting, de Launay’s engravings demonstrate the advantage of his language, which can imitate and interpret every detail. His framed prints create a feeling of a distant reality, intimately close yet far from reach. They remind us that what we have is a translation we can admire and appreciate.

In the act of translation, a painting loses its authentic essence. But in semiotic terms, the essence never existed in the painting itself. The relationship between imitation and creation, critical to translation, is at the core of linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure stated that languages are based on a sign system where a concept is paired with a sound-image: a signified and a signifier. In this respect, both languages—the original and the translation—are merely representational instruments. In their 2008 article, Claudia Mejía Quijano and Natalia Restrepo Montoya explain how Saussure’s extensive translation experience was a crucial milestone in the development of his theory:[84] “We can see the pleasure that [Saussure] the teenager takes in this refined game that combines imitation and creativity: putting into words in his own language what another has expressed in another language.”[85] Saussure’s enjoyment of translation, especially of poetic texts, helped him recognize that words form a playful, random, and symbolic system. Therefore, in his semiotic approach, words are signs of representation, and their form is subjectively arbitrary in its nature.[86] In its distance from the “idea,” language, too, becomes a second-hand experience, another medium for communication, offering an opportunity for any translator to combine imitation and creativity through representation.

In his translation of a painting, de Launay reminds us of the representational quality of art and his role as translator and mediator between an idea and its form. His ability to study a painting’s context, his talent to imitate the natural world and create fifty shades of gray with his burin, and his ability to convey the qualities of his language that allow the viewer to enjoy a reproductive yet unique work of art are what makes de Launay a true mediator and printmaking a medium that unites translation, interpretation, and re-creation.

A Certified Copy: Translating Images in the Eighteenth-Century French Print MarketUne copie authentique : traduire les images dans le marché français de l’imprimé au dix-huitième siècle

Abstract

Résumé

Traduttore, traditore?

Reframing Translation

(Re-)Presenting the Absent

Conclusion

Notes

Liste des figures

Résumés

Abstract

Résumé

Corps de l’article

Traduttore, traditore?

Reframing Translation

(Re-)Presenting the Absent

Conclusion

Parties annexes

Notes

Liste des figures

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