Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Drawings by Sir Peter Lely at the British Museum

Peter Lely
The Finding of Moses
1640s
wash drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Arcadian Scene
1640s
wash drawing
British Museum

"First of all, we must recall that Western culture, in one of its major currents, has certainly not left description outside meaning, and has furnished it with a finality quite "recognized" by the literary institution. This current is Rhetoric, and this finality is that of the "beautiful": description has long had an aesthetic function. Very early in antiquity, to the two expressly functional genres of discourse, legal and political, was added a third, the epideictic, a ceremonial discourse intended to excite the admiration of the audience (and no longer to persuade it); this discourse contained in germ  whatever the ritual rules of its use: eulogy or obituary  the very idea of an aesthetic finality of language; in the Alexandrian neo-rhetoric of the second century A.D., there was a craze for ecphrasis, the detachable set piece (thus having its end in itself, independent of any general function), whose object was to describe places, times, people, or works of art, a tradition that was maintained throughout the Middle Ages. As Curtius has emphasized, description in this period is constrained by no realism: its truth is unimportant (or even its verisimilitude); there is no hesitation to put lions or olive trees in a northern country; only the constraint of the descriptive genre counts; plausibility is not referential here but openly discursive: it is the generic rules of the discourse which lay down the law." 

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Sir Edward Carteret, Usher of the Black Rod
Bruno Ryves, Dean of Windsor and Register of the Order
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Knight in newly designed Garter Robes  
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Knight in newly designed Garter Robes
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
George Morley, Bishop of Winchester and Prelate of the Order
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Canopy-bearer for the Sovereign
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Canons of Windsor
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Poor Knights of Windsor
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Poor Knights of Windsor
ca. 1663-71
drawing-
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Poor Knight of Windsor afflicted with blindness
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Order of the Garter portrait study
Poor Knights of Windsor
ca. 1663-71
drawing
British Museum

"There is, in Nietzsche and in Bataille, one theme in common: that of regret. A certain form of the present is disparaged, a certain form of the past is exalted; neither this present nor this past is actually historical; they are both read according to the formal, ambiguous movement of a decadence. Thus is born the possibility of a non-reactionary regret, a progressive regret. Decadence is not read, contrary to the world's accepted connotations, as a sophisticated, hypercultural condition, but on the contrary as a deflation of values: return of tragedy as farce (Marx), clandestinity of festal expenditure in bourgeois society (Bataille), critique of Germany, disease, exhaustion of Europe, theme of the last man, of the vermin "that diminishes everything" (Nietzsche). We might add Michelet's diatribes against the nineteenth century  his own  the century of Boredom. In all, the same disgust provoked by bourgeois deflation: bourgeois man does not destroy value, he deflates it, diminishes it, establishes a system of the paltry."

 Quotations are from The Rustle of Language by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (New York : Hill & Wang, 1986)

attributed to Peter Lely
Studies of women
17th century
drawing
British Museum

Peter Lely
Nymph carried off by Satyr
17th century
chalk drawing
British Museum

I am grateful to the British Museum for making these images available.