Saturday, December 31, 2016

Artifacts - 18th century

Nicolas Lancret
The Indecisive Shepherd
ca. 1725-50
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"For Sigmund Freud himself, the destruction drive is no longer a debatable hypothesis.  Even if this speculation never takes the form of a fixed thesis, even if it is never posited, it is another name for Ananke, invincible necessity.  It is as if Freud could no longer resist, henceforth, the irreducible and originary perversity of this drive which he names here sometimes death drive, sometimes aggression drive, sometimes destruction drive, as if these three words were in this case synonymous.  Second, this three-named drive is mute.  It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own.  It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper movement.  It works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own 'proper' traces  which consequently cannot properly be called 'proper'.  It devours it even before producing it on the outside. This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic, anarchontic (we must not forget that the death drive, originary though it may be, is not a principle, as are the pleasure and reality principles): the death drive is above all anarchivic, once could say, or archiviolithic. It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation."

"Allowing for exceptions.  But what are exceptions in this case?  Even when it takes the form of an interior desire, the anarchy drive eludes perception, to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints itself in some erotic color.  This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin.  In other words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects.  It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own.  As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions.  These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful.  As memories of death."

 from Archive Fever : a Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida, translated by Eric Prenowitz (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Sebastiano Ricci
Bacchanal
18th century
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Anonymous English artist
Snuffbox with couple picking flowers
18th century
enamel on copper
British Museum

Joseph Nollekens
Merucry in repose
18th century
terracotta
private collection

Antonio Canova
Orpheus
1776
marble
Museo Correr, Venice

Donato Creti
Mercury and Paris 
1710s
oil on canvas
Palazzo d'Accursio, Bologna

Hubert Robert
Fallen Roman Capitals
18th century
drawing
British Museum

Claude-Joseph Vernet
View of Naples
1748
oil on canvas
Louvre

Henry Fuseli
Satan and Death with Sin intervening
1799-1800
oil on canvas
Los Angles County Museum of Art

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon
Mélidore et Phrosine (opera, 1794)
etching
1797
British Museum
John Flaxman
Illustration to Dante's Inferno
1793
engraving
Bibliothèque nationale, Paris

Thomas Gainsborough
Study of a Lady
ca. 1785
drawing
private collection

Thomas Gainsborough
Study of a Lady & a Child
ca. 1785
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Jacques-Louis David
Homer reciting his verses to the Greeks
wash drawing
1794
Louvre