Too Beautiful
to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis
by Elizabeth
C. Mansfield
University Of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 2007
240 pp.; illus. Trade, $75; paper $25
ISBN: 0-8166-4748-4; ISBN: 0-8166-4749-1.
Reviewed by Jonathan
Zilberg
jonathanzilberg@gmail.com
Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth,
and Mimesis is an intensely scholarly
study of myth, mimesis, and invention
in art history. Mansfield traces the history
of this selective mimetic practice of
creating a composite idealized female
image across two millennia of art production.
Some highlights include her insightful
discussion of the late 17th
Century woman artist Angelica Kauffman,
her stunning discussion of the contemporary
French performance artist, Orlan’s
carnal Zeuxianism and her equally provocative
linked interpretation of Picasso’s
Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.
However, despite its obvious merits, it
will be extremely frustrating to read
by those who reject Freudian psychoanalytic
theory and its application to the interpretation
of artistic imagery.
Above all, the study argues that Western
ambivalence towards mimesis is rooted
in the primal shock of the Oedipal experience.
It presents the Zeuxian process as an
expression of castration anxiety in the
reputed wounded psyche in the realization
that one’s mother has no penis. It
may, thus, ultimately become a classic
example of interpretive creativity and
over-determination in the new art history.
Despite this bizarre and surely unintended
phallocentric feminism, the second part
of the book in particular is undeniably
fascinating.
It is an important study in that it pays
serious attention to the enduring classical
myth of Zeuxis Selecting Models in which
composites are used to create ideal types,
in this case to represent ideal beauty.
The original myth relates how the ancient
Greek artist, Zeuxis, was commissioned
in the 5th Century B.C. to
create a painting memorializing the legendary
beauty Helen of Troy and records the story
of how and why he selected features from
individual woman in order to approximate
Helen’s said perfect beauty. Mansfield’s
most important contribution perhaps is
to show just how enduring this myth has
been in providing a subject in Western
painting especially in light of how surprisingly
little attention has been given to the
topic.
Again, it is an explicitly Freudian post-modernist
feminist text. It focuses over and over
again on the said experience of the uncanny
aspect of mimesis as a form of castration
anxiety based in the Oedipal complex.
Therein, to restate Mansfield’s central
premise once again, the Zeuxis legend
is evidence of a persistent anxiety over
mimesis in art in which Zeuxian mimesis
is another form of classical mimesis alternatively
embraced and rejected until finally reclaimed
in the Renaissance. Her argument is based
on two premises. First, that the tactic
used by Zeuxis, and the painting itself,
transmits an ideology and that the legend
itself transmits a cultural unconsciousness
that triggers the uncanny. Second, that
this "uncanny sensation" is
"a symptom of the ontological impasse
posed by classical mimesis itself".
Rather than engage the fascinating topic
of mimesis, what strikes me is how the
book must succeed or fail depending on
whether one is adequately persuaded that
these art forms encode Freudian narratives
that reveal an elemental castration anxiety.
As a consequence, this book deserves to
be extremely controversial and may well
receive a highly ambiguous critical reception
in cultural studies and feminist theory
if it is read with a skeptical eye.
The first half of the book is an exercise
in classical erudition, the sources effortlessly
moving from language to language, from
one arcane source to another returning
us to Pliny and Cicero who provide the
earliest references to the origin of the
Zeuxis myth. The book thus speaks to two
very different audiences, one interested
in classics and the other in feminist
art history, specifically in post-modern
Freudian feminism. If anything then, what
this book best represents, is just how
far the inter-disciplinary project has
gone in which art historians have turned
increasingly to feminism for inspiration
in the 1970s and over the intervening
decades to literary theory and cultural
studies.
In all this, the study fails in one fundamental
scholarly respect, or perhaps that is
the unstated point of the study and thus
in this succeeds. It makes no mention
of E.H. Gombrich’s seminal comments
in "Ideal and Type in Renaissance
Painting" (in New Light on Old
Masters, 1986/98, specifically see
pp. 91) nor Sir Kenneth Clark’s related
discussion in The Nude: A Study in
Ideal Form (1956, specifically see
pp. 13-14). Engaging their approaches
to the Zeuxian issue is surely required
in such an otherwise rigorous study in
that art historians have long addressed
the issues of ideal types which lie at
the art historical rather than psychoanalytic
core of this book. Clearly there is an
oppositional disciplinary agenda at work
here.
On reflecting on this absence one might
then ask: Has not this new feminist art
history re-enacted an intellectual corollary
of the Zeuxis myth? Are such scholarly
omissions, conscious or unconscious, not
acts of disciplinary patricide in which
the legacies of these pater figures have
been strategically excised in an act of
epistemological violence? Is this study
not thus a clear instance of aesthetic
theory in service of a particular ideology
and an excellent example of what has come
out of the "crisis" or "end"
of art history (see Donald Prezioski’s
Rethinking Art History 1989)? That
being said, I have no doubt that the highly
appealing interpretive work in this study
will continue to inspire this brave combination
of classical scholarship which does the
dangerous work of bringing ideas from
cultural studies, post-colonial gender
studies, psychoanalysis and modern art
into conversation with the ancient Greeks.
Beyond these perhaps retrograde quibbles,
the second and more readable part of the
study is a particularly powerful pastiche.
There Mansfield argues that the Zeuxian
myth is an act of colonization which served
to establish a Romanized imaginary community
that physically incorporated the empire’s
diversity into an ideal type and that
imperialism always craves metaphysical
assurance. While those hypotheses are
sound enough, I find the more important
part of her argument that the "uncanny"
is an expression of cultural anxiety over
the violence of colonialism to be less
than convincing. In any event, she argues
that Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles
exercises the racism prevalent in France
at the time while finding in African culture
a means for aesthetic and social progress
and signaling the impending collapse of
colonial rule. And continuing in a scintillating
progression, she connects this instance
to Orlan’s hybridization as a 21st
Century Marianne personifying the post-colonial
French Republic. In a climactic conclusion,
she aptly revisits the composite computer
generated face gracing Time Magazine’s
1993 issue "The New Face of America"
and concludes quite brilliantly how the
empire violently incorporates the world
while masking the anxiety of rule.
Through these arguably elegiac interpretive
stretches Mansfield argues that Western
imperialism has generated two histories,
one conscious and heroic and the other
unconscious and craven. She ingeniously
proposes that the Zeuxis myth interweaves
imagination and experience between the
two histories so as to substitute the
faith of the whole for the fear of the
parts. Ultimately then, it is metaphysical
doubt which sustains the Zeuxis myth and
the West’s irrepressible urge to
see and to seize what is too beautiful
to picture.
Yet I am left with several jostling images
in mind amongst others. After the shock
of Orlan’s carnal art passes by,
and the warm after glow of the sensuality
of the Orientalist Odalisques as the penultimate
space for exploring the Zeuxian tactic,
after revisiting the book’s opening
image from Balzac, of Sarrasine’s
shock at realizing that La Zambinella,
his ideal beauty, was in fact a castrato,
I cannot help but recall the manner in
which Zeuxis met his death. He had painted
an image of an old woman so hideously
ugly that according to legend he died
of laughter. So my parting questions to
Mansfield are these: What alternative
reading would result if one began instead
by understanding the opening gambit of
Sarrasine’s shock as about the gap
between illusion and reality and not as
the imagined psychic wound of incompleteness?
What would happen if one applied Jungian
theory instead of Freudian theory so as
to revisit the Zeuxis myth with the benefit
of Gombrich’s Platonism in mind?
Can one really rely on the arguably absurd
notion that the whole of this art history
is reducible to the infantile shock of
learning that one’s mother has a
vagina instead of a penis? If so, would
Zeuxis not surely laugh himself to death
all over again?
