Portraits à l'essai: iconographie de Montaigne (review)

This large-format volume is a catalogue raisonnéof 331 Montaigne portraits in various media, ranging from those executed during the essayist's lifetime to those of the present day. Philippe Desan has accomplished a herculean feat in compiling this material, aided by the solid iconographical documentation of Béatrice Le Cour Grandmaison. After a thirty-six-page Introduction, each of the portraits is reproduced one or two to a page in colour or black and white, and is accompanied by an account of its materials, location, provenance, and a longer enquiry into its likely authenticity. Authenticity is, of course, the key word. Montaigne explicitly legitimized only four of his portraits — the plaque he fastened in 1581 to the shrine in Loreto and those he sat for at the ages of twenty-five, thirty-five, and nearly fifty-five — but supplied no specific details. The famous allusion in 1580 to 'un mien pourtraict chauve et grisonnant' (I, 26) cannot be linked to the Thomas de Leu engraving, published posthumously in 1608, but might refer to its prototype (Hémery, c. 1568) or another executed in about 1578 (with hat?), which remains unidentified. Desan is at pains in his Preface to disavow any intent to determine the relative authenticity of the portraits, although individual comments do attempt to establish a hierarchy among them. By his refusal to admit the existence of any authentic portrait or any filiation, Desan's navigation through the 'imagined' Montaignes, especially the oils, becomes murky, as his criteria for evaluation are unclear. He cautiously distances himself from art-historical debates, claiming neither the expertise nor the desire to engage with matters of dating or authorship (p. 9) and, eschewing reliance on evolving facial features (p. 17) and medico-biographical facts (p. 18), alleges instead a comparative approach (to what end?). Yet, in the case of a chalk drawing presumably by François Quesnel, which he dates to around 1588, although it is neither signed nor dated and bears no inscription as to its subject, Desan asserts that this is 'le plus "authentique" portrait de Montaigne' because the physiognomy is the one to which we are accustomed by the de Leu engraving and the Chantilly painting, which are nonetheless late copies (p. 68). This sort of circular reasoning mars the descriptions of portraits and relies too heavily on outdated claims from art historians or other figures of supposed authority (for example, Dimier, Payen) when material proof is lacking, which is the case for the majority of sixteenth-century portraits. What results in these cases is that the force of conviction, based on personal preference, outweighs that of the argument, thereby diminishing the reliability of the whole. Similarly, it is unfortunate that Desan has chosen for cut-off the 1960 portrait study by Charles Lafon and Joseph Saint-Martin, to the exclusion of important critical revisions such as George Hoffmann's 2003 article on the de Leu and Chantilly copies (in Le Visage changeant de Montaigne, ed. by Keith Cameron and Laura Willett (Paris: Champion), pp. 15–32). That aside, this book is a handsome and convenient repository of Montaigne portraits, accompanied by most of the bibliography that relates to them and to all things art historical for the period.