Painted Readers, Narrative Regress

As with other forms of gradually satisfied desire, with reading, too, you really have to be there. Reflection isn't enough to call up the exact contours of its gratification. Let alone representation. Least of all a fixed image. Though painting may induce any number of desires, it cannot convey the sequence of their quenching. All it gives, borrowing from Keats, is the feel of not to feel it. That's the thing about reading in painting. Even while casting its spell in absentia, it withholds the duration of its pleasure. So why bother with it so often? Why doom the canvas to such recurrent frustration? Those were my launching questions, and they've led, very slowly, to my claim here: that painted reading can recruit narrative energy even while removing it from view.

The few illustrations of heatedly invested reading I had space for in my book Dear Reader didn't begin closing the distance between hunch and evidence. So it was back to the drawing board—and hence to the history of easel painting—to investigate a suppressed temporal momentum in the static moment of pictured reading. Or, in other words, the bracketed narrativity of painted narrative engagement. One thing struck me as particularly clear: that in the frozen dramaturgy of painting, the modest shape of the read book, to secure thematic attention—to turn the site or scene of reading into a scenario—was usually projected at a greater scale and somehow ramified across the canvas plane. That seemed at least a promising formal hook. But what would I be likely to fish out with it from the high seas or backwaters of the scholarly archive? Though cast far and wide and left dangling for hours at a time in treatise and catalogue alike, my bait was consistently ignored. So I ended up taking it myself.

Reading is regularly dismissed, when noted at all, as simply a convenience of the sitting, giving the model something to do while being painted. Beyond Michael Fried's willingness to number readers among such other subjects of absorbed attention (rather than theatrical gesture) as sleepers, bubble blowers, card players, and lovers, no commentator seems inclined to single out the secular scene of reading for any special consideration as a genre. ¹ Not even as descended from the canonical Annunciation portrait: the startled textual encounter with one's own divinized story. ² Yet what modes besides portraiture encroach upon the compositional logic of the reading scene? What other genre bearings do such images entail, especially as emergent forms in art history? And what cultural forces have adjusted over time one's sense of the reading scene as secular iconography? These are the broader considerations that elbow into the uncharted space opened by my initial query about the balked narrative allure of seen reading. What they come to, in sum, is as much an ideological cross-examination of the reading scene as a compositional one. How does this loosely codified genre resume from period to period, at once summarize and renew, an abiding definition of the "inward" human subject? A subject whose inwardness is not just proven by invisibility but incidentally vouched for by the graphically imagined force field of its literacy. If this is a way of implying that reading in painting rewrites the planes and curvatures of place as the inflected duration of inner space, what narrative power in text is thereby being at one and the same time submerged and manifested?

Given my lack of training in the field of art history, I was obliged to start slow. And I found that the simpler the question, the more useful. Take a commonplace portrait with book—no reading in progress, just its availability or momentary suspension, as in, say, El Greco's St. Jerome as a Cardinal, the scholar as if itching to get back to his thumb-marked bible (Fig. 1). What do you get when you cross this accessorized portrait format with the still life with book and skull (rather...