Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet Page A

Having discovered the subject during a long stay in Italy, when he made the acquaintance of André Fermigier and Jacob Bean (the future curator of the drawings and engravings department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York), and having met both Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi, on his return to France he made a proposal for the series to René Julliard, and then recruited authors, all of whom were specialists. But none of the books has the same format: the French translation of Anthony Blunt’s
Artistic Theory in Italy
is twenty centimeters high, whereas the French edition of Max Friedlander’s
From Van Eyck to Bruegel
stands at twenty-seven centimeters. Nor do they have the same appearance: they all have a paper jacket except Bernard Teyssèdre’s
L’Histoire de l’art vue du Grand Siècle
(Art history as seen from the
grand siècle
—seventeenth-century France). Two of the jackets are illustrated—Emil Kaufmann’s
Architecture in the Age of Reason
and
Philibert de l’Orme
by Anthony Blunt—but the others carry only typography. Four of them have the series colophon, the other five do not. The Kaufmann, the Friedlander, one of the Blunts (
Artistic Theory in Italy
), and Kenneth Clark’s
Landscape into Art
, all give the name of the translator, but we are not told who translated Michael Levey’s
Painting in Eighteenth-century Venice
, John Golding’s
Cubism
; Gombrich’s
The Story of Art
, or Blunt’s
Philibert de l’Orme
. To publish these books, all of them significant, but appealing to a fairly limited readership, and many of which had been published elsewhere, and to do so without any conformity ofpresentation, was asking for trouble in a commercially difficult area. After these nine titles were published, the collection came to an end in 1965.
    So for me, books have been a way of “seeing something” in painting, but they have done other things too. For instance, I was able to decode a Benetton advertising campaign for students in the Paris School of Political Science (Sciences-Po), using the analytical tools of art history, which applied very well. And it is not so difficult to understand why St Barbara is particularly honored in the Brazilian mining region of Minas Gerais—one of the biggest cities there is named Santa Barbara after her—if you know about Christian iconography: she has always been the patron saint of miners, protecting them from the dangers of their work. When Panofsky paid a visit to Henri Focillon in the 1930s—or perhaps it was to his daughter Hélène and her husband Jurgis Baltrusaitis (I can’t remember and nobody can tell me now)—they took him to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and he went off looking for the second church. I have just discovered from a recent book,
Relire Panofsky
(Re-reading Panofsky by Georges Didi-Huberman et al.) that his visit to Focillon in Maranville took place in August 1933. The story is told of Bernard Berenson, on learning that the Virgin Mary had appeared to Pope Pius XII, he immediately asked the first question that would occur to an art historian: “And in what style?”

7
REAL PEOPLE, FICTIONAL CHARACTERS
    The best bacon omelettes I have eaten in my life have been with Alexandre Dumas.
    JACQUES LAURENT
    Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which he or she figures. This character has not grown any older since the author brought him or her into existence, and will remain the same for all eternity. When we hold in our hand the text or texts in which such a person appears, it feels as if we are in possession of everything the