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My book is a painting.
-Marcel Proust to Jean Cocteau
"I assure you," went on Mme de Guermantes . . . "that with the palm-leaves and the golden crown on one side, it was most moving, it was precisely the same composition as Gustave Moreau's Death and the Toung Man. (Your Highness must know that masterpiece, of course.)"
The Princesse de Parme, who did not know so much as the painter's name, nodded her head vehemently and smiled ardently, in order to manifest her admiration for this picture. But the intensity of her mimicry could not fill the place of that light which is absent from our eyes so long as we do not understand what people are talking to us about.
Like the labyrinthine galleries of the Louvre frequented by the young Marcel Proust and his friends, In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu) houses a vast repository of paintings. In the novel, over one hundred artists are named, spanning the history of art from the trecento to the twentieth century, from primitivism to futurism, from Giotto to Leon Batest. Whether plunging into Proust for the first or the fifth time, each reader encounters many esoteric and increasingly obscure pictorial references that keep testing Ms mettle. These can leave him nodding his head, with a smile frozen on Ms face just like the Princesse de Parme.
Paintings in Proust grew out of a curiosity about paintings that this reader's visual memory could not readily summon. Many of these were works by the society artists who disappeared with la belle époque, but there were also a substantial number of Renaissance pictures whose specific iconography remained elusive. Coming across Mme Verdurin, "who regarded The Night Watch as the supreme masterpiece of the uMverse," most readers can call forth a reasonable facsimile of Rembrandt's immense canvas, but how many of us can visualize "that purely decorative warrior whom one sees in the most tumultuous of Mantegna's paintings, lost in thought, leaMng upon Ms shield"? Without the ability to conjure up these references - so revealing, so compounded - their intended impact is considerably diminished. The paintings selected by Proust to animate and expand the imaginative world of In Search of Lost Time function...