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Elise Goodman. The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savante. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 188 pp. 8 color, 75 b/w illus. ISBN 0-520-21794-2, $45.00.
Elise Goodman and the University of California Press have produced a valuable volume. Goodman's account of what she calls "the Enlightenment's penchant for picturing genius" (2) is generally both readable and thoroughly documented. With notes, a large but selective bibliography, and a well-designed index, the book is both a comprehensive study of a particular cultural phenomenon and a rich source of possibilities for future research and reflection. The focus on Madame de Pompadour provides a substantial central body of material from which a number of complementary subjects arises. Goodman persuasively places Pompadour in the tradition of strong, intelligent women going back to Mesdames de Montespan and de Maintenon and shows that Pompadour was herself determined to take a place in that line. Goodman argues that Pompadour's self-representations are based on prototypes "imaging Mme de Montespan and Mine de Maintenon, on whom Pompadour fashioned herself as royal mistress in the 1750s" (3).
Goodman's thesis is that Pompadour sought to accomplish the creation of an identity as a major savante through the systematic use of the visual arts, and in particular the portrait. Appropriately, and effectively, Goodman has provided many reproductions of portraits and other visual representations. There are eight color plates-all portraits of individual savantes-and seventy-five black-and-white reproductions. Taken together, the visual materials permit a comprehensive and nuanced reading of the iconic constitution of what David Le Breton has called la civilisation savante (183). Goodman's readings of these representations are clear and persuasive, and her accounts of their contexts and their origins are interesting. There are portraits of Madame du Chatelet, Madame de la Poupliniere, Madame de Mondonville, the Princesse de Rohan, Madame de Lambert, and others. Goodman also provides portraits of well-known savants, such as Abbe Huber, Charles-Simon Favart, Gabriel-Bernard de Rieux, and even Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The painters whose work is represented include Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Franqois Boucher, A. C. G. Lemonnier, Jean-Francois de Troy, and JeanMarc Nattier. There are reproductions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion plates and engravings. Goodman places Pompadour's portraits in the context of the vogue of "intellectual portraits" produced by major French...