The Master of Light
How Georges de La Tour’s philosophical vision resonates with our deepest intuitions
In the 1650s Louis XIII of France received a painting from a provincial artist hailing from Lorraine, at the eastern edge of the country. The King was so moved by the painting — described by one historian as being of “perfect taste” — he had all the other paintings removed from his room so that he could contemplate this one alone.
It was perhaps the finest moment in the artist’s successful career. A triumph that couldn’t be surpassed. Yet, despite his fame and success, he would soon after this event vanish from history.
The circumstances for this improbable disappearence are a mystery. All we know is that, not long after his death, the artist’s works were somehow disassociated from him — despite the fact that many were signed by his own hand. Instead the works were misattributed to Dutch painters and French compatriots. The artist’s legacy was dismembered and scattered among the legacies of other artists.
For hundreds of years, the artist was absent from art historical accounts while his masterpieces embellished the reputations of other artists. His name and some fragmented details of his life lingered unseen in bureaucratic archives.
It was only in the twentieth century that Georges de La Tour reemerged from obscurity. A German art historian, Hermann Voss (1884–1969), uncovered a biographical reference in 1915 and began to piece together the life of the artist and his works.
Despite Voss’s rediscovery of the master, and the endeavours of subsequent historians, still little is known of La Tour. There are no known self-portraits, and it is not known for sure where or how he trained or what guided his stylistic development.
The painting King Louis so admired was of a typical scene of the wounded Saint Sebastian — the elite Roman soldier revealed to be a Christian and sentenced to execution by archers’ arrows.
At the moment depicted, the saint lies at the base of the tree to which he was bound, perhaps taken for dead by the women attending to his body. Among them, Saint Irene of Rome holds a torch in one hand and Sebastian’s limp arm in the other.
St Sebastian was a popular subject in 17th century paintings. His martyrdom is often depicted with appropriate gore and violence. In La Tour’s depiction, however, we are moved by the scene’s unconventional stillness. The Saint is pierced below the sternum by just a single arrow, and there is only a tear-like droplet of blood.
The torch Irene holds up is the only source of light radiating through the image. Dark shadows are cast, heightening the heavy air of grief in the scene. The strong diagonal lines of the composition, collapsing from the top right to the bottom left, pulls our sight to the dying saint. The tightly cropped apature of the scene elongates the figures and gives the scene a feeling of both intimacy and monumentality.
The geometry of the composition, the simplicity of form — akin to statuary, and the sombre, yet vivid, combination of tone and colour is unlike anything else painted at the time, balancing stillness and grandeur in the complex of bodies.
It is among the greatest works of La Tour, and perhaps best combines his mastery of tone and light with the ambitious allegorical scope of his imagery. It is in images like this that we can see, aided by his use of light and through the moral and spiritual shades of his subject matter, an allegory of our experience of reality itself.
To grasp that idea, it’s necessary to delve into La Tour’s artistic development.
Origins
La Tour was born in 1593 in the commune of Vic-sur-seille in the Lorraine region, close to the modern borders with Germany and Luxembourg. The commune was a well-situated centre of trade, lying at the crossroads of routes into France, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire’s German border states. As such it was a culturally rich centre and a hotbed of artistic activity.
While details of La Tour’s training are unknown, it is guessed that he could have apprenticed either with one of the masters working in Vic or the city of Nancy, Lorraine’s capital at the time.
La Tour’s era was fast-changing and fraught. The period was one of on-going regional and civil conflict in Europe, meaning that art and artists were at the forefront of “soft power” struggles between those aligned with the Roman Catholic Church and those who had taken up the cause of Protestantism.
In some parts of Europe, religious conflict had dire consequences for artists. The Reformation was a religious revolution in the sixteenth century that broke the protestants, largely concentrated in northern parts of Europe, away from Roman Catholicism with their new vision for Christianity.
One acute aspect of this rebellion, particularly among militant protestants of the Calvinist movement, was to destroy religious images as idols that contravened God’s commandment that “graven images” were forbidden. Statues and paintings were stripped out of churches and publicly destroyed.
The attack on Catholicism’s perceived idolatry forced the Roman church to reform and reestablish its guidance of religious imagery at the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. This led to a new order and reinvigoration of the arts in Catholic Europe.
Intellectual and highly stylised “Mannerism”, which developed out of the High Renaissance, was out of favour. In favour was what we now describe as the Baroque style — art that privileged realism, movement and theatricality. As a result it is often muscular, grand and exuberant, designed to inspire awe in its audience.
Caravaggio and “Metapainting”
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is the most influential of the Baroque masters. He ascended to fame in Rome, the seat of spiritual and diplomatic power where Baroque art was born and flourished with the support of patrons like Pope Gregory XV and Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
His art was emotive and often violent or erotic. His religious paintings were favoured by some church authorities for being realistic and therefore relatable to the masses, despite Caravaggio’s controversial refusal to idealise holy subjects.
Caravaggio painted directly from life, an unusual approach at the time, and this grounded his images in the reality of the life around him. Saints are depicted with dirty feet and tanned forearms. The Virgin Mary is depicted as an Italian city housewife who greets pilgrims at the her terraced doorway in bare feet.
The Italian had an enormous influence on European art in the early decades of the seventeenth century because his work represented an artistic ethos as much as a style.
His paintings broke from tradition in their gritty realism, their spectacular use of chiaroscuro — the stark contrast of dark and light, and the inventive and playful ways that the artist made the paintings reflect on their own status as works of art.
The ripples of Caravaggio’s stylistic innovations spread through both Catholic and Protestant Europe in the decades after his death in 1610 from southern regions of Spain and Italy, to the northern reaches of Germany, England and the Netherlands.
La Tour himself came into the influence of Caravaggio just as many others had. It’s not known how exactly this happened, since there is a gap in La Tour’s biography between his early and later style. The inspiration to change his style came either through seeing the works of Caravaggio in person in Rome, or indirectly via the “Caravaggisti” — followers of Caravaggio — who had spread through parts of northern Europe.
It’s most probable that developments of Caravaggio’s style in the Netherlands inspired La Tour, since his paintings work in the genres and visual idioms developed by a Dutch group called the Utrecht Caravaggisti.
These idioms included the source of artificial light within the scene of the painting itself — such as a lantern, torch or candle. Caravaggio had experimented with this idea — most strikingly in his The Taking of Christ (circa 1602 — see above), in which the artist himself holds a lantern that partly illuminates the scene, but the Utrecht group had further developed the dramatic effect in the decade following Caravaggio’s death in 1610.
The Utrecht group often produced images in which a candle, torch or lamp was the only source of light in the scene. This heightened the tonal contrast whilst integrating the effect of light more fully into the composition.
The idea was subsequently taken in a more subtle direction by La Tour. While Utrecht artists like Gerrit Van Honthorst and Hendrick ter Bruggen used lamp and candlelight to heighten the drama of a scene thanks to the high contrast between dark and light that comes naturally with artificial light, La Tour seemingly explored light as if it were the subject of the paintings itself.
Stylistic Development
The artist had a singular vision from the beginning. His early works from the late 1620s into the 30s are largely brightly lit scenes, but nevertheless set in shallow, minimally-embellished spaces.
The most highly regarded among them are images of cheating card-players and fortune tellers. These were popular subjects, depicted by Carravaggio himself early in his own career, and La Tour was likely inspired by prints circulating through Europe.
Such images represent the playful side of Baroque art’s tendency for self-reflection. The artist connects the painting with its audience by allowing them to know what one or more people in the painting doesn’t know.
In the case of a young man having his fortune told, we — the viewer — see him being robbed by accomplices of the fortune teller while he is distracted and oblivious.
In the Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (c. 1630–34) we see the cheat taking the ace card from behind his back while his victim — an opulently dressed young man — stares obliviously at his own cards.
Eyes are important in this image. The “courtesan” in the centre looks to the server, who looks nervously to the wealthy young mark, who gazes at his own cards. There are no exchanges of look within the painting — the four characters are disconnected in the moment we see them, yet the glances tell us everything about what is going on.
There is, however, one mutual look — the cheat glances back to us, the viewers of the painting, breaking down the wall between our reality and that of the painting. His direct gaze and knowing smirk is an acknowledgement of our knowing of what’s happening.
These images have a moral to impart, of course — they teach us not to meddle in spiritually corrupt activities like gambling and divination. But they are not earnest images, they are playfully astute. They say as much about looking and the privilege of those who see as they do about the grubby subjects depicted.
One of the key aspects of Baroque art is the way it activates the viewer — it integrates them into its spectacle. This was often a dramatic engagement — the viewer positioned as a witness of some spectacular event, for example. But the effect could also be intellectual and playful, focusing more on pleasure than pathos.
This is certainly the case with these paintings. Their subjects are dressed in fanciful and ostentatious clothes in each of these ensembles — silks, pearls, textures and patterns are rendered in exquisite detail for their viewers’ delight. They are paintings about seeing, but also being seen, and the pleasures we can take in both.
Through their tricks, conceits and pleasures, the paintings of La Tour fall into the category of what the Romanian art historian Victor Stoichita labelled “metapainting”.
The metapainting, according to Stoichita, is a self-conscious work of art, rising to prominence in the seventeenth century within the broader Baroque movement. It’s a work of art that reflects on its own status as a representation. The image effectively allegorises itself — drawing attention to its medium, form, and status as art.
Metapainting emerged at a time when the ownership and display of paintings was changing. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, more private patrons crowded into a market previously dominated by the Church.
These patrons had spaces in their private properties purposely to display paintings. Paintings themselves were rendered on canvas for portability, and therefore easy to buy and trade. Increasing numbers of these works had secular or mythical subject matter and were made to delight their owners. In doing so, artists explored the limits of the medium to move, enthral, and entertain.
The Allegory of the Real
Caravaggio sometimes appears in his own paintings as a witness, sometimes as the victim of a violent act. Either way, he posits himself as the source of the image — the mediator between the seen and the seer — within the conceptual framework of the metapainting.
La Tour goes further. He puts the source of light itself — that which enables vision — into the image. This was not a new idea, as we have seen, but the level of refinement to which La Tour took this idea gives the fact a purity of expression — borne of an understanding of its allegorical power.
This refinement reaches its height in the final act of La Tour’s career. His human figures are simplified in their contours to almost geometrical forms, giving them a smooth appearance akin to classical sculpture. The English art critic Anthony Blunt, who popularised the French Baroque and championed La Tour, noted a “mathematical clarity” in the work. His paintings have a quality of stillness that puts him singularly at odds with the Caravaggisti in both northern and southern parts of Europe.
In La Tours’ paintings, light heightens the monumentality — the sheer substance — of the things depicted. There seems to be no effort to add drama through light-effects but rather, through stillness, make us conscious of light itself.
La Tour seems to be searching for the essence of painting, the emphasis is to carefully construct and crystallise a fleeting moment.
In this mode of metapainting, La Tour’s late works allegorise not only painting, but the very act of seeing — of sensing and knowing reality itself. At the heart of this allegorical impulse is the single source of light within the image, and the careful emphasis on a given moment.
Take the painting Girl Blowing on a Brazier (c. 1646–48). The moment captured here is the connection of light and breath. You can imagine, as the viewer of the painting, this precise moment as the girl’s breath brightens the embers which, in turn, light up her face. There’s a clarity here in the circular logic of the painting. We see the subject who feeds the source of light through which we see them.
The young woman is absorbed entirely in this moment of concentration. Her gaze is lowered to the pool of light — a small coal brazier, which illuminates her face and chest in a warm, subtle glow.
There is no detail nor any distraction to extract our attention from the simple forms of the young woman and the brazier, there is only darkness beyond. It’s a painting of quiet brilliance through economical restraint. The interplay of light and shadow contours the forms of her skin and clothes, pulling them from the coal-black darkness that would otherwise shroud the girl.
The image is self-referential — that is, it draws attention to its own status as an image, but that self-referential logic includes the viewer of the painting.
So how does an image like this allegorise our experience of reality?
The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke distinguished between the secondary and primary qualities of reality. Secondary qualities are those qualities that are subjective — they are a relation between a person and a thing.
Qualities such as colour and temperature are examples of secondary qualities — they are sensed qualities that exist in the mediation between a person’s senses and the object.
The colour green in the leaves of a tree is neither intrinsically part of the leaf, nor is it in my head as a hallucination. There is a conjunction in experience that makes green in the combination of my senses and the tree’s leaves.
The primary qualities of a thing are the qualities that are intrinsic to a thing. They exist independently from our experience of the object. These qualities include volume and shape — both qualities that can be measured objectively, it is supposed, through geometry. These are the aspects of the world that is “in-itself” as opposed to “for-us”.
While the secondary qualities of things are widely accepted, primary qualities are disputed as a category, being “primary” and therefore objective. If these qualities are there without needing to be sensed, they necessarily exist prior to subjective experience.
This is controversial in modern philosophy, since it is reckoned by many philosophers that to speculate about the world prior to thought is futile and self-contradictory.
We cannot represent the “in-itself” without it becoming, in that instance, “for-us”. For many thinkers since the enlightenment, when Immanuel Kant questioned any notion of true objectivity, the primary qualities are therefore just secondary. The real — the world in-itself, they would contend, is unknowable.
But we can understand that the world exists independently of our thinking without knowing it.
This is in part thanks to intersubjectivity — we know we’re not hallucinating about the world because others describe the world as we know it. We may be describing a world through secondary qualities, but that they more or less align means there’s a world of things independent of our thought.
But there is also an intuitive understanding of the world that is prior to thought — the way the world impinges on thought, the way it causes thought.
Either way, the real in-itself is not accessible through thought since thought is the product of secondary qualities. Neither intersubjectivity itself nor our intuition for the real are accessible through our own thoughts. Both are prior to knowledge, both are in a form of understanding distinct from knowledge.
Art allows us to virtually access the real. The artist fashions together representation of some slice of reality that is transmitted to the viewer. This becomes a slice of reality itself — a fusion of mind and world put to a purpose.
It is a reenactment — or staging — of that slice of reality in our imagination which allows us to explore our senses through thought. Isn’t that, after all, what imagining is? Through art we see seeing, we hear hearing, we touch touching.
Truth and Light
In the spirit of this idea, the twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger saw our contact with art as a “happening of truth”.
By “truth”, Heidegger does not mean factual truth — the correspondence between a statement and reality. What he meant, rather, was a deeper truth of being. According to Heidegger, an artist is a “shepherd of being” who un-conceals being to us through art.
The philosopher used Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of boots as an example of the way art reveals something essential about the being of what is depicted. The painting of the shoes brings forth a “shoe-ness” of the shoes in a way that is impossible to express through describing them in words.
Our world is shaped by the uses of the things around us — furniture, windows, tools, coverings, shelters, surfaces and gadgets. All man-made things, in some way, are thought of as “equipment”.
Art can dissolve the “equipmental” nature of the things it depicts — the nature in which we see the use and therefore value of things — and it does so in the case of Van Gogh’s shoes.
Instead of being just shoes, they evoke for Heidegger the existence of peasantry, the toil of the earth. “In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth,” he wrote, “its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.”
The problem with Heidegger’s analysis of Van Gogh’s painting of shoes is that the philosopher treated the work in exactly the way he warned against.
Heidegger wrote, “It would be the worst self-deception if we were to think that our description, as a subjective action, first imagined everything thus and then projected it into the painting.”
Art historian Meyer Schapiro accused Heidegger of that very deception. He pointed out that the shoes do not belong to a peasant toiling in the countryside, but rather to Van Gogh himself, living in Paris at the time.
Schapiro also points out that Heidegger’s “fanciful description” would equally apply to a real pair of peasant’s shoes as much as a painting of them. Heidegger’s imagination had stayed too far from the artist’s intent.
But Schapiro’s criticism aside, there is something to be said for a newly pre-linguistic contact with the painting’s subject matter, a contact that dissolves the “equipmental” guise of those things.
To misinterpret a painting with one’s imagination confirms the notion that the work of art unravels the thoughts that clothe reality. A real door is a door, but a painted image of a door can be “read” in many ways — half-open, half-closed, sinister, hopeful and so on, and this is precisely because we’re confronted by a useless door, a door that is no longer “equipment”.
Heidegger’s words about unconcealment and truth point to an essence of art. It lies behind the skin of interpretation about what we are looking at in a painting.
There’s no essence in art itself, but there is an essence to the relationship that art entails. That relationship is the necessary conjunction of the viewer’s imagination with the intent of the artist as manifested in the artwork.
Essence is what you cannot take away from something without it ceasing to be what it is. Even the most radical “readymade” art — found objects put on plinths and labelled as art — stops being art when you take away that relationship.
With the work of La Tour — as can be glimpsed in The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and fully realised in A Young Woman Blowing on a Brazier, we see a clarification of that relationship.
Through La Tour’s making things visible to us — staging the act of seeing itself — in his paintings, he does to the painting itself what Van Gogh does to the pair of shoes. He dissolves the “equipmental” guise of the painting itself — as something that represents something to us — and instead exposes representation itself as some bare fact.
We are suddenly made aware of the intuitive way we come into contact with the world before we think — the world in its primary qualities, the subliminal world.
The light caresses the contours of the people and objects in the painting, making them visible to us, but also, by extension, making them knowable to us. In Platonic philosophy, light — pure light — be it from the sun or the combustion of the lamp, is a metaphor for knowledge itself.
It’s particularly important that there is a single light source — the very means by which these objects are made known to us is itself present in the image.
The single source of light, as it is treated by La Tour, is a “vanishing point” of illumination. The vanishing point of perspective, despite its name, is better conceived of as the singularity of the image, the point from which the image decompresses and all things in the picture plane project from. All the things we see radiate from this point while remaining invisibly connected to it. It is the source of their substance.
Now consider the source of light — as it is treated by La Tour — in the same way. Light radiates out and caresses the contours of the gathered forms, giving them colour, shape and volume, texture and luminance. Their substance is made visible to us through the varied reflections of that pure light. The source of light, as a “vanishing point” of sorts, grounds all to see not just in visibility, but also in intelligibility. La Tour’s particular lights are a metaphor for all light.
In The Magdalene with Two Flames (c. 1640–44), La Tour duplicates the sole source of light — a candle — in a small ornate mirror as an image within the image. The viewer sees only the candle in the mirror surrounded by blackness.
The mirror would need to be angled back and to the left for Magdalene to gaze into her own reflection. This mirror, then, seems only to serve to reflect the candle — an object of Magdalen’s contemplation — for the viewer of the painting.
In the context of devotional images, particularly those in “emblem books” of the time that contained allegorical images, there are obvious spiritual readings and intentions behind this juxtaposition of mirror and light. There is also a the skull in her lap — a memento mori — and discarded jewellery at her feet.
But in this scene there is a play on seeing that puts the image in the mode of metapainting. Magdalene contemplates the real light, while we contemplate both the “real” light as image, since it is in the painting, and the image within the image — the candle’s reflection.
The reflection shows us the back of the candle, but it is naturally brighter than the side facing us since it is doubly lit by its own real flame and the reflected flame in the mirror. The light of the reflected candle — which is pure image — therefore lights up the “real” candle, which, moreover, we — the viewer — only see lit up in its reflection. Through this complex of relations, the image transfigures itself.
This interplay of different orders of reality, in and out of the picture, allegorises the painting itself as an object of devotion. To use Heidegger’s term, it loses its “equipmental” guise as mere representation to merge our reality with its own. Our encounter with the image becomes a moment of contemplative transcendence.
Just as we’ve seen in the other examples, the awe-inspiring stillness, the logical elegance, the exquisite modelling, and geometric simplicity of design in this image adds up to something that few painters match, and no philosopher can express in a thousand pages or more — the common experience of simply being.
This experience is trivial, mundane, thoughtless, in day to day existence. But then the curtain is pulled back and we understand. What we understand cannot be uttered, but it’s deeply felt.
I love his work