Leseprobe

66 empty hall. 6 But the simplicity of the strategy certainly belies its effectiveness. Through its site-specific location and those bodily and spatial continuities between the object and its setting, the framing devices andmode of encounter set up an illusionistic relationship, moving the painting beyondmerely addressing the beholder to instead actually implicate them in the scene depicted. Standing in that space, looking up at Restout’s Pentecost , the inhabitants of the abbey would have found themselves in the path of those rays of light descending as tongues of flame, craning upwards to see for themselves what the Apostles saw, and perhaps even sensing an inkling of what they felt. What was created in this installation in the refectory of Saint-Denis was nomere decorative adornment, but rather an encounter with an empirically unknowablemoment, a chance for the faithful spectator to almost , if not quite, experience what it was like when the Holy Spirit descended to earth. Transfiguration in the Chapel In 1723, François Lemoyne painted the Transfiguration on the ceiling of a Jacobin chapel just off Rue du Bac. Now the parish church of Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, re-designated as such following the diocesan reorganisation during the French Revolution, the church is un-usually small and architecturally simple for a Parisian parish church, due to its original function as a chapel for this French branch of the Dominican Order. When first con- structed in the seventeenth century, the building comprised only a short nave, a transept, and a tiny choir, but in the 1720s an additional chapel (now the Chapel of Saint-Louis) was built as an annex behind the choir to make more space for the growing order. It was on the ceiling of this chapel that Lemoyne painted his Transfiguration , which, thanks to the large aperture at the back of the choir, is visible from the nave of themain building (Fig. 3). 7 As an example of an object activated by the framing devices andmodes of encounter of its architectural situation, Lemoyne’s Transfiguration is in some ways similar to Restout’s Pentecost at Saint-Denis: an installation revolving around a single painted surface. But this time the architectural setting is more elaborate—not an empty hall, but a set of interlock- ing spaces withmultiple viewpoints—and far more is demanded of the beholder tomake the Transfiguration work in its entirety. Understanding how the display strategies of Lemoyne’s Transfiguration worked does not in this instance require any imaginative reconstruction, for the work is still in situ and the building has undergone no significant changes. Any visitor to the church of Saint- Thomas-d’Aquin is thus able to experience the work in much the same way as it was 6 Restout’s Pentecost originally had a pendant, Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law , hanging at the other end of the refectory. This painting is lost and was possibly destroyed during the French Revolution. With no sketches or reproductions, it is now impossible to reconstruct the effect the two works may have had together, but from the brief descriptions that remain, it certainly seems that it would have provided a comparable illusion at the other end of the hall. On Restout’s Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law , see: Gouzi, Jean Restout , 2000, p. 224.  7 On Lemoyne’s artistic practice, see: Bordeaux, François Lemoyne , 1984.