LAURENT DE LA HYRE (PARIS 1605-1656)
LAURENT DE LA HYRE (PARIS 1605-1656)
LAURENT DE LA HYRE (PARIS 1605-1656)
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LAURENT DE LA HYRE (PARIS 1605-1656)
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This lot is offered without reserve.
LAURENT DE LA HYRE (PARIS 1605-1656)

Rhetoric and Dialectic

Details
LAURENT DE LA HYRE (PARIS 1605-1656)
Rhetoric and Dialectic
both signed and dated 'L. DE LA HIRE. in. &. F. 1650' (the first: lower right; the second: on the stone plinth at right)
oil on canvas
40 1/4 x 46 7/8 in. (102.3 x 119.2 cm.), each
(2)the first: inscribed 'ORNATVS PERSVASIO' (on the hem of the cloak)
Provenance
Painted in 1650 for Gédéon Tallemant (1613-68), 'Maître des Requêtes', Hôtel Tallemant, Paris, and probably still 'in situ' until dispersed by sale in 1760.
M. Sinson, Paris; (†) his sale, Regnault-Delalande, Paris, 20-24 December 1814, lot 278.
Private collection, France, by 1947.
[The Buergenstock Collection - The Property of Fritz Frey]; Sotheby's, London, 11 December 1996, lot 81, where acquired by the present owner.
Literature
C. Sterling, A catalogue of French Painting 15th-18th Centuries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cambridge, 1955, pp. 86-89.
F. Frey, Der Bürgenstock: Kunst, Geschichte, Tradition, Hoteldorf, Zürich and Stuttgart, 1967, pp. 136-137, as Mercury and Diana.
P.-M. Auzas, 'A propos de Laurent de La Hire', Revue du Louvre, 1968, p. 12.
H. Wine, et al., 'Laurent de la Hyre's Allegorical Figure of Grammar', The National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XIV, 1993, pp. 23, 26, table 1.
C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London and New Haven, 1995, p. 365, under NG 6329; 2nd ed., 2001, p. 365, as still in the Bürgenstock collection.
V. Bar and D. Brême, Dictionnaire iconologique: Les allégories et les symboles de Cesare Ripa et Jean Baudoin, Dijon, 1999, p. 138, 197 and 285, illustrated.
Exhibited
Grenoble, Musées de Grenoble; Rennes, Musée Rennes; Bordeaux, Musée de Bordeaux, Laurent de La Hyre, 1606-1656: L'Homme et l'Oeuvre, 14 January-10 April 1989; 9 May-31 August 1989, 6 October 1989-6January 1990, nos. 262 and 263.
Special notice
This lot is offered without reserve.

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Lot Essay

These eloquent and noble Allegories of Dialectic and Rhetoric were originally made for a suite of paintings executed by La Hyre in 1649 and 1650. Depicting the Seven Liberal Arts that are the foundation of classical education as codified in Antiquity – Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, Grammar and Music, as well as Dialectic and Rhetoric – the set of paintings were likely installed around the walls of a single, grand room in the house of Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux (1613-1668), a member of the Council of State, who resided on rue d’Angoûlmois in the Marais quarter of Paris. Although today scattered in collections throughout the world, all of the paintings in La Hyre’s original series have survived and can be identified, as well as several replicas most likely from the artist’s workshop. In addition to the present paintings, the original series included Arithmetic (Foundation Hannema-de Stuers, Heino), Astronomy (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans), Geometry (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Grammar (National Gallery, London) and Music (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). All of these allegorical representations of the Liberal Arts are personified by female figures presented half-length and nearly life-size, wearing classical drapery and posed in landscape settings with antique architectural elements. Each is identifiable through her traditional attributes, and several of the paintings – including Rhetoric here – also bear inscriptions in Latin alluding to their subjects. In addition, two paintings of winged putti – one depicted holding a viol, the other a sheet of music – originally flanked Music; identical in height but much narrower in width than those of the Liberal Arts, the companion paintings of putti are today in the Musée Magnin, Dijon.

Established in ancient Greece but codified in late Roman antiquity, the Liberal Arts were divided into two categories, the first of which, the ‘Trivium’, consists of Dialectic (or Logic), Rhetoric and Grammar – the skills held to be essential for a person to participate in civic life, as explained in Plato’s Dialogues, including public debate, serving on a jury and defending oneself in court. The second category, consisting of the remaining four Liberal Arts, was identified as the ‘Quadrivium’, the intellectual, scientific and creative skills that followed upon mastery of the ‘Trivium’.

La Hyre’s paintings of Dialectic and Rhetoric, while originally parts of the larger decorative scheme designed for Tallemant, remained together as pendants once the complete suite was disassembled and sold off in 1760, and appeared together as one lot at auction in Paris on 20 December 1814. Both paintings are signed and dated 1650 and, indeed, La Hyre seems to have conceived them as pendants within the larger set of paintings, as their subdued and earthy palette, smooth and polished finish and closely associated subject matter suggests. (Although intimately related as philosophical concepts, ‘Dialectic’ is a method of philosophical debate that aims to establish the truth among opposing points of view through reasoned argumentation; ‘Rhetoric’, as defined by Aristotle, is ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.’) The principal source that guided La Hyre in the particulars of the iconography of his subjects was Cesare Ripa’s famous emblem book, the Iconologia, first published with illustrations in Rome in 1603, then translated into French and published in Paris in 1636. Following Ripa’s description of the personification of Dialectic, La Hyre paints a forceful young woman in a helmet, topped with two plumes, one black, one white. In her right hand she holds two sharp arrows, her left hand rests against a book inscribed ‘GORGIUS’, a reference to the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher (483-375 BC) celebrated for rhetorical innovations in paradoxical thought that were the basis for sophistry. In Ripa’s image of Dialectic/Logic, the helmet she wears signifies ‘the Vigor of the Intellect, especially necessary for Dialectic.’ The two plumes symbolize the ‘defense of the True as well as the False with reasons that seem acceptable, and both of which she plays with as easily as the wind lifts a feather; for the reasons which a vigorous intellect produces are like the feathers held by the hardness of her helmet…. The crescent moon she wears on her crest expresses the same, for, as Piero Valeriano in book 44 of the Hieroglyphica (1556) observes, Dialectic is like the moon for the variety of forms it takes.’

The painting of Rhetoric follows Ripa’s model even more closely, depicting, as Ripa recommends, ‘A fair lady, richly clothed, with a noble headdress; very complaisant; holds up her right hand open; a scepter in her left, with a book; on the skirt of her petticoat are the words, ORNATUS PERSUASIO [‘Decorated with Conviction’]; of a ruddy complexion, with a Chimera at her feet. Fair and complaisant, because there is none so ill-bred that is not sensible of the charms of Eloquence. Her open hand shows Rhetoric discourses in a more open way than Logic [Dialectic]. The scepter: her sway over men’s minds. The book: Study is requisite. The motto denotes its business: The Chimera, the three precepts of it; judicial, demonstrative, and deliberative.’ While La Hyre did not include a Chimera at Rhetoric’s feet, the two winged serpent entwined around her scepter, in the form of a caduceus, fulfill its function.

A fine chalk drawing after Rhetoric in the Harvard Art Museums, formerly considered a preparatory study by La Hyre, is regarded by Thuillier and Rosenberg (fig. 263c, p. 301) as a copy of the painting made by an unknown hand.

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