Homage to Daniel Arasse

Daniel Arasse is not a household name in the English-speaking world but as intellectuals go, he was, here in his native France and adoptive Italy, a star.  Some few of his masterful books have been translated into English, such as his definitive monography on Leonardo da Vinci or his essays of a deceptively lighter tone in Take a Closer Look.

I became his student (was the last of them to have defended my dissertation) by a fluke, or serendipity or synchronicity or something of the sort.

After leaving New College of Florida with a degree in Medieval- Renaissance Studies, I had been at the Sorbonne Paris-IV for a second Bachelor's (License) this time in Art History, and then a Maîtrise in Medieval Italian Art History. Let it be said that Paris-IV was known as Fac-Réac - the reactionary college. It was said of another section, Paris-I, that were art history a cabinet full of drawers, such as those antiquated card catalogues, Paris-I would then open the drawers and study the contents. Paris-IV, on the other hand, would study the drawers. I think too that the Sorbonne never quite recovered from its original establishment as a means to fight heresy.  I will never forget the young woman who was told during her presentation, as she began to say "I think-" was interrupted by the professor himself who said "Mademoiselle, no one asked you to think."

Having come from a school in which we were carefully cultivated to argue our own opinions and do original research, it was a foregone conclusion that Paris-IV and I would fall out. So much so that I was told at my Master's defense that "You do not do art history as it has ever or ever will be done at Paris-IV." and "You will have your B (upon which continuing my curriculum hinged) on condition that you leave the Sorbonne."

They sent me to the EHESS, (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) as if in shame, home to such luminaries as Derrida and Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Braudel, and so many others.  Only as a recent expatriate, I had never heard of the place. I looked up whomever was in charge of Italian painting and found the name Daniel Arasse. I managed an appointment utterly unaware that I was dealing with the the subject's dean in more than two countries. He looked over my master's thesis and said around the pipe in his mouth "Mademoiselle, this is just the sort of thing we do here, welcome to the house!"

It was only with time I understood the breadth of his celebrity, indeed of the institution, what that welcome meant. At the Sorbonne I had felt amputated and here I felt myself fly, especially under his tutelage. I will write more in the course of this blog on Daniel Arasse and his theories of art history earning him that celebrity, the doors my association with him opened for me directly and indirectly. 

He died in 2003 at 59 years old. Charcot's disease took him, a slow paralysis that gains eventually the entire body, lungs and heart included. The grapevine worked fast when he left us and I heard almost immediately. I could barely get through teaching my classes the next day, realizing how much I owed him in both content and approach. He marked every word of my lecture. I sobbed in front of an auditorium of over a hundred students. I could only console myself that I was teaching by example what a professor might mean to a student, what learning from someone can imply of emotional investment. I suppose the homage of tears were appropriate for a man who told me once that he had to leave a museum for weeping at the blue of a Matisse.

I remember one of his remarks on painting, that staring and staring at at a given piece, at some point it will rise and "stand up." In his last years he was confined to a wheel chair. But his mind was no less fierce for all that, publishing up until his death and then the colloquia and studies on his approach to art history that followed....

He was buried in Montparnasse cemetery a cold and rainy day in December.  His coffin was heaped with lilies as a tribute to his work on the Annunciation. And perspective. We mustn't forget here, perspective, in its strict and larger senses.

Friends gathered round the grave and sang Purcell as he was lowered down into the ground. 

I dream of him often, still. 

We were not close, and I don't mean to give that impression, but I will always, always remember when I was dismissed from the Sorbonne, that Daniel Arasse brought me into the right fold. In that sense for me, for this adopted child in an adopted country, adopting a new university in the wake of failing at the old, and this under the aegis of an intellectual protector, he will remain for me part of my "family of choice."