Theories of Pastiche from 1699 to the Present

Etymology and Early Definitions

Like so many good things, the term pastiche has its origins in Ital-ian cuisine. Pasticcio¹⁶ means a pie filled with various ingredients, usually beef or mutton, vegetables, pasta and spices. According to a traditional recipe recorded in the nineteenth century, the chopped ingredients and macaroni are layered in a buttered pan, covered with pastry and baked in an oven (Artusi 306-07); another common variant of pasticcio is a closed pie. The eclectic quality of the filling presumably suggested an affinity with works of art which combined elements from various sources.¹⁷ Battaglia’s Grande dizinario della lingua italiana cites the mock-heroic poem La Gigantea (written in 1547 and published in 1566)¹⁸ and the writings of the critic Francesco Scipione Maffei (1675-1755) as the first occurrences of pasticcio in the context of art. In addition to its cu-linary sense, pasticcio also denoted a mess or muddle, negative sense which has persisted to date. It may have contributed to the application of the term in art since eclectic derivative works were considered less valuable than originals or “good” imitations.

From a metaphor based on structural similarity the term evolved into a specialist concept which was used to classify and in many cases to evaluate works of art, probably during the

16 From the Latin pasticus < pasta, ‘paste’.

17 Other interpretations have been offered too: Jean-François Jeandillou writes that the idea of heterogeneity in pastiche does not apply to the imitative work but to its ambiguous relationship to the model: “en tant que simulacra artificiellement compose de scories, de fragments démarqués, il se situe au plus près de l’œuvre souche, tout en lui restant extérieur” (Esthétique 131). (“[A]s a simulacrum assem-bled from dross and copied fragments, [pastiche] positions itself as closely as possible to the source work, while remaining outside it.”)

18 The poem, which includes a reference to “nit-picking pedants” who make (or bake) pastiches out of Petrarchs (“fanno in pasticci il Petrarcea”), is often attrib-uted to Girolamo Amelonghi or Benedetto Arrighi. For details, see Zandré, Cul-tural Non-Conformity in Early Modern Florence (87-89, 102). I am grateful to Janne Koskinen and Aino Kostiainen for assistance with Italian sources.

teenth and eighteenth centuries. This trajectory was not a straight-forward one. In its Italian form, the term was – and still is – ap-plied to a type of popular opera performed between 1650s and 1800. These musical pasticci typically consisted of favourite arias welded together with a new libretto. According to Curtis Price in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the musical term pasticcio came into general use around the year 1730 (213). The musical pasticci did not suffer from low reputation since renowned composers such as Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck, Mozart and Haydn re-arranged their works into pasticci or contributed to composite op-eras which borrowed materials from many existing works (213-14). One example of this operatic practice is Handel’s Elpidia (1725) which consists of a libretto by Zeno and arias drawn from contemporary operas by Vinci and Orlandini. Handel himself contributed only the secco recitative and possibly the duets. Price concludes that “the result is stylistically removed from Handel, but it is not less dramatic or coherent than many of his own op-eras; and [. . .] the pasticcios allowed Handel to test the gallant tastes of the fickle London audience more radically than he dared to do in his own operas” (215).¹⁹ Like so many other musical terms, pasticcio retained its Italian form, due to the influence that this superpower of music had in the development of that art form and its institutions throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, in visual arts and literature the concept was mainly applied and developed by French critics and writers. It was in the French form ‘pastiche’ that the term became rooted in the vocabulary of the arts and spread because of the significant cultural influence of France to other European lan-guages. I offer a general overview of its distribution in some European languages in the appendix to this study.

Le Grand Robert quotes the year 1677 as the first appearance of the term pastiche in French, occuring in a treatise by the art critic Roger de Piles, entitled in the dictionary, and in many other sources, “Conn. des Tabl., III.” Piles’s formulation of pastiches as

19 For more details about Handel’s pasticci, see Reinhard Strohm’s article in Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (1985).

“neither originals, nor copies” became the veritable ur-definition in French, either quoted or incorporated without a source refer-ence into most dictionary entries on pastiche. In Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, Ingeborg Hoesterey embarks on a scholarly “sleuthing operation” in order to track down this refer-ence, discovering, after many dead-ends, that it is apocryphal (4-6). None of Piles’s works corresponds to the publication year or the abbreviated title, and Hoesterey’s most palpable source candi-date, Conversations sur la Connaissance de la Peinture from 1677 does not mention pastiche at all.²⁰ Hoesterey concludes:

Our desire to trace the statement that could establish the discourse tradition of [pastiche] [. . .] inadvertently revealed what poststructural-ists have been maintaining all along: that there is not one origin (Der-rida) but a forest of origins; that discursive conventions come about through displacements and transformations, through successive rules of use [. . .]. (5)

It would indeed be tempting to think that the concept of pastiche, which undermines the notion of originality, has no traceable ori-gin of its own. However, this is not the case, at least not in the sense suggested by Hoesterey. Further archival investigation pro-duced the origin that had eluded Hoesterey’s attention: by com-paring bibliographical information and consulting different edi-tions of Piles’s published works I was able to locate the oft-quoted passage in Abregé de la vie des Peintres (first edition 1699), a scholarly work which outlines parameters for evaluating art works and introduces the canonical painters and schools of European art from antiquity to the seventeenth century.²¹ In this treatise, Piles summarises and modifies the neoclassicist principles of his era, but what makes the work particularly interesting as the source of

20 Conversations sur la Connaissance de la Peinture is also cited as the source of the quotation in Aron’s Histoire du pastiche (7), but Aron appears to rely on second-hand sources since no exact reference is given.

21 Piles (1635-1709) was a painter, critic, and diplomat, whose travels took him around Europe between 1662 and 1692. He assisted many renowned collectors and collected a considerable library of art books and prints himself. Abregé de la vie des Peintres was written during Piles’s imprisonment in the Netherlands in the 1690s. (“Abregé de la vie de M. de Piles,” no pagination; Puttfarken x-xii.)

the first known discussion of pastiche is its practical orientation:

the book was written from the point of view of a curator to other curators and collectors, its aim being to aid them in the evaluation and correct attribution of paintings. Thus pastiche emerges as an art term in a context which dynamically combines neoclassicist conceptions with the demands of the evolving modern art market in which individuality was emerging as an appreciated value.

Abregé de la vie des Peintres includes a section called “De la Connoissance des Tableaux,”²² the third part of which – hence

“Conn. des Tabl., III” – is dedicated to the distinction between originals and copies or, more particularly, to the classification of three kinds of copy according to their degrees of faithfulness to the original. At the end of the section, Piles turns to pastiche, which he sees as a related but nevertheless distinct practice:²³

Il me reste encore à dire quelque chose sur les Tableaux, qui ne sont ni Originaux, ni Copies, lesquels on appelle Pastiches, de l’Italien, Pastici, qui veut dire, Pâtez: car comme les choses differentes qui assaisonnent un Pâté ne sont mêlées ensemble que pour faire sentir un seul goût, de même toutes les imitations qui composent un pastiche ne tendent qu’à faire paroître une verité. (102)

I still have something to say about those paintings which are neither originals nor copies and which are called pastiches after the Italian term for pies, Pastici; for just as the different things that season a pie

22 “On the Knowledge of Pictures” (Art of Painting 66).

23 I am quoting from the second edition (1715), which has been “reviewed and corrected by the author,” as it is the one I have had easiest access to. I have also acquainted myself with a copy of the first edition (1699) in the Bodleian Library and the differences in the pastiche passage are slight. In addition to these two editions, there is a later one dated 1767, but it does not include the passage on pastiches. The part containing the passage on pastiche has also been published separately (L’Idée du peintre parfait, pour server de règle aux jugemens que l’on doit porter sur les ouvrages des peintres, Londres 1707). To my knowledge, the first and second editions and L’Idée du peintre parfait are the only editions that contain the pastiche section. The English translation, The Art of Painting (1706), was made from the first French edition.

are mixed together to produce a single flavour, likewise the imitations which comprise a pastiche seek only to produce a single truth.²⁴

This is the source definition of pastiche that has been quoted over and over again in dictionaries and critical treatises, and it is easy to see why it would be appealing to later commentators, presenting pastiche through comparisons in a manner which is both concise and evocative. Yet precisely these qualities render the passage problematic, especially if it is considered in isolation from its wider context. For instance, the double negation “ni Originaux, ni Copies” leaves open the question of how pastiche relates to these two categories: is it somewhere between them or completely out-side their scale? According to Pierre Laurette, it designates the in-determinate space (l’espace incertain) of pastiche, analogous to the je ne sais quoi feeling of classical aesthetics (115). While pastiche is characterised by a degree of ill-definable ambiguity, one can find partial answers to the question in the continuation of the passage which has not been available to commentators on Piles’s defini-tion.²⁵ In this passage, Piles goes on to explain the relationship be-tween the pasticheur and his model:

Un Peintre qui veut tromper de cette sorte, doit avoir dans l’esprit la maniere & les principes du Maître dont il veut donner l’idée, afin d’y réduire son Ouvrage, soit qu’il y fasse entrer quelque endroit d’un Ta-bleau que ce Maître aura déja fait, soit que l’Invention étant de luy, il imite avec legereté, non seulement les Touches, mais encore le Goût du Dessein, & celuy du Coloris. Il arrive très souvent que le Peintre, qui se propose de contrefaire la maniere d’un autre Peintre, ayant toû-jours en vuë d’imiter ceux qui sont plus habiles que luy, fait de

24 For clarity’s sake, I will use my own English translations. In the 1706 English translation the passage is rendered as follows: “It remains for me to say some-thing of those Pictures that are neither Original nor Copies, which the Italians call Pastici, from Paste, because, as the several things that Season a Pasty, are reduc’d to one Tast, so Counterfeits that compose a Pastici tend only to effect one Truth”

(The Art of Painting 74). The anonymous translation is presumably by John Savage (see the bibliographical details of The Art of Painting provided in the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library).

25 For instance, Laurette refers only to the short definition (113), probably bor-rowed from a secondary source, although no source information is given. Like-wise, Hempel refers to Piles through a dictionary quotation (167).

leurs Tableaux de cette sorte, que s’il produisoit de son propre fond.

[. . .] Il y a de ces Pastiches qui sont faits avec tant d’adresse, que les yeux même les plus éclairez y sont surpris au premier coup d’œil. Mais après avoir examiné la chose de plus près, ils démêlent aussi-tôt le Co-loris d’avec le CoCo-loris, & le Pinceau d’avec le Pinceau. (102-03)

A painter who wishes to deceive in this manner has to have in his spirit (esprit) the manner and the principles of the master whose sense (l’idée) he wishes to convey, in order to reduce the master’s oeuvre in the imitation. Whether he is going to introduce some aspect of a painting that the master has already done, or whether he is inventing by himself, he imitates delicately not only the touches but also the taste of the drawing and that of the colouring. It often happens that the painter who aims to imitate (contrefaire) the manner of another painter, and whose aim has always been to imitate those who are more skilful than him, makes better paintings in this way than he would have made by himself. [. . .] Some of these pastiches are composed so skilfully that even the most enlightened eyes have been surprised at first. After having examined the matter more closely, however, they can soon distinguish one colouring from another and one brush from another.²⁶

It is possible to distinguish in this passage a partial answer to the question of the status of pastiches as “ni Originaux, ni Copies.”

As in originals, invention in pastiches need not be dependent of the models: the pasticheur is at liberty to invent a topic to which he applies the manner²⁷ of another painter. As to copies, the

26 “A Painter that wou’d deceive in this way, ought to have, in his Mind, the Manner and Principles of the Master, of whom he wou’d give an Idea, whether he takes any part of a Picture which that Master has made and puts it in his own Work, or whether the Invention is his own, and he imitates lightly, not only his Touches, but even his Goût of Design and Colouring. It often happens that these Painters who propose the Counterfeiting another’s manner, aiming to imitate such as are more Skilful than themselves, they make better Pictures of this kind, than if they were to do something of their own. [. . .] There are some of his [David Teniers] Pastici made with so much cunning, that the Eyes of the most judicious are surpriz’d by them at first sight, but after having examined them nearer, they soon distinguish the One’s Colouring, and the One’s Pencil, from the Other’s” (The Art of Painting 74-75).

27 In the art discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, manière had two basic meanings: it could either refer (neutrally) to the characteristic style of the artist or it could designate negatively the “tics” and individual traits of the art-ist. In Conversations sur la connaissance de la peinture, Piles compares manière to the

cial difference seems to be that whereas a copy imitates only one work (97-99), pastiche imitates elements from different works of the same author. Thus, while a copy can be judged in comparison to its model, the evaluation of a pastiche is less straightforward since it involves the juxtaposition of the characteristic manner of the art-ist being imitated with that of the pasticheur, whose own manner is traceable in the invention and selection as well as the execution of the imitation. Hence the duality of pastiche which Piles con-denses in the famous double negation of his definition.

According to Piles, the pasticheur’s aim is to render the sense or idea (l’idée) of another artist by imitating selected elements of his works. This conception of pastiche seems to relate to the neo-classical practice of selective imitation, in which the artist chooses to depict only those elements which correspond to the ideal con-ception of the object (see previous chapter). Thus when Piles sees truth (verité) as the intended effect of pastiche, he is probably thinking of something akin to an idealised synthesis of the manner of the imitated painter.²⁸ If a pasticheur succeeds in attaining this effect, the resulting imitation is capable of deceiving the viewers who will not recognise it as a pastiche but take it as a previously unknown painting by that artist. Although Piles’s description of pastiche resembles the modern conception of forgery, he did not speak of deception in negative terms, deception or illusion for him being (as for other neoclassicists) the desired effect of art and

style and writing of an author without any obvious negative undertones (Conversa-tions n. pag.; Michel 153-55).

28 Wido Hempel, who in “Parodie, Travestie und Pastiche” (167) quotes Piles’s definition from Brunot’s Histoire de la langue française, cannot see how derivative pastiches could attain to truth. Consequently, he suggests that there is a mistake in the word order of the original definition. Brunot’s quotation is taken from the first edition of Abregé de la vie des Peintres, where the definition goes as follows:

“parce que de même que les choses différentes qui assaisonnent un Pâté, se rédu-isent à un seul Goût; ainsi les faussetés qui composent un Pastiche, ne tendent qu’à faire une vérité[.]” In Hempel’s view, Piles must have meant conversely that the truths (vérités) which pastiche imitates must amount only to falsity (faussété). As I mentioned in chapter 1.1, however, faussété is one of the near-equivalents of imita-tion in neoclassical discourse and hence there need be no contradicimita-tion in Piles’s definition. This appears to be the likeliest interpretation since in the second edi-tion of Abregé de la vie des Peintres the word faussétés has been replaced by imitaedi-tions.

the measure of the quality of the work (see Puttfarken 47). Art’s aim was to create an illusion of nature, or, in the case of pastiche, an illusion of the style of another artist.

Piles’s example of a pasticheur capable of deceiving in this way is David Teniers the Younger (1610-90), “who has deceiv’d, and ever will deceive the Curious, who are not prepossest of his dexterity in transforming himself into [Jacopo] Bassano and Paolo Veronese”²⁹ (Art of Painting 75). In some cases the verisimilitude of pastiche to its model can be so striking that even experts find it difficult to distinguish “the One’s Pencil, from the Other’s.” Even in the best of pastiches the pasticheur’s own traits break the illu-sion, however. Piles notes that Teniers’s drawing is not equal to its model in spirituality and proper characterisation of objects; nor does his colouring have “the vigour and sweetness”³⁰ of Bassano (Art of Painting 75). It appears that in Piles’s view pastiches can maintain the illusion only temporarily, and when found out, they invariably fall below their models in artistic quality, as a detailed examination will reveal (Abregé 104).

The reception of pastiche thus appears to have two aspects:

first, delightful deception and the related admiration of skill, then critical analysis, in which the defects of the pasticheur are found out. Even if pastiches turn out to be disappointing as art works, their reception seems to offer two kinds of pleasure: the emotive pleasure of illusion and interest, and the analysing pleasure of dis-tinguishing the pastiche from its models. The relation between

first, delightful deception and the related admiration of skill, then critical analysis, in which the defects of the pasticheur are found out. Even if pastiches turn out to be disappointing as art works, their reception seems to offer two kinds of pleasure: the emotive pleasure of illusion and interest, and the analysing pleasure of dis-tinguishing the pastiche from its models. The relation between