In her study of the “artful body” and aristocratic identity in the visual arts from Louis XIV to the Regency, Sarah Cohen investigates the role played by personal artifice and dance in the performance of status, power, and social interaction. Drawing on a wealth of historical, visual, and documentary material, an intimate familiarity with dance and art history, and methodologies on performance and identity in African and contemporary art, Cohen explores the significance and meaning of outward appearances, bodily movement, and cultural practice in art ranging from Versailles to the last paintings of Watteau.

In chapter one, “The Court Ballet,” Cohen presents the intertwined cultural and political dimensions of social performance and dance under Louis XIV. Examining Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and texts by the Chevalier de Méré, La Rochefoucauld, Descartes, and Bossuet, Cohen discusses the evolution of the idea of the “artful body,” with its fusion of aristocratic comportment and cultivated mystique of personal charm and grace. Aristocratic status was claimed to be marked by outward appearances, but the signifiers defied easy definition, as in the oft-cited phrase je ne sais quoi. This stance was characterized by Bouhours as a “charm and a quality which blend into all of one’s actions and all of one’s words; which goes into the walk, the laugh, the tone of voice and down to the slightest gesture of the person who pleases.” At the heart of her argument is a fascinating discussion of the art of dance among royalty and the aristocracy, cited by many writers as a significant opportunity to display and perform one’s grace and refinement, as Cohen notes, “styling one’s actions to match one’s identity.” Ballet as performance thus differed significantly from drama, emphasizing the performer’s bodily movements rather than a verbal text. As documented in several key images, the king himself danced with his courtiers in productions during the 1650s, appearing in specially-created roles—and sometimes cross-dressed—that characterized his authority and sensual allure. Cohen argues convincingly that in this way Louis used ballet to enact artfully his relationship to his subjects, with their movements set in dynamic response to the “thrust” of his central axis.

In “Art as Spectacle,” Cohen considers the role of the artful body, artistic performance, and architecture in shaping political ideas in seventeenth-century France, first at Fouquet’s Vaux-le-Vicomte, and with greater effect at Versailles. Le Brun, Le Notre, and Le Vau—already versed in the fusion of art and performance by having worked for the crown in the 1650s—created Vaux-le-Vicomte as a place for royal entertainment, and simultaneously elevated Fouquet’s status to unacceptable heights. Cohen reads the intended program, decoration, and gardens of the ill-fated palace as a visual performance experienced in time and space. The unfolding sequence of its rooms and decor in dynamic exchange with the spectator are analogous to ballet’s rhythmic processions. After Fouquet’s fall in 1661, Cohen argues, Louis XIV created Versailles for his own program of performed identity, such as he had begun enacting in dance during the 1650s. Elaborately staged fètes, such as the Plaisirs de l’Isle enchantée, began in 1664, just as the gardens were being designed. As in earlier ballets, the king was both a significant performer and the primary viewer, occupying the central axis with his body, now in extended spatial procession along the newly-designed Allée Royale. Cohen argues that once his personal participation ceased in 1670, “his performances were in effect transferred into the surrogate ‘bodies’ of the structures at Versailles.” Roles that he had enacted in earlier ballets, such as that of the Sun, were transformed “from emblem, image, and analogy into a generative, even cosmic, force,” and resonated with Descartes’s heliocentric theory of the universe recently published in 1664. Cohen is convincing in her conclusion on the relationship between the court ballet and Louis XIV’s power through the interlinkages of performance and cosmology.

“Aristocratic Traceries” considers the lateral impact of this artistic performance, structured environment, and power dynamic in an intriguing examination of the “artful” aristocratic body during the later seventeenth century, a time when the ranks of the aristocracy swelled. Cohen again finds the impetus for design and cultural meaning in the visual display of the elegant body moving through space in dance. The contemporary engraved plates Cohen discusses, documenting the curvilinear sequences of the dancers’ choreographed steps—analogue to the “traceries” of garden broderies and the fluid arabesques of ornamental prints and rocaille decoration—are a revelation. For anyone interested in the evolution of ornamentation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this chapter updates Fiske Kimball’s treatment by discussing the cultural exchange and visual interdependence among the different media of dance, architecture, decoration, and engraving and by erasing distinctions between “high” and “low” art in aristocratic culture. She is persuasive regarding the evolution of this new aristocratic style that shifts away from the axial “center” of the king’s body and stylized performances. With the growing fashionability of couple-dancing and the collecting of ornamental prints beyond the court, this aristocratic style spread into French society. Cohen underscores her arguments with an informed knowledge of historical dance technique and visual material.

Chapters four and five further address the dissemination of this aristocratic style. “The Universal Masquerade” discusses the rise of highly-trained professional dancers, i.e. “skillful commoners who would perform as surrogates for their courtly counterparts.” In this light, Cohen examines the popularity of the “costume” print—single-figure engravings which documented first the characters of certain dance performances, and later particular individuals or “character” types dressed in the latest fashions or other signifying costume. Cohen’s attention, however, is drawn to the outward manifestation of “character” through the expressions of the body, aptly discussed according to contemporary writings. She proceeds to an inquiry into the “shifting identities and surrogate performances” in these prints, where the popularity of masquerade and cross-dressing underscored the dissolution of social identity. “Universal enjoyment” became the goal of masquerade balls, especially with the introduction of the contredanse that eliminated internal hierarchies. In the chapter “Watteau’s Performers,” Cohen further examines what she calls “the transformation of aristocratic performance into an aesthetic product that a wider public could appropriate.” Her discussion of Watteau’s ability to fuse nature with the surface allure of refined gesture and dress is thoroughly convincing in the context of the artful body that has been trained in dance movement that enacts elegance and character, distinguishing it from the rhetorical, theatrical bodies of academic art. Cohen thus goes beyond Norman Bryson and Thomas Crow in reading Watteau’s figures as both spectators and performers of the masquerade. In studying Watteau’s arabesques, with their asymmetry and implied sociality of the figures, she considers how he created “a new kind of sensual dynamics…shifting the paradigm from the presentational entrée of the court ballet to the inwardly focused ‘game’ of the couple dance,” replete with psychological intimacy and erotic possibility. The new “universal enjoyment” among those who were both spectators and performers is enacted in Watteau’s group subjects, where the “bodily disposition” can be “multiply suggestive without submitting to any narrative demands.”

Chapters six and seven continue the investigation of Watteau’s art. “Collective Rituals” examines aristocratic social gatherings, cultural expression, and Watteau’s painted fètes galantes after Louis XIV’s death, a time when aristocratic life shifted to Paris. Netherlandish “peasant” genre subjects came into vogue, and yet, as Cohen notes, French adaptations often incorporated “noble” style couple-dancing. Watteau, however, created a “collaborative spectacle.” Cohen addresses the resistance to any single interpretation or textual narrative in the Pilgrimage to Cythera, and places it in the milieu of the masquerade with its emphasis on immediacy, universal enjoyment, and the infinite possibilities of graceful movement. In the final chapter, “The Artful Body in Question,” Cohen concludes her study with an examination of how the artful body, along with the idea of natural grace, were recast in the eighteenth century in Enlightenment philosophy and aesthetics—in both painting and the ballet—as being distinctly feminine. This was fully manifested in the reaction against artifice and the Rococo at midcentury, accompanied by a return to the rhetorical body. Likewise, Watteau’s paintings lost their resonance and cultural meaning among French connoisseurs within decades of their creation. Cohen argues that, despite the shift from a monarchic to aristocratic society during the Régence, it is nevertheless important to read Watteau’s works according to the courtly traditions continuing from Versailles. Her final insights about Watteau’s own ironic reconsideration of bodily performance at the end of his life in Gersaint’s Shopsign and Gilles are no less significant than the rest of her investigation.

Throughout this innovative, engaging study, Cohen underscores her astute observations with an extensive, well-researched knowledge of period literature (philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic), visual material, and dance history. It is the cultural significance of dance and its impact on constructions of identity in the visual arts that will impress many scholars in the field. Cohen’s sensitive readings of art works, even familiar paintings such as Rigaud’s Louis XIV and those by Watteau, yield many new possibilities for better understanding this complex period.