Evolutionary approaches positing seamless and irreversible transitions from one medium to another continue to exert a significant hold over the history of art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of nineteenth-century printed images, a field still under the powerful sway of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Photography and film are held to triumph not only over painting, with its aura of uniqueness, but even over the reproductive techniques that preceded them. Burin engraving, it seems, was eclipsed by the first stirrings of technological modernity, while lithography was but a fleeting interlude between intaglio techniques and the appearance of photography. When accounts of the period do acknowledge the great variety of print techniques—existing practices that continued to flourish, and ones that first emerged at the time—such media often are presented as conservative anachronisms, inimical to the rising tide of French modernism.

While photography undoubtedly transformed the conditions under which images might be circulated and understood, reproductive engraving continued to be valued for many years; and with the appearance of illustrated magazines in France from 1833, such prints took on mass-cultural as well as elite forms. Art history has seldom returned to these images: it is telling that Stephen Bann’s interlocutors in his fascinating and meticulously researched new book, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France, are mainly nineteenth-century critics such as Philippe Burty, or doyens of early twentieth-century French art history such as Henri Focillon, the latter an engaged if critical representative of the last stage at which reproductive prints after well-known artworks were thought to have historical value on their own terms.

In Distinguished Images, Bann offers a sophisticated corrective to recent scholars’ neglect of such prints, developing themes addressed in his Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). The title of his latest book reminds readers of the original status of these often stunning works, while it signals their differences in terms of subject matter and medium, and highlights their sequential variation from earlier states of the same print. It also points to their embedding within contemporary critical discourses and to the crucial role played by journals such as L’Artiste, Gazette des beaux-arts, L’Art, and Le Magasin pittoresque. These publications were not only sites for the reproduction of images, but conduits for criticism that was highly sensitive to subtle differences between images and to their potential as markers of distinction.

Bann’s account alights early on that transitional moment in the emergence of the French avant-garde—the Salon of 1863—and the criticism that accompanied it. Critics such as Burty were particularly attentive to transitions in printmaking practice and to the varying fortunes of different print techniques during the course of the nineteenth century. The contemporary relevance—or not—of printmaking was thrown into particularly sharp relief by the creation that year of the Salon des Refusés and the heroic narrative of modernist painting it inaugurated. While stressing the significance of printmaking to these debates, Bann emphasizes the inadequacy of polarized terms such as “modern” or “anti-modern” to the discourse on prints, which, he contends, are better understood as subtle registers of a diverse public’s changing tastes and as negotiations of the technical possibilities of printmaking itself. More gray areas, less black and white.

The current obscurity of many artists discussed is underlined in the first chapter, “Reproducing the Mona Lisa,” which looks at how reproductive media enabled the painting’s celebrity. Bann argues against Focillon, who claimed that lithography—and Romanticism more generally—had played a crucial role in popularizing the Mona Lisa. At first reading, this analysis seems counterintuitive, given Bann’s stated aim to recall lithography’s widespread use by a diverse range of artists for whom its graphic possibilities and apparent lack of mediation were especially attractive. However, Bann is at pains to counter straightforward notions of technological evolution, and to present a more nuanced historical picture of the relationship between varied kinds of artistic value. Published in 1919, Focillon’s Technique et sentiment, études sur l’art moderne emerged in the aftermath of the 1860s etching revival; he caricatured burin engraving as stiff, academic, and excessively complicated. By tracing meticulously the early reputation of the painting and the construction of its mythology, Bann shows the important role played by Luigi Calamatta’s elaborate 1857 engraving of the Mona Lisa (a work dismissed by Focillon), arguing that a more historically precise account of this print’s reception provides a more complete understanding of the painting’s reputation.

Although Calamatta’s engraving was first exhibited in 1855, it originated with a drawing displayed in the engraver’s studio in the 1830s, where it reached a wide audience. Bann suggests that Calamatta’s work, combined with literary responses to the Mona Lisa, played an important role in initiating delirious responses to the painting in the work of George Sand, Théophile Gautier, and Walter Pater, whose descriptions of the sitter’s smile, in 1854, 1857, and 1869, respectively, militate against the crucial role Focillon accorded to Romantic lithography (Honoré de Balzac got there even earlier, referencing the smile in 1842). Bann advances his compelling case for an “anti-Darwinian” history of reproductive techniques by proposing the first photograph of the painting as an image by Gustave Le Gray of an 1848 oil copy by Aimé Millet, the kind of drawing usually made in anticipation of an engraving, repurposed here for photographic reproduction. Photography thus takes on a surprisingly traditional function of engraving as transmitter of disegno, demonstrating that media change was more often a careful process of remediation than, pace Victor Hugo, a case of “this” killing “that.”

If the first chapter challenges lithography’s standing as a reproductive art, the second proposes that lithography played a crucial role in popularizing the image of Normandy in the years after Waterloo. In line with the Romantic enthusiasm for medieval France, the movement to affirm distinctive regional identities was promoted by lithographic prints depicting historical monuments, whose survival of revolutionary iconoclasm also affirmed Restoration ideology. Bann considers carefully the historicist function of these prints as they appeared in serial publications such as the Voyages pittoresques, observing how lithography’s ability to register light effects, in particular, was crucial to the historical work the images performed. By the late 1830s, however, Normandy had begun to be displaced as the preferred province, and lithography no longer carried the same weight as a marker for historical truth, as new technologies such as the daguerreotype came to the fore. Bann situates these images and their literary accompaniments in relation to wider trends such as the emergence of a tourist economy and the expansion of a railway network connecting towns on the Normandy coast. Le Gray’s photographs of this coastline are thus emblematic of the waning interest in Normandy’s historical monuments and the increased importance of the “panoramic” coastal view to a modernism represented, on the one hand, by Impressionism, and, on the other, by the commodified landscape of the picture postcard.

Nothing exemplifies more clearly the complex mythography surrounding photography’s challenge to existing forms of reproduction than the career of one of its most famous practitioners, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, better known as Nadar. “No one,” writes Bann, “has suffered as much as Nadar, in terms of his current reputation, from the distorting effects of photographic exceptionalism” (89). Consequently, a key aim of the third chapter is to locate Nadar more effectively within the context of a nineteenth-century visual world in which he participated in a number of guises. Nadar began his career as a lithographer, and Bann suggests that his subsequent practice was informed to a significant degree by this experience. Drawing extensively on Nadar’s writings, particularly Mémoires du Géant (1864) and Quand j’étais photographe (1900), Bann argues that lithography’s urgent temporality not only provided Nadar with a means of conceptualizing immediacy of effect, but that it enabled new ways of thinking about historical time. Nadar’s memory of historical events was, Bann claims, mediated in terms of printed images; lithography in particular impressed itself upon the mature Nadar as a memory trace that subtended his comprehension of the modern world and helped define him as a modern artist. Addressing Nadar’s own art criticism—his unforgettably nasty description of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s portraits producing an effect “like the taste of an invalid’s handkerchief” (109)—this chapter concludes with a dazzling reading of Nadar’s recounting of the tale of the blind princess in Quand j’étais photographe, whose smile recalls nothing so much as the Mona Lisa, and anticipates Roland Barthes’s account of photography’s deathly enigma.

Chapter 4, “Is Lithography an Art?” approaches directly the question of the specific attributes or aims of a medium via a comparison of the divergent careers of Jean-Baptiste Aubry-Lecomte and François-Joseph Aimé de Lemud. Aubry-Lecomte, an exemplary lithographer for Focillon, achieved renown for prints after artists such as Anne-Louis Girodet and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, the soft, hazy effects of lithography matching perfectly the styles of these artists and facilitating a harmonious fusion of commercial and artistic interests. Meanwhile, Bann traces Aimé de Lemud’s career before and after his hugely successful 1839 print Master Wolfram, concluding with a discussion of the artist’s late career return, years after abandoning lithography, with a steel engraving of the deaf Beethoven. Bann suggests that both this print and Master Wolfram address the inability of visual art to convey sound, and that the textural effects of different print media were crucial to the ways in which printmaking negotiated an imaginative response to this impasse. As in the other chapters, Bann’s study of these works is remarkable for its patient attention to the historical and ideological significance of such formal effects, and to considerations of format such as the relationship between horizontality and verticality, refining significantly more technologically determinist accounts of printed images.

The final chapter concentrates on the etching revival of the 1860s. Crucial here was Charles Blanc’s Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which cast lithography as the province of connoisseurs and collectors, in contrast to etching’s contemporary vitality—the medium serving as standard bearer for a reenergized reproductive tradition in which the stylistically eclectic work of Léopold Flameng and Charles Waltner was particularly significant. The book ends with a discussion of Claude Gaillard’s enthusiasm for issuing separate states of his prints, and the final words are left to the unfinished, ruinous states of his Mona Lisa, prints of which one can still purchase at the Louvre.

While the different chapters of Distinguished Images intersect with one another in stimulating ways, and although there is a wonderful symmetry to the reappearance of Gaillard’s Mona Lisa, a more pronounced conclusion tying the chapters together would have been helpful. However, it is perhaps in the spirit of Gaillard’s unfinished work that the book should remain open-ended in this way. For Distinguished Images does not presume to tell a neat story, but rather to complicate and deepen an understanding of a fluid field of images that have long suffered from a more linear treatment. Essential reading for scholars of this period, Distinguished Images is both a crucial contribution to the study of reproductive images in nineteenth-century France and a powerful reappraisal of the story of art in modernity.