Image Authorship in Online Participatory Cultures

This work is the script for a lecture.

Today I will be discussing this understudied nineteenth-century oil painting, The Fallen Angel by French Académie painter Alexandre Cabanel. I will be trying to understand how the work went from a rejected early painting by a forgotten artist to one of the most well-known paintings within internet culture, albeit one whose fans have little interest in it’s painter, it’s time period or it’s provenance. I want to use this work as a case study for understanding image authorship in online ‘participatory’ cultures — wherein users are simultaneously media consumers, contributors, and producers.

In my first lecture, I will use Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author to ask whether The Fallen Angel’s internet incarnation is a work with a dead author. In my 1 second lecture, I will critique Barthes by conducting an author-based analysis of the work, to see if this reveals more answers about the internet reinterpretation. This structure may seem reversed, but it supports my argument: we must first lay out our Barthian interpretation before we critique it. Has the online version of The Fallen Angel lost all connection to its author, or is the author still the driving force behind this work? I hope my discoveries regarding online ‘collective authorship’ and The Fallen Angel’s status as a self-portrait convince you that the study of art in online cultures is a vital area of contemporary art history, as well as questioning The Death of the Author’s reputation for being tedious and overused. As an internet art historian, I never expected to take such interest in a nineteenth-century academic artist — my research has spurred an unanticipated fondness for a new genre of art, and I hope it does the same for you.

The Fallen Angel dates from 1847, during Cabanel’s stay at the Villa Medici for his Prix de Rome scholarship. The rules dictated that he complete a figure study in his second year. In my second lecture I will be examining the painting in more detail, but the work depicts the opening scene from John Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost, where fallen rebellious angels lie on the rocky landscape of Hell after losing the war of heaven. Lucifer, their leader, is pictured. The ‘good’ angels float above him, diaphanous in Grecian gowns; Lucifer has been punished with nakedness, and he curls his body away from us, half-hiding his face in shame. However, I think we can all agree — Cabanel’s treatment of Lucifer is not as defeated. He is vengeful, angry, and extremely beautiful. Sadly, the jurists did not like the piece, and their remarks were disparaging — ‘…The movement is wrong, the draughtsmanship imprecise, the execution deficient…’ And so, The Fallen Angel was forgotten, and this short 2 description exhausts what is often written about it within art history. So much study needs to be conducted on The Fallen Angel — much more than I have time for today. In order to get to the heart of this analysis, I will only be addressing the significance of the author in the work. In my second lecture, I will only be searching for similarities between Cabanel’s Fallen Angel and its internet incarnation: I will not be considering it within the wider context of Cabanel’s oeuvre.

2 Gabriel Negraschus, ‘Der Schone Satan in der Skulptur Des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Genius Der Leiden(Shaft)’ (PhD Thesis, University of Jena, 2018), p. 115.

The Fallen Angel begs to be cross-examined, affronting us with its uncompromising view of masculinity and vast expanse of flesh. I imagine many of you were prompted by this work to begin thinking about masculinity in academic art, about images of the devil, perhaps about the nineteenth-century erotic gaze. However, I did not encounter this work within the context of social art history, or even within the context of art itself. My encounter with this work was through social media when in the mid-2010s it became a popular artwork on the internet. This painting gained a lot of attention in this internet format, severed from any accompanying information — I do not doubt that many of you recognised it from this decontextualized state.

The Fallen Angel became firmly entrenched in online image culture. Users placed Cabanel’s work side-by-side with figures from pop culture, with self-portraits or lyrics from popular songs. LGBT+ and transgender communities widely shared the artwork, particularly on the microblogging website Tumblr. For example, here — a user reflects on the resemblance between Star Wars’s Anakin Skywalker and the angel, while another uses the work to exemplify a particular personality type, and another combines the work with song lyrics.

These online new ‘authors’ — authors simply being those who create meaning in the work — engage with the work’s sense of disobedience, homoeroticism and effeminate beauty. Its online traction is almost exceptional; I am sure that no other work has been lifted from obscurity and granted such disparate social media popularity. Looking at these online responses behind me raises more questions. Perhaps you’re thinking — what does this say about conceptualising masculinity in online communities? However, I believe that in order to begin a nuanced analysis of images within online culture, we need first to have a method of understanding how an image changes meaning on the internet. Much of the general populace’s exposure to art is now online.

No doubt many of us in this room experience much of our art on the internet. These artworks are often isolated, with no caption or background information, presented alongside art from other artists, societies and cultures. This state makes online imagery vulnerable to authorship critique.

When I first began looking at online reinterpretations of The Fallen Angel, I tried to find something they all shared. I realised that many responses share a disregard for the authority of the original author, Cabanel — the work is severed from its original context, manipulated for internet users’ own ends. This led me to critically revisit Barthes’s The Death of the Author. The text is a classic in literary theory, wherein Barthes argues for a new type of writing, unanchored to an author. Cabanel is particularly susceptible to authorship critique due to his position outside the canon: even if his name accompanies his work, there is little chance a reader will recognise him. We have to be critically self-conscious when working with The Death of the Author. We must be careful not to over-rely on the text as a source of authority, rather as an experimental methodology to help understand The Fallen Angel within

3 Zoe Mason, ‘A Google platform might change the way we view art’, The Fulcrum, https://thefulcrum.ca/features/a-google-platform-might-change-the-way-we-view-art/, (Date Accessed: 17/04/2020).

internet image culture. Further to this, not only was the text written three decades before the internet’s arrival, but within the context of a specific 1960s French literary culture that was heavily male, and heavily exclusive — Barthes only references Honoré de Balzac and Stéphane Mallarmé, making it clear his dying author is certainly a male one. On the contrary, social media is dominated by women and 4 marginalised identities, who are often both the audience and the author. This 5 undoubtedly adds a complicating dimension. In order to mitigate these complications, I will be referencing a text entitled Improbable Curators: Analysing Nostalgia, Authorship and Audience on Tumblr Microblogs by Dinu Gabriel Munteanu. It is through Munteanu that I became 6 fascinated with a Barthian approach to internet image culture — he believes that images within the complex intrapersonal image nexus of Tumblr blogging ‘become ‘language’, ‘discourse’, and ‘speech’, thus entering the analytical province of semiology.’ Munteanu is a communication theorist working with digital identity, and 7 Improbable Curators focuses on the transference of images around an online demographic he refers to as ‘young nostalgics’, those who interact with visual content with a view towards the past. In his words, they are content-collectors with ‘oneiric air of ambiguity, of interpenetrated psycho-symbolic accents - stressing the

4 Cheryl Walker, ‘Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author’, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (1990), pp. 551-71.

For data surrounding female and marginalised identity dominance on social media, see Connect Americas, ‘Women are driving the social media revolution: Several studies reveal that women outnumber men in use and time spent on social media’, https://connectamericas.com/content/women-are-driving-social-media-revolution, (Date Accessed: 17/04/2020) and Katelyn Burns,‘The internet made trans people visible. It also left them more vulnerable’, Vox, https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/12/27/21028342/trans-visibility-backlash-internet-2010, (Date Accessed: 17/04/2020). 6 Dinu Gabriel Munteanu, ‘Improbable Curators: Analysing Nostalgia, Authorship and Audience on Tumblr Microblogs’, in Collaborative Production in the Creative Industries, ed. Graham James and Gandini Alessandro (London, 2017) pp. 125-56. 7 Munteanu, ‘Improbable Curators’, p. 136.

feminine here, the mystical there, the childish or the tragic a few images lower’. I 8 chose to use Improbable Curators alongside Barthes as it offers interviews with these ‘new authors’ — the bloggers, the Instagram pages, the commenters, the people who are anonymously interacting with images much like The Fallen Angel. By supplementing Barthes’s theory on authorship with Munteanu’s first-hand analysis of internet culture, I hope to make my methodology applicable to the online world. While Barthes was writing for a different time, close reading of The Death of the Author reveals he prefigured internet decontextualisation of imagery. The text begins with an excerpt from Balzac, from which he questions — who is speaking in this piece of fiction? He invalidates explanations for literary works sought in the author who produced it, and states that literature is ‘tyrannically centred on the author, his person’. The ‘new authors’ interacting with The Fallen Angel have no 9 consideration of a ‘tyrannical author’; often this image is posted without any text assigning Cabanel as the painter. For internet users, Cabanel is not significant to their enjoyment of the work.

For example, here, this post with 1,900 ‘notes’ or interactions, where the image is accompanied by a short fictional caption written by the ‘new author’ themselves, who feels no need to give authority to Cabanel. Images I found of The Fallen Angel were often re-representations in themselves — the ‘original’ becomes so lost that it ceases to exist. Much visual material on Tumblr is what Munteanu calls ‘free-floating’, living parallel lives to many other instances of the same image, with no designation of origin. It seems that Barthes’s description of reader-driven authorship fits the internet, and Munteanu agrees with this online subversion of the author figure. When discussing what he calls the ‘vicarious curatorial visions’ of Tumblr users, he describes how the ‘young nostalgics’ ’destabilise the three conventional ‘sites’ of an image (‘production’ ‘image’ ‘audience’) but also raise interesting questions with regard to individual agency’ — that is, the agency of the blogger and their role in the image production.

This concept of destabilised authorship is mirrored in Barthes’s projection that after the death of the author, ‘every text is eternally written here and now’, and a text is ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’. This is the heart of Barthes’s text, and is vital to understanding 12 how The Fallen Angel has changed. The work has become a ‘tissue of quotations’ drawn from ‘innumerable centres of culture’. Going back to the raw instances of this work gaining traction on the internet,

we have meaning being created through elements of culture such as Star Wars, Korean singers, the beauty industry, through densely intrapersonal LGBT+ cultures. This slide is only a fraction of responses you can find online. And this

meaning is constantly being written — ‘eternally being written’ — by constant recycling through participatory communities. I can try and track some of this reception, but it seems every online ‘new author’ creates their own meaning. In Improbable Curators’s interviews with Tumblr bloggers, the ‘new authors’ themselves are aware of their semiotic manipulation of imagery. A blogger called Marie states ‘Yes, the photograph takes on a life of its own. It’s interesting … it loses its meaning and gains another meaning.’ Again, the new authors do not find original authors 13 significant to their use of imagery. But, how is this different from a nineteenth-century viewer interpreting The Fallen Angel? If you believe another of Barthes’s text, The Rhetoric of Image, every viewer brings their own ‘lexia’ to an image, and comes away with a slightly different meaning. And yes, disparate reinterpretations of images have always occurred, but 14 through the internet, all restrictions on this ‘tissue of quotations’ is stripped away. The internet allows no restriction of interpretation. Make yourself the author, make George Lucas the author, make musicians or celebrities the work. It is all equally as valid on the sphere of the internet as the original interpretation by Alexandre Cabanel — very often, posted reinterpretations gain more popularity. S11 As you can see, the comparison with Anakin Skywalker seems to have gained visible authority across the internet. There are undoubtedly many people who now associate Star Wars and The Fallen Angel without question. Barthes’s prediction has come true — ‘every text is eternally written here and now’. As we continue to read

13 Munteanu, ‘Improbable Curators’, p. 140. 14 Roland Barthes. ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977) pp. 32-51. 9

Barthes’s text, his next paragraph became instrumental for considering the role of me, us, the art historian, in looking at this image through the lens of the internet. S12 (Read out full quotation) ‘In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered.’ If we abide by the application of Barthes’s 15 methodology to internet images, he affirms that the role of the art historian, when faced with an authorless artwork like the online interpretation of The Fallen Angel, ceases to exist; to draw conclusions about its meaning would be to ‘impose a limit’ on this work. Hence why I believe this methodological analysis needs to be done before we draw conclusions about the work — before we draw conclusions about masculinity in online communities, as I brought up in my introduction. Barthes’s analysis fits how The Fallen Angel has changed; the image has become a ‘tissue of quotations’, and now ‘everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered’. However, I would venture to say The Fallen Angel’s authorless state is far beyond what Barthes hypothesised. ‘New authors’ form a sort of collective authorship of the image; each informing each other, some gaining authority, some simply adding to the intertextuality of the image. Cabanel’s voice is lost in this work — but some reanimate him, S11 as on the left here, which Barthes does not account for. Some manipulate his voice and cast themselves in his place. In the modern age, Barthes’s dead authorship becomes a far more complicated web — this has begun to be explored by Munteanu with his ‘free-floating’ approach to image transference by ‘young

15 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 147.

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nostalgics’, however, it needs more analysis. Barthes’s The Death of the Author serves well to address how meaning changes in art on the internet, but does not adequately prefigure the truly complicated nature of online authorship. I have stated that The Fallen Angel’s meaning has changed, and it seems visible enough looking at the internet reinterpretations; we are looking at a work different in meaning from the one presented to the Paris salon in 1847. However, in order to state this, I must be confident with the original meaning of Alexandre Cabanel’s The Fallen Angel. We must trace back our argument and give credence to what Barthes so vehemently disparaged — that the ‘image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person’. We must take a critical stance against Barthes, and ask — were any of these elements that ‘new authors’ are reacting to present all along?

Text 2: Deciphering The Fallen Angel S13 In the first lecture, I hypothesised that The Fallen Angel’s popularity on the internet has rendered it an example of Barthes’s The Death of the Author — although more theoretical analysis needs to be done to find an appropriate method of understanding authorship on the internet. I claimed themes of disobedience, homoeroticism and gender criticism in online responses were disconnected from the original author. The Fallen Angel has become ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.’ But to state this we need a confident understanding of the artwork itself. In this second lecture, I will investigate the intent behind Cabanel’s work from the culture and society from which

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it was produced, and from available primary sources. To oppose Barthes, I asked — were any of the reinterpreted ideas present in the original fabric of the work? The Fallen Angel’s context in humanist issues of fall and redemption, in personal projection onto religious narratives and Cabanel’s psychological suffering will complicate our use of Barthes’s text. Cabanel may be more significant to online ‘new authors’ than we first thought. Little has been written about Cabanel at all, bar the French Alexandre Cabanel: La Tradition du Beau, published in 2011 with the retrospective of his work at the Musée Fabre, and its abridged English translation, The Tradition of Beauty. These publications were a bid to rediscover Cabanel — sadly, they did not succeed. Cabanel’s letters will be hugely important for this biographical analysis, as are studies on Satan in nineteenth-century French culture; I will use Emily Walker’s thesis ‘Prince of Darkness, Light Bearer: An Exploration of Representations of the Devil as a Fallen Angel in Nineteenth-Century France’ throughout this lecture. First 16 we must know more about our author, Alexandre Cabanel. Born in 1823 and dying in 1889, Cabanel was Napoleon III’s preferred official painter. Andreas Blühm in The Tradition of Beauty states Cabanel was ‘one of the outstanding personalities of the Second Empire’, and that ‘Cabanel epitomises academic painting in the same way that Delacroix stands for romanticism and Courbet for realism’. Yet, there has been 17 only one major retrospective of his work. Why is he so unstudied? It may partly be due to his reputation for L’Art Pompier — a derogatory term for the dramatic,

16 Emily Walker, ‘Prince des Ténèbres, Porteur de lumière: Une exploration des représentations du Diable en tant qu’ange déchu en France au XIXe siècle’ (The University of Victoria, Masters’ thesis, 2013). 17 Michel Hilaire, ‘Preface’, in Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty, ed. Andreas Blüm, exhibition catalogue, The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud (Cologne, 2011), p. 8. 12

exorbitant, over-the-top allegorical and historical works that dominated the Salon during Cabanel’s time. S14 Nonetheless, he won the Prix de Rome in 1845 with his Mocking of Christ, in 1852 he won a second class medal for his Velleda, later winning a First Class Medal and Knights Cross Legion of Honour for The Death of Moses. By the beginning of 18 the 1860s, his place in the Paris art scene seemed secure; he was the only one thought capable of picking up the mantle after Ingre’s death in 1867.19 However, this was a period of transition, where the general hierarchy of art established by the Académie was eroding as modernism was nascent. Most of all, Cabanel was unlucky. Much of his work was shipped to America and hidden in private collections. Much, too, was destroyed in World War II. Even with his success, Cabanel seemed to suffer an equal amount of failure: in subsequent Salons, he could not live up to his previous work. Critic Maxime du Camp said of Cabanel — ‘we had reason to expect more, or anything better, from Monsieur Cabanel - the promise shown in Death of Moses is still waiting to be fulfilled’. Jules-Antoine Castagnary 20 said that ‘In his efforts to be part of the elegant, grand world, this poet, laden down with his medals, absolutely suppresses life’. None of these works behind me have 21 achieved The Fallen Angel’s popularity online: in fact, I would be surprised if any of you even recognise these pieces. There must be something particular about The Fallen Angel.

18 Michel Hilaire and Sylvain Amic, Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889): La Tradition du Beau (Paris, 2010), pp. 53. 19 Hilaire, ‘Preface’, p. 8. 20 Michel Hilaire, ‘Cabanel Reconsidered’, in Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty, ed. Andreas Blüm, exhibition catalogue, The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud (Cologne, 2011), p. 12. 21 Hilaire, ‘Cabanel Reconsidered’, p. 15.

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S15 Let us start to unravel the story of this work with the basics. In terms of content, Paradise Lost was not an unusual topic for painters of this time, with Sir Thomas Lawrence and Gustave Doré also illustrating Milton’s Lucifer. The Fallen Angel is a strikingly accurate portrayal of Milton’s text; from Book 1, Lucifer is described as — S16 (Read out full quotation) ‘Waiting revenge: cruel his eye, but cast, Signs of remorse and passion….’ Cabanel’s Lucifer is Milton’s Lucifer; he has captured the 22 ‘cruel’ eyes with ‘remorse and passion’ perfectly. But this painting goes beyond Milton’s text. S17 His treatment of Lucifer is part of a wider European artistic disposition Emily Walker identified as a humanist compassion for the figure of Lucifer — ‘Not the bestial Devil, but the angel fallen into the human body.’ On the screen, we have 23 Joseph Geef’s L’Ange du Mal, 1848, Constantino Corti’s Lucifero, 1867, and Jean-Jacques Feuchère’s Satan, which caused a sensation at the Salon in 1834.24 All within decades of Cabanel’s Lucifer, all experimenting with this alluring, masculine, very human diabolism. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the Devil was often represented as a cloven-hooved horned beast, and particularly Geef’s and Feuchère’s works maintain a level of bestiality with their sinewy mandorla

22 John Milton, Paradise Lost; A Poem in Twelve Books (London, 1674), Book 1, l. 598 - 606. 23 Original French: ‘Il ne s’agit pas, dans ces œuvres, du Diable bestial : les artistes présentent le sujet sous forme d’un ange déchu, au corps humain.’ Walker, Prince des Ténèbres, p. 57. 24 Sylvain Amic, ‘The Years in Rome’, in Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty, ed. Andreas Blüm, exhibition catalogue, The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud (Cologne, 2011), p. 148.

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of bat wings. But The Fallen Angel stands out from its contemporaries by its 25 complete humanism. Is this a vital aspect of the internet’s engagement with the work? After all, users seem especially interested in Lucifer’s beauty. S18 This top row comparison of the work with a Korean music star compares the angel’s beauty with the musician’s beauty, and just below, this makeup artist recreates Lucifer’s particular form of effeminate attractiveness. S19 Another striking element of Cabanel’s angel is that he is alone. He faces away from the ‘good’ angels, who pale in comparison to his body. Lucifer’s body is a show of skill; the musculature, the arms lifting to show the lightly defined serratus anterior, the tension in the arm from the clasping hands, the raised hamstring tendons and tensed calf… I was particularly amazed by the blue tones under the skin. It would be easy to suggest the online ‘new authors’ are purely engaging with this salacious display of masculinity, rather than any particularities of the art. But why this work, among hundreds similar? Answering this question requires two key primary resources on The Fallen Angel. The first is an 1847 letter from Cabanel to Alfred Bruyas, an art collector and personal friend. The second is a preparatory oil sketch. Studying these two resources led me to consider that The Fallen Angel is much more than an academic figure study. The work is a psychological self-portrait of its author, capturing an ahistorical angst of redemption that chimes with the adolescent audience of the internet. If this is true, there is a continuity between Cabanel and ‘new authors’.

25 Demetrio Paparoni, The Art of the Devil (Los Angeles, 2019).

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S20 We will first look at the letter, which describes The Fallen Angel at length. I have put the whole text on the slide so you can get a sense of the structure. Cabanel recounts that his work will be ‘interesting as a subject and for my reasons for execution’ — he had exceptional intentions for this work, rather than a traditional figure study. With regards to the subject matter, the description differs from the final 26 work. He states ‘I stage two natures, two races, one … finally to fall; while the other chaste and pure rises radiantly towards God…’ He describes the main motive of the work as ‘the genius of evil, Satan! … today broken power lowers his head … he hides the shame of his defeat.’ This letter implies the ‘chaste and pure’ angels are the 27 protagonists of the work, but in the final piece they are merely background to the beauty of Lucifer, whom he describes with a ‘lowered head’ as ‘broken’. Would you agree this is a broken figure? What happened between this letter’s fairly traditional narrative of good triumphing over broken evil, and the final work’s indulgence in diabolic beauty? S21 The letter combined with this 1846 preparatory sketch allows us to see a conceptual struggle in The Fallen Angel. I think we can all agree, this sketch gives an entirely different emotional effect from the final work. Here we have them both,

26 Alexandre Cabanel, letter to Alfred Bruyas, 27th September 1847, quoted by Gabriel Negraschus in ‘Der Schone Satan in der Skulptur Des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Genius Der Leiden(Shaft)’ (PhD Thesis, University of Jena, 2018), p. 148. 27 Original French: ‘Je mets en scène deux natures, deux races, l’une inexorablement vouée, prédestinée au mal et au malheur, enfin à tomber ; tandis que l’autre chaste et pure s’élève radieusement vers Dieu en le glorifiant. Or, le principal motif de mon tableau est le génie du mal, Satan ! sur qui jadis, Dieu s’était complu à répandre les grâces de la beauté divine ; aujourd’hui puissance brisée courbant la tête devant son créateur et maître, de qui il avait osé se faire rival. Il cache la honte de sa défaite cependant…’.

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side by side. S22 In the sketch, we see Cabanel’s ‘broken’ Lucifer, who has suffered the fall greatly. He is humiliated, ashamed and in pain. But again, this is not the work described in the letter — the fellow angels are gone, the figure is completely alone. This seems less a sketch for depicting a religious narrative, more a portrait of torment. The sky is clouded, and the figure has shrunk, his head and torso hunched and turned away from us. His posture is almost identical in both works; but by removing the focal point of the final piece — those eyes, the hair, the pinched eyebrows — the emotional effect is entirely changed. Through this sketch we can see that Cabanel was toying with contradictory concepts: the defeated Lucifer and triumphant angels, the shame of the fall, the proud figure of redemption. The only trace of the suffering of the sketch in the final work - S23 is in the eyes, the very vector around which internet reactions pivot. Cabanel’s choice of emotional intensity coupled with redemption is significant for internet users. But why did he change the work’s narrative so drastically? Gabriel Negraschus in ‘The Beautiful Satan in Nineteenth-century Sculpture’ suggests The Fallen Angel ‘was a work with which he [Cabanel] identified himself … He wanted to prove himself as an original painter, and that very fact was his rebellion.’ Cabanel may have been 28 self-identifying with his Fallen Angel, and in turn, internet users are doing the same. This may seem unusual, but self-identification with the devil was common in

28 Original German: ’Als Cabanel selbst noch angehender Maler war, stellte der Ange déchu ein Werk dar, mit dem er sich identifizierte und was tatsächlich an seine damalige Situation als Künstler gekoppelt war. Er wollte sich als besonders origineller Maler beweisen, wobei eben jener Umstand seine Rebellion darstellen.’ Negraschus, ‘Der Schone Satan’, p. 149.

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nineteenth-century France, as the story of Satan explored the critical questions of post-Enlightenment human existence, from the origins of the universe, the state of the soul, and the state of humanity.29 S24 To pursue this concept, I revisited Cabanel’s letters. Close reading reveals Cabanel’s years in Rome as unhappy, isolated, and devoted to art. On this slide, I have put just a few psychologically poignant excerpts. In a letter to Bruyas regarding his habits in Rome, he explains ‘I have been leading a rather orderly life, one completely devoted to art. I have remained as untouched, as pure as Rome’s vestal virgins of days gone by … What’s more, I am weary of chasing after happiness that turns out to be an illusion, what’s the use?’ His devotion to art seems more of a 30 curse than a blessing; in an 1849 letter he states ‘I hope this crazy ambition does not upset you too much. You should rather feel sorry for me: This is the fell swoop that will destroy my existence’. There is something of a certain depression in his letters, 31 too — to Bruyas, he said ‘Several times an evening, I have put details from my present life on paper so as to send them to you in letters. On re-reading them, however, even I found them so joyless and full of sorrow that I burned them…’32 Cabanel was 23 when he painted The Fallen Angel, and had already been subject to quite a few difficulties in life. The Mocking of Christ was only awarded

29 Walker, Prince des Ténèbres, p. 63. 30 Alexandre Cabanel, letter of summer 1847, quoted in English by Sylvain Amic, ‘The Years in Rome’, Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty, ed. Andreas Blüm, exhibition catalogue, The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud (Cologne, 2011), p. 30. 31 Alexandre Cabanel, Letter to a friend in Florence, 1849, quoted in English by Michel Hilaire, ‘Cabanel Reconsidered’, in Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty, ed. Andreas Blüm, exhibition catalogue, The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud (Cologne, 2011), p. 11. 32 Alexandre Cabanel, Letter of 10th October 1846, quoted in English by Sylvain Amic, ‘The Years in Rome’, Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty, ed. Andreas Blüm, exhibition catalogue, The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud (Cologne, 2011), p. 26.

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second place, and Cabanel’s Prix de Rome scholarship had to be argued for by the Secretary to the Académie — he was eventually awarded a ‘Second First Grand Prize’. One can imagine this may have been a difficult, humiliating experience. In 33 general, being an artist at this time was not easy: from childhood, the sacrifices Cabanel would have had to make to achieve such skill would have been immense. Success was for the few, failure meant obscurity, and quite possibly ruin.34 While Negraschus believes Cabanel’s self-identification with The Fallen Angel centres on a rebellion against the strictures of the Salon, I believe he identified with Lucifer’s story of fall and redemption. The Fallen Angel’s unusual humanism, it’s tormented early sketches and the shockingly intense facial expression begin to take shape as a self-portrait. This thread of analysis led me to consider Cabanel’s more official self portraits. S25 His early portraits are unremarkable, showing a young man, professional and earnest. But just a few years after Cabanel had painted The Fallen Angel, this is the kind of self-portrait he was producing. S26 His portraits increasingly have something of the gothic about them. Here he is 27, in 1849. The obscuring chiaroscuro on his face, the tousled hair, the set mouth and pinched eyebrows become a recurring feature in his self-portraits, a recurring feature that seems familiar…

33 Sylvain Amic, ‘Les Années Romaines’ in Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889): La Tradition du Beau (Paris, 2010) pp. 87. 34Alexander Sturgis, Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2006) p. 127.

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S27 Not only does Cabanel’s Lucifer look facially similar to Cabanel himself — in his 1851 portrait, his hair is even red — but emotionally similar. There is a concealment, a duality of vulnerability and cold masculinity. His expression is a subtle reflection of Lucifer’s, tragic yet strong. Not only did Cabanel reflect his own emotional state in his Fallen Angel, he actively painted his own face. It is difficult to say this for certain, of course. Artists often naturally reproduce their own features, and his letters only give us a brief glimpse into his character. However, in the empty field of study for this artwork, I believe it to be a fair proposal — and if this is the case, Cabanel’s presence is crucial to the online ‘new authors’ of the work. S28 They mirror this desire to self-aggrandise and self-mythologise in the face of difficulty. When comparing The Fallen Angel with the popular culture figure of Anakin Skywalker, or by painting their faces to look like him — are they not desiring to project themselves or others into this figure of redemption? Here on the right, where once we saw disregard for an author, this earlier user’s emotional intimacy with the work — ‘you were so misunderstood, torn down’ — seems eerily connected to the figure of Cabanel. While this work still evades clear conclusions, it appears these ‘new authors’ are not as detached from the original author as we thought in our first lecture. The ‘tyrannical’ figure of the author is very much still present in the work, however, something has changed about the authorship of the image in line with Barthes’s text. The Death of the Author gave us a good foundational approach to this artwork’s

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online existence, but ultimately fell short of the diversity of engagement between authorship and audience. I enjoy Munteanu’s term of ‘free-floating’, and I believe total freedom of image transfer has resulted in a ‘free-floating’ ‘collective authorship’. The idea of defeat and redemption coupled with the beautiful emotionalism struck a chord with online audiences, allowing a renaissance art historians could never have predicted. To conclude, I would like to go back to this quote from The Death of the Author, regarding the role of the art historian. S29 My study of image authorship in participatory cultures has definitely been a case of ‘disentangling’ rather than ‘deciphering’, and I do believe trying to fully understand the disparate online reinterpretations of The Fallen Angel would be to ‘impose a limit’ on the work. I also have no desire to ‘close’ this lecture with a quick and simple conclusion of what both The Fallen Angel and it’s online reinterpretations mean for each other. However, I will conclude that many of the themes internet interpreters were engaging with were present in Cabanel while he was producing this work, and that more theory in line with Munteanu’s analysis of authorship on Tumblr would make Barthes’s ideas more applicable to the internet age. Furthermore, contrary to Barthes’s quote behind me, and the idea that this renders the role of the art historian useless: The Fallen Angel’s online life catalysed my biographical analysis, leading me to discover new things about both Cabanel and this forgotten work of art. It is clear the modern reaction to The Fallen Angel is just as important as its traditional interpretation, and this cannot be excluded from the artwork’s life story without rendering it an incomplete story.

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All of us are ‘internet art historians’ in this modern age. I think many of us are aware that traditional art-historical methodology is simply incompatible with the method of image viewing borne from the internet. We are going to have to start acknowledging that the way of seeing through the internet is entirely different. I hope that not only do you go away with an appreciation for Alexandre Cabanel’s forgotten works, but in the future, you critically engage with your favourite paintings’ online lives, and take that modern audience’s participation in the art world seriously.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977) Barthes, Roland. ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977) Burns, Katelyn. ‘The internet made trans people visible. It also left them more vulnerable’, Vox, https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/12/27/21028342/trans-visibility-backlash-interne t-2010, (Date Accessed: 17/04/2020) Connect Americas, ‘Women are driving the social media revolution: Several studies reveal that women outnumber men in use and time spent on social media’, https://connectamericas.com/content/women-are-driving-social-media-revolution, (Date Accessed: 17/04/2020) Hilaire, Michel. Alexandre Cabanel: The Tradition of Beauty, ed. Andreas Blüm, exhibition catalogue,