Eric Karpeles, "Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to 'In Search of Lost Time", 2008:
"...Like the labyrinthine galleries of the Louvre frequented by
the young Marcel Proust and his friends. In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche
du tempsperdu) houses a vast repository of paintings. In the novel, over one
hundred artists are named, spanning the history of art from the trecento to the
twentieth century, from primitivism to futurism, from Giotto to Leon Bakst.
Whether plunging into Proust for the first or the fifth time, each reader
encounters many esoteric and increasingly obscure pictorial references that
keep testing his mettle. These can leave him nodding his head, with a smile
frozen on his face just like the Princesse de Parme...."
Marcel Proust, 'Swann's Way' from "Remembrance of Things Past/ In Search of Lost Time", 1913-1927:
"...He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the
paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics of the
people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least
susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he
knew, as, for instance, in a bust of the Doge Loredan by Antonio Rizzo, the
prominent cheekbones, the slanting eyebrows, in short, a speaking likeness to
his own coachman Rémi; in the colouring of a Ghirlandaio, the nose of M. de
Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the plumpness of the
cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the broken nose, the penetrating stare, the
swollen eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon. Perhaps because he had always regretted, in
his heart, that he had confined his attention to the social side of life, had
talked, always, rather than acted, he felt that he might find a sort of
indulgence bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his perception of the
fact that they also had regarded with pleasure and had admitted into the canon
of their works such types of physiognomy as give those works the strongest
possible certificate of reality and trueness to life; a modern, almost a
topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing
frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the necessity of finding in an
old masterpiece some such obvious and refreshing allusion to a person about
whom jokes could be made and repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps, on the other
hand, he had retained enough of the artistic temperament to be able to find a
genuine satisfaction in watching these individual features take on a more
general significance when he saw them, uprooted and disembodied, in the
abstract idea of similarity between an historic portrait and a modern original,
whom it was not intended to represent...."
"An Old Man and His Grandson", 1490 by Domenico Ghirlandaio
