The panel was found in the person of Paul Richer. He was a medical doctor who had worked under the renowned Jean-Martin Charcot, helping him develop his theory of hysteria; he was not only an anatomist and a member of the Academy of Medicine but also a sculptor and painter of great skill. Finally, Richer was an art historian with particular expertise in such matters as the anatomical correctness of Renaissance art—the muscles rippling beneath the skin in Michelangelo’s sinewy Last Judgment figures, Raphael’s soft, fleshy Madonnas. Remarkably, Richer was currently artist in residence at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which was housed in the former convent on the Seine where, more than a century earlier, Alexandre Lenoir had located his Museum of French Monuments.
Jean-Gaston Darboux, a mathematician who served as the academy’s permanent secretary, asked Richer for help in addressing a unique problem. Richer spoke two languages fluently: art and science. He could be counted on to apply principles of both fields. Richer chose to begin by assuming that the skull was authentic. If so, should it not be expected to conform in its features with an authentic image of Descartes, such as a painting made from life by a master? It was well known that there was a portrait of Descartes by one of the great portrait painters of all time, the Dutchman Frans Hals. This iconic image—of a brooding, rather dashing figure, a man of the world, a philosopher cum swashbuckler almost—hung in the Louvre, where indeed it still hangs. This was, Richer said, “the most accurate of the portraits of Descartes.” Further, “a head presents a certain number of very precise points of reference in the bones that are particularly apparent in the painting by the Dutch master.”
Richer began his analysis of the skull by having a technical draftsman who had not seen the skull in effect strip the flesh from the Hals portrait. That is, working from very sharp large-format photographs of the painting and employing a camera lucida—a device that uses mirrors to superimpose an image onto a canvas or paper—the draftsman created an extremely accurate drawing of the skull that he believed the man in the Hals portrait must have had, including every dent or protrusion, the height of the cheekbones, the breadth of the forehead, the set of the chin. Richer himself made a drawing of the skull of Descartes, being careful to execute it from the same position as that of the Louvre portrait—turning slightly to look to the right toward the artist—and on the same scale as the draftsman’s drawing.
Before members of the academy and the press, in an atmosphere of unusual drama, Richer brought the two drawings together and superimposed them. Detail for detail, as he described it—“the receding forehead, the projection of the orbital arches some distance from the equally prominent superciliary arch . . . the width of the face . . . the projection of the nasal bones, which although broken at their end indicate an abrupt nose . . . finally the shortness of the naso-alveolar distance, which agrees with a certain brevity of the upper lip”—they were nearly identical. To sharpen the comparison, Richer had also had drawings made of other, random skulls in the same position. The audience saw that these did not correspond so neatly with the first two and in fact showed “notable discordances.” Richer summed up with élan: “The skull preserved in the museum offers as absolute a similarity as is possible with that revealed in the portrait by Frans Hals.”
Disparate events over the past few months had coalesced. The news of the apparent loss and then recovery of the exotic but iconic artifact had built over the course of the winter, with the city’s recent troubles perhaps fueling a renewed concern for the French past. The atmosphere inside the academy for Richer’s demonstration was so charged, and the demonstration itself so elegant, compelling, and definitive, that the result was a news story that traveled around the world. “Sketch Identifies Skull of Descartes” was the front-page story in the New York Times. “The Skull of Descartes Is Authentic,” blared Le Figaro. The French newspaper went on to declare that “the method followed by the wise anatomist is a marvel from the point of view of scientific logic” and that “the result is conclusive: it is indeed the skull of Descartes that the museum possesses, and the documents and graphics put before the eyes of the academy leave no room for doubt.” For Paul Richer, the article went on to say, the outcome represented “not only a personal success of his very scientific method” but the development of a method to be used in all future anthropological reconstructions.
The New York Times, after noting that “the results of Prof. Richer’s investigations are generally regarded as settling once and for all a question of great historic interest,” added that “a movement is now afoot for placing the skull together with Descartes’s body, which reposes in the Church Saint Germain at Despres, in the Pantheon.” Le Figaro, however, reported other plans: a case “would be constructed where the skull of the great thinker will be exposed, together with the documents that are proof, from now on unquestionable, of its authenticity.”
The acclaim was universal. The case was solved. The matter was put to bed. Everyone on earth who had any interest whatever in René Descartes or philosophy or French history or skulls, it seemed, was satisfied.
With one exception. Some of the articles lauding Richer’s success had picked up on an interesting point—that Richer’s quest in some way mirrored that of Descartes himself. Richer—a sixty-three-year-old man with a bushy beard and lively, kindly eyes, whose studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts contained a selection of scientific instruments alongside clay models and art sketches—had all his life striven for accuracy, for an underlying method. What had motivated and united his medical work, his art, and his art historical study was a desire to get beneath the surface, especially the surface of the skin. Like Descartes himself, Richer wanted to understand the inner workings of the human body. And like Descartes, he was something of an aficionado of doubt. As the weeks wore on after his great success at the academy, what he came to feel was not that he had necessarily been wrong in his conclusion. Something else, equally Cartesian, nagged at him. Descartes’ own method—the method—had begun not with unfocused doubt but with a questioning of received wisdom, of everything that was not clear and distinct to the individual mind of the thinker. The Cartesian notion that wormed into Richer’s mind, even as the congratulations were coming in, was this: how did he know it was true that, as he had told the audience at the academy, “the most authentic of the portraits of Descartes is without contradiction that painted by Frans Hals, which is now owned by the Louvre”? As an art historian, Richer knew that attributions of works done centuries before fl oat on very choppy seas. What evidence was there that the Hals portrait had been painted from life?
As it happened, Richer’s doubts were in some respects justified. There is no reference to the other man in the respective biographies of Descartes and Hals; no document actually places the two men together. And the provenance of the painting in the Louvre is far from secure. When, in 1785, King Louis XVI bought a château west of Paris as a home for his wife, Marie Antoinette, the portrait of Descartes came with the package, it having previously been owned by the château’s owners, the dukes of Orleans. But records further back are murky. The year 1649 had come to be associated with the portrait, so that it was generally held that Hals had painted Descartes then—the year before he died. But Richer came to believe that this was all mere supposition.
Richer’s doubts were picked up by later art historians. In the 1960s, Seymour Slive, one of the great twentieth-century art experts and an authority on Frans Hals, took up the matter, observing that many portraits of Descartes, several of which look alike, seem to date from the same period. “Descartes was internationally mourned,” Slive noted, “a fact that helps explain the number of portraits made of him soon after his death; judging from the number made during the following decades, the demand for them increased rather than diminished.” Slive regarded the Louvre portrait—so smooth and serene and polished—as lacking Hals’s lively brushwork and depth of character.
Could it be then that Hals and Descartes never met? Was the Louvre portrait by someone else?
Had it perhaps been painted later, after Descartes’ death? Was it even a portrait of René Descartes?
Paul Richer didn’t have definitive answers, and for that matter few things in art history are certain, but evidence from another quarter sheds some different light. Baillet, Descartes’ seventeenth-century biographer, noted that just before Descartes boarded a ship from Holland to Sweden in what would be the final voyage of his life, he was lured by a friend—a Dutch priest named Bloemaert—to pay a visit. Father Bloemaert lived in Haarlem, and while he had the great philosopher in town he begged him to sit for a portrait. Frans Hals spent nearly his entire life in Haarlem and was the preeminent artist in the city at the time Descartes visited. Of the many portraits of Descartes in existence, one struck Seymour Slive forcefully as having all the hallmarks of a Hals. It hangs today in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. The problem with it—if your interest is in having a definitive, iconic image of a renowned historical figure—is that it’s very rough, not a finished painting at all, in fact, but a quick oil sketch; it’s also a rather cloudy, murky image. Yet in the estimation of Slive and other, later experts, it has the vigorous brushwork characteristic of Hals, and a deeper sense of personality than the Louvre portrait. Even though he is posed, the man in this little painting seems to be in motion, as if he had been in the process of swiveling away until, caught by something, his eyes stopped to gaze into the viewer’s. It is also a realistic, rather unkempt figure in this painting: there is some puffiness in the skin of the face; the man’s hair looks dirty. He seems sad.
The Louvre portrait is still widely associated with Frans Hals—it is routinely identified in art textbooks as by Hals—but the Louvre itself now labels it as “after Hals,” while the Copenhagen museum considers its Descartes to be by the Dutch master himself.
This reshuffling of attribution came after Paul Richer’s time. So what relevance does it have for his investigation of the skull? If Slive and others are right, then Hals did indeed paint the philosopher—in Haarlem, at the time when Descartes, weary from his battles with theologians and others over what his philosophy would mean for religion, was about to sail off to meet Queen Christina, as well as his death, in the “land of bears between rocks and ice.” And if they are right, the portrait painted from life is not the one in the Louvre—not the one Richer worked from—but the one in Copenhagen. Other portraits, including the one in the Louvre, seem to have been based either on this little oil sketch or on one of several earlier portraits that were painted of Descartes, none of which have completely solid provenance but any or all of which could have been done from life. As a check against the difficulty of knowing which of the portraits might have been painted from life, Richer repeated his process—having a draftsman create a drawing of the underlying skull—for several of these other portraits of Descartes. In all cases, in his estimation, the features on the portraits matched up with those of the skull—which to him suggested that, even if some of these paintings were copies, they were accurate in reflecting the bone structure of the face of the living man and that this structure matched that of the skull. So Richer had reconfirmation of his own work. He could put the matter to rest.
But as time went by the skull itself commanded Richer’s attention, and he conceived yet another project. Immediately after Descartes’ death, his friend Pierre Chanut had ordered a death mask made. This cast soon disappeared, but not before Christina commissioned her royal portrait painter, the Dutchman David Beck, to craft a postmortem portrait from it. The resulting painting is not the most lifelike, but Richer now hit on a use for it. This new project was a true obsession in the sense that no one else on earth paid much attention to it, for the obvious reason that, with world war in the offing, more important matters were afoot, but also because as far as others were concerned Richer had already established the authenticity of the skull of Descartes. Using his considerable skills as a sculptor, Richer fashioned a life-sized bust of René Descartes—noble of feature, classical in design—but a novel one, a sort of double bust. Starting with the Beck portrait, he had worked from the outside—the skin—inward toward the underlying bone. At the same time, he had created a plaster cast of the skull and worked from it outward, layering muscle and tissue until he reached the outer surface. What’s more, the face on the finished sculpture was removable, and when it was taken away the cast of the skull was revealed, grinning its perpetual ghoulish grin.
The bust exists still in the collection of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As symbol or metaphor it has less to do with philosophy, art, or the human body than it does with one of the most persistent of modern preoccupations: the quest for certainty in an uncertain world. Or, to put it in the negative, Paul Richer’s ghastly bust of Descartes is a manifestation of Doubt itself.
ONE OF THE ABIDING subproblems of the mind-body dichotomy, according to more than a few critics, is that it stacks the deck in favor of the mind. Think of yourself. Naturally your body—its aches and appetites—is part of the package, part of what you mean by “me,” but in all likelihood it is the other layer—dreams, hopes, guilt, memories, invented memories, relationships, knowledge, mad stratagems, paranoias, e-mails sent, movies watched, battles to wage, remorse to chew—that forms the greater portion of your self-image. No doubt this is partly because the mind, as the entity doing the thinking, has a tendency to cast itself in the lead role.
Curiously enough, the same imbalance is in effect in the saga of Descartes’ bones. The skull—that is to say, the material representation of “mind”—has occupied more people, has taken up more thought and energy, than have the rest of the remains. While the skull became the object of a detective story that encompassed some of the great scientific minds in history and has been subjected to artistic and scientific analysis, the “body” has been forgotten. There was a grand decree, at the height of the French Revolution, that it be enshrined in the great temple of secularism, the Pantheon, but the Reign of Terror and the rivers of blood that accompanied it washed away most thoughts of actually carrying it out.
But not entirely all. In 1927—with Paris deep in its syncopated Jazz Age, Lost Generation sway, with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Picasso and Stravinsky giving the city and the world a new way to understand “modern”—a couple of government officials happened to notice that the revolutionary decree to pantheonize Descartes had never been carried out. The pair brought the matter before the office of the consul general, an investigation was held, interest was piqued . . . and then a problem was discovered. Once again, the remains of the philosopher, now 277 years old, became international news. “The proposal to transfer the ashes of René Descartes, the seventeenth century philosopher, to the Pantheon, which has just been made by two general councillors, M. Robert Bos and M. André Gayot, may encounter a number of objections, according to the French Press, chief of which is the uncertainty as to the present resting place of the remains.” So began the story that ran in the New York Herald.
“Where are the remains of Descartes?” Le Temps asked. “A controversy ensued yesterday . . . not on the doctrine of the philosopher but on the place, the state, and the authenticity of his remains.” The story went on to note drily: “A plaque affixed to the church of Saint Germain-des-Prés indicates that they repose there. A plaque is not, one must say, irrefutable proof.”
Government officials had unraveled the whole chain of historical events and personalities, from Chanut and Christina to Paul Richer and his exotic tripartite bust, and they came to conclude that there was a weak link somewhere. Why, when the coffin was opened before the final burial, did it contain mostly bone chips and powder? These were not proper remains. Digging up the coffin would be unlikely to yield further clues since no one doubted the reports of Delambre and others who attended the 1819 reburial. A problem must have occurred earlier. Somewhere—over six countries, across three centuries, through three burials—something had gone wrong with the handling of the remains of René Descartes. Once this was realized, the matter was
dropped—no one wanted to go to the expense and bother of digging into the ancient church for a few handfuls of dubious powder—and it has largely remained dropped since that time.
Of course, it doesn’t matter. There are something like thirty-one wars being fought on the planet as I write. We are on the verge, or over the verge, of irreversible environmental damage. There are epic confrontations brewing that transcend national borders, which have to do with clashes of religious, economic, and political systems. The insignificance of some bits of bone lying beneath the floor of a church in Paris—whether or not they ever belonged to the person to whom they are attributed—is fairly monumental.
But my point in pursuing the trail of Descartes’ bones has been metaphorical: uncannily, they seem to form a spine, if you will pardon the expression, of modernity itself. Sixteen years after Descartes’ death, Hugues de Terlon considered Descartes someone who had penetrated to the mystical heart of nature, and he took a finger bone as a religious relic, a holy object meant to bridge the gap between the material and the eternal. By the time of the French Revolution, Condorcet and his compatriots looked on the bones in the mirror-opposite way: as relics of secularism, symbols of the force that reoriented people and society toward the here and now and gave rise to the principles of individual liberty, equality, and democracy. For Berzelius, Cuvier, and other nineteenth-century scientists, the skull was a talisman of science. Descartes’ bones—or rather, the meanings people have attached to them—are really about who we were and are, including the convictions and confusions and confrontations that divide us.
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