The Flung Sponge

The Flung Sponge:Techniques of Grace in the Eighteenth Century Kirsten Martin (bio) In the popular classical anecdote, which most famously appears in Pliny's Natural History, the painter Protogenes struggles to depict the foam coming out of a dog's mouth. Although the painting, featuring the war hero Ialysus, is perfect in every other regard, it is still missing a certain something that seems to hinge on getting the foam right. Pliny recounts Protogenes' struggles in detail: although in all the remaining details he had satisfied himself...the actual art displayed displeased him, nor was he able to diminish it, and he thought it was excessive and departed too far from reality—the foam appeared to be painted, not to be the natural product of the animal's mouth; vexed and tormented, as he wanted his picture to contain the truth and not merely a near-truth, he had several times rubbed off the paint and used another brush, quite unable to satisfy himself. Finally he fell into a rage with his art because it was perceptible, and dashed a sponge against the place in the picture that offended him, and the sponge restored the colours he had removed, in the way that his anxiety had wished them to appear, and chance produced the effect of nature in the picture!1 For Pliny, the resolution to Protogenes' challenge elaborates a tension between hard work and chance, suggesting that the best paintings often require a little extra help to come to life. But, in bringing the painting to life, the flung sponge also violates the standards of what Verity Platt calls "conventional illusionistic mimesis."2 Protogenes' aim is not simply to deceive. Rather, when he seeks to depict "the truth" [End Page 33] instead of a "near truth," he marks a distinction between mimetic exactitude and something else, an elusive quality that he is hard-pressed to pin down. We can assume that the painting was mimetically "correct" long before he threw the sponge: Pliny makes much of the fact that it took Protogenes several laborious years to perfect during which time he subsisted on nothing but soaked lupins to avoid dulling his senses.3 But this overwrought, painterly quality did not do in this case: the problem with the foam was precisely that it looked effortful, that it "appear[ed] to be painted." What Protogenes is after when he effaces the paint initially used to depict the foam is a quality of effortlessness that erodes the too-obvious boundaries between art and life. Although the foam's purpose is in part mimetic—at least insofar as it corrects previous attempts that "departed too far from reality"—its purpose is also to infuse the painting with a quality that conceals the immense efforts that have made such mimesis "perceptible." The foam is the missing piece that rescues Protogenes' painting from its own artifice, from being a merely flat mimetic representation of reality. Especially intriguing about the anecdote of Protogenes' flung sponge is not just the special status it assigns to the foam but how it strives to account for the artistic practices that produced it. At first glance, Pliny seems to be suggesting that the painting owes its success entirely to luck. Yet, he complicates this idea in the following paragraph in which he describes the legacy of the flung sponge: "It is said that Nealces also following this example of his [Protogenes] achieved a similar success in representing a horse's foam by dashing a sponge on the picture in a similar manner...Thus did Protogenes indicate the possibilities of a stroke of luck also."4 Pliny here presents Protogenes' "stroke of luck" as surprisingly replicable: this time the foam is not the product of frustrated rage but calm calculation. A painter, it seems, can plan to get lucky. If at first the anecdote seems exceptional because it is supposed to be a one-off, it ends up serving as a sort of lesson in technique. It shows how a method that is not by the book but, rather, premised on the incorporation of spontaneous effects, might be formalized into a standard artistic practice. By following Protogenes' example, Pliny

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