Beyond the second space. Balzac, Henry James and other painters

Abstract

This essay aims at reflecting on painting and the position of the painter facing his work by analysing two interdependent short stories from the XIX century: Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (1837) and Henry James’ The Madonna of the Future (1873). The main characters, the old demonic master Frenhofer and the ghostly idealist Theobald, both obsessively involved in realizing a female portrait, represent two opposite yet complementary concepts of painting, as well as mystical paradoxes of visibility: the informal magma of an expressionist orphism and the lightless transparency of a transcendental vacuum, respectively. Through a theoretical premise and a comparative textual analysis, the paper shows how this case of literary influence helps in rethinking the figure of the modern artist in relation to the interference between reality and imagination.