| Summary: | This article examines a peculiar reworking of the ‘moving artwork’ motif in early modern
French culture. The devisants of Guillaume Bouchet’s fictional dinner club, gathering in the
shadow of civil war, discuss ‘parfaites’ statues and paintings that must be restrained with
‘chainons et liens’ lest they wander away. Among their examples is a painting of a wounded,
dying mother anxious that her infant will suck blood, not milk – an image with a long
classical history and one that gained a particular resonance in the early modern period.
Drawing on recent studies of how agency is mediated through and by art objects, this article
traces the devisants’ affective and social responses to this scene of ethos and empathy. I ask
how Bouchet interrogates tense and mood, feeling and attachment, tragic ‘perfection’ and a
conditional future.
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