“So what remains of that woman who drained us of men and money, left us without honor and without energy, and who wreaked havoc on the political system of Europe? The Treaty of Versailles, which will last as long as it can; Bouchardon’s Amour, which will be admired forever; some stones engraved by Guay, which will surprise future antiquarians; a good little painting by Van Loo, which will be viewed occasionally; and a pinch of ashes.” Denis Diderot on Madame de Pompadour, “Salon of 1765” In his sardonic elegy for Madame de Pompadour, Diderot constructs a textual portrait of the royal mistress by inventorying the material things she left behind. Diderot’s description betrays his preoccupation with the materiality of posterity. The portrait’s meaning is inflected by the anticipated reactions of future audiences (admiration, surprise); those reactions are conditioned by the relative material durability of marble, gems, or human flesh. This essay looks at Pompadour’s own confrontation with material time—in her case, as a medium of self- portraiture. At Versailles, Pompadour brought together two seemingly disparate works of art as an unlikely pendant pair: a Gobelins tapestry-tableau woven after an oil painting of the personification of Painting, and an encaustic tableau of the Vestal Tuccia. Scholars have observed how these individual works resonated formally and iconographically with aspects of Pompadour’s physiognomy and social identity. This essay looks at Pompadour’s union of the two works as an act of non-mimetic self-portraiture through assemblage. By pairing the tapestry-tableau of Painting with the encaustic, Pompadour united them in a mutually defining relationship of temporal difference. Tapestry underwent a crisis of ephemerality in the eighteenth century because fugitive dyes were needed to reproduce the delicate palettes of Rococo paintings. Encaustic, by contrast, was an ancient wax-based technique revived in this period precisely because of its perceived durability. While the tapestry emphasized the transience of the present, the encaustic pointed back to antiquity and forward to posterity. This essay argues that Pompadour forged a dynamic self-portrait by placing two personally significant representations into a dialogue conditioned by material temporality. It considers how this mode of self-portraiture reflected Enlightenment conceptions of the self as a process shaped by memory, posterity, and difference.
