The Resemblance Game

The Resemblance Game

In the days when the young Proust, in the mid-1890s, used to go to the Louvre with Lucien Daudet, Alphonse’s son, with whom he shared a tender friendship, the two would meet in the Salle des Sept Mètres, named for its seven-meter-high ceiling (Denon, room 709).

The room had been inaugurated in 1874 to exhibit the early Italian masters, who had just been rediscovered and were in fashion. Italian paintings from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries still hang in this room, but not the works Marcel and Lucien admired. Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin and Uccello’s Battle now hold pride of place in the Salon Carré (Denon, room 708), while Domenico Ghirlandaio’s An Old Man and his Grandson has moved to the edge of the Grande Galerie, right by the Salle des Sept Mètres and the Salon Carré. Proust could see all three works at a single glance, but I still don’t have to walk very far to go from one to the other. At the Louvre, Marcel and Lucien amused themselves by playing the resemblance game, or “rediscovering in the paintings of the masters the individual features of the faces that we know,” as Proust would later write. Who among us hasn’t indulged in this rather easy pastime while visiting a museum? “Look, it’s just like Dr. Cottard!” In the pages of In Search of Lost Time, it’s Swann, the art-lover, who inherits the dubious habit of applying art to life and recognizes “under the colors of a Ghirlandaio, M. de Palancy’s nose.”