PAUL DURO

What Is a Parergon?

abstract
Despite important recent work, the rehabilitation of parergon as a critical concept in the history of art has yet to be fully
broached. From the time Jacques Derrida introduced the term into contemporary critical theory in The Truth in Painting,
its character and function have been largely understood as referencing a threshold or boundary—in particular, that of the
border of the artwork. Yet a review of the term’s long history suggests a meaning that differs in significant ways from its
current near-univocal characterization as a synonym for a frame. In particular, premodern art theory and criticism identifies
a parergon with matters such as the background action in a history painting, the inclusion in a landscape of picturesque
embellishments, or, following Kant, the addition of ornament to a painting, a statue, or a building. This article therefore
proposes we ask again: What is a parergon?

Although historically the parergon (para: beside,
ergon: work) contributes much to our understand-
ing of such weighty matters in art theory and crit-
icism as the hierarchy of the genres, the role of
the subject, and pictorial composition, it has never
been in wide circulation in the manner of other
critical terms such as disegno, imitatio, or beau
idéal. Yet this infrequence of use is not the only
reason for our ignorance. Much of our present
disregard of the parergon’s broader historical im-
portance is due to its current celebrity as the key
term in Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting,
where the parergon’s character and function are
largely understood to denominate a threshold or
border—in particular, that of a frame (Derrida
1987, 15–147).1
It is not my purpose here to rehearse Derrida’s
argument in extenso, nor to question the impor-
tance of boundaries, borders, and frames in the
constitution of the artwork; rather, I want to con-
sider the role of the parergon in antiquity and
early modern history in order to engage with a
broader understanding of the term than that al-
lowed by Derrida. Why this is important will, I
hope, become clear as this article unfolds, but the
fundamental justification may be stated immedi-
ately. In order to assess the scope and meaning of
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77:1 Winter 2019
C 2019 The American Society for Aesthetics
the historical parergon, we need to look beyond
its current incarnation in critical theory to trace
its history as a critical term in art history under
three distinct but closely related heads—as frame
or border, as accessory to the main subject, and as
ornament. Only then will we be able to gauge the
importance of this uncommon word that, despite
its relatively infrequent use by artists and critics,
offers the possibility of filling a gap that is not
otherwise adequately addressed in the discourse
on art.
i. parerga without borders
Historically, ‘parergon’ does not reference an in-
dependent entity, but “something subordinate or
accessory to the main subject” (Oxford English
Dictionary 2018). A classic account of this kind
of pictorial accessory appears in Strabo’s Geogra-
phy, where the first-century BCE geographer and
historian describes a painting by Protogenes of a
flute-playing satyr leaning on a column:
On the top of the column was a partridge. The bird
strongly attracted, as was natural, the gaping admira-
tion of the people, [such that] . . . the Satyr, although
24
executed with great skill, was not noticed. . . . When Pro-
togenes observed that the principal [έργον: ergon] had
become the subordinate part [πάρεργον: parergon] of
his work, he obtained permission of the curators of the
temple to efface the bird, which he did. (Strabo 1857, 30,
vol. 3; translation modified)
Protogenes’s decision to include the partridge con-
flicted with established ideas of what constituted
the subject. The satyr is the subject (ergon), and
the partridge the parergon, yet the satyr, “al-
though executed with great skill, was not noticed.”
It is this quality of insufficiency with a hierarchy
of genres (where the human subject is overlooked
in favor of a bird), that prompted Pliny the Elder
to remark, in reference to another work by Proto-
genes, “he painted among those by-works (which
painters call Parerga), certaine small gallies and
little long barks, to shew therby the small begin-
nings of his art” (Pliny 1601, 542, vol. II)—a refer-
ence to the belief that Protogenes had begun his
career as a painter and decorator of ships—that is,
as an artisan.
Like the satyr and partridge, the “small gal-
lies” anecdote underlines the importance of the
subject in the matter of art. Protogenes’s self-
identification as an artist is dependent on his
choice of subject. The little ships were there to
show how much he had grown from “the small
beginnings of his art” and should now be consid-
ered an artist. Little wonder the popular reaction
to the partridge he carelessly positioned atop a
column so frustrated him; the skill with which he
had painted the partridge was precisely not the
recognition he was looking for, showing that not
how but what artists painted was preeminent in
establishing their rank.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann commented on
this hierarchy in noting that classical painters were
wary of being seen as mere imitators of everyday
nature and that the work of the artist was to avoid
the representation of the trivial, the marginal, and
the mundane:
The slight regard paid by the ancient artists to ob-
jects which were seemingly not within their province,
is shown, for instance, by the painted vases, on which
the chair of a seated figure is indicated simply by a bar
placed horizontally. But, though the artist did not trou-
ble himself as to the way in which a figure should be
represented sitting, still, in the figure itself, he displays
all the skill of an accomplished master. . . . But if, in any
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
one work, the principal figure is admirably beautiful,
and the adjunct, or assigned emblem or attribute, is far
inferior to it, then I believe we may conclude from this
circumstance that the part which is deficient in form and
workmanship was regarded as an accessory or Parergon,
as it was also termed by artists. For these accessories are
not to be viewed in the same light as the episodes of a
poem, or the speeches in history, in which the poet and
historian have displayed their utmost skill. (1850, 246).
In one sense, Winckelmann’s example is the op-
posite of Protogenes’s satyr and partridge, where
it is the artist’s skill in painting the avian acces-
sory that wins the plaudits of the crowd. In all
other respects, however, Winckelmann, as one
might expect from an eighteenth-century scholar
steeped in classicism, presents a clear justification
for considering the human figure as the main sub-
ject (ergon), and the chair as a mere accessory
(parergon).2 In a similar manner, Winckelmann’s
emphasis on the narrative (“accessories are not
to be viewed in the same light as the episodes of
a poem”) reminds us that embellishments, sub-
sidiary motifs, and accessories are subordinate to
the main subject, thus functioning as parergon to
the principal action.
It is this fundamental distinction between prin-
cipal and subordinate elements that is the ground-
ing condition for the operation of a parergon in
pre-Derridean art theory. In his treatise On Paint-
ing of 1435, Leon Battista Alberti praises work
that offers variety and interest in the composi-
tion; but his enthusiasm turns to censure when
these embellishments interfere with the principle
subject:
I disapprove of those painters who, in their desire to
appear rich or to leave no space empty, follow no system
of composition, but scatter everything about in random
confusion . . . In a ‘historia’ I strongly approve of the
practice I see observed by the tragic and comic poets, of
telling their story with as few characters as possible. In
my opinion there will be no ‘historia’ so rich in variety of
things that the nine or ten men cannot worthily perform
it. (Alberti 1991, 65–66, 78; italics in original)
Like Winckelmann, Alberti insists that the com-
position should follow the lead of the poets and
avoid extraneous detail or minor distractions that
detract from the main story. Alberti does not name
parerga when he criticizes painters who “follow
no system of composition,” but he does not need
Duro What Is a Parergon?
to. In identifying the representation of a historia
(subject) as the artist’s principal task, he connects
historia with Aristotle’s description of tragedy as
“a mimesis of an action, and only for the sake
of this is it a mimesis of the agents [characters]
themselves” (Aristotle 1987, 38).
While Alberti cites the demands of historia
to justify the compositional order of painting,
Gabriele Paleotti, archbishop of Bologna, insists
on a doctrinal distinction based on decorum:
Elements that have nothing to do with the main subject
. . . are called parerga in Greek, and examples would
include paintings of our Lord being cruelly whipped at
the column in which are added to one side, even if off in
the distance, a boy playing with a dog, or a battle of birds,
or a peasant catching frogs, or other things that painters
imagine without caring whether or not they correspond
to the main subject. (2012, 231)
Paleotti’s treatise, Discorso intorno alle imagini
sacre e profane (Discourse on Sacred and Profane
Images), explains his interest. As we know from
the opposition Paolo Veronese experienced when
he painted a Last Supper in the House of Simon
(the title later changed to Feast in the House of
Levi), for the refectory of Santi Giovanni e Paolo
in 1573, the Counter-Reformation paid particu-
lar attention to the all-important relation between
subject matter and treatment. Accused of profan-
ity by the Roman Catholic Inquisition for secular-
izing a narrative drawn from the Bible, Veronese
was asked why he had included a “man dressed as
a buffoon with a parrot on his wrist,” and replied,
perhaps unwisely, “for ornament,” thereby iden-
tifying the jester as a mere parergon to the action
(Holt 1958, 68).
Veronese’s reply confirms how closely con-
nected the question of what Paleotti calls “el-
ements that have nothing to do with the main
subject” is for the emerging concept of decorum
in painting. When Thomas Blount included ‘par-
ergon’ under the head of ‘Landskip’ in his 1656
dictionary Glossographia, he did so understand-
ing that landscape formed a separate category of
painting from the historia of Alberti or the sa-
cred theme the Last Supper. The historia, called
“poesia” by Titian and later and more generally
“history painting,” were hedged around with re-
strictions and protocols of what should, and should
not, be represented (Puttfarken 2005, 10). When
Blount asserts, “All that which in a Picture is not
25
of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Par-
ergon, or by-work,” he is categorically excluding
parergon from the “body or argument” of the
“poesia,” instead identifying it with background
or landscape. He drives home his point with an
example:
[I]n the Table of our Saviour’s Passion, the picture of
Christ on the Rood (which is the antient English word
for Cross) the two Theeves, the blessed Virgin Mary, and
St. John, are the Argument: But the City Jerusalem, the
Country about, the clouds, and the like, are Landskip.
(Blount 1656)
As in a historia, the subject is the representation of
human actions, distinguished from the “by-work”
through their involvement in the plot or narrative.
Christ’s agony, or the thieves’ responses to dying
in the presence of the Son of God, or Mary and
St. John’s anguish, constitute the central elements;
everything else is parerga.
In a letter to his patron Paul Fréart de
Chantelou of 1658, Nicolas Poussin describes this
distinction between subsidiary elements and the
main subject in his painting Holy Family in Egypt,
now in the Hermitage Museum:
I promised to make known the parerga which are in the
background of the painting that I have done for you. . . . I
have put into the painting all those things there to delight
by their novelty and variety and to show that the Virgin
who is represented there is in Egypt. (Poussin 1911, 448–
449)
Poussin’s remarks perfectly illustrate the nature of
this kind of parerga. They are there to ornament
the composition—“to delight by their novelty and
variety”—and in this case to emphasize that the
Holy Family is in in Egypt (and not still en route
as in the more frequently portrayed Flight into
Egypt). This subordinate element includes, in the
mid-distance, a procession of priests of the cult
of Serapis, who bear aloft an ark of relics. These
background details are not part of the main story,
which concerns the miraculous provision of food
for the Holy Family; rather, its importance derives
from the distinction it draws between the Chris-
tian subject matter of the foreground (ergon) and
pagan rituals of the background (parergon).
Let us stay with Poussin a moment longer to
examine another work, his celebrated Eliezer and
Rebecca at the Well (1648), now in the Louvre
26
museum. The painting was the object of a dispute
in the Académie royale de peinture et de sculp-
ture over whether Poussin should have included
the train of camels—conspicuous by their absence
in his painting—described in the Bible. The di-
rector of the Académie, Charles Le Brun, offered
cogent reasons why the inclusion of such “bizarre
objects,” and therefore parergonal to the sacred
narrative, would militate against the decorum of
the “principal action” of the representation:
M. Poussin, seeking always to purify and clarify the sub-
ject of his works and to agreeably demonstrate the prin-
ciple action he was addressing, had rejected bizarre ob-
jects that could lead the eye of the spectator astray and
amuse him only with trivia; that the field of representa-
tion is destined exclusively for the figures necessary to
the subject and for those who are capable of an inge-
nious and agreeable expression; such that [Poussin] was
correct not to concern himself with a train of camels that
would have been as unprofitable for the work as em-
barrassing by their number. (Mérot 2003, 130–139; my
translation)
Le Brun is not recorded as having used the term
‘parergon’ in his remarks, but he could, with pro-
priety, have done so. “Objects that could lead the
eye of the spectator astray and amuse him only
with trivia” is highly reminiscent, at a remove of
almost two millennia, of the criticism of Proto-
genes’s misstep in including a partridge atop a
column. Le Brun’s justification for their exclu-
sion shows that parerga cannot be separated from
questions related to subject matter, nor accom-
modated into a historia, ranked as the most no-
ble form of picturing (the equivalent of tragedy
in drama) without doing violence to the received
idea of ambitious painting.
ii. parerga and the hierarchy of the genres
A parergon cannot be identified as a thing in itself,
but only in relation to something already recog-
nized as the main work (the ergon). It therefore
follows that the link between the main subject and
the parergonal elements of a painting broaches
the question of the formulation, codified by André
Félibien in 1668, of a hierarchy of the genres, in
fact a hierarchy of art and artists, that had been in-
creasingly important in art theory at least since the
early sixteenth century (Mérot 2003, 50–51; Duro
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
2005, 690–691). As artists from Protogenes to
Le Brun realized, to applaud a painter for the
uncritical depiction of external nature was to
praise the lesser achievement of mimesis over
invention. This explains Protogenes’s anger that
his satyr was overlooked in favor of an avian
interloper; the partridge was never intended to be
the principal part of the painting—a frustration
that must have only intensified when he realized
his popular success was at the expense of his
standing as a figure painter. Little wonder he
erased the offending element.
This distinction between the genres, and the
scant importance accorded to the representation
of the lower orders, prompts Edward Norgate,
writing about Raphael’s tapestry cartoons ac-
quired by Charles I in 1623 and now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum, to remark:
It doth not appeare that the antients made any other
Accompt or use of [landscape] but as a servant to their
other peeces, to illustrate or sett their Historicall paint-
ing by filling up the empty Corners, or void places of
Figures and story, with some fragment of Landscape . . .
as may be seene in those incomparable Cartoni of the
Acts of the Apostles. . . . (1919, 44)
Norgate’s reference to landscape as a servant,
“filling up the empty Corners” describes one kind
of parergon very well. Where the landscape is
part of the representation, as in an Acts of the
Apostles or as described in Blount’s Crucifixion,
it is compositionally and iconographically a “by-
work,” designed to support the principal narra-
tive. But were a landscape to assume dominion
over the main subject, then it would undermine
the hierarchy, making a subject like the act(ion)
of the Apostles subservient to a minor genre. It
is for this reason that Poussin instructs his pa-
tron Chantelou, when considering his new acqui-
sition, Israelites Gathering the Manna, to “read the
story and the painting, in order to discern if each
thing is appropriate to the subject” (1911, 20–21).
The purpose is to ensure that Chantelou sees the
miraculous appearance of the manna as the main
subject, in which the setting—the rocky and arid
desert landscape—is there purely to lend credence
to the hunger and thirst of the Israelites.
Why this mattered is closely allied to the ques-
tion of the status of parerga. Where a significant
subject is present, as in a Christ at the Column, a
Crucifixion, or a Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well,
Duro What Is a Parergon?
then the minor genre could be what the main
subject always intended such elements to be—a
parergonal support to the narrative; but if there is
no main subject, no Aristotelian emphasis on dra-
matic action, then the subject would exhibit a lack
for which no amount of skill in the depiction of an-
cilliary elements could compensate. Jean-Baptiste
Dubos refers precisely to this kind of absence in
his 1719 treatise, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie
et sur la peinture:
How shall our attention be engaged by a picture repre-
senting a peasant driving a couple of beasts along the
highway, if the very action which this picture imitates,
has no power of affecting us? . . . There is nothing in
the action of a country feast, or in the amusements of a
parcel of soldiers in the guardhouse, that is capable of
moving us. . . . [W]e disapprove of his choice of objects
that have so little in them to engage us. (Dubos 1748,
43–44, vol. I)
The dismissive characterization of a drover as a
subject unworthy of our interest alerts us to the
importance of the hierarchy of subject matter in
the appreciation of painting. Implicit in Dubos’s
remarks is not only the idea that a hierarchy—with
history painting at its apex—should exist, but also
that the distinction between the representation of
human action and the depiction of inanimate na-
ture could be drawn as an unbridgeable divide
separating main action from minor themes.
But if the hierarchy continued to be a major
factor in the choice of subject matter in Italy
and particularly in France down to the end of
the eighteenth century, in northern Europe it
was always less influential. Christopher S. Wood,
in his study of the early sixteenth-century artist
Albrecht Altdorfer, speaks of the artists as
“abolish[ing] the boundary between subject and
setting, as well as the hierarchy, by banishing the
subject and funnelling setting toward the literal
centre of the image” (2014, 69). Wood’s remark
productively distinguishes between ergon and
parergon, introducing the concept of border or
boundary between pictorial elements within a
composition, thereby distinguishing the idea of
the boundary or border from that of the frame.
As Wood shows, if, in certain settings, the genres
were to be ranked categorically, to serve both as
guide and limit to the various ways of representing
nature, then each (whether major or minor) was
open to subversion by other categories within the
27
hierarchy. While this mattered little to the lesser
genres (they were already lumped together as ir-
redeemably minor, forever excluded from history
painting’s charmed circle), it mattered crucially
when it was a question of maintaining the author-
ity, and representational practices, of narrative
painting. This collapse of subject into setting
allows for the dissolution of the ergon/parergon
relationship and the consequent marginalization
of the ergon. In this scenario the loss of a subject,
which the parergon, by definition, cannot replace,
means that neither landscape nor the pastoral
pursuits of those engaged in work there (such as
Dubos’s drover) can be characterized merely as
the setting for a painting, nor for that matter is
the one able to serve as a foil to establish the
distinction between genre painting and historia
that brought about the ergon/parergon in the first
place.
The examples examined so far all share the
characteristic of placing the parergon in a subor-
dinate or supplementary role to the ergon, and the
terms used to characterize this relationship have
included ‘accessory,’ ‘embellishment,’ and ‘orna-
ment,’ suggesting an affinity of purpose that is
borne out by the historical evidence. But it is just
this abolition of the boundary between subject
and setting that Wood speaks of that is given life
in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus (c.1555). The drama of the narrative
(the fall) is relegated to a distant corner of the
composition—Icarus drowns while a fisherman
fishes on, and the ploughboy on the cliff top steers
the plough and sees nothing. Several writers have
produced ekphrasis on the painting, most perti-
nently for the present discussion W. H. Auden in
“Musée des Beaux-Arts,” who comments that the
“old masters” realized that the site of any tragedy
(ergon), however terrible, contains on its margins
(parergon), episodes of quotidian normalcy:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns
away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry
But for him it was not an important failure. (Auden 1991,
179)
iii. the parergon as ornament
A parergon is also an ornamental addition or em-
bellishment to the main work. This aspect of the
28
parergon is not in opposition, or even at variance,
with the parergon of subject matter; rather ‘orna-
ment’ serves to emphasize the properties of the
parergon as an accessory or embellishment to the
main work (ergon), and frees the parergon to func-
tion less as a subordinate element to the main
story and more as an adornment or ornament of
the work. An early and instructive example of this
kind of parergon is found in Galen’s On the Use-
fulness of the Parts of the Body, in which the Greek
physician and philosopher compares the way na-
ture has ornamented certain parts of the human
body to the way good craftsmen “give an extra
proof of their skill by modeling some ornament
or device for the work beyond what is useful,”
such as crafting designs of “ivy, or the tendrils
of grapevine, or a spray of cypress, or some other
such thing” on shields, sword hilts, or bowls (Galen
1968, II 529).3
Galen’s characterization of the parergon as an
ornamental addition is echoed by Alberti, who
writes, “Ornaments done by artificers that are
added to painting, such as sculpted columns, bases,
and pediments, I would not censure if they were in
real silver and solid or pure gold, for a perfect and
finished painting is worthy to be ornamented even
with precious stones” (Alberti 1991, 85–86). Al-
berti thinks about ornamenting the frame, almost
certainly that of an altarpiece where the archi-
tectural surround (“sculpted columns, bases, and
pediments”) is integral to the painting. Even so, he
distinguishes between painting and border. Else-
where in his treatise, he disapproves of the use
of gold leaf within the pictorial field, where its
monetary value would compete with the artist’s
ingenium as the source of the painting’s value.
While a fifteenth-century altarpiece is a very dif-
ferent kind of artwork from the detachable quadri-
lateral surround of easel paintings that became
the norm from the sixteenth century onwards, Al-
berti’s characterization of the frame as an essen-
tially ornamental enclosure, conceptually and ma-
terially separate from the picture field, lays the
groundwork for the Kantian work/frame distinc-
tion that is at the heart of much contemporary
theorizing of the boundaries of the artwork.
Another important instance of ornamental
additions that address the main subject from
the frame/margins of the composition concerns
the borders of maps and printed matter more
generally, where marginal embellishments, such
as captions, topographies, and grotesques, often
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
enclosed in exuberantly ornamental cartouches,
distinguish between the subject and supplemen-
tary matter that comments on them. Jacques Gom-
boust’s 1652 Plan de Paris shows, along with a map
of the city, framed topographical views inserted
into each corner, the whole further surrounded by
a dense written commentary. A further example
of this kind of parerga is found in Abraham Or-
telius’s atlas, Theatrum orbis terrarium (1579), the
second edition of which contained a supplement
entitled Parergon Theatri, a supplement that dis-
played maps of, for the most part, ancient his-
torical locations and mythical sites such as the
voyages of Jason and the Argonauts and the lo-
cation of Utopia. Unlike the main atlas, which
represented the most rigorous and scientific car-
tographical research of the day, the supplement
contrasts these values with a degree of literary and
poetic license (as one might expect from a map of
Utopia), imparting imaginative commentary that
served as a counterpoint to the main work’s sci-
entific rigor. And while cartouches in the main
atlas were used to represent or comment on the
unmapped or inaccessible parts of continents and
uncharted oceans, the supplement announced its
status by framing the supplement with the title
“Parergon” within a quadrilateral surround in im-
itation of a picture frame (Heuer 2009, 131).
iv. the parergon as pictorial embellishment
There is a significant difference between the be-
jeweled surround to an altarpiece, or a cartouche
on a map, where the parergon operates as a formal
distinction between work and frame, and the sub-
ject/accessory distinction familiar from my earlier
examples. There is, however, another focus where
a parergon functions as a compositional embel-
lishment within the bounds of the work. Blaise
de Vigenère, writing in the late sixteenth century,
illustrates this form of parergonality:
Among their works painters paint perspectives, shrubby
trees, little animals, old ruins, and collapsed buildings,
mountains and valleys, together with such other acces-
sories and incidents that serve to enrich and give grace
to their task, and fill out that which otherwise would
remain uselessly denuded and empty, in danger of be-
ing an eyesore. The Greeks call them παρεργα [par-
erga], or superfluous additions, besides what is needed.
(1999, 131)
Duro What Is a Parergon?
De Vigenère’s comment encompasses the usual
range of motifs that may be called parerga—
“shrubby trees, little animals, old ruins, and col-
lapsed buildings, mountains and valleys” (131)—
but in characterizing parerga as “superfluous addi-
tions, besides what is needed,” he anticipates what
I might call the definitive characterization of orna-
mental parerga that appears in Henry Peacham’s
Graphice, or The Most Ancient and Excellent Art
of Drawing and Limming, published early in the
seventeenth century as “needeless graces”: “For
your Parergas or needlesse graces, you may set
forth the same with Farme-houses, Water-milles,
Pilgrims travelling, the ruines of Churches, Cas-
tles, &c.” (1612, 45).
It is these “needeless graces” that engage the
prelate and historian Paolo Giovio, writing about
the paintings of Dosso Dossi early in the sixteenth
century:
The gentle manner of Dosso of Ferrara is esteemed in his
proper works, but most of all in those which are called
parerga. For devoting himself with relish to the pleasant
diversions of painting he used to depict jagged rocks,
green groves, the firm banks of traversing rivers, the
flourishing work of the countryside, the gay and hard
toil of the peasants, and also the far distant prospects
of land and sea, fleets, fowling, hunting, and all that
genre so pleasing to the eyes in a lavish and festive style.
(Gombrich 1966, 113–114)
This insistence that parerga were not “proper
works” but rather “the pleasant diversions of
painting,” associates parerga with genre painting
(“the gay and hard toil of the peasants”), cement-
ing its place in the lower echelons of the hierarchy
of the genres.
These examples conform to the idea of parerga
as ornament, a means of embellishing the compo-
sition, and in this respect anticipate the fashion for
the picturesque in late eighteenth-century Britain.
The Reverend William Gilpin, whose Three Es-
says on the Picturesque (1792) largely defined the
movement, argued that ‘picturesque’ should be
understood as anything that is suitable for includ-
ing in a picture. Gilpin’s interest lies with the
role of parerga that “embellish [an artist’s] pic-
tures with pleasing shapes.” When he writes that
“[a] group of cattle, standing in the shade on the
edge of a dark hill, and relieved by a lighter dis-
tance beyond them, will often make a complete
picture without any other accompaniment,” he is
29
instancing a pictorial trope that ornaments the
landscape (Gilpin 1792, 27–28; 55–56). There is
nothing here that suggests Gilpin wishes for any
other subject other than a picturesque prospect
or seeks to raise the standing of landscape paint-
ing in the manner of Claude or Poussin, through
reference to the Bible or mythology. Rather, he
explains his intention more fully by drawing on
the vocabulary of picturesque sketching:
In adorning your sketch, a figure, or two may be intro-
duced with propriety. By figures I mean moving objects,
as wagons, and boats as well as cattle, and men. But they
should be introduced sparingly. In profusion they are
affected. Their chief use is, to mark a road—to break a
piece of foreground—to point out the horizon in a sea-
view—or to carry off the distance of a retiring water by
the contrast of a dark sail, not quite so distant, placed
before it. But in figures thus designed for the ornament
of a sketch, a few light touches are sufficient. Attempts
at finishing offend. (Gilpin 1792, 77)
Although Gilpin does not use the term ‘par-
erga,’ his reference to “embellish his pictures with
pleasing shapes” shows a remarkable homogene-
ity with earlier usage. Above all, such figures
add interest to the representation of the action,
serving as “staffage,” that is, what Cassell’s dic-
tionary describes as “accessories, decoration . . .
such as figures in a landscape” (1978, ‘Staffage’).
But whether called staffage or picturesque ele-
ments that stimulate the artist’s powers of inven-
tion, these parerga remain just that—“needlesse
graces,” ancillary to the composition, yet serving
to engage the interest of the spectator.
v. the borders of paintings
To read Derrida on the parergon is to experience
at once a dizzying sense of possibility for the re-
formulation for the boundaries of the artwork, yet
also to find oneself drawn toward an occasionally
convoluted and overly narrow definition of what
a parergon is. Approaching the artwork as the site
of a “lack,” Derrida seeks to reveal the inherent
weakness of a symbolic form, such as art, that pur-
ports to inclusivity and autonomy, yet relies on all
manner of liminal devices to reinforce its inher-
ently unstable boundaries.4 While common sense
might suggest that such marginal matter merely
serves to demarcate the inside from the outside
30
of the artwork, Derrida focuses on what one critic
has called the “logic of the frame” to challenge
the idea that the artwork possesses an essence
that is already present and complete (Bernstein
1992, 168). The frame around a painting is just
such a device, and Derrida argues that the par-
ergonal frame comes to trouble the either/or, in-
side/outside, pure/impure binaries that establish
the identity of the artwork in the first place:
Parergon: neither work (ergon) nor outside the work
[hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above
nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not re-
main indeterminate and it gives rise [donne lieu] to the
work. It is no longer merely around the work. That which
it puts in place—the instances of the frame, the title, the
signature, the legend, etc.—does not stop disturbing the
internal order of discourse on painting, its works, its com-
merce, its evaluations, its surplus-values, its speculation,
its law, and its hierarchies. (1987, 9)
For Derrida, the frame is that part of the artwork
that “gives rise” to the artwork, completing the
work in a way that the work, in and of itself, is
incapable of achieving (Derrida 1987, 42–43, 59).5
But if there is no need to question the value of
an argument that has been instrumental in turning
attention “from work to frame” (to borrow the ti-
tle of a seminal essay by Craig Owens), opening
up a discourse that has proved invaluable for the
study of the conceptual and material boundaries
of the artwork, Derrida’s narrow association of
parergon with frame has served to occlude other,
incompatible meanings of parergon, to say noth-
ing of his complete disregard for the term’s histor-
ical importance (Owens 1994; Duro 1996; Jonietz
2016, 1042). But what of Kant? Is he not in some
measure responsible for the displacement of the
parergon onto the frame? His reference to “the
borders of paintings” in Critique of the Power of
Judgment—the reference on which Derrida bases
his analysis—might make it seem so. Let us look
again at this passage, which appears in §14 “Elu-
cidation by means of examples”:
Even what one calls ornaments (parerga), i.e., that which
is not internal to the entire representation of the object
as a constituent, but only belongs to it externally as an ad-
dendum and augments the satisfaction of taste, still does
this only through its form: like the borders of paintings,
draperies on statues, or colonnades around magnificent
buildings. But if the ornament itself does not consist in
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
beautiful form, if it is, like a gilt frame, attached merely in
order to recommend approval for the painting through
its charm—then it is called decoration, and detracts from
genuine beauty. (Kant 2000, §14, 110–111).6
When Kant defines “the borders of paintings” as
“that which is not internal to the entire represen-
tation of the object as a constituent, but only be-
longs to it externally as an addendum,” he seems
to insist on the liminal nature of his example.
But Kant’s definition relates not to the frame as
such but to the kind of frame (gilt or plain) and
the purposes to which it is employed—whether it
serves the painting by modestly deferring to the
depiction (plain) or whether it draws attention to
itself through a show of charm (gilt), designed to
appeal to the eye and not the intellect: “but if the
ornament itself does not consist in beautiful form,
if it is, like a gilt frame, attached merely in order to
recommend approval for the painting through its
charm—then it is called decoration, and detracts
from genuine beauty” (2000, §14 110, 111).
Kant’s other examples of parerga (“draperies
on statues, or colonnades around magnificent
buildings”) (111), likewise serve to illustrate this
distinction between form and decoration, al-
though not all commentators have been willing
to forgo a quip that the columns of a colonnade,
far from being merely ornaments, or decoration,
to the building, surely hold up the roof. (In fact,
columns are often non-integral to the main struc-
ture and serve rather to designate the peristyle, as
in a classical Greek temple. Heidegger’s comment
that “the building encloses the figure of the god,
and in this concealment lets it stand out into the
holy precinct through the open portico,” is rel-
evant here (1993, 167). In a similar way, Kant’s
“draperies on statues” may seem to make little
sense. What is it about a clothed statue that sus-
tains Kant’s thesis? Again, we need to see beyond
the apparent oddity of the example. A recent study
of the nude in art has referred to nudity as “the
zero point of material” (Nancy and Ferrari, 2014).
This is well said. The human form has been the
basis of much Western art and architecture from
the classical era to the present, and extraneous el-
ements of any kind—such as clothing—are seen
as interfering with the (naked) truth of the repre-
sentation. Hence, Kant contrasts the unadorned
essence of the form (the nude) with drapery that
serves to ornament the essential body.7
Duro What Is a Parergon?
Although footnoted in all recent editions, few
critics have remarked that neither “parerga” nor
“borders of paintings” were included in the first
edition of the Third Critique. Kant added them
to his revisions for the second, 1793 edition. So
why are they there? If we reread his comments
with these terms mentally excised, the reference
to a “gilt frame” appears somewhat abruptly, un-
related to the examples that precede it. It seems
probable that Kant belatedly included “the bor-
ders of paintings” to make his reference appear
more logically within his argument. Whatever the
reason these terms were added, the effect, as
surely Kant intended, was to associate ‘parerga”
with ornament and ‘frame’ with decoration, both
terms that fit into the historical definition of ‘par-
ergon’ as “ornamental addition, embellishment”
(Oxford English Dictionary 2018).8
Kant’s gilt frame example aligns closely with
a letter Nicolas Poussin sent from Rome to
his patron Paul Fréart de Chantelou in April
1639, informing him that he had dispatched
his painting, Israelites Gathering the Manna, to
Paris unframed—a logical enough decision, as the
weight of the frame would have added to the ship-
ping costs and risked damage to the fragile canvas.
Having dealt with these practical considerations,
Poussin emphasizes the importance of a suitable
frame for the painting: “When you receive it, I
beg of you, if you find it good, decorate it with
a bit of a frame [un peu de corniche], because it
needs it in order that, considering [the painting]
in all its parts, the rays of the eye are held in check
. . . ” Then, in a caveat that anticipates Kant’s ref-
erence to “a gilt frame” with astonishing preci-
sion, Poussin adds a rider: “It would be much to
the purpose if the aforementioned molding were
simply gilded in matt gold, as it will blend harmo-
niously [très doucement] with the colors without
clashing.” (1911, 20–21). Poussin does not use the
term ‘parergon’ in this instance, but the precision
with which he describes his preferred frame makes
clear his aversion to the kind of frame Kant de-
scribes as “decoration.”
vi. conclusion
This article has attempted to look beyond the all-
consuming presence of Derrida’s “Parergon” es-
say in order to reveal the parergon’s historical
dimension—even if, as seems to be the case, art
31
theory has paid scant attention to its historical
importance for much of the time. It is wrong to
blame Derrida for this oversight; he merely bor-
rowed the term from Kant, without bothering, it
must be said, very much about Kant’s intentions
in employing the term in the first place (Jonietz
2016). As a corrective, I have focused on the par-
ergon in two areas—its connection to the question
of subject matter (the hierarchy of the genres) and
as ornament or pictorial embellishment. If this has
achieved its purpose, then the expanded parergon
offers us the possibility of seeing a value beyond
that of its relation to the frame or border, and one
that informs on protocols and norms that form the
basis of art theory in both antiquity and the early
modern period.
Although relatively few in number, references
to parerga in the history of art offer an insight
into picture theory out of all proportion to the
infrequency of the term’s appearance in the liter-
ature of art. There is no concept in current use
that duplicates its frame of reference or offers
the potential for a better understanding of the
way the genres are discussed, at least with respect
to the all-important early modern period. The so-
called “parts” of painting—including imitation,
invention, expression, delight, decorum—all of
which have something to add to our understanding
of the parergon, assume their full importance only
when they are understood relationally the one to
the other, the “part” to the whole, in a manner
similar to the way the parergon is understood rela-
tionally to the ergon.9 If this is the case, then a par-
ergon, which by definition must be understood in
relation to the ergon, has an important role to play.
One reason for this is the continued attention
paid to the Derridean parergon at the expense
of other, and in many cases, any other, under-
standing of the term. This is not to advocate for a
revision of Derrida’s argument or to question of
the value of his conclusions (Duro 1996); rather,
my attempt here is to open up the parergon
to a range of meanings and to connect them,
as far as possible, to their known instances of
historical usage. However, while I have for the
most part limited my discussion to examples
where the term parergon/parerga has been
explicitly cited, it would be a mistake to assume
a broader understanding of parergon has no
place other than in these examples. The way
forward is surely to see that a parergon is being
discussed even when it is not explicitly named.
32
At the same time, it is important to avoid a
proliferation of the term where it has scant rele-
vance. We need to be guided by historical usage if
we are to avoid narrowing the parergon to a frame,
on the one hand, or adding unwarranted examples
with the otherwise laudable intention of associ-
ating the term parergon with concepts that have
little of the parergonal to recommend them.10
PAUL DURO
Department of Art History/Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York 14627-0001
internet: paul.duro@rochester.edu
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Duro What Is a Parergon?
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1. An early version of Derrida’s essay “Parergon” ap-
peared in the journal Digraphe 3 and 4 in 1974.
2. Winckelmann is a little wayward with his analysis. It
is not a question of whether the “principal figure” is beauti-
ful or not. The perceived inferiority of the accessory comes
not from any weakness in the representation, but from its
subordinate status with respect to the principal subject.
3. There is an informative discussion of “”Metal
Mounts as Parerga” in Grasskamp (2015, 29–32). I regret
I discovered this source too late to integrate it into my
argument.
4. For comment on Derrida’s use of liminality as an in-
tellectual tool, see Sharpe (2016). The expression “symbolic
form” is Cassirer’s, who offers his most accessible discussion
of the concept (1992, 23–26 and 137–170).
5. From the first line of the original French edition of
The Truth in Painting, the text asserts the primacy of the
frame: “Let’s say, to hold fast to the frame, to the limit,
I write here four times around painting” (Derrida, 1987,
3; my translation). Simone Heller-Andrist has noted how
Derrida insinuates the language of quadrilateralism into the
structure of his argument, from “framed” and “squared up”
to “[the parergon] is no longer merely around the work”
(Heller-Andrist 2012, 30; Derrida 1987, 55, 60, 9).
6. The Guyer and Matthews translation of Kant’s Third
Critique, cited here (2000), renders “Einfassungen der
Gemälde” as ‘the borders of paintings’ and not as ‘picture
frames’ as in many earlier translations. The difference may
seem trivial; it is not. If Kant had intended to instance a
picture frame, he would have used the appropriate term:
Bilderrahmen—but ‘borders of paintings,’ while undoubt-
edly encompassing picture frames, is much broader. So
to claim, as Derrida does, that Kant answers his question
“What is a frame?” by saying: “it’s a parergon,” is to double
down on his misrepresentation of Kant’s example by con-
fining it to a narrow interpretation of parergon as ‘frame’
(Derrida 1987, 63).
7. The argument for which these examples serve as
markers appears most clearly in the title of the preceding
33
section §13, “The pure judgment of taste is inde-
pendent from charm and emotion” (Kant 2000, 107).
8. A similar point may be made about the inclusion
of ‘parerga.’ Kant had used the term in his treatise Reli-
gion within the Limits of Reason Alone, published, like the
second edition of the Third Critique, in 1793, to describe
four “General Observations” appended to the treatise “as
it were, parerga to religion within the limits of pure rea-
son; they do not belong within it but border upon it” (1960,
47–48). It is ironic that its inclusion in the Third Critique,
purely as a clarification of ‘ornament,’ has been mistak-
enly paired with ‘border of paintings,’ thereby misrepre-
senting Kant’s intention. For further discussion of the im-
plications of the way Derrida deploys Kant’s terminology
to the advantage of his argument, see Heller-Andrist (2010,
esp. 26–41).
9. The classic study of the humanistic theory of painting
remains Lee (1967). De Piles’s The Principles of Painting
(1743) carries on its title page a similar, if more extensive,
list of the “parts” of painting.
10. ‘Attribute’ is a case in point. The lunar diadem of
Diana, Saint Catherine’s wheel, Zeus’s thunderbolt, are at-
tributes, not parerga—visual signs that identify their sub-
jects. Fragment and detail are also problematic for the same
reason. Degler (2015) includes both attribute and frag-
ment in the title of her study of parerga in Quattrocento
painting.
I would like to thank my spring 2018 “Rhetoric of
the Frame” graduate class at the University of Rochester
for their support. At a time when they had every right
to expect me to devote my pedagogical energies to their
concerns, they generously encouraged me to rehearse
the argument presented in this article until it began to
make sense. To Rachel Crawford, Erin Francisco, Tristan
Menzies, Yasin Nasirov, Michael Ormsbee, Jacob Ruta,
Katherine Soules, and Nathan Tosh: Thank you, all—
you were the best. In addition, I would also like to ac-
knowledge, with thanks, the enormously helpful anony-
mous readers’ reports. They, together with stern advice
from the journal’s editors, greatly helped me to under-
stand what needed to be done to ready this article for
publication.