Léal souvenir? La photographie, la peinture et le serment de l image fidèle

The aim of this paper is to question the objectivist conception of photography by confronting it with the history – and epistemology – of the painted image. I suggest that the idea of photography as an objective testimony seems to rest upon a phenomenon already described by ancient rhetoric – enargeia , which Cicero latinized into evidentia . Thus the question is raised whether the objectivity of the photographic image is not the mere continuation of an old rhetorical and pictorial tradition about the epistemic-rhetoric evidentia of testimony. Moreover, through the detailed analysis of two paintings by Jan Van Eyck – The Arnolfini Portrait and Leal Souvenir –, I argue that what guarantees an image’s objectivity to the point of its being accepted as evidence ultimately is not the non-subjective mechanical process or the automatic indexical device used to make the photographic image but the image’s built-in pledge of faithfulness which was at the heart of painters’ thoughts long before the invention of photography.