BLOWING BUBBLES, BURSTING BULLES: AN ANALYSIS OF MANET'S BOY BLOWING BUBBLES AND THE POLITICIZATION OF HOMO BULLA

Abstract

This paper analyzes the political dimensions surrounding visual and literary allusions to soap bubbles. Traditionally, iconographic studies consider soap bubbles within the history of northern Baroque vanitas, attaching to bubbles notions of ephemerality and transience. Building on these interpretations, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French artists and writers created a complex metaphor for soap bubbles that relied on their impermanence and fragility, as well as their illusory nature. By coupling the earliest conceptual meanings of soap bubbles with their almost imperceptible formal properties, the bubble blower came to symbolize deceivers, or figures creating illusions or delusions. Eventually, this transformed vanitas symbolism became harnessed to political critiques and representative of chimerical assertions of papal authority, calumny, and false promises of liberal reform. I not only describe the alternative meanings associated with soap bubbles in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, but also I situate Edouard Manet's Les Bulles de savon (1867) within this trajectory. While most scholars interpret Manet's painting and accompanying prints as a continuation of, and legacy to, the Dutch vanitas tradition, I illustrate how the artistic and political milieu in which Manet worked mirrored earlier criticisms employing allusions to bubbles.