The Judgment of Paris.

Art historians are unfailingly instructive when they demonstrate how artists may rely on compositional devices that can be traced back into the mists of antiquity - to sarcophagi and ancient coins - and that inform entire histories of visual representation. A case in point is the arrangement of four figures - two largely undressed females, two fully clothed males - in Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, a work often invoked as inaugurating the era of Modernism in art. As Hubert Damisch writes, it was already observed in 1863, when this scandalizing work was first exhibited, that "the focal group of three figures in Manet's composition was a direct quote from a print that was well-known in artists' studios at the time." The engraving, by the Renaissance printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi, was itself made from a drawing by Raphael that has its own antecedents, connecting Manet's painting with a history stretching back two thousand years.

For Damisch, Manet's "most visible stroke of audacity, even insolence, is the air of contemporaneity with which he imbued the scene." The work "refuses all poetic or mythological alibis." The men are dressed in the style of Manet's own time, and at least the main female figure looks like someone one might encounter in a state of real, unretouched female nakedness: no one would take her for a goddess or a nymph. The main action of Raimondi's print, on the other hand (even if the grouping appropriated and made central by Manet is off to one side, and its members pay no attention), is the Judgment of Paris, who, by awarding Venus the apple, declares her the most beautiful of three vying goddesses.

The Judgment of Paris, as an image, is the main topic of Damisch's fascinating book, which addresses itself to feminine beauty, to the relationship of beauty to sexuality, to the artistic representation of beauty and of sexuality, and to the relationship between what Paris is shown as seeing and what viewers of such a representation see. Damisch's question - which generates the remaining questions of the book - is, "What does it mean to desire a woman in painting?" The question hardly applies within Manet's Dejeuner, where the buttoned-up males show not the slightest interest in their nude partners. Indeed, this may have been what made the painting so scandalous at the time, according to Meyer Schapiro: "that two men are sitting in a glade in the company of two naked women without any current of emotion passing between the sexes."

In more conventional depictions of the Judgment, Venus must be shown as beautiful, and beautiful in a way that implies sexual desire on Paris' part. For Paris is in effect choosing between three kinds of beauty "corresponding to three different paths to happiness": the other goddesses, Juno and Minerva, have promised him power and victory in exchange for the prize, but Venus carries the day by offering him what, lusty shepherd that he is, he cannot refuse - the favors of the most beautiful woman in the world. In thwarting the other goddesses, Paris seals his fate and that of countless others: his choice will of course lead to the Trojan War, add to his own death, as a prince of Troy. Perhaps he would bestow the prize differently if he knew its consequence, but in any case he selects sexual pleasure as his defining value, and it is the promise of sexual pleasure that a painter representing Venus as seen by Paris generally tries to embody.

How is this to be achieved? "How, other than through symbolism or allegory, can he represent the difference between the three types of beauty among which he must choose?" Juno and Minerva can be made to symbolize power and victory by equipping them with the emblems of power and victory - a scepter and a shield. But Venus has only her body through which to symbolize the connection between beauty and sexual desirability - and her body is not singularly different from that of her competitors. Damisch's story, in which he touches on Cranach, Rubens, Watteau, and others, is that of artists struggling with this problem.

"In showing beauty as desirable, painters have two options: they can represent an object that vividly conveys this idea, one that even functions for the beholder himself as an object of desire (as Sansovino's Venus supposedly did); or they can depict an object such that it functions for one or several figures within the image as an object of desire. The two options are not mutually exclusive, of course." Even in the censorious atmosphere of the Third Empire, nudity alone would not suffice to convey sexual desire to the viewer. August Cabanel's Birth of Venus, exhibited the same year as Le Dejeuner, was "immediately purchased by the Emperor who seized the occasion to award its artist the Legion of Honor," though Venus is as pink as a shrimp and provocatively supine. But Manet's nude, naked on the grass, is "something close to pornography" - perhaps because in the company of men wearing clothes - and so she arouses excitement in the viewer. This leads the author to his summarizing statement that "beauty, insofar as it is linked to the body, and to sexual difference, is always to some extent indecent, and this of necessity." In recognizing this, Manet managed to achieve what painters of the Judgment of Paris were rarely able to bring off, by his daring juxtaposition between the naked and the clothed.

"It is remarkable that the genitals themselves, the sight of which is always exciting, are hardly ever regarded as beautiful," Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, in a passage that Damisch cites frequently. "The quality of beauty seems, on the other hand, to attach to certain secondary sexual characters. So the love of beauty is a perfect example of a feeling with an inhibited aim." Thus Cabanel's Birth of Venus shows a sexually exciting female without being a sexually exciting painting. Kant - Damisch's other authority figure - was obliged by his analysis of beauty to abstract from it any concern with sexuality, since beauty is by his definition disinterested, whereas sexual desire is surely the paradigm of having an interest in someone's body. Kant did argue that in the female form, "nature handsomely represents the purposes inherent in the female build." But again, this is as true of Cabanel's Venus, if it is true at all, as it is of Manet's naked model.

Damisch's book, by his own admission, is "frankly experimental." It is "a braid of intermingled strands that has progressively taken form ... as opposed to a Warburgian series, in which each link must be riveted securely into place for the chain of transformations to acquire its full demonstrative force." No topic arises that is not pursued. Manet leads to Raimondi who leads to Raphael, who leads to drawing, which leads to the Judgment of Paris, which divides into judgment, Paris, happiness, love, the body, sexuality, all forming a complex history and a complex structure. The pleasure of this wonderful book lies in the unbraiding of its many questions, the replaiting of its many hypotheses, whatever uncertain conclusions it leaves one with.

Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. His most recent book is Praying with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (University of California Press, 1996).