Abstract: The narrative structure of Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is related to the visual structure of the eponymous painting. A process of textual duplication affects the characters and the image: two modes of knowledge and mimesis, and finally perhaps two images superimposed on the canvas. Some later works, reprising the Balzacian subject in literature and cinema, are examined more quickly: those of Théophile Gautier, the Goncourt brothers, Émile Zola, and Jacques Rivette.
