The absent leg of the table is the left leg of LE BATELEVR

-The table is too narrow,suggesting a large table and the position of the right leg of the table next to us suggests that the table will fall.

* Anyway,is a fact that the fourth leg of the table is absent.

Is the fourth leg of the table 'absent', or rather 'our of the frame of view'?

Just for dream it ...

*The point that it is absent,dear JMD !

'it is absent' is ambiguous, Eugim.

It could mean: 'it is absent from the drawing', in which case I agree, given the frame in which the partial drawing is contained; or it could mean: 'it is absent from the table', in which case the statement is more than is warranted from the depiction. Given that the table is represented as stable (ie, nothing seems to be falling off its surface), then either a stabilising fourth leg is implied, or some other mechanism (that is more far-fetched than a fourth leg) is implied.

So its 'absence' is from the narrow frame of the viewer, not from the table therein depicted, any more than we are to suppose that the table-top is 'absent' underneath the objects depicted thereon, nor that the ground behind the Bateleur or outside the frame shown is non-existent because 'not there' in the portion of the drawing we are seeing.

PS - this does not mean that in a specific reading situation, we are prevented from seeing it as indeed 'missing' a stabilising leg and thus read it as about to fall. But I would suggest that this is different to talking about the table per se, but rather about the possibilities inherent in any partial image shown in the context of a reading to which we are to bring our own imaginative transformations.

jmd wrote:'
PS - this does not mean that in a specific reading situation, we are prevented from seeing it as indeed 'missing' a stabilising leg and thus read it as about to fall. But I would suggest that this is different to talking about the table per se, but rather about the possibilities inherent in any partial image shown in the context of a reading to which we are to bring our own imaginative transformations.

Sometimes I find useful to explore the storyline of Le Bateleur being a ‘three-card monte’ kind of trickster. The fourth leg out of the card’s frame would suggest then that in the path of pure material gratification stability is never complete, there is always something else, out of the picture, we feel missing. That’s the downfall of the con man.


Best,


EE

Very interesting E.E. !

Surely I was not absolutely clear.

* I sustain that there is not a fourth leg of the table.
Also is not out of the frame.
It not exists anyway.

Days ago One Potato hanged the I card of Claude Burdel deck.
He pointed rightly the topic of the impossible to sustain stick on the figure hand.
Also I see it at the Madenie deck and also I see that the XVIIII has a closest link with the Burdel one.
Burdel is from 1751.
Conver is by far the more closer to Madenie,but his XVIIII has not the same graphic outline.