Thomas Kirchner
Between Academicism and its Critics: Leonardo da Vinci’s Traité de la peinture and Eighteenth-Century French Art Theory
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Re-Reading Leonardo. The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900
Edited and introduced by Claire Farago
[1] We have seen in the essays of Kemp and J.V. Field that one of the themes of Leonardo’s Treatise on which the newly created Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture focused its discussions was the teaching of perspective, with particular reference to the different views of Charles Le Brun and Abraham Bosse . The "clash on perspective" was really fierce, but relatively short-lived. There is however another aspect of the Treaty that thrilled theorists and members of the Academy during the second half of 1600 and for almost the entire next century, that is the representation of the human body, or even better of passions and human feelings. To this theme is dedicated the present writing by Thomas Kirchner. Without reaching the previously mentioned hardship, the debate on how to represent human feelings proved even further reaching than that on perspective, because it threatened to undermine the very role of the Academy in the teaching of painting. The real peculiarity of the entire story, which we will briefly recall following the line of reasoning proposed by the author, is that anyone who expressed an opinion, of a greater or lesser proximity with academic teachings, did it invoking, directly or indirectly, what written by Leonardo in his Treatise. They demonstrate, once again, that many "Leonardos" have existed historically, often antithetical to each other, but yet equally plausible.
[2] It was already mentioned that, in reality, the first printed edition was published in 1651 when the Academy had just been born; and that before 1651 the theory of art in France did not exist yet. It is therefore logical to think that - when the method of teaching at the Academy had to be set up - the reference point was Leonardo, historically the first major "French" artist, because the last few years of his life spent beyond the Alps. Leonardo was taken into particular consideration with reference to the depiction of passions and human feelings. Leonardo’s warnings to young apprentices are known: they should roam the streets and try to learn as much as possible the type of faces and expressions, always carrying around a notebook in order to fix the physiognomy and human feelings. “Leonardo was concerned with developing a strategy that allowed the artist to study in nature a human being, and especially a human being in motion, and to reproduce him/her in immediate proximity to reality” (p. 301). In fact, planning the teaching, the members of the Academy misunderstood the meaning of "nature" as proposed by Leonardo and instead propose “the study of the human figure in a succession of clearly defined steps of increasing level of difficulty. At the beginning the student was asked to copy individual body parts after graphic models: eyes, noses, mouths, ears, hands, feet, etc... The next step was the combining of these parts to create faces, arms or legs, and finally the whole human figure – always after graphic models. In a second procedure... the student was asked to copy from three-dimensional models... before studying the entire human figure at hand of plaster copies of antique sculptures... Only in the third instance was the student allowed to work from the living model, thus reaching the pinnacle of his education... The students who succeeded in this last class could participate in the Grand Prix, which required a multi-figured composition and presented the end of one’s artistic education” (pp. 301-302). All of this with an obvious effort to systematize the teaching which, in words, still relied on nature, but ended up considering the "nature" simply the repertoire of models for the studies. One of these repertoires, also largely inspired by the exhibition of Leonardo, was precisely the one proposed by the Conferences on the expression and the appearance by Charles Le Brun, who actually proposed a set of models that abstracted from the reality of human experience: “the goal of the academicians was not a better understanding of nature but the liberation of the artist from nature and its study” (p. 303). The great advantage of this translation, officially inspired by Leonardo, but in reality subversive of his writings, is to render "teachable" in precise stages a matter which could not otherwise be marked in such a precise way.
[3] The limits of the academic method disclosed themselves over years and led to criticism from an increasing number of people, including members of the Academy themselves. Among the texts quoted, a particular significance is attributed to the preface in 1730 that Pierre-Jean Mariette placed before a Recueil de testes de caractères et de charges dessinées, par Léonard de Vinci Florentin, published by the Count of Caylus. Mariette pleaded to return to the most genuine method of Leonardo, to return to the streets to study and observe people, and denied that this kind of approach would only be good for what was called, in diminutive terms, as "genre painting", but also for the "high art" par excellence, or history painting (Mariette cited in this regard the Ultima Cena and the performance of the expressions given by da Vinci therein). Mariette, in short, “furnishes proof that Leonardo’s method not only brought forth grotesque heads whose attraction did not extend far beyond their strangeness, but that it also offered a sound method for high art, capable of providing a counter-model to the academic process” (p. 307). Mariette’s opinion was then taken up years later by Caylus himself, about the crisis of contemporary French painting. If Caylus (which from 1731 was a member of the Academy) was aware of the "coldness" of the results obtained in this institution, his reasoning was, however, always scoped within the Academy, proposing a reform of education imparted there. Caylus felt the need that students would come back to deal with the real representation of human expressions, but always on the basis of codified procedures and teachable within the Academy. The solution he identified is the Prix d'expression, i.e. an annual contest that required young artists to represent faces and human passions by referring to a person who acted as a model: “One of the professors, chosen by lottery, had to select a live model and instruct him/her in such a way that he/she was able to act out an emotion over a period of three hours. The model was not supposed to be old; special value was set on his/her honourableness” (p. 309). The award, instituted in 1759, by request of the same Caylus, soon proved a failure. However, it is curious to observe how, while well aware of the failure, Academy members did not manage to discuss the root cause of it (the impossibility to create artificially what Kirchner called "selective reality"), but rather clashed on procedural matters related to the prize, as if any rule change could solve the problem. One of the most significant statements, once again referring to the need stated by Leonardo to study nature closely, is signed by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, secretary of the Academy, that in 1776 “suggested that the competition should not be held once but three times a year, and that the model should not be selected by one professor but by each participant himself. Three months before the competition, the students were to be informed of the nature of the emotion to be represented and whether the emotion was to be expressed by a man or woman” (p. 311). It was a reform proposal - and there were those who pointed this out - that made up the risk of transferring the study of young artists beyond the boundaries of the Academy. Holding a contest every four months, warning students of the subject with three months in advance, meant that they would have had to spend nine months a year in search of their models and representing their passions outside the Academy itself. Obviously, the Cochin’s proposal was not accepted, and it came to a rather simplistic compromise (one week notice to students and model selected by professors) which of course did not change things in any respect.
[4] In the meantime, however, things were changing. It came to the forefront a type of art criticism that did not deal with procedural issues and rules within the Academy, but globally challenged the usefulness of academic studies. Its most genuine expression was Denis Diderot in his Essays on Painting. Again referring to the study of nature and reality, in fact Diderot argued that “truth can only be found in real life; it could not be experienced through the mediation of a model. Artistic education, as practised in the Académie, thus was fundamentally called into question... Diderot not only opened for discussion the problem of academic education but academic art. Indeed, the legitimacy of the institution of the Académie was threatened. The reference to Leonardo’s painting treatise cannot be overlooked” (p. 313).
[5] At the margins, it is the case here to remember the Eighteenth-century French editions of the Treaty of Leonardo, demonstrating an interest that remained high throughout the century, and was closely linked to the debate and teaching at the Academy . In 1716 a second French edition was issued in Paris, edited by Pierre -Francois Giffart, followed by a third edition published in 1796 by Deterville, very similar, but not identical to the previous edition.
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