History of Art Literature Anthologies
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Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard.
Une anthologie réunie par Pascal Dethurens.
[Writing on Painting. From Diderot to Quignard. Anthology curated by Pascal Dethurens]
Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 496 pages
[Original Version: June 2017 - New Version: April 2019]
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| Fig. 19) Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Vase of Olives, 1760. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Eighteenth century
painting in the pages of literates
Denis Diderot as an art critic
Philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) regularly
published critical reviews of painting exhibitions held at the Louvre (the
so-called Salons) for the
French-language journal La Correspondance Littéraire. In 1763, he praised Chardin's
realism (1699-1779), writing: "His
painting is nature itself. It is as if the objects were out of the canvas and
their truth could deceive eyes. (...) When I am looking at the paintings of
other painters, it seems to me that I need to acquire new eyes; to see those of
Chardin, I just have to keep the eyes that nature gave me and make use of them" [41]. This wide-ranging statement was followed
by the detailed description of the work "Vase of Olives" (fig. 22) presented at the Salon that year: "The
artist put on a table a pot of China's old porcelain, two biscuits, a vase
filled with olives, a basket of fruit, two glasses filled with half wine, an
orange and a soufflé (... ). But the
fact is that that porcelain vase is really porcelain; the fact is that those
olives are really separate from the eye because of the water where they swim;
it's all about taking those biscuits and eating them; catching that orange,
opening and pressing it, and drinking that glass of wine and peeling those
fruits and putting the knife in that soufflé " [42].
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| Fig. 20) Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Vase of Olives, 1760 (detail) |
Diderot then referred to a previous work by the
painter, the Ray, a still life
presented at the Exposition de la Jeunesse in 1728 to join the Royal Academy.
The canvas was still exposed in the Academy (today it is in the Louvre): "The object is disgusting: but it is the very
same flesh of the fish. It's its skin. It's its blood. (...) Of this magic, we
can be really understand nothing. His layers, appplied the one above the others, may be thick in colour, and the effects sweep then from the bottom layer to
the surface. In other cases, one would say that he blew some steam on the
canvas; at other times, that he even sprinkled some light foam over the picture"
[43].
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| Fig. 21) Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, The ray, 1728. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
This narrative is fully in the tradition of the
apologue of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, described by Pliny the Elder: great art
deceives the eye and the painter is a sort of magician: "Chardin has full control over the harmony of
colours and reflections. He does not scatter pigments of white, red or black on
the palette; it is the very substance of objects, it is the air and light that he
catches with the tip of his brush and that he fixes on the canvas”
[44]. Similar concepts were
repeated by Diderot in 1765, in the following Salon, about three still lives: "The Attributes of Music", painted that year, and the "Attributes of the Sciences" and the
"Attributes of the Arts",
works of the year 1731 [45]. Diderot admitted that there were some aspects of
repetition in the "manner"
of Chardin (which, in any case, he defended against the criticisms by the British
painter William Hogarth). He added that Chardin’s genre, practiced for thirty
years, "is the simplest kind of
painting" [46], but claimed that "no living painter, not even Vernet, is so perfect in his genre" [47].
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| Fig. 22) Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Coresus Sacrificing himself to Save Callirhoe, 1765. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
On Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), the
anthology offered another page by Diderot, very different by setting. As a text
of a purely literary nature, it was a fictive dialogue between Diderot and
Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the editor of La Correspondance Littéraire. Diderot described the painting as
if he had seen the action in a dream, and Grimm concluded that, during his dream, the philosopher had certainly expanded the story of to be "Coresus Sacrificing himself to Save
Callirhoe", a work by Fragonard of 1765, presented at the Salon of the
same year [48]. The story was highly dramatic: because
of Bacchus, all members of the society had lost control of their own behaviour;
the great priest Coresus was aware that only a human sacrifice would restore the
normal course of things. In parallel, Coresus was in vain seeking to conquer
the heart of the beautiful Callirhoe, who rejected him. Bad destiny wanted that, interpreting an
oracle’s intention, the crowd intended to immolate precisely Callirhoe’s life. To prevent anything from happening to his beloved, while permitting the return of social order, the grand priest took his life away. Callirhoe, suddenly
troubled by the sacrifice of the priest, also committed suicide. I would be
tempted to say it was a sort of mythological antecedent of Romeo and Juliet. In
the dialogue with Grimm, Diderot did not directly describe the scene of the
painting, but recounted the antecedents and the subsequent events only as part
of his dream. Here the philosopher did not comment on Fragonard’s qualities as
a painter; Grimm argued instead that no painter of his own country (he was
German) would ever be able to achieve so much.
Years passed and in 1781 the old Diderot (it will
be for him the last year of artistic reports on the Salons)
was confronted with Jacques-Louis David's neoclassicism (1748-1825), and in
particular with "Belisarius Begging
for Alms". It was also a work of 1781, which testified swift mutations
of artistic taste. Diderot's words demonstrate how he combined praise,
questioning and criticism, indirectly revealing that his preferences were no longer
fully aligned with changing paradigms in art, even if he appreciated some
innovative aspects. The theme was taken from Byzantine history: the great general
Belisarius, who had defeated the Vandals and rescued the Empire, was blinded by
Emperor Justinian and ended therefore his days begging alms in the streets of Byzantium.
"I am seeing the picture every day
and I always believe it is the first time. This young man [note of the editor:
David was thirty-three years old] shows great manners in the conduct of his
work, has character, his heads have expression without being assumed, his
attitudes are noble and natural. As far as his design is concerned, he is
capable of drawing a drapery and making beautiful folds. His colour is
beautiful without being brilliant. I wish there was less stiffness in his
flesh, while in some circumstances his muscles do not have enough flexibility.
He would perhaps gain if he toned-down somewhat his depiction of architectures.
If I had to comment on the soldier's astonishment, the woman giving alms, those
arms crossing, I would ruin my pleasure and make the artist unhappy, but I
cannot help but tell him: do you not agree that Belisarius was enough
humiliated by being force to beg for alms? Was it really necessary to represent
him in the position of the one who asks for the money? In my view, David should
have better moved [old Belisarius’] arm around the boy or raised it to heaven,
so that he could complain about the hardness of his destiny" [49].
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| Fig. 23) Jacques Louis David, Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1781. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
For reasons of space, it is not possible to display
and comment other passages by Diderot included in Pascal Dethurens’ anthology.
They were dedicated to François Boucher (1703-1770) [50], Jean-Baptiste Greuze
(1725-1805) [51], Hubert Robert (1733-1808) [52], Louis-Michel Van Loo
(1707-1771) [53] (in this case, Diderot wrote about a portrait which Van Loo had made of
himself, which did not find the full consent of the philosopher) and Claude
Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) [54]. The critical style was there similar to his
pages on Chardin, with the description of works accompanied by a critical
evaluation of the painters. Dethurens's selection demonstrates that Diderot provided
the same quality, in terms of description and judgment, even on painters with completely
different style and themes.
Charles Baudelaire: the ‘cursed poet' and art
criticism in an age of comprehensive tast renovation
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| Fig. 24) Jean Antoine Watteau, The Embarkation for Cythera (Pilgrimage to Cythera), 1717. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The "Voyage
to Cythera", one of the poems of the Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1887), shows how much
the taste was moving away from XVIII century painting, despite the apparent
continuity of aesthetic preferences of the Second Empire with the Ancient Régime. It is enough to compare the poetic
text of Baudelaire with the Pilgrimage to
Cythera by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), and in particular with his bright
landscape and fairy humanity. The common theme was the Greek island of Cythera,
to which Greek mythology assigned the role of residence of Aphrodite, the
goddess of love. Baudelaire’s poem dated 1857 also began with some verses
describing the island in its beauty [55]:
"Island
of sweet secrets, of the heart's festivals!
The beautiful shade of
ancient Venus
Hovers above your seas
like a perfume
And fills all minds
with love and languidness.
Fair isle of green
myrtle filled with full-blown flowers
Ever venerated by all
nations,
Where the sighs of
hearts in adoration
Roll like incense over
a garden of roses
Or like the eternal
cooing of wood-pigeons!"
(Translation by Jack Collings Squire, 1909 [56]).
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| Fig. 25) Jean Antoine Watteau, The Embarkation for Cythera (Pilgrimage to Cythera), 1717 (detail) |
However, the tone of the verse changed
instantly, showing that Baudelaire's Cythera was completely different from that
of Watteau [57]. The statue decorated with the flowers of the painting was
replaced in the poem by a gallows:
"Cythera
was now no more than the barrenest land,
A rocky desert
disturbed by shrill cries.
But I caught a glimpse
of a singular object!
It was not a temple in
the shade of a grove
Where the youthful
priestess, amorous of flowers,
Was walking, her body
hot with hidden passion,
Half-opening her robe
to the passing breezes;
But behold! as we
passed, hugging the shore
So that we disturbed
the saa-birds with our white sails,
We saw it was a
gallows with three arms
Outlined in black like
a cypress against the sky.
Ferocious birds
perched on their feast were savagely
Destroying the ripe
corpse of a hanged man;
Each plunged his
filthy beak as though it were a tool
Into every corner of
that bloody putrescence;
The eyes were two
holes and from the gutted belly
The heavy intestines
hung down along his thighs
And his torturers,
gorged with hideous delights,
Had completely
castrated him with their sharp beaks.”
(Translation by Jack Collings Squire, 1909
[58])
Instead, the "cursed" spirit of
Baudelaire matched very well with that of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
(1746-1828). In 1857 the French poet published an article on "Quelque
caricaturistes étrangers" and focused on Goya's skills as a caricaturist.
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| Fig. 26) Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Los caprichos (Whims), Table 59, And still they don't go!, 1799. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
"Goya
is always a great, often striking artist. It combines happiness, joviality, the
Spanish satire in Cervantes' good times with a much more modern spirit, or at
least a spirit which has been much more sought in modern times: the love of the
unseizable, the feeling of violent contrasts, the terror caused by nature and
human appearance, when they are strangely altered by circumstances. (...)
Goya's great merit is to create a monstrous, but still credible world. His
monsters were born feasible, harmonious. Nobody more than he dared in the sense
of a possible absurdity. All of these contortions, these beastly faces,
diabolical grunts are penetrated by humanity" [59].
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| Fig. 27) Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Los caprichos (Whims), Table 62, Who would have thought it!, 1799. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Baudelaire wrote in particular on two Whims of 1799. "I
remember in particular two extraordinary engravings. The one represents an
extraordinary landscape, a combination of clouds and rocks. Whether it is a
corner of the Serra, which is still unknown and not attended by anyone? Of a
sample of Chaos? There, in this abominable theatre, there is a battle between
two witches suspended in the middle of the air. One on horseback of the other: the
one is beating, is dominating the other. These two monsters roll through the
dark air. (...) The other engraving shows a being, an unfortunate, a lonely and
desperate monad, who wants at all costs to get out of his grave. Malicious
demons, a myriad of bad gnomes of Lilliputian size, weigh by virtue of
collective effort on the tombstone. These guardians, watching over the fate of
the dead, have coalesced against the recalcitrant soul, consumed in a vain and unequal
struggle" [60].
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| Fig. 28) Jacques Louis David, The Death of Marat, 1793. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Baudelaire was also a great admirer of Jacques
Louis David's neoclassical art (the above mentioned artist, who did not meet
Diderot's full consent), as it is evident from what the poet wrote in 1846
about the "The Death of Marat"
of 1793.
"All
these details correspond to history and reality, like a novel by Balzac: here
is the drama, evident in all his dreadful horror. In a strange effort, the work
has nothing trivial or ignoble. It is at the same time David's masterpiece and
one of the great curiosities of modern art. What is extraordinary in this unusual
poem is that it has been painted with extreme speed, and when you think about
the beauty of the design, there is enough to confuse the spirit. This is the
bread of the strong and the triumph of spiritualism: cruel as nature, this
painting has all the scent of the ideal" [61] (From: The Musée classique du bazar Bonne-Nouvelle).
The de Goncourt brothers and the return to
Diderot
One hundred years will have to pass before the Eighteenth-century sunny painters that Diderot so much appreciated were again
proposed to readers as a beauty canon to be imitated. We owe their rediscovery
to the brothers Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870), in their collection of writings on the 18th century art, drafted with an "artistic prose" so consonant – in
its neo-baroque style – with the painting style of the Rococo age.
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| Fig. 29) Jean-Baptist Siméon Chardin, Basket with Wild Strawberries, 1761. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The de Goncourts proposed again the theme of
Chardin's magical realism; it was the
same captivating effect they pursued in the choice of their language. "It is a magic vis-à-vis which all art
becomes pale, and all other painters weaken. (...) In one of these muffled and
blurred backgrounds that he [Chardin] is so well able to blend, and where he
vaguely mixes the coolness of caves and the shadows of coffee shops, on one of
these tables coloured like moss or marble, accustomed to host his signature,
Chardin puts on the dishes of a sweet, here is the soft velvet of a peach, the
amber transparency of a white grape, the sugared frost of plum, the dewy purple
of strawberries, the packed grapes of muscat and its bluish condensation, the
wrinkles and warts of orange skin, the lace of embroidered melons, the inflamed
redness of old apples, the nodes of bread crusts, the smooth bark of chestnut,
and even the hazelnut wood. All this is in front of you, in the air of the day,
as it were at your fingertips. Every fruit has the flavour of its colours, the
fluff of its peel, the substance of its pulp. It seems to have fallen from the
tree in Chardin's canvas" [62].
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| Fig. 30) Jean Antoine Watteau, Restless Lover, 1717-1718. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The de Goncourt brothers celebrated the Eighteenth
century as the age of seduction. "Watteau
renewed grace. The grace for Watteau is no longer the ancient grace: a rigorous
and solid charm, the perfection of Galatea marble, the all-plastic seduction
and the material glory of Venus. Watteau's grace is simply grace. It is the
nothing that dresses the woman of pleasure, of coquette, of a beautiful beyond
the physical beautiful. It is that subtle thing that seems to be the smile of
the line, the soul of form, the spiritual manifestation of materiality. All the seductions of the resting woman:
languor, laziness, abandonment, inclination, elongation, nonchalance, cadence
of the poses, the beautiful air of the profiles open to all ranges of love,
the fleeting wandering of the breasts,
serpentines and undulations, the softness of the female body, and the play of
the sharp fingers on the fan's sleeve, and the indiscretions of the high heels
that come out from the skirts, and the happy fortunes of contention, and the
coquetry of gestures, the handle of the shoulders, and all that the mirrors of
the last century taught women, the mimicry of grace!" [63]. The same colouring on the theme of female beauty dominates the pages of
the two brothers on the above mentioned Boucher [64] and Maurice Quentin de la
Tour (1704 -1788) [65].
Eighteenth century art and the symbolist and
decadent literature of late-Nineteenth century
The love for the Eighteenth century painting continued
in the second half of the Nineteenth century as an avenue of the poetic
symbolism of decadence. The richness and even the overabundance of the
iconographic semantic of the Ancient
Régime was a source of inspiration for a literature, which was also marked
by the literary exuberance of language.
Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) evoked Watteau in a
poetic description of a Sabbath in his "Classic Walpurgis Night" of 1866. He did indirectly, making
reference to a re-interpretation of Watteau by Auguste Raffet (1804-1860), a
painter and illustrator specialised in history painting. He also mentioned
another artist: André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), a landscape painter. In any case, Verlaine
referred in his poem to Watteau, one of his preferred painters, to
offer a 'classic' version of one of the most important 'Gothic' myths of Nordic
romanticism.
"Husky
songs of distant horns, in which the tenderness of the senses clasps the terror
of the soul in intervals harmoniously dissonant in their drunkenness; and
there, in response to the horns’ call,
white shapes suddenly
intertwine, translucent, which, amid the green shadow of branches, the
moonlight makes opaline —Raffet’s dream of Watteau! –
Intertwine amid the
trees’ green shadow with a languid gesture, full of a deep despair; then
dancing in a circle, very slow, around the shrubs, the bronze and marble
sculpture.
(...)
It doesn’t matter!
Always these feverish phantoms leading their vast round dance, sad and tossing like
dust-motes caught in sunbeams, in a damp pallid moment disappearing
When dawn extinguishes
the horns one after the other, so that there remains absolutely nothing
more—absolutely—than a garden by Lenôtre, ridiculous, charming and seemly" [translation by
Karl Kirchwey] [66].
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| Fig. 31) Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Interior with still life and a dog, 1728. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Marcel Proust devoted to Chardin an article in
1895, in which - according to Dethurens - he identified his still lives “as the pictorial expression of his poetry,
centred on the privileged relationship between art and time"
[67]. Here are some of his
judgments: "In these rooms (...)
Chardin enters like the light, giving everything its colour; he leads all the
beings of still lives or animated nature from the eternal night in which they
were buried; he attributes a meaning to the nature’s shape, which is otherwise
so brilliant for the sight, but so obscure for the spirit. Like the princess in
her awakening, each one returns to life, resumes his or her colours, begins to
talk to you, to live, to last. Everything on this banquet table - from the
folds of the tablecloth raised halfway to end with the knife, which is inserted
on a side and whose blade is hidden - remembers the hurry of the servants;
everything preserves the testimony of the gluttony of the guests. The top of
the fruit dish, still so glorious, but already as bare as an autumn orchard, is
crowned with marvellous and rosy peaches like cherubim, inaccessible and smiling as
immortal " [68].
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| Fig. 32) Jan Antoine Watteau, The Indifferent, 1717. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Paul Claudel (1868-1955) was also conquered by
Watteau’s grace, in his collection of art writings The Œil écoute (The Eye is Hearing), bringing together texts from
1935 to 1946. The poet's prose is as baroque as the above mentioned texts by
Proust and Verlaine, and perfectly aligned with the painting text of Watteau.
The commentary is on "The
indifferent", an image whose iconographic significance is still today
a reason for in-depth debates, however without firm conclusions. "No, no, it is not indifferent this messenger
dressed of mother-of-pearl, this forerunner of the dawn; let us rather say than
that he is looking for a balance between flight and march; he is not yet
dancing, but with a tense arm and the other unfolding a lyrical wing with
amplitude, he finds a suspended balance in which weight - neutralized with a
juggle - is a matter of least importance. He is in a starting and arrival position, he listens, waits for the
right time, searches it in our eyes and counts - from the tip of his fingers at
the end of this arm - while the other arm, wrapped in a large coat, is
preparing to support the movement of the knee. Half-fawn and half-bird, half-sensitivity and half-speech,
half-insolence half-relaxation" [69].
With this page by Claudel, Dethurnes offered us
for the last time a testimony of literates on those painters of the Eighteenth
century about whom Diderot first and the de Goncourt brothers later on had
shown so much enthusiasm: Chardin and Watteau. Perhaps, is it a sign that their
art no longer corresponded to the sensitivity of the second half of the last
century? Hard to say. A large retrospective dedicated to Chardin was held at
the Grand Palais in Paris in 1979, to move afterwards to Cleveland and Boston; twenty
years later, on the occasion of the third centenary of its birth, an itinerant
exhibition brought a large Chardin collection from Paris (always at the Grand
Palais) to Düsseldorf, London and New York. As for Watteau, an important itinerant
exhibition, organised also in this case on the occasion of the third centenary
of the birth, was held between 1984 and 1985 in Washington, Paris and Berlin, and
is still considered memorable. Perhaps one could say that, even if painters loose the centrality of the attention by the literate community of an age, they can still recover public success thanks
to the irresistible psychological and commercial attractiveness of the exhibitions held because of the anniversaries. History of taste is and remains cyclical.
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| Fig. 33) The poster of the Chardin Exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1979 |
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| Fig. 34) The Watteau catalogue for the itinerant exhibition in Paris, Düsseldorf, London and New York in 1984 |
Malraux and Youcenar: Goya and Piranesi in the
age of existentialism
In the French literature of the second half of
1900, the interest for the Eighteenth century art was all focused on the
pains and horrors of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) and Giovan Battista
Piranesi (1720-1778), who inspired André Malraux (1901-1976) and Marguerite
Yourcenar (1903-1987) respectively. Also for them, as for Baudelaire one
hundred years before, the artists of the Eighteenth century were not inspiring sources
for linguistic delight, but for existential anxiety. Malraux was the symbol of
a whole generation: as de Gaulle's minister of culture, he incorporated the
desire for a profound renewal of French culture after World War II, however in
continuity with the masters of French tradition. Yourcenar is still today one
of the most famous female novelists in the world.
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| Fig. 35) André Malraux's essay on Goya in 1950 |
"To
Goya – as Dethurens wrote - Malraux
devoted an entire essay: Saturn. Destin, Art et Goya (1950). The Spanish artist represented in his eyes the most powerful
experience of painting, in line with his own approach to melancholy and death.
For History, the Disasters of War are
what Saturn is for mythology: in the order of material events (the atrocities
committed in Spain by Napoleon) as in the order of the symbol (Saturn, at the
same time the father of humanity and the devourer of his children), all leads
to the reign of horror " [70].
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| Fig. 36) Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Nada, from the Disasters of War, 1810-1820. Source: https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/nada-ello-dira/449af650-2d2d-4cad-bade-1e70e8cc9062 |
"The
demons - Malraux wrote in 1950 - have
now found their real form: the atrocious. From the time of his illness, Goya sought everything that caused immediately the
common anguish of humans: humiliation, nightmare, rape, imprisonment. His jails, his
tortures are now unfolding on the whole of Spain, and his art has become worthy
of collecting the public confession of a world that shouts what its etchings
whisper. (...) Like all the artists, Goya seeks with greed in real what he
needs. (...) Scenes from the
Disasters of War have the same role: if they are seen, they move the memory; if
they are told, they evoke the imagination. But Goya seeks in these scenes the
expression and not the reconstruction, and many of his engravings seem to slide
over the copper plates as ragged clouds: the cavalry charge, the women dragged
to be raped, the pulled dead body, the flights in front of fire, the fall of
the bodies under the bombardment, the raids of monks and looting soldiers, the
tumult, and even Nada, which however
represents death" [71].
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| Fig. 37) Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Imaginary Prison, Table No. 8, 1760. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In 1962 Marguerite Yourcenar interpreted
Piranesi’s Prisons as the symbol of
the denial of reality. Here are some of his sentences from her essay Sous bénéfice d'inventaire: "Let's face them, these Prisons, which are,
with the black paintings of Goya, one of the most secretive works that a man of
the Eighteenth century ever left us. First of all, this is a dream. No expert
in dream-related matter would hesitate a single moment, in the presence of
these pages marked by the main characteristics of a dream state: the negation
of time, the displacement of space, the suggestion of levitation, the thrill of
a resolved or overcome impossibility, a terror which is closer to ecstasy than
those who, from the outside, analyse the products of a visionary would think, the
absence of a visible link or contact between the parties or the characters of
the dream, and finally the fatal and necessary beauty" [72]..."Time, even more than air, does not move: a
perpetual chiaroscuro excludes the notion of time and the scary solidity of
buildings that of the wear of centuries" [73]. (...) "Our dizziness in front to the irrational
world of the Prisons is the result
not of the absence of measures (no one has ever been more geometric than
Piranesi) but of the multiplicity of calculations that are known to be exact
and which lead to a proportion which is known to be false" [74].
The return to a classical reading of Eighteenth-century
painting with Simon and Bonnefoy
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| Fig. 38) Jacques Louis David, The Tennis Court Oath on June 20, 1789, without date. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The influence of Eighteenth-century painting on
French literature has extended to the last decades of literary life in French,
with Claude Simon (1913-2005), Nobel Prize in 1985, and Yves Bonnefoy (born in
1923 and still living). The return of interest, among literates, to the art of
the Eighteenth century coincided, in these two cases, with a literary style that aims
to retrieve the classical prerogatives of fiction and poetry and even includes the
return to classical eckphrasis. We were, in fact, in an epoch of the late Twentieth century which intended to overcome the ideological anxieties of the
1960s and 1970s and to re-establish a visible link to the tradition (think of
the success of so-called "New Philosophers", such as Bernard-Henri
Levy, in those years). Simon's text, inspired by David's "The Tennis Court Oath" was drafted in 1981 as par of the
novel "Les Géorgiques" (the
choice of a Virgilian title reveals the classical intention). This was a very
detailed eckphrastic description (of which I am including only the beginning,
dedicated to the figure sitting on the left of David's composition): "The scene is the following: in a large room,
a man is sitting in front of a table with one of the two legs folded half under
his chair, raising the heel of the foot, with the right foot brought forward
and turned flat, while the tibia forms with the horizontal thigh an angle of
about forty-five degrees. The two arms are resting on the edge of the table,
their hands hold a sheet of paper (a letter?) on which his eyes are fixed. The
man is naked. Despite having a certain age, as shown by the receding hairline
in a face with thick strokes and pronounced cheeks, the regular practice of
gymnastic has undoubtedly kept the body, like for certain knights or certain soldiers,
a robust muscle system, whose projection one can follow - despite overweight -
under the fat layer. The same folds of the belly are as powerful as those of an
old wrestler whose weight does not obstruct the force, but adds to it" [75].
 |
| Fig. 39) Giambattista Tiepolo, Apollo leads Beatrice of Burgundy to the Genius Imperii, 1751 (Würzburg, residence). Source: Wikimedia Commons. |
The poet Yves Bonnefoy discussed in 1977, in
the essay "The Red Cloud",
the art of Tiepolo and in particular his use of colours. "But what surprises those who look at the
vaults of Palazzo Clerici or at Würzburg is the effect of colour, which is
entirely new in the history of Christianity. The baroque colour was thick, was
based on backlight effects, and also dramatically indicated the ever-ongoing,
never-completed transformation of existence in light. Here, however, it would
be said that the background itself is to develop light from its pigments, as if
it were a chandelier of thousands of lamps tinted in blue, orange and red colours. And yet this is not the light
painting that a happy moment in fifteenth century had dreamed of, to give
meaning to the recognized, rediscovered identity of divine and sensorial
reality. Since this new colour is as if it were not in the right place, in
relation to the proportions of nature; that
colour no longer has any relationship with the green of the foliage and the
warm colours of the fruits. That colour has acidic yellow colours, pink, and
purple, that the earth does not offer us. They suggest rather luxurious
coloured clothes, as if the sky had covered the ornaments of the festive Venice
that commissioned so many of these paintings. In Tiepolo, the clarity of colour is not the revelation of the divine
essence of what is here, with us, in us, like in the Baptisme of Christ by
Piero della Francesca: it is the unreal, it is once again a fiction that
manifests itself as false. (...) Indeed,
there is nothing true in this art but the bodies, especially the bodies of
young women, rich in flesh, nourished to life until arrogance, to preserve in
art what the true needs in real life: a direct experience of natural reality.
But all this is as if it were a scene, because this art is devoted to a
dialectic of sensuality and artifice, of frankness and of convention, which
serves above all the cause of culture" [76].
It goes without saying that I would be curious to see
what today’s French world of literature will have to say about the art of
Watteau and Chardin, Fragonard and David, Goya and Tiepolo, in a time when the
country has seemingly suffered a profound loss of confidence in its own future
because of a widespread sense of crisis. Did Michel Houellebecq, the prophet of
a despaired world, choose any of these artists? But now it is time to consider
what the anthology can offer us on the painting of the Nineteenth century. We
will do this in the third part of this post.
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three
End of Part Two
Go to Part Three
NOTES
[42] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p. 22
[43] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.22
[44] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.24
[45] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.27
[46] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.27
[47] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.27
[48] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.39
[49] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.49
[50] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.30
[51] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. pp.33-35
[52] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. pp.42-43
[53] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.44
[54] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.46
[55] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.108
[56] Jack Collings Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers, London, The New Age Press, 1909.
See http://fleursdumal.org/poem/187
[57] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.108-110
[58] See Jack Collings Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers, London (quoted).
[59] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.114
[60] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.114
[61] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.116
[62] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.137
[63] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.132
[64] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.140
[65] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.142
[66] Verlaine, Paul - Poems Under Saturn , (quoted) …. p. 258
[67] Verlaine, Paul - Poèmes saturniens, Translated by and with introduction by Karl Kirchwey, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011
[68] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.258
[69] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.265
[70] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.245
[71] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.379
[72] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.380
[73] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.384
[74] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.386
[75] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.426
[76] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.437
[57] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.108-110
[58] See Jack Collings Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers, London (quoted).
[59] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.114
[60] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.114
[61] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.116
[62] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.137
[63] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.132
[64] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.140
[65] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.142
[66] Verlaine, Paul - Poems Under Saturn , (quoted) …. p. 258
[67] Verlaine, Paul - Poèmes saturniens, Translated by and with introduction by Karl Kirchwey, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011
[68] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.258
[69] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.265
[70] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.245
[71] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.379
[72] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.380
[73] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.384
[74] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.386
[75] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.426
[76] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.437
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