History of Art Literature Anthologies
Click here to see all the anthologies reviewed in the series
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. 40) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Vow of Louis XIII, 1823 |
It would be utopian to think of offering the
reader, in the space of one post only, an even simply approximate image of the
interaction between literature and painting in France during the Nineteenth century.
The fact is that, exactly in the Nineteenth century, France was the most
privileged place in Europe for the development of these two arts (unlike, for
example, in Germany, where symphonic music and philosophy made particular
ground, or in Italy, with opera). Moreover, their development took place in
close mutual interaction. Dethurens’ anthology documented it with passages from works by the greatest
authors in French literature, from Hugo to Balzac, from Baudelaire to Zola,
from Mallarmé to Verlaine, including also other fifteen authors. The writings
of the writers accompanied, and often offered a noble justification for, the
evolution of French painting, from neoclassicism to romanticism, from realism
to symbolism.
In the impossibility of covering this evolution
in full, we will focus on the couple of artists who dominated aesthetic
discussion in the mid-nineteenth century, dividing the spirits between
classicism and romanticism: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix.
Specifically, we will focus on art criticism produced by the community of French literates around 1855, when the Exposition
universelle des beaux-arts was held in France, the first Universal Exhibition of Fine Arts in
the world, promoted by Napoleon III. Ingres, who was 75 years old, exhibited
there more than forty works; Delacroix (who was 57 and therefore younger) took
also part with more than thirty pieces. The two major artists of the first half
of the century were therefore present with a sort of parallel world retrospective
exhibitions: a gratifying opportunity for all art critics, in particular
literates, to comment on their paintings.
Limiting ourselves to two painters, we will
obviously be wrong to artists such as Courbet and Corot, Claude Monet and
Eduard Manet, Gauguin and Degas, Renoir and Van Gogh, as well as all post-Impressionists
and Symbolists of end century. And yet we would not know how to fix it, if not expanding the quotations infinitely.
Ingres
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| Fig. 41) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Luigi Calamatta, 1828 |
Ingres was, in the early Nineteenth century,
the champion of classical style, as well as the point of reference of
anti-romantic and conservative public opinion. It may be surprising, in this
sense, that the first quotation about his work in the anthology is by George
Sand, (1804-1876), one of the icons of romantic literature and emancipated
lifestyle, one of the major opponents of the regime of Restoration,
correspondent of Giuseppe Mazzini and co-founder of the Revue
indépendante in
support of the rights of the less wealthy. Not only that: the canvas, which was
here the subject of an extraordinarily positive evaluation by the female writer,
was "The Vow of Louis XIII",
which - using all iconographic instruments of Italian Renaissance painting -
offered a symbolic allegory of the link between Church and State.
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| Fig. 42) Luigi Calamatta, Ritratto di George Sand, 1840. Fonte: https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/14116 |
For George Sand, the qualities of this Ingres’ canvas were simplicity and sobriety, harmony and nobility. The pages quoted by
Pascal Dethurens were drawn from the complete collection of her writings, and
in particular from the posthumous volume of essays by the writer, entitled "“Questions d’art et de littérature”
(Questions of Art and Litterature) [77] (1878). More precisely, it was a short
article written by George Sand on "Ingres
and Calamatta" in 1837. Since the years of his youth, the Italian engraver Luigi Calamatta
(1801-1869) had been working with Ingres. This was the time when the French master was painting The Vow of Louis XVIII in Florence (precisely, in 1823), to exhibit
it at the Louvre Salon in the following year. The two artists remained
great friends throughout their lives, despite the age difference.
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| Fig. 43) Luigi Calamatta, The Vow of Louis XIII, engraved from Ingres's original, 1837. Source: https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1608151&partId=1&searchText=Calamatta%2C+Luigi&page=1 |
That work (for which Ingres received the Legion of Honour) was key for his
fortune in France, marking his affirmation at home after almost eighteen years
of voluntary exile in Italy. The advocates of classicism made it the symbol of
the opposition to the romanticism of Delacroix, who was present at that Salon
with the "Massacre of Scio".
Fourteen years later, in 1837, Calamatta produced, at Ingres's request, an
engraving of the canvas (which in the meantime had been transferred to the
cathedral of Mountaban, for which it was originally painted), so that his work was
documented to the readers' audience in the capital. As the scholar Rosalba
Dinoia explained us [78], thanks to this incision Calamatta won the honour
medal for the Salon exhibit. It was on
that occasion that George Sand published her article “Ingres and Calamatta” in 1837.
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| Fig. 44) Raphael, Sistine Madonna, 1513-14. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
It must be said that the painting (with its
obvious quotations from Raphael’s Sistine
Madonna) is not today anymore one of the best known of the French painter
and that the memory of Luigi Calamatta as a divulger of Italian Renaissance
culture in France (he was one of the masters of the artist and art critic
Charles Blanc) has now almost completely vanished.
But why did George Sand devote so much
attention to such a far-reaching world - in terms of aesthetics and politics -
from her own? In fact, there might be predominant personal reasons: George Sand
and Luigi Calamatta were great friends for over thirty years [79]. Ms Sand had
known him as an engraver, and Calamatta had portrayed her on many occasions and
different poses. Maurice, George's son, also married in 1862 Lina Calamatta,
daughter of the incisor [80].
Let's go back to Ms Sand’s pages in Dethurens’
anthology, which – as it was told - were a hymn to Ingres's classicism. "This majestic scene is made up of a lot of simplicity,
according to the classic way of the ancient masters. The kneeling king, with his lifted arms in front of the altar, offers
his sceptre and his crown to the queen of the skies, who appears in her glory,
holding in her arms the son of God. Two
young angels lift up the choir curtains and support them symmetrically, in
order to offer the king this celestial appearance. A group of small angels, of
lovely beauty, is immersed as deep as their back in the cloud that supports
Mary. Two of them moved below, touching the temple's marble. Standing in front
of Louis XIII, they are holding the table where the prince recorded the
devotional consecration of the French kingdom” [81]. Moving from a description to the critical evaluation, George Sand stated
that the figure of the Virgin "is
without doubt the most beautiful sacred creation that our century has produced
in painting (...). I think that it alone would be sufficient to put Ingres at
the head of the most beautiful artists of our day” [82].
These were years where the French public
opinion was not only divided between Ingres and Delacroix, but also on the role
of religion in art, with harsh controversies of a purely ideological nature. In
the second half of the Nineteenth century, the opposite and extreme positions in
favour of or against a public role of religion in public life corresponded to
diametrically different political stances: on the one hand, France assumed
during the Second Empire the role of
the military power guaranteeing the State of the Church against the attempts of
englobing Rome in unified Italy, and on the other hand the Third Republic proclaimed the principle of secularism. In fact, Sand
avoided giving a religious interpretation of the painting, and she rather saw
in it a transfiguration of mythological iconographies. Therefore, she wrote that
Ingres wanted to depict the Virgin "severely,
without pity as consciousness, without indulgence as justice. (...) In the
representation of the Vow of Louis XIII, the Virgin is the Christian Themis
[note of the translator: the Greek female titan, symbol of justice], and she
seems to say to Louis: «You have a great task
to do.» In Ingres's thought, it is the immortal equity
saying: «There is nothing good that is not
great, there is nothing lasting that is not true»” [83].
Together with an iconographic interpretation, George
Sand offered a more formal stylistic assessment: "In Ingres’ painting, the Virgin is in a perpendicular position,
well-lighted from the back and shown in full relief. The mother and child group
is drawn more clearly than the lower group. These latest figures, lightened as a
refraction, have greater nobility and transparency, although they are actually less
illuminated. This arrangement of light is of great effect and the main figure
obtains an important solemnity. Child Jesus is a masterpiece of design. The
head is just as regular and as divine as that of the mother. But what is
unparalleled is the movement of the Virgin's two hands, which lie with the calm
and the ease of the strength on the sides of Jesus. Their aptitude reveals
power, and the whole figure of the Virgin is impregnated with divine pride”
[84].
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| Fig. 45) Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Antiochus and Stratonice, 1940. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
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| Fig. 46) Piero della Francesca, Flagellation of Christ, 1455–1460. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In 1846, Ingres exhibited eleven works at the Galerie du bazar Bonne-Nouvelle, a private gallery organizing
charity exhibitions, and exposing paintings lent to this end by private
collectors. In addition to those by Ingres, the gallery presented hundreds of
works by great masters of French art (Greuze, David, Géricault
and many others) [85]. A young Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote an article
on the exhibition, titled "Le Musée
classique du bazar Bonne-Nouvelle". Concerning Ingres, Baudelaire
focused in the article on the "Great
Bather" (1808), "Small
Bather" (1828) and "Antiochus
and Stratonice", a work performed in Rome in 1840 and less known than
the first two. Despite the highly discrete representation, the theme of this
last work was obscene (and perhaps this is the reason why Baudelaire dealt with
it): Antiochus fell deadly ill because he was secretly in love with his
father's second wife, Stratonice. The doctor was controlling the beat of the dying,
while the father laid prostrate at the foot of the bed. And yet it was the woman
- on the left - to stand out the most in the canvas (how not to think of the Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca?). in fact, when the woman appeared, the patient's heartbeat suddenly
accelerated, revealing to the doctor the secret and prohibited passion, but
also precluding to the sudden death. Baudelaire wrote of the painting as a
classically inspired composition that would have filled Poussin with
astonishment.
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| Fig. 47) Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Valpinçon Bather (La Grande Baigneuse), 1808. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In the article of 1846, Baudelaire also disagreed
openly with the critics of Ingres, taking his defence. "Monsieur Ingres has for a long time refused
to exhibit at the Salon and, in our opinion, he is right. His stupendous talent
always ends up making a fiasco in the midst of these crowds, of this stunned
and fatigued audience, who undergoes the law of those who cried more. (...) I
hear that Ingres' painting would be grey. Open
your eyes, dull nation, and tell me if you've ever seen any more lucid and
shimmering painting, and maybe ever a more intense search for colours
(...). I also hear that Ingres would be a
mischievous drawer who ignores aerial perspective, and his painting would be as
flat as a Chinese mosaic. We can only replicate that (...) his Stratonice [shows] (...) a huge
arrangement of bright tones and effects (...). One of the things, in our
opinion, which distinguishes Ingres's talent, is his love for women. His
libertinage is serious and full of conviction. Ingres is never so happy or so
effective but when his genius lies with the charm of a young beauty. The
muscles, the hair bends, the shadows of the dimples, the mountainous skin
ripples, nothing is missing” [86].
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| Fig. 48) A photo of the 1855 Universal Paris Fine Arts Exhibition. Source: http://expositions.bnf.fr/napol/grand/113.htm |
Nine years later, on the occasion of the Exposition universelle des beaux-arts in
1855, Baudelaire attempted to give a critical account of the whole work of the
artist: "What does Monsieur Ingres
looks for, then, what does he dream? What did he come to say to this world?
What new extension is he bringing to the gospel of painting? I would be happy to believe that his ideal
is a kind of ideal made half of holiness, half of calm, almost indifferent,
something analogous to the ancient ideal, to which he added the curiosities and
minutiae of modern art” [87]. Despite these initially highly appreciative words, the poet dwelled here with a topic that was
making a lot of talk: some people said that Ingres always used the same physical
model of man and woman, thereby adapting and correcting nature, and thus
committing trickery. On the one hand, Baudelaire tried to give a noble
interpretation to the argument of fraud against nature: "Ingres' design is the design of a man who
created a system. He believes that nature must be corrected, amended; that the
happy, pleasant deception, performed for the purpose of the pleasure of the
eyes, is not just a right but a duty” [88].
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| Fig. 49) Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville, 1845. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
On the other hand, concluding on this point,
Baudelaire did not hesitate in 1855 to draw some critical conclusions about
Ingres's manner, a sign that he intended to qualify the past praise of the
article of 1846 with some more critical assessments: "Drawn from this almost morbid concern of style, the painter often
suppresses the model or decreases it to the unseen, hoping to give more value
to the contour, so that his figures have the air of models of a very correct
shape, inflated with soft and inanimate matter, foreign to the human body.
Sometimes the eye falls on lovely details, honestly expressive, but then a bad
thought comes to our mind: that Ingres was not looking for nature, but that
nature made violence to the painter, and that this tall and mighty lady
[nature] dominated him by her irresistible ascendant” [89]. This is a
judgment that now is no longer shared: Ingres is today particularly appreciated
as a portraitist and designer (think of the pages dedicated to him a few years ago by David Hockney).
After George Sand and Charles Baudelaire, the
attention to Ingres in the world of letters was witnessed in the anthology Écrire la peinture by some pages of Théophile Gautier (1811-1872).
Gautier's judgment was different from that of Baudelaire, and it was notably
undiconditionnaly positive, in line with George Sand's pages of 1837. Yet, we would have
expected to find Sand and Gautier on opposite positions; Ms Sand was the
representative of a politically and social engaged literature, Gautier instead
the poet and theoretician of the so-called "art for art". In the preface of his Premières poésies, a programmatic text who eventually inspired all
the currents of aestheticism in the Nineteenth century, Gautier wrote in 1832:
"The author saw nothing else in the
world but what he sees from his window, and does not want to see anything else.
There is no political colour: there is neither red, nor white nor even
tricolour; there is nothing ... Nothing in the composition of the verses is a
pretext [used by the author to support a view]. As for the proponents of a useful literature, utopians, economists,
Saint-Simonian supporters and others who asked the author what the purpose is [Translator's Note: in French, A quoi
cela rime ?, and therefore literally: how is it rhymed?], he will reply: the first verse rhymes with the second, when the
rhyme is not ugly, and so on. What is it for? It serves to be beautiful. Is it
not enough? Like flowers, like fragrances, like birds, like all what man failed
to modify and to ruin for his own use. In general, as soon as something becomes
useful, it stops being beautiful” [90].
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| Fig. 50) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1819. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
On 18 and 25 July 1855, Gautier devoted an
article in Le Moniteur universel (of
which he was the art critic from 1855 to 1868) to Ingres's presence in the above
mentioned 1855 Exposition
universelle. The Moniteur was not a simple daily; founded
as the official organ of the French Revolution, it had become since 1852 the Journal
officiel de l'Empire français, and therefore every article revealed the aesthetic preferences of the
Second Empire. In the long passage quoted by Dethurens, Gautier dwelled on the
theme of Ingres’ odalisques: Ingres "loves
this theme, so favourable to painting, such an easy plea of nakedness in our
era, where we are all dressed from head to toe. He made many odalisques or
bathers" [91]. Evidently, his article tells us that even
the conservatively minded public opinion (the one reading the Moniteur to inquire about the activities
of government during the Second Empire) did not have too many problems either
with a description of female naked body clearly conceived by Gautier to capture
the erotic fantasy of the male readers or with an iconographic description
confirming every conceptual prejudice of colonial orientalism (based on the
idea, mentioned by Gautier, of an 'enslaved
beauty'). Beyond the intrinsic aestheticism of Gautier’s prose, Ingres was
here proposed as a "regime painter".
"If
ever a divinely beautiful creature has exposed herself in his caste nudity to
the looks of unworthy men to contemplate her" Gautier wrote "it is surely the lying Odalisque [note
of editor: the Odalisque couchée, nowadays known as Grande Odalisque]: Nothing more perfect has ever arisen from the brush. Raised in half on
the elbow, resting on pillows, the odalisque - turning her head towards the
spectator with a flexion full of
grace - shows the shoulders of a
golden whiteness, a back
crossed by a delightful serpentine line, kidneys and legs of an ideally shaped
softness, feet whose plant has never trampled anything other than the carpets
of Izmir and the eastern alabaster steps of the harem pools, and finally feet
whose fingers, seen from the bottom, bend sluggishly, fresh and white like
camellia gems, and seem to be modelled on some ivory of a miraculously found
Phidias. The other, languidly
abandoned arm, swirling along the contours of the hips, holds in her hand a
fancy of feathers that escapes, and is sufficiently away from the body to let
see a virgin breast of exquisite shape, the breasts of Greek Venus, sculpted by
Cleomenes for the Temple of Cyprus and transported to the Pasha's seraglio"
[92].
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| Fig. 51) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, detail, 1819 |
"A sort of
cashmere turban, tailored to an extreme taste, and whose fringes fall behind
the nape, wraps the top of his head, revealing a bandana over which a wrap-around
crown is bound; pearl clusters complete this oriental hairstyle. The eyes,
whose bright green pupils look to the side; the nose, with red nostrils like
the inside of a shell; her mouth, dilated in a quiet smile; the full and a bit
wide cheeks; the chin, designed with a round and voluptuous curve; it all
contributes to the formation of a type where the individuality of the Orient
blends with the ideal of Greece. It is precisely this - and it must have been
the intention of the painter - the enslaved beauty in its melancholy serenity
(...)” [93].
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| Fig. 52) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Odalisque with Female Slave, 1855. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Gautier's article was motivated by the latest
creation by Ingres: the Odalisque with
Female Slave in 1855. "The
second odalisque is a young blond woman, tired of the snappy seraglio's
languor, with the head inclined in her arms, between the waves of her flowing
hair. Her naked body contorts in a
pose contracted by a spasm of boredom. Perhaps some secret desire that could
not be achieved, some crazy aspiration to freedom shakes this beautiful
creature, buried alive in the grave of the harem, and makes her roll over on
braids and mosaics. A young, Abyssinian female slave whose slim shoulders
glimpse a bronze-like chest, kneels
at the white favourite and plays on the lute some of his wild and bizarre
melodies, which could kill pain as the song of a nanny, except that they might
also inspire a strange nostalgia of unknown homelands” [94].
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| Fig. 53) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Roger Delivering Angelica, 1855. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In the same year, Gautier celebrated, in his essay
on Fine Arts in Europe, "Roger Delivering Angelica", a 1819
canvas by Ingres, a work inspired by Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Here too, Gautier's words were mainly devoted to
the feminine nude figure, which was however given here an entirely chaste
interpretation: "As for Angelica,
she is the most soothing, the most delightful figure in its pearly pallor than
an imagination loving the beautiful can dream. (...) Angelica is not a living statue; she is a woman, and even a modern
woman. We do not know what might be finer, more slender, and why not say it,
despite the word seems weird, more Christian than this figure. How she bends
her swan neck, perhaps a little too long! How she spreads the blond cascade of
her hair! How she stretches her eyes out to sky in her tender blue"
[95].
Eugène Delacroix
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| Fig. 54) Eugène Delacroix, The Barque of Dante, 1822. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) was the hero of
romantic poetry in French and European painting, and therefore Ingres' rival in
the aesthetic field. While he was also a high quality writer (think of his Journal), he was recalled by Pascal Dethurens with
writings by two above-mentioned authors (Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier)
who also appeared in the same anthology with passages on Ingres, and by a contemporary writer
(Assia Djebar). Even in the case of Delacroix, 1855 was a decisive year: as
already said, the Paris Exposition
universelle presented 35
works of him.
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| Fig. 55) Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827-1828. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
In truth, Charles Baudelaire protested because
one of his favourite paintings by Delacroix, i.e. The Death of Sardanapalus, was not included in the Exposition. The story is that of
Sardanapalus, the last king of Assyria, who – already defeated by the enemies –
ordered that all his wives and concubines (along with all pages, dogs and
horses) be killed before committing suicide himself. "I'm upset that Sardanapalus did not come back this year. Organisers
would have displayed very beautiful, clear, bright, rose-coloured women, at
least to what I seem to remember. Sardanapalus was also as beautiful as a woman. Generally, Delacroix's
women can be divided into two groups: the ones who are easy to understand,
often mythological, and necessarily beautiful (cuddled up nymphs, pictured on
the back, like on the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon [at the Louvre]). They
are copious, very strong, huge, and abundant; they are distinguished by a
wonderfully transparent flesh and admirable hair” [96].
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| Fig. 56) Eugène Delacroix, Apollo slays Python, 1850-1851 (Galerie d’Apollon, Louvre, Paris). Source: Wikimedia Commons |
“As for
the others (...) I would like to call them intimate women. It would seem that
they keep a painful secret in their eyes, impossible to hide in the depths of
their dissimulation. Their pallor is like a revelation of inner struggles. Whether
they are distinguished because of the charm of crime or the smell of holiness, whether
their gestures are languishing or violent, these heart or soul sick women have
in their eyes the lead grey colour of fever or the abnormal and bizarre splendour
of their evil and, in the gaze, the intensity of what is supernatural. But
always and in any case, they are distinct women, essentially distinct; In
short, Monsieur Delacroix seems to me to be the best gifted artist to express
the modern woman, especially the modern woman in her heroic manifestation, in
the hellish or divine sense” [97].
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| Fig. 57) Eugène Delacroix, Sketch for Lions Hunt, 1854. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
“[Delacroix’s] new and unknown pictures to the public [at the Exposition universelle] - Baudelaire
continues - are the two Foscaris, the
Arab Family, the Lions Hunt, an Old Head (a portrait of Delacroix is a rarity).
These different paintings serve to see the prodigious security which the master
reached. Lions Hunt is a true colour explosion (this term should not be
interpreted literally). Never again anything more beautiful, more intense colours
will be able to penetrate the soul through our eye channel” [98].
As for Gautier, Dethurens reproduced a
quotation on Delacroix from the same article in the Moniteur universel of 18 and 25 July 1855 commenting the Exposition universelle, article already
considered in connection with Ingres. Gautier turned out to be an enthusiast supporter
of Ingres, but also his attention to Delacroix was not sporadic: the literature
critic Carine Dreuille [99] analysed all the poet’s writings on the painter and
we can learn from her that Gautier followed regularly Delacroix’s exhibitions at
the Salons from 1832 to 1868, five years after the death of the painter.
"The
Barque of Dante..., despite the fact that it dates back to 1822, and therefore
to the artist's first youth, was fully representative of his art: it is there
that he established his measure, and a similar start is a master stroke. Dante
and Virgil, led by Phlegyas, cross the lake surrounding the infernal city of
Dite: the damned are attacking the boat and try to enter. Dante recognizes
amongst them a few Florentines" [100]. It should be said, however,
that although Gautier acknowledges that this work opened a new chapter in the
history of French art, his stylistic analysis was very weak, mainly based on an
iconographic interpretation based on the presumed original intention of the
painter’s will when producing a scene full of horror: "From the dark backdrop, marked by the red
smoke of eternal fire, are detached Dante and Virgil, standing on the boat.
Dante comes closer to his guide Virgil, with that terror that emerges from
almost every tercet of the Divine Comedy. The poet from Mantua, accustomed to
the horrors of the empire of darkness for a dozen centuries, is much calmer and
is not overwhelmed either by the grizzled mouths or the convulsive hands,
biting and scratching the parapet of the boat. To the point that the terrified
Florentine observes these bodies, twisted as a result of unnecessary efforts,
as well as these pale trunks as if they were pieces of dead flesh. On them, in
the muddy waves, is dropped the blazing light of the hellish day. One of these
damned, curved on the back of a wave like a sentenced to death who is put to
the wheel, is certainly one of the best pieces Delacroix has ever painted” [101].
From a more formal point of view, Gautier noted that "the deafening and veiled harmony of the backgrounds, and the softened
tones of the waters, put the damned and the group of the two poets in the
foreground" [102].
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| Fig. 58) Eugène Delacroix, The Barque of Dante, 1822, detail |
Gautier's same article on the Universal Exposition
described The Massacre at Chios, a
work of 1824. "The Massacre at Chios
shows the artist free from every imitation, every influence and now in full
possession of himself” [103]. The painter is aware that, when the canvas had
been exhibited for the first time at the Salon
of 1824, "these horrible scenes,
whose ugliness was not disguised by any academic safeguard, this feverish and
convulsive design, this violent colour, this rage lifted the indignation of the
classicists, whose wigs were like those of Haendel, and excited to the contrary
the young painters for their unprecedented brazenness and their novelty, which
nothing had anticipated " [104].
Here's how Gautier described the scene to the Moniteur's readers: "Under a blue, yellow-striped sky, and in the
midst of the dark blue of the sea, stands out the whiteness of a naked,
devastated land covered with dead bodies, scattered with blood clots, where the
sun seems to want to foment the plague in-between the putrefaction, the last
vengeance of the corpses; the smoke of the fires rises in the distance, while
some of the slaughterers complete their work of destruction in the foreground
and a hungry infant sticks to the breast of the already dead mother. An old,
worn-out, wrinkled, dry lady, stunned by the pain, vaguely glances in front of
herself. A young woman leans weeping against the shoulder of a dying man; his
agony leaves him with open and upset eyes, his body stiffens in a last
convulsion” [105].
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| Fig. 59) Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, 1824. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Then Gautier focused on a detail that, on the
one hand, introduced a new tragic element, while on the other hand offered him
an occasion to comment again on the colour of the painting. "Farther a Turkish soldier, rearing on a
piebald, drags a young Greek tied to the tail of the horse. With a naked torso,
she turns to try to undo the knots of her rope with a striking revolt movement.
Between these fragments of dead, wounded and dying people, this pure, white,
and virgin body produces a pretty terrible dissonance, offering an even greater
impression of the horror of the massacre. Everyone around this beautiful young
man takes on more lurid, yellowish, cadaveric, pestilential, more greener and
purple shades” [106].
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| Fig. 60) Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834. Source: Wikimedia Commons |
Finally, Delacroix resurfaced in the anthology in the words of Assia Djebar (1936-2015), a French-speaking Algerian-born
novelist who has recently passed away, member of the French Academy of Sciences
since 2005. In 1980, Djebar wrote a collection of tales about women's
emancipation entitled "Women of Algiers in their Apartment", using the same title as Delacroix's painting
of 1834.
"Women of Algiers in their Apartment: three women, two of whom sitting in
front of a hookah. The third, in the foreground, is lying in the middle,
leaning against some pillows. A female servant, who gives us her back for three
quarters, raises an arm as if she wanted to close the heavy upholstery that
hides this closed universe. All the sense of the painting is based on the
relationship that women have with their body and the place of their captivity.
Resigned prisoners in a closed place, illuminated by a kind of dream light that
is coming from nowhere, like the light of a greenhouse or an aquarium. Delacroix's genius depicts these ladies at
the same time as present and distant, enigmatic to the highest degree" [107].
For the first time, Ms Djebar wrote, a Western
painter - the heir to a tradition that had transformed the seraglio into a mere
opportunity to show nakedness - presented these women as a symbol of female solitude, in an atmosphere where every communication was fully impossible.
"Always expecting Women (...) With
us viewers, they cannot have any dialogue. They do not abandon themselves to, or
refuse our look. Strangers, but terribly present in this rarefied cloistered
atmosphere. (...) If the picture of Delacroix unconsciously fascinates us, it
is not, in fact, because of this superficial Orient that it proposes us, in a shadow
of light and silence, but because - putting
these women in front of us while they are in the act of observing - it reminds
us that we normally do not a right to observe. This picture itself is a stolen
look” [108].
Our review of the writers dealing with Ingres
and Delacroix has thus opened with an emancipated woman of the Nineteenth
century, George Sand, and is now closing with an Algerian feminist, Assia
Djebar, writing in the years preceding the terrible decade of the civil war. Considering
the case thoroughly, almost all the paintings reviewed by Baudelaire and Gautier in this post related to
the iconographic representation of women, and the two writers identify both painters as guardians of the new definition
of a modern woman. It is perhaps a sign that every age has captured the
modernity of the art in terms of its capacity to represent the
female world of its time through painting.
In the next and last part of this post we will make
a time jump and see how the relationship between literature and painting changed
when abstraction became a dominating principle in the art of the twentieth
century.
End of Part Three
NOTES
[78] Dinoia, Rosalba - Luigi Calamatta (1801-1869). L’uomo, l’artista, le opere. Temi per una analisi critica. (The man, the artist, the work. Themes for a critical analysis), Quotation at page 45. See: http://dspace.unitus.it/bitstream/2067/2414/1/rdinoia_tesid.pdf
[79] Dinoia, Rosalba - Luigi Calamatta, quoted, p. 8 and ff.
[80] Jacobs, Alphonse. - George Sand à Croisset et Flaubert à Nohant, From: "Les Amis de Flaubert", n° 8, 1956. Quotation at page 60. See
http://www.amis-flaubert-maupassant.fr/article-bulletins/008_023/
[81] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 496 pages. Quotation at page 73.
[82] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.73
[83] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.73
[84] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.73
[85] Shelton, Andrew Carrington – Ingres and his critics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Quotation at page 156. See
[81] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2015, 496 pages. Quotation at page 73.
[82] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.73
[83] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.73
[84] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.73
[85] Shelton, Andrew Carrington – Ingres and his critics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Quotation at page 156. See
https://books.google.de/books?id=veSn-tSofF0C&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=1846+ingres+exposition&source=bl&ots=LAr6IXPH3W&sig=QBgTRmCA9hz8XjEldClcZrdxmag&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwighY2pvOfUAhVNUlAKHS36BksQ6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&q=bonne-nouvelle&f=false
[86] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.119
[87] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.120
[88] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.120
[89] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.120
[90] Hautecœur, Louis - Littérature et peinture en France du XVIIe au XXe siècle, Armand Colin, Paris, 1942, 325 pages. Quotation at pages 90-91.
[91] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.84
[92] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.84
[93] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.84
[94] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.87
[95] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.87
[96] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.125
[97] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.125
[98] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.129
[99] Dreuille, Carine – Eugène Delacroix vu par Théophile Gautier, 1999. See:
[86] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.119
[87] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.120
[88] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.120
[89] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.120
[90] Hautecœur, Louis - Littérature et peinture en France du XVIIe au XXe siècle, Armand Colin, Paris, 1942, 325 pages. Quotation at pages 90-91.
[91] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.84
[92] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.84
[93] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.84
[94] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.87
[95] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.87
[96] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.125
[97] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.125
[98] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.129
[99] Dreuille, Carine – Eugène Delacroix vu par Théophile Gautier, 1999. See:
[100] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.90
[101] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.90
[102] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.90
[103] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.93
[104] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.93
[105] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.93
[106] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.93
[107] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.466
[108] Dethurens, Pascal - Écrire la peinture. De Diderot à Quignard, (quoted) …. p.469
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