David to Delacroix: The Rise of Romantic Mythology

David to Delacroix

David to Delacroix

The Rise of Romantic Mythology

Dorothy Johnson

Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

The publication of books in this series is made possible through the generous support of William G. Rand in memory of Bettie Allison Rand.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Dorothy

David to Delacroix : the rise of romantic mythology/

Dorothy Johnson. —1st ed.

p. cm. —(Bettie Allison Rand lectures in art history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3451-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Mythology, Classical, in art. 2. Romanticism in art—France.

3. Psychology and art—France. 4. Art, French—18th century—Themes,

motives. 5. Art, French—19th century—Themes, motives. I. Title.

N7760.J64 2010

704.9′4892130944—dc22   2010032658

cloth 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1

In loving memory of

my brother, John L. Winter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: David and the Rise of Romantic Mythology

1 Eros and the Origins of Art: Girodet's Mythic Meditations

2 From Eros to Thanatos: The Mapping of the Mythological Body

3 Ingres and the Enigma

4 Mythological Madness and the Feminine: From Gros's Suicidal Sappho to Delacroix's Murderous Medea

Conclusion: The Continuum of Myth

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book developed from the Bettie Allison Rand Lectures that I gave at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in fall 2008. It is always a great pleasure to present ideas before an intelligent and attentive audience on a subject that is dear to one's heart and about which one has been meditating for many years. For this privilege I wish to thank Mary Sheriff, whose kind invitation to give the Rand Lectures led to this book. Her generous and enthusiastic support over many years has been invaluable. In particular, her many superb publications on women in French art and culture and other germane matters on the eighteenth century were essential to my thinking about women in myth. I would also like to thank Mary Sheriff and Keith Luria for their generous hospitality during my stay in Chapel Hill. I am very grateful to the faculty and students of the Art and Art History Department at the University of North Carolina, as well as to friends and colleagues, who gave me such a warm reception there. Their questions inspired me to see pertinent issues from new perspectives. It was a delight to meet Bill Rand, whose generosity funds the Rand Lecture Series in honor and memory of his wife, Bettie Allison Rand. I particularly enjoyed our conversations about mythological subjects in art.

This book owes its beginnings to Jacques de Caso, teacher and friend, who first suggested that I write on mythology, when he, as all good mentors do, offered unstinting encouragement. Over the entire course of my career, I have had many enlightening conversations with him on myth, in which he generously shared his incomparable knowledge and insights. It is a great pleasure to express my gratitude. I owe a great debt to Christopher M. S. Johns and Beth Wright, two superb scholars and colleagues, who read the manuscript in its entirety and made apposite suggestions and comments. A book that has been meditated on over such a long time naturally incurs many debts. I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have benefited this book in various and innumerable ways: Mark Antliff, Sylvain Bellenger, David Carrier, Elisabeth Fraser, Gudrun Gersmann, Stéphane Guégan, Martial Guédron, Basil Guy, Barthélemy Jobert, Hubertus Kohle, Anne Lafont, Patricia Leighton, Régis Michel, and Véronique Meyer. At the University of Iowa, I would like to thank dear friends and colleagues Robert Rorex, John Scott, Katherine Tachau, and Wallace Tomasini, for sharing wonderful ideas and stimulating conversations over the years. I thank also Eric Dean for his generous technical assistance with images. I am grateful to my research assistant, Abigail Yoder, who assisted with technical aspects of the manuscript preparation. The University of Iowa also provided generous funding to help support the research and writing of this book, through Career Development Awards, the Arts and Humanities Initiative Award, and the Roy J. Carver Professorship fund.

I am grateful to have been invited to lecture on subjects that dealt in whole or in part with Romantic mythology in many venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the William and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Louvre, the Institut Historique Allemand in Paris, the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Northwestern University, the Otto Friedrich University of Bamberg, the University of Cincinnati, the International Conference on Western Art History in Taipei, the University of Marne-la-Vallée, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, among others.

I would like to thank two eminent scholars who are no longer with us but whose encouragement and generous sharing of expertise benefited this book. I remember the excitement I felt as a graduate student when I went to the mailbox one morning and received a letter from Robert Rosenblum, whom I did not know personally at the time but whose foundational work on eighteenth-century art I, as was true for every other scholar of the period, was well aware of. This letter opened up a dialogue that only ended with his death. His generosity to a young scholar (a generosity that I later found to be characteristic of him) made a lasting impression upon me.

I was lucky to have studied French literature at the University of California, Berkeley, with Ted Rex, whose expertise extended to eighteenth-century art and music, among many other aspects of French culture. Ted remained a lifelong mentor and friend who instantiated ideals of breadth as well as depth in scholarship that are fast disappearing. Having conversations on Greek myth in his beautiful garden in the Berkeley hills with the shimmering sunlight and the panoramic view of the Bay could not but make one think that one had been magically transported to the original academy in Athens.

At UNC Press I would like to thank my superb editor, Elaine Maisner, for her tremendous support, and Paul Betz for his patience in responding to my many queries.

Last, I thank my husband, Jack Johnson, who has contributed to this book more than I can say and with whom I share this book and my life.

David to Delacroix

Introduction

David and the Rise of Romantic Mythology

The devotee of myth is in a way a philosopher,

for myth is made up of things that cause wonder.

–ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, I, 982b 18–19

In this book we will explore a phenomenon that merits further attention, the rise of Romantic mythology in French art.¹ Romantic mythology in the visual arts was a pan-European movement, but mythic subject matter played a particularly prepotent role in French art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The fascination with myth and its meanings that developed during the eighteenth century in the domain of literature as well as the visual arts intensified circa 1800 in France. Vast numbers of new mythological images were created in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries and can be found in virtually every arena of the visual arts—from large-scale mythological paintings and sculptures exhibited at the Salons to smaller-scale paintings and statuettes, drawings, prints, and book illustrations (Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, enjoyed a popularity verging on mania and went through many illustrated editions). The built environment equally abounded in mythological subjects, which adorned tapestries, furniture, and objects of various types and functions—porcelain, table decoration, and even wallpaper.² By 1800, depictions of mythic figures could be found everywhere, from the world of the powerful and elite to the domain of the bourgeoisie.

In France during this period, we encounter a great enthusiasm for and engagement with myth, which was widespread and entered many levels of French culture and society. Earlier in the eighteenth century, in accord with a perdurable European tradition, mythology had been an integral part of the privileged world of the king and court. Louis XIV's self-identification with Apollo had famously demonstrated that mythological persona could be assumed as a flattering guise to support political and cultural power (mythologized portraits of the elite, in fact, would enjoy continual revivals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—one thinks of their popularity with Napoleon and his family, for example).³

Familiarity with the stories of mythology, which were referred to as fables, were an essential part of educated high culture in the eighteenth century. In his treatise on education, Traité des études, of 1726, a work that remained influential throughout the century, Charles Rollin wrote of the importance of knowing myths to understanding literature as well as art: "There are other books exposed to the eyes of everyone: paintings, prints, tapestries, statues. These are so many enigmas to those who do not know la fable, which is often the explanation and the dénouement of the work. These come up in conversation fairly often."⁴ In his entry, Mythologie, in the Encyclopédie of 1765, Louis de Jaucourt reiterates this position: "This is why knowledge, at least superficial knowledge, of la fable is so widespread. Our theater, our lyrical and dramatic plays, and our poetry of all genres allude to it constantly; the engravings, paintings, and statues that decorate our cabinets, galleries, ceilings, and gardens are almost always derived from la fable. . . . La fable is the patrimony of the arts."⁵

We might expect that the importance of this patrimony of myth with its attendant ties to the court and elite culture would disappear with the tumultuous events of the French Revolution and its aftermath in the 1790s when self-conscious efforts were made to erase the aristocratic past and its institutions. We find in the case of mythology in the visual arts that the opposite is true. During the 1790s, in fact, at the very time when religious subject matter becomes untenable due to Revolutionary and Republican ideologies, myth takes on a new momentum, particularly myths related to eros and desire, as we shall see.

This study seeks to examine anew the use of myth as an essential visual language in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France to communicate contemporaneous ideas and concerns. Representations from Graeco-Roman mythology have generally been folded into discussions of the development of neoclassicism, with Joseph-Marie Vien being credited in France with establishing the neoclassical aesthetics of myth.⁶ But the new language of myth and the artists who forged it transcend this narrow classification and time frame. As we shall see, mythic subjects and interpretations become a central mode of meditating upon modern mores, culture, and the human condition.

To study comprehensively the range and variety of the overwhelming efflorescence of mythic representation during this period would be a daunting task, one that would fill many volumes and still only begin to give a more complete picture. This study takes on a more modest goal, namely to offer insights into the passionate zeal for myth in the visual arts in the context of its intersections with other domains of the late Enlightenment. We will do so through the examination of salient examples of some of the major artists of the time, from David to Delacroix. We will focus our attention principally on painting, bringing in examples of sculpture from time to time (the arena of sculpture, quite expectedly, remained profoundly engaged with myth throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).⁷

It should not surprise us that during this period of mythological revival in the visual arts writings on myth would also be copious.⁸ Up until the 1770s, much of the writing on myth in France was informed by the definition given in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie of 1694, which characterized fable or myth as something feigned and invented in order to instruct and entertain.⁹ This definition, which implies an intellectual superiority and safely relegates myth to a world of poetry and imagination, informed many of the highly regarded treatises on myth, such as B. le Bouvier de Fontenelle's De l'origine des fables of 1724. Fontenelle wrote: Religion and good sense have disabused us of the fables of the Greeks; but they still remain with us through means of poetry and painting, for which it seems they have found the secret of making themselves necessary.¹⁰ This idea also informs Abbé Banier's Explication historique des fables of 1710, which went through many editions in the eighteenth century.¹¹ Banier and other Enlightenment mythologists also theorized about the historical importance of myth and its allegorical meanings.

These ideas were important to educators of the period, who asserted the importance of teaching mythology, notwithstanding the potential dangers of its erotic stories for the young. These stories could be turned into moral, didactic tales, as found in one of the most popular educational works of the period—François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon's Les aventures de Télémaque, a moralized retelling of Telemachus's adventures as he seeks to find his father, Odysseus, and in so doing encounters many temptations and pitfalls, often erotic in nature.¹² This book, originally written for the dauphin and published in 1699, went through many editions in the eighteenth century, and numerous episodes were depicted in paintings of the period, such as Charles-Joseph Natoire's famous series of 1739.¹³ In addition to teaching morality through myths, educational treatises would also safely place mythology at a distance by associating it with primitive man.

In his 1762 educational tract, Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had earlier opposed the role of myth in modern culture, wrote that all works of Nature were man's first deities.¹⁴ Such ideas, which initially served to express the intellectual distance traversed from early cultures to the Enlightenment, would gain momentum as part of a new anthropological interest in myth and its origins in early cultures, as we find in two seminal works of the later eighteenth century—Court de Gébelin's Le monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne (1773–82) and Charles Dupuis's highly influential L'origine de tous les cultes of 1795 (these works, of course, owe a debt to Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova of 1725, which placed such strong emphasis on the importance of myth in the development of human history and culture).¹⁵

By 1806, we encounter a very different view of myth from that expressed in the 1694 Dictionnaire. Classicist, archaeologist, and mythographer A. L. Millin, in his lengthy entry on mythology in the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, wrote: We can say that there is a mythological truth just as there is a historical truth and that it is not more permissible to distance oneself from it than from history. . . . Mythology gives us the understanding of a large number of historical singularities concerning customs, usages, and the religion of the Ancients.¹⁶ According to Millin, then, mythology is no longer seen as something feigned and invented in order to instruct and entertain but rather revelatory of a kind of truth—in fact, a truth equal in value to historical truth, and one that can also reveal the nature of ancient religions.

The enthusiasm for myth and its importance to French Enlightenment culture in the visual arts around 1800 was given impetus during the reign of Louis XIV. As is well known, the prestige of the antique with its historical associations of art and empire and the concomitant prestige of mythology, with its capricious court of the gods and goddesses, was of central importance to Louis XIV, the sun king, who, as mentioned earlier, famously associated himself with Apollo, as seen in much of the iconography at Versailles.¹⁷ Louis XIV had acquired many antique sculptures from Italy and had marble replicas made of others to adorn his palace at Versailles. Mythological painting and sculpture, often commissioned in monumental format as decor for palaces or private residences, remained an essential feature of the privileged domain of the king and court for successive regimes in the eighteenth century. For Louis XIV and his eighteenth-century Bourbon successors, mythology constituted a primary subject matter for a wide array of court divertissements—painting, sculpture, pageantry, plays, literature, music, dance, and so on.¹⁸ The joys of love are particularly celebrated in mythological paintings of the first half of the eighteenth century, which join the brilliance and vitality of the rococo style with interests in beauty, love, and sensuality.¹⁹

In Nicolas Bertin's Bacchus and Ariadne, of 1710–15 (plate 1), for example, we observe a conversation between the ephebic Bacchus and his bride, to whom he promised immortality as a wedding gift.²⁰ The image is a captivating celebration of sensual beauty and the intoxication of wine and love, accompanied by a happy Cupid and an entourage of amoretti. Jean-François de Troy's Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne of 1717 (figure 1) brings a large group of mythological celebrants to the festivities.²¹ This is a social event. Music, dance, and song are conjoined with love and desire. François Boucher, one of the most sought-after and prolific court painters of rococo mythologies, in his enchanting Triumph of Venus of 1740 (figure 2), presents an array of cavorting marine gods and creatures who pay homage to the embodiment of female beauty and sensuality.

In 1754, however, just fourteen years after the Triumph of Venus, the critic La Font de Saint-Yenne declared such amatory and celebratory subjects unfit for the new moral mission of art.²² By the middle of the eighteenth century, with the advent of that complex movement in the visual arts we call neoclassicism and the promulgation of a putative moral severity, rococo mythologies began to be replaced. As is well known, new ideas about the antique past began to emerge and predominate, given impetus by the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum and the wealth of visual material unearthed.²³ The vast number of new artifacts and discoveries, which were reproduced and widely disseminated in prints, helped to create an avid pan-European market for authentic antiquities as well as replicas (it is not surprising that forgeries also became an industry during this period), with subjects most often taken from Greek and Roman mythology.

Figure 1. Jean-François de Troy. Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, 1717. Staatliche Museen. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin/Art Resource, New York.

This period also witnessed the appearance of the extremely influential writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann on the history of ancient art, such as Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks of 1755 and the History of Ancient Art of 1764.²⁴ Winckelmann stressed how antique sculpture, in particular, should be used as a model to create a severe, enlightened modern art. His Monumenti Antichi Inediti from 1767 contributed to the emerging corpus of illustrated archaeological publications of antiquities, which served as new iconographical sources for artists and included reproductions of vase paintings, gems, coins, and sculpture.²⁵

Figure 2. François Boucher. Triumph of Venus, 1740. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Copyright © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Artists, in their quest for genuine ancient sources, discovered a wealth of material, for example, in Pierre-François d'Hancarville’s publication of William Hamilton's antique vase