Introduction

Within the past few decades a number of scholars have expressed dismay at the minimal amount of interest now stimulated by sculpture, particularly the sculpture created in during the ancien régime. In a study on Houdon published posthumously, Louis Réau observed that “in the twentieth century sculpture is no longer esteemed at its true value.”1 François Souchal, in an editorial in the Gazette des beaux-arts in 1992, lamented that “sculpture is the poor relative in research as well as in public exhibitions.”2 The first half of James Hall’s study, The World as Sculpture, subtitled The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the Present Day, is devoted to demonstrating the many manifestations of sculpture’s subordination to painting from the late Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.3 Hall’s work is wide-ranging, covering six centuries and several west- ern European countries, but focuses in particular on the situation in Italy during the Renaissance, and Neoclassic periods. Specialized studies of post-medieval western sculpture exist, but there are still large gaps that need filling. Souchal’s superb four- volume compilation of sculpture from the era of Louis XIV does not extend to work produced after the early eighteenth century and is limited to cataloguing.4 In From Pigalle to Préault, Alison West viv- idly described the present-day downplaying or ignoring of sculpture not only on the part of museum and church officials, but also by the

1 Louis Réau, Houdon: sa vie et son oeuvre (: F. de Nobèle, 1964), 17. Except where noted, all translations from the French included in this study are my own. French quotations translated into English in the main text are listed in French in an appendix at the end of this study. 2 “Editorial: Clodion,” Gazette des beaux-arts, VIe pér., 120, 1992, 1. 3 James Hall, The World as Sculpture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999), 1–171. 4 François Souchal, French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th centuries: The Reign of Louis XIV (Oxford: Cassirer, 1977–93). 20 A God or a Bench majority of scholars.5 West’s investigation is concerned specifically with production from the mid-eighteenth century through the mid- nineteenth, particularly in France. The neglect that she signaled is in fact generally discernible in connection with seventeenth-century and pre-Revolutionary eighteenth-century French sculpture.6 Confirmation is found in a catalogue published in connection with the exhibition of Chardin’s paintings held in 1999–2000, where it is observed that more investigation should be made of the sculpture of his time.7 It is nevertheless the case that during the same recent decades a number of major exhibitions devoted to the productions of sculptors of the ancien régime have been organized, accompanied by exemplary scholarly catalogues. Among them are exhibitions of works by Sara- zin (1992), Clodion (1992), Pajou (1997), Houdon (2003) and a dis- play of sculpture by Pigalle belonging to the collections of the Louvre (1998).8 Important studies of particular topics connected with the sculptural production of the time have been published; these include Gerold Weber’s Brunnen und Wasserkünste in Frankreich im Zeital- ter von Louis XIV and Betsy Rosasco’s The Sculptures of the Château of Marly During the Reign of Louis XIV.9 Aline Magnien, in La nature

5 Alison West, From Pigalle to Préault (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1998), 1. 6 To cite the case of a specific sculptor, Julia Dabbs, Embodying Ethos: Anguier, Poussin, and the Concept of Corporal Expression in the French Academy (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1999), 8, nn. 23 and 24, and 9, n. 28 points out the lack of thorough study of Michel Anguier’s work. 7 Pierre Rosenberg and Renaud Temperini, Chardin: suivi du catalogue des oeuvres (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), 155: “la sculpture française du XVIIIe siècle, qui aujourd’hui encore reste très méconnue et ne bénéficie pas de la popularité qu’elle mérite.” 8 Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Françoise de La Moureyre, Jacques Sarazin, sculpteur du roi, 1592–1660; Anne Poulet and Guilhem Scherf, Clodion; James D. Draper and Guilhem Scherf, Augustin Pajou, Royal Sculptor 1730–1809; Anne Poulet, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment; Jean-René Gaborit, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle 1714– 1785. 9 Gerold Weber, Brunnen und Wasserkünste in Frankreich im Zeitalter von Louis XIV (Worms: Werner’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985); Betsy Rosasco, The Sculptures of the Château of Marly During the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: Garland, 1986). Introduction 21 et l’antique, la chair et le contour, delved into theoretical bases for sculptural representation of anatomy during the period.10 Despite this promising upsurge of interest in the subject, studies of the total body of sculptural production during the ancien régime in relation to its political, social, and cultural context have yet to be produced. Texts providing overviews of the high arts of the period, such as Anthony Blunt’s Art & Architecture in France 1500–1700 and Michael Levey’s Painting and Sculpture in France 1700–1789 as well as Luc Benoist’s coverage in La sculpture française primarily focus on formal and stylistic characteristics of the works.11 While of essential importance, those accounts should be supplemented by in- vestigations of the roles assumed by various kinds of sculpture within the culture of the time. One area of this subject, the political advertis- ing for which royal monuments were employed and reactions to those promotional campaigns, has been addressed in specialized studies by N. R. Johnson, Jeffrey Merrick, Peter Burke, Chandra Mukerji, and Andrew McClellan,12 but further examination of the multiple, often charged, meanings and implications accompanying sculpture during this period remains to be made. Significant sculptural activity was also being carried on in other territories during the era under consideration, and some of the con- cerns surrounding its production in France are to be found elsewhere

10 Aline Magnien, La nature et l’antique, la chair et le contour, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2004.2 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004). 11 Anthony Blunt, Art & Architecture in France 1500–1700 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1953); Michael Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France 1700–1789 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993); Luc Benoist, La sculpture française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963). 12 N. R. Johnson, Louis XIV and the Age of the Enlightenment, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CLXXII (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1978); Jeffrey Merrick, “Politics on Pedestals: Royal Monuments in Eighteenth- Century France,” French History, V, 1991, 234–64; Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992); Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1997); Andrew McClellan, “The Life and Death of a Royal Monument: Bouchardon’s Louis XV,” Oxford Art Journal, XXIII, 2000, 1–27. 22 A God or a Bench as well.13 Yet despite the appearance of similar issues in the art of other countries, it is nevertheless true that examination of the situation in France at the time of the ancien régime provides the most complete and multi-faceted picture of attitudes toward sculpture. France main- tained a noteworthy degree of political continuity and unity during this period. Although there were unquestionably changes in the nature and flux in the policies of Bourbon rule over the course of its duration, it nevertheless constitutes a temporal unit encompassing a number of political, social, and cultural constants. Among them are the gradual achievement and maintenance of a centralized absolutist government accompanied by a highly stratified social system. At the same time, as is generally recognized, during the course of this era France became the source of elite culture and of intellectual and political ferment many elements of which influenced or were adopted by much of the western world. Another reason for the focus on artistic production in France during this era is furnished by the high level of organization of the arts maintained there, accompanied by an extensive surviving documenta- tion. These circumstances provide a wealth of information that serves as a valid basis for interpretations of the sort put forward in this book. There exist financial accounts, records of proceedings, official and

13 For example in England, its sculpture of this period most recently discussed in Malcolm Baker, Figured in Marble: the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth- Century Sculpture (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2000), and in Italy; see Christopher M. S. Johns, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: in the Age of Clement XI (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1993). As an instance, the continuation of the rivalry between the arts (paragone) is also an underlying theme in the Allegory of the Arts (c. 1730; Ottowa, National Gallery of Canada) by the Bolognese painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi. Its personification of Painting is working on a canvas of Pygmalion carving his statue of the ideal woman. The entire painting on the easel is in grisaille and thus colorless, like the art of sculpture it represents, while the vivid hues in the rest of Crespi’s portrayal proclaim painting’s greater interest and vitality. The representation of the sculptor and his work is only an image of an image, and as such one degree further from reality, and much smaller, than the figure of Painting whose ability to materialize it proclaims her superior powers: Painting’s triumph is completed by her leading the viewer to the realization that she can create the illusion of sculpture but the reverse is not possible. Introduction 23 personal correspondence, treatises, biographies, and memoirs. The records of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and its satellite institutions such as the French Academy in Rome, along with those of the surintendance des bâtiments (Royal Buildings Admin- istration), furnish information of a completeness and detail that facilitate investigation of the art produced and also of the conditions bearing on much of its creation and reception. As is well known, it was also during this era that non-artist writing on art in the forms of both theory and criticism developed in France, its volume growing to impressive proportions by the time of the Revolution. The organiza- tion of public exhibitions and the steps taken toward museum display14 stimulated an interest in art among many members of the large and often leisured educated and upper classes, resulting in an abundance of textual responses. Sculpture performed a wide variety of functions in this society. Continuing and updating past practice, it embodied religious doctrine on the insides and outsides of churches. It proclaimed faith together with temporal status and splendor on tombs. It represented the con- cepts of rulership on government buildings and in other public spaces. It advertised power and cultural values while decorating palaces, gardens, and fountains. Increasingly in the later decades of the era it transmitted messages of wealth and social standing for aristocratic and certain bourgeois patrons via large numbers of portraits and objects adorning residences and cabinets. The accomplishments of French sculptors in catering to all these purposes earned external commissions for several of them: the desire to emulate achievements in France led, among other examples, to René Fremin’s extensive production at La Granja for Philip V of Spain and to Jacques Saly’s work for Frederick V of Denmark. Sim- ilarly, François-Gaspard Adam, succeeded by his nephew, Sigisbert Michel, served as court sculptor to Frederick the Great in Berlin, and Etienne-Maurice Falconet created sculpture in Russia for Catherine the Great.

14 Robert W. Berger, Public Access to Art in Paris (University Park, PA: Pennsyl- vania State UP, 1999), 201–22. 24 A God or a Bench

The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was primarily composed of members practicing one or the other of these arts al- though, as Chapter 5 describes, they were not exactly on an equal footing. Sculpture students, like those in painting (although in smaller numbers), could win a prix de Rome and resultantly be sent to the French Academy in Rome for further training. There they studied antique sculpture at first hand and made copies of it for the royal collections as well as for private patrons. Yet despite the indisputable successes of French sculptors on multiple fronts there is much evidence that their status and that of their art were in many ways subordinate to those of painters. Within both the elite and popular cultures of the time sculpture and sculptors were subject to a range of associations different in both kind and degree from those operative in the case of painting. Examination of plentiful primary textual and pictorial information leads to the conclusion that painting was of predominant interest, among both arts institutions and consumers; sculpture was accorded lesser consider- ation. This situation has been remarked by several scholars: in an exhibition catalogue Georgel and Lecoq noted “the discreet” expres- sions of “scorn by painting” for sculpture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.15 Nathalie Heinich described how the instituting of the Academy “accentuated the inequality” between painters and sculptors and that “the privileging of painting was intensified with the extension of the private market for works of art.”16 Writing of the earlier decades of the Academy’s existence, Paul Duro stated:

Painting was the Academy’s raison d’être; Sculpture seemed to be a supplementary discipline included only to strengthen the Academy’s hand and prevent criticism of omission. Painting provided the central element and the critical terms used by theorists.17

15 Pierre Georgel and Anne-Marie Lecoq, La peinture dans la peinture (Paris: Biro, 1987), 34. 16 Nathalie Heinich, Du peintre à l’artiste, artisans et académiciens à l’âge clas- sique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993), 48–51. 17 Paul Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1997), 21–4. Introduction 25

In discussing the visual arts in the eighteenth century Levey observed that “the place taken by sculpture in the artistic hierarchy was in general below that of painting” and “sculptors had a status necessarily thought of as lower than that of painters.”18 The intentions of this book include presenting a description of the parameters of the situation, enlarging upon the observations of these scholars and going beyond discussion of the organization and activities of the Academy and the tradition of the paragoni (texts devoted to rivalry between two forms of art).19 My approach is based on presentation and analysis of the various kinds of evidence that the subjects, techniques, and products of painting stimulated much greater attention and comment than those of sculpture and that painters on the whole achieved greater esteem than sculptors. I have also attempted to isolate and investigate the cultural factors that tended to place sculp- ture in an unfavorable light and thus to further the development of the imbalance. My intention is in no way to deny the considerable achievements of sculpture at this time – and the financial success of several of its practitioners – but instead I have aimed to shed light on hitherto unexplored aspects of the social roles of these artists and their productions. The situation was not static; events, attitudes and the cultural climate in the eighteenth century varied from those of the seventeenth and continued to develop over the course of the decades. The ways in which sculpture was placed in a negative light changed, but did not rapidly disappear. They survived and co-existed with certain new positive values assigned to this art after the middle of the eighteenth century: the government’s commissioning of the series of statues of the Great Men of France as a spur to patriotism did not result in the appointment of a premier sculpteur nor did it eliminate the ongoing characterization of sculptors as manual laborers. The first three of the chapters that follow focus on cultural factors bearing on the reception of sculpture, including those that caused it to be viewed negatively or largely ignored. Chapter 1, on public sculpture, points out the constant and widespread accessibility

18 Levey, 61. 19 See Chapter 4. 26 A God or a Bench of such productions, a mixed blessing entailing their relative inability to provide the pleasure of novelty. It examines the varieties and characteristics of royal monuments and their utilization by the rulers to transmit messages to their subjects. Also included is consideration of responses to the monuments, which ranged from approval to hostility and derived from political or aesthetic perspectives. This chapter also deals with sculpture in parks and adorning public buildings and presents opinions about it expressed in guidebooks and elsewhere. Chapter 2 is concerned with those factors that tended to prevent sculpture from being perceived as possessing the desirable vitality and life-enhancing qualities that made painting and other art forms attractive. Its ubiquitous appearance on tombs linked it with death, and so did certain widely popular theatrical and literary works such as the Don Juan narrative and the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Its preservation of the past and close linkage with the canons of long- gone antiquity also, especially in the eighteenth century, diminished its appeal for a novelty-hungry society. Chapter 3 deals with the perceived relationships between sculp- ture and idolatry that derived from cultural and political circumstances during this period. While the controversy over the acceptability of sculpted images in religious worship was in part a continuation of the sixteenth-century disputes sparked by the Reformation, its character in ancien régime France was conditioned by factors specific to the era, such as the persecution of the Huguenots, the disputes between Jesuits and Jansenists, and the pronouncements of philosophes. The next three chapters deal with the ways in which the superior status of painting was acknowledged and advanced. They include delineation of the benefits that the subordination of sculpture provided for the organization and leadership of the arts and clarify the circum- stances of the preference given to painting. The prolongation of the paragone throughout most of the period and the several ways that it was extended into visual forms, as detailed in Chapter 4, supported the campaign of the Academy to enhance the prestige of the art of painting. Sculptural responses to this situation are also examined here. The roles accorded to sculptors within and outside of the Academy and the widespread perception of their generic social characteristics and activities form the subject of Chapter 5. Dezallier d’Argenville Introduction 27 stated that there were more French sculptors than painters, an obser- vation seemingly difficult to understand but supported by the description in this chapter of the different kinds of practicing sculp- tors.20 Chapter 6 deals with the range of images that served to repre- sent sculpture and statuary in painting and in sculpted form. This chapter also details the varied ways in which texts of the time that were not overtly paragonic revealed the assumption that sculpture is the lesser of the two arts in importance. From the foregoing it is evident that this book is not intended to provide a chronological study of the era’s sculpture, nor does it focus on the careers or achievements of individual sculptors. Stylistic analy- sis is not its concern any more than is comparative iconographic study. It does not pretend to be a systematic and exhaustive treatment of the texts written during this era that were concerned with or touched on sculpture. It does, on the other hand, seek to pick out major themes and attitudes connected with the reception of sculpture found in those texts and in contemporary works of visual art, and to examine them in the light of relevant cultural factors. A word must be added about the title of this study. As will be seen in Chapter 3, it is excerpted from a quotation furnished by Vol- taire concerning the decision made by an artisan after he had pondered what to create from the trunk of a tree. It suggests a number of the themes dealt with in this book and moreover provides the eighteenth- century counterpart to a fable written by La Fontaine in the seven- teenth, thus also pointing to a unity and continuation of certain ideas throughout the course of the ancien régime.

20 Antoine-Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville, Vies des fameux sculpteurs depuis la renaissance des arts (1787; reprint Genève: Minkoff, 1972), xxiv.