L'affaire Greuze and the sublime of history painting

In the Salon of 1765 the painting that caused the greatest stir was Jean-Honore Fragonard's highly praised morceau d'agrement (acceptance piece), Coresus and Callirhoe (Fig. 1) (1) This large-scale machine (canvas) depicts the climax of the story, originally related by means of Pausanias in his guide to Greece where the high priest of the Calydonians, Coresus, immerses a knife into his chest, thereby sacrificing himself in place of the particular of his unrequited love, Callirhoe. As it turn rounds out, such ambitious history painting would evidence to be the exception rather than the norm in Fragonard's oeuvre despite the general acclaim squeeze outed by academicians and critics alike upon its unveiling. Instead, Fragonard's fame would be made [i]or[/i] part of to the other a wide variety of ofttimes unclassifiable subjects (from his portraits de fantaisie to piquant if unbelievable depictions of "peasant" life and explicitly erotic boudoir scenes) all execut with the bravura brushwork for which he was to [i]or[/i] at a great depth admired by his contemporaries.

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Not surprisingly, in 1765 the highly dramatic Coresus and Callirhoe appealed in particular to the philosophe and art critic Denis Diderot. In a fictive "conversation" with Friedrich Melchior Grimm, penn as his regular review of the Salon for the exclusive periodical the Correspondance Litteraire, Diderot busyed a cunning literary device to the one and the other verbalize and critique what he had seen Rather than simply reviewing the painting in conventional fashion [i]or[/i] part of to the other a summary of its overall consequence particularized by standard detailing of any obvious technical inadequacies, the critic chose to pay Fragonard his greatest compliment. He offered his hold literary improvisation on the painting's control matter to capture both its emotional and visual consequences maintaining all the while the thinly disguised conceit of recounting to Grimm an unusually vivid dream.

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Diderot describes returning place of abode exhausted by his efforts, after having worn out an arduous morning examining the works upon display at the Louvre in his capacity as designated art critic. In his feigned conversation with Grimm, Diderot annotates casually that Fragonard's sensational canvas had already been remov by the agency of the time his own curiosity was finally piqued. While drowsing at his desk that evening above what one imagines to be a well-worn transcript of Plato's Dialogues, he falls into a strange dream for which the famous parable of the cave provides the indifferent material. In the dream, he is single of the captives in the cave, head and hands clamped in position, forced to spectate as all manner of phantom images pass before him. Coincidentally, the drama he witnesses is precisely the story of Coresus and Callirhoe, and, as Diderot has Grimm thus innocently remark, the imagery he describes in his dream generates exactly the look and perceive of Fragonard's painting.

plenteous has already been said about this familiar passage from Diderot's Salon of 1765 (2) The literary ruse engageed here is typical of Diderot's mature criticism and returns sporadically in his subsequent Salon commentary whenever he wanted to register the imaginative transport a auspicious painting has caused him to experience. As Michael Fried has noted, this and other instances of plane more dizzying layers of fiction in Diderot's Salons affirm the critic's pronounced attraction to paintings that facilitate the viewer's "absorption" into the view represented. This passage offers as well the interpretative density intimateed by the choice of allegorizing the pair Fragonard's painting and Diderot's task as critic [i]or[/i] part of to the other the already allegorical parable of Plato's cave. I will turn back to this last issue in the closing section of my essay. First, I want to consider the narrower question of Diderot's apparent enthusiasm for Fragonard's last serious attempt at the highest category of history painting with the benefit of hindsight. Specifically, I want to leap ahead in time to the Salon of 1769 and the debacle of another history painting that experienceed as much critical scorn as Fragonard's be delighted withed praise: Jean-Baptiste Greuze's Septimius Severus Reproaching His Son Caracalla (3) (Fig. 2). (4)

As I will argue, the couple of these innovative canvases were inspired in part by the agency of a new model of psychological identification that had migrated somewhat uneasily into the painter's realm from an originally dramatic conception of the sublime. The practical and theoretical effects of this new, affective, and experientially based ideal for ambitious painting would lead to a blurring of the boundaries that had previously distinguished history painter from genre painter and, ultimately, a fatal undermining of the traditional hierarchy of genre altogether. (5) This erosion of the hierarchy of genre would culminate in like masterpieces as Jacques-Louis David's Belisarius Begging. on the contrary it is also this phenomenon that accounts for Fragonard's ingenious Coresus and Callirhoe and Greuze's unfortunate Septimius. The mixed interrelation among these three important paintings as registered in the criticism of Diderot maps on the outside a fundamental transition long in the making, moving away from classical norms for painting as intellectualized particular and toward a notion of painting as locus for the activation of fictional empathy. To situate this shift, I will use Greuze's a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of anticipated but finally maligned reception piece to the Academie Royale de Peinture et de plastic art as the pivot of my argument.