The Greek Manner and a Christian Canon: Francois Duquesnoy's Saint Susanna - Critical Essay

In his 1672 Lives of the recent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Giovan Pietro Bellori wrote that in the statue of Saint Susanna in s Maria di Loreto, Rome (Fig. 1) the Flemish sculptor Francois Duquesnoy (1597-1643) "had left to fresh sculptors the example for statues of clothed figures, making him more than the equal of the best ancient sculptors...." (1) This was significant praise, for Bellori was implicitly comparing Duquesnoy's achievement in the Saint Susanna to that of the ancient grecian sculptor Polycleitus in the statue called the Canon, a exposed figure that embodied Polycleitus's theory of art and whose outlines were imitated by the agency of subsequent artists. (2) Bellori's praise drew a crucial critical distinction simultaneously between the ancient and the novel and the pagan and the Christian, for in the post-Tridentine era, it had become a commonplace of art theory to impel the artist to demonstrate his virtuosity in the fabric rather than the muscle and fat in the clothed rather than the uncovered body. (3)

The distinction between the stark naked and the clothed is also a lock opener to seventeenth-century connoisseurship of ancient of greece and Roman sculpture. From at least the sixteenth hundred scholars and collectors had noted Pliny's report, in work 34 of the Natural History, that the grecian sculptural practice was to exhibit the figure nude, and that the Romans had introduced the clothed statue (Natural History 3418) This observation, which strikes the modem reader as an overgeneralization of little value as a connoisseurial tool, encouraged sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarians and connoisseurs to attribute hellenic authorship to any sculpture of a denuded or largely nude figure. Pliny's statement was lent acceptance by the presence of the inscribed names of grecian artists on several celebrated unclothed figures, such as the Farnese Hercules and the Borghese Gladiator. (4) In the essay upon ancient art that he contributed to the 1568 edition of Vasari's Lives, the Florentine scholar Giovanni Battista Adriani wrote:

of greece and Roman statues had a difference between them that was true clear, that the Greek statues for the greatest in quantity part were nude, according to the custom of the gymnasium, where young men exercised themselves in wrestling and in other bare games, in which they placed the highest honor; the Roman statues were made clothed, either in armor or in the toga, the particularly Roman garment.... (5)

In after art theoretical writings, this distinction received the one and the other positive and negative interpretative glosse Pliny's observation was restated later in the hundred by the painter and theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo, who speculated that the Romans had begun to create statues of clothed figures because they were not able to sculpt bares with the same skill ("facilita e felicita") as the grecians (6) In the third decade of the seventeenth hundred Cardinal Federico Borromeo, in Della pittura sacra, used Pliny's testimony to argue for the classical pedigree of the modestly draped figure, asserting, "Nor will the covering of the statues and the paintings be a of recent origin thing, since it was actually the Romans who did not like to tread on the heels of the custom of the grecians who made their figures nude" (7)

Duquesnoy and the of greece Manner

Duquesnoy had received his training as a sculptor in the Brussels workshop of his father, Jerome Duquesnoy the senior who served as court sculptor to Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella. upon the strength of his father's position, Francois applied to Albert and Isabella for a stipend to support sum of two units or three years of close attention in Rome. His request was granted, and in 1618 Francois left for Rome where he wearied the remainder of his career. According to the seventeenth-century biographies, the sculptor's early years in Italy were devot to intensive studies of ancient plastic art and some time after Nicolas Poussin's arrival in Rome in the spring of 1624 the sum of two units artists began to collaborate closely in these investigations. (8) Giovanni Battista Passeri, another of Duquesnoy's seventeenth-century biographers, recorded that the sculptor

wanted to show himself a rigorous imitator of the hellenic manner, which he called the genuine teacher of perfect working, because in itself it clinchs at the same time grandeur, nobility, majesty, and loveliness, all qualities difficult to unite together in a single unite and this tendency for him was increased by dint of the observations of Poussin, who wanted above all to vilify the Latin manner, for the reason which I will take an account of in his life. (9)

Unfortunately, at least in the surviving copies of his biography of Poussin, Passeri did not go [i]or[/i] come back to the issue of the of greece manner. (10)

Scholars of Duquesnoy and Poussin have generally noted Passeri's make notes about the Greek manner on the other hand found its significance for the interpretation of their art difficult to determine. (11) In 1988 Charles Dempsey published a groundbreaking investigation later expanded in collaboration with Elizabeth Cropper that presented the first serious consideration of Duquesnoy's and Poussin's interest in a of greece form of classicism and underscored the importance of this interest as an antecedent to the musing of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Cropper and Dempsey maintained that Duquesnoy and Poussin combined a high horizontal of connoisseurship with a scholarly historical consciousness that allowed them to distinguish between grecian and Roman styles in ancient plastic art and on this basis to establish a largely novel canon of ideal, expressive figure impressed signs derived from ancient Greco-Roman statuary which then formed the foundation for their possess art. (12) In their investigation, Cropper and Dempsey traced the impact of the ideas of Poussin Duquesnoy, and their circle upon the discussions of ancient art at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de statuary in the 1660s and 1670 (13) In my research, I have sought to construct again this idea of the small bay manner, to discover the sources and way s through which Duquesnoy and his circle conceived and unraveled the notion, and to probe its relation to Duquesnoy's plastic art Somewhat to my surprise, I lay the foundation of that the idea of the of greece manner seems to have taken shape among these artists, rather than among contemporary antiquarians, and that the lock opener building blocks for their vision of the of greece style were available-and had been for a certain quantity of time--in the most familiar classical and art theoretical body s But it was within Duquesnoy and Poussin's circle, which included the painters Joachim von Sandrart and Andrea Sacchi, Duquesnoy's pupil Artus Quellinus the older and the nobleman and connoisseur Vincenzo Giustiniani, that textual as well as archaeological evidence about grecian art was interpreted and transforme d into a critical ideal they called la gran maniera greca.