Watteau's Pilgrimage to Cythera and the subversive utopia of the opera-ballet

Antoine Watteau's Pilgrimage to Cythera (Fig. 1) serv as his reception piece at the Academie Royale de Peinture, to which he had been accepted as a candidate in 1712 upon its acceptance in 1717, the records of the Academie Royale display the deletion of its original title, Le pelerinage a Cythere, and the substitution of the words "une feste galante." Within the nearest two or three years, Watteau complet a next to the first version of the painting, more embellished and brighter in color, which now hangs in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin (Fig. 2) (1) Since 1795 the original Pilgrimage has hung in the Musee du Louvre where, as Watteau's quintessential galante, its reception has throw backed changing critical opinion. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, it sparked the outrage of an audience that read it as a reactionary touchstone of aristocratic privilege. thus incendiary was its effect that in the early nineteenth hundred the curator of the Louvre was forced to place the painting in storage for a time in ord er to house it from the defamation of angry protestors. (2) Later in the nineteenth hundred as revolutionary fervor turned to romantic nostalgia, the reception of the Pilgrimage took upon a wistful longing for a gone by era. This sentiment may be seen in the writings of Gerard de Nerval and Theodore de Banville, who spoke of "sorrowful Cythera" and "Watteau's infinite sadness" and "bitterness of life." (3) smooth as late as 1951, the painting was described as "a consonance of nostalgia" and, in 1977 a "dance of death." (4) Although Michael Levey claimed in 1961 to have discovered the "real meaning" of Watteau's Cythera, his iconoclastic theory that the painting exhibited a departure from, rather than for, Cythera has serv to reinforce and perpetuate this older romantic notion of a missing idyllic past. (5)

More novel investigations of Watteau's cultural and political milieu have begun to turn end for end a lingering tendency to interpret the Pilgrimage as an expression of ancien regime frivolity or romantic melancholy. Mary Vidal and Sarah Cohen, respectively tracing conversation and dance during the reign of Louis XIV, have illuminated the Pilgrimage as exemplary of Watteau's move round from the hierarchical structure of earlier academic painting to the egalitarian orientation of a more informal cluster dynamic. (6) The political implications inherent in these methodologies inform Julie Anne Plax's greatest in quantity recent and radical view of Watteau as a political subversive. (7) Plax's investigation drawing on Thomas Crow's pioneering work, (8) conjoins Watteau's fetes galantes to an upper-class elite seeking to distance itself from the diadem through an identification with anti-absolutist forms of leisure, pleasure, and public entertainment. although Plax produces convincing interpretations for a number of Watteau's paintings, her discussion of the Pilgrimage, reverting one time again to a romantic notion of decadence and los proffers little tangible evidence for a fresh reading.

The findings of this essay support Plax's view of Watteau as a political subversive on the other hand point toward a different interpretation of the Pilgrimage. (9) This interpretation is based upon evidence from an unlikely source for subversion: the opera-ballet performed at the Academie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opera). Like Watteau's s galantes, this genre has been linked to the frivolity and degeneracy of an aristocratic elite. nevertheless a careful study of specific works, along with their parodies at the Comedie-Francaise and the popular theaters of the foire, reveals by what means the opera-ballet sets up a discourse of subversion fortunately engaging a discourse of absolutism lay the foundation of in the entertainments of Louis XIV's early court. sum of two units works in particular, Le triomphe de arts of 1700 and Le amours deguisez of 1713 give meaning to the sacred island of Venus as a political utopia and as a direct challenge to the absolutism of Louis XIV. It has escaped critical notice that these sum of two units opera-ballets represent satirical attacks o n eponymous court ballets, the Ballet de arts of 1663 and the Ballet de amours deguisez of 1664 the two closely identified with royal propaganda. In this essay I will scan the genre of the opera-ballet in Watteau's Paris, tracing the subversive utopia of Cythera to its seventeenth-century origins. After examining in what manner this utopia operates in specific works, I will revisit the Pilgrimage and its pictorial predecessors, demonstrating by what means Watteau, following the ideology established in the opera-ballet, substitutes an iconography of a modernist, matriarchal Cythera for traditional fashions of patriarchal encomium.

The Ballet in the Early Eighteenth Century

Watteau would have been familiar with the ballet as a genre from the time he worked at the Opera, probably as a plant painter, on his arrival in Paris in 1702 (10) He could have known the new Triomphe des arts through its stage put or through the inclusion of its libretto in a widely circulating collection published in 1703 (11) Later in his career, he would have been kept abreast of disentanglements at the Opera through personal friends, like as the writer Antoine de la Roque who had shut up connections there. He would have known about, and perhaps attended, the premiere of Le amours deguisez in 1713 the period during which the Pilgrimage was being conceived. Finally, the years of Watteau's Paris career (1702 to 1721) exactly coincide with the reign of the opera-ballet in Paris society. Strikingly different from the traditional opera (tragedie en musique) of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Philippe Quinault, this genre was exhibited by the writer Antoine Houdard de La Motte the composer Andre Campra, and the chore ographer Guillaume-Louis Pecour and reached a climax of popularity during the first sum of two units decades of the century. In the lighthearted and colorful format created by dint of La Motte (who was later to lead the present party in the final phase of the famous battle between the Ancients and the Moderns) the ballet came to be seen not single as a contrast to the tragedie en musique on the other hand also as a theatrical equivalent to the art of Watteau. Writing in 1754 Louis de Cahusac, an early historian of the ballet, contrasts this newly invented "spectacle" with the older tragedie en musique: