Posted: January 30th, 2022

Summary and Analysis of Grigsby's Argument

Abstract and Evaluation of Grigsby’s Argument
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Based mostly on: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Nudity à la grecque in 1799,” The Artwork Bulletin, vol. 80, no. 2 (June 1998), pp. 311-35

summarize Grigsby’s argument in 1-2 paragraphs after which use the remainder of your response to guage the effectiveness of her argument. How does she reveal the connections between artwork, style, politics, and morality How does she construction her argument and how much proof does she use What did you discover most fascinating about her argument, or what did you discover most unconvincing and why
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Nudity à la grecque in 1799
Creator(s): Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Supply: The Artwork Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 311-335
Printed by: School Artwork Affiliation
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Nudity a la grecque in 1799
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Get up the ladies on the proper ofJacques-Louis David’s Oath
of the Horatii of 1785 and place them between the male
warriors (Fig. 1). Now take away the lads’s garments. That is the
startling, even preposterous, double transfer of David’s Intervention
of the Sabines of 1799 (Fig. 2). If David’s martyr portraits of
remoted, unconscious, and eroticized male our bodies, like his
Demise ofJoseph Bara of 1793 (Fig. Three), astutely and economically
supplied an iconography for the unconventional fraternal Republic, his
transposition of the solitary male nude right into a syntax that
prominently included dressed ladies proved problematic.
The tableau’s awkward character derives from the tensions
not solely between feminine gown and male nudity but additionally
between the ladies’s motion and the lads’s friezelike stasis,
between the pathos now displaced onto the feminine figures
and the technical precision lavished on the evacuated husks
of the standing male academies.
Scholarship has for probably the most half handled the novel conjunction
of bare male our bodies and newly central feminine protagonists
as separate points. Whereas the nudes have been described
by way of David’s stylistic improvement towards a higher
classical Greek purism, the Sabine ladies’s prominence has
been interpreted as affording a familial foundation for the reconciliation
of a divided and warring post-Revolutionary France.
Aesthetic priorities (male nudity) and narrative saliency
(feminine intervention) have typically been held asunder.
Historians have additionally sometimes emphasised the success relatively
than the tensions of David’s stilted and theatrical portray.
That success, we have now been advised, hinged on ladies’s capability
1 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785. Paris, Mus&e du Louvre (picture: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, RMN)
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312 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
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2 David, Interventiono f theS abines,1 799. Paris, Mus&ed u Louvre (picture: RMN)
to combine a fractured society. As daughters of the Sabines
and wives of the Romans, the Sabine ladies have been objects of
trade that unified a brand new individuals. Marginalized from the
public sphere of the unconventional Jacobin fraternal order, ladies
through the Listing might be shuffled onto heart stage in
order strategically to signify one other familial foundation for
group. This has been the emphasis of students like
Stefan Germer, who has argued that girls, “confined to the
non-public sphere all alongside,” may embody “a brand new moral
basis for society,” and Dorothy Johnson, who has
characterised the work as an “picture of savage and primordial
maternity,” which celebrates “ladies’s primordial and important
position within the creation of civilization.”‘ In contrast, Ewa
Lajer-Burcharth has emphasised ladies’s feminist activism
through the French Revolution and David’s reliance on ladies
as figurations of dysfunction. Nevertheless, she, too, has argued that
the Intervention of the Sabines in the end comprises the risk
posed by ladies by binding them to the roles of moms and
wives, successfully circumscribing their exercise inside a household
configuration. In accordance with Lajer-Burcharth, David’s tableau
represents above all a “protection of the patrilinearity of the
household” and thereby features “as a type of safeguard picture,
certainly a ‘salutary imago’ of the male republican self on the
finish of the revolution.”2
These accounts take as their premise the success of David’s
tableau. Their deconstruction of its ideological workings
will depend on the belief that the portray matched its
viewers’s wants, that David with typical savvy enabled a
society present process speedy change to redefine itself. Certainly, we
depend on David’s work to inform us about these social and
political transformationsW. e perceive them to be constitutive
of such shifts. Issues come up, nonetheless, when his work
are extricated from the sphere of competition through which they have been
made and obtained. In his finest photos, David virtually at all times
took dangers that have been hotly debated. This was half and parcel of
his artwork’s productive work; its eloquence and intelligence
resided in David’s capability to find such sizzling spots, such important
websites of dissension and nervousness. In actual fact, David’s Interventiono f
theS abinesd id not reconcile its fractured viewers. Displayed
at eye degree, reverse a mirror, in a industrial exhibition, the
portray was definitely a box-office success, attracting some
fifty thousand guests over its unprecedented five-year run.Three
However the votes made by admission charges are proof much less of
consensus than of curiosity, and that curiosity, this paper will
argue, derived from the work’s controversy, its failure to
deploy antiquity as a unifying metaphorical language. Paradoxically,
David’s very success in giving revolution vintage type
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 313
in the end led to classicism’s lack of authority. Nudity a la
grecque in 1799 couldn’t be disengaged from the dramatic
return of girls to heart stage.
The Nudity of Heroes
The controversies surrounding David’s tableau are well-known,
if not sufficiently interrogated. David himself mapped them
out in a brochure distributed to all paying guests, thereby
situating the work inside an exhibitory body of dissension.
The artist felt compelled to supply lengthy, erudite textual
arguments replete with essential antecedents to defend the
revolutionary entrepreneurial exhibition and the nudity of his
tableau’s male protagonists.Four David’s textual content arguably tried
to regulate debate in addition to to instantiate it. In actual fact, contemporaries
seized his phrases and continued to dispute each decisions
for years.5 I might argue that the controversies have been interrelated
and that the scandal of David’s tableau resided within the
methods it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public
spectacle. Certainly, it was the industrial presentation of
antiquity as a website of nakedness and the mingling of genders
and lessons that made David’s epic portray such a provocation
to the critics of Listing France.
For David, the nude signified artwork as a result of it signified
antiquity. In his “Word on the Nudity of My Heroes,” the
painter described the nude as a higher creative achievement
than the clothed determine and supplied a classical pedigree for
the perfect type. He explicitly said that his purpose was to color a
work that the Greeks and Romans wouldn’t have discovered
overseas to their customs. Considerably, the artist presumed
that authenticity, even transparency, to the classical world
could be valued in trendy France. To talk to the ancients
was to talk to Frenchmen, however the indicators of that veracity
(male nudity) required an exegesis, even a protection, appended
to the brochure that addressed his fellow countrymen.
David’s purpose, that the ancients wouldn’t discover his
portray overseas to their customs, admitted the potential for
disparate cultural boundaries, however his unexamined assumption
that Frenchmen would respect and perceive the
language of the ancients refused to acknowledge such basic
distinction. The painter’s profound religion within the sociopolitical
efficacy and relevance of classicism couldn’t absolutely
management the paradox between universalist and relativist fashions
of tradition. David would by no means know whether or not the ancients
discovered his tableau overseas to their customs, however he definitely
found that a lot of his countrymen thought-about it alien to
their very own.
As classical perfect, nudity held out a promise to transcend
the messy particularities of precise social relations. For David,
nudity was the guarantor of artwork’s aesthetic energy to ameliorate
a stratified and fractured society. Through the Listing, in
spite of the disaster of the Terror, it was nonetheless potential to consider in
the wholeness of the physique. The dream of transparency to an
embodied fact was imagined by the Ideologue Amaury
Duval: “The dressed man is a masks; he’s solely himself
undressed; it’s males one should paint and never the simulacra of
males.”6 Nonetheless, the religion expressed by David and Duval
was beneath siege in 1799.7 For a few of their contemporaries,
nudity exacerbated relatively than alleviated class tensions.
Whereas Lajer-Burcharth has asserted that David’s idealized
Three David, TheD eath ofJosephB ara, 1793. Avignon, Mus&eC alvet
(picture: RMN)
nudes supplied the bourgeois male viewer an illusory fiction of
“a unified and autonomous self” (410), a lot of David’s
critics believed the nudity of his tableau’s figures to be in
battle with bourgeois pursuits and style.
Most easily, this was a matter of a failure on the a part of the
bourgeoisie to understand the creative language of antiquity.
That failure was implicitly criticized in a dialogue within the
Journal des Arts. After an beginner declared he discovered the determine
of Tatius at left “Stunning, however too nude,” an artwork pupil
vaunted his dedication to nudity as a part of his creative
credentials. The scholar ridiculed the beginner’s “bourgeois”
choice for draped chiffon, an implicit jab at that class’s
narcissistic funding in portraiture in addition to its materialism.
However it was the critic for Le Courrierd es Spectaclesw ho supplied the
most vehement and adamantly literal assault on the nudity in
the Sabines. Allowing artwork no metaphorical latitude, the
creator “C.Z.” couldn’t forgive David for portraying warriors
unrealistically: no individuals, vintage or “savage,” positioned bare
males in circumstances requiring clothes.Eight
For literal-minded, post-Revolutionary critics like C.Z.,
classicism was not more than a overseas and anachronistic set of
customs.9 Regardless of its heritage as France’s most revered
aesthetic custom, classicism’s conventions might be ridiculed
in 1799 as an affectation alien to French habits and
values. Furthermore, the danger posed by a portray just like the Sabines
was not merely that it was anachronistic however that it rendered
the ruling class susceptible, all too simply scary workingclass
ridicule of bourgeois pretensions. Burlesquing the
pedantic affectations of elites had been a mainstay of comedy
because the seventeenth century, however right here male nudity is the
focus of the social critic. C.Z., tongue in cheek, evoked the
stuff of panicky nightmares: “A dressed hero is way extra
imposing. When you ship him nude in the midst of a public
place, I strongly doubt that the dressed individuals who encompass
him, will see him with eyes apart from these of his valet de
chambre, and you understand how tough it’s to be a hero within the
eyes of the latter.”10
C.Z. astutely denigrated the classical hero by redefining
him in particularly up to date French phrases. Romulus and
Tatius grew to become susceptible, bare Frenchmen stripped of
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314 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
clothes and sophistication authority earlier than a (disrespectful) crowd of
dressed home servants. Though David had argued that it
was customary amongst historical painters, sculptors, and poets
to signify gods and heroes nude, it was clear to C.Z. that
such a customized inverts class prerogatives: so the elite should go
naked whereas the frequent individuals benefit from the privileges of
clothes! If the reasoning is unsophisticated, it higher underscores
the extent to which the reception of nudity may
depend upon class standing.
Chaussard’s Protection
Between David’s textual content and the critics of nudity there’s an
incommensurable hole. If the artist privileges classical aesthetic
standards with little thought to the discrepancy between
historical cultures and his personal, the hostile critics privilege
French social practices because the circumscribing situations of artwork
making and feign ignorance of the French tutorial pictorial
custom. Nevertheless, David’s most eloquent republican champion,
the Ideologue Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, supplied a
extra advanced evaluation of the Sabines.11 In distinction to
David, who presumed that the tableau may produce a
unified public appreciative of his antiquarian references and
deployment of nudity, Chaussard argued that the controversial
reception of the male nudes appropriately differentiated
strata of French society.12 The republican critic admitted that
David’s elegant language of antiquity, significantly his male
nudes, could be understood solely by an elite, however he believed
the portray ameliorated a divided society by providing completely different
bases of attraction: “Whereas [David’s] enemies go to the
portray to hunt flaws; his rivals to hunt torments; his emulators
to hunt classes; the thinker to hunt an object of
profound meditation; the buddy of the humanities to hunt pleasure
blended with admiration; the multitude throngs to seek out new
and full of life sensations. For [the multitude], it’s actually solely a
spectacle” (Chaussard, 39). Appreciation of antiquity requires
sophistication, however the touching narrative of household
strife and reconciliation requires no particular initiation and
appeals to the multitude since “man is above all avid for
sturdy sensations or feelings” (Chaussard, Three).
Whilst he praised David’s accomplishment, Chaussard
betrayed his ambivalence: “The vulgar solely seize expressions
of a typical and trivial nature; these [expressions] of a
superior order and le beau idealescape them by their elevation,
or overpower and humiliate them by their grandeur. It’s the
pathos of the topic that pulls the gang round this
tableau” (Chaussard, 38). Thus, whereas an informed phase
of the viewers can recognize le beau perfect and the portray’s
exemplary, elevated model and message, the multitude is
hungry just for the sensations supplied by the spectacle of
pathos. Chaussard referred to David’s work as a “drama,” however
he tried to distance it from the favored spectacle’s extra
unruly and boisterous modes of acclaim. The Sabines, he
argued, surprised the multitude into “spiritual silence” (39).
For Chaussard, David’s portray without delay revealed class divisions
and ameliorated them not solely by gathering all individuals
earlier than the canvas but additionally by reworking the habits of the
“crowd” into one thing extra intently resembling dignity. The
pathos of the familial drama-women’s emotional intervention
between ennobled males d l’antique-drew the gang
earlier than the portray, and this was good. However the match between
crowd and feminine emotional expressivity needed to be mediated,
even remodeled, by an intervening mannequin of applicable
noble habits. That onerous burden was born by Hersilia
(Fig. Four).
Like Amaury Duval, Chaussard praised this girl in white
for her noble standing. Hersilia was distinguished from the
ladies who encompass her not solely by her perfect character and
magnificence but additionally by “the dignity of her struggling, the very best
trait characterizing a being and a spirit outdoors the frequent
situation” (Chaussard, Eight). In contrast, the opposite ladies,
who rush ahead, matted, with burning tears and uncovered
breasts, expressed “passions in frequent situations or
vulgar individuals” (9). Chaussard was proper to distinguish
Hersilia from her emotive refrain.13 In David’s portray, the
central heroine without delay divides the warring males from every
different and protects the viewers from the hurling propulsion
of the expressive feminine figures. Hersilia stands, legs and arms
outstretched, like a dam containing the impacted wall of
dysfunction behind her. Solely her left hand fails to succeed in
Romulus’s defend; that is the weakest level of containment,
and the ladies and youngsters pour forth by the opening,
the infants tumbling like waves onto the foreground strip
of earth.
Chaussard and David alike relied on Hersilia to mediate
between the Aristocracy and vulgarity, between the inexpressive
stilted male heroes and the emotional feminine refrain. Given
her pivotal position within the reconciliation of antitheses, it comes as
no shock that David struggled lengthy and laborious to present her
type and was by no means absolutely glad. In a collection of preparatory
drawings, the painter progressively tidied up and contained
the agitated rhythms of her determine (Figs. 5, 6). Whereas her
flapping hair and the rippling waves of her bodice initially
radiated out from her type, within the last portray, hair and
costume are circumscribed, polished and made to stick
intently to the graceful orbs of her head and breasts. Hersilia is
more and more likened to the 2 male protagonists in place
and scale in addition to pose, the parallel disposition of their legs
establishing a strong rhythm throughout the image’s floor
(with a last piquant observe sounded by the leg of the twisting
ephebic youth who retreats at proper). Conjoining the tableau’s
feminine and male perpendicular axes, Hersilia’s cruciform
determine is, subsequently, the very fulcrum of the composition. As
the solitary embodiment of female the Aristocracy, she alone
forces ladies’s propelling expressivity into the static horizontal
frieze of clever masculine show.
Chaussard’s criticism of the Sabines supplied a delicate protection
of David’s classicizing idiom by emptying the male nudes of
narrative signification and displacing expressivity in addition to
temporality onto the feminine figures. The ladies act-they
intervene-in order that the lads might cease appearing and
thereby assume the stasis recognized with artwork. The suspension
of the lads’s motion, the transformation of warfare into show,
permits the male our bodies to grow to be le beau iddal. Hersilia’s
contradictory position is each to enact intervention and to cease
time. She features to arrest the male protagonists’ exercise
but additionally to dam up ladies’s emotive narrative momentum. In
so doing, she is supposed to reconcile the incommensurable
classes engendered by this splitting of portray’s perform
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 315
Four David, Interventiono f theS abines,d etail
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316 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
5 David, preparatory examine for Interventiono f theS abines,1 794.
Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, D partement des Arts Graphique
(picture: RMN)
6 David, preparatory examine for Interventiono f theS abines,1 795.
Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphique
(picture: RMN)
into elite aesthetics (statuary) and common expressivity
(drama). There are dangers to this double transfer, nonetheless. Because the
hostile criticism of the Sabines attests, the feminine figures have been
not able to securely metamorphosing bare males into an
autonomous realm of artwork, nor may Hersilia deflect criticism
from her personal type. A heroine’s noble standing on the interstices
of (excessive) artwork and (common) spectacle was not so simply
secured.
Chaussard successfully accommodated the dissension between
David and C.Z. in regards to the standing of male nudity by
studying their aesthetic disagreement as a matter of sophistication
distinction. The “grandeur” of nudity, Chaussard implied,
went over C.Z.’s head, however the drama of David’s portray was
pitched downward to his (uninitiated) degree. Chaussard tried
to defend classical nudity by segregating it from
wider society as an inviolate realm of le beau perfect. For the
republican critic, the last word achievement of David’s portray
was its capability to protect that (masculine) classical perfect
by providing one other axis of (female) spectacular pathos.
Nonetheless, Chaussard’s argument in the end didn’t protect
the aesthetic isolation of David’s male nudes. Certainly,
C.Z.’s voice erupted on the finish of his textual content at the same time as he
tried to refute it. All of a sudden, Chaussard, like C.Z., conjured
the abhorrent imaginative and prescient of the Frenchman robbed of
garments.
There’s a man who should dread to see himself nude; it’s
the person of our trendy ages, it’s the being degraded
bodily in addition to morally, deformed by swaddling, by all
the bonds by which he’s and continues to be strangled,
compressed by his garments, bent beneath the ridicule of
fashions, branded by idleness, by pleasures and vices.
(Chaussard, 38)
Nothing might be extra loathsome than the sight of contemporary
man stripped naked, not as a result of he could be humiliated
earlier than his servants however as a result of his physique had been completely
inscribed by his (vulgar) cultural practices, significantly
style. In contrast to David’s figures, up to date man had been
degraded bodily in addition to morally by French sartorial
habits, by swaddling garments, by all his confining bonds. The
male physique of the French nation was deformed, bent, branded,
and strangled. Chaussard’s rhetorical violence, recalling the
character of Revolutionary debates, bespoke explicit nervousness
in regards to the our bodies of France’s new child male residents.
14
Chaussard’s discourse differs considerably from pre-Revolutionary
assaults towards outmoded indicators of privilege and social
rank. Pleasure and vice have been as soon as related to the falsity of
make-up and powdered wigs of an unproductive aristocratic
class, however Chaussard’s rhetoric doesn’t goal particular social
teams. As an alternative, his criticism is leveled on the plethora of
improvised and revolutionary attachments to the body-the
deformation of a complete and intact masculinity by a debased
and synthetic set of outward indicators. Most importantly, this
socially undifferentiated creature is molded by a commodifled
style obtainable to all members of society. The republican’s
textual content drew on Revolutionary (and Rousseauist) criticism
of nature’s perversion by synthetic establishments.15 Amongst different
issues, the Revolution was speculated to have liberated the
our bodies of French residents heretofore oppressed by the artifice
and social stratification of ancien regime gown.16 The paradox,
nonetheless, is that the Revolutionary funding within the
physique as a pure signal had ushered in an more and more arbitrary
and ephemeral system of style. Unmoored from conventional
class privileges, clothes grew to become a matter of invention.17 Lynn
Hunt has described the Revolutionary preoccupation with
the ornament of the physique as an try to attain transparency
(clothes immediately signifying the interiority of the Revolutionary
Self).’*s However to invent Revolutionary signs-whether
sartorial or political-was to engender an environment of
intense competitors and speedy obsolescence, a ordinary stressed
revolution. Though the Republic expended monumental
sources in a semiotics of legitimation, the outcome was a extra
conspicuous notion of transience.
Style’s tempo of innovation and obsolescence solely accelerated
through the Listing. By no means earlier than had gown modified so
rapidly. Within the yr that David’s exhibition of the Sabines
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 317
7 Cafi of theI ncroyablese,n graving, ca. 1797. Paris, Mus~e
Carnavalet (picture: phototheque des Musees de la Ville de
Paris)
opened, one critic bemoaned the pace with which la mode
metamorphosed: this alarming acceleration of market pressures
ruined households, marriages, and virtuous ladies.19
Chaussard, too, in his social commentary of 1798, Le nouveau
Diable boiteux, likened style to the winds.20 The provisionality
and arbitrariness of sartorial kinds didn’t signify an
evacuation of political signification, nonetheless. Quite the opposite,
gown through the Listing grew to become an specific marker of
political allegiances. Stratified post-Thermidor France produced
a extremely ingenious and factionalized style. Whereas the
male members of the royalist so-called golden youth, these
post-Thermidor dandies often called muscadins and incroyables,
expressed their resistance to the republican authorities by a
flamboyant elaboration of English kinds, the revolutionary
exclusifs flaunted an opposing set of sartorial signifiers (Figs. 7,
Eight).21 Inside this extremely politicized and self-conscious semiotic
system, the royalists’ black collars have been understood towards the
Jacobins’ crimson collars, the counter-Revolutionaries’ lengthy hairstyles
replete with “canines’ ears” sideburns towards the Jacobin
brief haircuts (les t0tes tondues).22 In such a factionalized and
accelerated local weather of experimentation, up to date gown
clearly supplied no single “nationwide” set of markers. Fairly
than emanating from the courtroom, French style, like French
society, was splintered into dissenting camps.
For Chaussard, subsequently, David’s male nudes signified a
renunciation of style, a really perfect distanced from the unstable
inconstancy of ephemeral social practices. Nudity a l’vintage
supplied an answer to the transient indicators of social group.
Because the sculptor Pierre Cartellier later complained in a letter to
Antoine-Denis Chaudet, the “masks” of style was topic to
fifty variations in the midst of the century.23 Nudity, by
distinction, proposed a certainty, a fact untouched by the
continuous revolution of fashion. Nudity, so the argument went,
“~,.i~LtT~kJ~
Eight The Unique, from A. J. de Barruel-
Beauvert, Caricatureps olitiques,
1797-98. Paris, Bibliotheque
Nationale
stood outdoors time. Nonetheless, Chaussard’s outburst betrays
him: “There’s a man who should dread to see himself nude; it’s
the person of our trendy ages … bent beneath the ridicule of
fashions.” To explain nudes by way of up to date
Frenchmen’s our bodies, even to be able to oppose them, is to
admit to their relation. Nudity a la grecque inevitably led to the
specter of nakedness in turn-of-the-century France. And even
the bare physique was inscribed by its cultural and historic
specificity; it was branded and deformed by its social practices.
There was no retrievable generalized and perfect signal
amongst actual our bodies. David’s shift to male nudity from the
vintage gown of his pre-Revolutionary tableaux Horatii and
The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Our bodies of His Sons, seems to
have been tough to defend.
David’s Nudes
Within the criticism attending David’s Sabines, the nude male
heroes have been seen, on the one hand, as metaphoric idealizations,
complete and full classical nudes; however,
as literal and veristic males stripped of garments. David’s portray
itself should be held chargeable for the polarized interpretations
it engendered; Intervention of the Sabines provoked debate
concerning the standing of nudity by juxtaposing two very completely different
bare male figures (Figs. 9, 10). One in all their specific
variations has been misplaced as a result of modifications David made to
the canvas in 1808. Till that date, Tatius’s frontally disposed
determine displayed genitals. Though the portray now deploys
the scabbard in a manner that recollects the virtually comical contrivances
of material sometimes featured in academies (Fig. 11),
there was no such phallic displacement within the tableau’s preliminary
presentation. At the moment, the plunging penile scabbard attracts
relatively than deflects consideration, significantly given the odd
suspension of no fewer than three legs from Tatius’s coated
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318 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
9 David, Interventiono f theS abines,
element
genitals, however in 1799 Tatius’s uncensored nudity additionally elicited
remark. David’s uncommon choice was famous by the English
customer Henry Redhead Yorke as he stood earlier than the work:
“Tatius is displayed full to the view in puris naturalibus. He additionally
wears not solely a helmet and sandals, however carries a defend and a
scarlet mantle buckled on the breast, however so contrived as to
exhibit his complete physique in a state of nature.”24 In a convention in
which shading and material served gently to veil the genitals,
David’s use of props solely accentuated their presence in a manner
that appeared to Yorke much less pure than intentionally contrived.
Earlier than the 1808 modifications, the Sabine warrior Tatius
was a much more uncovered and susceptible determine than Romulus,
the halfgod. All that is still hidden to the spectator within the
again view of Romulus was displayed within the frontal determine of
Tatius. Though the 2 males stand in mirrored opposition,
with Hersilia because the whitened display between them (and their
ephebic equerries as their bracketing enhances), their
intimate pairing solely highlights their variations.25 Frontally
disposed, Tatius, the mortal man, consists of an ungainly,
disjointed set of limbs appended to a brief and broad stump
of a torso. He’s, furthermore, unusually asymmetrical. His bent
proper arm and leg compress that aspect of his physique right into a
compact unit enclosed by the size of his sword. In contrast,
his left arm and leg are prolonged however seem no much less awkward,
as a result of their lengths are segmented.
Our view of Tatius’s grasp of the underside of the defend
underscores his full visibility-we see the size of his arm
submitted to the mechanical necessities of his armor (like
a mounted specimen in a trompe l’oeil portray). Such particulars
imbue this barely scowling, bare warrior with a poignantly
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 319
10 David, Interventiono f theS abines,
element
prosaic high quality. Gravity and tactility play their half. Tatius’s
disproportioned however volumetric physique appears cumbersome, a
burden to bear throughout house, and the steel weapons such
heavy and unforgiving weights. David’s technical difficulties
additional exacerbate our sense of the determine’s awkwardness. The
arm holding the defend is ambiguously connected to the
oversize shoulder; the dimunitive head seems to retreat
from the clumsy tangle of material, straps, and bulging
muscle tissues at proper.
In contrast, the determine of the halfgod Romulus is kind of
efficiently understated. Our sense of his completeness and
perfection is produced, paradoxically, by the concealment of
his physique: deep shadows and a collection of substitute types
occlude the visibility of his anatomy. In contrast to the darkish, concave
oval held by Tatius (is it an oval or a foreshortened circle),
Romulus’s luminous and superbly convex round defend
hides most of his torso in addition to his left shoulder and arm.
11 David, Acadimie of a Man, Referred to as Hector, 1778. Montpellier,
Musee Fabre (picture: RMN)
r~l:
Zia
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320 ART BULL.ETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME I.XXX NUMBER 2
12 David, Portraito f Henrietted e VerninacY, ear VIII [ 1799-1800].
Paris, Musee du Louvre (picture: o RMN)
Gently kissing the swish curve of his silhouetted waist, the
excellent circle stops exquisitely in need of severing his physique in
two and casts the proper half in shadow, rendering it an
abstracted and swish set of undulating contours. Whereas
Tatius is evenly lit, solely a slicing fringe of Romulus catches the
gentle and presents a glimpse of flesh. The flat therapy, even
tonality, and obvious lack of acuity within the shaded aspect of his
physique muffle his corporality however nonetheless heighten the
eroticism of the softly modeled orbs of his buttocks-so
completely echoing the softly protruding sphere of the defend as
nicely because the vertically disposed sword’s sheath. In contrast, as
Yorke aptly recommended, the harshly thrusting sword and scabbard
that bracketed Tatius’s genitals underscore relatively than
mitigate the sense of their vulnerability. The juxtaposition of
implements of warfare and bare male anatomy makes Tatius
appear extra, not much less, defenseless. His flesh is assailable.
Romulus is protected and fortified by the phallic substitutes
for mere anatomy as a result of the all-too-human referents of
corporal specificity, resembling genitals, are cloaked.26
If David’s brochure assimilated Tatius and Romulus by
subsuming each figures throughout the overarching class of
vintage nudity, his portray provoked argument concerning the
standing of its male nudes by providing disparate fashions of the
unclothed physique. Tatius’s determine, not like that of Romulus, fails
to repress the artist’s toil earlier than a weary mannequin encumbered
by props. By betraying his standing as a unadorned mannequin, the Sabine
warrior proves to be not more than what C.Z. suspected: an
undressed Frenchman, Chaussard’s physique branded and inscribed
by the deformations of up to date practices. Thus,
whereas Romulus’s seamless determine bolstered classicists’ arguments
about nudity’s ideality, Tatius’s clumsy type fueled
critics’ hostility concerning the absurdities of nakedness. David’s
portray was way more advanced than his personal printed
protection would permit. Plainly neither David nor his critics
have been able to addressing each Tatius and Romulus without delay.
The Nudity of Ladies
If the male nudes have been inherently controversial, Hersilia
draped in white like her sisters in David’s tableaux of the
1780s, would appear to supply an acceptably chaste classical
counterpoint. Right here at the least David appears to have taken no dangers
and sustained his pre-Revolutionary iconography of feminine
gown. Whereas nudity couldn’t hold up to date references
at bay, at the least genuine archaeology would possibly. Considerably,
nonetheless, the English customer Henry Redhead Yorke, who had
commented on Tatius’s nudity, was compelled to slide into
modish French to be able to describe Hersilia’s gown: “Between
f~8Y
.: “.
A~Rt~l
J
.
1 s
”
1
~: 1
~. . l.a Y
x I I
“~
~ r
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= =rt-r. ~`1~I~P~_ ,I ,LY;t:~-
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13 Costumed e Bal, from CostumeP arisien( Paris, Yr VIII
[1799-1800]), pl. 184
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NUDITY A LA
GRECQUE
IN 1799 321
14 Jean-FranCoisJaninet afterJean Guillaume Moitte, Liberty,
1792. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale
these two figures stands Hersilia; she is robed in white advert la
grecque, in different phrases in line with the current style.””27
David maintained his pre-Revolutionary model of feminine
costume in Intervention of the Sabines, however French ladies’s
sartorial practices had modified radically because the mid-1780s.
In 1783, a critic had contrasted up to date ladies’s
toilette to the noble simplicity of a feminine vintage statue, “a
nice determine di la grecque, very stunning, with an vintage air,
costume and type of probably the most beautiful purity, a virginal and
primitive expression, and who gave the impression to be neither of our
nation nor our century.”28 By the late 1790s, nonetheless, the
girl attired la grecque appeared eliminated neither in house
nor in time. Removed from securing historical past portray’s decorous
distance from present social practices, classical garb supplied a
level of contact between previous and current in fin de siecle
France. David himself was drastically chargeable for such a
collapse of excessive artwork and ephemeral style. The instance of
his work mixed along with his affect as Revolutionary
iconographer had inspired a pervasive adoption of classical
gown, significantly by ladies. As Jules David emphasised,
trendy ladies have been consciously modeling themselves on
the feminine protagonists populating David’s main pre-
Revolutionary tableaux (David, vol. 1, 336). Paris was crammed
with Camillas and the daughters of Brutus. Portraits like
David’s Mme V (1799) corroborate the proof of up to date
style plates that Frenchwomen had appropriated the
15 Ponce, after Borel, NationalA ssemblyD: edicatedt o ladies
patriots;T hec hosenm omenti s the offeringo f thef irst patrioticd onation
madeb yw omena rtistso n Septembe7r, 1789. Paris, Bibliotheque
Nationale, Cupboard des Estampes
vintage apparel beforehand adorning allegorical personifications
and classical historical past portray’s heroines (Figs. 12-14). Prior
to the Revolution, such appropriations had continued a
longer custom of occasional fictional role-playing. Ladies
masqueraded as Flora for his or her portraits or theatrically enacted
the classical previous at events, most notably, Marie-Louise-
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s well-known supper a la grecque in 1788.29
By the late 1790s, nonetheless, gown i l’vintage had grow to be
on a regular basis garb. Fairly than an elite’s occasional fantasy
costume, the white classical robe had grow to be a broadly
adopted and ceaselessly worn style.
Hersilia stands, subsequently, not solely because the solitary embodiment
of ennobled femininity in David’s tableau but additionally as its
most fashionably stylish protagonist. Of all of the figures inside
the portray, she most intently resembles members of the
viewers. If Hersilia bore the burden of integrating elite and
frequent viewers, what are the implications of her apparel’s
simultaneous referentiality to the previous and to the current
How did her up-to-date stylishness a la grecque inflect her
standing as ennobled heroine And what was the connection
between her contemporaneity and the unstable interpretations
of the male nudes who bracket her
Nudity i la grecque has appeared to this point to concern the standing
of male nudes. Nevertheless, inside Listing debates about
style, classicizing nudity was related above all with the
rising visibility of feminine, not male, our bodies. Ladies’s
negating sartorial methods on the very outset of the French
Revolution had metamorphosed within the late 1790s right into a
flirtation with gown that approached undress. On September
7, 1789, ladies had donned easy white robes and donated
their ornaments to the state in an try and distance
themselves from compromising associations of femininity
with aristocratic ostentation (Fig. 15).30 Nevertheless, renunciation,
too, is a sartorial selection. Negation leads from the
excesses of ornamentation to the excesses of revealed flesh;
modesty occupies some indeterminable, unrealizable midpoint.
Through the Listing, the appropriation of Greek apparel
evoked the Revolutionary prescription of feminine chastity however
47.-
7.
os T ; c
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322 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
16 Eulalie Morin, Portraito fJulietteR icamier,1 799. Versailles,
Chaiteau de Versailles (picture: RMN)
transgressed it, playfully manipulating however fairly wittily rejecting
the virtuous position imposed on ladies all through the
Revolution. The staid, classically draped determine of republican
Liberty (Fig. 14) had at all times been susceptible to mocking
commentary about ladies’s lasciviousness.31 Through the
hedonistic days of the Listing, the shift from liberty to
license appeared all too inevitable. In 1797, a verse exploited
the inherent ambiguities of the time period and gaily described the
“liberties taken” by ladies’s post-Revolutionary style:
Liberty, that is my motto;
All costumes are respectable;
Disgrace to those that are scandalized by them!
Why ought to we put on gloves,
These ladies go nicely with out chemises.32
In post-Thermidor France, ladies had certainly discarded
layers of their underclothing. A lot ink was spent mocking
the brand new option to be seen in public “sans chemise. “As well as,
Grecian robes had grow to be more and more gentle and clear
as might be seen in a 1799 portrait by Eulalie Morin ofJuliette
Recamier wearing such a skinny gown a’ la grecque that her
breasts and nipples, like Hersilia’s, are fairly clearly seen
(Fig. 16).33 In a witticism of the interval, ladies have been flattered
for being “well-undressed” relatively than “well-dressed.”’34 A
get together recreation concerned disrobing to be able to decide which
girl’s costume, together with footwear, weighed the least.35 A
variety of up to date work by Louis-Leopold Boilly
characteristic ladies whose gauzy outfits and abbreviated undergarments
reveal not solely arms and cleavage but additionally, by the
clear cloth, the fleshy size of their legs, in some
instances deceptively coated by flesh-colored tights (Fig. 17).36
Within the late 1790s, nudity was self-consciously carried out by
ladies as an intriguing recreation of revelation and deception.
The scandals related to the interval’s most trendy
ladies are well-known. Was it Mme Hamelin or Mme Tallien who
promenaded within the Champs-Elysees “half nude,” arms and
throat revealed, a gauzy fabric protecting flesh-colored stockings
to be able to fabricate a glimpse of her nakedness That an
trustworthy man was pressured to rescue this exhibitionist from a
jeering crowd supplied the press a moralizing pretext to inform the
story.37 However different reviews point out that this style was hardly
circumscribed to the stylish elite: “9-tenths of girls are
wearing white and really negligently assembled. A really small
quantity appear to be occupied with their toilette and they’re
distinguished by bearing their shoulders and part of their
again nude.”38
Not surprisingly, the Frenchwomen who walked by
the general public gardens in clear and gauzy draperies invited
denunciations of the classical model on the premise of extraaesthetic
standards. In such assaults, classical garb was deemed
inappropriate to the French local weather as a result of it belonged to a
completely different geography and subsequently a unique tradition. In
1798, for instance, a physician named Desessarts argued within the
press that “he had seen extra younger women die because the system
of mudites gazies than within the final forty years.”39 In 1799 one other
doctor, Victor Broussonet, condemned the unhealthiness
of girls’s appropriation of flimsy classical garb in his
brochure De la mode et des habillements. Broussonet asserted
that French ladies have been silly to undertake the minimal
cladding of historical Mediterranean cultures within the chilly
local weather of Paris: “Respiratory irritation, colds, the suppression
of menses have been the results of these revolting nudities.
Our ladies, in imitation of the Romans, have found
breasts and shoulders.”40 On September 7, 1799, solely months
earlier than the exhibition of the Sabines, the journal Le Publiciste
described one other physician’s try and dissuade ladies from
exposing themselves to such risks:
With a view to dissuade ladies from the furor of showing
virtually nude in our gardens, the physician Angrand cites the
demise of a teen from a chest sickness contracted
these final days at Tivoli. He publicizes that he’s going to
accumulate a large number of histories of grave sicknesses, typically
deadly, occasioned by the utilization of clothes d la grecque.41
Lower than two weeks later, the Journal de Paris printed a
letter to the editor from the Institut member Louis-Mathieu
Langlhs who, regardless of his republican commitments, expressed
hostility towards ladies’s adoption of vintage costume.42
Once more, medical causes have been marshaled, however Langlhs emphasised
morality relatively than well being. In Langlhs’s letter, ladies’s
Greek fashions have been explicitly condemned as “indecent”:
For a very long time the ethical and bodily disadvantages of
the Greek costume when worn in a moist and variable
local weather like ours have been pronounced by males of artwork and
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NUDITY A LA
CGRECQUE
IN 1799 323
17 Boilly, No Settlement,
from the collection Follies of
the Day, oil on canvas,
1797. Non-public assortment.
males of fine sense. Ladies themselves have extra details
and observations about this than all of the medical doctors of this
College have collected; however expertise is of no use to them
simply because it typically is not any use to us, and nothing is much less
astonishing. What do risks and even demise imply to
those that dare to danger modesty, a sentiment extra essential
to this [feminine] intercourse than self-preservation Whether or not
one clothes di la grecque or d la romaine, I dare predict the
outcome won’t ever be Cornelias.43
Langle’s’s argument registers the contradictions of post-
Revolutionary French tradition: the experimental identification
with antiquity as an exemplary mannequin coexisted with an
rising suspicion of its outward indicators. Cornelia is virtuous,
however dressing like her has its ethical and bodily dangers. Appropriating
robes a l’vintage is not going to remodel Frenchwomen into
their virtuous historical counterparts; in reality, on the contrary.
The mere selection to decorate d la grecque is proof of a scarcity of
modesty. If the ladies’s donation of jewels in 1789 had
equated the virtuous self-sacrifice of the Roman ladies with
their easy white garments, such a conflation of vintage
clothes and exemplary habits was not potential in
1799. Classical gown was now seen solely as a very
exhibitionist and immoral style selection, and one furthermore
that leveled the variations between ladies in troubling methods.
In 1799, Pierre-Louis Roederer, some of the eloquent
critics of girls’s classicizing style, conjured the dissolution
of conventional distinctions between ladies within the new
circulation of revealed physique components. In accordance with this republican
theorist, each girl was far too keen to flaunt her
flattering characteristic: “The meeting of girls shouldn’t be as different.
There are not the outdated, not the ugly. Those that
don’t have a determine have such a phenomenal throat! Those that
don’t have a [beautiful] throat have such stunning arms!
Right here, all is youth, from the age of sixteen to sixty years.”44
Whether or not younger or outdated, French ladies have been being sexualized
by their titillatingly skimpy and diaphanous garb. In fact,
the effaced distinctions between ladies weren’t solely these
of age and relative magnificence. A lady’s advantage additionally may no
longer be learn by her gown. Flesh apparently eroticized
ladies equivalently; variations of morality have been not
inscribed on their our bodies. As a authorities surveillance
report of 1798 made clear, all ladies, whether or not prostitutes at
the Palais Royal or virtuous daughters and wives, have been
revealing themselves. The trustworthy girl had ceased to supply
the dishonest girl a mannequin for emulation.45
Finally, nonetheless, the best risk posed by ladies’s
new exhibitionism was not their affect on different ladies however
the ability they inappropriately wielded over males. Roederer,
for one, understood style to be the means by which ladies
exercised their “empire.”’46 This was not merely a matter of
ladies’s seduction of males however of their substitution of tyranny
for republicanism. Ephemeral style is by definition antithetical
to timeless legislation. The stakes have been self-evident: so long as
women-immoral, trendy, fickle, and tyrannical-are
outstanding, there might be no (fraternal) Republic.
It’s the independence of girls’s morals that has given
them the authority of style [la mode]. So long as ladies
are spectacles in performances, nymphs in promenades,
and goddesses of their palace, there is not going to be a republic
in France. In useless will the structure have been established
in accordance with the excellence of political
powers; there’ll at all times be an influence against all others,
and that’s style. Style will at all times fight legal guidelines,
as a result of legal guidelines, if solely as a result of they’re at all times a critical
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324 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOIUME
I.XXX
NUMBER 2
18 Adrien-Pierre-FranCoisG odefroy, after F.J. Harriet, Parisian
Tea, ca. 1800. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale
19 Engraving, ca. 1799. Paris, Bibliothe’que Nationale
factor, can by no means be a la mode. One can attribute the morals
of the European republics of Switzerland and Holland to
the impotence of girls to train the empire of style.
47
What significantly disturbed Roederer have been the methods ladies
insidiously exercised energy in tradition that they weren’t
allowed to wield in republican authorities. “What a contradiction!
You refuse ladies all political existence, which could be very
simply, and but you allow all our habits to be primarily based on their
instance!” (Roederer, vol. Four, 383).
By permitting ladies to train their empire over style,
males have been following their instance. If we predict again to
Chaussard’s invective regarding degraded trendy man, we
can higher recognize his emphasis on the Frenchman suffocating
beneath his trendy layers. Nevertheless, to argue that man was
emasculated by succumbing to female style is to occlude
a supply of higher nervousness throughout this era. In actual fact, the
Listing witnessed a dramatic divergence in feminine and
male style (Figs. 17-19).48 Males have been drowning beneath
accretions of cloth whereas ladies more and more discarded their
garments. Whilst feminine residents approached a state of nudity,
males have been encasing their our bodies, eclectically appropriating
English style both as a sober self-presentation or, by
exaggeration, because the opposite: an excessively self-indulgent
and effete sensualism that emphatically renounced republican
sobriety. The male incroyables, admittedly probably the most excessive
instance, swaddled their outsize physiques in ample
layers of clothes and loosely becoming boots and wrapped their
“delicate” necks in voluminous scarves, framed by large
collars that rose up the again of the top. Although cleanshaven,
the incroyables’ faces have been hidden by lengthy fluffy hair,
which hung down in strands alongside the jaw like “canines’ ears,”
and generally by giant round eyeglasses (worn whether or not
wanted or not). An incroyable’sa ttire and hairstyle, subsequently,
coated most of his face and physique, rendering the nostril and jaw
that emerged from the folds of material and hair excessively
outstanding, penile and obscene, ideas of flesh rising from
the swaddled and exaggerated size of the neck. Through the
Listing, males’s our bodies appeared to have been deformed (and
perversely eroticized) by the accretions that enveloped and all
however overwhelmed them.
Style, then, might have been related to ladies, however a
most annoying deceit had been enacted. It was males’s our bodies,
not ladies’s, that bore the burden of artifice; they have been
sinking inside its perverse folds and crevices whereas ladies
had co-opted the masculine Republic’s imaginative and prescient of classical
simplicity. To sentence ladies’s preoccupation with style
was partly to deflect consideration from the methods through which male
our bodies had been extra dramatically remodeled by la mode. If
males have been being suffocated by artifice, ladies had gallingly
appropriated nudity, that former signifier of the masculine
beau perfect.
This had no small implications for the authority of classicism
in post-Revolutionary France. The standing of nudity d
l’vintage was profoundly compromised by its appropriation by
ladies. Not a time period outdoors up to date social
practices, nudity itself had been subsumed throughout the provisional,
politicized, and arbitrary semiotics of a feminized
style. Actually, nudity was thereby trivialized, however it was
additionally subjected to criticism on the premise of pragmatic criteriahow
startling to fret that classical figures would possibly grow to be
chilly or catch chilly! Related to modish methods of
feminine seduction, vintage signifiers like nudity have been now
condemned on the premise of their inappropriateness to post-
Revolutionary France, a spot without delay chilly, damp, and
desperately in want of a stringent morality to interchange the loss
of Church.
By donning classical apparel, ladies had sophisticated and
intensified longer-standing debates. France was within the course of
of deciding. May classicism signify the French nation
Was classicism common in buy or solely archaeologically
particular to a time and place May it signify all individuals or
solely an aesthetically initiated elite Did classicism supply a
secular ethical basis rather than the Church When
ladies placed on clear white vintage robes within the 1790s,
they rendered frivolous, ephemeral, and interchangeable
French tradition’s most critical, formidable, and purportedly
common model. In addition they redefined its politics. For Roederer,
nudity was republican provided that it was male. When feminine, it
smacked of the ancien regime. Certainly, Roederer noticed the
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NUDITY A l.A GRE;CQUE
IN 1799 325
feminine usurpation of nudity as a determined try on the
a part of ladies to recuperate energy misplaced through the Revolution.
Ladies weren’t solely susceptible to tyranny, they have been
regressive, wishing at least a return to France’s forsaken
previous:
Ladies have abused clothes to smash and oppress males …
however, in abusing nudity, they lose, or at the least danger the empire
and rights of their charms.
It’s as a result of ladies have seen their domination in
France vanish with the monarchy that they’ve risked
even their existence. They didn’t need the modest
happiness of an American, a Swiss, a Genevan; to regain all
they’ve misplaced, they’ve staked all the things they’ve, down
to their well being, and shortly even this everything-goes angle
will likely be gone.49
Roederer spells it out. Ladies have been drawing consideration to
themselves to be able to regain the prominence that they had
loved beneath the ancien regime. Certainly, they might danger
anything-even their health-to “smash and oppress males.”
Roederer understood nudity to be one step too far in a
continuum of style wielded by ladies to dominate males.
For ladies to abuse nudity was to danger their empire, however
whether or not they maintained their energy or not, important
harm had been accomplished to the Republic’s iconography: nudity
d l’vintage had been metamorphosed into an indication of (female)
tyranny relatively than (masculine) liberty.
The issue, in fact, was that classicism had at all times been
Janus-faced: gallant mythologies a la rococo competing with
stoic and austere historic iconographies. David’s achievement
of a piercingly lucid “virile” idiom able to representing
solemn Revolutionary certainties was formidable as a result of
it was convincing, however it should be seen as comparatively short-lived,
bracketed on both aspect by ladies’s competing appropriations
of antiquity. If antiquity within the fingers of David may
signify the austere absolute truths of Corneille, it may additionally
be Racinian-elegant, fairly, ornamental, frivolously worn, stuffed with
innuendo, playful, witty, even humorous.50 In opposition to Apollo
Belvedere and heroic Davidian academies lurked the specter of
Mme du Barry, looking for consideration but once more (Fig. 20). Lower than
thirty years had elapsed since her pretentious, oversize portrait
“as Muse” had been faraway from the Salon partitions
due to its overly clear classicizing robe. What was
unacceptable was the best way the king’s mistress had audaciously
mapped antiquity’s highest claims onto her personal sexualized
physique.51
In discussions of style within the press and different ephemeral
literature, debates about nudity have been commonplace, however
throughout the context of style, classicizing nudity was related
with ladies, not their overdressed male counterparts. In
David’s Intervention of the Sabines, ladies whose vintage robes
fall apart to disclose breasts, legs, and thighs are positioned within the
midst of bare males. Within the portray, ladies grow to be the
dressed time period against male nudity, but their clothes may
elicit issues about present enthusiasms for a lascivious
nudity d la grecque. How ought to David’s selection concurrently
to invert and to evoke up to date practices be interpreted
Actually, the painter’s choice to depict his male
heroes nude might be seen as an try and outline nudity &
20 FranCois-Hubert Drouais, Portrait of Mme du Barry as Muse,
1771. Versailles, Chambre de Commerce
l’vintage in masculine phrases, to salvage the beau perfect as a
masculine creative custom relatively than a female sartorial
invention. The implications in 1799 of sustaining his
pre-Revolutionary feminine iconography can be seen as
inadvertent: David believed in male nudity, and the ethical
ambiguity of his feminine figures was an unintended results of
modified circumstances. David had maintained his creative
commitments; it was Frenchwomen who had modified by
habitually dressing like his work’ feminine protagonists.
Nonetheless, David’s preparatory drawings counsel that he
purposely modified Hersilia’s apparel, reworking the flapping
layers of her bodice into the ultimate portray’s streamlined,
clinging white robe that not solely reveals rosy nipples however
opens to indicate the expanse of hips and thigh. If the modifications
served partly to circumscribe Hersilia’s “vulgar” expressivity,
in addition they made her extra trendy, paradoxicallyand
right here is David’s inescapable quandary-both extra vintage
and extra up-to-date. The brooches on the shoulders, the
enhancement of a sleeveless look, the easy band beneath her
breasts, the archaeological sandals: these have been all particulars
recounted within the style pages of journals in addition to up to date
descriptions of Paris’s most seen ladies.52 David
selected to make Hersilia extra chic-more like Mme Hamelin
and Mme Tallien promenading within the Tuileries, extra like
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326 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
21 Boilly, Make Peace, from the collection Follies of the Day, 1797.
Non-public assortment
Boilly’s socialites in his collection Follies of the Day of 1797 (Fig.
17).53 In a collection of fine-tuned modifications, the painter
enhanced his heroine’s resemblance to a group of
controversial exhibitionists.
That affiliation of Sabines and outstanding, morally ambiguous
Listing ladies may solely have been additional intensified
by the tales that circulated in regards to the identification of
David’s nonprofessional feminine fashions. Like lots of the
interval’s most celebrated ladies, the sisters de Bellegarde
loved the superstar of magnificence wed to scandalous sexual
mores. Collectively, they have been well-known for his or her compromising
attachment to the world of the studio; they have been identified, in
Etienne-Jean Delkcluze’s phrases, “by the singular life they led
within the midst of artists of all genres.”54 Brunette Adele had left
her husband and youngsters within the provinces to grow to be a
extremely seen Parisian mistress. Whereas it was usually acknowledged
that she had sat for the bare-breasted kneeling girl
within the Sabines, rumors circulated concerning the extent to
which she had uncovered her physique to the painter.55Jules David
even claimed that Adele, “useless” about her position as mannequin,
loved showing in public together with her hair organized to match
that of David’s matted determine (David, 336). Married to a
defrocked priest, her blonde sister, Aurore, inevitably invited
tales that she had posed for Hersilia.56 She might have had
some competitors. In accordance with Jules David, three society
girls volunteered for the half. These, then, have been a number of the
ladies of style who would have inflected the reception of a
portray typically characterised as proof of David’s dedication
to a newly purified, aestheticized classicism confined to
erudite citations.57 Think about such nouveaux riches ladies
transferring by the Sabines exhibition house, appreciating
their stylish couture and resemblance to David’s heroine
mirrored within the wall-length mirror, all for the value of a ticket.
May there have been a greater showplace to rejoice the
spectacular, exhibitionist pleasures of style and the erotics
of public sociability
To simplify David’s portray into a picture of a fractured
public sphere reconciled by the intervention of the Sabine
ladies’s “non-public” familial claims is subsequently to disregard the
controversies surrounding ladies through the Listing. Though
David’s portray has been seen as a strong repression
of Revolutionary feminist claims in its alignment of
femininity and maternity, that latter equation of girls and
motherhood was undermined by the portray’s foregrounding
of girls’s prominence as public spectacle inside Listing
France. In late 1790s Paris, ladies have been visibly disrupting
the Revolutionary fraternity, however not essentially as moms.
Certainly, this was the supply of tension. Roaming areas
outdoors the house, ladies appeared neither securely constituted
by nor constitutive of familial bonds. Fashionable scholarship
that takes with no consideration ladies’s position as representatives of
the non-public sphere is subsequently repeating a reactionary prescription,
not a actuality of post-Revolutionary society.58 Thinkers
like Roederer and Louis-Sebastien Mercier championed feminine
domesticity in response to French ladies’s perceived
failure to establish themselves with such duties. Finally,
Intervention of the Sabines couldn’t circumscribe ladies’s
prominence to their familial roles. Hersilia and her emotive
refrain have been, above all, providing a public efficiency of
these bonds. In contrast to the ladies in Horatii and Brutus, who
have been confined to home areas, the Sabine ladies have been
meant to be transferring spectacles throughout the public sphere of
the traditional battleground in addition to the Listing entrepreneurial
exhibition house.
In post-Thermidor France, ladies’s visibility appeared not
solely to flaunt their distinction from males but additionally to represent
the very supply of their energy and dominance. For a
Revolutionary like Roederer, the distinction of girls solely
too clearly represented a distinction of politics, the haunting
specter of the fraternal Republic’s antithesis: ladies’s lawlessness-
like style, like tyranny, like immorality-fully outdoors
males’s lawful governance. How then may David’s Intervention
of the Sabines suggest that the trendy girl function an
exemplary mannequin Was this what Revolutionary utopian
aspirations had come to That promiscuous unregulated
ladies just like the Bellegarde sisters, Fortunee Hamelin, Theresia
Tallien, Josephine Beauharnais, and Anne-Francoise
Lange ought to supply fashions of distinction, a distinction of
style relatively than morality59 It was solely too evident that
gown, not advantage, was inspiring common imitation. And the
distinction of modishness, not like that of advantage, perpetually
wanted to outrun these “nine-tenths” of Frenchwomen who
acted as copycats. To be exemplary as a result of one is trendy
is to maintain transferring on the head of a crowd. If antiquity, within the
fingers of stylish ladies, had grow to be au courant, it will
inevitably grow to be go&. Clearly, this type of exemplarity,
relatively than providing France a bedrock basis of values,
solely perpetuated a meaningless overturning of indicators.
David was working with unstable supplies right here: without delay
exploiting antiquity’s fashionability and, like Chaussard, making an attempt
desperately to buttress a convention of the classical masculine
beau iddal that had lengthy served as the muse of his artwork
in addition to his politics. In 1799, Hersilia wouldn’t behave
herself. There was no manner David may make her into the
“impartial” emblem of noble maternal femininity that she has
come to signify for a lot of trendy students. This isn’t to
say that David as painter and as creator of the accompanying
brochure didn’t attempt to management her disruptive and competing
pressure by diminishing its worth relative to the masculine nudes.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 327
As Chaussard famous, Intervention of the Sabines aligns masculinity
with timelessness and femininity with temporality.60 The
tableau opposes not solely masculine stasis (the horizontal
frieze) to feminine motion (the intersecting narrative eruption)
but additionally male nudity to feminine style. It’s towards ladies’s
temporality and ephemeral appropriation of nudity that
David’s printed exegesis regarding “the nudity of [his]
heroes” should be interpreted. The painter’s textual content directs
consideration to the male nudes and renders the feminine figures
invisible. In accordance with David’s brochure, ladies’s decisions
weren’t at problem. As an alternative, viewers have been invited to ponder,
admire, talk about, even debate male nudity. If the feminine
protagonists may elicit a lot casual commentary–
gossip-about their gown and the identification of the fashions, the
male our bodies, David cues us, warranted formal essential dialogue.
Each portray and brochure spotlighted Hersilia’s bracketing
male counterpoints, however they did so partly by heightening
their controversy. Tatius significantly was meant to goad.
David relied on the shock worth of males’s uncovered flesh and
genitals within the midst of dressed figures to direct his startled
viewers’s consideration towards his male heroes.
However it’s exactly this reliance on stunning masculine
show that factors to the instability of the portray’s gendered
structural oppositions. For Chaussard, stasis signified a realm
of aesthetic ideality contrasted to ladies’s vulgar and disorderly
exercise, however that stillness additionally resembled the exhibitionism
related to style. Tatius and Romulus have been topic
to being learn, like trendy ladies, as flamboyant if
silly exhibitionists, resorting to extremism to attract consideration
to themselves. Given the fashionability of the Sabine
ladies and the prevalence of pictures like Boilly’s Make Peace
(Fig. 21), wouldn’t viewers have been predisposed to see
Hersilia as a classy Frenchwoman separating her competing
lovers who abruptly, inexplicably, and fairly extravagantly
discard their fits Wouldn’t that wall-length mirror reverse
the portray solely improve this sense of the painted males’s
all of the sudden uncovered nakedness David, Chaussard, and Roederer
might have insisted that the male nudes have been like legislation, that’s,
timeless and common, however these heroes is also interpreted
as males who strove to take advantage of ostentatious of
style decisions.61
When Male and Feminine Nudities Meet
In Intervention of the Sabines, David supplied an unstable
encounter and made it the very foundation of his work’s controversy
in addition to its success. This was a risque confrontation between
competing gendered aesthetic and political fashions: between
contemporaneity and historical past, between style and le beau
iddal, between the ancien regime and the Republic. However the
multivalence of the time period nudity d la grecque in 1799 attests to
the incapacity of such classes to stay discrete. Even when
consideration might be diverted from the spectacle of girls to
the male nudes, these nudes have been now embedded inside a
public sphere (and pictorial syntax) newly outlined to incorporate
ladies, and ladies, furthermore, who have been a la mode. The
presence of trendy ladies inflected the methods the male nudes
have been obtained. In opposition to trendy females, the standing male
acadimies now appeared undressed. In addition they appeared as
objects ofwomen’s imaginative and prescient.
To date, my argument has for probably the most half handled the
masculine and female variations of nudity a la grecque as
impartial entities, however David’s portray is about their
intimate if anxious confrontation. Word, for example, Hersilia’s
guarded, unusually birdlike, darting look at that peacock
Romulus (Fig. Four). One pupil distended, the opposite
diminished and dashing away, her glassy-eyed gaze fails to
cohere. Whereas her close to eye appears directed at an angle towards
us, the far eye retreats to the aspect, its iris sitting up too excessive
and too small, lower each by its profile edge and the overemphasized
slice of white. Stare too intently and Hersilia seems
walleyed. Look additionally on the equally hooded and ambiguously
muffled asymmetrical gaze of the older girl who faces
Romulus and threatens to tear off her robe and expose her
breasts. Listed below are ladies in states of undress concerning a
displayed male nude; certainly, they’re the one figures gazing
at Romulus’s uncovered physique. It’s tough, nonetheless, to evaluate
exactly the place they give the impression of being and what they see there. They alone
get pleasure from entry to Romulus’s different aspect, that presence or
absence lurking behind (or eclipsed by) defend and sheath,
buttocks. As viewers by proxy, they heighten the sense of
suspense attending Romulus’s withheld physique. Their oddly
uninformative however directed gazes, coupled with Tatius’s frontality,
compel the query: Ought to the viewer undertaking Tatius’s
anatomy onto the halfgod’s entrance, assembling his physique half by
half (shoulder, arm, chest, hardened abdomen, genitals) in an
try and reconstruct the person as seen by the ladies To do
so is to enact imaginatively a homoerotic conjoining, certainly,
identification, of the 2 males’s our bodies, however such a projection
additionally subtly compromises the halfgod with the doubts unfurled
by the awkward, “bare” specificities and vulnerabilities of
his foil. Undermined is Romulus’s standing as an indivisible,
autonomous, and coherent signifier of phallic perfection,
completeness, and energy. Considerably, it’s ladies’s viewing
that initiates the method.
In David’s tableau, ladies are the privileged beholders not
solely of a god (and rapist-cum-husband) but additionally of the
masculine beau iddal. Whereas the homoerotic attraction of solitary
bare male figures in work like Bara (Fig. Three) rendered
the feminine viewer invisible and irrelevant, David’s insertion of
the Sabine ladies into the body of male nudity appears to
have necessitated an anxious appraisal of the connection
amongst ladies, sexuality, and the general public sphere. If feminist
scholarship has been preoccupied with the male gaze on the
feminine object, particularly the feminine nude, and up to date inquiries
have targeted on the circuit of homoerotic need for the
male viewer of the male nude, the portray of the Sabines
configures a in a different way gendered confrontation. Few work
have catalyzed such a fervent and anxious preoccupation
on the a part of its contemporaries with the feminine viewer of
masculine flesh.
David’s tableau foregrounds the feminine spectator not solely
in its privileged positioning of girls as viewers of Romulus
but additionally in its very centerpiece, the explosive girl in crimson
who conspicuously and immediately stares at us, thereby wedding ceremony
aggressivity and feminine viewing. The confrontational character
of her degree frontal gaze serves as a counterpoint to each
Hersilia’s skittish deflected regard and the rolling asymmetry
of the outdated girl’s eyes. The ability in addition to the menace of
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328 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2

22 Henry Fuseli, drawing,
ca. 1800-1805. Zurich,
Kunsthaus
the girl in crimson resides within the riveting directness of her
stare. However David, at the same time as he so successfully conveys the
compelling intercourse between ladies’s viewing and our
personal, registers the query of its eclipse (or the ability of its
revelation): beneath the billowing tent of material, the girl’s
clenched fingers, hovering exactly at eye degree, threaten
to drop (or rise) like a shade over her eyes.
Finally, nonetheless, the relation between ladies viewers
and the actual world seems to have been far much less fraught than
ladies’s regard of (males’s) artwork. It’s important that the
trendy girl figures within the criticism of David’s portray
not as a visual object however as a viewer of artwork’s male nudity. That
ladies had grow to be an erotic spectacle in Listing France
was much less explicitly mentioned than the methods their viewing
impinged on artwork’s masculine our bodies. It was the assembly of
male nudes and precise Frenchwomen that obsessed the male
critics of the Sabines, each detrimental and constructive. It’s straightforward to
discern the specter of girls’s confrontation with Tatius’s
uncovered genitals in these interchanges. Whereas detrimental critics
predictably denounced the portray’s capability to compromise
feminine members of its viewers, David’s supporters repeatedly
described the work’s opponents as prudish, unsophisticated,
and hypocritical ladies. In his overview of the Sabines
exhibition, Charles Landon, for example, produced a fastidious
feminine spectator to be able to dismantle her place.
In accordance with Landon, some ladies wished Tatius to be
additional coated, however they have been hypocritical inasmuch as they
didn’t protest the comparable nudity of vintage sculptures.
If society was to comply with the reasoning of those feminine spectators,
it will be essential to censor all of the sculptures in
public civic areas, together with the just lately arrived spoil of
Napoleonic conquest, the Laocodn.62 (It was exactly this
confrontation between trendy feminine viewer and Laoco6n’s
bulging anatomy that delighted Henry Fuseli throughout
the early 1800s; Fig. 22). The royalist critic for the Journal des
Dibats,Jean-Baptiste-Bon Boutard, made an identical level about
those that believed that male nudity produced harmful
impressions: “If David’s tableau is immoral, it will be
essential to relegate to the shadows of storerooms and
museums all of the statues that adorn our public gardens and
embellish our palaces.'”63
At stake in these arguments appears to be the standing of artwork
itself. Was the return of the feminine spectator so decisive that
all male nudes grew to become topic to elimination on the premise of
morality Lest one assume that David’s supporters exaggerated
the extent to which censorship might be enlisted within the
identify of feminine modesty, take heed to the polemicist Louis-
Sebastien Mercier, who, moreover condemning ladies’s present
vintage style, additionally boldly denounced public sculpture
by conjuring a younger lady’s encounter with a titillated Bacchus
on the verge of an erection:
Morality and statues are two incompatible issues. And may
one regard as illustrious geniuses, or relatively as legislators of
modesty, these artists whose conceited chisel not solely
reproduced however even enlarged the sexual components of statues
mutilated by time
No! It’s not a weak spot to be scandalized by such
nudities. One doesn’t have the proper to signify to the
eyes of a mom of a household that which one wouldn’t dare
make audible to her ears; her younger daughter strolling at
her sides shouldn’t elevate her eyes beneath the lily, image of
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 329
her innocence, to ponder nude the rounded buttocks
of a Bacchus within the spring of his life, and whose amorous
visage signifies that he feels the motion of voluptuousness
spring up.64
Via the younger lady’s eyes, Mercier sees vintage marble
metamorphose into pulsating sexual arousal. Whether or not as a result of
of their modesty, their hypocritical prudery, or their
licentiousness, ladies rewrote artwork and male nudity by (hetero)-
sexualizing them. Certainly, in line with David’s detrimental and
constructive critics alike, ladies noticed intercourse in all places. Whereas the
prude could seem the antithesis of the promiscuous undressed
girl, each attest to ladies’s incapacity to depart inviolate an
aesthetic sphere. In fact, there isn’t any such autonomous
realm of “purity”; the strain between ideality and eroticism
is intrinsic to the illustration of bare our bodies. However in
post-Revolutionary France, the stress to acknowledge the
presence of girls viewers made the tensions (and capacious
multivalences) inherent to the beau idial, that cobbledtogether
however cherished fiction, crudely manifest. Excessive artwork and
somatic low couldn’t be held asunder. Maybe ladies’s
presence merely offered a automobile for males to voice their very own
fantasies, however the shift from a masculine homoerotic to a
female heterosexual mannequin of viewing appears to have been
decisive. If the antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann
may eloquently evoke his personal “rising” and “heaving”
response to the sensual pleasures afforded by the Apollo
Belvedere with out compromising the standing of aesthetic discourse,
no such erotic responsiveness on the a part of ladies
might be subsumed throughout the rubric of aesthetic discrimination
in 1790s France.65 As a result of it was inextricably certain up
with ladies’s sexuality, ladies’s spectatorship threatened to
wrench the heroic male nude into the tawdry realm of
pornography. Did the mere presence of Hersilia, like Mercier’s
younger lady, elicit imaginings of Romulus’s springing
“motion of voluptuousness,” a motion, furthermore, over
which he had no management66
Not surprisingly, ladies’s energy to compromise the masculine
beau idial elicited anger on the a part of male critics.
Roederer, for one, believed that Mercier’s preoccupation with
public sculpture was misguided. Ladies, not male statues,
have been the issue. In a broadcast letter, he expressed his
impatience: “Citizen, you complain to your self of encountering
totally nude statues of marble or bronze in our public
promenades; have not you seen in our spectacles, our balls, in
society, a crowd of figures who have been neither of marble nor
bronze, much more nude than these statues”67 In accordance with
Roederer, Bacchus and his inanimate companions had been
upstaged. Neither marble nor bronze, ladies had made
themselves into residing nudes, nudes, furthermore, who appeared
to be proliferating, actually taking up the general public areas of
Paris: “our spectacles, our balls, in society, a crowd.” Right here was
the actual irritation. Ladies weren’t solely competing for
consideration with male artwork, they have been additionally pretending to require
its elimination from view. What! Ought to gardens not
characteristic heroic male nudes however grow to be the only real province of a
crowd of undressed ladies Was there no place any longer
for artwork, for marble, for bronze Had feminine flesh concurrently
made marble appear flesh, undone its impartial
standing, and, in a hypocritical feint, taken its very place Was
this the conspiratorial intention of the alluring half-naked
Frenchwomen who hypocritically demanded the protecting of
Tatius’s uncovered genitals at the same time as they sought a glimpse in
mirrors hidden inside their fluttering followers 68Actually the
author of a letter “To Ladies dressed a la Grecque and a la
Romaine” printed within the Journal des Dames et des Modes in
1799 acknowledged their ploy and held them accountable:
Ladies have chosen the costume of Psyche, Venus and her
nymphs. Wearing a fascinating method, they entice
and maintain our regard. Their breasts whose actions give
delivery to our needs, whose scrumptious types are hardly
hid by a light-weight cloth … so as higher to attract their
voluptuous contours, all the things on this new style provokes
voluptuousness; and but ladies complain of the
little decency that’s preserved close to them.69
Involuntarily seduced, unfairly accused of indecency, the
male critic holds ladies absolutely chargeable for fixing his
regard.
Roederer conflated the nudity of artwork and the nudity of
Frenchwomen. He noticed Mercier as a dupe, scapegoating
Bacchus within the identify of girls who themselves made a
spectacle of nakedness. Chaussard, against this, rebutted
accusations that the nudity of David’s male protagonists
endangered feminine spectators by considerably differentiating
between ladies’s nakedness and artwork’s nudity. Fairly than
merely claiming superiority to the inhibitions of well mannered feminine
society, Chaussard was keen to deal with explicitly the intimate
relationship between ladies’s viewing and fears of
unregulated feminine sexuality. The critic who attended to the
refrain of “vulgar” ladies within the image additionally devoted an ideal
deal of time addressing the results of the portray on their
feminine counterparts milling about in entrance of the image.
Certainly, his protection of nudity solely thought-about the girl
spectator.
With Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel de Montaigne to
bolster his place, Chaussard argued that the affect of the
unknown on a feminine creativeness was way more harmful
than a direct confrontation with the bare male physique. A nude
absolutely uncovered to the sunshine results in indifference. Chaussard
quoted Rousseau to argue that the partially draped nude
produces different results: “Is not it identified that statues and
work solely offend the eyes when a mix of clothes
renders nudities obscene The quick energy of the senses
is weak and restricted: it’s by the mediation of the creativeness
that they make their biggest ravages” (Chaussard, 34).
David’s nudity was contrasted to the obscene “combination” of
clothes in different kinds of artwork. The partially clad determine invitations
the risks of girls’s fantasies. In keeping with sensationalist
theories of the eighteenth century, Chaussard claimed that
behavior blunts the ability of sense impressions whereas creativeness
is capaciously damaging.70 Providing a panoply of authorities
from vintage philosophy to ethnography to unravel the
downside of girls’s “heated” arousal and extravagances,
Chaussard emphasised that educating ladies was much better
than leaving them to guess “in line with the freedom and warmth
of their fantasy. Instead of true components, ladies substitute by
warmth and by hope different components triply extravagant.”71 (Witness
the danger of David’s subsequent occlusion of Tatius’s genitals in
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330 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
23 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Sacrificeo f theR ose,c a. 1785-88.
Non-public assortment
my “triply extravagant” imaging of the trio of legs hanging
beneath his scabbard.) Confronted with the philosophical
and social downside of the feminine gaze, a revered lineage of
nice male thinkers all agree it’s higher that there be no
surprises. Ladies’s presence in David’s exhibition house was
justified as an Enlightenment undertaking of training.
Chaussard’s enlightened sexual discourse inherits the Revolutionary
concern that non-public conduct be clear to
public advantage. His strongest barbs have been reserved for these
male hypocrites who, whereas anxious concerning the advantage of
ladies within the public exhibition, nonetheless uncovered their
moms, wives, and daughters to the lascivious tableaux of
their non-public cupboard. David’s nudes are measured towards the
easel work that corrupt feminine advantage by the licentious
poses of veiled figures. Contrasting the Sabines to Jean-
Honore Fragonard’s Sacrifice of the Rose (Fig. 23), Chaussard
pits the general public tackle and virility of classicism’s male nudity
towards the non-public and libertine Rococo preoccupation with
feminine seduction. Produced simply earlier than the Revolution and
engraved in 1790, Fragonard’s apparently fairly profitable
portray celebrates the lack of girl’s virginity by representing
the swooning ecstasy of a feminine nude whose clear
draperies slide down from her uncovered breasts to wrap
round her interior thighs.72 Eyes rolled again, mouth partly
open, the girl’s face mimicsJean-Baptiste Greuze’s formulaic
moneymakers, these endlessly insipid, coy women whose
cell options appear to have misplaced their anatomical moorings
and threaten to slide away (the pictorial melting metaphorically
enacting a lubricated onanism). Visually, the distinction to
the Sabines couldn’t be extra startling nor, for David’s
defender, simpler. How may one accuse David’s male
nudes of being obscene
when quite the opposite it’s figures veiled from head to foot
who categorical the motion most at odds with decency Such is
this determine who, within the Sacrifice of the Rose, swoons subsequent to an
altar; such are all these compositions so trendy, so
libertine, through which preside, for lack of true genius, gross
equivocation, and extra harmful than the cynical work
of Aretino, tackle themselves much less to the senses of
imaginative and prescient than to vicious thought, reawakening all problems
with the help of seductive allusions, voluptuous indicators,
generally imprecise and devious, at all times expressive and licentious.
Right here, listed below are indecent compositions that corrupt
the center and trick and pervert the spirit. This man who
deploys them in his cupboard beneath the eyes of his mom,
spouse and daughter, doesn’t fail to proscribe with indignation
the nudity of all these half-gods of antiquity who, in
their common expression, solely recall dignity, advantage, heroism.
(Chaussard, 33)
So that is the hypocrisy of C.Z.! Indulging in non-public pornographic
debauchery whereas publicly pretending ethical outrage
earlier than vintage halfgods like Romulus! Lajer-Burcharth has
astutely identified the methods classicism accrues authority in
Chaussard’s textual content by its gendered opposition to Rococo works
(412).73 However Fragonard’s work should not the one time period
towards which David’s nudes are understood. Chaussard
opposes David’s forthright nudes to the erotic metonymies of
diaphanous clothes. If the sensual narratives of these
flowing materials have been certainly facilely and expertly enacted by
Fragonard’s fluid brushwork, they have been additionally, as we all know,
carried out within the gardens and promenades of Paris by French
ladies dressed d la grecque. Considerably, the nuditis gazees of
trendy Parisiennes have been much less about complete revelation (though
this was apparently tried) than concerning the seductiveness
of our bodies all however revealed by cloth. In Chaussard’s
textual content, the risks of veiled seduction evoke not solely
Rococo libertinism however present female style, that model a
la Grecque now made Rococo, that perversion of the previous
marker of advantage into a brand new type of libertinism.
Roederer was subsequently flawed to confuse the nudity of artwork
and the nudity of partly veiled Frenchwomen. Chaussard is
not duped by Frenchwomen’s appropriation of Greek nudity.
As an alternative, he seizes on the variations between feminine and male
nudity & la grecque and polarizes them: Frenchwomen’s halfdraped
our bodies weren’t the identical as marble or painted absolutely
nude gods. Gauzy material is seductive as a result of it obscures; it
renders unknown-private-parts of the physique whereas teasingly
implying their presence and accessibility. Full nudity renders
the physique public as a result of nothing is hidden from full communal
view. C.Z. believed David’s figures to be “gratuitously
indecent” as a result of they transposed a non-public state-nakedness
(on which even a servant’s gaze impinged)-into a
public spectacle. For C.Z., privateness made public was indecent.
Chaussard, good Revolutionary that he was, eloquently proposes
the inverse: it’s privacy-the hidden, the veiled-that is
obscene. For Chaussard, even a classically draped heroic male
determine couldn’t embody advantage within the ways in which a nude may.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 331
Solely the physique revealed speaks fact, significantly, I might add,
at a time when even material a l’vintage had grow to be compromised
by feminine sexuality and the license, superficiality, and
ephemerality related to not solely the ancien regime however
additionally post-Revolutionary style. (Word that Chaussard’s opposition
of veiled and absolutely revealed refuses to acknowledge the
extent to which Romulus’s physique was cloaked by his armor.
Steel weapons, we should presume, don’t “deceive” just like the
folds of sentimental muslin.)
Chaussard solely discusses ladies viewers of male nudity.
Fairly than valorizing the male viewer of feminine objects, he’s
involved to direct consideration to the lads as applicable
objects of sight for each sexes. Like David, he appears to say:
look, take a look at males. Come out, Frenchwomen, from the
dangerously secretive viewing afforded by your duplicitous
followers. As an alternative, in public view, look immediately at artwork’s nude males.
Considerably, nonetheless, Chaussard’s dialogue of girls’s
viewing of male nudes leads inexorably again to ladies’s
draped our bodies; feminine our bodies essentially function the detrimental
instance. In Chaussard’s textual content, ladies are conjured as veiled
our bodies and veiled imaginative and prescient. However whereas Chaussard makes an attempt to
emancipate ladies’s trying, he and his contemporaries
can’t a lot as entertain the notion of girls’s full
nudity. Hersilia could also be compromised dressed d la grecque however
nobody, not even the dedicated classicist Chaussard, may
“think about” her stripped naked. If ladies’s gazes might be
pedagogically sanitized, there appears to be no resolution to the
methods ladies’s our bodies are completely inscribed by sexuality.
Draped or bared, girl is rarely absolutely public. The republican
valiantly tried to salvage Romulus and Tatius; he tried
to salvage an viewers through which genders and lessons
mingled; he tried to salvage ladies’s viewing; however the spectacle
of Hersilia, the good mediator and intervener in her
clinging white robe, continued to pose perplexing issues.
Ladies’s Intervention
Intervention is not any small matter. Ladies had certainly intervened
in 1799, compromising classicism, compromising nudity,
compromising the (fraternal) Republic. Ladies had
regarded to an inventive custom that was meant to be exemplary,
they usually had imitated its instance, however that imitation appeared
to many contemporaries to be confined to decorate, not virtuous
conduct. And to make gown exemplary was basically to
overturn the notion of exemplarity as a everlasting basis
of timeless values. A lot has been fabricated from the methods
David’s portray impressed masculine emulation on the a part of
younger male artists, however that Bloomian story of sons imitating
fathers shouldn’t be the story most related to an understanding of
Intervention of the Sabines.74 Ladies, too, can emulate, however in
1799 their emulation challenged a lineage-men begetting
males; males men-that had bracketed them out.
Theirs was not the story admirable republicans like Chaussard
and Roederer hoped to inform their male progeny.
However it’s flawed in the long run to conflate intervention and
emulation; the latter can too simply be denigrated as senseless
aping. Ladies might have appropriated republican iconography
and thereby corrupted it, however even Roederer, who so
explicitly denounced ladies’s new tyrannical empire over la
mode, believed that girls weren’t in the end their very own
iconographers-their energy was not of their making. In 1798,
Roederer laid the blame on the door of painters.
In a promenade, a half-nude girl and others wearing
gauze are greater than nude…. But one should agree that
artists have additionally contributed to this revolution. On the delivery
of the republican system, that they had spoken a lot of Greek
women, and our ladies had taken them at their phrase, for
worry that one would converse to them subsequent of Roman ladies.
They have been so lovable these Greek women and so boring these
Roman ladies! One can elevate one’s daughter to be a
Roman girl, however one prefers, oneself, to be a Greek lady.
In truth, citizen, there’s something very harsh and
tyrannical within the authority of painters. 4 years in the past, they
wished to make us change our habits as a result of ours have been
not picturesque; they organized the nation for portray,
relatively than arranging portray for the nation. Now they
amuse themselves dressing our ladies as fashions, chilling
them, giving them colds, to be able to have higher ease to
observe the purity of types of their work. Will artwork
profit from this I doubt it. It is vitally agreeable, I think about,
to attract stunning contours; however is not it additionally agreeable to
categorical modesty, chastity, their triumphs, their difficulties,
their give up Painters of expertise! it’s in virtues, and never
within the license of nudity, that there are treasures for you.75
Frenchwomen might have flattered their vainness by fashioning
themselves as lissome Greek nymphs relatively than sturdy
Roman paragons, however it was “tyrannical” painters who had
initiated this nationwide makeover. Looking for sinuous contours,
artists have been chargeable for (un)dressing ladies, risking
their well being and dangerously selling “the license of
nudity” as a substitute of advantage. Ladies, the creator decides, have been
in the end the malleable supplies of the dictatorial artist.
There might be little doubt that Roederer writing within the
spring of 1798 had David in thoughts. I don’t must rehearse
David’s central position as iconographer of the Revolution and
pageant grasp for Robespierre. Through the Listing, the
phrase “tyrannical painter” would conjure his identify above
all. Regardless of Roederer’s certainty that girls a la mode
conspired for energy, he finds a strategy to make David their
puppet grasp. However at the same time as Roederer’s textual content robs ladies of
authorial company, it additionally registers the affect of their mimicry.
To the extent that “nudity” was now certain to “license,” it
was additionally certain to trendy Frenchwomen undressed d la
grecque. Within the controversial reception of David’s Sabines,
theirs was maybe probably the most formidable intervention. Of
course, what republican classicism and the masculine beau
iddal misplaced by way of authority, David’s coffers gained in boxoffice
gross sales. Though he wouldn’t exhibit one other portray
that includes classical male nudes for fifteen years, the scandal of
nudity & la grecque in turn-of-the-century Paris amply paid for
his nation home.76
Who then risked whose well being On the onset of the
Napoleonic Empire, the creator of The Good friend of Ladies; or,
Letter ofa Physician in regards to the affect of the clothes of girls on
their morals and well being. . .. supplied David’s instance to justify
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332 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
24 David, Le Sacre, 1805-7.
Paris, Musee du Louvre
(picture: RMN)
his denunciation of girls’s unfastened and revealing clothes,
however his parable of 1804 inverts Roederer’s story of 1798.
In accordance with this creator, the Sabines might have made David
rich, however he had paid the value of his personal bodily
well-being:
I can solely cite with some confidence the works of medical doctors
who’re particularly dedicated to proving the risks of
immorality. But there’s some purpose to deduce from the
slackness [la mollesse] of clothes that of morals, and from
the latter a nasty affect on well being, after we see David,
surrounded by royal luxurious and fallen ladies, struck by a
shameful affliction.77
By 1804, it appeared clear that Roederer’s tyrannical puppet
grasp had fallen into the seductive, regal fold of unfastened and
luxuriant ladies. Hersilia, it seems, had led ineluctably to
the coronation of Josephine by a wan, swaddled and ermineblanketed
hero. Sick, royal, and female, David was able to
paint Le Sacre for the Salon of 1808 (Fig. 24). David, within the
midst of portray that homage to the flowing satins, velvets,
and trendy stuffs of the Empire, succumbed to public
approbation and painted over Tatius’s genitals.
Assistant professoro f historical past of artwork at U.C. BerkeleyD, arcy Grimaldo
Grigsbyi s currentlyw orkingo n a booke ntitledE xtremities in Paint:
Representing Empire in Put up-Revolutionary France (1789-
1830). Her essay “Rumor, Contagion and Colonization in Gros’s
Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804)” was printed in Representations
51 (Summer season 1995). [History of Art Department, University of
California at BerkeleyB, erkeleyC, alif 94720]
Continuously Cited Sources
Aulard, Alphonse, Paris pendant la riaction thermidorienne et sous le directoire:
Recueils de paperwork, 5 vols. (Paris, 1898).
Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, 1799, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David
(Paris: Pougens, Yr VIII [1799-1800]), in Assortment Deloynes (Paris:
Biblioth~que Nationale, 1980), microform, vol. 21, no. 597.
Crow, Thomas, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven:
Yale College Press, 1995).
David, Jules, Le peintre Louis David 1748-1825: Souvenirs et paperwork inidits
(Paris, 1880-82).
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, “David’s Sabine Ladies: Physique, Gender and Republican
Tradition beneath the Listing,” Artwork Historical past, 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430.
Musee du Louvre,Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825, exh. cat., Paris, 1989.
Roederer, Pierre-Louis, Oeuvresd u ComteP L. Roedererv, ol. Four (Paris, 1856).
Notes
This text is basically primarily based on chap. Four of my dissertation “Classicism,
Nationalism and Historical past: The Prix Dicennaux of 1810 and the Politics of Artwork
beneath Put up-Revolutionary Empire,” College of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1995.
I want to thank Thomas Crow, Pat Simons,Joel Isaacson, and David Bien
for his or her feedback at the moment in addition to readers of this altered model:
foremost amongst them, Todd P. Olson, but additionally Erika Najinski, Jeannene
Prybylski, Anne Wagner, Margaret Waller, and the readers for Artwork Bulletin. I
would additionally wish to thank my environment friendly analysis assistant Heather MacDonald.
Margaret Waller generously shared her unpublished materials on associated
points. Funding was offered by Fulbright, Lurcy, Social Science Analysis
Council, and Kress Two-Yr Institutional Fellowships. Translations are mine
except in any other case indicated. For Gregoria.
1. Stefan Germer, “In Search of a Beholder: On the Relation of Artwork,
Audiences and Social Spheres in Put up-Thermidor France,” Artwork Bulletin 79
(Mar. 1992): 19-36 at 34; Dorothy Johnson, Jacques-Louis David: Artwork in
Metamorphosis (Princeton: Princeton College Press, 1993), 124.
2. See Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “David’s Sabine Ladies: Physique, Gender and
Republican Tradition beneath the Listing,” Artwork Historical past 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430
at 413 (creator’s emphasis) and 424 (emphasis added); see additionally Erica Rand,
“Depoliticizing Ladies: Feminine Company, the French Revolution, and the Artwork
of Boucher and David,” Genders 7 (Spring 1990), 47-68. Alex Potts has additionally
emphasised the centrality of the male as “a really perfect object of need and a really perfect
subjectivity with which the male spectator can establish”; Potts, “Stunning
Our bodies and Dying Heroes: Pictures of Excellent Manhood within the French Revolution,”
Historical past Workshop3 zero (Autumn 1990): 1-21; repr. in revised type in his
Flesh and the Excellent: Winckelmann and the Origins of Artwork Historical past (New Haven: Yale
College Press, 1994), 229.
Three. Mus6e du Louvre, 336.
Four. In his brochure, David said that even previous to the exhibition he had
encountered criticism of the nudity and that it will definitely be repeated
(“An objection that has already been made to me and that won’t fail to be
repeated”), Le tableau des Sabines, exposi publiquement au palais nationwide des
sciences et des arts …. (Paris, Yr VIII [1799-1800]), 15; cited in Daniel
Wildenstein, Paperwork compMmentaireas u catalogue de l’oeuvre de Louis David
(Paris: Basis Wildenstein, 1973), 150.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 333
5. See beneath for controversies in regards to the nudity of the male figures. A
variety of statements within the press assimilated David’s non-public entrepreneurial
exhibition to spectacular entertainments topic to a authorities tax; his
defenders valiantly tried to disclaim the appropriateness of such a conflation
of artwork and spectacle. The controversy intensified relatively than diminished over
the years;b y 1801, even David’sa rdent supporter Pierre-Jean-BaptistCe haussard
criticized the deleterious results industrial exhibitions would have on
the general public salon; see Journald esA rts,Three zero Fructidor,Y earI X [Sept. 17, 1801]. For
the vicissitudes of the portray’s preliminary reception, see Mus6e du Louvre,
328-32; for later controversies,p articularlyd uring the debates catalyzedb y the
1810 decennial competitors, see DarcyG rimaldoG rigsby,” ClassicismN, ationalism,
and Historical past,” Ph.D. diss., College of Michigan, 1995, chap. Four.
6. A.D. [AmauryD uval], La DicadeP hilosophiqu1e3 (10 Pluviose, Yr VIII
[Jan. 30, 1800]). In accordance with Duval, clothed figures needs to be painted by
ladies and mediocre painters. The Ideologues have been a disparate group of
liberal social and political theorists usually dedicated to Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac’s concept of sensationalism. Self-appointed inheritors of the Enlightenment
philosophetsh, ey dominated the nationwide Institute’sC lasso f Morala nd
Political Sciences. Whilst they misplaced favor beneath Napolkon, significantly after
the Concordat of 1801, they continued to specific their Enlightenment concepts
by their organ, the journal La DicadeP hilosophiquSe.e e Joanna Kitchin,
Un journal “philosophique”:L a Dicade (1794-1807) (Paris: M.J. Minard, 1965);
and Marc Regaldo Un milieu intellectuel: La Dicade Philosophique, 5 vols. (Paris:
Diffusion, H. Champion, 1976). In regards to the masculine beau idial on this
interval, see Regis Michel, LeB eaui dial, exh. cat., Mus&ed u Louvre,P aris,1 989;
Potts, 1990, 1994 (as in n. 2); Thomas Crow, “Observations on Type and
Historical past in French Portray of the Male Nude,” in VisualC ultureI:m agesa nd
Interpretationesd, . Norman Bryson et al. (Hanover,N .H.: WesleyanU niversity
Press, 1994), 141-67, repr. in expanded type in EmulationM: akingA rtistsf or
RevolutionaryF ranceb y Thomas Crow (New Haven: Yale College Press,
1995); Whitney Davis, “The Renunciation of Response in Girodet’s Sleep of
Endymion,”in Bryson et al, 168-201; Marie-PierreF oissy-Aufrareet al, La Mort
de Bara (Avignon: Fondation du Mus6e Calvert, 1989); Abagail Solomon-
Godeau, “Male Hassle: A Disaster in Illustration,” Artwork Historical past 16, no. 2
(une 1993): 286-312; and idem, Male Hassle: A Disaster in Illustration (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1997); in addition to Carol Ockman, “Profiling
Homoeroticism: Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon,” Artwork Bulletin
75 (June 1993): 259-74; and idem, Ingres’s Eroticized Our bodies: Retracing the
SerpentinLe ine (New Haven:Y ale UniversityP ress, 1995).
7. Abagail Solomon-Godeau in her guide Male Hassle(a s in n. 6), 195-99,
has additionally briefly famous the eruption of detrimental criticism of male nudity on this
interval. Whereas she emphasizes the “totally male formations” inside which the
male nude was “produced, obtained, commissioned, bought, mentioned, celebrated
or criticized” (199), I deal with the methods women-actual and
imagined-impinged on the “masculine character of the creative sphere.”
Eight. Mariani, letter to the editor, Journal des Arts, 15 Pluvi6se, Yr VIII [Feb. 4,
1800]: 9: “There you might be, bourgeois gents! You like draped chiffons
higher than stunning types. / As for me, / Nothing is extra stunning than the
nude, / the nude alone is amiable.” See additionally the nameless brochure Critique
du tableau des Sabines du Citoyen David, mentioned in Mus6e du Louvre, 336; and
C.Z., Le Courdiedre sS pectacle8s, F rimaire,Y earI X, [Nov. 29, 1800], Three.
9. One other nameless critic, who lamented the shortage of work commemorating
France’sm ilitaryg lories, was particularlyt roubled by the inappropriateness
of portraying navy heroes nude. The dialogic conceit he used hardly
masks the creator’s dismay and contempt; creative precedents can’t justify a
selection that’s without delay indecent and ahistorical. The dialogue juxtaposes the
public’s standards of morality and historic accuracy to the artist’s intraaesthetic
commitments to the acadimie and visible precedents; La Revue du
Museum: Dialogue entre Damon et un peintre (Paris, 1799), Eight-10, in Assortment
Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform, vol. 21, no. 562,
142-44.
10. C.Z. (as in n. Eight)
11. Chaussard, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David (Paris, Yr VIII [1799-
1800]), Deloynes Assortment, 21, no. 597. An Ideologue, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste
Chaussard changed Amaury Duval as La Decade Philosophique’s artwork critic in
1798. The fervor with which he embraced the Revolution is recommended by a play
he wrote in 1791 aptly entitled La France rigndtre, which bore the epigraph
“One doesn’t enlighten males with the torch of hatred however with the flame of
Purpose.” His Enlightenment religion in rationality accompanied a profound
dedication to antiquity and an entire disavowal of Christianity, to the
extent that he changed his “superstitious” hyphenated Christian surname
with Publicola in 1792. However, throughout theJacobins’ rule, Chaussard was
thrice positioned on Robespierre’s execution checklist as a result of he remained a dedicated
Girondist. Regarding Chaussard, see Grigsby (as in n. 5), chaps. Four, 6. See
additionally the extremely informative essay by Marc Regaldo, “Profil perdu: L’idiologue
Chaussard,” in Approches des Lumires: Milanges offerts d Jean Fabre (Paris:
Klinksieck, 1974), 381-401; E. Hereau, “Ndcrologie: Pierre-Jean-Baptiste
Chaussard,” Revue Encycloptdique 21 (1824): 251-53; Regaldo (as in n. 6);
Kitchin (as in n. 6); Adrian Rifkin, “Historical past, Time and the Morphology of
Essential Language, or Publicola’s Alternative,” in Artwork Criticism and Its Establishments in
Nineteenth-CenturyF rance, ed. Michael Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester College
Press, 1994), 29-42.
12. Stefan Germer and Hubertus Kohle emphasize the break up tackle of the
portray in “From the Theatrical to the Aesthetic Hero: On the Concept of Advantage
in David’s Brutus and Sabines,” Artwork Historical past 9, no. 2 (June 1986): 168-84.
13. Amaury Duval (as in n. 6), 228, additionally explicitly described Hersilia in phrases
of sophistication hierarchy: “Every of those ladies has a specific expression that
signifies the rank she occupies in society. The struggling of Hersilia is noble.”
14. In one other passage of his essay concerning the Sabines, 30, Chaussard
spells out his conviction that the French individuals didn’t benefit from the bodily
vigor and perfection of the Greeks. Exhorting David to go to Greece itself,
Chaussard nostalgically evokes the great thing about the southern peoples relative to
the northern.
15. Chaussard’s condemnation of style’s deformation of contemporary man
resembles different kinds of texts that introduced the philosophe’ms edical discourse
to the examination of “unnatural” social practices. For example, in Dr.
Clairian’s 1803 publication entitled Recherches et considirations medicales sur les
vitements des hommesp articulibrements ur les culottes. … (Paris, 1803), a doctor
addressed fears that restrictivem ale culottes( breeches) risked the disappearance
of the French race.
16. See, for instance, Socidt6 Populaire et R6publicaine des Arts, Issues
sur les avantages de changer le costume franfais (Paris, n.d.): “Beneath the
empire of despots, the ineffective class of idle wealthy decided the shape to present to
clothes…. Free males is not going to comply with the airs of those frivolous beings….
[The free man] enters into the spirit of French regeneration to revive the
costume to its unique purpose and the morals of equality.” See additionally the
Conference’s decree of October 29, 1793, in regards to the newfound freedom
from vestimentaryc odes, cited in Philippe Perrot, Fashioningt heB ourgeoisieA:
Historical past of Clothes within the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton College
Press, 1994), 20.
17. For the debates about gown through the Revolutionary interval and the
historical past of style from Revolution to Empire, see Nicole Pellegrin, Les
vitements de la liberti: Abicidaire des pratiques vestimentaires en France de 1780 d
1800 (Aix-en-ProvenceA: linea, 1989); William Olander, “Pour transmettre:
la posterit6: French Portray and Revolution, 1774-1795,” Ph.D. diss., New
York College, 1983, 218-19; Aileen Ribeiro, Style within the French Revolution
(New York:H olmes and Meier, 1988);J. Renouvier, “Costume,”i n Histoired e
l’artp endantl a revolution(P aris:V veJ . Renouard, 1863), 463-80; Lynn Hunt,
“Rdvolutionf rancaise et la vie priv6e,” in Histoired e la vie pridvee, d. Philippe
Aries and Georges Duby (Paris: Seuil, [1985]), 21-52; Margaret Waller,
“Disembodiment as a Masquerade: Style Journalists and Different ‘Realist’
Observersi n DirectoryP aris,”L ‘EspriCt riateur3 7, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 50-60;
Raymond Gaudriault, RIpertoire de la gravure de mode franfaise des origines d 1815
(Paris:P romodis, 1988); Philippe S6guy,H istoired esm odess ous l’Empir(eP aris:
Promodis;C ercle de la Librairie,1 988); FrancoisB oucher, Histoired u costume
en Occident de l’antiquiti d nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 335-50; Ruth
Turner Wilcox, TheM odei n Costume(N ew York:S cribner, 1958), 220-45; The
Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire 1789-1815, exh. cat.,
Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York, 1989.
18. See Lynn Hunt, “The Rhetoric of Revolution in France,” Historical past
WorkshopJourn1a5l (Spring 1983): 78-94; and idem (as in n. 17), 24-26.
19. FranCois Poultier, “Physionomie de Paris,” Amis des Lois, 30 Vent6se,
Yr VI [March 20, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. Four, 578.
20. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, Le nouveau Diable boiteux: Tableau philosophiquee
t moradl eP aris( Paris,Y earV II [ 1798-1799]), vol. 2, 233. The rapidityo f
style’s transformation led a journal to bemoan mockingly throughout a quiet
summer time: “For eight days, at the least, style has been of an everlasting fidelity”
Miroir8, Fructidor,Y earV [Aug. 25, 1797], cited in Aulard,v ol. Four, 305.
21. See, for instance, the engravings in Caricaturepso litiquesb y Antione-
Joseph de Barruel-Beauvert( Paris,Y earV I [1797-98]).
22. For instance, the Bureau Central reported on 29 Prairial,Y earV I (June
16, 1798): “It’s sure that, restrained by extreme surveillance, an incurable
class of opponents [frondeurso] f the federal government and egoists for whom the
good or the dangerous of our political state of affairs is altogether a matter of indifference,
having no different technique of signaling their opposition to republican rules,
have affected a gown extraordinary in some features: inexperienced collars, black
collars, purple collars, then ties, then leaded canes; in the event that they haven’t, for lack of
alternative, seved as an indication of rallying amongst royalists, they have been at the least so
many tacit insults to those [republican] rules”; cited in Aulard, vol. Four,
720. See additionally Le Pddacteur of three Fructidor, Yr V [August 19, 1797], cited in
ibid., 301; Sdguy (as in n. 17), 34, and Edmond andJules de Goncourt, Histoire
de la soci~t• fran~aise pendant le Directoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 304-5;
Boucher (as in n. 17), 338.
23. Pierre Cartellier to Antoine-Denis Chaudet, letter of Could 7, 1804, in H.
Jouin, “Lettres inddits d’artistes fran•ais du XIX sidcle,” Nouvelles Archives de
l’ArtFranfais,
3d ser., 16, (1900): 7-Eight.
24. Henry Redhead Yorke, France in Eighteen Hundred and Two, ed. J.A.C.
Sykes (London, 1806), 124.
25. These variations resemble but additionally deviate from the paradigm of the
older energetic companion (erastes) and the passive youthful love object (eromenos)
attribute of historical vase portray. For a bibliography of this literature and
a consideration ofJ.-A.-D. Ingres’s exaggeration of that implicit opposition in
his early work, see Ockman, 1993 (as in n. 6).
26. Romulus’s determine accords subsequently with Jacques Lacan’s assertion that
“the phallus can solely play its position as veiled”;Jacques Lacan, “The Which means of
the Phallus,” in Female Sexuality:Jacques Lacan and the “EcoleF reudienne, “ed.
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334 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton; Pantheon, 1982),
74-85.
27. Yorke (as in n. 24), 124.
28. La morte de trois milles ans au Salon de 1783 (1783) Four, in Assortment Deloynes
(Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1980) micoform, vol. 13, no. 286, 178.
29. See Elisabeth Vig6e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, ed. Claudine Herrmann, (Paris:
Des Femmes, 1984) vol. 1, 85-88; and likewise the account by Aime Martin in
Pierre de Nolhac, Madame Vigie-Lebrun: Peintre de Marie-Antoinette (Paris:
Goupil, 1912), 129-35; this occasion is briefly talked about by Mary Sheriff, The
Distinctive Lady: Elisabeth Vigie-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics ofArt (Chicago:
College of Chicago Press, 1996), 47-48.
30. The ladies, artists and wives of artists, have been self-consciously performing
historical past portray, citing and enacting vintage precedents celebrated, for
occasion, in Nicolas-Man Brenet’s portray Piety and Generosity of Roman Ladies;
Brenet’s tableau hung subsequent to David’s portray of masculine martial sacrifice,
Oath of the Horatii, within the Salon of 1785. That the Frenchwomen donating
jewels in 1789 modeled themselves on classical ladies was broadly famous by
up to date observers; for example, Courrier Francais 65 (Sept. 18, 1789):
313; and Ruvolutions de Paris9 (Sept. 5-12, 1789): 19-22, which described these
ladies as “retracing amongst us the virtues of Greece.” I interpret the act of the
donation as a double transfer, without delay distancing ladies and artwork from decoration
and luxurious. Nevertheless, if their sacrifice was likened to males’s sacrifice to the
state, it was far much less sustainable; the negation of decoration can solely be
carried out as soon as. Relating to the donation, see Vivian Cameron, “Approaches
to Narrative and Historical past: The Case of the Donation of September 7, 1789, and
Its Pictures,” Research in Eighteenth-Century Tradition 19 (1989): 413-32; the occasion
was described in “Origines des dons patriotiques, faites A la nation,”
RNvolutions de Paris 9 (September 5-12, 1789): 19-22; and by the group’s
spokesperson, Mme Moitte, in two brochures, L’dme des Romaines dans les
femmes franraises and Suite de l’dme des romaines dans lesfemmes franfaises (Paris,
1789), in addition to Journal inidit de Madame Moitte, ed. Paul Cottin (Paris, n.d.),
1-Three. I’ve analyzed this donation at size in an unpublished paper entitled
” ‘L’&clat des sacrifices’: Decoration, Portray and Feminine Citizenship within the
Donation of September 7, 1789.”
31. Through the Revolution, one author reveals the ways in which (feminine) signal
and (summary) signified have been conflated; he protests a younger girl representing
Purpose on the Competition of Purpose absolutely should have represented Liberty:
“For the senses and the philosophical creativeness are each equally shocked at
the thought of a woman-especially a youthful woman-representing Purpose”;
quoted in Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Press, 1988), 101-2. See additionally Darcy
Grimaldo Grigsby, “Liberty’s Fragmented Physique: Revolutionary Politics and
the Instability of Allegory; An Evaluation of the Preliminary Reception of Delacroix’s
Le 28juillet, Libertieguidant le peuple,” M.A. thesis, College of Michigan, 1989;
and Marcia Pointon, “Liberty on the Barricades: Ladies, Politics and
Sexuality in Delacroix,” in Bare Authority: The Physique in Western Portray
1830-1908, (Cambridge: Cambridge College Press, 1990), 59-82.
32. Armand Charlemagne, Le monde incroyable, quoted in Renouvier (as in n.
17), 476.
33. See additionally an nameless portrait, ca. 1800, within the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork,
Washington, D.C., reproduced in Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 126. Renouvier (as in n.
17), 476, describes the development thus: “That which finest clothes a girl is
nudity.” See additionally Lucet, La Correspondance des Dames, vol. 2, (Paris, Yr VIII
[1799-1800]). Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has mentioned ladies’s risque selfrepresentation
in relation to Girodet’s retaliation towards Mlle Lange in 1799;
see her “Le rh6torique du corps f6minin sous le Directoire: Le cas d’Anne-
Francoise Elizabeth Lange en Danae,” in Les femmes et la Rivolution franCaise,
ed. Marie-France Brive (Toulouse: Presses Universitaire de Miraie, 1990), vol.
2, 221-25.
34. Quoted in Walter Markov, Grand Empire: Advantage and Vice within the Napoleonic
Period (New York: Hippocrene, 1990), 204.
35. “Their complete outfit, inclusive of footwear and jewellery, was not speculated to
weigh greater than half a pound. The file was mentioned to be held by the pleasant
spouse of Hamelin, a Swiss military contractor, who strolled by the Tuileries
gardens arrayed in nothing however a gossamer veil till the importunate gawking
of passers-by compelled her to retire”; quoted in ibid.
36. See Journal des Dames et des Modes, 9 Pluvirse, Yr VI [Jan. 28, 1798].
In accordance with Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 153 n. 31, Mme Tallien most popular
flesh-colored tights with gold spangles that glinted beneath her clear
robes. Mme Tallien, nie Thirisia Cabarrus, was the daughter of a outstanding
Spanish banker and spouse of the Revolutionary journalist and politician
Jean-Lambert Tallien; her salon performed a central position in Thermidorian excessive
society. David Kunzle states that this era’s scanty, skinny muslin robes have been
additionally generally “dampened to stick sculpturally to the physique”; Kunzle,
Style and Fetishism: A Social Historical past of the Corset, Tight-Lacing and OtherForms of
Physique-Sculpturei n the West( Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1982), 105.
37. La Petite Poste de Paris, Three Messidor, Yr V [June 21, 1797], cited in
Maurice Lescure, Madame Hamelin: Merveilleuse et turbulent Fortunde (1776-
1851) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 38. A couple of days later L’Ami du Peuple of 5
Messidor, Yr V [June 23, 1797] printed a commentary on this incident
that ended with an exhortation to “the imprudent” that “it’s crucial at
least to respect the individuals, and that, if one is dissolute, it’s crucial to cover it;
if one is well-behaved, it’s crucial to seem so”; quoted in Aulard, vol. Four, p.
189, in addition to in Lescure, 38. The incident is mentioned by Waller (as in n. 17),
in addition to Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33). In accordance with Louis Madelin, La France
du Directoire (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1922), Mme Hamelin tried “to interchange
the style of the sans-culottes with that of the sans-chemise.” Right here is the duc
de Broglie in his memoirs: “Like many others, I noticed Madame Tallien …
disguised as Diana together with her half-naked breast, carrying cothurns on her ft,
and dressed, if I could use the time period, in a tunic which scarcely coated her
knees”; de Broglie, Private Recollections of Duc de Broglie 1785-1820, trans.
Raphael Ledos de Beaufort (London, 1887), vol. 1, 21.
38. Courrier des Spectacles, 11 Thermidor, Yr V [July 28, 1797], 251. A.
Charlemagne’s poem (as in n. 32) additionally factors to this pervasive adoption of
Greek costume when he asks, “Who is that this Greek with large arms” and
discovers, on overhearing her argot, that she is Mme Angot, that drastically
common image of the crude feminine arriviste.
39. Dr. D6sessarts, Paris, Oct. 1798, quoted in Srguy (as in n. 17), 51.
40. Dr. Victor Broussonet, De la mode et des habillements (1799, second ed., 1806).
Arguments of those kinds could be sustained over the course of the last decade. In
1804, for instance, a pamphlet entitled L’ami desfemmes ou lettres d’un m~decin
listed quite a few examples of girls who had died due to their irrational
dedication to the unhealthy vagaries of classicizing style.
41. Le Publiciste, 21 Fructidor, Yr VII [Sept. 7, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. 5,
715.
42. In Louis-Mathieu Langlks, Voyage de Thunberg au cap de Bonne-Espirance,
aux iles de la Sonde et auJapon (Paris, 1796), vol. Four, 59.
43. Louis-Mathieu Langls, letter to the editor, Journal de Paris, 3e jour
compl6mentaire, Yr VII [Sept. 19, 1799], quoted in Aulard, vol. 5, 737. That
female Greek kinds have been generally related to indecency is corroborated
as nicely by a style column of thejournal Miroir, which two years earlier
juxtaposed the brand new model of robe (considerably, named les robes d l’hypocrite) to
the clothes d l’vintage: “They’re maybe extra respectable than the robes d la
grecque”; quoted in Aulard, vol. Three, 751.
44. Pierre-Louis Roedere, Journal de Paris, 15 Fructidor, Yr VII [Sept. 1,
1799], quoted in Roederer, vol. Four, 396. Referred to as “chief of the philosophes” by a
up to date, Roederer was hostile to each the the Aristocracy and clergy and thus
embraced the Revolution. A reasonable member of the Jacobin membership, he
equivocally supported constitutional monarchy and opposed the execution of
the king. After the autumn of the Girondists, he went into hiding, solely to reemerge
after Thermidor. He supported Bonaparte however quickly grew to become disillusioned and
fell out of favor through the Consulate; nonetheless he was appointed a depend
by Napoleon in 1808. See Thierry Lentz, Roederer 1754-1835 (Paris: Serpenoise,
1989); Roederer’s writings have been printed between 1853 and 1859 as
Oeuvresd u ComteP L. RoedererV. ol. Four contains the essays on style cited on this
article.
45. “Immorality impeded by surveillance has been much less obvious outdoor,
and the arrest of twenty-four prostituted ladies has at the least dammed up this
scandal. One sees with remorse that the ladies most disposed by their
sights and their morality to win the admiration which they search, have an effect on
appearances opposite to the advantage of their very own sentiments and thereby
involuntarily embolden by their instance these identified to be probably the most
shameful”; Bureau Central report, Four Messidor, Yr VI [une 22, 1798], cited
in Aulard, vol. Four, 745.
46. See Elizabeth Colwill, “Reworking Ladies’s Empire: Representations
of Ladies in French Political Tradition, 1770-1807,” Ph.D. diss., SUNY,
Binghamton, 1990.
47. Roederer, Journal d’Economie Publique, de Morale et de Politique, 10
Frimaire, Yr V [Oct. 31, 1796], quoted in Roederer, vol. Four, 382.
48. Chaussard himself acknowledged the Listing’s putting opposition of
female and male style in a dialogue in Le nouveau Diable boiteux (as in n. 20),
vol. 2, 232-33. The person accuses the girl of displaying an excessive amount of and relying
on la mode as a “magic talisman,” and the girl responds that the person, too,
succumbs to style: “… and if I tremble from chilly, do not you suffocate from
warmth”
49. Roederer, letter addressed to Louis-Sbastien Mercier, Journal de Paris,
13 Germinal, Yr VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807-Eight, quoted in Roederer, vol. Four, 382:
“elles ont fait, pour regagner tout ce qu’elles avaient perdu, un va-tout oii elles
ont mis jusqu’d leur sante; et ce va-tout sera bient6t perdu.” Roederer’s
assertion was deemed fascinating sufficient to have been reported and
recounted in one other journal, L’Ami des Lois, 14 Germinal, Yr VI [Apr. 3,
1798], additionally cited in Aulard, vol. Four, 595.
50. In regards to the strategic opposition of Corneille and Racine within the late
18th century, see Crow, 33-45.
51. See T. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New
Haven: Yale College Press, 1985), 176-77.
52. See, for instance, the primary problem of Tableau Gindral du Gozt, des Modes et
Costumesd e Paris par Une Socidtdd ‘Artistese t Gens de Lettres, 1 Vendimiaire, Yr
VII [Sept. 22, 1798], which describes the Roman-style white tunic, specifying
that “nudity” (sleevelessness) had changed sleeves even in harsh climate.
Right here is the duchesse d’Abrantes’s description of Mme Tallien: “She had taken
to carrying a kind of semi-Grecian costume that grew to become her admirably. It was
plain, virtually extreme, and he or she wore it with consummate grace…. Her solely
adornment was an extended, ample gown of muslin falling in giant folds about her
limbs and modeled after the material of a Grecian statue. Solely, the gown was of
selection Indian muslin and usual, little doubt, extra elegantly than these of
Aspasia and Poppea. It was caught up on the bosom, and the sleeves have been drawn
again over the arms and mounted with old school cameo brooches. Comparable
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 335
brooches adorned her shoulders and her waist”; d’Abrantes, Histoire des Salons
de Paris, quoted in L. Gastine, Madame Tallien: Notre Dame de Thermidor
(London: John Lane, the Bodely Head, 1913), 188-89. In 1801 Roederer
made gentle of the methods feminine gown had come to be minimally clasped by such
brooches in a mock dialogue between a pin and a needle through which the needle
lamented its lack of employment: ladies’s clothes was now solely pinned
collectively, typically with cameo brooches, meant because the pin complained, solely to
be unclasped, Journal de Paris, 21 Fructidor, Yr IX [Sept. 8, 1801], in
Roederer, vol. Four, 400-401.
53. Regarding Boilly’s collection, see Susan Siegfried, The Artwork of Louis-Liopold
Boilly: Fashionable Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven: Yale College Press,
1995), 70-75.
54. Etienne-Jean Del6cluze, Journal de Delcluze 1824-1828, ed. R. Baschet
(Paris: Bernard Grosset, 1948), 338.
55. Louis Hautecoeur, Louis David (Paris: La Desk Ronde, 1954), 180.
56. Truthful ones, in line with Pierre-Maximillien Delafontaine’s manuscript
at Paris, Bibliothque de l’Institut, ms 3784; see additionally Hautecoeur (as in
n. 55), 180 n. 40.
57. See Norman Bryson, Custom and Want: From David to Delacroix
(Cambridge: Cambridge College Press, 1984), 88-95; Germer and Kohle
(as in n. 12), 179-80.
58. There may be now a big bibliography regarding ladies’s relation to the
public sphere through the Revolutionary interval; see, for instance,Joan Landes,
Ladies and the Public Sphere within the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell College Press 1988); Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses:
Ladies and Illustration within the French Revolutionary Period (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers College Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Household Romance of the French
Revolution (Berkeley: College of California Press, 1993); as nicely asJohanna
Meehan, ed., Feminists Learn Habermas: Gendering the Topic of Discourse (New
York: Roufledge, 1995). There are fewer research in regards to the standing of
ladies through the post-Revolutionary years; see Geneviive Fraisse, Purpose’s
Muse: Sexual Distinction and the Beginning of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd
(Chicago: College of Chicago Press, 1989).
59. In regards to the scandal of Girodet’s vengeful, satiric denunciation of
the licentiousness and venality of 1 such trendy parvenu, Mlle Lange,
on the Salon of 1799, see George Levitine, “Girodet’s DNaenwa ,: The
Iconography of a Scandal,” Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 57-59 (1969-
70): 69-79; Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33); and Crow, 233-36.
60. I’m indebted to Stefan Germer’s dialogue of the portray’s two axes,
which he pertains to Emile Benveniste’s distinction between r&it and discours;
Germer (as in n. 1), 33-34.
61. Romulus, regardless of his nudity, nonetheless bears the traces of the incroyable’s
foppish magnificence, along with his “canines’ ears” sideburns, distinctive full-lipped
profile, and ornamentation condensed and displaced onto the serpentine crimson
feather and luxuriant gold equipment. Tatius might have appeared bare to
many, however, in his personal manner, Romulus too was au courant in 1799.
62. Charles Landon, Journal des Arts, no. 34 (20 Niv6se, Yr VII[IJ an. 10,
1800]): Four.
63. Boutard, Journal des Dibats, 13 Ventose, Yr VIII [Mar. 4, 1800]: 2-Three,
quoted in Assortment Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform,
vol. 21, no. 598, 787-88. A well-liked vaudeville particularly took as its topic
ladies’s hypocritical relation to David’s tableau. The brunt of the satire is the
comparatively educated girl artist whose basically susceptible ethical
place is exploited by an amorous younger man in pursuit of her daughter.
Tricked by the male suitor, the silly mom leaves her daughter defenseless
within the lobby of David’s exhibition as a result of she doesn’t dare expose her to
painted male nudes. In fact, the daughter is kidnapped and the play ends
with a parodic tableau vivant of David’s portray. See C. C. Jouy, Longchamp,
and Dieu-La-Foy, Le tableau des Sabines: Vaudeville en un acte (Paris, 1800).
64. Chapter C”LNXuXdXiti,, ” in Le Nouveau Paris, ed. J.-C. Bonnet
(Mercure de France, 1994), p. 649; this essay was largely primarily based on two articles
which appeared in Journal de Paris on 9 and 12 Germinal, Yr V [Mar. 29 and
Apr. 1, 1797]: 790-91 and 803-Four respectively. That Mercier’s grievance had
each forex and longevity is attested by J. B. Pujoulx’s dialogue of the
nudity of statues in his publication Paris d lafin du XVIIIe sitcle (Paris, 1801), 12.
65. In fact, homoerotic readings may additionally at explicit historic
junctures require related censorship or obfuscation. For instance, within the
significantly homophobic ambiance of early-19th-century England, Lord
Byron was compelled to masquerade his erotic response to the Apollo Belvedere
as that of a feminine viewer (a tactic he repeatedly deployed in his writings).
However, I might insist that in late-18th-century France, the homoerotic,
completely masculine paradigm of viewing dominated aesthetic discourse.
Alex Potts has described the restraints positioned on homoerotic readings of artwork in
Potts, 1994 (as in n. 2), esp. 118-31; regarding Byron, see Louis Crompton,
Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley:
College of California Press, 1985).
66. In her just lately printed guide The Distinctive Lady, Mary Sheriff
discusses 18th-century thinkers’ preoccupation with the feminine gaze on the
male object, and in a very amusing passage addresses Denis Diderot’s
account of embarrassing sexual arousal whereas modeling nude for the feminine
painter Mme Terborch; Sheriff (as in n. 29), 115-20, esp. 118.
67. Roederer, Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Yr VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807,
quoted in Roederer, vol. Four, 386.
68. In accordance with Jules David, 360, males’s habits earlier than David’s tableau
was markedly completely different from that of the trendy ladies who feigned
modesty and embarrassment by protecting their eyes with a fan cleverly
concealing a viewing glass, thereby without delay hiding and directing their gaze:
“The boys of style prided themselves on observing and signaling in loud
voices all of the beauties and all of the faults [of the picture], designating every
muscle by its identify and insisting with a completely masculine liberty on the
amplitude or meagerness of types. They’ve been described to us as passing
an attentive eye-glass over all the small print of the tableau. As for the ladies who
didn’t attain this excessive diploma of freedom, a fan through which a mirror was positioned
permitted them to regulate appropriately the reflections made round them
and to cover their confusion, all of the whereas satisfying their curiosity.” With out
clothes that differentiated the spouse from the whore, ladies have been known as on to
carry out their advantage. If their “look” was sexually alluring, the methods they
allotted their sight would possibly show their modesty. The frilly contrivance of
the fan was meant to safe their standing as ladies for whom the general public
contemplation of genital nudity was no acquainted occasion. Standing between
mirror and tableau, these ladies would have been extremely conscious of eyes all
about them evaluating their efficiency of modesty with fluttering followers. The
problem of deception, trying whereas pretending to not, was exacerbated by
the extreme visibility they acquired when doubled within the reflection. If the sense
of surveillance was heightened, so, too, would have been the titillating sense of
danger and illicit pleasure. Furthermore, the mirror reflection, whereas alternately
obfuscating the canvas or offering a long-distance, crystallized view (relying
on the dimensions of the gang), additionally supplied the viewer a tantalizing alternative
to see herself touching, intersecting, approaching, or abandoning the bare
males. The mirror permitted the efficiency of intimate dalliances, thereby
each heightening the eroticism and the sense of the nakedness of the male
protagonists.
69. De Cailly, Journal des Dames 25 (10 Pluviose, Yr VII [Jan. 29, 1799]):
398-400.
70. Whereas the preoccupation with the affect of violent sensations on
pregnant ladies was dissipating through the early 19th century, contemporaneous
tracts on the results of girls’s creativeness on their progeny spanned
this era; see, for instance, Benjamin Bablot, Dissertation sur le pouvoir de
limagination des femmes enceintes (Paris, 1788), and, through the Empire,
Jean-Baptiste DemanCgoenosni,d vrations physiologiques sur le pouvoir de
limagination maternelle durant la grossesse
a
…, 2 vols. (Paris, 1807). For a latest
dialogue of this obsession, see Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Creativeness
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard College Press, 1993), esp. 7-Eight.
71. Chaussard, 43-44. The creator argues that younger youngsters are nude
with out corrupting their innocence; prior to now, pious women consecrated to the
faith of humanity nursed totally bare sufferers with out offending their
chaste regard; and even in Rome, “Catholic prejudice” helps the exhibition
of nude statues. In a footnote, Chaussard additionally quotes Montaigne’s Essays
at size. The 16th-century thinker solely addressesjustifications for girls’s
viewing of bare males and in flip cites many various sorts of proof,
together with Plato’s order that each sexes of all ages current themselves nude at
the gymnasium; the instance of Indian ladies, who see males nude to be able to
cool their sense of imaginative and prescient; and Lacedaemonian ladies, who, he claims, have been
extra virginal than Frenchwomen and who noticed younger males train bare
each day. Montaigne additionally refutes the purported declare of the ladies Pohfg u
that their nudity was an invention to draw males, concluding they misplaced extra
attract than they gained; he ends his argument by citing Livy, “Livy mentioned that to
an excellent girl a nude man is nothing greater than a picture.”
72. In accordance with Pierre Rosenberg, the work was in all probability painted between
1785 and 1788. When Fragonard died in 1806, The Sacrifice of the Rosewas one
of solely three works listed in his obituary within the Journal de Paris (the others have been
its potential pendant, one other late work, The Fountain of Love, and his early,
solitary large-scale historical past portray, Callirhoes).A ccording to Charles Landon,
these works “introduced him monumental sums of cash”; quoted in Rosenberg,
Fragonard, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum ofArt,
NewYork, 1988, 548-53.
73. Bigger-Burcharth (as in n. 2), 412.
74. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiousness of lnfluence: A Principle of Poetry (New York:
Oxford College Press, 1973); Bryson (as in n. 57); and Crow.
75. Roederer,Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Yr VI [Apr. 2, 1798], quoted in
Roederer, vol. Four, 386-87.
76. Musie du Louvre, 335.
77. P.-J. Marie de Saint-Ursin, L’ami des femmes; ou, Lettre d’un mdecin,
concernant l’affect de l’habillement desfemmes sur leurs moeurs et leur
sant.
…
(Paris, 1804), 46.
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