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Ingres's studio between history and allegory: Rachel, antiquity, and tragedie
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2006 by Sarah Betzer
In 1855 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres finally broke the vow he had made more than twenty years earlier never again to exhibit his work at an annual Salon. At the Exposition Universelle that year, as one of four painters granted a retrospective presentation, Ingres was celebrated as a designated leader of the arts in France. (1) However, Ingres's participation was secured only by the promise of a private gallery in which to show his work. This space at once sequestered the artist's paintings from the presumably distasteful proximity of the work of Eugene Delacroix and others and further buttressed Ingres and his work against the threat of the dual specters of industry and commerce that were such an integral part of the Exposition Universelle phenomenon. (2) Exhibition goers perceived this enforced distance and described Ingres's gallery as a space of literal and figurative alienation. If Ingres had long been regarded as the standard-bearer of the classical tradition, the distance had never seemed greater between the artist and contemporaneity, here emblematized by the Exposition Universelle's conceptual scaffolding of progress and industry. As Andrew Shelton has shown, this gap resonated throughout the critical responses to Ingres in 1855, uniting the assessments of detractors and supporters alike; the artist was "not of his time," and instead practiced the "cold science of an archeologist." (3) Charles Baudelaire, struggling to characterize the experience of Ingres's "sanctuary," wrote that it produced a mix of malaise, boredom, anxiety, and fear in viewers, who felt, almost involuntarily, that they might faint in this space whose rarefied air was more akin to a chemistry lab than an art exhibition. (4)
Ingres's gallery was designed as a temple of art. While implicitly conceived as a rebuttal to the aesthetic challenges faced by Ingres and his school at midcentury, it was nevertheless experienced at best as a frozen Mount Olympus, at worst as a sort of morgue or phantasmatic space inhabited by automatons. (5) In 1855, critics assailed Ingres and his student Amaury-Duval (Amaury Eugene Emmanuel Pineu-Duval), who that year exhibited the allegorical portrait Tragedy, for the disconcerting retreat from the present evinced by their paintings. (6) But despite their fetishization of antique form, Ingres and his students did not turn their backs on the contemporary sphere of the living. If allegory provided the means to elevate portraiture to the level of history painting, it also ensured that the rupture between past and present would be negotiated through the body of the portrait subject. This essay joins other recent work to propose that allegory remained a vital representational mode for nineteenth-century French art, even in the aftermath of the ultimately unsuccessful 1848 competition for the figure of the Republic. (7) In what follows, I hope to show that allegory is a vital conceptual category for rethinking the contours of nineteenth-century art, particularly that which took shape under the long shadow of "history" painting.
Within a year, Ingres had completed yet another temple project, one that emphatically announced his work under the sheltering sign of antiquity and, crucially, allegory. In a joint project with the architect Jacques-Ignace Hittorff, Ingres's watercolor the Birth of the Muses was painted for the rear wall of a miniature temple, the Temple to Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, commissioned by Prince Jerome Napoleon (Fig. 1). (8) In the painting, Ingres returned to the airless contours reminiscent of the linear drawings of John Flaxman and to the neo-Pompeian palette of his earlier career. Surrounded by Jupiter and the eight other Muses, at the center of the composition in a passage of sinuous linearity, the last Muse Erato emerges fully grown from the thighs of her mother, Mnemosyne. Completed between May and August 1856 and today held in the Musee du Louvre, Paris, Ingres's watercolor is the only extant element of the otherwise lost temple structure (Fig. 2). (9) This extraordinary object was based on Hittorff's reconstruction of the Temple of Empedocles at Selinonte (the focus of his book L'architecture polychrome chez les Grecs of 1851) and was constructed of bronze, ivory, and other lavish materials. At its termination, the temple measured a mere three feet tall but cost a stunning total of 800,000 francs; it took the efforts of fifteen artisans to build. (10)
At first glance, the Birth of the Muses seems a fairly straight-forward history painting in miniature. Both Ingres's painting and its architectural framework appear to eschew unequivocally any interest in "the modern" in favor of an exclusive focus on the emphatically "antique" nature of the composite object. However, the temple structure rewarded the attentive viewer with a striking revelation at its core. The presiding Muse is not simply a character from Greco-Roman mythology. In fact, this figure effects, through allegory, a kind of historical fold to bring the viewer face to face with a visage imported from then present-day Paris: the famed tragic actress Rachel (Elisabeth Rachel Felix). Ultimately, the temple project suggests that for Ingres and others at midcentury, antiquity might profitably be given form through recourse to modern identities.
