Ingres's studio between history and allegory: Rachel, antiquity, and tragedie

"Que Signifie Cette Rachel en Platre Colorie?"

Amaury-Duval's portrait of Rachel was far from a unanimous success. It has been presumed that the government rejected the portrait, since no portion of the 4,000 francs agreed on as payment was ever paid for this work. Documents in the Archives Nationales attest to the fact that the commission by the Ministre de l'Etat for Tragedy was effectively replaced by the artist's painting La salutation angelique, which was completed in late 1856 and for which the artist was paid 5,000 francs. (73) Such evidence of a replacement or substitute commission has led scholars to hypothesize that the state rejected the portrait based on either Amaury-Duval's failure to satisfy pictorially or as the result of Rachel's floundering fame. (74) For, in the face of her extended absences from the Comedie-Francaise while on tour throughout Europe between 1852 and 1854 and the triumph of a new tragedienne, Mademoiselle Ristori, who debuted at the Theatre Italien during the 1855 Exposition Universelle, Rachel's status as doyenne of tragedy was increasingly under threat. (75)

Art critics who wrote about the 1855 Exposition Universelle were overwhelmingly unsympathetic to the portrait. Even Edmond About, one of Ingres's staunchest defenders that year, decried Amaury-Duval's portrait, which he qualified as one that "the jury hesitated to receive and that it would have done better to refuse." (76) About's displeasure hinged on the fact that "in the Greek style, [the portrait] reveals dry drawing and a disastrous color." (77) He continued, "Even allowing for pastiche and flat tints, one can't help but regret the iciness of the painting, which resembles fresco on plaster." (78) About was not alone in his condemnation of the painting's coldness and questionable color scheme. Almost without exception, salon critics that year shared his unfavorable impression.

While reviews by About, Charles Perrier, Gautier, and Maxime du Camp provide substantial negative commentary regarding the portrait's color, tone, and lack of modeling, it is my contention that the painting's "failure" must be understood less as a result of its form than its function. That is, critical response to the image repeatedly emphasized the image's illegibility and inability to communicate a coherent meaning. Thus, when the critic Claude Vignon (Noemie Cadiot) wondered, "what does this Rachel in colored plaster signify?" the terms of Vignon's rhetorical question are essential. (79) The critic is alert to the painting's function as both portrait of sitter and representation of the very idea of tragedy. As coherent signification eludes the image (and spectator), meaning is unhinged. Along with the portrait's formal failure--in this case, its incapacity to convincingly approximate marble--Vignon contends that the portrait neglects to offer us an intelligible meaning.

Taken on these terms, it seems clear that Amaury-Duval's portrait emphatically fell short of critics' expectations. One way to understand this response to Amaury-Duval's portrait is that it refused to perform the work of a symbol, which then was conceived to function quite distinctly from allegory. Allegory has often been considered as an academic mode par excellence insofar as it establishes "a conventional relationship between an illustrative image and its abstract meaning." (80) In the mid-eighteenth century, Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw allegory as a means for surpassing the realm of the senses and engaging the intellect by way of a "learned store of meaningful and clear images for abstract ideas." (81) Winckelmann's theory of allegory was firmly rooted in the emblem book tradition insofar as it advocated that artists employ conventional, recognizable visual tropes. His hope that a thorough "compendium" would be assembled that brought together and classified "meaningful figures and images that give poetic form to general ideas ... from all mythology, from ancient and modern writers,... and from the monuments of antiquity preserved on gems, coins, and utensils" attested to his investment in the legibility and instrumentality of allegory. (82) Such a volume, once completed, would be a tool for the artist in using allegory, "not to conceal his ideas but to clothe them." (83)