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

Rachel, Winckelmann, and Identification

Ingres's stated aesthetic precepts make clear that Amaury-Duval's sculptural turn in his work on Rachel may well have had its roots in studio pedagogy; Ingres notoriously celebrated two masters, Raphael and Phidias. Furthermore, Ingres's own formation in David's studio explains the artist's emulation of antique sculpture and makes probable his familiarity with not only the work of Winckelmann but also that of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Certainly, the ingriste tendency to suppress facial expressivity may be seen as responding to the debate between Winckelmann and Lessing regarding that critical touchstone of antiquity, the Laocoon sculpture group. (117) However, of his two stated artistic deities, Ingres seems to have most actively emulated the work of Raphael. (118) Despite this prioritization, Ingres was indebted to Winckelmann's writings, which were put to work in his own artistic production, art theoretical pronouncements, and studio pedagogy. Although Ingres and his students did not share Winckelmann's belief that the medium of sculpture constituted the privileged condition of representation, they were Winckelmannian insofar as they were committed to his aesthetic claims. Thus, for Ingres and his students, the problem was how to translate the terms by which Winckelmann privileged antique sculpture into two-dimensional painting.

Rachel embraced a similar aesthetic system. Both the ingristes and Rachel felt that all artistic production should be measured against and inspired by the temporal and aesthetic touchstone of Greek antiquity. Describing a trip to the Louvre with her father, Rachel recollected,

  I passed, without much emotion, in front of the paintings, though he
  made me notice the tragic scenes by David. But when I was in the
  middle of the sculptures, I felt rise in me some kind of revolution,
  that was like a revelation.... The next day, I leafed through
  engravings after the antique; never had a lesson at the Conservatory
  done me such good. (119)

Like her ingriste portraitists, and Winckelmann before them, Rachel chose to forgo artistic intermediaries in order to proceed directly to the source of artistic "revelation." The critical distinction, however, was the quality of the aesthetic experience. If the artists of Ingres's studio approached the work of past masters with reverence, Rachel's experience of antique sculpture, by contrast, took the form of mirroring, recognition, and self-reflection.

Rachel cited her visits to the Louvre as a partial explanation for her ability to have so convincingly taken on an antique identity. In her own account and those of her critics, Rachel is thus seen to channel, through her study, the best qualities of antique sculpture. Rachel herself maintained that she had exceeded even Winckelmann in her commitment to and understanding of the antique:

  I half-opened Winckelmann and I didn't understand anything. Isn't it
  he who said that art, like wisdom, begins by the study of oneself? But
  what good is it to read Winckelmann, who knew everything? I know more
  about it than he, because I foresaw everything. When I saw Greek
  figures for the first time, I believed I recognized myself in
  them. (120)