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

Notwithstanding its frozen and immobile form, Amaury-Duval's 1854 portrait of Rachel ultimately produced a disconcertingly volatile confrontation with temporal change. (132) Neither firmly of the past nor wholly of the present, the painting pointed instead to the unbridgeable gap between these two episodes. Instead of securing the role of Ingres and his students as the backward-looking lovers of an archaic science, their use of allegory requires our rethinking of the fundamental categories that structure the familiar narratives of the nineteenth century. By reorienting our inquiry to scrutinize the rhetorical and procedural strategies employed by these artists, we are able to confront new axes and new relations that reframe the artists and works in question. The result is a new vision of Ingres's studio community as a space of artistic production engaged with the rhetorical and representational mode that Walter Benjamin has asserted is "the scaffolding of the modern." (133)

Benjamin's powerful assertion of the centrality of allegory to a theory of the modern, which hinges on his argument that the return to allegory marks "a radical change in the concept of history and memory itself," offers a productive lens through which to view the allegorical work of Ingres's studio. (134) If Baudelaire, for whom "all ... becomes allegory," always regarded the metropolis through the time-collapsing lens of the allegorist, so, too, did Ingres's studio, for whom the lost forms of the antique were increasingly haunted by the specter of Parisian modernity. If Ingres and his students had long been engaged in a reconceptualization and redeployment of the practices and priorities of history painting to the realm of portraiture, their series of images of Rachel marks an emphatic allegorical turn. Such a turn may, as Benjamin suggests, register the heightened pressure placed on the ingrisle "historical" project at midcentury.

Sarah Betzer is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Vermont. Her research focuses on the visual culture and aesthetic theory of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. She is preparing a book on history painting, allegory, and female portraiture in the studio of J.-A.-D. Ingres [Art Department, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vt. 05405, sbetzer@uvm.edu].

Notes

Heartfelt thanks are due to Hollis Clayson, Whitney Davis, Anne Higonnet, and Sheila Crane, whose critical acumen, generosity, and enthusiasm were sustaining factors in the genesis of this article. Marc Gotlieb, Andy Shelton, and the other anonymous reader for The Art Bulletin offered substantial and incisive suggestions that considerably improved my analysis. Thanks are also due to Regis Michel, Vivian Rehberg, Abby McGowan, Paul Deslandes, John Tagg, Jacques Foucart, Florence Viguier, Peter Benson Miller, Kelley Helm-stutler Di Dio, and Lory Frankel, who provided analytic and practical support. I gratefully acknowledge the research funds provided by the University of Vermont, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation's Institutional Fellowship in the History of Art, and the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship from Wellesley College. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.