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

As we penetrate the layers of Hittorff and Ingres's temple, we are met at every stage with a symbolic structure supported by the deployment of allegory, the visual and rhetorical mode that, as Stephen Barney has explained, "pretends to name, not things, but whatever lies under things," a mode thus exceedingly structured and profoundly abstract. (27) In their portraits of Rachel, Ingres and his students worked specifically to exceed the temporal and individual specificities of the sitter by mediating the traces of an individuated body and the idea of a sitter communicated through generalized forms. Here, the temple's archaeology of visual signs of ancient Greece--from the temple form to its iconographic program--communicates an allegory of Rachel as antique. Crucially, Rachel's own self-fashioned connection to antiquity via tragic drama is the essential link on which the temple's meaning rests.

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If Ingres's watercolor extended and elaborated the connection between the tragedienne and her classical prototype through the narrative of the birth of the Muses, the image served a more self-reflexive purpose as well. Ingres's painting both fixed Rachel as antique and fixed Ingres himself within a historical genealogy of artists stretching from the nameless authors of Herculaneum frescoes to Raphael, the ingrisle deity par excellence. Initial studies for the watercolor indicate that Ingres had in mind the models of Herculaneum frescoes and Raphael's Parnassus as he worked out the final composition. (28) In this, Ingres's project followed in the footsteps of his students in their portraits of Rachel. In each of these cases, Rachel's connection to antiquity was asserted by portraying the sitter in her self-proclaimed role as Tragedy, a strategy that registered an implicit connection between the artists themselves and the actress's project of revitalizing antiquity.

Rachel's Competing Identities

Elisabeth Rachel Felix, known as Rachel, was heralded as the greatest tragic actor in the mid-nineteenth century. Credited with having revived French theater--that of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, who themselves had first translated classical Greek plays for the stage in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--Rachel came to stand as the embodiment of the "antique." (29) Born in 1821, the second daughter in an itinerant Jewish family of old-clothes merchants, Rachel made her stage debut when the state-subsidized and classically oriented Comedie-Francaise was suffering from substantial competition, not only in the guise of romantic dramas by the likes of Victor Hugo but perhaps even more potently from boulevard theaters and their immensely popular melodramas. (30) By 1838, when Rachel took the stage for the first time as Camille in Horace, the classical tragic repertoire of the Comedie-Francaise was loudly proclaimed as having died. Reviews by Theophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Jules Janin, and others helped to solidify Rachel's role as savior of the French dramatic heritage. More than any other public figure in the period, Rachel drew on the operations of allegory in her self-presentation. Rachel and her critical supporters insistently attempted, both through the popular press and in the many depictions of the actress, to shape her into, more than simply a tragic actress, an allegory of tragedie specifically rooted in antiquity. However, Rachel's theatrical rise to widespread public fame as savior, voice, and embodiment of antiquity uneasily coexisted with her personal history as a member of an itinerant Jewish family.