VENUS
Duke of Devonshire’s Collection,
Chatsworth
THE SCULPTURE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Why Canova and Thorvaldsen should have found this necessary in an age which was full of pregnant thought and feeling, is hard to say. One can only note a similar tendency in other branches of European activity in the latter years of the eighteenth century. The painter David, for instance, was content to work to a pseudo-Greek standard, instead of constructing a fresh one, fitted to the new state of things in France. The great picture in the Louvre, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women,” is almost icy on account of the artist’s pre-occupation with the externals of classical art. Were it not for the evidence of David’s portraits one would regard the painter of the “Sabine Women” as entirely lacking in human emotion. As it is, we know that the assumption of classical externals is merely the outcome of a bad habit.
A similar tendency to pose in the outworn robes of an earlier civilization was a common fault among the men and women who sought to bring the ideals of the French Revolution home to Europe. Witness the days which the National Assembly devoted to the unending wrangle over the precise wording of the “Rights of Man.” The time was wasted, not because the Declaration really forwarded the ideal of equality before the law and the abolition of all class distinctions, but because the founders of the American Republic had framed a similar Declaration of Rights. The civic dinners in Paris in imitation of the Spartan manner were equally mere poses. Parisians sat, surrounded by their servants, at tables spread in the very streets, while fashionable hostesses called upon passers-by to note “how we love equality.” The tendency which led the Parisians to such follies, led Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Flaxman to follow a pseudo-classic style instead of allowing the passions and thoughts astir in their souls to find an adequate method of expression. This initial error deprived even their most ambitious works of that almost mystical appeal which gives the statuary of the greatest Hellenes and Florentines its unique value. Though full of grace and charm, their marbles impress us at once as devoid of either deep feeling or high thinking.
The one sculptor, who absorbed the patriotic spirit generated by the French Revolution, and also found means to express it in marble, was François Rude (1784-1855). Unlike Thorvaldsen, Canova and Flaxman, Rude never lived in Rome. He was French to the marrow. Indeed, when he won the Grand Prix in 1812, he did not take advantage of the opportunity to visit Italy. The son of a Dijon blacksmith, Rude came to Paris in 1807 with £16 in his pocket. He had nothing except an invincible determination to become a sculptor, to ensure success. However, he secured work and joined the École des Beaux Arts. “Seven lost years,” was Rude’s opinion of the time he spent in this centre of academical method. Rude had always been an ardent politician, and the support he gave to Napoleon during “The Hundred Days” led to his exile. After twelve years in Brussels, he returned to Paris—aged forty-three. The exhibition of the “Neapolitan Fisher Boy” in 1833, established Rude’s reputation. The work is now in the Louvre. The circumstances under which it was carved recall those under which Michael Angelo produced his “[David].” Rude was furnished with an odd prism-shaped piece of marble. The delightful ingenuity with which he has used the happy pose arising from the boy’s crossed legs is worthy to be remembered along with the achievement of Michael Angelo himself.
RUDE
“THE MARSEILLAISE” RELIEF