A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

The part played by Diana of Poitiers in the career of Goujon can be paralleled from the history of almost every prominent French artist. Indeed, women played so great a part in French Court life that it would be strange if traces of their influence could not be readily found. French sculpture was in the first place an art of the Court. It was equally an art of the boudoir. For the market-place and the forum of the Hellene, the Frenchman substituted the bedroom. Here policies were discussed and shaped; here culture grew and the arts were moulded. A complete history of the relationship between French sculpture and French womanhood would certainly prove that the influence of the French Court beauties upon sculpture was at least as potent as that of the “blue stockings” led by Madame de Rambouillet upon literature.

One thing, however, must be remembered. This influence differed entirely from that which Phryne exercised over the art of Praxiteles, La Bella Simonetta over Botticelli, or Emma Hamilton over Romney. It was not emotional, but material. The impulse behind it was not love, but a desire for power. Indeed, the same thing may be said of the influence of the Court beauties upon French life in general. When the Marquise de Montespan set herself to attract the attention of Louis XIV., she knew that he did not love her. “He knows that he owes it to himself to possess the most beautiful woman in France.”

This holds true of most of the other women who exercised such power throughout this period of French history. Montesquieu has summed up the motives inspiring their efforts in a sentence in the “Persian Letters”:

“Do you think, Ibben, that a woman consents to be the mistress of a minister for love of him? What an idea! It is in order that she may lay before him every morning five or six petitions.”

The far-seeing Frenchman enables us to grasp what the blackguardly old father-in-law of the Marquise de Montespan meant when he heard of his daughter’s success, and cried, “Here’s fortune knocking at my door at last.”

Had the influence of the women of France been of a more emotional character, French sculpture would doubtless have approximated much more closely to that of Greece during the age of Praxiteles. As it was, it leaves us cold. It has the feminine grace but not the feminine passion. It seems to be inspired by a love which would stop at flirtation, fearing to lose itself in the depths of complete surrender.

THE AGE OF LOUIS QUATORZE

The insistence upon the social circumstances which moulded the earliest phase of French sculpture is justified when it is remembered that they were no less important during the two following epochs. Until the coming of the Revolution, France was ruled by an absolute monarch, and practically all the artistic life of the country centred around him. Throughout this time French sculpture was dominated by its connection with a great court, and by the feminine influences which were so potent in French Court life. The great revival of sculpture during the reign of Louis XIV., which now claims consideration, is at once explained when it is correlated with the fact that political considerations forced France to accept an even more absolute monarchical rule, and an even more complete centralization of French culture than had been necessary in the time of the Valois kings.

At the end of the sixteenth century Henry IV. had settled the religious difficulties in France, and had proved how heartily the advent of a monarchy able and willing to vindicate its authority was welcomed. The administrative zeal of Sully, Henry’s minister, and the taxation reforms which he carried through, laid the foundations of the vast wealth which Louis XIV. controlled. Without this the great efflorescence of art, a few years later, would not have been possible.

But the complete supremacy of the French king in the seventeenth century was due rather to pressure from surrounding nations than to internal considerations. The reign of Louis XIV. was the age in which Europe reconstructed her political system upon the principle of territorialism under a system of absolute monarchy. The natural complement of Sully, with his maxim, “Plough and cow—these are the breasts of France whereat she sucks,” was Richelieu, with his vigorous foreign policy. Richelieu carried the ideals of Francis I. and Henry IV. to their furthest limit. In everything Richelieu was pro-Louis—never pro-France. He was not satisfied until the whole financial and judicial administration had been brought under royal control by means of a bureaucracy depending entirely upon royal favour.