A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

If a clear realization of the gardens at Versailles is necessary for the true appreciation of such a work as Girardon’s “[Apollo and the Nymphs],” the interior of a French palace must be pictured if the smaller sculptures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are to be understood. The sculptors worked with the knowledge that their works were eventually to be placed in such rooms as the Salon of Venus at Versailles with its marble walls, its green velvet hangings and silver chandeliers, or the Throne Room, with its decorations of crimson and gold, its ceiling by Delafosse and pictures by Titian, Guido Reni, Rubens and Van Dyck, or even the great Galérie des Glaces, 240 feet in length, with its seventeen great windows framed by Corinthian pilasters, and faced by the seventeen mirrored arches running along the opposite side. Many sculptures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which we rightly consider insipid and unsatisfying, may well have served their purpose at the time. They cannot, however, be properly judged apart from the richly decorated salons which they were designed to complete.

This is true of a portion of the sculpture of Louis Quatorze. It is even more true of practically all the sculpture of Louis Quinze and Louis Seize. If the seventeenth century was the period of the great decorative sculptors, the characteristic of the eighteenth century was its demand for smaller works. The reign of Louis Quatorze had been a building age. In the main, it called for architectural sculpture. Eighteenth-century taste, however, ran in the direction of the single-figured statue and the statuette. The tendency was exactly that which, in the art of painting, produced a Watteau and a Fragonard in place of a Nicholas Poussin and a Charles Lebrun. The growing popularity of smaller statues was the equivalent of the increased demand for easel pictures.

Under the circumstances it is not to be wondered that the eighteenth-century French sculptors lost the fine sense of decorative effectiveness with which the school of Louis XIV. had been endowed. As a consequence they were far less successful in carrying out the larger public works which every nation demands from time to time. On the contrary, the smaller works produced in the eighteenth century were often instinct with vivacity and charm. It was only when they essayed the greater tasks that the sculptors failed to throw off completely what may be termed the boudoir manner.

CLODION

SATYR WITH FLUTE

Musée Cluny, Paris

Our meaning may be illustrated from the history of the tomb of the Marshal de Saxe in the church of St. Thomas, at Strasbourg. It was designed in 1756, by Jean Baptiste Pigalle—then the foremost sculptor in France.

Marshal de Saxe was, of course, the victor at Fontenoy, and Pigalle depicts Death welcoming the hero while France vainly attempts to stay Death’s hand. The scattered trophies, as well as the Austrian eagle, the Belgian lion, and the English leopard, speak of the Marshal’s success as a soldier. The work is clearly a national memorial, and, had it been the work of a great national sculptor, would have suggested national feeling and pride in every line and mass. In point of fact it is evident that it does nothing of the kind. The sculptor, finding himself unable to feel the design as a whole, has been content with “building up” the memorial. Being a competent craftsman he naturally produced a satisfactory, if uninspired, work.