The Salle de Coyzevox continues the series, with numerous portrait-busts of the celebrities of the age of Louis XIV, mostly insipid and banal. The decline goes on with accelerated rapidity.
The Salle des Coustou, mostly Louis XV, marks the lowest depth of the degradation of plastic art, here reduced to the level of Palais Royal trinkets. It represents the worst type of 18th century handicraft, and hardly contains a single passable statue. Its best works are counterparts in marble of Boucher and Greuze, but without even the touch of meretricious art which colour and cleverness add to the craft of those boudoir artists. Few of them rise to the level of good Dresden china. The more ambitious lack even that mild distinction.
The Salle de Houdon, of the Revolutionary epoch, shows a slight advance upon the preceding (parallel to the later work of Greuze), and is interesting from its portrait-busts of American statesmen and French republican leaders. Some of the ideal works, even, have touches of grace, and a slightly severer taste begins to make itself apparent. The classical period is foreshadowed.
The Salle de Chaudet, of the First Empire, answers in sculpture to the School of David in painting. It is cold, dignified, reserved, and pedantic. It imitates (not always at all successfully) the antique ideals. The best works in this room are Canova’s; but the intention is almost always better than the execution. A sense of chilly correctness distinguishes these blameless academic works from the natural grace and life of antique Greek sculptors. They lie under the curse which pursues revivals.
The Salle de Rude contains plastic work of the Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the Second Empire. It answers roughly to the romantic School of Delaroche in painting. Several of these almost contemporary works have high merit, though few of them aim at that reposeful expression which is proper to sculpture. Some, indeed, trench upon the domain of painting in their eager effort to express passing emotion and action. Picturesqueness and sensuousness are their prevailing features. Nevertheless, the room, as a whole, exhibits the character of a real renaissance, such as it is, from the mediocrity of the last century, and the bleak propriety of the classical revival. Too many of the works, however, are aimed at the taste of the Boulevards. They foreshadow that feeling which makes too much modern sculpture attempt to catch the public by flinging away everything that is proper to the art. The desire for novelty is allowed to override the sense of beauty and of just proportion: repose is lost; dignity and serenity give place to cleverness of imitation and apt catching at the momentary expression.
III. THE SMALLER COLLECTIONS.
The other collections at the Louvre appeal for the most part rather to the specialist than to the general public. They are for workers, not for sight-seers. The Egyptian Museum, for example, to the L as you enter the Cour du Louvre by the main entrance, contains, perhaps, the finest collection of its sort in all Europe. You must, of course, at least walk through it—especially if you have not seen the British Museum. The objects, however, are sufficiently indicated for casual visitors by means of the labels; they need not be enumerated. The opposite wing, to the R as you enter, contains the Assyrian Collection, inferior on the whole, especially in its bas-reliefs, to that in the British Museum. Beyond it, again, to the left, lie a group of rooms devoted to the intermediate region between the sphere of Assyrian and Greek art. These rooms ought certainly to be examined by any who wish to form some idea of the origin and development of Hellenic culture. The first two rooms of the suite contain Phœnician works,—important because the Phœnicians were the precursors of the Greeks in navigation and commerce in the Mediterranean, and because early Greek art was largely based on Phœnician imitations of Assyrian and Egyptian work, or on actual Egyptian and Assyrian objects imported into Hellas by Phœnician merchants. These Semitic seafarers had no indigenous art of their own; but they acted as brokers between East and West, and they skilfully copied and imitated the principal art-products of the two great civilisations on whose confines they lay, though often without really understanding their true import. The Phœnicians were thus the pioneers of civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Room IV, beyond these two, contains more Phœnician antiquities, and others from Cyprus, an island inhabited by Greeks or half Greeks, but one in which this imported Oriental culture earliest took root and produced native imitations. Examine these objects as leading up to, and finally correcting, the archaic Greek work ill represented by a few objects in the Salle de Phidias. The Salle de Milet, beyond, contains Greek antiquities from Asia Minor, some of which indicate transition from the Assyrian to the Hellenic type. Examine these from the point of view of development. The reliefs from the temple of Assos in Mysia show an early stage in the evolution of Asiatic Greek art. Compare them with the archaic objects in the Salle de Phidias. It must be borne in mind that civilised art entered Greece from Assyria, by way of Phœnicia, the Hittites, Lydia, Phrygia, the Ionian cities in Asia Minor, and the Islands of the Archipelago. These intermediate rooms should therefore be studied in detail from this point of view, dates and places being carefully noted, as illustrating the westward march of art from Nineveh to Athens. The last hall of the suite, the Salle de Magnésie, on the other hand, contains works from Ephesus of a late Greek period, representing rather a slight barbaric deterioration than a transitional stage. These collections, most important to the student of Hellenic culture, may be neglected by hurried or casual visitors.
The Salle Judaïque, to the right, under the stairs, contains the scanty remains of the essentially inartistic Jewish people, interesting chiefly from the point of view of Biblical history. The famous and much-debated Moabite Stone, recording the battles of King Mesa of Moab with the Jews in B.C. 896, is here preserved. It is believed to be the earliest existing specimen of alphabetic as opposed to hieroglyphic or ideographic writing.
There is, however, one group of objects in the Louvre, too seldom visited, which no one should omit to inspect if time permits him. This is the admirable **Dieulafoy Collection of Persian Antiquities. To arrive at it, go to the front of the Old Louvre, facing St. Germain l’Auxerrois, as for the previously noted series. Enter by the principal portal, and turn to the R, through the Assyrian collection, whose winged bulls and reliefs of kings you may now inspect in passing, if you have not done so previously. Mount the staircase at the end, and, at the landing on the top, turn to your L, when you will find yourself at once face to face with the collection.