Perfection by imitation
EVEN BEFORE his death, Winckelmann had destroyed the taste for the baroque and rococo. In their place, classical Greek style became the inspiration for painting, sculpture, architecture, and even fashion. These changes occurred during a time when interest in art began to expand to include a rising bourgeois class as well as the traditional small elite of intellectuals, wealthy nobility, and church officials. By the end of the eighteenth century, salons in Paris might attract more than seven hundred visitors a day, most of them representatives of the new classes, who were serious and high-minded to a fault. In 1720 there were only nineteen art academies in all of Europe; by 1790, when the French Revolution had just begun, there were more than a hundred. A new idea—that art could encourage commerce—pushed this steady growth. In time the academies all would teach, in the letter and spirit of Winckelmann, that perfection in art was achieved by imitating the ancients.
Herculaneum and Pompeii, the Roman cities that had been covered in A.D. 79 by a sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius, had been rediscovered in 1738 and 1748, respectively. Now, in the final third of the eighteenth century, voyagers to Greece began to write travelogues and publish prints of drawings for an eager audience. They braved the fleas and other insects that rained from the ceilings of local lodgings at night and infested the ruins where shepherds still let their flocks graze. These travelers ignored as well the repulsive stench from the latrines near the monuments and the way the thuggish Turkish guards extracted exorbitant bribes to view the sites. Instead, books such as Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758) and Antiquities of Athens (1762) contained drawings of wistful, lovely scenes of broken pillars and ferns bursting through the cracks of abandoned temples. Printing after printing sold out. In particular, Voyage du jeune anacharsis en Grèce by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1788) went through many editions in the original French and in every other European language, including Greek. This novel purports to be the journey of a young prince through classical Greece, but its account of ancient people and times was regarded as authentic by its many readers.
In Paris in the 1760s, as a worldly observer noted, “Everything is à la grecque. The interior and exterior decoration of buildings, furniture, fabrics, jewelry of all kinds, everything in Paris is à la grecque.” Travelers to Rome rushed to see the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere with all the expectation and excitement that is reserved today for the Sistine Chapel. Josiah Wedgwood began to mass-produce fine china. John Flaxman, his principal designer, copied his vases and plaques from Greek originals he found in the British Museum. Flaxman also produced a popular series of prints of scenes from Homer.
For fine artists, Winckelmann’s basic ideas seemed to reveal hidden but powerful natural laws: Good taste began in Greece; the only way to achieve great art was by imitating the ancients; the greatness in Greek art lay in its “noble simplicity” and “quiet grandeur.” These ideas inspired neoclassicism, a movement of artists such as the French painter Jacques-Louis David, the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, and the English architect Sir John Soane, whose work began to appear in the years after Winckelmann’s death. Their principal aesthetic was imitation of the noble simplicity of classical Greek art.
Winckelmann’s belief that Greek art flourished because of the political freedom in classical times became almost a mantra for orators during the French Revolution. His conception of art as moving through a cycle of four distinct periods lasted well into the nineteenth century, when it became a dividing point between the neoclassicists and the romantics. And his belief that art can reveal the divine as well as or better than religion is still with us today.
Winckelmann was the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual father of every aspect of the classical obsession that would last in Europe well past the 1820s. Without the profound change in taste and thinking that he inspired, there would have been no passion for la grecque in Paris. But more important, there would have been no paintings by David, no sculptures by Canova, no buildings by Sir John Soane, no Wedgwood china, no prints by John Flaxman. And the Venus de Milo would never have excited the interest of the French ships’ captains and ambitious ensigns who anchored at Melos in 1820. She would have remained in the niche, covered over by the farmer Yorgos, and never arrived in Paris to become the reigning goddess of the Louvre.
III
In the Hallways of the Louvre
THE VENUS DE MILO arrived in Paris in February 1821. The city, after ten years of revolution beginning in 1789, followed by sixteen years of submission to Napoleon’s will, followed by five years of exhaustion and stagnation, had recently awakened to find itself once again the place where life seemed fullest, gayest, and prettiest. The foreign soldiers who had occupied the city after Waterloo had all left. The reparations demanded of the French government for the Napoleonic Wars had been paid. The Bourbons were back on the throne in the person of Louis XVIII, the brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, but he reigned as a constitutional monarch and was by nature neither oppressive nor vindictive. The economy, stalled by the reparations and several years of drought and poor harvests, took off in 1820. At last France was free of war, free of fear, and free of the absolute power of the emperor.
Suddenly, French taste and French style dominated Europe. Elegant shops in Paris were filled with luxurious baubles like a pair of pistols set with gold and pearls that shot perfume instead of bullets. Even the emperor of Austria bought lace, gloves, and stockings for his wife in Paris. French cuisine returned to its preeminence. Paris had more than three thousand restaurants and three to four thousand cafés. Even at the best of them the bill for dinner was still reasonable, especially when compared with prices in London or other European capitals. But the food was only part of the experience at a Parisian restaurant. One traveler wrote,
No other capital of Europe can boast of such luxurious establishments open day and night with varied menus, in which one can have a meal at any time, and where one can enjoy peace and solitude among the crowd. Writers, princes, artists, judges, ministers, deputies, soldiers, foreigners from all over, Croesuses of all classes and ages, beauties from the north or south—how many races and eccentrics the viewer sees!
There were broad boulevards lined with trees and crowded with shops, cafés, and theaters. In the evening people strolled there or stopped at a café for a lemonade, a beer, or an ice. Just watching the passing crowd was rich entertainment. Peddlers, bootblacks, sword swallowers, jugglers, acrobats, pickpockets, and fortune-tellers made the boulevards a perpetual fair.
Indulgences that were forbidden in other countries were tolerated, if not encouraged, in Paris. There was gambling, drinking, and prostitution. Well-dressed women walked alone amid the luxurious shops and restaurants of the Palais Royal. They would take their customers to a room in an attic or underground to a small closet in a cellar where, according to an English guidebook of the era, the two would indulge in “frightful and unimaginable sensuality … such as no Englishman can conceive.” Thus warned, the English swarmed across the channel and into Paris. In London there was even a famous afterdinner toast: “London and liberty! Edinburgh and education! Paris and pocket money!”
All this is recognizable in Paris still. But in many other ways the city of 1821 was not at all like the Paris of today. There was no Eiffel Tower. There was no Sacré-Coeur looking down across the city from atop Montmartre. The Place de la Concorde was mud and ditches. The banks of the Seine were mud, not stone, and lined with public baths and laundries. The Arc de Triomphe, which wouldn’t be completed for fifteen more years, was nothing but four pitiful stumps.
The population was 800,000, by far the largest of any city on the Continent, and growing daily. Although the boulevards were spacious, the streets were narrow, crooked, and dark. Houses were built with the upper floors overhanging the lower ones so that slop could be poured out the windows into the street. The mess would lie there until passing horses, carriages, or pedestrians pressed it into the mud. Then the r
ain transformed it all into a black sludge. People who walked in the streets fouled their boots, trousers, skirts, and gloves. Arriving at a destination in spotless clothes was a sign of wealth, since it meant one could afford a carriage. The stench was overwhelming. What sewers there were ran directly into the Seine, where people bathed and drew drinking water.
Many people were sensible enough to drink only wine, but that was not enough to prevent general devastation from disease. Life expectancy was only thirty-nine. Diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis were rampant, and every few years an epidemic of cholera would sweep through the city.
A skilled worker might earn as much as fifteen francs a day, but a general laborer earned only three francs. Women and children who worked received much less. A family of four needed about six francs a day to live, so the families of average laborers were condemned to hopeless poverty. Even among better-paid workers, illness or injuries that reduced the number of days worked could send a family from comfort to poverty in short order. About half the people in Paris were paupers.
Presiding over all this was the improbable figure of Louis XVIII. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Louis had been no one’s first choice to assume control of France, but he was after all the rightful heir to the throne. He weighed more than 350 pounds. For most of his reign he could move about only in a wheelchair. As a young man he had married the ugliest noblewoman in Europe. Her eyebrows grew up her forehead, and she refused to bathe. Fat as he was and awful as she was, they had no children. She died during their exile, so Louis was now a widower without an heir. It seemed impossible that the blubbery and diffident king would marry now and produce children. He was infatuated with the comtesse du Cayla, but his sex life with her was limited to taking snuff from between her breasts. When she was on her way to see the king, the royal guards, though continuing to stand motionless while staring straight ahead, would commence a chorus of sniffing.
During his years in exile Louis had perfected a withering stare, but he was only passably intelligent and seemed hardly up to the task at hand. Nevertheless, he surprised everyone by outmaneuvering any threats to his power and by ruling on the whole sensibly and fairly. In particular he prevented the reactionary nobility, who had returned to France lusting for revenge, from instituting a new era of executions and persecution.
Although the laws stiffened and loosened from time to time, the censorship by which Napoleon had stifled free expression was relaxed during the Restoration. The arts, which had languished during the empire, returned with almost explosive force. In 1820 Lamartine published Méditations poétique, the first work of French romantic poetry, and it became a sensation. Even the king read it. A new generation of artists, writers, and musicians was about to appear: Hugo, Delacroix, Berlioz, Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, among many others. One reason the Venus de Milo became so famous so quickly is that she arrived in France at the precise moment when the neoclassicism of the past gave way to the romanticism of the future. Since the neoclassicists, like Winckelmann, believed in imitating classical art, and since the romantics, also like Winckelmann, believed that great art was the result of personal and political freedom, each side could embrace the Venus de Milo in its fight against the other.
The looted masterpieces
ONCE IN Paris, the Venus de Milo would be placed in the Louvre, the former palace that had been transformed into an art museum, although in 1821 it looked radically different than it does now. It was just half the present size, consisting only of the Cour Carrée (the Sully Wing today) and the long building that runs west from the Cour Carrée for almost a quarter mile along the right bank of the Seine (the Denon Wing today). Both the Cour Carrée and the long gallery had a dilapidated, abandoned air that Napoleon’s efforts at reconstruction had failed to dissipate.
The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel was there, too, standing in front of the Tuileries Palace, which burned to the ground in 1871. The Tuileries began at the end of the long gallery and ran perpendicular from the Seine to the present Rue de Rivoli. The palace had been Napoleon’s residence in Paris, just as now it was Louis XVIII’s. But when the king happened to gaze out his window toward the spot where I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid now stands, an area that today is an immense open plaza, he saw nothing but a maze of sagging, dispirited tenements lining dismal streets thick with mud and putrid refuse. The forlorn souls who lived there were among the most wretched inhabitants of Paris, indeed of all France. Balzac described this “intimate alliance of squalor and splendor” in Cousin Bette:
These houses … lie wrapped in the perpetual shadow cast by the high galleries of the Louvre, blackened on this side by the north wind. The gloom, the silence, the glacial air, the hollow sunken ground level, combine to make these houses seem so many crypts, or living tombs. If, passing in a cab through this dead area, one happens to glance down the impasse du Doyenne, a chill strikes one’s heart, one wonders who can possibly live here and what may happen here at night, at the hour when the alley becomes a place of cut-throats, when the vices of Paris, shrouded in night’s mantle, move as they will.
Although there had been plans under the ancien régime to transform the Louvre from an abandoned palace to a museum, they never really progressed. Then the Revolution came. The new government seized the property of both the king and the Catholic Church and found itself in possession of many priceless works of art. The Louvre was the natural place to display these treasures. After about a year of feverish renovations, it opened as a public museum on August 10, 1793, a date that was chosen because it was exactly one year after the fall of the monarchy. The paintings all hung in the Grande Galerie, which was lit by windows in the walls. On cloudy days it was too dark to see the paintings properly, while on sunny days it was too bright. And the paintings were hung neither chronologically nor by school but haphazardly high and low on the wall and pressed tightly together in every available space.
The Terror would begin just weeks later, but outside France the armies of the revolutionary government were having surprising success. French troops had just occupied Belgium, although it would require another six months to secure their hold. During the occupation, there was random pillage of the usual kind, but the Convention—the revolutionary government dominated by the extremists Danton and Robespierre—authorized systematic theft as well. In June 1794 the revolutionary government proposed “to send secretly after the armies educated citizens who would be charged with recognizing and having carefully transported the masterpieces found in the countries where our armies have penetrated.” Consequently experts in art arrived in the conquered land, bearing lists of the finest works and where to find them. They then went down the lists, looting the property of nobles and churches and sending their booty on to the Louvre. (Experts in books and manuscripts did the same for the national library. Botanists took plants for the former Garden of the King, now the Museum of Natural History.) These thefts were described as war reparations, the price the conquered land must pay to the French for liberating them from the onerous weight of their kings and nobility.
When the first shipment of art from Brussels arrived in Paris, a delegate to the ruling Convention announced why it was right to bring these treasures to France: “These immortal works are no longer in a foreign land: they are today deposited in the native land of arts and of genius, in the native land of liberty and of sainted equality, the homeland of the French Republic.” Art could flourish only in France because only France was free—as free as the ancient Greeks. That made France also the rightful heir of the masterpieces of antiquity. Another speaker a few months later declared, “There is only we who are able to appreciate them [ancient statues] and we who can elevate them in temples worthy of them and their illustrious makers.”
Winckelmann’s work, simplified and politicized, became the bedrock of the Revolution’s thinking about art. In October 1794, as the Terror faded after the execution of Robespierre three months earlier, the Convention appointed a committee to make a new translation of Winckelm
ann that could be used as a reference book. The committee reported that this work was “one of the best elementary and classic texts that it is possible to put in the hands of young people in order to introduce them to the knowledge of the beauty of Antiquity and to form the taste of those who hope to become artists.” This new edition of Winckelmann was to be placed in each museum and each important library in the republic.
The Revolution’s taste for antiquity spread across all society. The Convention had set the example when it ordered all its official furniture made from Greek or Roman models. Soon furniture everywhere copied classical Greek forms, especially in the cafés. Stores sold medallions and cameos in the antique style. After the Terror, when life became easier, women began dressing themselves coquettishly as Athenians in robes of linen. The government tried unsuccessfully to replace the usual religious and civil holidays with Greek festivals. There were classical decorations, high priests, and Greek temples made of cardboard. One official wanted to reinstate the Olympic games. Another wanted gymnastic exercises during the festivals in imitation of the Greeks. Public buildings, scientific discoveries, and the units in the new metric system of weights and measures were all given Greek names. That inspired this verse from a song in a music hall revue declaring that nowadays, in order to understand French well, one should learn Greek:
Myriagramme, Panthéon,
Mètre, kilomètre, oxygène,
Litre, centilitre, Odéon,
Prytanée, hectare, hydrogène,
Les Grecs ont pour nous tant d’attraits
Que, de nos jours, pour bien entendre
Et bien comprendre le français,
Gregory Curtis Page 6