The Judgment of Paris (24 page)

But Room M was the main attraction in 1864. It included paintings by Jean-François Millet as well as one of the most arresting scenes in the entire exhibition,
Oedipus and the Sphinx
by Gustave Moreau, a thirty-eight-year-old former student of François Picot. Having taken some three years and thirty studies to complete,
Oedipus and the Sphinx
drew rave reviews from major critics such as Gautier, Saint-Victor and Maxime du Camp, all of whom heralded Moreau as a force to be reckoned with. "We welcome this new name," wrote a critic for
Le Temps,
"which represents unflagging effort and work, devotion to the Old Masters, and the knowledge and application of sound principles and traditions."
⁸
But most Salon-goers had flocked to Room M to see, for the first time in three years, the two new paintings by Meissonier.

The year 1864 marked Meissonier's thirtieth anniversary at the Salon: he had shown work at seventeen Salons since his debut with
A Visit to the Burgomaster
in 1834. Yet he had not been looking forward to this new Salon with any special enthusiasm. Ever the perfectionist, he was suffering from self-doubts over
The Battle of Solferino.
Four years of hard work on this important commission had still, he feared, failed to capture the Emperor at his moment of glory. "It is really grievous for me, after so many years of work and effort," he wrote a few weeks before the Salon was opened, "at the moment when I thought I could count on what I had learned, to acknowledge that I have found myself powerless to succeed, as well as I could have wished, at the first thing that His Majesty asked of me."
⁹

Meissonier did not specify precisely how
The Battle of Solferino
had failed, but critics also had their doubts about the painting. Many questioned its small size, which seemed inappropriate, even somewhat ludicrous, for a battle scene. A familiar sight at Salons, battle paintings were almost always sprawling panoramas that covered half a wall and plunged the viewer into the thick of the action. Solferino certainly seemed to call for such treatment. The largest battle fought in Europe for almost fifty years, it had featured a front fifteen miles long, a quarter of a million soldiers, and as many as 40,000 casualties. In 1861, an artist named Adolphe Yvon tried to do justice to the battle with a painting that consumed more than 500 square feet of canvas and featured a fully life-size Napoléon III directing the action on a battlefield almost thirty feet across. Meissonier's painting was, by contrast, a dainty thirty
inches
wide. Paul de Saint-Victor protested at such an extreme economy of scale: "One doesn't use a microscope to paint three nations fighting at close quarters, as though it were a matter of observing amoebae battling each other in a drop of water."
¹⁰
Likewise, the critic for
Le Figaro
joked that it looked as if the French had gone to war against Lilliput, and a writer in
Le Nain Jaune
claimed to be reminded of the illustration on a box of chocolates.
¹¹

Its small size was not, in the eyes of other critics, the only problem with Meissonier's work. The presence on the Selection Committee of Camille Corot had ensured that the Salon of 1864, unlike that of 1863, showcased a good number of landscapes, not the least of which was Corot's own dreamy river view,
Memory of Mortefontaine,
which was immediately purchased by the government. A number of fine landscapes were on show in Room M, including the work of a twenty-three-year-old pupil of Corot named Berthe Morisot, who was making her Salon debut with a woodland scene of sun-dappled greenery entitled
Old Path at Auvers.
Alas for Meissonier, the dusty, sunbaked Lombardian plain did not lend itself to a beautiful landscape. Critics seized on the apparent bleakness of the setting against which his battle unfolded. "The landscape seems to me the weakest part of the painting," a critic named Charles Clement complained in the
Journal des Dibats.
"It is painted a disagreeable color, harsh and meager, and strewn with infelicitous details." The critic for
Les Beaux-Arts
—the journal owned by the Marquis de Laqueuille, the benefactor of the Salon des Refusés—likewise found the landscape hard, dry and lacking in warm tones, while the artificiality of both the sky and land reminded another of the efforts of a painter of porcelain.
¹²

These negative reviews detonated in the pages of the newspapers with a disheartening regularity through the months of May and June, deepening Meissonier's conviction that his painting had miscarried and giving him, after thirty years of exhibitions, the novel experience of watching one of his paintings disappoint the critics. Fortunately, the griping reviews were offset by the applause for
The Campaign of France
(plate 2B), which the critics judged far more favorably. In fact, Meissonier's portrait of Napoléon Bonaparte was one of the great successes of the Salon of 1864. Most critics rhapsodized over the grandeur and dignity with which Meissonier infused Napoléon as he and the doomed Grande Armée slogged their way through the snow. In offering a kind of moral lesson—courage and stoicism in the face of adversity—the painting answered the Académie's call for art to be patriotic, inspirational and heroic. Saint-Victor took the lead in a unanimous chorus of praise, poetically describing the image of Napoléon to his readers in
La Presse:
"His face is sublime with resigned despair. He feels that his genius is beaten but not dead. He sees his star fade in the dark sky."
¹³

The most rapturous applause of all, though, came from Edmond About, an inexhaustible thirty-six-year-old journalist, playwright, pamphleteer and novelist whom the
Westminster Review
called "the literary grandson of Voltaire."
¹⁴
In 1864 About added to his ever-growing tally of works a volume of art criticism in which Meissonier played the role of conquering hero. "Never, I think," he wrote, "has Meissonier been better inspired than this year; never has he attempted such great things; never has his genius taken so high a flight."
¹⁵
He went on to scold those who complained about the small size of Meissonier's works, to stoutly (and almost uniquely) defend
The Battle of Solferino,
and to lambaste the judges for not decorating Meissonier with the Grand Medal of Honor. "Oh Frenchmen of Paris!" he lamented like a latter-day Jeremiah. "You do not deserve great artists, as you do not know how to reward them!"
¹⁶

The measure of esteem that Manet had earned at the Salon des Refusés drained swiftly away as his two new works went on show at the 1864 Salon. Both canvases were roundly attacked by critics of almost every stripe, led by Théophile Gautier, whose normally charitable disposition deserted him when he found himself standing before
Incident in a Bull Ring
and
The Dead Christ with Angels.

Manet must have entertained strong misgivings about
Incident in a Bull Ring,
a work that had given him much trouble. Even so, he could hardly have been prepared for such a critical mauling from Gautier, especially given the critic's enthusiasm for
The Spanish Singer
three years earlier. Manet may have hoped the painting's Spanish theme (which inspired a satirical journal to lampoon him as "Don Manet y Courbetos y Zurbarán de las Batignolas"
¹⁷
) might once again appeal to a Hispanophile like Gautier. However, Gautier could find nothing good to say about the work, denouncing it as "completely unintelligible" before describing to his readers the awkward and apparently nonsensical scene in which "a microscopic bull stands on its hind legs, astonished, in the middle of an arena spread with yellow sand."
¹⁸

This "microscopic bull" was the source of much amusement to both the public and the critics alike, appearing to them a deplorably amateurish stab at conveying on canvas the recession of three-dimensional space in the bull ring—with the result that the bull, placed in the background, looked like it had shrunk. The journalist Hector de Callias, writing in
L 'Artiste,
mocked how the matadors seemed to be laughing at "this little bull which they could crush under the heels of their pumps," while Edmond About joked that the dead toreador laid out in the foreground looked as if he had been "killed by a horned rat."
¹⁹
The painter and engraver Louis Leroy, writing in
Le Charivari,
a satirical journal that poured its rather sophomoric brand of scorn on hairstyles and fashions as well as art and literature, speculated that Manet had to be suffering from "an acute affliction of the retina" since "Nature could not appear this way without an aberration of the optic nerve." He went on to suggest that Manet should be placed in a special box in the Paris slaughterhouse until he learned the correct way to paint a bull.
²⁰

Manet's novel approach to linear perspective may have found such disfavor in part because Room M contained, a few feet away, a masterful example of how the impression of a receding three-dimensional space could be created. In a composition at once diabolically complex and exquisitely executed, Meissonier's
The Campaign of France
showed Napoléon and his generals riding diagonally across the picture plane, from left to right, in a flawless escalation of both scale and detail, leading from the soldiers at the periphery, along the or-thogonals formed by the ruts in the snow, to Napoléon on his white charger at the very center of the scene. Besides a convincing depth in the visual field, Meissonier achieved, through his flow of marching figures, one of the most satisfactory images of motion in the history of art. Next to such a master-class in perspective construction, Manet's awkward and implausible bullfight scene could hardly have been rated by the critics of the day as anything other than a dismal flop.

Worse still for Manet were the reviews accorded his second work,
The Dead Christ with Angels.
Gautier, once again, was appalled by the scene, calling Manet a "frightful Realist" and pointing out that his Christ was so filthy that "not even the Resurrection would cleanse him."
²¹
This portrayal of Christ—with, to all appearances, dirty hands and a grubby beard—offended most critics. "We have never seen such audaciously bad taste," thundered the critic for the
Gaiette des Étrangers,
who complained how lampblack seemed to have been smeared on the face of "the most beautiful of men."
²²
Another journal,
La Vie Parisienne,
jested that the painting was actually meant to portray "the poor miner rescued from a coal pit."
²³

These reviews were in many ways unfair to Manet. While Christ was usually portrayed by artists as the ideal man, paintings of the Crucifixion and, even more, the Entombment often emphasized his grotesque physical sufferings and horrific death with wincing particulars of torture, disfigurement and rigor mortis. One of the most famous images of the Entombment ever painted was that done in 1507 by Raphael, whose slit-eyed, gaping-mouthed Christ makes a no less unglamorous corpse than Manet's. The problem for Manet was that he had sailed, however unintentionally, into some very choppy theological waters. As the critic for
La Vie Parisienne
put it, Manet's Christ seemed to have been "painted for Monsieur Renan."
²⁴

The "Monsieur Renan" in question was, in 1864, the most controversial man in France, enjoying a reputation in France as the Church's most dangerous foe since Martin Luther. Born in 1823 to a Breton fisherman, Ernest Renan was a brilliant scholar of Hebrew who had studied for the priesthood before leaving the Church because of his disenchantment with its teachings. He spent a decade working at the Imperial Library, where he honed his knowledge of ancient languages and published translations of the Book of Job and the Song of Solomon before applying in 1859 for the chair of Hebrew and Chaldaic at the College de France (then known as the College Imperial). When the Roman Catholic Church opposed his candidacy, he was dispatched by Napoléon III, in a sort of compromise, on an archaeological expedition to the Middle East. There, in 1861, in a hut in Lebanon, he wrote
The Life of Jesus,
which interpreted the Bible in historical and scientific terms rather than theological ones. Crucially, Renan's Christ was a man, a mere mortal, rather than the Son of God. He appeared in
The Life of Jesus
as an itinerant Galilean preacher whose miracles, such as the raising of Lazarus, were tricks played on a credulous population. His supposed divinity owed itself to myths about the Resurrection spread by frenzied followers after his death (which Renan diagnosed, in his confident scientific spirit, as having been the result of a ruptured vessel in the heart). Returning to Paris with his manuscript, he assumed the vacant post at the College Imperial in 1862 and in the following year published his book—coincidentally, six weeks after the Salon des Refusés had opened. Within a few months
The Life of Jesus
had sold 60,000 copies, run through a dozen printings, and provoked so much outrage and indignation that Renan, at the insistence of conservative Catholics, was deprived of his academic position.

The rumpus caused by
The Life of Jesus
may well have motivated Manet to paint his
Dead Christ with Angels,
a work begun at the height of the storm. Whatever the case, a portrait of Christ painted by an artist with Manet's reputation was bound to draw fire at a time when orthodox opinion was so incensed by Renan's own depiction of Christ. Moreover, Manet's presentation of the dead Christ as less than the
beau idéal,
with a sooty face and grimy hands, appeared to endorse Renan's conclusion that he was a man rather than a divinity.