The Judgment of Paris (9 page)
Manet's newfound devotion to painting scenes of contemporary life did not mean that he had jettisoned his regard for—and his imitations of—the art of previous centuries. If Raphael borrowed an image from Michelangelo and then transposed it, Manet, at least in the case of
Le Bain,
did not even bother with the transposition: he simply appropriated the poses of these three figures in the engraving and arranged his models into their exact attitudes. Victorine was therefore given the role of the water nymph, Gustave and Ferdinand those of the river gods. Still, his painting was not a mere line-by-line reproduction of the figures in the Raimondi engraving. In keeping with his desire to capture something of the roisterous spirit of the Asnières daytrippers, he wittily updated Raphael's scene. Thus while Victorine, like the water nymph, appeared in the nude, her male companions were turned out resplendently in black frock coats, fob-chains and bright cravats—the very height of Second Empire fashion. Gustave even wore a bohemian hat on his head and held a cane (instead of the river god's trident of reeds) in his hand. In place of the plumed helmet and shield abandoned on the ground in
The Judgment of Paris,
Manet added a wickerwork picnic basket with its debris of bread and fruit, together with a jumble of discarded clothing: a blue polka-dot dress and a beribboned straw hat.
The Judgment of Paris
(Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael)
Le Bain
was therefore, despite its origins in a Renaissance print, a daringly modern scene not unlike the works of Realism painted by Courbet. It was, in many ways, a defiant painting. Manet had copied or adapted numerous Old Masters, but never had he given his source such an audacious spin. He was not simply copying Raphael—he was cheekily reworking him, turning a mythological scene from one of the most celebrated engravings of the Renaissance into a tableau of somewhat vulgar Parisian holidaymakers in whom the morally fastidious might detect indecent undertones.
Manet's painting therefore marked an assault on the bastions of nineteenth-century art. Raphael was revered above all other painters by the conservative members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, most of whom viewed his achievement as the pinnacle of artistic perfection. His paintings were a vital part of the pedagogical program at the École des Beaux-Arts, where copies of fifty-two images from his most celebrated frescoes were permanently on display for the edification of students.
14
Those fortunate enough to win the Prix de Rome were sent forth from Paris to spend five years absorbing the artistic style of the Italian Renaissance by making further copies of masterpieces by Raphael and other artists such as Michelangelo.
*
Of all Raphael's admirers in France, by far the greatest was Ingres, who claimed he endeavored always to follow the path of the Renaissance master. Raphael, he once proclaimed, was not a man but "a god come down to earth."
15
With its clever refashioning of Raphael,
Le Bain
was not a work guaranteed to please Ingres. Indeed, Manet can hardly have been entirely optimistic about his chances for success with so brazen a painting.
E
RNEST MEISSONIER HAD signed his name on the petition to the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, with a certain amount of pretension and pride, as "E. Meissonier, Membre de l'lnstitut." He had been elected to a chair in the Institut de France a little more than a year earlier, in the autumn of 1861, when the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts voted for him to join their ranks. For Meissonier, already dripping with medals and bristling with ribbons, including that of the Legion of Honor, membership in the Institut was the latest and undoubtedly the greatest honor so far bestowed on him.
*
Yet Meissonier's consecration by the French artistic establishment was not without incident. His election to the Académie had actually succeeded only on the second attempt, since in 1860 he was defeated for a vacant chair when the members of the Académie instead cast their votes for Émile Signol, a former student at the École des Beaux-Arts who had won the Prix de Rome in 1830 with a weighty scene from classical mythology entitled
Meleager Taking Up Arms Once More at the Insistence of His Wife.
Though Signol was a comparatively youthful fifty-eight, many members of the Académie were, quite literally, men from a different age, ten of the fourteen painters having been born in the eighteenth century. Their average age was sixty-eight, with the venerable and vituperative Ingres their elder statesman at eighty. A good number had spent large chunks of their careers on ladders and scaffolds, like Michelangelo and Raphael, executing murals on the walls and ceilings of churches and government buildings. In nineteenth-century France, murals were still what they had been during the Italian Renaissance, the most exalted form of painting. Their difficulty of execution as well as their obvious grandeur of design—what one writer called their "gravity" and "elevation"—made works painted on walls and vaults far more prestigious than oil paintings done on canvas.
1
"It's to the decoration of churches," Ingres had once declared, "of public palaces, of halls of justice, that art must dedicate itself. That is its true and unique goal."
2
Or as Géricault more bluntly expressed it: "Real painting means working with buckets of color on hundred-foot walls."
3
The career of Meissonier did not come close to matching this profile. He had not studied at the École des Beaux-Arts; he had not competed for, much less won, the Prix de Rome; he had not spent years honing his skills in Rome; he had not worked in fresco; and his little
bonshommes
and cavaliers, however popular with the public, hardly answered the Académie's call for classical subjects of profound moral earnestness. His artistic compass was oriented toward the north, to the work of the Flemish and Dutch painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Meissonier's candidacy in 1861—when his main rival was sixty-six-year-old Nicolas-Auguste Hesse, yet another alumnus of the École des Beaux-Arts and winner of the Prix de Rome—must therefore have seemed no more likely to succeed than his bid the year before.
Any artist failing to conform to the standards of the Académie could be sure of a rough ride whenever the votes were cast to elect a new member of this self-perpetuating elite. A case in point had been the fate of Delacroix, the leading exponent of Romanticism. A movement specializing in depictions of storms and massacres, Romanticism produced canvases that were a far cry from the staid forms and austere style favored by most painters in the Académie. Ingres had derided Delacroix as a "drunken broom," a reference to how he subordinated fine detail to bright color and emotional effect. This challenge to the artistic orthodoxy meant Delacroix was elected only at the seventh attempt, having been rejected a total of six times between 1839, when his name was first put forward, and 1857, when he finally claimed his chair at the age of fifty-nine.
Meissonier was good friends with Delacroix, who used to visit the Grande Maison, together with Adolphe Thiers, for games of
boules
4
Meissonier was also a great admirer of Delacroix's work, claiming never to pass through the Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre, on whose ceiling his friend had painted
Apollo Slaying Python,
without doffing his hat as a mark of respect for what he called a "dream of genius."
5
Delacroix may have seemed an unlikely artistic ideal for Meissonier, since the shipwrecks and slaughters of Delacroix's paintings were the antithesis of Meissonier's sedate, well-dressed
bonshommes.
Yet Meissonier was also capable of producing the kind of violent and impassioned scenes of revolutions and massacres for which Romanticism was both renowned and reviled. He had witnessed bloodshed at close hand long before the Battle of Solferino, since in 1848 he saw active service as a captain in the National Guard, the citizen militia that was the duty of every able-bodied man between twenty and fifty-five. He fought on the side of the newly formed republican government during the "June Days," an insurrection in Paris by thousands of unemployed workers in June 1848. Stationed near the Hôtel de Ville, Meissonier witnessed, he later recalled, "all the horror of such warfare. I saw the defenders shot down, hurled out of windows, the ground strewn with corpses, the earth red with blood." In the end, some 1,500 men died on the barricades or in reprisals afterward. Meissonier was chilled by the words of an officer in command of the National Guard who, when asked if all the men shot without trial were guilty, casually replied: "I can assure you that not more than a quarter of them were innocent."
6
With the "terrible impression" of this spectacle still fresh in his mind, Meissonier had painted a harrowing vision of the tragic aftermath of civil strife—a work that in its shock tactics and ghastly realism was different from anything else in his body of work. A remarkable painting,
Remembrance of Civil War
(plate 1 A) was an unblenching piece of pictorial reportage that showed dead bodies heaped together beneath a shattered barricade. Shown at the Salon two years later, it attracted admiring reviews but also attention from the political authorities, who had it removed from the wall before the exhibition closed. However, the canvas made a deep impression on Delacroix, the "master of massacres" to whom Meissonier gave a watercolor study for the work. "I experienced one of the greatest pleasures of my life in making him a present of it," he later remembered.
7
Meissonier could therefore count on the vote of Delacroix, who had supported him in 1860, noting afterward in his journal that "the insipid Signol," a "nurseling of the École," had been chosen in favor of Meissonier because the other members were "shuddering at the idea that an original talent should enter the Academic"
8
Meissonier probably also enjoyed the support of his old teacher, Cogniet, another close friend of Delacroix who had been elected to his own chair in 1849 following important public commissions for both the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles. Few other painters were prepared to endorse Meissonier, though, and his election in 1861 was achieved, after three rounds of voting, thanks to support from various of the sculptors, architects, engravers and musicians in the Académie—men whose prejudices were considerably less intractable than those of the painters.
9
Meissonier's election was explained in a number of newspapers as having been a concession by the Académie to his tremendous public appeal. Many of these same papers celebrated his election as a victory for youth—Meissonier was forty-six at the time—over "the old Académie" with its "mongrel Raphaelism" (as Delacroix called it) and uncompromising reverence for Rome.
10
Certainly the robust painter, with his fondness for athletics, cut a conspicuous figure among the more elderly members of the Académie. "I was still vain enough of my youth," Meissonier later claimed, "to go running up the staircase of the Institut two steps at a time, and to jump seven or eight on my way down."
11
And yet Meissonier, with his lofty dreams of majestic historical scenes, did not intend to go completely against the grain of the Académie. Therefore, in 1861, in his letter of application to the Académie, he had promised to reward its members for their votes "with new efforts and works perhaps more worthy of its attention."
12
He pledged to leave behind his
bonshommes,
in other words, and devote himself to elevated pictorial ventures with which he hoped to enhance both his own reputation and the grandeur of French art. If the members of the Académie wished to see this change with their own eyes, he had informed them, they were welcome to visit his picture-dealer Francis Petit, in whose gallery in the Rue Saint-Georges he had temporarily put on display (though it was still only half-finished)
The Battle of Solferino.
