Summary and Analysis of Grigsby's Argument

Summary and Analysis of Grigsby's Argument Order Description Based on: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Nudity à la grecque in 1799,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 80, no. 2 (June 1998), pp. 311-35 summarize Grigsby’s argument in 1-2 paragraphs and then use the rest of your response to evaluate the effectiveness of her argument. How does she reveal the connections between art, fashion, politics, and morality? How does she structure her argument and what kind of evidence does she use? What did you find most interesting about her argument, or what did you find most unconvincing and why? Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and College Art Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org Nudity à la grecque in 1799 Author(s): Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 311-335 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051235 Accessed: 15-11-2015 07:24 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Nudity a la grecque in 1799 Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Wake up the women at the right ofJacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii of 1785 and place them between the male warriors (Fig. 1). Now remove the men's clothes. This is the startling, even preposterous, double move of David's Intervention of the Sabines of 1799 (Fig. 2). If David's martyr portraits of isolated, unconscious, and eroticized male bodies, like his Death ofJoseph Bara of 1793 (Fig. 3), astutely and economically offered an iconography for the radical fraternal Republic, his transposition of the solitary male nude into a syntax that prominently included dressed women proved problematic. The tableau's awkward character derives from the tensions not only between female dress and male nudity but also between the women's action and the men's friezelike stasis, between the pathos now displaced onto the female figures and the technical precision lavished on the evacuated husks of the standing male academies. Scholarship has for the most part treated the novel conjunction of naked male bodies and newly central female protagonists as separate issues. While the nudes have been described in terms of David's stylistic development toward a greater classical Greek purism, the Sabine women's prominence has been interpreted as affording a familial basis for the reconciliation of a divided and warring post-Revolutionary France. Aesthetic priorities (male nudity) and narrative saliency (female intervention) have often been held asunder. Historians have also typically emphasized the success rather than the tensions of David's stilted and theatrical painting. That success, we have been told, hinged on women's capacity 1 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785. Paris, Mus&e du Louvre (photo: ? Reunion des Musees Nationaux, RMN) " "p i i . i ~i •N,, This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 312 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 nrr iri- e~BL?e1~ ~-%i~sPe~~R~ ~CIP~" ?I' .if ..A. 0/ 'i ALc. 40Uz -L77?1?~i Al ' MEN 2 David, Interventiono f theS abines,1 799. Paris, Mus&ed u Louvre (photo: ? RMN) to integrate a fractured society. As daughters of the Sabines and wives of the Romans, the Sabine women were objects of exchange that unified a new people. Marginalized from the public sphere of the radical Jacobin fraternal order, women during the Directory could be shuffled onto center stage in order strategically to represent another familial basis for community. This has been the emphasis of scholars like Stefan Germer, who has argued that women, "confined to the private sphere all along," could embody "a new ethical foundation for society," and Dorothy Johnson, who has characterized the work as an "image of savage and primordial maternity," which celebrates "women's primordial and essential role in the creation of civilization."' By contrast, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has emphasized women's feminist activism during the French Revolution and David's reliance on women as figurations of disorder. However, she, too, has argued that the Intervention of the Sabines ultimately contains the threat posed by women by binding them to the roles of mothers and wives, effectively circumscribing their activity within a family configuration. According to Lajer-Burcharth, David's tableau represents above all a "defense of the patrilinearity of the family" and thereby functions "as a kind of safeguard image, indeed a 'salutary imago' of the male republican self at the end of the revolution."2 These accounts take as their premise the success of David's tableau. Their deconstruction of its ideological workings depends on the assumption that the painting matched its audience's needs, that David with typical savvy enabled a society undergoing rapid change to redefine itself. Indeed, we rely on David's paintings to tell us about those social and political transformationsW. e understand them to be constitutive of such shifts. Problems arise, however, when his paintings are extricated from the field of contention in which they were made and received. In his best pictures, David almost always took risks that were hotly debated. This was part and parcel of his art's productive work; its eloquence and intelligence resided in David's capacity to locate such hot spots, such vital sites of dissension and anxiety. In fact, David's Interventiono f theS abinesd id not reconcile its fractured audience. Displayed at eye level, opposite a mirror, in a commercial exhibition, the painting was certainly a box-office success, attracting some fifty thousand visitors over its unprecedented five-year run.3 But the votes made by admission fees are evidence less of consensus than of interest, and that interest, this paper will argue, derived from the work's controversy, its failure to deploy antiquity as a unifying metaphorical language. Ironically, David's very success in giving revolution antique form This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 313 ultimately led to classicism's loss of authority. Nudity a la grecque in 1799 could not be disengaged from the dramatic return of women to center stage. The Nudity of Heroes The controversies surrounding David's tableau are well known, if not sufficiently interrogated. David himself mapped them out in a brochure distributed to all paying visitors, thereby situating the work within an exhibitory frame of dissension. The artist felt compelled to offer long, erudite textual arguments replete with important antecedents to defend the innovative entrepreneurial exhibition and the nudity of his tableau's male protagonists.4 David's text arguably attempted to control debate as well as to instantiate it. In fact, contemporaries seized his terms and continued to dispute both choices for years.5 I would argue that the controversies were interrelated and that the scandal of David's tableau resided in the ways it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public spectacle. Indeed, it was the commercial presentation of antiquity as a site of nakedness and the mingling of genders and classes that made David's epic painting such a provocation to the critics of Directory France. For David, the nude signified art because it signified antiquity. In his "Note on the Nudity of My Heroes," the painter described the nude as a greater artistic achievement than the clothed figure and offered a classical pedigree for the ideal form. He explicitly stated that his goal was to paint a work that the Greeks and Romans would not have found foreign to their customs. Significantly, the artist presumed that authenticity, even transparency, to the classical world would be valued in modern France. To speak to the ancients was to speak to Frenchmen, but the signs of that veracity (male nudity) required an exegesis, even a defense, appended to the brochure that addressed his fellow countrymen. David's goal, that the ancients would not find his painting foreign to their customs, admitted the possibility of disparate cultural boundaries, but his unexamined assumption that Frenchmen would respect and understand the language of the ancients refused to acknowledge such fundamental difference. The painter's profound faith in the sociopolitical efficacy and relevance of classicism could not fully control the paradox between universalist and relativist models of culture. David would never know whether the ancients found his tableau foreign to their customs, but he certainly discovered that many of his countrymen considered it alien to their own. As classical ideal, nudity held out a promise to transcend the messy particularities of actual social relations. For David, nudity was the guarantor of art's aesthetic power to ameliorate a stratified and fractured society. During the Directory, in spite of the crisis of the Terror, it was still possible to believe in the wholeness of the body. The dream of transparency to an embodied truth was imagined by the Ideologue Amaury Duval: "The dressed man is a mask; he is only himself undressed; it is men one must paint and not the simulacra of men."6 Nonetheless, the faith expressed by David and Duval was under siege in 1799.7 For some of their contemporaries, nudity exacerbated rather than alleviated class tensions. While Lajer-Burcharth has asserted that David's idealized 3 David, TheD eath ofJosephB ara, 1793. Avignon, Mus&eC alvet (photo: ? RMN) nudes offered the bourgeois male viewer an illusory fiction of "a unified and autonomous self" (410), a number of David's critics believed the nudity of his tableau's figures to be in conflict with bourgeois interests and taste. Most simply, this was a matter of a failure on the part of the bourgeoisie to appreciate the artistic language of antiquity. That failure was implicitly criticized in a dialogue in the Journal des Arts. After an amateur declared he found the figure of Tatius at left "Beautiful, but too nude," an art student vaunted his commitment to nudity as part of his artistic credentials. The student ridiculed the amateur's "bourgeois" preference for draped chiffon, an implicit jab at that class's narcissistic investment in portraiture as well as its materialism. But it was the critic for Le Courrierd es Spectaclesw ho offered the most vehement and adamantly literal attack on the nudity in the Sabines. Permitting art no metaphorical latitude, the author "C.Z." could not forgive David for portraying warriors unrealistically: no people, antique or "savage," placed naked men in circumstances requiring clothing.8 For literal-minded, post-Revolutionary critics like C.Z., classicism was no more than a foreign and anachronistic set of customs.9 Despite its heritage as France's most respected aesthetic tradition, classicism's conventions could be ridiculed in 1799 as an affectation alien to French habits and values. Moreover, the risk posed by a painting like the Sabines was not simply that it was anachronistic but that it rendered the ruling class vulnerable, all too easily provoking workingclass ridicule of bourgeois pretensions. Burlesquing the pedantic affectations of elites had been a mainstay of comedy since the seventeenth century, but here male nudity is the focus of the social critic. C.Z., tongue in cheek, evoked the stuff of panicky nightmares: "A dressed hero is far more imposing. If you send him nude in the middle of a public place, I strongly doubt that the dressed people who surround him, will see him with eyes other than those of his valet de chambre, and you know how difficult it is to be a hero in the eyes of the latter."10 C.Z. astutely denigrated the classical hero by redefining him in specifically contemporary French terms. Romulus and Tatius became vulnerable, naked Frenchmen stripped of This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 314 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 clothing and class authority before a (disrespectful) crowd of dressed domestic servants. Although David had argued that it was customary among ancient painters, sculptors, and poets to represent gods and heroes nude, it was clear to C.Z. that such a custom inverts class prerogatives: so the elite must go bare while the common people enjoy the privileges of clothing! If the reasoning is unsophisticated, it better underscores the extent to which the reception of nudity could depend on class standing. Chaussard's Defense Between David's text and the critics of nudity there is an incommensurable gap. If the artist privileges classical aesthetic criteria with little thought to the discrepancy between ancient cultures and his own, the hostile critics privilege French social practices as the circumscribing conditions of art making and feign ignorance of the French academic pictorial tradition. However, David's most eloquent republican champion, the Ideologue Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, offered a more complex assessment of the Sabines.11 In contrast to David, who presumed that the tableau could produce a unified public appreciative of his antiquarian references and deployment of nudity, Chaussard argued that the controversial reception of the male nudes appropriately differentiated strata of French society.12 The republican critic admitted that David's sublime language of antiquity, particularly his male nudes, would be understood solely by an elite, but he believed the painting ameliorated a divided society by offering different bases of appeal: "While [David's] enemies go to the painting to seek flaws; his rivals to seek torments; his emulators to seek lessons; the philosopher to seek an object of profound meditation; the friend of the arts to seek pleasure mixed with admiration; the multitude throngs to find new and lively sensations. For [the multitude], it is really only a spectacle" (Chaussard, 39). Appreciation of antiquity requires sophistication, but the touching narrative of family strife and reconciliation requires no special initiation and appeals to the multitude since "man is above all avid for strong sensations or emotions" (Chaussard, 3). Even as he praised David's accomplishment, Chaussard betrayed his ambivalence: "The vulgar only seize expressions of a common and trivial nature; those [expressions] of a superior order and le beau idealescape them by their elevation, or overpower and humiliate them by their grandeur. It is the pathos of the subject that attracts the crowd around this tableau" (Chaussard, 38). Thus, while an educated segment of the audience can appreciate le beau ideal and the painting's exemplary, elevated style and message, the multitude is hungry only for the sensations offered by the spectacle of pathos. Chaussard referred to David's work as a "drama," but he attempted to distance it from the popular spectacle's more unruly and boisterous modes of acclaim. The Sabines, he argued, stunned the multitude into "religious silence" (39). For Chaussard, David's painting at once revealed class divisions and ameliorated them not only by gathering all people before the canvas but also by transforming the behavior of the "crowd" into something more closely resembling dignity. The pathos of the familial drama-women's emotional intervention between ennobled men d l'antique-drew the crowd before the painting, and this was good. But the fit between crowd and female emotional expressivity had to be mediated, even transformed, by an intervening model of appropriate noble behavior. That onerous burden was born by Hersilia (Fig. 4). Like Amaury Duval, Chaussard praised this woman in white for her noble status. Hersilia was distinguished from the women who surround her not only by her ideal character and beauty but also by "the dignity of her suffering, the highest trait characterizing a being and a spirit outside the common condition" (Chaussard, 8). By contrast, the other women, who rush forward, disheveled, with burning tears and uncovered breasts, expressed "passions in common conditions or vulgar persons" (9). Chaussard was right to differentiate Hersilia from her emotive chorus.13 In David's painting, the central heroine at once divides the warring men from each other and protects the audience from the hurling propulsion of the expressive female figures. Hersilia stands, legs and arms outstretched, like a dam containing the impacted wall of disorder behind her. Only her left hand fails to reach Romulus's shield; this is the weakest point of containment, and the women and children pour forth through the opening, the babies tumbling like waves onto the foreground strip of earth. Chaussard and David alike relied on Hersilia to mediate between nobility and vulgarity, between the inexpressive stilted male heroes and the emotional female chorus. Given her pivotal role in the reconciliation of antitheses, it comes as no surprise that David struggled long and hard to give her form and was never fully satisfied. In a series of preparatory drawings, the painter progressively tidied up and contained the agitated rhythms of her figure (Figs. 5, 6). While her flapping hair and the rippling waves of her bodice initially radiated out from her form, in the final painting, hair and costume are circumscribed, polished and made to adhere closely to the smooth orbs of her head and breasts. Hersilia is increasingly likened to the two male protagonists in position and scale as well as pose, the parallel disposition of their legs establishing a powerful rhythm across the picture's surface (with a final piquant note sounded by the leg of the twisting ephebic youth who retreats at right). Conjoining the tableau's female and male perpendicular axes, Hersilia's cruciform figure is, therefore, the very fulcrum of the composition. As the solitary embodiment of feminine nobility, she alone forces women's propelling expressivity into the static horizontal frieze of artful masculine display. Chaussard's criticism of the Sabines offered a subtle defense of David's classicizing idiom by emptying the male nudes of narrative signification and displacing expressivity as well as temporality onto the female figures. The women act-they intervene-in order that the men may stop acting and thereby assume the stasis identified with art. The suspension of the men's action, the transformation of war into display, permits the male bodies to become le beau iddal. Hersilia's contradictory role is both to enact intervention and to stop time. She functions to arrest the male protagonists' activity but also to dam up women's emotive narrative momentum. In so doing, she is meant to reconcile the incommensurable categories engendered by this splitting of painting's function This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 315 4 David, Interventiono f theS abines,d etail This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 316 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 5 David, preparatory study for Interventiono f theS abines,1 794. Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, D partement des Arts Graphique (photo: ? RMN) 6 David, preparatory study for Interventiono f theS abines,1 795. Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphique (photo: ? RMN) into elite aesthetics (statuary) and popular expressivity (drama). There are risks to this double move, however. As the hostile criticism of the Sabines attests, the female figures were not capable of securely metamorphosing naked men into an autonomous realm of art, nor could Hersilia deflect criticism from her own form. A heroine's noble status at the interstices of (high) art and (popular) spectacle was not so easily secured. Chaussard effectively accommodated the dissension between David and C.Z. concerning the status of male nudity by reading their aesthetic disagreement as a matter of class difference. The "grandeur" of nudity, Chaussard implied, went over C.Z.'s head, but the drama of David's painting was pitched downward to his (uninitiated) level. Chaussard attempted to defend classical nudity by segregating it from wider society as an inviolate realm of le beau ideal. For the republican critic, the ultimate achievement of David's painting was its capacity to preserve that (masculine) classical ideal by offering another axis of (feminine) spectacular pathos. Nonetheless, Chaussard's argument ultimately failed to preserve the aesthetic isolation of David's male nudes. Indeed, C.Z.'s voice erupted at the end of his text even as he attempted to refute it. Suddenly, Chaussard, like C.Z., conjured the abhorrent vision of the Frenchman robbed of clothes. There is a man who must dread to see himself nude; it is the man of our modern ages, it is the being degraded physically as well as morally, deformed by swaddling, by all the bonds by which he is and continues to be strangled, compressed by his clothes, bent under the ridicule of fashions, branded by idleness, by pleasures and vices. (Chaussard, 38) Nothing could be more loathsome than the sight of modern man stripped bare, not because he would be humiliated before his servants but because his body had been permanently inscribed by his (vulgar) cultural practices, particularly fashion. Unlike David's figures, contemporary man had been degraded physically as well as morally by French sartorial habits, by swaddling clothes, by all his confining bonds. The male body of the French nation was deformed, bent, branded, and strangled. Chaussard's rhetorical violence, recalling the character of Revolutionary debates, bespoke particular anxiety concerning the bodies of France's newborn male citizens. 14 Chaussard's discourse differs significantly from pre-Revolutionary attacks against outmoded signs of privilege and social rank. Pleasure and vice were once associated with the falsity of makeup and powdered wigs of an unproductive aristocratic class, but Chaussard's rhetoric does not target specific social groups. Instead, his criticism is leveled at the plethora of improvised and innovative attachments to the body-the deformation of a whole and intact masculinity by a debased and artificial set of outward signs. Most significantly, this socially undifferentiated creature is molded by a commodifled fashion available to all members of society. The republican's text drew on Revolutionary (and Rousseauist) criticism of nature's perversion by artificial institutions.15 Among other things, the Revolution was supposed to have liberated the bodies of French citizens heretofore oppressed by the artifice and social stratification of ancien regime dress.16 The paradox, however, is that the Revolutionary investment in the body as a natural sign had ushered in an increasingly arbitrary and ephemeral system of fashion. Unmoored from traditional class privileges, clothing became a matter of invention.17 Lynn Hunt has described the Revolutionary preoccupation with the decoration of the body as an attempt to achieve transparency (clothing directly signifying the interiority of the Revolutionary Self).'*s But to invent Revolutionary signs-whether sartorial or political-was to engender an atmosphere of intense competition and rapid obsolescence, a habitual restless revolution. Although the Republic expended enormous resources in a semiotics of legitimation, the result was a more conspicuous notion of transience. Fashion's pace of innovation and obsolescence only accelerated during the Directory. Never before had dress changed so quickly. In the year that David's exhibition of the Sabines This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 317 7 Cafi of theI ncroyablese,n graving, ca. 1797. Paris, Mus~e Carnavalet (photo: ? phototheque des Musees de la Ville de Paris) opened, one critic bemoaned the speed with which la mode metamorphosed: this alarming acceleration of market pressures ruined families, marriages, and virtuous women.19 Chaussard, too, in his social commentary of 1798, Le nouveau Diable boiteux, likened fashion to the winds.20 The provisionality and arbitrariness of sartorial styles did not represent an evacuation of political signification, however. On the contrary, dress during the Directory became an explicit marker of political allegiances. Stratified post-Thermidor France produced a highly inventive and factionalized fashion. While the male members of the royalist so-called golden youth, those post-Thermidor dandies known as muscadins and incroyables, expressed their resistance to the republican government by a flamboyant elaboration of English styles, the revolutionary exclusifs flaunted an opposing set of sartorial signifiers (Figs. 7, 8).21 Within this highly politicized and self-conscious semiotic system, the royalists' black collars were understood against the Jacobins' red collars, the counter-Revolutionaries' long hairstyles replete with "dogs' ears" sideburns against the Jacobin short haircuts (les t0tes tondues).22 In such a factionalized and accelerated climate of experimentation, contemporary dress clearly offered no single "national" set of markers. Rather than emanating from the court, French fashion, like French society, was splintered into dissenting camps. For Chaussard, therefore, David's male nudes signified a renunciation of fashion, an ideal distanced from the volatile inconstancy of ephemeral social practices. Nudity a l'antique offered a solution to the transient signs of social organization. As the sculptor Pierre Cartellier later complained in a letter to Antoine-Denis Chaudet, the "mask" of fashion was subject to fifty variations in the course of the century.23 Nudity, by contrast, proposed a certainty, a truth untouched by the continual revolution of style. Nudity, so the argument went, "?~,.i~LtT~kJ~ 8 The Exclusive, from A. J. de Barruel- Beauvert, Caricatureps olitiques, 1797-98. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale stood outside time. Nonetheless, Chaussard's outburst betrays him: "There is a man who must dread to see himself nude; it is the man of our modern ages ... bent under the ridicule of fashions." To describe nudes in terms of contemporary Frenchmen's bodies, even in order to oppose them, is to admit to their relation. Nudity a la grecque inevitably led to the specter of nakedness in turn-of-the-century France. And even the naked body was inscribed by its cultural and historical specificity; it was branded and deformed by its social practices. There was no retrievable generalized and ideal sign among real bodies. David's shift to male nudity from the antique dress of his pre-Revolutionary tableaux Horatii and The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, appears to have been difficult to defend. David's Nudes In the criticism attending David's Sabines, the nude male heroes were viewed, on the one hand, as metaphoric idealizations, whole and complete classical nudes; on the other hand, as literal and veristic men stripped of clothes. David's painting itself must be held responsible for the polarized interpretations it engendered; Intervention of the Sabines provoked debate about the status of nudity by juxtaposing two very different naked male figures (Figs. 9, 10). One of their explicit differences has been lost due to modifications David made to the canvas in 1808. Until that date, Tatius's frontally disposed figure displayed genitals. Although the painting now deploys the scabbard in a way that recalls the almost comical contrivances of drapery typically featured in academies (Fig. 11), there was no such phallic displacement in the tableau's initial presentation. Today, the plunging penile scabbard draws rather than deflects attention, particularly given the odd suspension of no fewer than three legs from Tatius's covered This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 318 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 9 David, Interventiono f theS abines, detail genitals, but in 1799 Tatius's uncensored nudity also elicited comment. David's unusual decision was noted by the English visitor Henry Redhead Yorke as he stood before the work: "Tatius is displayed full to the view in puris naturalibus. He also wears not only a helmet and sandals, but carries a shield and a scarlet mantle buckled on the breast, but so contrived as to exhibit his whole body in a state of nature."24 In a tradition in which shading and drapery served gently to veil the genitals, David's use of props only accentuated their presence in a way that seemed to Yorke less natural than deliberately contrived. Before the 1808 modifications, the Sabine warrior Tatius was a far more exposed and vulnerable figure than Romulus, the halfgod. All that remains hidden to the spectator in the back view of Romulus was displayed in the frontal figure of Tatius. Although the two men stand in mirrored opposition, with Hersilia as the whitened screen between them (and their ephebic equerries as their bracketing complements), their intimate pairing only highlights their differences.25 Frontally disposed, Tatius, the mortal man, consists of an awkward, disjointed set of limbs appended to a short and broad stump of a torso. He is, moreover, strangely asymmetrical. His bent right arm and leg compress that side of his body into a compact unit enclosed by the length of his sword. By contrast, his left arm and leg are extended but appear no less awkward, because their lengths are segmented. Our view of Tatius's grasp of the underside of the shield underscores his full visibility-we see the length of his arm submitted to the mechanical requirements of his armor (like a mounted specimen in a trompe l'oeil painting). Such details imbue this slightly scowling, naked warrior with a poignantly This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 319 10 David, Interventiono f theS abines, detail prosaic quality. Gravity and tactility play their part. Tatius's disproportioned but volumetric body seems cumbersome, a burden to bear across space, and the metal weapons such heavy and unforgiving weights. David's technical difficulties further exacerbate our sense of the figure's awkwardness. The arm holding the shield is ambiguously attached to the oversize shoulder; the dimunitive head appears to retreat from the clumsy tangle of drapery, straps, and bulging muscles at right. By contrast, the figure of the halfgod Romulus is quite successfully understated. Our sense of his completeness and perfection is produced, paradoxically, by the concealment of his body: deep shadows and a series of substitute forms occlude the visibility of his anatomy. Unlike the dark, concave oval held by Tatius (is it an oval or a foreshortened circle?), Romulus's luminous and beautifully convex circular shield hides most of his torso as well as his left shoulder and arm. 11 David, Acadimie of a Man, Called Hector, 1778. Montpellier, Musee Fabre (photo: ? RMN) r~l: Zia This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 320 ART BULL.ETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME I.XXX NUMBER 2 12 David, Portraito f Henrietted e VerninacY, ear VIII [ 1799-1800]. Paris, Musee du Louvre (photo: o RMN) Gently kissing the graceful curve of his silhouetted waist, the perfect circle stops exquisitely short of severing his body in two and casts the right half in shadow, rendering it an abstracted and graceful set of undulating contours. While Tatius is evenly lit, only a slicing edge of Romulus catches the light and offers a glimpse of flesh. The flat treatment, even tonality, and apparent lack of acuity in the shaded side of his body muffle his corporality but nonetheless heighten the eroticism of the softly modeled orbs of his buttocks-so perfectly echoing the softly protruding sphere of the shield as well as the vertically disposed sword's sheath. By contrast, as Yorke aptly suggested, the harshly thrusting sword and scabbard that bracketed Tatius's genitals underscore rather than mitigate the sense of their vulnerability. The juxtaposition of implements of war and naked male anatomy makes Tatius seem more, not less, defenseless. His flesh is assailable. Romulus is protected and fortified by the phallic substitutes for mere anatomy because the all-too-human referents of corporal specificity, such as genitals, are cloaked.26 If David's brochure assimilated Tatius and Romulus by subsuming both figures within the overarching category of antique nudity, his painting provoked argument about the status of its male nudes by offering disparate models of the unclothed body. Tatius's figure, unlike that of Romulus, fails to repress the artist's toil before a weary model encumbered by props. By betraying his status as a naked model, the Sabine warrior proves to be no more than what C.Z. suspected: an undressed Frenchman, Chaussard's body branded and inscribed by the deformations of contemporary practices. Thus, while Romulus's seamless figure bolstered classicists' arguments about nudity's ideality, Tatius's clumsy form fueled critics' hostility regarding the absurdities of nakedness. David's painting was far more complex than his own published defense would allow. It seems that neither David nor his critics were capable of addressing both Tatius and Romulus at once. The Nudity of Women If the male nudes were inherently controversial, Hersilia draped in white like her sisters in David's tableaux of the 1780s, would seem to offer an acceptably chaste classical counterpoint. Here at least David seems to have taken no risks and sustained his pre-Revolutionary iconography of female dress. While nudity could not keep contemporary references at bay, at least authentic archaeology might. Significantly, however, the English visitor Henry Redhead Yorke, who had commented on Tatius's nudity, was compelled to slip into modish French in order to describe Hersilia's dress: "Between f~8Y .:? ". A~Rt~l ?J ?. 1 s?? \ " \\ 1 ~:? 1 ~. . l.a Y x I I "~ ~? r t I i '('. I = =rt-r. ~`1~I~P~_ ,I ,?LY;?t:~- k : ._i-;-- -L .f i.- -~:--'"LL;-~ -?;-? ~: r\ r ..--. .- ct ;L '? - -- - - :i, ~~de~ ._~I 13 Costumed e Bal, from CostumeP arisien( Paris, Year VIII [1799-1800]), pl. 184 This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 321 14 Jean-FranCoisJaninet afterJean Guillaume Moitte, Liberty, 1792. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale these two figures stands Hersilia; she is robed in white ad la grecque, in other words according to the present fashion.""27 David maintained his pre-Revolutionary style of female costume in Intervention of the Sabines, but French women's sartorial practices had changed radically since the mid-1780s. In 1783, a critic had contrasted contemporary women's toilette to the noble simplicity of a female antique statue, "a great figure di la grecque, very beautiful, with an antique air, costume and form of the most exquisite purity, a virginal and primitive expression, and who seemed to be neither of our nation nor our century."28 By the late 1790s, however, the woman attired la grecque seemed removed neither in space nor in time. Far from securing history painting's decorous distance from current social practices, classical garb offered a point of contact between past and present in fin de siecle France. David himself was greatly responsible for such a collapse of high art and ephemeral fashion. The example of his paintings combined with his impact as Revolutionary iconographer had encouraged a pervasive adoption of classical dress, particularly by women. As Jules David emphasized, fashionable women were consciously modeling themselves on the female protagonists populating David's major pre- Revolutionary tableaux (David, vol. 1, 336). Paris was filled with Camillas and the daughters of Brutus. Portraits like David's Mme V (1799) corroborate the evidence of contemporary fashion plates that Frenchwomen had appropriated the 15 Ponce, after Borel, NationalA ssemblyD: edicatedt o women patriots;T hec hosenm omenti s the offeringo f thef irst patrioticd onation madeb yw omena rtistso n Septembe7r, 1789. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes antique attire previously adorning allegorical personifications and classical history painting's heroines (Figs. 12-14). Prior to the Revolution, such appropriations had continued a longer tradition of occasional fictional role-playing. Women masqueraded as Flora for their portraits or theatrically enacted the classical past at parties, most notably, Marie-Louise- Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun's famous supper a la grecque in 1788.29 By the late 1790s, however, dress i l'antique had become everyday garb. Rather than an elite's occasional fantasy costume, the white classical gown had become a widely adopted and frequently worn fashion. Hersilia stands, therefore, not only as the solitary embodiment of ennobled femininity in David's tableau but also as its most fashionably chic protagonist. Of all the figures within the painting, she most closely resembles members of the audience. If Hersilia bore the burden of integrating elite and common viewers, what are the implications of her attire's simultaneous referentiality to the past and to the present? How did her up-to-date stylishness a la grecque inflect her status as ennobled heroine? And what was the relationship between her contemporaneity and the volatile interpretations of the male nudes who bracket her? Nudity i la grecque has seemed thus far to concern the status of male nudes. However, within Directory debates about fashion, classicizing nudity was associated above all with the increasing visibility of female, not male, bodies. Women's negating sartorial strategies at the very outset of the French Revolution had metamorphosed in the late 1790s into a flirtation with dress that approached undress. On September 7, 1789, women had donned simple white gowns and donated their ornaments to the state in an attempt to distance themselves from compromising associations of femininity with aristocratic ostentation (Fig. 15).30 However, renunciation, too, is a sartorial choice. Negation leads from the excesses of ornamentation to the excesses of revealed flesh; modesty occupies some indeterminable, unrealizable midpoint. During the Directory, the appropriation of Greek attire evoked the Revolutionary prescription of female chastity but 47.- 7. os T ; ?c This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 322 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 16 Eulalie Morin, Portraito fJulietteR icamier,1 799. Versailles, Chaiteau de Versailles (photo: ? RMN) transgressed it, playfully manipulating but quite wittily rejecting the virtuous role imposed on women throughout the Revolution. The staid, classically draped figure of republican Liberty (Fig. 14) had always been vulnerable to mocking commentary about women's lasciviousness.31 During the hedonistic days of the Directory, the shift from liberty to license seemed all too inevitable. In 1797, a verse exploited the inherent ambiguities of the term and gaily described the "liberties taken" by women's post-Revolutionary fashion: Liberty, this is my motto; All costumes are decent; Shame to those who are scandalized by them! Why should we wear gloves, These women go well without chemises.32 In post-Thermidor France, women had indeed discarded layers of their underclothing. Much ink was spent mocking the new choice to be seen in public "sans chemise. "In addition, Grecian gowns had become increasingly light and transparent as can be seen in a 1799 portrait by Eulalie Morin ofJuliette Recamier dressed in such a thin robe a' la grecque that her breasts and nipples, like Hersilia's, are quite clearly visible (Fig. 16).33 In a witticism of the period, women were flattered for being "well-undressed" rather than "well-dressed."'34 A party game involved disrobing in order to determine which woman's costume, including shoes, weighed the least.35 A number of contemporary paintings by Louis-Leopold Boilly feature women whose gauzy outfits and abbreviated undergarments reveal not only arms and cleavage but also, through the transparent fabric, the fleshy length of their legs, in some cases deceptively covered by flesh-colored tights (Fig. 17).36 In the late 1790s, nudity was self-consciously performed by women as an intriguing game of revelation and deception. The scandals associated with the period's most fashionable women are famous. Was it Mme Hamelin or Mme Tallien who promenaded in the Champs-Elysees "half nude," arms and throat revealed, a gauzy cloth covering flesh-colored stockings in order to fabricate a glimpse of her nakedness? That an honest man was forced to rescue this exhibitionist from a jeering crowd offered the press a moralizing pretext to tell the story.37 But other reports indicate that this fashion was hardly circumscribed to the chic elite: "Nine-tenths of women are dressed in white and very negligently assembled. A very small number seem to be occupied with their toilette and they are distinguished by bearing their shoulders and a part of their back nude."38 Not surprisingly, the Frenchwomen who walked through the public gardens in transparent and gauzy draperies invited denunciations of the classical style on the basis of extraaesthetic criteria. In such attacks, classical garb was deemed inappropriate to the French climate because it belonged to a different geography and therefore a different culture. In 1798, for example, a doctor named Desessarts argued in the press that "he had seen more young girls die since the system of mudites gazies than in the last forty years."39 In 1799 another physician, Victor Broussonet, condemned the unhealthiness of women's appropriation of flimsy classical garb in his brochure De la mode et des habillements. Broussonet asserted that French women were foolish to adopt the minimal cladding of ancient Mediterranean cultures in the chilly climate of Paris: "Respiratory inflammation, colds, the suppression of menses have been the result of these revolting nudities. Our women, in imitation of the Romans, have discovered breasts and shoulders."40 On September 7, 1799, only months before the exhibition of the Sabines, the journal Le Publiciste described another doctor's attempt to dissuade women from exposing themselves to such dangers: In order to dissuade women from the furor of appearing almost nude in our gardens, the doctor Angrand cites the death of a young person from a chest illness contracted these last days at Tivoli. He announces that he is going to collect a great number of histories of grave illnesses, often fatal, occasioned by the usage of clothing d la grecque.41 Less than two weeks later, the Journal de Paris published a letter to the editor from the Institut member Louis-Mathieu Langlhs who, despite his republican commitments, expressed hostility toward women's adoption of antique costume.42 Again, medical reasons were marshaled, but Langlhs emphasized morality rather than health. In Langlhs's letter, women's Greek fashions were explicitly condemned as "indecent": For a long time the moral and physical disadvantages of the Greek costume when worn in a humid and variable climate like ours have been pronounced by men of art and This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA CGRECQUE IN 1799 323 17 Boilly, No Agreement, from the series Follies of the Day, oil on canvas, 1797. Private collection. men of good sense. Women themselves have more facts and observations about this than all the doctors of this Faculty have collected; but experience is of no use to them just as it often is no use to us, and nothing is less astonishing. What do dangers and even death mean to those who dare to risk modesty, a sentiment more important to this [feminine] sex than self-preservation? Whether one dresses di la grecque or d la romaine, I dare predict the result will never be Cornelias.43 Langle's's argument registers the contradictions of post- Revolutionary French culture: the experimental identification with antiquity as an exemplary model coexisted with an increasing suspicion of its outward signs. Cornelia is virtuous, but dressing like her has its moral and physical risks. Appropriating gowns a l'antique will not transform Frenchwomen into their virtuous ancient counterparts; in fact, to the contrary. The mere choice to dress d la grecque is proof of a lack of modesty. If the women's donation of jewels in 1789 had equated the virtuous self-sacrifice of the Roman women with their simple white clothes, such a conflation of antique clothing and exemplary behavior was no longer possible in 1799. Classical dress was now seen only as a particularly exhibitionist and immoral fashion choice, and one moreover that leveled the differences between women in troubling ways. In 1799, Pierre-Louis Roederer, one of the most eloquent critics of women's classicizing fashion, conjured the dissolution of traditional distinctions between women in the new circulation of revealed body parts. According to this republican theorist, every woman was far too willing to flaunt her flattering feature: "The assembly of women is not as varied. There are no longer the old, no longer the ugly. Those who do not have a figure have such a beautiful throat! Those who do not have a [beautiful] throat have such beautiful arms! Here, all is youth, from the age of sixteen to sixty years."44 Whether young or old, French women were being sexualized by their titillatingly skimpy and diaphanous garb. Of course, the effaced distinctions between women were not only those of age and relative beauty. A woman's virtue also could no longer be read by her dress. Flesh apparently eroticized women equivalently; differences of morality were no longer inscribed on their bodies. As a government surveillance report of 1798 made clear, all women, whether prostitutes at the Palais Royal or virtuous daughters and wives, were revealing themselves. The honest woman had ceased to offer the dishonest woman a model for emulation.45 Ultimately, however, the greatest threat posed by women's new exhibitionism was not their impact on other women but the power they inappropriately wielded over men. Roederer, for one, understood fashion to be the means by which women exercised their "empire."'46 This was not merely a matter of women's seduction of men but of their substitution of tyranny for republicanism. Ephemeral fashion is by definition antithetical to timeless law. The stakes were self-evident: as long as women-immoral, fashionable, fickle, and tyrannical-are prominent, there could be no (fraternal) Republic. It is the independence of women's morals that has given them the authority of fashion [la mode]. As long as women are spectacles in performances, nymphs in promenades, and goddesses in their palace, there will not be a republic in France. In vain will the constitution have been established in accordance with the distinction of political powers; there will always be a power opposed to all others, and that is fashion. Fashion will always combat laws, because laws, if only because they are always a serious This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 324 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOIUME I.XXX NUMBER 2 18 Adrien-Pierre-FranCoisG odefroy, after F.J. Harriet, Parisian Tea, ca. 1800. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale 19 Engraving, ca. 1799. Paris, Bibliothe'que Nationale thing, can never be a la mode. One can attribute the morals of the European republics of Switzerland and Holland to the impotence of women to exercise the empire of fashion. 47 What particularly disturbed Roederer were the ways women insidiously exercised power in culture that they were not allowed to wield in republican government. "What a contradiction! You refuse women all political existence, which is very just, and yet you permit all our habits to be based on their example!" (Roederer, vol. 4, 383). By allowing women to exercise their empire over fashion, men were following their example. If we think back to Chaussard's invective concerning degraded modern man, we can better appreciate his emphasis on the Frenchman suffocating under his stylish layers. However, to argue that man was emasculated by succumbing to feminine fashion is to occlude a source of greater anxiety during this period. In fact, the Directory witnessed a dramatic divergence in female and male fashion (Figs. 17-19).48 Men were drowning under accretions of fabric while women increasingly discarded their clothes. Even as female citizens approached a state of nudity, men were encasing their bodies, eclectically appropriating English fashion either as a sober self-presentation or, through exaggeration, as the contrary: an excessively self-indulgent and effete sensualism that emphatically renounced republican sobriety. The male incroyables, admittedly the most extreme example, swaddled their outsize physiques in ample layers of clothing and loosely fitting boots and wrapped their "delicate" necks in voluminous scarves, framed by huge collars that rose up the back of the head. Though cleanshaven, the incroyables' faces were hidden by long fluffy hair, which hung down in strands along the jaw like "dogs' ears," and sometimes by large circular eyeglasses (worn whether needed or not). An incroyable'sa ttire and coiffure, therefore, covered most of his face and body, rendering the nose and jaw that emerged from the folds of cloth and hair excessively prominent, penile and obscene, tips of flesh emerging from the swaddled and exaggerated length of the neck. During the Directory, men's bodies seemed to have been deformed (and perversely eroticized) by the accretions that enveloped and all but overwhelmed them. Fashion, then, may have been associated with women, but a most disturbing deceit had been enacted. It was men's bodies, not women's, that bore the weight of artifice; they were sinking within its perverse folds and crevices while women had co-opted the masculine Republic's vision of classical simplicity. To condemn women's preoccupation with fashion was partly to deflect attention from the ways in which male bodies had been more dramatically transformed by la mode. If men were being suffocated by artifice, women had gallingly appropriated nudity, that former signifier of the masculine beau ideal. This had no small implications for the authority of classicism in post-Revolutionary France. The status of nudity d l'antique was profoundly compromised by its appropriation by women. No longer a term outside contemporary social practices, nudity itself had been subsumed within the provisional, politicized, and arbitrary semiotics of a feminized fashion. Certainly, nudity was thereby trivialized, but it was also subjected to criticism on the basis of pragmatic criteriahow startling to worry that classical figures might become chilly or catch cold! Associated with modish strategies of female seduction, antique signifiers like nudity were now condemned on the basis of their inappropriateness to post- Revolutionary France, a place at once cold, damp, and desperately in need of a stringent morality to replace the loss of Church. By donning classical attire, women had complicated and intensified longer-standing debates. France was in the process of deciding. Could classicism represent the French nation? Was classicism universal in purchase or only archaeologically specific to a time and place? Could it represent all people or only an aesthetically initiated elite? Did classicism offer a secular moral foundation in place of the Church? When women put on transparent white antique gowns in the 1790s, they rendered frivolous, ephemeral, and interchangeable French culture's most serious, ambitious, and purportedly universal style. They also redefined its politics. For Roederer, nudity was republican only if it was male. When female, it smacked of the ancien regime. Indeed, Roederer saw the This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A l.A GRE;CQUE IN 1799 325 female usurpation of nudity as a desperate attempt on the part of women to recuperate power lost during the Revolution. Women were not only prone to tyranny, they were regressive, wishing no less than a return to France's forsaken past: Women have abused clothing to ruin and oppress men ... but, in abusing nudity, they lose, or at least risk the empire and rights of their charms. It is because women have seen their domination in France vanish with the monarchy that they have risked even their existence. They did not want the modest happiness of an American, a Swiss, a Genevan; to regain all they have lost, they have staked everything they have, down to their health, and soon even this everything-goes attitude will be gone.49 Roederer spells it out. Women were drawing attention to themselves in order to regain the prominence they had enjoyed under the ancien regime. Indeed, they would risk anything-even their health-to "ruin and oppress men." Roederer understood nudity to be one step too far in a continuum of fashion wielded by women to dominate men. For women to abuse nudity was to risk their empire, but whether they maintained their power or not, significant damage had been done to the Republic's iconography: nudity d l'antique had been metamorphosed into a sign of (feminine) tyranny rather than (masculine) liberty. The problem, of course, was that classicism had always been Janus-faced: gallant mythologies a la rococo competing with stoic and austere historical iconographies. David's achievement of a piercingly lucid "virile" idiom capable of representing solemn Revolutionary certainties was formidable because it was convincing, but it must be seen as relatively short-lived, bracketed on either side by women's competing appropriations of antiquity. If antiquity in the hands of David could signify the austere absolute truths of Corneille, it could also be Racinian-elegant, pretty, decorative, lightly worn, full of innuendo, playful, witty, even humorous.50 Against Apollo Belvedere and heroic Davidian academies lurked the specter of Mme du Barry, seeking attention yet again (Fig. 20). Less than thirty years had elapsed since her pretentious, oversize portrait "as Muse" had been removed from the Salon walls because of its overly transparent classicizing gown. What was unacceptable was the way the king's mistress had audaciously mapped antiquity's highest claims onto her own sexualized body.51 In discussions of fashion in the press and other ephemeral literature, debates about nudity were commonplace, but within the context of fashion, classicizing nudity was associated with women, not their overdressed male counterparts. In David's Intervention of the Sabines, women whose antique gowns fall aside to reveal breasts, legs, and thighs are placed in the midst of naked men. In the painting, women become the dressed term opposed to male nudity, yet their clothing could elicit concerns about current enthusiasms for a lascivious nudity d la grecque. How should David's choice simultaneously to invert and to evoke contemporary practices be interpreted? Certainly, the painter's decision to depict his male heroes nude can be seen as an attempt to define nudity & 20 FranCois-Hubert Drouais, Portrait of Mme du Barry as Muse, 1771. Versailles, Chambre de Commerce l'antique in masculine terms, to salvage the beau ideal as a masculine artistic tradition rather than a feminine sartorial invention. The consequences in 1799 of maintaining his pre-Revolutionary female iconography can also be seen as inadvertent: David believed in male nudity, and the moral ambiguity of his female figures was an unintended result of changed circumstances. David had maintained his artistic commitments; it was Frenchwomen who had changed by habitually dressing like his paintings' female protagonists. Nonetheless, David's preparatory drawings suggest that he purposely modified Hersilia's attire, transforming the flapping layers of her bodice into the final painting's streamlined, clinging white gown that not only reveals rosy nipples but opens to show the expanse of hips and thigh. If the modifications served partly to circumscribe Hersilia's "vulgar" expressivity, they also made her more fashionable, paradoxicallyand here is David's inescapable quandary-both more antique and more up-to-date. The brooches at the shoulders, the enhancement of a sleeveless look, the simple band below her breasts, the archaeological sandals: these were all details recounted in the fashion pages of journals as well as contemporary descriptions of Paris's most visible women.52 David chose to make Hersilia more chic-more like Mme Hamelin and Mme Tallien promenading in the Tuileries, more like This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 326 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 21 Boilly, Make Peace, from the series Follies of the Day, 1797. Private collection Boilly's socialites in his series Follies of the Day of 1797 (Fig. 17).53 In a series of fine-tuned modifications, the painter enhanced his heroine's resemblance to a community of controversial exhibitionists. That association of Sabines and prominent, morally ambiguous Directory women could only have been further intensified by the stories that circulated concerning the identity of David's nonprofessional female models. Like many of the period's most celebrated women, the sisters de Bellegarde enjoyed the celebrity of beauty wed to scandalous sexual mores. Together, they were famous for their compromising attachment to the world of the studio; they were known, in Etienne-Jean Delkcluze's words, "by the singular life they led in the midst of artists of all genres."54 Brunette Adele had left her husband and children in the provinces to become a highly visible Parisian mistress. While it was generally acknowledged that she had sat for the bare-breasted kneeling woman in the Sabines, rumors circulated regarding the extent to which she had exposed her body to the painter.55Jules David even claimed that Adele, "vain" about her role as model, enjoyed appearing in public with her hair arranged to match that of David's disheveled figure (David, 336). Married to a defrocked priest, her blonde sister, Aurore, inevitably invited stories that she had posed for Hersilia.56 She may have had some competition. According to Jules David, three society ladies volunteered for the part. These, then, were some of the women of fashion who would have inflected the reception of a painting often characterized as evidence of David's commitment to a newly purified, aestheticized classicism confined to erudite citations.57 Imagine such nouveaux riches women moving through the Sabines exhibition space, appreciating their chic couture and resemblance to David's heroine reflected in the wall-length mirror, all for the price of a ticket. Could there have been a better showplace to celebrate the spectacular, exhibitionist pleasures of fashion and the erotics of public sociability? To simplify David's painting into an image of a fractured public sphere reconciled by the intervention of the Sabine women's "private" familial claims is therefore to ignore the controversies surrounding women during the Directory. Although David's painting has been seen as a powerful repression of Revolutionary feminist claims in its alignment of femininity and maternity, that latter equation of women and motherhood was undermined by the painting's foregrounding of women's prominence as public spectacle within Directory France. In late 1790s Paris, women were visibly disrupting the Revolutionary fraternity, but not necessarily as mothers. Indeed, this was the source of anxiety. Roaming spaces outside the home, women seemed neither securely constituted by nor constitutive of familial bonds. Modern scholarship that takes for granted women's role as representatives of the private sphere is therefore repeating a reactionary prescription, not a reality of post-Revolutionary society.58 Thinkers like Roederer and Louis-Sebastien Mercier championed female domesticity in response to French women's perceived failure to identify themselves with such duties. Ultimately, Intervention of the Sabines could not circumscribe women's prominence to their familial roles. Hersilia and her emotive chorus were, above all, offering a public performance of those bonds. Unlike the women in Horatii and Brutus, who were confined to domestic spaces, the Sabine women were intended to be moving spectacles within the public sphere of the ancient battleground as well as the Directory entrepreneurial exhibition space. In post-Thermidor France, women's visibility seemed not only to flaunt their difference from men but also to constitute the very source of their power and dominance. For a Revolutionary like Roederer, the difference of women only too clearly represented a difference of politics, the haunting specter of the fraternal Republic's antithesis: women's lawlessness- like fashion, like tyranny, like immorality-fully outside men's lawful governance. How then could David's Intervention of the Sabines propose that the fashionable woman serve as an exemplary model? Was this what Revolutionary utopian aspirations had come to? That promiscuous unregulated women like the Bellegarde sisters, Fortunee Hamelin, Theresia Tallien, Josephine Beauharnais, and Anne-Francoise Lange should offer models of distinction, a distinction of fashion rather than morality?59 It was only too evident that dress, not virtue, was inspiring general imitation. And the distinction of modishness, unlike that of virtue, perpetually needed to outrun those "nine-tenths" of Frenchwomen who acted as copycats. To be exemplary because one is fashionable is to keep moving at the head of a crowd. If antiquity, in the hands of chic women, had become au courant, it would inevitably become pass&. Clearly, this kind of exemplarity, rather than offering France a bedrock foundation of values, only perpetuated a meaningless overturning of signs. David was working with volatile materials here: at once exploiting antiquity's fashionability and, like Chaussard, trying desperately to buttress a tradition of the classical masculine beau iddal that had long served as the foundation of his art as well as his politics. In 1799, Hersilia would not behave herself. There was no way David could make her into the "neutral" emblem of noble maternal femininity that she has come to represent for many modern scholars. This is not to say that David as painter and as author of the accompanying brochure did not try to control her disruptive and competing force by diminishing its value relative to the masculine nudes. This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 327 As Chaussard noted, Intervention of the Sabines aligns masculinity with timelessness and femininity with temporality.60 The tableau opposes not only masculine stasis (the horizontal frieze) to female action (the intersecting narrative eruption) but also male nudity to female fashion. It is against women's temporality and ephemeral appropriation of nudity that David's published exegesis concerning "the nudity of [his] heroes" must be interpreted. The painter's text directs attention to the male nudes and renders the female figures invisible. According to David's brochure, women's choices were not at issue. Instead, viewers were invited to contemplate, admire, discuss, even debate male nudity. If the female protagonists could elicit much informal commentary-- gossip-about their dress and the identity of the models, the male bodies, David cues us, warranted formal critical discussion. Both painting and brochure spotlighted Hersilia's bracketing male counterpoints, but they did so partly by heightening their controversy. Tatius particularly was meant to goad. David relied on the shock value of men's exposed flesh and genitals in the midst of dressed figures to direct his startled audience's attention toward his male heroes. But it is precisely this reliance on shocking masculine display that points to the instability of the painting's gendered structural oppositions. For Chaussard, stasis signified a realm of aesthetic ideality contrasted to women's vulgar and disorderly activity, but that stillness also resembled the exhibitionism associated with fashion. Tatius and Romulus were subject to being read, like fashionable women, as flamboyant if foolish exhibitionists, resorting to extremism to draw attention to themselves. Given the fashionability of the Sabine women and the prevalence of images like Boilly's Make Peace (Fig. 21), would not viewers have been predisposed to see Hersilia as a chic Frenchwoman separating her competing lovers who abruptly, inexplicably, and quite extravagantly discard their suits? Would not that wall-length mirror opposite the painting only enhance this sense of the painted men's suddenly exposed nakedness? David, Chaussard, and Roederer may have insisted that the male nudes were like law, that is, timeless and universal, but these heroes could also be interpreted as men who strove to make the most ostentatious of fashion choices.61 When Male and Female Nudities Meet In Intervention of the Sabines, David offered an unstable encounter and made it the very basis of his work's controversy as well as its success. This was a risque confrontation between competing gendered aesthetic and political models: between contemporaneity and history, between fashion and le beau iddal, between the ancien regime and the Republic. But the multivalence of the term nudity d la grecque in 1799 attests to the incapacity of such categories to remain discrete. Even if attention could be diverted from the spectacle of women to the male nudes, those nudes were now embedded within a public sphere (and pictorial syntax) newly defined to include women, and women, moreover, who were a la mode. The presence of stylish women inflected the ways the male nudes were received. Against fashionable females, the standing male acadimies now appeared undressed. They also appeared as objects ofwomen's vision. Thus far, my argument has for the most part treated the masculine and feminine versions of nudity a la grecque as independent entities, but David's painting is about their intimate if anxious confrontation. Note, for instance, Hersilia's guarded, strangely birdlike, darting glance at that peacock Romulus (Fig. 4). One pupil distended, the other diminished and rushing away, her glassy-eyed gaze fails to cohere. While her near eye seems directed at an angle toward us, the far eye retreats to the side, its iris sitting up too high and too small, cut both by its profile edge and the overemphasized slice of white. Stare too closely and Hersilia appears walleyed. Look also at the similarly hooded and ambiguously muffled asymmetrical gaze of the older woman who faces Romulus and threatens to tear off her gown and expose her breasts. Here are women in states of undress regarding a displayed male nude; indeed, they are the only figures gazing at Romulus's exposed body. It is difficult, however, to assess precisely where they look and what they see there. They alone enjoy access to Romulus's other side, that presence or absence lurking behind (or eclipsed by?) shield and sheath, buttocks. As viewers by proxy, they heighten the sense of suspense attending Romulus's withheld body. Their oddly uninformative but directed gazes, coupled with Tatius's frontality, compel the question: Should the viewer project Tatius's anatomy onto the halfgod's front, assembling his body part by part (shoulder, arm, chest, hardened stomach, genitals) in an attempt to reconstruct the man as seen by the women? To do so is to enact imaginatively a homoerotic conjoining, indeed, identification, of the two men's bodies, but such a projection also subtly compromises the halfgod with the doubts unfurled by the awkward, "naked" specificities and vulnerabilities of his foil. Undermined is Romulus's status as an indivisible, autonomous, and coherent signifier of phallic perfection, completeness, and power. Significantly, it is women's viewing that initiates the process. In David's tableau, women are the privileged beholders not only of a god (and rapist-cum-husband) but also of the masculine beau iddal. While the homoerotic appeal of solitary naked male figures in paintings like Bara (Fig. 3) rendered the female viewer invisible and irrelevant, David's insertion of the Sabine women into the frame of male nudity seems to have necessitated an anxious appraisal of the relationship among women, sexuality, and the public sphere. If feminist scholarship has been preoccupied with the male gaze on the female object, especially the female nude, and recent inquiries have focused on the circuit of homoerotic desire for the male viewer of the male nude, the painting of the Sabines configures a differently gendered confrontation. Few paintings have catalyzed such a fervent and anxious preoccupation on the part of its contemporaries with the female viewer of masculine flesh. David's tableau foregrounds the female spectator not only in its privileged positioning of women as viewers of Romulus but also in its very centerpiece, the explosive woman in red who conspicuously and directly stares at us, thereby wedding aggressivity and female viewing. The confrontational character of her level frontal gaze serves as a counterpoint to both Hersilia's skittish deflected regard and the rolling asymmetry of the old woman's eyes. The power as well as the menace of This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 328 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 22 Henry Fuseli, drawing, ca. 1800-1805. Zurich, Kunsthaus the woman in red resides in the riveting directness of her stare. But David, even as he so effectively conveys the compelling intercourse between women's viewing and our own, registers the question of its eclipse (or the power of its revelation): beneath the billowing tent of drapery, the woman's clenched hands, hovering precisely at eye level, threaten to drop (or rise) like a shade over her eyes. Ultimately, however, the relation between women viewers and the real world appears to have been far less fraught than women's regard of (men's) art. It is significant that the fashionable woman figures in the criticism of David's painting not as a visible object but as a viewer of art's male nudity. That women had become an erotic spectacle in Directory France was less explicitly discussed than the ways their viewing impinged on art's masculine bodies. It was the meeting of male nudes and actual Frenchwomen that obsessed the male critics of the Sabines, both negative and positive. It is easy to discern the specter of women's confrontation with Tatius's exposed genitals in these interchanges. While negative critics predictably denounced the painting's capacity to compromise female members of its audience, David's supporters repeatedly described the work's opponents as prudish, unsophisticated, and hypocritical women. In his review of the Sabines exhibition, Charles Landon, for instance, produced a fastidious female spectator in order to dismantle her position. According to Landon, some women wanted Tatius to be further covered, but they were hypocritical inasmuch as they did not protest the comparable nudity of antique sculptures. If society was to follow the reasoning of these female spectators, it would be necessary to censor all the sculptures in public civic spaces, including the recently arrived spoil of Napoleonic conquest, the Laocodn.62 (It was precisely this confrontation between fashionable female viewer and Laoco6n's bulging anatomy that delighted Henry Fuseli during the early 1800s; Fig. 22). The royalist critic for the Journal des Dibats,Jean-Baptiste-Bon Boutard, made a similar point about those who believed that male nudity produced dangerous impressions: "If David's tableau is immoral, it would be necessary to relegate to the shadows of storerooms and museums all the statues that decorate our public gardens and embellish our palaces.'"63 At stake in these arguments seems to be the status of art itself. Was the return of the female spectator so decisive that all male nudes became subject to removal on the basis of morality? Lest one assume that David's supporters exaggerated the extent to which censorship could be enlisted in the name of female modesty, listen to the polemicist Louis- Sebastien Mercier, who, besides condemning women's current antique fashion, also boldly denounced public sculpture by conjuring a young girl's encounter with a titillated Bacchus on the verge of an erection: Morality and statues are two incompatible things. And can one regard as illustrious geniuses, or rather as legislators of modesty, those artists whose immodest chisel not only reproduced but even enlarged the sexual parts of statues mutilated by time? No! It is not a weakness to be scandalized by such nudities. One does not have the right to represent to the eyes of a mother of a family that which one would not dare make audible to her ears; her young daughter walking at her sides should not raise her eyes below the lily, symbol of This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 329 her innocence, to contemplate nude the rounded buttocks of a Bacchus in the spring of his life, and whose amorous visage indicates that he feels the movement of voluptuousness spring up.64 Through the young girl's eyes, Mercier sees antique marble metamorphose into pulsating sexual arousal. Whether because of their modesty, their hypocritical prudery, or their licentiousness, women rewrote art and male nudity by (hetero)- sexualizing them. Indeed, according to David's negative and positive critics alike, women saw sex everywhere. While the prude may seem the antithesis of the promiscuous undressed woman, both attest to women's incapacity to leave inviolate an aesthetic sphere. Of course, there is no such autonomous realm of "purity"; the tension between ideality and eroticism is intrinsic to the representation of naked bodies. But in post-Revolutionary France, the pressure to acknowledge the presence of women viewers made the tensions (and capacious multivalences) inherent to the beau idial, that cobbledtogether but cherished fiction, crudely manifest. High art and somatic low could not be held asunder. Perhaps women's presence simply provided a vehicle for men to voice their own fantasies, but the shift from a masculine homoerotic to a feminine heterosexual model of viewing seems to have been decisive. If the antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann could eloquently evoke his own "rising" and "heaving" reaction to the sensual pleasures afforded by the Apollo Belvedere without compromising the status of aesthetic discourse, no such erotic responsiveness on the part of women could be subsumed within the rubric of aesthetic discrimination in 1790s France.65 Because it was inextricably bound up with women's sexuality, women's spectatorship threatened to wrench the heroic male nude into the tawdry realm of pornography. Did the mere presence of Hersilia, like Mercier's young girl, elicit imaginings of Romulus's springing "movement of voluptuousness," a movement, moreover, over which he had no control?66 Not surprisingly, women's power to compromise the masculine beau idial elicited anger on the part of male critics. Roederer, for one, believed that Mercier's preoccupation with public sculpture was misguided. Women, not male statues, were the problem. In a published letter, he expressed his impatience: "Citizen, you complain to yourself of encountering entirely nude statues of marble or bronze in our public promenades; haven't you seen in our spectacles, our balls, in society, a crowd of figures who were neither of marble nor bronze, even more nude than these statues?"67 According to Roederer, Bacchus and his inanimate companions had been upstaged. Neither marble nor bronze, women had made themselves into living nudes, nudes, moreover, who seemed to be proliferating, literally taking over the public spaces of Paris: "our spectacles, our balls, in society, a crowd." Here was the real irritation. Women were not only competing for attention with male art, they were also pretending to require its removal from view. What! Should gardens no longer feature heroic male nudes but become the sole province of a crowd of undressed women? Was there no place any longer for art, for marble, for bronze? Had female flesh simultaneously made marble seem flesh, undone its independent status, and, in a hypocritical feint, taken its very place? Was this the conspiratorial intention of the alluring half-naked Frenchwomen who hypocritically demanded the covering of Tatius's exposed genitals even as they sought a glimpse in mirrors hidden within their fluttering fans? 68Certainly the writer of a letter "To Women dressed a la Grecque and a la Romaine" published in the Journal des Dames et des Modes in 1799 recognized their ploy and held them responsible: Women have chosen the costume of Psyche, Venus and her nymphs. Dressed in an enchanting manner, they attract and hold our regard. Their breasts whose movements give birth to our desires, whose delicious forms are hardly concealed by a light fabric ... in order better to draw their voluptuous contours, everything in this new fashion provokes voluptuousness; and yet women complain of the little decency that is preserved near them.69 Involuntarily seduced, unfairly accused of indecency, the male critic holds women fully responsible for fixing his regard. Roederer conflated the nudity of art and the nudity of Frenchwomen. He saw Mercier as a dupe, scapegoating Bacchus in the name of women who themselves made a spectacle of nakedness. Chaussard, by contrast, rebutted accusations that the nudity of David's male protagonists endangered female spectators by significantly differentiating between women's nakedness and art's nudity. Rather than simply claiming superiority to the inhibitions of polite female society, Chaussard was willing to address explicitly the intimate relationship between women's viewing and fears of unregulated female sexuality. The critic who attended to the chorus of "vulgar" women in the picture also devoted a great deal of time addressing the effects of the painting on their female counterparts milling about in front of the picture. Indeed, his defense of nudity solely considered the woman spectator. With Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel de Montaigne to bolster his position, Chaussard argued that the impact of the unknown on a female imagination was far more dangerous than a direct confrontation with the naked male body. A nude fully exposed to the light leads to indifference. Chaussard quoted Rousseau to argue that the partially draped nude produces other effects: "Isn't it known that statues and paintings only offend the eyes when a mixture of clothing renders nudities obscene? The immediate power of the senses is weak and limited: it is by the mediation of the imagination that they make their greatest ravages" (Chaussard, 34). David's nudity was contrasted to the obscene "mixture" of garments in other kinds of art. The partially clad figure invites the dangers of women's fantasies. Consistent with sensationalist theories of the eighteenth century, Chaussard claimed that habit blunts the power of sense impressions while imagination is capaciously damaging.70 Offering a panoply of authorities from antique philosophy to ethnography to solve the problem of women's "heated" arousal and extravagances, Chaussard emphasized that educating women was far better than leaving them to guess "according to the liberty and heat of their fantasy. In place of true parts, women substitute by heat and by hope other parts triply extravagant."71 (Witness the risk of David's subsequent occlusion of Tatius's genitals in This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 330 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 23 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Sacrificeo f theR ose,c a. 1785-88. Private collection my "triply extravagant" imaging of the trio of legs hanging beneath his scabbard.) Confronted with the philosophical and social problem of the female gaze, a revered lineage of great male thinkers all agree it is better that there be no surprises. Women's presence in David's exhibition space was justified as an Enlightenment project of education. Chaussard's enlightened sexual discourse inherits the Revolutionary concern that private conduct be transparent to public virtue. His most powerful barbs were reserved for those male hypocrites who, while anxious about the virtue of women in the public exhibition, nonetheless exposed their mothers, wives, and daughters to the lascivious tableaux of their private cabinet. David's nudes are measured against the easel paintings that corrupt female virtue by the licentious poses of veiled figures. Contrasting the Sabines to Jean- Honore Fragonard's Sacrifice of the Rose (Fig. 23), Chaussard pits the public address and virility of classicism's male nudity against the private and libertine Rococo preoccupation with female seduction. Produced just before the Revolution and engraved in 1790, Fragonard's apparently quite lucrative painting celebrates the loss of woman's virginity by representing the swooning ecstasy of a female nude whose transparent draperies slide down from her uncovered breasts to wrap around her inner thighs.72 Eyes rolled back, mouth partly open, the woman's face mimicsJean-Baptiste Greuze's formulaic moneymakers, those endlessly insipid, coy girls whose mobile features seem to have lost their anatomical moorings and threaten to slip away (the pictorial melting metaphorically enacting a lubricated onanism). Visually, the contrast to the Sabines could not be more startling nor, for David's defender, more effective. How could one accuse David's male nudes of being obscene when on the contrary it is figures veiled from head to foot who express the action most at odds with decency? Such is this figure who, in the Sacrifice of the Rose, swoons next to an altar; such are all these compositions so modern, so libertine, in which preside, for lack of true genius, gross equivocation, and more dangerous than the cynical paintings of Aretino, address themselves less to the senses of vision than to vicious thought, reawakening all disorders with the aid of seductive allusions, voluptuous signs, sometimes vague and devious, always expressive and licentious. Here, here are indecent compositions that corrupt the heart and trick and pervert the spirit. This man who deploys them in his cabinet under the eyes of his mother, wife and daughter, does not fail to proscribe with indignation the nudity of all these half-gods of antiquity who, in their general expression, only recall dignity, virtue, heroism. (Chaussard, 33) So this is the hypocrisy of C.Z.! Indulging in private pornographic debauchery while publicly pretending moral outrage before antique halfgods like Romulus! Lajer-Burcharth has astutely pointed out the ways classicism accrues authority in Chaussard's text by its gendered opposition to Rococo works (412).73 But Fragonard's paintings are not the only term against which David's nudes are understood. Chaussard opposes David's forthright nudes to the erotic metonymies of diaphanous garments. If the sensual narratives of those flowing fabrics were indeed facilely and expertly enacted by Fragonard's fluid brushwork, they were also, as we know, performed in the gardens and promenades of Paris by French women dressed d la grecque. Significantly, the nuditis gazees of fashionable Parisiennes were less about total revelation (although this was apparently attempted) than about the seductiveness of bodies all but revealed through fabric. In Chaussard's text, the dangers of veiled seduction evoke not only Rococo libertinism but current feminine fashion, that style a la Grecque now made Rococo, that perversion of the former marker of virtue into a new kind of libertinism. Roederer was therefore wrong to confuse the nudity of art and the nudity of partly veiled Frenchwomen. Chaussard is not duped by Frenchwomen's appropriation of Greek nudity. Instead, he seizes on the differences between female and male nudity & la grecque and polarizes them: Frenchwomen's halfdraped bodies were not the same as marble or painted fully nude gods. Gauzy drapery is seductive because it obscures; it renders unknown-private-parts of the body while teasingly implying their presence and accessibility. Full nudity renders the body public because nothing is hidden from full communal view. C.Z. believed David's figures to be "gratuitously indecent" because they transposed a private state-nakedness (on which even a servant's gaze impinged)-into a public spectacle. For C.Z., privacy made public was indecent. Chaussard, good Revolutionary that he was, eloquently proposes the inverse: it is privacy-the hidden, the veiled-that is obscene. For Chaussard, even a classically draped heroic male figure could not embody virtue in the ways that a nude could. This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 331 Only the body revealed speaks truth, particularly, I would add, at a time when even drapery a l'antique had become compromised by female sexuality and the license, superficiality, and ephemerality associated with not only the ancien regime but also post-Revolutionary fashion. (Note that Chaussard's opposition of veiled and fully revealed refuses to acknowledge the extent to which Romulus's body was cloaked by his armor. Metal weapons, we must presume, do not "deceive" like the folds of soft muslin.) Chaussard solely discusses women viewers of male nudity. Rather than valorizing the male viewer of female objects, he is concerned to direct attention to the men as appropriate objects of sight for both sexes. Like David, he seems to say: look, look at men. Come out, Frenchwomen, from the dangerously secretive viewing afforded by your duplicitous fans. Instead, in public view, look directly at art's nude men. Significantly, however, Chaussard's discussion of women's viewing of male nudes leads inexorably back to women's draped bodies; female bodies necessarily serve as the negative example. In Chaussard's text, women are conjured as veiled bodies and veiled vision. But while Chaussard attempts to emancipate women's looking, he and his contemporaries cannot so much as entertain the notion of women's full nudity. Hersilia may be compromised dressed d la grecque but no one, not even the committed classicist Chaussard, could "imagine" her stripped bare. If women's gazes can be pedagogically sanitized, there seems to be no solution to the ways women's bodies are permanently inscribed by sexuality. Draped or bared, woman is never fully public. The republican valiantly attempted to salvage Romulus and Tatius; he attempted to salvage an audience in which genders and classes mingled; he tried to salvage women's viewing; but the spectacle of Hersilia, the great mediator and intervener in her clinging white gown, continued to pose perplexing problems. Women's Intervention Intervention is no small matter. Women had indeed intervened in 1799, compromising classicism, compromising nudity, compromising the (fraternal) Republic. Women had looked to an artistic tradition that was meant to be exemplary, and they had imitated its example, but that imitation seemed to many contemporaries to be confined to dress, not virtuous conduct. And to make dress exemplary was fundamentally to overturn the notion of exemplarity as a permanent foundation of timeless values. Much has been made of the ways David's painting inspired masculine emulation on the part of young male artists, but that Bloomian tale of sons imitating fathers is not the story most relevant to an understanding of Intervention of the Sabines.74 Women, too, can emulate, but in 1799 their emulation challenged a lineage-men begetting men; men looking at men-that had bracketed them out. Theirs was not the story admirable republicans like Chaussard and Roederer hoped to tell their male progeny. But it is wrong in the end to conflate intervention and emulation; the latter can too easily be denigrated as mindless aping. Women may have appropriated republican iconography and thereby corrupted it, but even Roederer, who so explicitly denounced women's new tyrannical empire over la mode, believed that women were not ultimately their own iconographers-their power was not of their making. In 1798, Roederer laid the blame at the door of painters. In a promenade, a half-nude woman and others dressed in gauze are more than nude.... Yet one must agree that artists have also contributed to this revolution. At the birth of the republican system, they had spoken much of Greek girls, and our women had taken them at their word, for fear that one would speak to them next of Roman women. They were so lovable these Greek girls and so boring these Roman women! One can raise one's daughter to be a Roman woman, but one prefers, oneself, to be a Greek girl. Truthfully, citizen, there is something very harsh and tyrannical in the authority of painters. Four years ago, they wanted to make us change our habits because ours were not picturesque; they arranged the nation for painting, rather than arranging painting for the nation. Now they amuse themselves dressing our women as models, chilling them, giving them colds, in order to have greater ease to observe the purity of forms in their paintings. Will art benefit from this? I doubt it. It is very agreeable, I imagine, to draw beautiful contours; but isn't it also agreeable to express modesty, chastity, their triumphs, their difficulties, their surrender? Painters of talent! it is in virtues, and not in the license of nudity, that there are treasures for you.75 Frenchwomen may have flattered their vanity by fashioning themselves as lissome Greek nymphs rather than sturdy Roman paragons, but it was "tyrannical" painters who had initiated this national makeover. In search of sinuous contours, artists were responsible for (un)dressing women, risking their health and dangerously promoting "the license of nudity" instead of virtue. Women, the author decides, were ultimately the malleable materials of the dictatorial artist. There can be little doubt that Roederer writing in the spring of 1798 had David in mind. I do not need to rehearse David's central role as iconographer of the Revolution and pageant master for Robespierre. During the Directory, the phrase "tyrannical painter" would conjure his name above all. Despite Roederer's certainty that women a la mode conspired for power, he finds a way to make David their puppet master. But even as Roederer's text robs women of authorial agency, it also registers the impact of their mimicry. To the extent that "nudity" was now bound to "license," it was also bound to fashionable Frenchwomen undressed d la grecque. In the controversial reception of David's Sabines, theirs was perhaps the most formidable intervention. Of course, what republican classicism and the masculine beau iddal lost in terms of authority, David's coffers won in boxoffice sales. Although he would not exhibit another painting featuring classical male nudes for fifteen years, the scandal of nudity & la grecque in turn-of-the-century Paris amply paid for his country house.76 Who then risked whose health? At the onset of the Napoleonic Empire, the author of The Friend of Women; or, Letter ofa Doctor concerning the influence of the clothing of women on their morals and health. . .. offered David's example to justify This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 332 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 24 David, Le Sacre, 1805-7. Paris, Musee du Louvre (photo: ? RMN) his denunciation of women's loose and revealing clothing, but his parable of 1804 inverts Roederer's tale of 1798. According to this author, the Sabines may have made David wealthy, but he had paid the price of his own physical well-being: I can only cite with some confidence the works of doctors who are especially devoted to proving the dangers of immorality. Yet there is some reason to infer from the slackness [la mollesse] of clothing that of morals, and from the latter a bad influence on health, when we see David, surrounded by royal luxury and fallen women, struck by a shameful affliction.77 By 1804, it seemed clear that Roederer's tyrannical puppet master had fallen into the seductive, regal fold of loose and luxuriant women. Hersilia, it turns out, had led ineluctably to the coronation of Josephine by a wan, swaddled and ermineblanketed hero. Sick, royal, and feminine, David was ready to paint Le Sacre for the Salon of 1808 (Fig. 24). David, in the midst of painting that homage to the flowing satins, velvets, and fashionable stuffs of the Empire, succumbed to public approbation and painted over Tatius's genitals. Assistant professoro f history of art at U.C. BerkeleyD, arcy Grimaldo Grigsbyi s currentlyw orkingo n a booke ntitledE xtremities in Paint: Representing Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (1789- 1830). Her essay "Rumor, Contagion and Colonization in Gros's Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804)" was published in Representations 51 (Summer 1995). [History of Art Department, University of California at BerkeleyB, erkeleyC, alif 94720] Frequently Cited Sources Aulard, Alphonse, Paris pendant la riaction thermidorienne et sous le directoire: Recueils de documents, 5 vols. (Paris, 1898). Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, 1799, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David (Paris: Pougens, Year VIII [1799-1800]), in Collection Deloynes (Paris: Biblioth~que Nationale, 1980), microform, vol. 21, no. 597. Crow, Thomas, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). David, Jules, Le peintre Louis David 1748-1825: Souvenirs et documents inidits (Paris, 1880-82). Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, "David's Sabine Women: Body, Gender and Republican Culture under the Directory," Art History, 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430. Musee du Louvre,Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825, exh. cat., Paris, 1989. Roederer, Pierre-Louis, Oeuvresd u ComteP L. Roedererv, ol. 4 (Paris, 1856). Notes This article is largely based on chap. 4 of my dissertation "Classicism, Nationalism and History: The Prix Dicennaux of 1810 and the Politics of Art under Post-Revolutionary Empire," University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1995. I would like to thank Thomas Crow, Pat Simons,Joel Isaacson, and David Bien for their comments at that time as well as readers of this altered version: foremost among them, Todd P. Olson, but also Erika Najinski, Jeannene Prybylski, Anne Wagner, Margaret Waller, and the readers for Art Bulletin. I would also like to thank my efficient research assistant Heather MacDonald. Margaret Waller generously shared her unpublished material on related issues. Funding was provided by Fulbright, Lurcy, Social Science Research Council, and Kress Two-Year Institutional Fellowships. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. For Gregoria. 1. Stefan Germer, "In Search of a Beholder: On the Relation of Art, Audiences and Social Spheres in Post-Thermidor France," Art Bulletin 79 (Mar. 1992): 19-36 at 34; Dorothy Johnson, Jacques-Louis David: Art in Metamorphosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 124. 2. See Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, "David's Sabine Women: Body, Gender and Republican Culture under the Directory," Art History 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430 at 413 (author's emphasis) and 424 (emphasis added); see also Erica Rand, "Depoliticizing Women: Female Agency, the French Revolution, and the Art of Boucher and David," Genders 7 (Spring 1990), 47-68. Alex Potts has also emphasized the centrality of the male as "an ideal object of desire and an ideal subjectivity with which the male spectator can identify"; Potts, "Beautiful Bodies and Dying Heroes: Images of Ideal Manhood in the French Revolution," History Workshop3 0 (Autumn 1990): 1-21; repr. in revised form in his Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 229. 3. Mus6e du Louvre, 336. 4. In his brochure, David stated that even prior to the exhibition he had encountered criticism of the nudity and that it would certainly be repeated ("An objection that has already been made to me and that will not fail to be repeated"), Le tableau des Sabines, exposi publiquement au palais national des sciences et des arts .... (Paris, Year VIII [1799-1800]), 15; cited in Daniel Wildenstein, Documents compMmentaireas u catalogue de l'oeuvre de Louis David (Paris: Foundation Wildenstein, 1973), 150. This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 333 5. See below for controversies concerning the nudity of the male figures. A number of statements in the press assimilated David's private entrepreneurial exhibition to spectacular entertainments subject to a government tax; his defenders valiantly attempted to deny the appropriateness of such a conflation of art and spectacle. The controversy intensified rather than diminished over the years;b y 1801, even David'sa rdent supporter Pierre-Jean-BaptistCe haussard criticized the deleterious effects commercial exhibitions would have on the public salon; see Journald esA rts,3 0 Fructidor,Y earI X [Sept. 17, 1801]. For the vicissitudes of the painting's initial reception, see Mus6e du Louvre, 328-32; for later controversies,p articularlyd uring the debates catalyzedb y the 1810 decennial competition, see DarcyG rimaldoG rigsby," ClassicismN, ationalism, and History," Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1995, chap. 4. 6. A.D. [AmauryD uval], La DicadeP hilosophiqu1e3 (10 Pluviose, Year VIII [Jan. 30, 1800]). According to Duval, clothed figures should be painted by women and mediocre painters. The Ideologues were a disparate group of liberal social and political theorists generally committed to Etienne Bonnot de Condillac's theory of sensationalism. Self-appointed inheritors of the Enlightenment philosophetsh, ey dominated the national Institute'sC lasso f Morala nd Political Sciences. Even as they lost favor under Napolkon, particularly after the Concordat of 1801, they continued to express their Enlightenment ideas through their organ, the journal La DicadeP hilosophiquSe.e e Joanna Kitchin, Un journal "philosophique":L a Dicade (1794-1807) (Paris: M.J. Minard, 1965); and Marc Regaldo Un milieu intellectuel: La Dicade Philosophique, 5 vols. (Paris: Diffusion, H. Champion, 1976). Concerning the masculine beau idial in this period, see Regis Michel, LeB eaui dial, exh. cat., Mus&ed u Louvre,P aris,1 989; Potts, 1990, 1994 (as in n. 2); Thomas Crow, "Observations on Style and History in French Painting of the Male Nude," in VisualC ultureI:m agesa nd Interpretationesd, . Norman Bryson et al. (Hanover,N .H.: WesleyanU niversity Press, 1994), 141-67, repr. in expanded form in EmulationM: akingA rtistsf or RevolutionaryF ranceb y Thomas Crow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Whitney Davis, "The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet's Sleep of Endymion,"in Bryson et al, 168-201; Marie-PierreF oissy-Aufrareet al, La Mort de Bara (Avignon: Fondation du Mus6e Calvert, 1989); Abagail Solomon- Godeau, "Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation," Art History 16, no. 2 (une 1993): 286-312; and idem, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997); as well as Carol Ockman, "Profiling Homoeroticism: Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon," Art Bulletin 75 (June 1993): 259-74; and idem, Ingres's Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the SerpentinLe ine (New Haven:Y ale UniversityP ress, 1995). 7. Abagail Solomon-Godeau in her book Male Trouble(a s in n. 6), 195-99, has also briefly noted the eruption of negative criticism of male nudity in this period. While she emphasizes the "entirely male formations" within which the male nude was "produced, received, commissioned, sold, discussed, celebrated or criticized" (199), I focus on the ways women-actual and imagined-impinged on the "masculine character of the artistic sphere." 8. Mariani, letter to the editor, Journal des Arts, 15 Pluvi6se, Year VIII [Feb. 4, 1800]: 9: "There you are, bourgeois gentlemen! You love draped chiffons better than beautiful forms. / As for me, / Nothing is more beautiful than the nude, / the nude alone is amiable." See also the anonymous brochure Critique du tableau des Sabines du Citoyen David, discussed in Mus6e du Louvre, 336; and C.Z., Le Courdiedre sS pectacle8s, F rimaire,Y earI X, [Nov. 29, 1800], 3. 9. Another anonymous critic, who lamented the lack of paintings commemorating France'sm ilitaryg lories, was particularlyt roubled by the inappropriateness of portraying military heroes nude. The dialogic conceit he used hardly masks the author's dismay and contempt; artistic precedents cannot justify a choice that is at once indecent and ahistorical. The dialogue juxtaposes the public's criteria of morality and historical accuracy to the artist's intraaesthetic commitments to the acadimie and visual precedents; La Revue du Museum: Dialogue entre Damon et un peintre (Paris, 1799), 8-10, in Collection Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform, vol. 21, no. 562, 142-44. 10. C.Z. (as in n. 8) 11. Chaussard, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David (Paris, Year VIII [1799- 1800]), Deloynes Collection, 21, no. 597. An Ideologue, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard replaced Amaury Duval as La Decade Philosophique's art critic in 1798. The fervor with which he embraced the Revolution is suggested by a play he wrote in 1791 aptly entitled La France rigndtre, which bore the epigraph "One does not enlighten men with the torch of hatred but with the flame of Reason." His Enlightenment faith in rationality accompanied a profound commitment to antiquity and a complete disavowal of Christianity, to the extent that he replaced his "superstitious" hyphenated Christian surname with Publicola in 1792. Nevertheless, during theJacobins' rule, Chaussard was thrice placed on Robespierre's execution list because he remained a committed Girondist. Concerning Chaussard, see Grigsby (as in n. 5), chaps. 4, 6. See also the highly informative essay by Marc Regaldo, "Profil perdu: L'idiologue Chaussard," in Approches des Lumires: Milanges offerts d Jean Fabre (Paris: Klinksieck, 1974), 381-401; E. Hereau, "Ndcrologie: Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard," Revue Encycloptdique 21 (1824): 251-53; Regaldo (as in n. 6); Kitchin (as in n. 6); Adrian Rifkin, "History, Time and the Morphology of Critical Language, or Publicola's Choice," in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-CenturyF rance, ed. Michael Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 29-42. 12. Stefan Germer and Hubertus Kohle emphasize the split address of the painting in "From the Theatrical to the Aesthetic Hero: On the Idea of Virtue in David's Brutus and Sabines," Art History 9, no. 2 (June 1986): 168-84. 13. Amaury Duval (as in n. 6), 228, also explicitly described Hersilia in terms of class hierarchy: "Each of these women has a particular expression that indicates the rank she occupies in society. The suffering of Hersilia is noble." 14. In another passage of his essay regarding the Sabines, 30, Chaussard spells out his conviction that the French people did not enjoy the physical vigor and perfection of the Greeks. Exhorting David to go to Greece itself, Chaussard nostalgically evokes the beauty of the southern peoples relative to the northern. 15. Chaussard's condemnation of fashion's deformation of modern man resembles other kinds of texts that brought the philosophe'ms edical discourse to the examination of "unnatural" social practices. For instance, in Dr. Clairian's 1803 publication entitled Recherches et considirations medicales sur les vitements des hommesp articulibrements ur les culottes. ... (Paris, 1803), a physician addressed fears that restrictivem ale culottes( breeches) risked the disappearance of the French race. 16. See, for example, Socidt6 Populaire et R6publicaine des Arts, Considerations sur les avantages de changer le costume franfais (Paris, n.d.): "Under the empire of despots, the useless class of idle rich determined the form to give to clothing.... Free men will not follow the airs of these frivolous beings.... [The free man] enters into the spirit of French regeneration to restore the costume to its original goal and the morals of equality." See also the Convention's decree of October 29, 1793, concerning the newfound freedom from vestimentaryc odes, cited in Philippe Perrot, Fashioningt heB ourgeoisieA: History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 20. 17. For the debates about dress during the Revolutionary period and the history of fashion from Revolution to Empire, see Nicole Pellegrin, Les vitements de la liberti: Abicidaire des pratiques vestimentaires en France de 1780 d 1800 (Aix-en-ProvenceA: linea, 1989); William Olander, "Pour transmettre: la posterit6: French Painting and Revolution, 1774-1795," Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1983, 218-19; Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (New York:H olmes and Meier, 1988);J. Renouvier, "Costume,"i n Histoired e l'artp endantl a revolution(P aris:V veJ . Renouard, 1863), 463-80; Lynn Hunt, "Rdvolutionf rancaise et la vie priv6e," in Histoired e la vie pridvee, d. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (Paris: Seuil, [1985]), 21-52; Margaret Waller, "Disembodiment as a Masquerade: Fashion Journalists and Other 'Realist' Observersi n DirectoryP aris,"L 'EspriCt riateur3 7, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 50-60; Raymond Gaudriault, RIpertoire de la gravure de mode franfaise des origines d 1815 (Paris:P romodis, 1988); Philippe S6guy,H istoired esm odess ous l'Empir(eP aris: Promodis;C ercle de la Librairie,1 988); FrancoisB oucher, Histoired u costume en Occident de l'antiquiti d nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 335-50; Ruth Turner Wilcox, TheM odei n Costume(N ew York:S cribner, 1958), 220-45; The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire 1789-1815, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989. 18. See Lynn Hunt, "The Rhetoric of Revolution in France," History WorkshopJourn1a5l (Spring 1983): 78-94; and idem (as in n. 17), 24-26. 19. FranCois Poultier, "Physionomie de Paris," Amis des Lois, 30 Vent6se, Year VI [March 20, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 578. 20. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, Le nouveau Diable boiteux: Tableau philosophiquee t moradl eP aris( Paris,Y earV II [ 1798-1799]), vol. 2, 233. The rapidityo f fashion's transformation led a journal to bemoan mockingly during a quiet summer: "For eight days, at least, fashion has been of an eternal constancy" Miroir8, Fructidor,Y earV [Aug. 25, 1797], cited in Aulard,v ol. 4, 305. 21. See, for example, the engravings in Caricaturepso litiquesb y Antione- Joseph de Barruel-Beauvert( Paris,Y earV I [1797-98]). 22. For example, the Bureau Central reported on 29 Prairial,Y earV I (June 16, 1798): "It is certain that, restrained by severe surveillance, an incurable class of opponents [frondeurso] f the government and egoists for whom the good or the bad of our political situation is altogether a matter of indifference, having no other means of signaling their opposition to republican principles, have affected a dress extraordinary in some aspects: green collars, black collars, purple collars, then ties, then leaded canes; if they have not, for lack of opportunity, seved as a sign of rallying among royalists, they were at least so many tacit insults to these [republican] principles"; cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 720. See also Le Pddacteur of 3 Fructidor, Year V [August 19, 1797], cited in ibid., 301; Sdguy (as in n. 17), 34, and Edmond andJules de Goncourt, Histoire de la soci~t• fran~aise pendant le Directoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 304-5; Boucher (as in n. 17), 338. 23. Pierre Cartellier to Antoine-Denis Chaudet, letter of May 7, 1804, in H. Jouin, "Lettres inddits d'artistes fran•ais du XIX sidcle," Nouvelles Archives de l'ArtFranfais, 3d ser., 16, (1900): 7-8. 24. Henry Redhead Yorke, France in Eighteen Hundred and Two, ed. J.A.C. Sykes (London, 1806), 124. 25. These differences resemble but also deviate from the paradigm of the older active partner (erastes) and the passive youthful love object (eromenos) characteristic of ancient vase painting. For a bibliography of this literature and a consideration ofJ.-A.-D. Ingres's exaggeration of that implicit opposition in his early work, see Ockman, 1993 (as in n. 6). 26. Romulus's figure accords therefore with Jacques Lacan's assertion that "the phallus can only play its role as veiled";Jacques Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus," in Feminine Sexuality:Jacques Lacan and the "EcoleF reudienne, "ed. This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 334 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2 Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton; Pantheon, 1982), 74-85. 27. Yorke (as in n. 24), 124. 28. La morte de trois milles ans au Salon de 1783 (1783) 4, in Collection Deloynes (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1980) micoform, vol. 13, no. 286, 178. 29. See Elisabeth Vig6e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, ed. Claudine Herrmann, (Paris: Des Femmes, 1984) vol. 1, 85-88; and also the account by Aime Martin in Pierre de Nolhac, Madame Vigie-Lebrun: Peintre de Marie-Antoinette (Paris: Goupil, 1912), 129-35; this event is briefly mentioned by Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigie-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics ofArt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47-48. 30. The women, artists and wives of artists, were self-consciously performing history painting, citing and enacting antique precedents celebrated, for instance, in Nicolas-Guy Brenet's painting Piety and Generosity of Roman Women; Brenet's tableau hung next to David's painting of masculine martial sacrifice, Oath of the Horatii, in the Salon of 1785. That the Frenchwomen donating jewels in 1789 modeled themselves on classical women was widely noted by contemporary observers; for instance, Courrier Francais 65 (Sept. 18, 1789): 313; and Ruvolutions de Paris9 (Sept. 5-12, 1789): 19-22, which described these women as "retracing among us the virtues of Greece." I interpret the act of the donation as a double move, at once distancing women and art from ornament and luxury. However, if their sacrifice was likened to men's sacrifice to the state, it was far less sustainable; the negation of ornament can only be performed once. Regarding the donation, see Vivian Cameron, "Approaches to Narrative and History: The Case of the Donation of September 7, 1789, and Its Images," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 413-32; the event was described in "Origines des dons patriotiques, faites A la nation," RNvolutions de Paris 9 (September 5-12, 1789): 19-22; and by the group's spokesperson, Mme Moitte, in two brochures, L'dme des Romaines dans les femmes franraises and Suite de l'dme des romaines dans lesfemmes franfaises (Paris, 1789), as well as Journal inidit de Madame Moitte, ed. Paul Cottin (Paris, n.d.), 1-3. I have analyzed this donation at length in an unpublished paper entitled " 'L'&clat des sacrifices': Ornament, Painting and Female Citizenship in the Donation of September 7, 1789." 31. During the Revolution, one writer reveals the ways that (female) sign and (abstract) signified were conflated; he protests a young woman representing Reason at the Festival of Reason surely must have represented Liberty: "For the senses and the philosophical imagination are both equally shocked at the idea of a woman-especially a youthful woman-representing Reason"; quoted in Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 101-2. See also Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, "Liberty's Fragmented Body: Revolutionary Politics and the Instability of Allegory; An Analysis of the Initial Reception of Delacroix's Le 28juillet, Libertieguidant le peuple," M.A. thesis, University of Michigan, 1989; and Marcia Pointon, "Liberty on the Barricades: Women, Politics and Sexuality in Delacroix," in Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1908, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59-82. 32. Armand Charlemagne, Le monde incroyable, quoted in Renouvier (as in n. 17), 476. 33. See also an anonymous portrait, ca. 1800, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., reproduced in Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 126. Renouvier (as in n. 17), 476, describes the trend thus: "That which best dresses a woman is nudity." See also Lucet, La Correspondance des Dames, vol. 2, (Paris, Year VIII [1799-1800]). Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has discussed women's risque selfrepresentation in relation to Girodet's retaliation against Mlle Lange in 1799; see her "Le rh6torique du corps f6minin sous le Directoire: Le cas d'Anne- Francoise Elizabeth Lange en Danae," in Les femmes et la Rivolution franCaise, ed. Marie-France Brive (Toulouse: Presses Universitaire de Miraie, 1990), vol. 2, 221-25. 34. Quoted in Walter Markov, Grand Empire: Virtue and Vice in the Napoleonic Era (New York: Hippocrene, 1990), 204. 35. "Their entire outfit, inclusive of shoes and jewelry, was not supposed to weigh more than half a pound. The record was said to be held by the delightful wife of Hamelin, a Swiss army contractor, who strolled through the Tuileries gardens arrayed in nothing but a gossamer veil until the importunate gawking of passers-by compelled her to retire"; quoted in ibid. 36. See Journal des Dames et des Modes, 9 Pluvirse, Year VI [Jan. 28, 1798]. According to Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 153 n. 31, Mme Tallien preferred flesh-colored tights with gold spangles that glinted under her transparent robes. Mme Tallien, nie Thirisia Cabarrus, was the daughter of a prominent Spanish banker and wife of the Revolutionary journalist and politician Jean-Lambert Tallien; her salon played a central role in Thermidorian high society. David Kunzle states that this period's scanty, thin muslin gowns were also sometimes "dampened to adhere sculpturally to the body"; Kunzle, Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight-Lacing and OtherForms of Body-Sculpturei n the West( Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1982), 105. 37. La Petite Poste de Paris, 3 Messidor, Year V [June 21, 1797], cited in Maurice Lescure, Madame Hamelin: Merveilleuse et turbulent Fortunde (1776- 1851) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995), 38. A few days later L'Ami du Peuple of 5 Messidor, Year V [June 23, 1797] published a commentary on this incident that ended with an exhortation to "the imprudent" that "it is necessary at least to respect the people, and that, if one is dissolute, it is necessary to hide it; if one is well-behaved, it is necessary to appear so"; quoted in Aulard, vol. 4, p. 189, as well as in Lescure, 38. The incident is discussed by Waller (as in n. 17), as well as Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33). According to Louis Madelin, La France du Directoire (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1922), Mme Hamelin attempted "to replace the fashion of the sans-culottes with that of the sans-chemise." Here is the duc de Broglie in his memoirs: "Like many others, I saw Madame Tallien ... disguised as Diana with her half-naked breast, wearing cothurns on her feet, and dressed, if I may use the term, in a tunic which scarcely covered her knees"; de Broglie, Personal Recollections of Duc de Broglie 1785-1820, trans. Raphael Ledos de Beaufort (London, 1887), vol. 1, 21. 38. Courrier des Spectacles, 11 Thermidor, Year V [July 28, 1797], 251. A. Charlemagne's poem (as in n. 32) also points to this pervasive adoption of Greek costume when he asks, "Who is this Greek with big arms?" and discovers, on overhearing her argot, that she is Mme Angot, that greatly popular symbol of the crude female arriviste. 39. Dr. D6sessarts, Paris, Oct. 1798, quoted in Srguy (as in n. 17), 51. 40. Dr. Victor Broussonet, De la mode et des habillements (1799, 2d ed., 1806). Arguments of these sorts would be sustained over the course of the decade. In 1804, for example, a pamphlet entitled L'ami desfemmes ou lettres d'un m~decin listed numerous examples of women who had died because of their irrational commitment to the unhealthy vagaries of classicizing fashion. 41. Le Publiciste, 21 Fructidor, Year VII [Sept. 7, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. 5, 715. 42. In Louis-Mathieu Langlks, Voyage de Thunberg au cap de Bonne-Espirance, aux iles de la Sonde et auJapon (Paris, 1796), vol. 4, 59. 43. Louis-Mathieu Langls, letter to the editor, Journal de Paris, 3e jour compl6mentaire, Year VII [Sept. 19, 1799], quoted in Aulard, vol. 5, 737. That feminine Greek styles were commonly associated with indecency is corroborated as well by a fashion column of thejournal Miroir, which two years earlier juxtaposed the new style of gown (significantly, named les robes d l'hypocrite) to the dresses d l'antique: "They are perhaps more decent than the gowns d la grecque"; quoted in Aulard, vol. 3, 751. 44. Pierre-Louis Roedere, Journal de Paris, 15 Fructidor, Year VII [Sept. 1, 1799], quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 396. Called "leader of the philosophes" by a contemporary, Roederer was hostile to both the nobility and clergy and thus embraced the Revolution. A moderate member of the Jacobin club, he equivocally supported constitutional monarchy and opposed the execution of the king. After the fall of the Girondists, he went into hiding, only to reemerge after Thermidor. He supported Bonaparte but soon became disillusioned and fell out of favor during the Consulate; nonetheless he was appointed a count by Napoleon in 1808. See Thierry Lentz, Roederer 1754-1835 (Paris: Serpenoise, 1989); Roederer's writings were published between 1853 and 1859 as Oeuvresd u ComteP L. RoedererV. ol. 4 includes the essays on fashion cited in this article. 45. "Immorality impeded by surveillance has been less apparent outdoors, and the arrest of twenty-four prostituted women has at least dammed up this scandal. One sees with regret that the women most disposed by their attractions and their morality to win the admiration which they seek, affect appearances contrary to the virtue of their own sentiments and thereby involuntarily embolden by their example those known to be the most shameful"; Bureau Central report, 4 Messidor, Year VI [une 22, 1798], cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 745. 46. See Elizabeth Colwill, "Transforming Women's Empire: Representations of Women in French Political Culture, 1770-1807," Ph.D. diss., SUNY, Binghamton, 1990. 47. Roederer, Journal d'Economie Publique, de Morale et de Politique, 10 Frimaire, Year V [Oct. 31, 1796], quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 382. 48. Chaussard himself recognized the Directory's striking opposition of male and female fashion in a dialogue in Le nouveau Diable boiteux (as in n. 20), vol. 2, 232-33. The man accuses the woman of showing too much and relying on la mode as a "magic talisman," and the woman responds that the man, too, succumbs to fashion: "... and if I tremble from cold, don't you suffocate from heat?" 49. Roederer, letter addressed to Louis-Sbastien Mercier, Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807-8, quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 382: "elles ont fait, pour regagner tout ce qu'elles avaient perdu, un va-tout oii elles ont mis jusqu'd leur sante; et ce va-tout sera bient6t perdu." Roederer's statement was deemed interesting enough to have been reported and recounted in another journal, L'Ami des Lois, 14 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 3, 1798], also cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 595. 50. Concerning the strategic opposition of Corneille and Racine in the late 18th century, see Crow, 33-45. 51. See T. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 176-77. 52. See, for example, the first issue of Tableau Gindral du Gozt, des Modes et Costumesd e Paris par Une Socidtdd 'Artistese t Gens de Lettres, 1 Vendimiaire, Year VII [Sept. 22, 1798], which describes the Roman-style white tunic, specifying that "nudity" (sleevelessness) had replaced sleeves even in harsh weather. Here is the duchesse d'Abrantes's description of Mme Tallien: "She had taken to wearing a sort of semi-Grecian costume that became her admirably. It was plain, almost severe, and she wore it with consummate grace.... Her only adornment was a long, ample robe of muslin falling in large folds about her limbs and modeled after the drapery of a Grecian statue. Only, the robe was of choice Indian muslin and fashioned, no doubt, more elegantly than those of Aspasia and Poppea. It was caught up at the bosom, and the sleeves were drawn back over the arms and fastened with old-fashioned cameo brooches. Similar This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 335 brooches adorned her shoulders and her waist"; d'Abrantes, Histoire des Salons de Paris, quoted in L. Gastine, Madame Tallien: Notre Dame de Thermidor (London: John Lane, the Bodely Head, 1913), 188-89. In 1801 Roederer made light of the ways female dress had come to be minimally clasped by such brooches in a mock dialogue between a pin and a needle in which the needle lamented its lack of employment: women's clothing was now only pinned together, often with cameo brooches, intended as the pin complained, only to be unclasped, Journal de Paris, 21 Fructidor, Year IX [Sept. 8, 1801], in Roederer, vol. 4, 400-401. 53. Concerning Boilly's series, see Susan Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Liopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 70-75. 54. Etienne-Jean Del6cluze, Journal de Delcluze 1824-1828, ed. R. Baschet (Paris: Bernard Grosset, 1948), 338. 55. Louis Hautecoeur, Louis David (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1954), 180. 56. Truthful ones, according to Pierre-Maximillien Delafontaine's manuscript at Paris, Bibliothque de l'Institut, ms 3784; see also Hautecoeur (as in n. 55), 180 n. 40. 57. See Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 88-95; Germer and Kohle (as in n. 12), 179-80. 58. There is now a large bibliography concerning women's relation to the public sphere during the Revolutionary period; see, for example,Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1988); Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); as well asJohanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New York: Roufledge, 1995). There are fewer studies concerning the status of women during the post-Revolutionary years; see Geneviive Fraisse, Reason's Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 59. Concerning the scandal of Girodet's vengeful, satiric denunciation of the licentiousness and venality of one such fashionable parvenu, Mlle Lange, at the Salon of 1799, see George Levitine, "Girodet's DNaenwa ,: The Iconography of a Scandal," Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 57-59 (1969- 70): 69-79; Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33); and Crow, 233-36. 60. I am indebted to Stefan Germer's discussion of the painting's two axes, which he relates to Emile Benveniste's distinction between r&it and discours; Germer (as in n. 1), 33-34. 61. Romulus, despite his nudity, still bears the traces of the incroyable's foppish elegance, with his "dogs' ears" sideburns, distinctive full-lipped profile, and ornamentation condensed and displaced onto the serpentine red feather and luxuriant gold accessories. Tatius may have appeared naked to many, but, in his own way, Romulus too was au courant in 1799. 62. Charles Landon, Journal des Arts, no. 34 (20 Niv6se, Year VII[IJ an. 10, 1800]): 4. 63. Boutard, Journal des Dibats, 13 Ventose, Year VIII [Mar. 4, 1800]: 2-3, quoted in Collection Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform, vol. 21, no. 598, 787-88. A popular vaudeville specifically took as its subject women's hypocritical relation to David's tableau. The brunt of the satire is the relatively educated woman artist whose fundamentally vulnerable moral position is exploited by an amorous young man in pursuit of her daughter. Tricked by the male suitor, the foolish mother leaves her daughter defenseless in the foyer of David's exhibition because she does not dare expose her to painted male nudes. Of course, the daughter is abducted and the play ends with a parodic tableau vivant of David's painting. See C. C. Jouy, Longchamp, and Dieu-La-Foy, Le tableau des Sabines: Vaudeville en un acte (Paris, 1800). 64. Chapter C"LNXuXdXiti,, " in Le Nouveau Paris, ed. J.-C. Bonnet (Mercure de France, 1994), p. 649; this essay was largely based on two articles which appeared in Journal de Paris on 9 and 12 Germinal, Year V [Mar. 29 and Apr. 1, 1797]: 790-91 and 803-4 respectively. That Mercier's complaint had both currency and longevity is attested by J. B. Pujoulx's discussion of the nudity of statues in his publication Paris d lafin du XVIIIe sitcle (Paris, 1801), 12. 65. Of course, homoerotic readings could also at particular historical junctures require similar censorship or obfuscation. For example, in the particularly homophobic atmosphere of early-19th-century England, Lord Byron was compelled to masquerade his erotic response to the Apollo Belvedere as that of a female viewer (a tactic he repeatedly deployed in his writings). Nevertheless, I would insist that in late-18th-century France, the homoerotic, exclusively masculine paradigm of viewing dominated aesthetic discourse. Alex Potts has described the restraints placed on homoerotic readings of art in Potts, 1994 (as in n. 2), esp. 118-31; concerning Byron, see Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 66. In her recently published book The Exceptional Woman, Mary Sheriff discusses 18th-century thinkers' preoccupation with the female gaze on the male object, and in a particularly amusing passage addresses Denis Diderot's account of embarrassing sexual arousal while modeling nude for the female painter Mme Terborch; Sheriff (as in n. 29), 115-20, esp. 118. 67. Roederer, Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807, quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 386. 68. According to Jules David, 360, men's behavior before David's tableau was markedly different from that of the fashionable women who feigned modesty and embarrassment by covering their eyes with a fan cleverly concealing a viewing glass, thereby at once hiding and directing their gaze: "The men of fashion prided themselves on observing and signaling in loud voices all the beauties and all the faults [of the picture], designating each muscle by its name and insisting with an entirely masculine liberty on the amplitude or meagerness of forms. They have been described to us as passing an attentive eye-glass over all the details of the tableau. As for the women who did not attain this high degree of freedom, a fan in which a mirror was placed permitted them to control appropriately the reflections made around them and to hide their confusion, all the while satisfying their curiosity." Without clothing that differentiated the wife from the whore, women were called on to perform their virtue. If their "look" was sexually alluring, the ways they dispensed their sight might prove their modesty. The elaborate contrivance of the fan was meant to secure their status as women for whom the public contemplation of genital nudity was no familiar event. Standing between mirror and tableau, these women would have been highly aware of eyes all about them evaluating their performance of modesty with fluttering fans. The challenge of deception, looking while pretending not to, was exacerbated by the intense visibility they acquired when doubled in the reflection. If the sense of surveillance was heightened, so, too, would have been the titillating sense of risk and illicit pleasure. Moreover, the mirror reflection, while alternately obfuscating the canvas or providing a long-distance, crystallized view (depending on the size of the crowd), also offered the viewer a tantalizing opportunity to see herself touching, intersecting, approaching, or abandoning the naked men. The mirror permitted the performance of intimate dalliances, thereby both heightening the eroticism and the sense of the nakedness of the male protagonists. 69. De Cailly, Journal des Dames 25 (10 Pluviose, Year VII [Jan. 29, 1799]): 398-400. 70. While the preoccupation with the impact of violent sensations on pregnant women was dissipating during the early 19th century, contemporaneous tracts on the effects of women's imagination on their progeny spanned this period; see, for example, Benjamin Bablot, Dissertation sur le pouvoir de limagination des femmes enceintes (Paris, 1788), and, during the Empire, Jean-Baptiste DemanCgoenosni,d vrations physiologiques sur le pouvoir de limagination maternelle durant la grossesse a ..., 2 vols. (Paris, 1807). For a recent discussion of this obsession, see Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 7-8. 71. Chaussard, 43-44. The author argues that young children are nude without corrupting their innocence; in the past, pious girls consecrated to the religion of humanity nursed entirely naked patients without offending their chaste regard; and even in Rome, "Catholic prejudice" supports the exhibition of nude statues. In a footnote, Chaussard also quotes Montaigne's Essays at length. The 16th-century thinker solely addressesjustifications for women's viewing of naked men and in turn cites many different kinds of evidence, including Plato's order that both sexes of all ages present themselves nude at the gymnasium; the example of Indian women, who see men nude in order to cool their sense of vision; and Lacedaemonian women, who, he claims, were more virginal than Frenchwomen and who saw young men exercise naked every day. Montaigne also refutes the purported claim of the women Pohfg u that their nudity was an invention to attract men, concluding they lost more allure than they gained; he ends his argument by citing Livy, "Livy said that to a good woman a nude man is nothing more than an image." 72. According to Pierre Rosenberg, the work was probably painted between 1785 and 1788. When Fragonard died in 1806, The Sacrifice of the Rosewas one of only three works listed in his obituary in the Journal de Paris (the others were its possible pendant, another late work, The Fountain of Love, and his early, solitary large-scale history painting, Callirhoes).A ccording to Charles Landon, these works "brought him enormous sums of money"; quoted in Rosenberg, Fragonard, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, NewYork, 1988, 548-53. 73. Larger-Burcharth (as in n. 2), 412. 74. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of lnfluence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Bryson (as in n. 57); and Crow. 75. Roederer,Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798], quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 386-87. 76. Musie du Louvre, 335. 77. P.-J. Marie de Saint-Ursin, L'ami des femmes; ou, Lettre d'un m?decin, concernant l'influence de l'habillement desfemmes sur leurs moeurs et leur sant. ... (Paris, 1804), 46. This content downloaded from 129.98.211.27 on Sun, 15 Nov 2015 07:24:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions