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Lebensztejn reviews "Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror" by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth.
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EWA LAJER-BURCHARTH
Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 400 pp., 11 color ills., 165 b/w. $60
Since the works of Robert Rosenblum (Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, 1967) and Hugh Honour (Neo-classicism, 1968), we have witnessed a spectacular renewal in British and American studies of the Western art of the late 18th century. Books by historians as diverse as Michael Fried, Thomas Crow, Norman Bryson, Timothy J. Clark, and Alex Potts show how research in Neoclassical art has profited from the theoretical interests marking the last three or four decades in structural, combinatory theories of the sign and representation, psychoanalysis, and gender studies.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's book Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror participates in this renewal, which had its moment of glory in 1989 with the international colloquium organized at the Musee du Louvre, Paris, by Regis Michel on the occasion of the exhibition Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825, at the Louvre and the Musee National du Chateau de Versailles, and the official celebrations of the French Revolution.' It was during the course of this colloquium, where the most antithetical art historical points of view had the opportunity to emerge, that LajerBurcharth presented an analysis of David's painting The Sabine Women that caused a sensation and that one might consider the core of her book.
Necklines studies David's dark years, between the fall of Robespierre, which was also his own, in 1794, and the advent of the Consulate. These six years followed a five-year period during which the career of the painter was increasingly associated with the Revolution. At the time, David became a political man, engaged in leftist forces (the party of the Montagnards), and attempted to realize the dream of many ambitious artists in the modern world of transforming society through his art. It was during these years that the image of David as renewer of historical painting was replaced by that of "the Raphael of the sans-culottes" (as he was called in 1799 when he exhibited the heroic nudes of The Sabine Women). As David became caught up in exceptional events, Belisarius, the Horatii, and Brutus in his work made way for the heroes and martyrs of the present Revolution, the deputies of the jeu de Paume, Le Peletier, Marat expiring, and the young Bara. Etienne-Jean Delecluze, one of David's students who published the first comprehensive book on the artist and who strove to depoliticize him, compared these works to that of a somnambulist.2
With the fall of his friend Robespierre, David narrowly escaped the guillotine and was imprisoned twice. The resulting political and personal trauma lasted several years, and during this period David produced none of the historical paintings that, until the Revolution, he had habitually put out, slowly but steadily. Necklines is concerned with these years from 1794 to 1800, the long unproductive months and the artist's painstaking efforts to regain his hold. These efforts are primarily manifest in unfinished portraits and projects: the unfinished self-portrait of 1794, the project of Homer reciting his verse, the unfinished painting of Psyche abandoned, the portraits on woods of his brother-in-law and sister-in-law (the only paintings he would show at the Salon during this period), those of the Montagnards imprisoned after Thermidor, and finally, after a long gestation period, the large canvas of The Sabine Women, the first historical painting to be completed in ten years.
The contextual method of Necklines is particularly well suited to the David of these agitated years. Yet while relying on a considerable mass of facts, some totally new, the author lets her factual and theoretical biases show. There is hardly any mention, for example, of the portraits of two Dutch plenipotentiaries (1795), Gaspar Meyer and, especially, Jacobus Blauw, a patriot of the left with Babouvist sympathies. The very figure of Gracchus Babeuf, the communist revolutionary guillotined in 1797 after the Conspiracy of the Equals, is absent from the book (his name appears only on p. 114 in the caption to the frontispiece of his pamphlet against the Montagnard Carrier). It is rather amusing that Antoine Schnapper, a scientifically and politically reactionary art historian, should be the one who mentions the fact that in 1796, while he worked on The Sabine Women, David subscribed to Babeuf's newspaper the Tribun du Peuple.4 In Necklines, the enormous issue of the painter's political position and thought after Thermidor remains scarcely addressed.
Instead, Lajer-Burcharth highlights the interaction of David's art and certain psychocultural aspects of Thermidorian society shaken by the Terror. A new bourgeoisie sought to forge an image of itself by staging its language, dress, social life, entertainments, and debaucheries. It is the self-representation of this society that is confronted in David's art.
Support for this assertion takes the form of a well-known but until now neglected detail. When David organized a private exhibition of the The Sabine Women at the Louvre in December 1799, charging admission-a new idea that shocked the public but brought the artist a nice sum, which he invested in a farm-he placed at the back of the room a large, pivoting mirror called a psyche, in which viewers could contemplate the reflected painting. Serious critics such as C. P. Landon and Pierre Jean-Baptiste Chaussard saw this above all as a means of underlining the truth of representation, but lampooners took delight in considering this setup as a way for the visitor to cause his own image to appear amid the naked warriors of early Rome. He was plunged into a heroic world. With ingenuity, Lajer-Burcharth sees the admission fee and the mirror as the two faces of the spectator's participation: if the entry fee represented the 'share' the artist asked the visitors to take in his project, the presence of the mirror served as the material tool for securing their bodily participation in the painting" (p. 137).
David re-created this arrangement (but the author does not think it useful to mention it) when he showed Le sacre in 1807-8 and his last large painting, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Graces, in 1824.5 His aim was clearly illusionist in nature ("It is not a painting; you walk into this tableau" Napoleon said of Le sacre), but Lajer-Burcharth sees much more in this psyche, viewing it as the apparatus in which the interaction between art and society is constituted, a specular relationship that is less social than psychological:
... what I wish to stress is the psychocultural nature of mediation, that is, the historically specific subjective dimension of the relation between art and society. Such exploration calls for a theory of the subject as a contingent psychocultural construct implicated in the visual sign. Based in the psychoanalytical theory of subjectivity, my notion of reflection refers, then, to the historically specific psychosocial process of investment in the image, and particularly in the body image, as a representation of the self. Such a notion of reflection is inscribed by the idea of psychic projection-at once individual and collective-- structuring both the production and the reception of the image. It is not only class identity but also psychosexual identity that is at stake here. To speak of reflection in regard to the Sabines is to examine the relation between the visual image and society neither through the notion of imitation nor that of mediation as such, but rather in terms of dual operations of recognition and mis-recognition. It is, then, not to evoke the idea of direct visual analogue or some spectral echo of a preexisting social identity but rather to explore the ways this painting participated in the psychocultural formation of the late-- revolutionary self. (pp. 138-39)
The author's theoretical model is the Lacanian mirror stage, the moment when, between the age of six and eighteen months, the human subject recognizes and specularly constructs his own image. For Lajer-Burcharth, the society born from Thermidor, shaken by the Terror, was seeking to reconstruct its identity in a relationship of this type:
The fashion for the psyche seems to suggest that the post-Thermidorian bourgeoisie were not unlike the Lacanian baby, that is, that they looked at themselves in the mirror not to find the image of what they were but of what they wanted to become. Their comportment could be seen, then, as a symptom of a crisis of the self, of a collective uncertainty about identity, brought about by the Revolution and specifically by the Terror. (p. 160)
Everything revolves, then, around the specular gaze. And according to a point of view that has been widely held among British and American academics for well over twenty years, this gaze is split by sexual division-doesn't sex mean division? It would have been worthwhile to follow the way in which David emphasized the relations between the sexes throughout his career, in his historical paintings as well as in his portraits. In a few of the first paintings, Minerva and Mars (1771), Antiochus and Stratonice (1774), the man is in a position of weakness, a victim of a woman's weapons or charms; Saint Roch (1780), Belisarius (1781), and Andromache (1783) show the woman in a pitiful light: she aids a deprived or ailing man and weeps at his death in battle. In the Oath of the Horatii (1784) and more violently in Brutus (1789), the cause of the state, with its virile, warlike, and collective values, prevails over the values of feeling and family, represented by women and children. But with the last painting, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Graces (1824), we come full circle; the god of war is once again vanquished, not by the warrior Minerva, this time, but by Venus and Cupid-- devirilized by pleasure, as Paris was on the eve of the Revolution in the picture painted for the comte d'Artois, the very incarnation of the nobility's reaction. The Sabine Women is the pivotal point of this descending trajectory of virile values: wives, mothers, and children intervene in the midst of combat, succeed in stopping it, and establish civil peace; twentyfive years later, a few months before the comte d'Artois became King Charles X, the triumph of Venus and her Graces seems to mark, not without sarcasm, the historical failure of revolutionary values (though the god Mars still holds his javelin).
Necklines does not follow this symbolic trajectory but concentrates on The Sabine Women and their cultural context of the Thermidorian Convention and the Directory. The section on the "moral body" mentions a series of very interesting facts concerning theoretical reflection (the Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme by Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis), illustration (The Fashionable Mother as opposed to The Mother as All Should Be), and the ceremonial (the Feast of Spouses of 10 Floreal, Year V) that establish an ideology of woman as biologically and socially devoted to conjugal and maternal values-the values that the Sabine Women defend against the destructive fury of the warriors. These examples evoke others, such as the text by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux commenting on his Temple of Memory, where, like an echo of the Davidian message, we find:
Conquerors on earth are, in the order of destiny, what volcanoes and tempests are in the physical order; they renew it after having destroyed it....
Women renew the world; the warrior destroys it.... It is to women that the most barbarous peoples are indebted for the softening of their ways; the first humans, too ferocious to have good manners, are softened by them; they place their power between husbands, fathers, and prevent them from slitting each other's throats.fi
The relationship between the sexes is complicated in The Sabine Women by a relationship between males in which a male body becomes the object of a narcissistic desire for another male body, a relationship that Ewa LajerBurcharth, after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, describes as homosocial. The evolution of the figure of Romulus in particular, from the drawings to the painting, moves in the direction of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's deeply eroticized ideal.
Together with the two nude ephebes who flank them on each side, the male protagonists define the margins of the image as a territory of the same-sex relations that pull the composition sideways, away from its maternal core, thus deflecting the family message that this painting formulates. The alternative region of infra-masculine meaning that thus opens up within the image does not easily fit the ethos of virile combat implied by the iconography-and the objections raised by David's contemporaries the appropriateness of the nude figures for conveying the idea of combat are a sign of recognition of this inconsistency. The libidinally charged, passive male nudes speak, rather, of a different kind of bond sustained "between men," beyond the ethos of action but also outside the heterosexual bonds of the family. They speak of masculinity glace, defined specularly, in relation to itself, and sustained by the inter-male desire that does involve not women at all. (p. 180)
This aspect of David's art, taken a step further in Endymion by Anne-Louis Girodet (1791) and especially Apollo and Hyacinthus by the Primitif Jean Broc (1801), is naturally accentuated in the scenes representing a social group that excludes women, such as philosophers, political men, or warriors: The Death of Socrates (1787), The Oath of the Tennis Court (1791), and Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae, which was David's most drawnout undertaking (1800-1814). In his republican desire for the regeneration of the social body, the artist turned toward the Hellenic model. Lajer-Burcharth shows how David, at the heart of the Montague party, sought to live in a world where virtue is an affair of men linked by the ties of a repressed eroticism. After the fall of Robespierre, he attempted to reconstruct this atmosphere in his studio, where students posed nude for each other: ". . . his renewed, near-exclusive interest in training in the second half of the 1790s took on a new meaning: it was an attempt to create a surrogate world replacing what the artist had lost with the fall of the Jacobins" (p. 221).
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's book appears to be a product of a second generation of feminism in the history of art. Instead of being interested in the femininity of Mme Vigee-Lebrun, the author wonders about the femininity of David, this bard of virility. And instead of constructing a theoretical grid that would then be applied wholesale to a given corpus, she confronts the factual material on which she is working with the theoretical model through which she is interpreting this material. Through the play of reciprocal reflections, The Abandoned Psyche, the psyche of The Sabine Women, the mirror stage, and the narcissism of the new bourgeoisie of the Directory interact in an effective and convincing way.
Lajer-Burcharth does not hesitate to put her own fantasies into play; one can only approve of this, for we would do well to recognize that fantasy always accompanies a rational construction. But to each his/her own fantasies and the desire to embrace the fantasies of the other. That is why, while recognizing a homoerotic (more than homosexual) element in the two leaders of The Sabine Women, each accompanied by an ephebic squire, it is difficult for me to go along with the author when she urges us to imagine the seated fop from Philibert-Louis Debucourt's illustration L'orange, on le moderne Jugement de Paris (reproduced on p. 199) as ready to turn around to give his orange not to one of the three merveilleuses (ultrafashionable women of the Directory) who play the role of the ancient goddesses of Olympus but to the muscadin (dandy) straightening his tie in front of the mirror above the mantelpiece. Rather, the libido of this new Paris appears so absorbed that it has itself become the destination of the orange-an anagram, in French, of organe (organ)-is destined. From all sides, desire seems neither heterosexual nor homosexual but autosexual: the muscadin primps before the mirror, the women are interested in the interest of the fop, who seems interested only in their interest in himself. Even the dog seeks attention from one of the beauties. One of the five spectators to the left has taken stock of the situation and is busy eating his own orange. For me, the scenario of Debucourt is not that imagined by Lajer-Burcharth; his message is more characteristic and more comic: in this particular world, no desire can find fulfillment, for they are all desires for desire.
More than other artists, David has made his oeuvre receptive to a high degree of projection; with its enormous ambiguities, which are those of his time (his contemporary Goya offers analogous characteristics), his art is a receptacle of fantasies of all sorts. By wanting to cancel them out, we risk establishing a fantasy of going beyond fantasies. It is not enough to seek an objective truth about David; any assertion concerning him immediately calls for its opposite: political man with a politics of art and pure artist; violent terrorist and humane commissioner; radical revolutionary and operator who would stoop to anything in defense of his interests; artist of the ideal and realist without concessions. This group of combinations yields his complexity and power. To recognize that the terrain is not neutral is the first duty of the David historian; that is why all fantasies are respectable (if they have the good sense to recognize themselves as such), though they are not all equally so.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's method is rewarding, but she offers an image of David that is swollen and lacking in nuance. With the hermeneutic double circle that she sets up-- feminism and Lacanism-Lajer-Burcharth, while availing herself of effective means of investigation, becomes trapped in a space that offers no openings. Her Lacanism at times goes so far as to distort Freudian psychoanalysis; thus, we have the surprise of reading on p. 19, "Notoriously, traditional psychoanalytical discourse [what does this mean?] aligned hysteria with women, thereby conflating the unknowing and confused relation to desire with female sexuality per se. Yet, to cite Lacan, `When pushed beyond the limits of their control of language and affect, any person... may be hystericized.' -7 In fact, male hysteria was the point of departure of the psychoanalytic approach; it was the theme Freud had chosen as early as 1886 to present before the Medical Society of Vienna. In his 1925 autobiography, he declared once again that one of the things that had struck him most in Paris at Dr. Charcot's was "the frequent presence of hysteria in men."
Moreover, the author has a tendency to overdo the psychological and artistic portrait that she is drawing of her painter. In analyzing the self-portrait that David painted in prison in 1794, she interprets the deformity of his left check as what Lacan called extimite (not "extemite," as incorrectly given on p. 313): "a sign of externality of meaning within oneself. A piece of his own flesh returned to him, through the revolutionary discourse as a sign of his monstrosity-David la grosse join-as the Terror grafted in his very body, it is a part of his face that David wants to have no meaning at all" (pp. 42-43). It is true that David's political enemies did not hesitate to seek in this deformity the visible image of his revolutionary monstrosity-the text cited on p. 41 of Necklines is eloquent in this regard-and another adversary, the comte Clary, reports that when David spoke, he always gave the impression of chewing blood.8 But David himself saw this more as an infirmity that he tried to hide by adopting a frontal pose, distributing the shadow in order to suggest the swelling of the cheek while at the same time concealing it. With his characteristic skill of a stage director, David tilted the axis of his face while maintaining the horizontal line of the mouth, thereby normalizing his deformity without erasing it. (This explains how Lajer-Burcharth might see-wrongly, in my opinion-the two eyes as considerably out of line [p. 37].) Most critics have also remarked that in this portrait he depicted himself as noticeably younger than his actual age, forty-six, to the point that the date of the painting has sometimes been questioned.9 The self-portrait of 1794-unfinished, like most of the paintings from the 1790s-seems to link narcissism and melancholy.
A bit further, describing the houppelande (loose-fitting coat of the period) in this portrait, which is barely stumbled and where she has found fingerprints (p. 39; 1 could not see them, despite careful examination), LajerBurcharth writes, "It is David's own sense of his body as feminine that he thus paints. The houppelande's uncanny fleshiness of a not simply anatomical but more specifically sexual organ, its vulva-like velvet morphology, is the materialization of a pictorial disavowal of the woman David was...." (pp. 43-44). In the last chapter, where the train of Mme Recamier's gown becomes, via Lacan's objet petit a (object a), "the site where David paints himself into Mme Recamier" (p. 296), the method veers toward self-caricature. Here we fall into the simplifications of a method that is content to apply a model mechanically, instead of making it interact with the complexity of the facts. Worse still, this model tends at times to be isolated, following the bias of gender studies in their present state. Thus, the author can write in the very first paragraph of the introduction (p. 1), "The reorientation ... toward gender, rather than class, as a principal category of historical analysis, has allowed us to both recognize the French Revolution's profound cultural investment in the body and to examine this investment critically." What matters is not the importance of such a point of view but rather its dissociation from political and social phenomena linked to the Revolution. This partial depoliticization of an important cultural phenomenon is not neutral: it is inscribed in a conflictual intellectual camp within American culture. It finds its privileged place in the deeply elitist academic arenas where the author teaches (Harvard) and publishes (Yale); these are the places par excellence of "gender rather than class."
It is an unquestionable intellectual advance to examine David from a point of view other than the self-satisfied positivism that is widespread in the traditional field of art history, especially the art history of French institutions, whose centralism favors the most conservative forces, even when the government in power is aligned with the left. But the optic of Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, while opening perspectives that are not insignificant (in particular, on melancholy and narcissicism), at the same time limits these perspectives. It would have been desirable to situate them, say, in the space of artistic melancholy. This subject has an entire history, since at least the problem no. XXX. 1 of the pseudo-Aristotle, a history retraced in the monumental work of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy. The association of melancholy and the mirror is evoked in respect to Charles, Baudelaire by Jean Starobinski in his small book La melancolie au miroir (1989).10 It offers rich suggestions that bring together the Davidian motifs evoked in Necklines-melancholy, the mirror, exile, Andromache, and the Roman she-wolf:
Starobinski's book reproduces a Fontainebleau engraving by Leon Davent, which depicts a feminine figure, no doubt a Melancholy, stretched out among the attributes of the sciences and the arts in a field of ruins, not far from a she-wolf being suckled by Romulus and Remus. Lajer, Burcharth indeed has a commentary on the she-wolf of the Capitoline: on p. 165 she reproduces a drawing that David made in prison of a female wolf feeding the twins and observes that one of the suckling twins in the drawing is found in the painting of The Sabine Women, thrown to the ground at the feet of Hersilia; the latter is thus to Romulus's son what the she-wolf is, to Romulus himself: a figure of the state that intervenes "in defense of the patrilinearity of the family" (p. 167). Nevertheless, in describing this drawing as "a variation on the Capitoline sculpture group," she confuses different ancient or pseudo-ancient representations of the she-wolf and neglects the Davidian variations on this motif, which reappear quite visibly in the painting at the center of Romulus's shield. It would have been instructive to follow these variations, starting with the strange "primitive" animal that appears in the form of a bas-relief in the Brutus of 1789, this flattened wolf with the head of a donkey, paws stretched out and quadruple human breasts, which Delecluze, in his book on David, evoked in these terms: "in the basrelief representing Remus and Romulus being nursed by the wolf, the painter strove to depict a very crude sculpture, as it must have been soon after the foundation of Rome."12
The wolf does not appear in the so-called first idea for The Sabine Women, a drawing where Romulus holds a long shield, a scutum free of ornament. But in the second drawing of the entire composition, a bearded Romulus holds a round shield, a clipeus, which shows the she-wolf depicted with anthropomorphic features, like one of the tigers in the political caricature Les former acerbes illustrated on p. 24 of Necklines. In the painting (as in a drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), the wolf once again has the head of an animal, but the twins now suckle back to back, a presage of the fratricidal struggles that accompanied the birth of Rome and an allusion to those that paid the price of carrying out the French Revolution. These variations are based on a drawing made by David in Rome, in 1784 or 1785, not after the famous statue of the Capitoline, but after a bas-relief in the Vatican13 (a mediocre pastiche of the Renaissance),14 in which the wolf turns her head toward the nursing pups. In The Sabine Women, the wolf of the Capitoline, with the head of a lowing cow, appears to the right above a standard. The Roman totem indeed represents the primordial mother, but this one also nurtures with her milk the founding murder of the state. While preaching national reconciliation in his great painting, as he indicated to Chaussard, David remained attached in 1799, through this minor but perfectly visible detail, to the Jacobin positions that were always his; the blood of his brothers had to be shed in order to give birth to the Republic. It was already, ahead of time, the lesson of Brutus. Lajer-Burcharth wants to see the woman in red who faces us, at the center of The Sabine Women, as "an obvious personification of the Terror" (p. 168); she is all the less convincing since the Terror was not conceived among its partisans in terms of vociferation but of inexorable necessity; if it is represented here, it is perhaps only as this reminder (in the future perfect) of fraternal murder.
Like most artists of the West between the Renaissance and the late nineteenth century, David has been studied from two main angles. On the one hand, there is the traditional approach, which envisages the artist in a monographic, positivist manner, concentrates research, on biographical data, and studies the works with regard to attribution, documentation, and collection. This is the point of view defended by the curators of the 1989 exhibition, Antoine Schnapper, professor at the Universite de Paris IV, and Arlette Serullaz, chief curator at the Musee du Louvre. On the other hand, there is the modern, speculative approach, which attempts to interpret and problematize the art of David, his studio, his themes, his politics, his eroticism. This last aspect is favored by British and American academic research; its method may be theorydriven (establishing a theoretical grid at the outset which is then applied to the area of study) or associative (combining different elements, which attempt to illuminate each other, in the form of a collage).
These two points of view clashed during the David exhibition and colloquium in 1989 15 with a violence that evoked the debate over line versus color that agitated artists and art lovers in France three centuries earlier: documents or theory, line or color, each opinion excluding the possibility of recourse to the other. That this violence had something masochistic about it was pointed out by Antoine Coypel in a speech given in 1720 at the Academic des Beaux-Arts. "It is the urge, I said to my young friends, to follow the advice of Toinette in [Moliere's] Malade imaginaire: it is the urge to cut off an arm, so that the other might get better; and to put out an eye in order to see more clearly with the other."16 In Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, the history of art has two eyes and two arms and knows how to use them; the only regret, perhaps, is that it does not always use them with the desired tact.
What one might wish for this discipline is not only that it take into consideration all the parameters of research-documentary, formal, theoretical, fantastical-but that it integrate them more; that the work so constituted is not simply a theoretical veneer or a collage whose elements hold together more or less but an organic give and take, thoroughly invigorating the material under study. It is not, however, a matter of reconciling the two antagonistic aspects of art history, following in the example of the Romans and the Sabines; they did not produce enough children together, and much remains to be done before arriving at such a reconciliation, through rape and violence if necessary. One might well say that the history of art, essentially, has yet to come.
Notes
1. Regis Michel, ed., David contre David, 2 vols. (Paris: La Documentation Francaise, 1993).
2. E. J. Del&luze, Louis David: Son Ecole et son temps (Paris: Didier, 1855), 179.
3. Not on canvas, as stated in the captions to the illustrations in Necklines. As for Psyche, she may date from 1787, not 1794. See Antoine Schnapper, "Apres
(exposition David: La Psyche retrouvee," Revue de l'Art 91 (1991): 64.
4. Antoine Schnapper, in Jacques-Louis David, 17481825, exh. cat., Musee du Louvre, Paris; Musee National du Chateau, Versailles, 1989-90, 223.
5. Ibid., 335, 416 n. 521.
6. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L architecture (1804; reprint, Nordlingen: A. Uhl, 1981), 159-60.
7. This is not a quote from Lacan, as LajerBurcharth indicates on p. 311, but a commentary by Ellis Ragland-Sullivan, "Hysteria," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (London: Blackwell, 1992), 165.
8. Louis Hautecoeur, Louis David (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1954), 215.
9. It is interesting to compare David's selfportraits with the portraits painted, sculpted, or drawn by other artists; cf Jacques Wilhelm, "David et ses portraits," Art de France 4 (1964): 158-73.
10. Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Sax], and Raymond Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964); Jean Starobinski, La melancolie au miroir (Paris: Julliard, 1989).
11. Charles Baudelaire, "Le cygne," in Les Hears du Mal (Paris, 1857); Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: Godine, 1982), 91.
12. Del&cluze (as in n. 2), 123.
13. Arlette Serullaz, Dessins franfais du Musee du Louvre: Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825 (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1991), 210 (album 24, fol. 54); the drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, as in ibid., 29.
14. See Cecile Duliere, Lupa romana (Brussels: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1979), vol. 2, 102, catalogue of fakes, no. 9, fig. 323.
15. See, for example, the debate between Antoine Schnapper (as in n. 4), 14-15, and Regis Michel, "De la non-histoire de l'art," in Michel (as in n. 1), introduction.
16. Antoine Coypel, Discours prononcez dans les Conferences de l Academie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, 1721; reprinted in Les Conferences de l Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siecle, ed. A. Me-rot (Paris: Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, 1996), 451.
JEAN-CLAUDE LEBENSZTEJN
Universiti de Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne
75231 Paris 05 France
Translated from the French by Jeanine Herman
Copyright College Art Association of America Mar 2001