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Dante's Ugolino and the School of Jacques-Louis David: English Art and Innovation

2013; Routledge; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905495.2013.822689

1477-2663

Aida Audeh,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See the author's “Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Visual Arts and National Identity,” Dante in France (Russell Goulbourne, Claire Honess, Matthew Treherne, eds.), Series: La Parola del testo (Serra, Italy:Le Lettere, 2013). See also the author's doctoral dissertation in which this surprising breadth of interest in Dante in French art is first treated: Rodin's Gates of Hell and Dante's Divine Comedy: An Iconographic Study (University of Iowa, 2002). Ilaria Bignamini, et. al., Grand Tour: the lure of Italy in the eighteenth century (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996); Edgar Peters Bowron, Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Merrell Publishers, 2000); Hanns Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The chronology of events involving the interactions of these English and French artists is: 1749 Reynolds in Rome 1752 Reynolds in Florence, Venice, and Paris on way back to England 1770 Fuseli in Rome - creates drawings and oil sketches based on Dante's Commedia Reynolds begins his Ugolino painting 1773 Reynolds exhibits his Ugolino at Royal Academy in London 1774 Print version of Reynolds' Ugolino is available 1775 David in Rome 1778 Fuseli leaves Rome, some of Fuseli's original circle still in Rome, subsequent generations will follow 1780 David leaves Rome 1784 David in Rome Gauffier in Rome and creates his sketch of Ugolino, c.1784-90 Dufau probably in Rome 1785 David leaves Rome 1788 Flaxman in Rome Exhibition in Rome of George Sidney's Ugolino painting 1790 Flaxman begins working on his illustrations for Dante's Commedia in Rome Girodet in Rome and creates his sketches based on Flaxman's in process, c.1790-93 Gauffier leaves Rome for Florence 1792 Dufau in Belgium 1793 Girodet leaves Rome Gros in Florence and creates his sketch after Reynolds' Ugolino, c.1793-4 Publication in Rome of John Flaxman's illustrations of the Commedia 1794 Flaxman leaves Rome Gros in Genoa 1795 Girodet in Genoa (early Spring) Girodet in Paris (June) 1796 Gros in Milan 1799 Creation of Fuseli's preliminary drawing of his 1806 painting Ugolino and His Sons 1800 Dufau exhibits his Ugolino painting in the Paris salon On the pressures and competition with David's studio see Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1995, rev'd 2006). On the expectations for Neoclassical history painting in eighteenth-century France see Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven:Yale, 1987); Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1988); Robert Herbert, David, Voltaire, Brutus, and the French Revolution: An Essay in Art and Politics (London: Allen Lane, 1972); and Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). On the “Englishness” of Dante's Ugolino as subject of art in the eighteenth century, see Frances A. Yates, “Transformations of Dante's Ugolino,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol.14, 1951, pp.92-117. The salon livret read: “Le comte Ugolin et ses quatre fils condamnés à mourir de faim dans une tour, par l'ordre de Roger, archevéque de Pise, après les guerres civiles des Guelphes contre Nino Visconti. Suject tire de l'Enfer du Dante, chant 33.” Explication des ouvrages de peinture et dessins, sculpture, architecture et gravure, des artistes vivans, exposés au Muséum central des Arts, d'après l'arrêté du Ministre de l'Intérieur, le 15 Fructidor, an VIII, de la République Française (Paris, 1800). On the importance of the Salon in France see Richard Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism: From the Ancien Régime to the Restoration (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1993). On Dante's reception in France, see Michael Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage (London:Routledge, 1989, 2006); Werner P. Friederich, Dante's Fame Abroad: 1350-1850 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1950); Michael Pitwood, Dante and The French Romantics (Geneva:Droz, 1985); Albert Counson, Dante en France (Paris:Fontemoing, 1906). Recent scholarship demonstrating nationalist tendencies in Dante's reception during the nineteenth century include Aida Audeh and Nick Havely, eds., Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2012) and Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, The City and the Nation in the Italian Unification: The National Festivals of Dante Alighieri (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Quoted in David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000), p.569. On familial drama in relation to political developments of the late eighteenth century see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Carol Duncan, “Fallen Fathers: Images of Authority in Pre-Revolutionary French Art”, Art History, vol. 4, no.2, 1981, pp.186-202; Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On Reynolds' idea for an archetype in history painting see Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On Reynolds' diverse visual sources for Ugolino see Postle, 1995 and Mannings, 2000. On print distribution of Reynolds' Ugolino in Europe see Mannings, 2000, and in relation to French artists see Philippe Bordes, “Jacques-Louis David's Anglophilia on the Eve of the French Revolution,” The Burlington Magazine vol.134, 1992, pp.482-490. Quoted in Mannings, 2000, p.569. On the “fruitful moment” see H. Mason, “Voltaire versus Shakespeare: the ‘Lettre à l'Académie Française’ (1776),” The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (Autumn), 1995, pp.173-185 and R. Niklaus, “Diderot et Rousseau: pour et contre le theater,” Diderot Studies, vol.4, 1963, pp.153-189. See Bordes, 1992; Postle, 1995; and Stefen Germer and Hubertus Kohle, “From the Theatrical to the Aesthetic Hero: On the Privatization of the Idea of Virtue in David's Brutus and Sabines,” Art History, vol.9, no.2, 1986, pp.168-184. Important sources relevant to Gros' early period in Italy include Philippe Bordes, “Antoine-Jean Gros en Italie (1793-1800): Lettres, Une Allegorie Revolutionnaire et un Portrait,” Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art Français, 1978, pp.221-243; Paul Joannides, “Some English Themes in the Early Work of Gros,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 117, 1975, pp.774-785. For discussion of possible sources of Géricault's composition, including the Ugolino subject, see Lorenz Eitner, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, London:Phaidon, 1972. Information on Louis Gauffier is limited. See, for example, Philippe Bordes, “Louis Gauffier and Thomas Penrose in Florence,” The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin, vol. 60, 1971, pp.72-75; R. Crozet, “Louis Gauffier,” Bulletin de la Société de l'Histore de l'Art Français, 1947, pp.100-113; Paul Marmottan, “Le Peintre Louis Gauffier,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1926, pp.281-300. Gauffier's authorship of this drawing has been called into question recently based on its resemblance to an 1822 painting of the same subject by Pietro Benvenuti, an Italian Neoclassical artist working in the style of J-L David in association with his students in Italy such as François-Xavier Fabre (see Eric Pagliano, L'atelier de l'oeuvre – dessins italiens du Musée Fabre (Snoeck Pub, 2013), p.359). I find the resemblance of this drawing to Benvenuti's 1822 painting and a known preparatory sketch (see Liletta Fornasari, Pietro Benvenuti (Florence:Ente Cassa di risparmio di Firenze, c.2004, p380) slight, however. Any resemblance between Gauffier's sketch and Benvenuti's later work on the subject suggests, rather, the existence of common roots in Reynolds' iconic painting and David's anglicized classicism among those in David's circle who took up the Ugolino subject in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Kathleen Russo, “Henry Fuseli's Interpretations from Dante,” Italian Culture, vol.11, 1993, pp.83-102. On the relationship between Fuseli's art and developments in theater, see Andrei Pop, “Greek Tragedy and Cultural Pluralism,” Art Bulletin, March 2012, vol. 94, no.1, pp.78-98; Stephen Leo Carr, “Verbal-Visual Relationships: Zoffany's and Fuseli's Illustrations of Macbeth,” Art History , vol. 3, no. 4, December 1980, pp.388-409; Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). See Joseph Luzzi, “From the Dark Wood to the Garden: Dante and Autobiography in the Age of Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol.6, 2002, pp.349-370; “Literary Lion: Alfieri's Prince, Dante, and the Romantic Self,” Italica, vol. 80, no.2, 2003, pp.175-196; Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, New Haven:Yale University Press, 2008. See James H. Rubin, “Delacroix's Dante and Virgil as Romantic Manifesto: Politics and Theory in the early 1820s,” Art Journal, vol. 52, No. 2, 1993, pp. 48-58; see the author's “Gustave Doré's Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy: Innovation, Influence, and Reception,” Studies in Medievalism, vol. XVIII, 2010, pp.125-164. On Shakespeare's reception in France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see John Golder, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason: The Earliest Stage Adaptations of Jean-François Ducis 1769-1792 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1992); John Pemble, Shakespeare goes to Paris: How the Bard conquered France (London: Hambledon, 2005); and on the relationship of theater and art in the school of David see Mark Ledbury, “Visions of Tragedy: Jean-François Ducis and Jacques-Louis David,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol.37, no.4, 2004, pp.553-580 and “Stages of Creation: History, Epic and Theatre in David's Early History Painting Projects,” Studiolo: Revue d'Histoire de l'Art de l'Académie de France à Rome, vol.3, 2005, pp.169-187. Philippe Bordes, “Louis Gauffier and Thomas Penrose in Florence,” The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin, vol.60, 1971, pp.72-75; P. Marmottan, “Le Peintre Louis Gauffier,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1926, pp.281-300. Philippe Bordes, “Girodet et Fabre,” La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France, vol.6, 1974, pp.393-399. On English patrons' relation to the classical past see Bignamini, 1996; Bowron, 2000; Gross, 2002. On the use of Flaxman's engravings as templates see Sarah Symmons, “French Copies after Flaxman's Outlines,” The Burlington Magazine, vol.115, no.846, 1973, pp.591-599 and Flaxman and Europe: The Outline Illustrations and their Influence (New York: Garland, 1984). André Chénier, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1966), pp.680-682, translation mine. On LeBrun's passions see Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: the Origin and Influence of Charles LeBrun's ‘Conférence sur l'expression générale et particulière’ (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994). On Girodet's relationship with Flaxman see Ada Shadmi Banks, “Two Letters from Girodet to Flaxman,” Art Bulletin vol.61, March 1979, pp,100-101; Gerald E. Bentley, “Flaxman in Italy: A Letter Reflecting the Anni Mirabiles, 1792-93,” The Art Bulletin, vol.63, no.4, 1981, pp.658-664. On Rodin's interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy see the author's “The Prodigal and the Avaricious: Rodin's Engagement with Dante's Inferno VII”, Studies in Medievalism, vol. 22, 2013, pp.115–152; “Rodin's Gates of Hell and Dante's Divine Comedy: The Literal and Allegorical in the Paolo and Francesca Episode of Inferno 5,” Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Portrayal, Popularization, Nick Havely, ed. (Bern, Switzerland:Peter Lang, 2011), pp.181-198; “Rodin's Gates of Hell: Sculptural Illustration of Dante's Divine Comedy,” Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession (London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 2006, 2001), pp.93-126; “Rodin's Three Shades and their Origin in Medieval Illustrations of Dante's Inferno XV and XVI,” Journal of Dante Studies, vol. 117, Fall 1999, pp.133-169; “Rodin's Gates of Hell and Aubé's Monument to Dante: Romantic Tribute to the Image of the Poet in 19th-century France,” The Journal of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (continuation of The Stanford University Museum of Art Journal), vol. 1, 1998-1999, pp.33-46. Sources on Fortuné Dufau are limited. See the author's “Dufau's La Mort d'Ugolin: Dante, Nationalism, and French Art, ca.1800,” Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation, Aida Audeh and Nick Havely, eds. (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.141-163; Robert Rosenblum, “Who painted David's Ugolino?,” Burlington Magazine, vol. 110, no. 788, 1968, pp.621-626.