Sculpture et poétique: Sculpture and Literature in France, 1789-1859 (review)

"Ut sculptura poesis" works as a phrase, because the term "image" is applicable to both sculpture and writing. It might well have been an alternative title for this welcome survey of the hitherto relatively neglected links between literature and sculpture in France, from the post-revolutionary period up to 1859. The work crosses many boundaries. It is both a volume in its own right and a special "journal issue" of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Well illustrated and carefully edited, it contains twelve essays, three of which are written in English and the remainder in French. It contains, in Part I, a diachronic investigation of the interaction between sculpture and poetic creation during the period in question and, in Part II, a series of case-studies analyzing the tension between the respective demands and attractions of form and content in the sculptural and literary arts.

For Lessing, in his æsthetic treatise, Laocoön, sculpture is an art concerned with the deployment of bodies in space, unlike poetry - the medium of which is time. The visual arts were thus characterized as static, focusing on a turning point between past and future, as in Rude's Departing Volunteers, where the medium of relief facilitates the narrative reading of the sculpture. Lessing, of course, famously added that all bodies exist, not only in space, but also in time. Indeed, sculpture was not slow to exploit the multiplicity of viewpoints implicit in the body's rotation through several figures, as in Canova's Three Graces or the anamorphosis of Christophe's Le Masque, heightened in its poetic presentation by Baudelaire.

Chronologically, the Neo-Classical values of the post-revolutionary period, coupled with the writings of Winckelmann on eighteenth-century archaeological finds, meant that, as pointed out by Isabelle Leroy-Jay Lemaistre, marble reigned supreme in the world of the Empire and the First Restoration, notwithstanding André Chénier's nostalgia for the energy, rather than the forms of sculptural transformation, as outlined in a fine essay by Jean Starobinski. After 1831, the use of bronze by Barye, in his Lion au serpent, Jehan Duseigneur, in his Roland furieux or Préault, in his Tuerie, marked the emancipation of sculptors from the constraints of academicism and the development of sculptural modeling as distinct from carving. In a particularly incisive essay on Auguste Clésinger's Femme piquée par un serpent, Wendy Nolan Joyce highlights the principal elements in this evolution: more contemporary subject-matter; more expressive poses; more naturalistic style; more emphasis on three-dimensionality.

Æsthetically, too, these trends are reflected in the writings of the period, which, as subtly indicated by Michel Brix, represent not so much a break between Romanticism and Neo-Classicism, but an evolution from the Neo-Platonism of M^me de Staël and Victor Cousin to a belief in art as an expression of the passions, with no claim to absolute Truth, as exemplified by Stendhal (Patrizia Lombardo's essay is particularly helpful in this connection) and Balzac. The essay by Michèle Hannoosh contains stunningly new evidence of Delacroix's appreciation of Medieval and Renaissance sculpture, which led him to conceive of a modernist move away from the continuous and evenly carved line in sculpture and towards the sculptural "massing" of color in painting.

Although sculpture was slow to wake up to the call of modernism - partly because of its function as an instrument of commemoration (as witness Chateaubriand, in Jean Marie Roulin's presentation), partly because it was hi-jacked by the developing mania for statues (as shown by Rosemary Lloyd) and partly because of its inherent size and inflexibility (until the fabrication of medallions came to revolutionize public attitudes towards its accessibility) - its approval ratings altered dramatically between 1846, when Baudelaire famously wondered "Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse," to 1859, when he hailed sculpture for its "rôle divin." In criticizing sculpture for its insipidity...