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  • Le Nadir de la grâce: Essai sur la figure et la défiguration
  • Abigail Alexander (bio)
Sylvie Thorel . Le Nadir de la grâce: Essai sur la figure et la défiguration. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012.

Sylvie Thorel's work, Le Nadir de la grâce, examines the evolving aesthetic concept of grâce, particularly following Winckelmann's eighteenth-century neoclassical standpoint. Through an extensive and diverse pool of artistic and literary examples, Thorel explores the implications and developments of a neoclassical understanding of grâce as an equilibrium between an idea and the matter conveying it along with the melancholic suspicion that nothing lies underneath or beyond said matter: "Les pages qui suivent portent sur le devenir de cette configuration qui relie la pensée de la figure et de la grâce, héritée du néoplatonisme, et la mélancolie attachée au sombre rêve d'ouvrir les statues" (18). This image of opening statues presages the repercussions in the collective artistic imagination following the neoclassical leanings during the Terror, which, Thorel notes, made "un spectacle de la mise à mort de la noblesse et du beau idéal" (18). With a simultaneous backwards glance to Winckelmann's neoclassicism and to the impact of the neoclassical aesthetic of 1793, Thorel thoroughly studies a series of nineteenth-century transformations of the concepts of image and figure and concludes with the arrival of the new artistic means of animating statues: cinema. While the staggering breadth of examples Thorel treats greatly surpasses the scope of this summary, a brief recapitulation of those she considers in greater detail here serves as a map through her work.

As an introduction to Winckelmann's position, Thorel presents the controversy over Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard, the Laocoön statue debate, and Diderot's treatment of Chardin's La Raie. All three of these pieces spark debate as they all arguably transgress the requirement for subject matter to provide access to some spiritual passage. The expression of Caravaggio's boy proves problematic because it appears to be an ignoble grimace; in the case of the Laocoön statue, the debate arises over whether the subject portrays a dignified murmur or a disgraceful cry; and, as La Raie exposes a partly-skinned, anthropomorphized stingray in danger of feline attack, Diderot's treatment of this painting analyzes the effects of genius on matter, or of dessein on dessin. These three controversial pieces all both reveal an animalistic side of humanity and focus more upon a present moment rather than an eternal concern. Thorel's following description of Winckelmann's neoclassical dream, which yearns for a matter so capable of leading to the idea that the matter itself dissipates, outlines the trajectory from this desire for an animating grâce to a melancholic recognition of disorder and finally to a morbid pleasure in disfiguration: "Néoclassicisme: c'est, au nom de la restauration du goût, l'enfoncement le plus doux dans la mort, le glissement dans les enfers du corps et peut-être de la morale" (52).

Thus sketching the future of Winckelmann's neoclassicism, Thorel engages with the division separating his neoclassical dream and the Romantic preference for irregular beauty. As the major impetus underlying this fracture, [End Page 952] Thorel points both to the Christian concept of the interior/exterior divide, citing Hegel, and to the violence of the French Revolution, which delivers "sa coupe sanglante entre les temps anciens et les modernes, d'une façon qui devait paraître absolument irréversible et qui donnait au rêve néoclassique une dimension à la fois actuelle et intempestive" (61). One example that, as Thorel explains, bridges this transitional period emerges as Mme. de Staël's Corinne ou de l'Italie, in which the protagonist undergoes the metamorphosis from possessing a "bonheur 'classique'" to contending with a "mort douloureuse, déjà 'romantique' ou moderne" on account of her contact with a post-revolutionary representative of the Christian separation between interiority and exteriority (61). After this brush with Christian thought in the wake of the Terror, the neoclassic dream of grâce becomes mere nostalgia. Thorel then turns...

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