Drawing and History in the Comte de Caylus’ Recueil d’antiquités

Few art enthusiasts were as well connected or as involved in artistic matters during the reign of Louis XV as the Comte de Caylus (1692–1765). In his youth, Caylus developed a friendship with one of the most important artists of the century, the painter Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), with whom he shared a libertine sensibility.¹ In fact, Watteau produced many salacious drawings for his close friends, which were meant to be enjoyed privately during their lives. Watteau repented at the end of his life and asked that the drawings all be destroyed, but Caylus kept several works, like The Remedy, which shows a beautiful young woman reclining and preparing to be injected by the clyster held by her servant. It gives us some idea of the erotic images enjoyed by both men. But Caylus did not simply appreciate art as a viewer—he was also an artist himself, as demonstrated by one of his etchings, produced in 1731 after a work by Watteau, Venus Wounded by Love (fig. 1). The erotic arabesque after Watteau’s drawing attests to Caylus’ libertine predilections and his artistic abilities as a draughtsman. Caylus’ own skills as a draughtsman allowed him to capture the quality of other artists’ works, which served him well throughout his career; even for an entirely different project later in his life, the seven-volume study entitled Recueil d’antiquités egyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines, et gauloises, which showed off his ability to replicate the basic lay-out and structure of numerous other artists’ and artisans’ work, while also conveying their stylistic traits. Published between 1752 and 1767, the Recueil contained hundreds of his engravings depicting artifacts from ancient cultures,² including, for example, plate 71, depicting fragments of a Roman wall painting (Antiquités romaines, figures I à III) (fig. 2). Though Caylus’ early works, with their libertine sensibilities and more romantic flair may seem stylistically and intellectually distinct from the precisely rendered, linear works in the Recueil, his entire corpus rested on his theories about the special quality and power of drawing. By analyzing the introductory prefaces to each successive volume of the Recueil, this article examines the role that drawing plays in making imagined historical experience more present and tangible. In retrospect, we might see Caylus’ endeavor in this ostensibly “antiquarian” project as a continuation of his life-long desire to capture the very particular, verbally ineluctable goût (taste) of an age—his own or that of cultures past.

When we compare these two strikingly different prints separated by some thirty years, there are obviously marked differences in manner and style. (figs. 1 and 2). In his etching after a drawing by Watteau, Caylus translates the delicate figures that occupy a sparsely populated, ornamental space, using a very shallow line, which produces a tonal, drawing-like effect. The tonal differences between the flattening, surface forms inside the arabesque and the spatial form describing the clouds, on which Venus rests, are subtle but distinct. Extremely thin, diagonal lines together make up the flattened surfaces of the arabesque ornament, while the uneven tone of the clouds subtly suggests varying density of the clouds. These two different types of shaded regions create a tension between the two- and three-dimensionality that invites visual inspection and imaginative projection on the part of the viewer.³ The delicate, tightly parallel lines produce a flatness that subtly juxtaposes the soft modeling and textures suggested by the velvety, darkened areas of the original drawing. Here, Caylus exploits etching techniques to not simply duplicate the composition of, but to evoke the “hand,” or the manner of Watteau. In other words, this print is as much about Watteau as it is about the subject matter of the nude. Some thirty years later, when Caylus set to work depicting hundreds of antique fragments, he again exploited engraving techniques to emphasize the linear as well as the shadowed and modeled qualities. But this time around the effect was quite different from that of his Watteau copy. Figure 2 typifies his representational goals in the Recueil. His depiction of the...