History, Painting, and the Seriousness of Pleasure in the Age of Louis XV by Susanna Caviglia (review)

Susanna Caviglia’s History, Painting, and the Seriousness of Pleasure in the Age of Louis XV takes the most repeated, disparaging stereotype about rococo painting (pervasive since the eighteenth century)—namely, that it’s aristocratic and fundamentally frivolous—and provocatively attempts to turn it on its head. Far from being mere fripperies designed to decorate fashionable interiors belonging to society’s elites, these works, in Caviglia’s view, constitute depictions of repose that reflect the peaceful period in which they were made; they also created and encouraged a sense of peacefulness (and the hope for peace’s prolongation) in their viewers. Caviglia’s thoroughly researched contribution to the field details shifts in history painting’s appearance in the early decades of the eighteenth century before considering new philosophical underpinnings, pedagogical programs, and artistic practices that played a role in distinguishing works made in the decades during which Louis XV reigned from those produced in the age of Louis XIV. Having traced these trends, Caviglia articulates continuities across Louis XV-period and late-eighteenth-century painting, ultimately arguing that the break from the rococo with which the Davidian school is traditionally associated isn’t much of a break at all.

Caviglia begins by observing that the history paintings created by the group of artists at the center of her study, whom she collectively refers to as “the generation of 1700” (a phrase coined by Pierre Rosenberg and used to describe artists like François Boucher, Charles-Joseph Natoire, Carle Vanloo, and Pierre Subleyras, among others, who were born in or around that year, benefitted from similar training, and enjoyed comparable careers) differed markedly from history paintings produced by the generation of painters who were employed by Louis XV’s great-grandfather, Louis XIV (12). Where Louis XIV-period history paintings emphasize heroic, narrative action and embody the so-called grand genre, thus creating a painted universe that parallels Louis XIV’s militaristic reign, history paintings produced under Louis XV often take peaceful moments of “action arrested and sustained in repose,” rather than actual activity, as their subjects, even as paintings produced under both reigns often had their basis in many of the same textual sources (4). Caviglia acknowledges the mostly mythological Louis XV-period paintings’ erotic potential, but argues that it is their considerably smaller number of (often nearly nude) figures, as well as these subjects’ stasis and suspension in both time and place that connote (and create in the viewer) an internal sense of peacefulness, happiness, and harmony, which together constitute a wholly different sort of pleasure: “a kind of tranquility of the soul” (21).

Caviglia’s study outlines and accounts for this move away from multi-figure, action-packed narrative scenes in the age of Louis XV in part one before addressing how shifts in artistic training and practice contributed to history paintings’ altered appearance and priorities in parts two and three. Chapter one, “The action de repos,” demonstrates that figures in repose akin to those in historical landscapes of the previous century moved from being secondary (if not staffage) to center stage in history paintings produced during Louis XV’s reign. They began, in other words, to take up most of a painting’s surface area. Interior states, including reverie, meditation, absorption, and contemplation, be it of another figure in a multi-figure composition, or of the self (as in paintings like Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié’s Narcissus contemplating his reflection (1771)), are enacted by figures whose relaxed, often immobile bodies rendered viewers physically immobile when partaking of the pleasure of prolonged contemplation of a painting. Though Caviglia anchors this chapter in an almost overwhelming plethora of primary sources (including dictionaries and philosophical tracts) that prove that pleasure’s direct relation to happiness and peace in this period is anything but anachronistic, her deployment of visual evidence is...