nineteenth-century france: from staël to baudelaire 67
Chapel ceiling; in this way, again, it meets the requirements of the aca-
demic exercise, for scholars were expected to learn as much as they
could from the great art of the past while in Rome. The perfect figure is
bound or locked into a perfect order of things, which it fits like clock-
work. Its watchwords are control, perfection, tradition—not freedom,
spontaneity, originality.
But some observers could find Flandrin’s painting beautiful in a dif-
ferent way. The inturned pose suggests profound self-absorption or
interiority, while the face is unseen. The figure is delineated with a
clarity so intense that later observers likened it to Surrealism, and yet
its mood or expression is left to the viewer’s imagination; the surround-
ing expanse of sea is almost featureless but again seems to lead the
thoughts to unfathomable distances. As the critic Théophile Gautier
(1811–72) remarked, we could explain the figure as a shepherd who has
lost his flock, or a shipwrecked man on a deserted island; but these
rational explanations seem somehow inadequate to the haunting mood
of the picture. Indeed, Gautier went on to describe it in Kantian terms:
it offers no precise meaning, he wrote, nor does it proceed from any
intention, but exists as a free manifestation of beauty, and com-
municates ‘the dreams of the painter beyond the trammels of subject-
matter’. Flandrin’s study may, then, please us more than a fully resolved
painting of a definite subject: ‘Art here expresses itself, without other
preoccupation’.
2
The artists and writers of subsequent generations who
found this work fascinating forgot its origins as an academic exercise;
for them it stimulated a wealth of aesthetic ideas [84, 123].
Flandrin’s painting can be seen to meet the criteria of two altogether
different ways of thinking about beauty, both of which were powerful
in early nineteenth-century France. On the one hand, it is faithful to
notions of an ideal or perfect beauty that exists in the object (in this
case, the beautiful male body); such notions were upheld by the French
system of art-teaching, with its competitions and prizes, its clear stan-
dards for excellence, and its respect for the artistic achievements of the
past. On the other hand, Flandrin’s painting is also amenable to re-
interpretation in the subjective terms of the new German aesthetics,
according to which the work gives rise to thoughts of beauty in the
mind of the observer, or communicates such thoughts, in the form of
aesthetic ideas, from the mind of the artist to that of the observer. In
this painting, then, Flandrin succeeded in harmonizing two different
approaches to beauty. More often, in the contentious art world of
nineteenth-century France, the two came into collision. Yet the colli-
sion was productive. If debates about beauty in nineteenth-century
France were fierce, that was because beauty was seen to matter. This
was a world of political revolutions, of social reformism, of belief in
progress and human perfectibility. Why was it that beauty mattered so
much in such a world?