nineteenth-century france: from staël to baudelaire 77
tation of nature, is often associated with Romanticism, but Quatremère
(to Cousin’s approval) is able to support it using exclusively classical
sources, Plato and Cicero.
17
Appropriately, Cousin adds a reference to a
famous letter by Raphael, in which he too gives preference to the
mental ideal over observation of the model: ‘In order to paint a beauty I
would have to see several beauties, but since there is a scarcity of beauti-
ful women, I use a certain idea that comes to my mind’.
18
Clearly, ‘academic’ art theory was not a monolith, but itself involved
a range of debates about both art and beauty. Moreover, there is no
‘pure’ academic or idealist position in French art theory of the earlier
nineteenth century: if, in the debate of 1807, Quatremère relied on
classical texts, he was cognizant of Kant and German aesthetics by the
time he came to write his major theoretical treatise of 1823, Essay on the
Nature, the End and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts. On the
other hand, there is no ‘pure’ Kantian or Romantic position in French
writing of any kind; so powerful were the idealist and Platonic tradi-
tions in French thinking about art that they could not be simply
forgotten or discarded by a new generation.
By the same token it is not possible to isolate ‘conservative’ from
‘radical’ positions on beauty. Many writers of the left felt powerfully
the fascination of ideal beauty, which could symbolize a utopian future
of social harmony as well as the authority of the established order.
19
On
the other hand, Kantian ideas of artistic freedom and the originality of
the artist-genius might be aligned with revolutionary calls for political
liberty, with an artistic elite apart from society, or with capitalist com-
petition in the art market.
The one constant is that beauty remained a key term for writers
across the entire spectrum of political, moral, religious, and artistic
opinion. Perhaps that is why beauty mattered so much, in a world
where other concerns might seem more urgent. It could be argued that
the aesthetic was important because it could not be mapped on to
another set of concerns (political, moral, religious, or social) in any
straightforward fashion. That is, debates on beauty may have offered a
different set of terms in which the customary alignments no longer
applied, and which could therefore produce genuinely new thinking.
Ingres and Delacroix
When we pass from art theory to art practice, however, the simplified
polarities seem to reassert themselves, for nothing in this period of the
history of art is so conspicuous as the archetypal opposition between
two towering figures: Ingres, inheritor of the Classical legacy of his
master David, and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), invariably described
as the arch-Romantic. We can see the opposition, already, in the two
artists’ contributions of 1824 to the Salon, the major, state-sponsored