82 nineteenth-century france: from staël to baudelaire
distinct alternatives: ‘Study the beautiful only on your knees’, he
admonishes; ‘Have religion for your art.’
22
Yet the Vow of Louis XIII
does not even pretend to offer direct access to a transcendent realm;
instead, it articulates the passage through successive degrees of ideal-
ization, from the present day of the spectator, through the historical
register of the king, to the eternal realm of ideal beauty or of the
Madonna herself. And yet this last conceptual leap, into the timeless, is
referred back to the historical and material world not only through the
overt reference to Raphael’s picture, but also through the need to visu-
alize the visible appearance of the Madonna. For Stendhal, the process
of idealization remained incomplete: ‘The Madonna is beautiful
enough, but it is a physical kind of beauty, incompatible with the idea of
divinity.’
23
It is the Romantic Stendhal, here, who is the idealist. Ingres,
the heir to the classical tradition, has no expectation of somehow tran-
scending the ‘physical’ beauty of well-drawn bodies and human facial
expressions; thus his baby Jesus appears capable of wriggling and his
heavy-lidded Madonna, perhaps, of eliciting the kind of sensual
response to which Cousin objected so strenuously. On the one hand,
the painting declares an unconditional commitment to ideal beauty
that is at least equivalent to, and possibly indistinguishable from,
religious faith. On the other hand, this is not an unconscious or un-
selfconscious act of faith; it is one that remains acutely aware both of its
own history, through the very obviousness of the reference to Raphael,
and of its own contingency, by accepting the need to put ideal beauty
into the physical form of contemporary art.
Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres of Chios, by contrast, might
seem to have little to do with beauty. Indeed, Stendhal criticized
Delacroix for making his figures too unattractive to move the specta-
tor.
24
However, the panoply of figures can also be seen to experiment
with a newly expanded, ‘Romantic’ conception of beauty that rejects
the single ideal of the Raphaelesque model. Three years later, the
leading Romantic writer Victor Hugo (1802–85) would develop such
ideas in the preface to his play Cromwell (1827). In modernity, according
to Hugo, the uniform beauty of antiquity—magnificent but monoto-
nous—gives way to the variety of character and expression that Hugo
terms ‘grotesque’. Thus the gaunt and wrinkled older woman to the
right of centre in Delacroix’s picture, the woman next to her who has
collapsed in death, her neck awry and her flesh already pallid, the mer-
ciless Turk on the rearing horse, the suffering and emaciated man
stretched passively across the centre—all of these figures can be seen,
not as ‘beautiful’ in the conventional sense of lovely or pleasing, but as
aesthetically significant in the new sense of Hugo’s grotesque.
Delacroix himself, writing of his work on the picture in his journal,
emphasized the expressive power of the figures as a ‘truer’ beauty than
the merely attractive: