Time-chaste damsels

Abstract

ion (New York, 1976), 140–84. For a discussion of Ingres’s line and eroticism, see C. Ockman, Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line (New Haven, CT, 1995). is a formal feature of neoclassicism, with its “frieze-like” arrangements of figures. Ingres recognized this clarity of contour particularly in Greek art; he praised the preference of the ancients for figures spaced at a distance from one another, resulting in an effect of “simplicity,” an expression of beauty through the “developments of lines.” The crisp silhouette is also an attribute of early Renaissance gold-ground painting, as well as Flemish primitivism, styles “innocent” of chiaroscuro and sfumato as ways to render porous the boundaries between a figure and its ground. In a conscious archaism, Raphael cultivated clarity of contour in many of his paintings of the Virgin Mary, including La Belle Jardinière (ca. 1507), which is often Figure 1. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière, 1806. Oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Inv. 1447. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Color version available as an online enhancement. Figure 2. Henri Lehmann, Faustine Léo, 1842. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Wolfe Fund and Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Richardson Gift, 2004.243. Photo: www.metmuseum.org. Color version available as an online enhancement. 9. J.-A.-D. Ingres, Ingres: Écrits sur l’art, ed. A. Goetz (Paris, 2013), 48: “Cette règle d’espacer les objets en peinture et dans les bas-reliefs tenait au désir d’exprimer pleinement la beauté et de la montrer dans les développements des lignes.” Ingres’s “writings,” which consist of notes from journals and records of conversations in the atelier, were assembled posthumously by Henri Delaborde. 11. G. de Nerval, Les Filles du feu; Les Chimères; et autres textes, ed. M. Brix (Paris, 1999), 230: “sans tenir compte de l’ordre des temps.” All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 12. This is not a particularly empowering role for the female subject. Indeed, Ingres’s Caroline Rivière models the “virgin” who serves as counterpart to the “dark woman” or “whore” of the emergent Romantic mythology of dark and light femininities, “black” and “white” Venuses. On this binary, see G. Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (New York, 1999), 247–57. 13. As Sarah Betzer has recently argued, Ingres did not view the practice of portraiture as incompatible with an engagement with history. While portraiture was not “history painting” in the academic sense, it was nevertheless both historical and historically aware. S. Betzer, Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History (University Park, PA, 2012), 17–67. Susan Siegfried has also insisted on the historical and geographical “imaginary” embedded in Ingres’s portraits of women, including the portraits of Caroline and Sabine Rivière. S. L. Siegfried, Ingres: Painting Reimagined (New Haven, CT, 2009), 71– 145. 14. This is Adrian Rifkin’s complex thesis in his account of Ingres. 142 RES 73/74 2020 cited as a source for the portrait of Caroline Rivière. As a device used in nineteenth-century portraits of the jeune fille, this crisp line performs the chastity and simplicity that cordon off the girl from the danger of stories, while also enabling her to occupy the realm of 10. On the archaism of style and reference in the Rivière grouping, see N. Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge, 1984), 120–23. the parade as a space unbound by historical sequence. In this space, as imagined by Gérard de Nerval, the poet and critic whose work lies at the origins of my understanding of la parade, what was once past surges up, freed from the constraints of diachronic time. As historical sequence cedes to temporal synchrony, persons from multiple historical epochs can coexist, “without taking into account the order of times,” as Nerval puts it. Yet Nerval gives pride of place to the figures of young women, precisely because these young women, so chaste, possess no binding ties. This poetics of the parade moves far beyond the antics of the boulevard theater, yet nevertheless remains bound to these popular spectacles. Ingres, Scheffer, and the other artists who worked in this style may or may not have known or appreciated this poetics. Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière, painted and exhibited in 1806, predates Nerval’s mature works by more than forty years, although Scheffer’s excurses in the genre are more contemporary. Nevertheless, Nerval’s parade accesses the taut, brittle charge of these paintings of young girls. His texts describe a set of affective complexes within which such paintings can be found to resonate. That some of these affects are linked to the experience of popular theater is not incompatible with the reception of Ingres by “Parisian populism,” including the spectacles on offer on the Boulevard du Temple. Ingres’s uncompromising approach to classicism resulted in pronounced stylization, which lent itself to popular Figure 3. Ary Scheffer, Figure of an Angel Representing Mademoiselle de Montblanc after Her Death, 1847. Oil on canvas, 176.5 x 90 cm. Grenoble, Musée de Beaux Arts, MG 2007-5-1. Photo: Ville de Grenoble / Musée de Grenoble–J. L. Lacroix. Color version available as an online enhancement. Rifkin recognizes Ingres as one pole of the “idealised threnody of Parisian populism,” as such populism is characterized in Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). A. Rifkin, Ingres Then, and Now (London, 2000), 72–79, quote on 76. Knowles: Time-chaste damsels 143 shorthands for aesthetics poached from on high. Nerval’s own practice as a viewer takes its cue from the heteroclite character of popular aesthetics. Images seen in the world, from paintings to the figures on the tréteaux, adopt new configurations in his imagination. To some extent, it is this imaginative “work” that deserves our attention during the Romantic period, as much as individual works of art. This virtual work, wrought between text, image, mind, and spectacle, was the signal feature of Romantic reception, and yet it is more than just reception because it comes to constitute another work, one that often surpasses in interest discrete works of art. In this aesthetic economy, parade and painting are equal forms, suppliers of appealing figures with which to furnish (meubler) the imagination. Yet it is the parade that makes the offer explicit, inciting other visual forms to be viewed in the same way. 1:796–801. By the 1830s, much of the lively outdoor life of the Boulevard du Temple had declined, subject to various zoning restrictions. R. F. Storey, Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: NineteenthCentury French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 6–7. 17. Nerval, Oeuvres complètes, 1:780. 18. Nerval, Oeuvres complètes, 1:791: “les vrais connaisseurs, les Parisiens pur sang.” Nerval and the parade on the Boulevard du Temple In the early eighteenth century, Antoine Watteau had haunted the Parisian fairs, where the stock types from the Comédie-Italienne played the parade on balconies attached to the façades of theaters. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Nerval was a devoted denizen of the Boulevard du Temple, the broad avenue in northeastern Paris that inherited the atmosphere and the character of the fairgrounds. In addition to providing a venue for performances of melodrama, tightrope walking, trained dogs, pantomime, and eventually the despised vaudeville, the Boulevard du Temple was known for its parades, which had been part of the district’s offerings since the mid-eighteenth century, when the street first became a locale for theaters. Parades were presented outdoors, on the street, with minimal decor. The performers stood on a platform, with the exterior wall of the theater or a piece of canvas serving as a backdrop. Nerval adored the parades. In the spring of 1844, he published three articles in which he reminisced about the old Boulevard du Temple while searching on the present-day boulevard for some vestige of the parade and the tréteaux, the planks set on trestles or barrels that provided their stages. 15. On the Boulevard du Temple, see J. Goudot, “Naissance, vie et mort du Boulevard du Crime,” Orages 4 (2005): 21–39. 16. “Le Boulevard du Temple: Autrefois et aujourd’hui,” L’Artiste, March 17, 1844, in G. de Nerval, Oeuvres complètes, ed. J. Guillaume and C. Pichois, 3 vols. (Paris, 1984–93), 1:778–82; “Le Boulevard du Temple: Spectacles Populaires,” L’Artiste, May 3, 1844, in Nerval, Oeuvres complètes, 1:791–95; “Le Boulevard du Temple: Spectacles Populaires,” L’Artiste, May 12, 1844, in Nerval, Oeuvres complètes, Nerval admired the way a street filled with a number of different parades created a visually heterogeneous, colorful, odorous, noisy environment—bigarrés is the rather untranslatable word he uses to praise the Place du Môle in Naples, which he compares to the old Boulevard du Temple. In the midst of this environment, it was not just the buskers and the buffoons who performed the parade but the urban denizens themselves, particularly women, who used the wide, tree-lined avenue to promenade, flirt, and show off their new hairstyles. In addition, the parade was the expertise of the working classes, “the true connoisseurs, Parisians of pure blood,” whose approval had made the careers of several great actors. Like many of his contemporaries, Nerval subscribed to a mythology of the “people” as possessed of unadulterated, instinctive, and therefore superior aesthetic preferences. On the Boulevard du Temple, Nerval was drawn less to the parades of actors and more to the sideshow type of attractions, including a “giant, accompanied by a sequined fish,” a “strong woman who had stones broken on her belly,” and in particular “that pretty girl with red hair, with her intéressante famille and her