[p.277]

Sculpture

I love fanatics, not those who present you with an absurd formula of belief and carrying a dagger to your throat, shout: Sign or die ; but rather those who, strongly in love with some particular and innocent taste, see nothing comparable to it, defend it with all their strength, go into houses and streets, not with a spear, but with their syllogism at a standstill, summoning both those who pass and those who are stopped to agree on their absurdity, or on the superiority of the charms of their Dulcinea¹ over all the creatures of the world. They're pleasant these, they amuse me, they sometimes amaze me. When by chance they have encountered the truth, they expose it with an energy that shatters and overturns everything. In paradox, accumulating image after image, calling to their aid all the powers of eloquence, figurative expressions, bold comparisons, tricks, movements, appealing to sentiment, to the imagination, attacking the soul and its sensibility in all sorts of places, the spectacle of their efforts is still beautiful. Such is Jean-Jacques Rousseau² when he rages against the letters he has cultivated all his life, the philosophy he professes, the society of our corrupt cities in the midst of which he burns to live and where he would be desperate to be ignored, misunderstood, forgotten. However much he closes the window of his hermitage looking out on the capital, it's the only place in the world he can see; deep in his forest, he's elsewhere, he's in Paris. Such is Winckelman³ when he compares the productions of ancient and modern artists. What doesn't he see in that section of man we call the Torso⁴? the muscles bulging on his chest are nothing less than the undulations of [p.278] the sea⁵ ; its broad curved shoulders, it is a great arch⁶ concave that is not broken, but rather strengthened by the burdens with which it is loaded ; and its sinews, the ropes of the ancient balistes⁷ that hurled quarters of rocks immense distances, are in comparison no more than spider's threads⁸. Ask this charming enthusiast by what way Glycon⁹, Phidias¹⁰ and the others managed to make such beautiful and perfect works, he will answer: By the feeling of freedom¹¹ which elevates the soul, and inspires it to great things; the rewards of the nation, public consideration; sight, study, constant imitation of beautiful nature, respect for posterity, the intoxication of immortality, diligent work, the happy influence of morals and climate, and genius.... Undoubtedly, there is not a single point in this answer that anyone would dare to dispute. But ask him a second question, and ask him if it's better to study Antiquity than Nature, without whose knowledge, study and taste the ancient artists, with all the special advantages they enjoyed, would nevertheless have left us only mediocre works: Antiquity! and suddenly the man with the most spirit, warmth and taste is in the middle of Toboso at night¹². He who disdains the antique for nature, risks being [p.279] never but small, weak and petty in drawing, character, drapery and expression. He who will have neglected nature for the antique, will risk being cold, lifeless, without any of those hidden and secret truths that one glimpses only in nature itself. It seems to me that one should study the antique to learn to see nature.

Modern artists have revolted against the study of antiquity, because it has been preached to them by amateurs¹³ ; and modern literati have been defenders of the study of antiquity¹⁴, because it has been attacked by philosophers¹⁵.

Let's interrupt the philosopher for a moment to say a word about that charming enthusiast Winckelmann. I don't know which carpenter dared to translate his Histoire de l'art chez les Anciens, which has just appeared in 2 gr. in-8° volumes. This is a man who doesn't know French, who, I believe, doesn't hear German, but who certainly doesn't hear the book he has dared to translate. The most familiar terms of art are barely known to him; he confuses, for example, naturel and nature on every page. This excellent work should be read in German, if at all possible. It is full of warmth, enthusiasm, taste and great, profound views. The author treats the ignorant harshly, but this is because he has the utmost contempt for any man who has not spent his life in this study. As for the French translation, it's good enough to throw into the fire. And then, speak, Mr. Philosopher.

It seems to me, my friend, that statuaries hold more to antiquity than painters. Could it be that the Ancients have left us some beautiful statues and that their paintings are known to us only through the descriptions and testimony of literati. There's quite another difference between Pliny's finest line¹⁶ and Agasias' Gladiator¹⁷.

It still seems to me that it is more difficult to judge sculpture well than painting, and this opinion of mine, if true, must make me more circumspect. There is almost only a man of art who can discern in sculpture, a very beautiful thing from a common thing. No doubt the Expiring Athlete¹⁸ will touch you, wait for you, perhaps even strike you so violently that you will neither be able to separate nor attach your gaze to it ; if, however, you had to choose between this statue and le Gladiateur whose beautiful and true action certainly, is yet not made to address your soul, you would make Pigal and Falconnet laugh, if you preferred [p.280] the former to this one¹⁹. A large figure alone and all white, this is so simple, there are so few of those data that could facilitate the comparison of the work of art with that of nature. Painting reminds me in a hundred ways of what I see, of what I have seen; not so with sculpture. I dare to buy a painting based on my taste, my judgment; if it's a statue, I'll take the artist's advice.

So you believe, you may ask, that sculpture is more difficult than painting? - I don't think so. Judging is one thing, doing is another. Here's the block of marble, the figure is there, you have to pull it out²⁰. Here's the canvas, it's flat, that's what you have to create on; the image has to come out, move forward, take on relief, I have to turn around it, if not me, then my eye; it has to live. - But, add you, painted or modeled²¹. - All right, then. - And it has to live modeled without any of those life-giving resources on the palette. - But are these resources easy to use? The sculptor has everything when he has drawing, expression and the facility of the chisel; with these means he can successfully attempt a nude figure. Painting requires other things as well. As for the difficulties to be overcome in more compound subjects, it seems to me that they increase in greater number for the painter than for the sculptor. The art of grouping²² is the same, the art of draping is the same ; but the chiaroscuro²³, but the order, but the place of the scene, but the skies, but the trees, but the waters, but the props, but the backgrounds, but the color, but all its accidents ; sed non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites²⁴. Sculpture is made both for the blind and for those who see; painting is only for the eyes²⁵. On the other hand the former certainly [p.281] has fewer objects and fewer subjects than the latter: one paints whatever one wants; the severe, grave and chaste sculpture chooses²⁶. She sometimes plays around an urn or a vase, even in the largest and most pathetic compositions: in bas-relief, we see children frolicking over a basin that is to receive human blood²⁷; but it's still with a kind of dignity that she plays: she's serious, even when she's joking. No doubt she exaggerates; perhaps even exaggeration suits her better than it does painting. The painter and the sculptor are both poets, but the latter never²⁸. Sculpture suffers neither the jester, nor the burlesque, nor the pleasant, rarely even the comic; marble does not laugh^s29. Yet she gets drunk with fauns and sylvans; she has very good grace to help the satyrs put old Silene back on his mount³⁰ or support her disciple's faltering steps. She's voluptuous, but never trashy. She still retains in voluptuousness something sought-after, rare and exquisite, which tells me that her work is long, arduous and difficult, and that while it's permissible to use the brush to attach to canvas a frivolous idea that can be created in an instant and erased with a breath, it's not so with the chisel, which, depositing the artist's thought on a hard, rebellious and eternally durable material, must have made an original and uncommon choice. The pencil is more libertine than the brush, and the brush more libertine than the chisel. Sculpture presupposes a more stubborn and profound enthusiasm, more of that seemingly strong and quiet verve, more of that covered and hidden fire that boils within; it is a violent, yet silent and secret muse.

If sculpture does not suffer a common idea, neither does it suffer mediocre execution; a slight incorrectness of drawing that one would hardly deign to notice in a painting is unforgivable [p.282] in a statue. Michelangelo knew this well; where he despaired of being perfect and correct, he preferred to remain raw³¹. - But even that proves that since sculpture has less to do than painting, we demand more strictly of it than we have a right to expect. - I thought so too.

A few questions I've had about sculpture.

The first is why chaste sculpture is nonetheless less scrupulous than painting and shows the nudity of the sexes more often and more frankly³²?

It is, I think, that after all it looks less like paint. It's that the material it employs is so cold, so refractory, so impenetrable ; but above all, it's that the main difficulty in imitating it lies in the secret of softening this hard, cold material, of turning it into soft, supple flesh, of rendering the contours of the limbs of the human body, of warmly and truthfully rendering its veins, muscles, joints, reliefs, flats, inflections and sinuosities, and that a piece of drapery saves her whole months of work and study; it's that perhaps her morals, wilder and more innocent, are better [p.283] than those of painting, and that it thinks less of the present moment than of times to come. Men have not always been clothed; who knows if they always will be?

The second is why sculpture, both ancient and modern, has stripped women of the veil³³ that nature's modesty and the age of puberty cast over sexual parts, and left it to men?

I'll try to pile up my answers, so that they slip out one by one.

Cleanliness, periodic indisposition, the warmth of the climate, the convenience of pleasure, libertine curiosity and the use of courtesans who served as models in Athenes and Rome, these are the reasons that will present themselves first to any man of sense, and I believe them to be good ones. It's easy not to render what you don't find in your model. But perhaps art has more sought-after motives: it³⁴ will make you notice the beauty of this outline, the charm of this meandering, long, soft, gentle sinuosity that starts at the end of one groin and goes on alternately lowering and raising until it has reached the end of the other groin³⁵ ; he'll tell you that the path of this infinitely pleasant line would be broken in its course by an interposed tuft ; that this isolated tuft binds to nothing, and makes a stain in the woman, instead of in the man, this species of natural clothing, of rather thick shade to the nipples, goes clearing up to the truth on the sides and on the sides of the belly, but remains there although rare, and goes, without interrupting, to seek itself tighter, higher, more furnished around the natural parts ; it will show you these natural parts of man, stripped, like a small intestine, a worm of an unpleasant shape.

The third, why did the Ancients only ever drape their figures with wet cloths?

[p.284] It's because, no matter how hard one tries to characterize a fabric in marble, one never succeeds except imperfectly; that a thick, coarse fabric steals the nude that sculpture is even more jealous of pronouncing than painting, and that, whatever the truth of its folds, it will retain something heavy which, joining with the nature of the stone, will make the whole take on a false air of rock.

The fourth, why does the Laocoon have the shortened leg longer than the other?

It's because without this bold drawing incorrectness the figure would have been unpleasant to the eye. It's that there are effects of nature that must either be palliated or neglected; I bring a very common and simple example in which I challenge the greatest artist not to sin against truth or grace. I suppose a naked woman on a stone bench; whatever the firmness of her flesh, certainly the weight of her body pressing her buttocks hard against the stone on which she sits, they will blister unpleasantly from the sides, and form from behind, one and the other, the most impertinent bulge imaginable. But won't the edge of the bench make a very deep, ugly cut in her thighs underneath? So what to do? There's no wavering, you have to either close your eyes to these effects and assume that a woman [p.285] has buttocks as hard as stone and that the elasticity of her flesh cannot be overcome by the weight of her body, which is not true, or throw some drapery all around her figure that steals both the unpleasant effect and the most beautiful parts of her body from me at the same time.

The fifth is, what would be the effect of the most beautiful and true coloring of paint on a statue?

Bad, I think. Firstly, there would be only one point around the statue where this coloring would be true. Secondly, there's nothing so unpleasant as the contrast of the true set next to the false, and never will the truth of the color meet the truth of the thing; the thing is the statue alone, isolated, solid, ready to move. It's like Roslin's beautiful Hungarian stitch, on wooden hands, her beautiful satin, so true, on mannequin figures. Gouge out a statue's eye sockets and fill them with an enamel eye or a colored stone, and you'll see if you can stand the effect. You can even see from most of their busts that they preferred to leave the eyeball plain and solid than to trace the iris and mark the sloe, to imagine a blind man than to show a punctured eye; and, whether our moderns like it or not, the Ancients seem to me in this respect to have a stricter taste than they do.

.

In all the arts, unity of imitation is as essential as unity of action; and to confuse or associate together two ways of imitating nature is a barbarous thing and a thing of detestable taste. This is a principle that the Ancients respected by instinct, but which I have never read in any poetics, even though it is an essential and fundamental principle. If you intend to imitate nature in relief and in the round with marble, you must not imitate it with color; if you imitate it with color, you will not give it relief.

If your characters sing, they must not dance; if they dance, they must not sing. It's also barbaric to make them speak and sing alternately. My dear philosopher, another time, I'll make my answers to your five questions too.

Painting is divided into technique and ideal; and both are subdivided into portrait painting, genre painting, and historical painting. [p.286]Sculpture has more or less the same divisions; and just as there are women who paint the head, I wouldn't find it strange if one appeared incessantly who made the bust. Marble, as we know, is merely a copy of terracotta. Some have thought that the Ancients worked in marble first; but I don't think they've given it enough thought.

One day, Falconnet was showing me the pieces of the young sculpture students who had competed for the prize, and he saw me astonished by the vigor of expression and character, the grandeur and nobility of these works coming out from under the hands of nineteen to twenty year olds; wait for them in ten years' time from now, he told me, and I promise you they won't know any of this.... Sculptors need their models even longer than painters do, and whether they're lazy, stingy or poor, they don't call on them after the age of forty-five. Sculpture demands a simplicity, a naiveté, a rusticity of verve that is rarely retained beyond a certain age; and this is the reason why sculptors degenerate faster than painters, unless this rusticity is natural to them and of character. Pigal is gruff, Falconnet even more so; they'll do well for the rest of their lives. Le Moyne is polite, gentle, mannered, honest; he is and will remain mediocre.

Plagiarism is also possible in sculpture, but is rarely ignored. It is neither as easy to practice, nor as easy to save as in painting... And then let's go to our artists.

1Dulcinea is Dom Quixote's imaginary Lady, in Cervantes' novel: in fact, a simple peasant girl from the village of Toboso.

2 An allusion to the inner revolution that Rousseau, in Book IX of the Confessions, recounts having experienced in 1756, when he left Paris for the Ermitage de Montmorency lent to him by Madame d'Épinay. His break with Diderot dates from this period.

3 Johann Joachim Winckelmann's first opuscule, Gedancken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (Reflections on the imitation of Greek works in sculpture and painting), Friedrichstadt, printed by Christian Heinrich Hagenmüller, 1755, 40 p. in-4°, was not available in French. Just published was Histoire de l'art chez les Anciens, trans. by Gottfried Sellius and edited by J. B. R. Robinet, Paris, Saillant, 1766, 2vol. in-8°. It is this translation that Grimm, below, criticizes violently. The original was published in 1764.

4Allusion to the Belvedere Torso and Winckelmann's lyrical description of it. See, in the 1766 edition, t. II, p. 247-250, and in the Livre de Poche translation by Dominique Tassel, p. 527-529. Winckelmann was not the first to exalt the Torso as the quintessence of ancient statuary. In a lecture given on September 13, 1665, on the occasion of a visit to the Académie, Bernini took him as an example: "He repeated the defect of French painters, which is to have a small, sad and meager manner; that to correct it, it is necessary to study after the antique, principally after the torso of the Belvedere..." (Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, Paris, Pandora, 1981, p. 182).

5"Let the Artist admire in the outline of this body the continual flow of one form into another, & the moving features which, like waves, rise, fall, & mingle together" (Histoire de l'art chez les Anciens, 1766, II, 249).

6 "Il paroît que le dos ait la même signification par la maniere sublime dont il semble vouté" (Histoire de l'art chez les Anciens, 1766, II, 248). Winckelmann deduces from the shape of his back the thoughts of Hercules busy recapitulating his labors...

7According to Furetière, a ballista is a "machine of war, & espece de fronde dont se servoient les Anciens pour jeter des pierres". In other words, a catapult.

8 Understand: compared to the nerves (prominent veins) of the Belvedere's torso, the ropes of the balistes are no more than spider threads. Diderot fantasizes; in Winckelmann's description, on the contrary, we read: "The veins are all invisible there" (op. cit., p. 248).

9Glycon of Athens, sculptor of the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC, author of the Farnese Hercules, of which a Roman marble copy from the Imperial period is preserved in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Utpictura18, notice #006185 and Encyclopédie, t. XX, Dessin, pl. 33, #006189.

10Phidias (490-430), arguably the most famous sculptor of classical Greece, was notably the author of two chryselephantine statues (in ivory and gold), an Athena parthenos and an Olympian Zeus.

11 This is Winckelmann's central thesis. At the beginning of Volume II, he presents the beginnings of Greek art history as a transition from an ancient style to a sublime style, which he presents as follows: "Art was perfected in Greece when Reason & Liberty united in concert to enlighten & polish this beautiful land of the earth." (p. 18) The later Belvedere Torso is said to date from the brief period when, at the instigation of Paul-Émile, the Romans restored freedom to the Greeks: "The Torso of Hercules appears to be one of the last perfect Works that Art produced in Greece, before the loss of its freedom." (p. 250)

12Diderot compares Winckelmann to Don Quixote dreaming at night of his Dulcinea of Toboso.

13Diderot can't help but think here of the Comte de Caylus, a wealthy collector of antiquities received as an amateur at the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in 1731, then at the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1742, much to Diderot's scandal. Caylus was interested in archaeology, a discipline in its infancy at the time. He published, in 7 volumes from 1752 to 1767, a Recueil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines, and in 1755 a Mémoire sur la peinture à l'encaustique et sur la peinture à la cire, an ancient painting technique whose secret he claimed to have rediscovered. Diderot vigorously contested it.

14A reference to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which had continued into the 18th century with the Querelle d'Homère, sparked by Mme Dacier's translation, which was intended to be scrupulously faithful to the original text.

15 Is Diderot once again taking aim at Rousseau?

16Allusion to the descriptions of paintings in Book XXXV of Pliny's Natural History.

17The Borghese Gladiator, now in the Louvre, MA527, see #011269 and Encyclopédie, t. XX, pl. 37, #011270. Winckelmann, who refers to him several times, always calls him "the so-called Gladiator of the Villa Borghese" (in the 1766 trad., "Le Gladiateur nommé Borghesien"). He is described precisely, in the 1766 ed., II, 288-289; LP, p. 556.

18The Dying Gaul, a Roman copy in the Capitoline Museum after a bronze statue made for the monument to Attalus II by Epigonos of Pergamon. He is also said to be Gladiateur mirmillon, or Mirmille mourant. See #010267, #019982 (engraving by Audran).
This sculpture is apparently not mentioned by Winckelmann. It had been described by Abbé Du Bos (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, I, 38, énsb-a, 1993, p. 128). Jaucourt repeats Du Bos's description in the article Gladiateur expirant in the Encyclopédie (1757).

19 According to Diderot, who follows Falconet and Pigalle, the Gladiateur Borghèse (which, incidentally, was retained for the plates of proportions in the Drawing section of the plates of the Encyclopédie) should therefore be preferred to the Gladiateur expirant. Yet it is this that he will use as an example in the Paradoxe sur le comédien to evoke the comedian's "cold sense". The Sculpture article in the Encyclopédie, which is by Falconet, mentions theGladiator (borghese) three times and ranks it among the nine masterpieces of ancient sculpture; the Gladiator exhaling is not mentioned.

20 The idea of a virtual presence of the statue in the block of marble goes back to Leonardo da Vinci: "The sculptor must, in producing his work, make a manual, striking effort to remove the superfluity of the marble or stone whatever, which exceeds the figure enclosed within it; which requires an exercise all mechanical." (Traité de la peinture, trans. A. Chastel, Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1987, p. 98)

21I.e., prepared for carving: the sculptor prepared a modello, usually terracotta, from which to carve the stone. See more precisely Furetière's article: "verb. act. Faire un modele, a pattern. This Sculptor models all his figures in wax, in plastre, before carving them in marble.
Modeler, also means, to draw in hollow, to make molds on the illustrious works of Antiquity. Le Roy had the Trajan colomn modeled, and the hollows were brought to France. Almost all the beautiful figures of Antiquity have been modeled, & several copies have been made in plaster in the hollows drawn on the original."

22Group: organize characters, figures, into groups. "Group" is defined in the Encyclopédie as a painting term ("assemblage of several objects which are so close together or united, that the eye embraces them at once") and as a sculpture term ("groppo, meaning knot: it is an assemblage of two, three, or a greater number of figures, which compose a subject"). An example of a group in sculpture, cited by the Encyclopédie, is the Laocoon.

23This is no doubt an echo of the comparison between La Rencontre du pape Léon 1er et d'Attila treated in fresco by Raphael (#016360) and the Algarde bas-relief on the same subject (#016359). See section 50 of Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture by Abbé Du Bos, ensb-a, p. 166. Winckelmann repeats this comparison in Réflexions sur l'imitation des œuvres grecques dans la peinture et la sculpture, 1755, trad. fr., 1786, p. 35-36, but there is no longer any question of chiaroscuro or the effect of degradation when one goes to the bottom.

24 "It is not for us to settle all these disputes between you." Palemon's reply to Menarchus at the end of the 3rd eglogue of Virgil's Bucolics .

25Diderot here takes up the thesis developed by Roger de Piles for whom "drawing is not a matter of sight, but of touch [...]: it therefore does not define the essence of painting but that of sculpture since painting is exclusively an art of sight, whereas sculpture is also an art of touch." (Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Tache aveugle, Gallimard, Nrf essais, 2003, p. 19)

26 Asyndète: we sculpt only a few subjects, themselves comprising only a few objects (which we are therefore obliged to choose), while we paint all the subjects and all the objects we want.

27See perhaps the Bacchanale d'enfants by Étienne Le Hongre. The vase was arranged in 1683 in the bosquet of the Versailles ballroom, MR 3469, inv. 1850.9164. The children's bacchanal motif is widespread in 18th-century bas-reliefs, but the human blood is an exaggeration by Diderot.

28The sculptor never ventures into caricature. See the end of the article Charger in Furetière: "Charger, in terms of Painting, means, Defiguring a thing, adding to the truth, making a burlesque exaggeration of the main features that contribute to the likeness. This painter has charged this portrait, to say, he has indeed made a portrait that resembles something, but he has disfigured it, he has made it ridiculous. It is also said figuratively. This slanderer has loaded the story he tells us, he has added many things of his own."

29This shocking formula anticipates, in a way negatively, that of D'Alembert's Rêve de D'Alembert : "for finally this sensibility that you substitute for it, if it is a general and essential quality of matter, it is necessary that the stone feels."

30 Silenus' triumphs, or drunken Silenus, usually depict him mounted on a donkey.

31According to L. Versini, allusion to Michelangelo's slaves. See #020723 and #020724.

32This is the question posed by Michel Anguier at the start of his August 2, 1670 lecture on the Laocoon. "Why naked?" he asks.

33Hair.

34He = the man of meaning.

35Libertine transposition of Hogarth's line of beauty. Diderot had just read the Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753) and will refer to it explicitly in the Salon of 1767.