Lepicious

My friend, what if we kept on making tales?...

162. William the Conqueror's Descent into England

William the Conqueror's Descent into England - Lepicié — William the Conqueror's descent into England - Lepicié

A general could hardly have made his soldiers understand better that they had to win or die¹, than by burning the ships that had brought them². And so William did. The beautiful line for the historian ! the beautiful model for the conqueror ! the beautiful subject for the painter ! provided [p.241] that this painter is not Lépicié³ ! What moment do you think this one chose⁴ ? The one where the flame consumes the ships, and the general announces to his army the terrible alternative⁵. You think you see on canvas the ships in flames ; William on his horse talking to his troops ; and on this innumerable multitude of faces all the variety of impressions, worry, surprise, admiration, terror, despondency and joy ! Your head fills with groups ; there you search for William's true action, the characters of his principal officers, the silence or murmur, rest or movement of his army⁶. Take it easy, and don't go to any trouble that the artist has dispensed withé ! When you have genius, there are no ungrateful moments⁷. Genius makes all things fruitful.

To the right, on the side of the sea and the ships, we see a faint glow, smoke, which indicates that the fire has fallené ; a few idle and mute soldiers, without movement, without passion, without character ; then, all alone, a fat man running, arms outstretched, shouting at the top of his lungs, and whom I asked a hundred times who he was after, without being able to find out⁸. Then William, in the center of his army, on his horse, advancing from right to left, as in his country, and on a common occasion ; he is preceded by marching infantry and cavalry, on the same side and seen from the back⁹. No noise, no tumult, no military enthusiasm, no bugles, no trumpets. This is a thousand times colder and more sullen than the passage of a regiment under the walls of a provincial town, on its way to its garrison¹⁰. Three objects alone stand out ; this fat, short, heavy pedestrian figure, placed alone between William and the burnt vessels, arms outstretched and [p.242] shouting unheard¹¹. Guillaume on his horse. Man and horse as heavy and as monstrous, as false and as sad, less noble and less significant than your Louis XIV from Place Vendôme¹² ; and then the enormous back of a rider, and the even more enormous rump of his horse.

But, my friend, would you like a painting ? Leave these figures pretty much as distributed, and flip¹³. Ignite the vessels, make William speak, and show me on the faces the passions, with their expression heightened by the reddish glow of the vessels' flame ; may the fire serve you yet to produce some amazing effect of light¹⁴. The layout of the figures lends itself to this, even without changing it. [But see, my friend, the prestige¹⁵ of expanse and mass]. This composition strikes, calls first, but doesn't stop. If I had the head of Le Sueur¹⁶, of Rubens¹⁷, Carracci¹⁸ or any other, I'd tell you how we could have taken advantage of the moment the artist preferred ; but in the absence of one of these heads, I don't know. I can only conceive of the need to replace the interest of the moment, which is neglected, with je ne sais quoi de sublime, which goes very well with apparent or real tranquility, and which is infinitely above movement. Witness this Déluge universel by Poussin¹⁹, where there are only three or four figures. But who [p.243] finds such things ? and when the artist has found them, who feels them ? In the theater, it's not in the violent scenes, where the multitude goes into raptures, that the great actor shows me his talent. Nothing is so easy as to indulge in fury, insults and outbursts. It's : Take a seat, Cinna ; not :

Un son all disgusted with his father's murder,
Etakes his head in his hand, demanding his wages,

that it's hard to say well²⁰. The author, who here plays up the role of the moment in painting²¹, is half the effect of declamation. It's when passion held back, covered up, concealed, secretly boils deep in the heart, like fire in the underground cauldron of volcanoes, it's in the moment before the explosion, it's sometimes in the moment after it, that I see what a man knows how to do²² ; and what would make me a bit vain would be to be worth something when the paintings are worth nothing²³. It's in the quiet scene that the actor shows me his intelligence, his judgment. It is when the painter has left aside all the advantage he could gain from a hot moment, that I expect from him great characters, rest, silence, and all the wonder of a rare ideal and a technique almost as rare²⁴. You'll find a hundred painters pulling themselves out of a battle engaged ; you won't find one pulling himself out of a battle lost or won. Nothing²⁵ replaces, in Lépicié's painting, the interest he neglected. There is neither harmony nor nobility²⁶. It's dry²⁷, tough and raw.

This painting is 26 feet wide by 12 feet high.

All this subtle theory of the effect²⁸ of rest and silence in works of poetry and painting would deserve to be better developed. I know of nothing written on the subject.

Notes

Vincere aut mori, motto of the Roman gladiators. It's the motto that can be read on the banner brandished behind William.

Agathocles of Syracuse, when he attacked Carthage in the 4th century, after landing his troops there, had his ships burnt to make retreat impossible : the soldiers now had no choice but between victory and death. William the Conqueror is said to have done the same in the XI^e century (Battle of Hastings, 1066) and Herman Cortès in the XVI^e.

The succession of exclamation marks presents the beginning of the text as praise, in the tradition of the epidictic genre of ekphrasis (the rhetorical exercise of description is historically thought to fall under praise). But the last exclamation ruins all the others.

On the choice of moment, see the article Composition in the Encyclopédie. For Diderot, the composition of a history painting involves first sequencing the story to be represented, then choosing one of the sequences, a " instant " or a " moment ".

The moment chosen is that of an alternative, i.e. a swing. In the article Composition, taking the example of the Jugement d'Hercule, Diderot favors the instant following the swing, when Hercules has just made his choice.

Diderot reconstructs a virtual painting from the chosen moment : an event and the repercussions of that event ; at the center, the speech of the protagonist, Guillaume, and around him the variety of reactions from his soldiers.

Diderot suggests here that the moment chosen by Lépicié was neither the easiest nor the most effective to compose. In contrast to the ungrateful instant, there is what Lessing would name, in the Laocoon (1766), the fecund, or pregnant instant.

This character, to Guillaume's right (completely right in the image, which is truncated), asks him why he burned the ships. William turns to answer him and points with his wielding sword at the green banner, which is the color of the Normans. Between William and the soldier, the baniwhite banner signifies the swing of choice: "Vincere aut mori". Compare with Hallé's Trajan (#001043).

Diderot doesn't grasp the gesture imagined by Lépicié : Guillaume's horse and Guillaume himself turn backwards at the interpellation of the soldier on the right, when they had already gone towards the English and the battle. They turn back to the burnt-out ships, now that it's a question of victory or death. The soldiers and horsemen ahead of him, further to the left, make the same disgruntled gesture. Lépicié has well captured the moment when they are almost completely resolved to battle, the moment immediately preceding the common adherence to " defeat or die ".

Diderot substitutes a genre subject for the history scene : he trivializes the scene.

He has been heard by Guillaume, who turns towards him. Diderot, on the other hand, clearly spots the interposition, constitutive of the screen device.

La place Vendôme was the square where the Saint-Ovide fair was held, and where the farces of the fair theater were performed. See #011393. Theequestrian statue of Louis XIV at its center was destroyed in 1792 and melted down to produce cannons. A new equestrian statue of Louis XIV was inaugurated in 1822.

As all the characters turn towards the burning ships, to the right : a change of position for the characters, but also a change of moment. We return to the first virtual painting imagined by Diderot.

By this expression Diderot désignifies chiaroscuro.

The illusion effect. That whole sentence in parenthesesèses, which doesn't appear in the Literary Correspondence, was added to the copy destined for Catherine II as well as to that of the Vandeul collection.

The convocation of all the highest authorities in classical painting prepares the overthrow : the unglamorous moment chosen by Lépicié, which is not the easy moment enabling the great effects of the grand genre to be deployed, is a weak moment : it would be the sublime moment if Lépicié had lived up to his choice. Thus, in Saint Gervais and saint Protais led in procession to sacrifice a sheep to Jupiter (#001005) Le Sueur has depicted the saints in effect as if they were being led to martyrdom. They're not supposed to have yet refused to worship idols before Astasius, so they can't already play out the tragic moment of their execution. Strictly speaking, nothing happens in this painting : the instant chosen by Le Sueur is an ambiguous artifact that condenses refusal, sacrifice and martyrdom, i.e. the whole story. This null instant is a total instant.

In The Abduction of the Daughters of Leucippus (#000847), Rubens knows how to depict a horse and rider turning around as they move forward.

Although Diderot veryregularly refers to the Carracci brothers, it's most often in a vague way, as models of great classical painting, often associated in a list with other great Italian painters. On two occasions, however, in 1761 and 1767, he refers to a Descente de croix, perhaps the National Gallery painting also known as The Three Marys. (#005882)

#005173. Compare with Bassano's Déluge, which is teeming with characters (#004242). Poussin prefers to isolate, in an end-of-the-world landscape, the gesture of a mother who, knowing she is doomed, raises her child above her, believing she can save him. A sublime gesture, when we know that all, in the end, will be drowned...

Two passages from the same tragedy by Corneille. The second describes the Roman civil war in the epic register, a register expected in a tragedy. The first (one of Corneille's most famous lines) initially disarms the viewer with its almost trivial simplicity : Augustus has just discovered Cinna's plot against him ; instead of déchaining his anger and revenge, he announces his forgiveness. Difficult for an actor to say well such a simple sentence which must produce such a sublime effect !

The moment determines the painter's composition of the painting in the same way that the playwright determines the actor's representation of the scene. For Diderot, the instant is therefore textual in nature: it is the cutting of the narrative sequence into the text of the story.

The best moment is therefore not the paroxysmal moment, is not the climactic moment of the action (the " hot moment "), but just before, or just after.

The logical sequence is a little elliptical here: the commentary on the painting comes after the painting itself, its ability to produce an effect on the imagination of the reader-spectator is weaker than that of the painting itself. The commentary is therefore in the position of the weak, textual moment that follows the strong, visual moment of the painting. If the author of genius chooses precisely the weak instant to produce a sublime effect with very few means, Diderot commentator is in a position to produce, through his commentary, the sublime effect that the failed painting will have missed.

Here we see the appearance of the two notions that would constitute the central theoretical couple of the Salon of 1767, the technical and the ideal.

Asyndète. Understand : But alas, nothing replaces...

Harmony is the quality of color, while nobility is that of drawing. In the next sentence, " sec " is opposed to " nobility ", " hard and raw " - to " harmony ".

" An Author, orator, Poet sec, aridus, jejunus, who is neither abundant in thought nor rich in expression. A dry style, devoid of the amenities, the ornaments that make style beautiful. A dry matter, which does not provide what to treat it with pleasure, with elegance. " (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, ed. 1771, VII, 608.)

The question of composition has become a theory of effect : this shift is characteristic of the shift from the poetic to the aesthetic regime (Rancière).