Summary and Analysis of Grigsby’s Argument
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Based on: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Nudity à la grecque in 1799,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 80, no. 2 (June 1998), pp. 311-35

summarize Grigsby’s argument in 1-2 paragraphs and then use the rest of your response to evaluate the effectiveness of her argument. How does she reveal the connections between art, fashion, politics, and morality? How does she structure her argument and what kind of evidence does she use? What did you find most interesting about her argument, or what did you find most unconvincing and why?
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Nudity à la grecque in 1799
Author(s): Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 311-335
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051235
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Nudity a la grecque in 1799
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Wake up the women at the right ofJacques-Louis David’s Oath
of the Horatii of 1785 and place them between the male
warriors (Fig. 1). Now remove the men’s clothes. This is the
startling, even preposterous, double move of David’s Intervention
of the Sabines of 1799 (Fig. 2). If David’s martyr portraits of
isolated, unconscious, and eroticized male bodies, like his
Death ofJoseph Bara of 1793 (Fig. 3), astutely and economically
offered an iconography for the radical fraternal Republic, his
transposition of the solitary male nude into a syntax that
prominently included dressed women proved problematic.
The tableau’s awkward character derives from the tensions
not only between female dress and male nudity but also
between the women’s action and the men’s friezelike stasis,
between the pathos now displaced onto the female figures
and the technical precision lavished on the evacuated husks
of the standing male academies.
Scholarship has for the most part treated the novel conjunction
of naked male bodies and newly central female protagonists
as separate issues. While the nudes have been described
in terms of David’s stylistic development toward a greater
classical Greek purism, the Sabine women’s prominence has
been interpreted as affording a familial basis for the reconciliation
of a divided and warring post-Revolutionary France.
Aesthetic priorities (male nudity) and narrative saliency
(female intervention) have often been held asunder.
Historians have also typically emphasized the success rather
than the tensions of David’s stilted and theatrical painting.
That success, we have been told, hinged on women’s capacity
1 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785. Paris, Mus&e du Louvre (photo: ? Reunion des Musees Nationaux, RMN)
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312 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
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to integrate a fractured society. As daughters of the Sabines
and wives of the Romans, the Sabine women were objects of
exchange that unified a new people. Marginalized from the
public sphere of the radical Jacobin fraternal order, women
during the Directory could be shuffled onto center stage in
order strategically to represent another familial basis for
community. This has been the emphasis of scholars like
Stefan Germer, who has argued that women, “confined to the
private sphere all along,” could embody “a new ethical
foundation for society,” and Dorothy Johnson, who has
characterized the work as an “image of savage and primordial
maternity,” which celebrates “women’s primordial and essential
role in the creation of civilization.”‘ By contrast, Ewa
Lajer-Burcharth has emphasized women’s feminist activism
during the French Revolution and David’s reliance on women
as figurations of disorder. However, she, too, has argued that
the Intervention of the Sabines ultimately contains the threat
posed by women by binding them to the roles of mothers and
wives, effectively circumscribing their activity within a family
configuration. According to Lajer-Burcharth, David’s tableau
represents above all a “defense of the patrilinearity of the
family” and thereby functions “as a kind of safeguard image,
indeed a ‘salutary imago’ of the male republican self at the
end of the revolution.”2
These accounts take as their premise the success of David’s
tableau. Their deconstruction of its ideological workings
depends on the assumption that the painting matched its
audience’s needs, that David with typical savvy enabled a
society undergoing rapid change to redefine itself. Indeed, we
rely on David’s paintings to tell us about those social and
political transformationsW. e understand them to be constitutive
of such shifts. Problems arise, however, when his paintings
are extricated from the field of contention in which they were
made and received. In his best pictures, David almost always
took risks that were hotly debated. This was part and parcel of
his art’s productive work; its eloquence and intelligence
resided in David’s capacity to locate such hot spots, such vital
sites of dissension and anxiety. In fact, David’s Interventiono f
theS abinesd id not reconcile its fractured audience. Displayed
at eye level, opposite a mirror, in a commercial exhibition, the
painting was certainly a box-office success, attracting some
fifty thousand visitors over its unprecedented five-year run.3
But the votes made by admission fees are evidence less of
consensus than of interest, and that interest, this paper will
argue, derived from the work’s controversy, its failure to
deploy antiquity as a unifying metaphorical language. Ironically,
David’s very success in giving revolution antique form
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 313
ultimately led to classicism’s loss of authority. Nudity a la
grecque in 1799 could not be disengaged from the dramatic
return of women to center stage.
The Nudity of Heroes
The controversies surrounding David’s tableau are well known,
if not sufficiently interrogated. David himself mapped them
out in a brochure distributed to all paying visitors, thereby
situating the work within an exhibitory frame of dissension.
The artist felt compelled to offer long, erudite textual
arguments replete with important antecedents to defend the
innovative entrepreneurial exhibition and the nudity of his
tableau’s male protagonists.4 David’s text arguably attempted
to control debate as well as to instantiate it. In fact, contemporaries
seized his terms and continued to dispute both choices
for years.5 I would argue that the controversies were interrelated
and that the scandal of David’s tableau resided in the
ways it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public
spectacle. Indeed, it was the commercial presentation of
antiquity as a site of nakedness and the mingling of genders
and classes that made David’s epic painting such a provocation
to the critics of Directory France.
For David, the nude signified art because it signified
antiquity. In his “Note on the Nudity of My Heroes,” the
painter described the nude as a greater artistic achievement
than the clothed figure and offered a classical pedigree for
the ideal form. He explicitly stated that his goal was to paint a
work that the Greeks and Romans would not have found
foreign to their customs. Significantly, the artist presumed
that authenticity, even transparency, to the classical world
would be valued in modern France. To speak to the ancients
was to speak to Frenchmen, but the signs of that veracity
(male nudity) required an exegesis, even a defense, appended
to the brochure that addressed his fellow countrymen.
David’s goal, that the ancients would not find his
painting foreign to their customs, admitted the possibility of
disparate cultural boundaries, but his unexamined assumption
that Frenchmen would respect and understand the
language of the ancients refused to acknowledge such fundamental
difference. The painter’s profound faith in the sociopolitical
efficacy and relevance of classicism could not fully
control the paradox between universalist and relativist models
of culture. David would never know whether the ancients
found his tableau foreign to their customs, but he certainly
discovered that many of his countrymen considered it alien to
their own.
As classical ideal, nudity held out a promise to transcend
the messy particularities of actual social relations. For David,
nudity was the guarantor of art’s aesthetic power to ameliorate
a stratified and fractured society. During the Directory, in
spite of the crisis of the Terror, it was still possible to believe in
the wholeness of the body. The dream of transparency to an
embodied truth was imagined by the Ideologue Amaury
Duval: “The dressed man is a mask; he is only himself
undressed; it is men one must paint and not the simulacra of
men.”6 Nonetheless, the faith expressed by David and Duval
was under siege in 1799.7 For some of their contemporaries,
nudity exacerbated rather than alleviated class tensions.
While Lajer-Burcharth has asserted that David’s idealized
3 David, TheD eath ofJosephB ara, 1793. Avignon, Mus&eC alvet
(photo: ? RMN)
nudes offered the bourgeois male viewer an illusory fiction of
“a unified and autonomous self” (410), a number of David’s
critics believed the nudity of his tableau’s figures to be in
conflict with bourgeois interests and taste.
Most simply, this was a matter of a failure on the part of the
bourgeoisie to appreciate the artistic language of antiquity.
That failure was implicitly criticized in a dialogue in the
Journal des Arts. After an amateur declared he found the figure
of Tatius at left “Beautiful, but too nude,” an art student
vaunted his commitment to nudity as part of his artistic
credentials. The student ridiculed the amateur’s “bourgeois”
preference for draped chiffon, an implicit jab at that class’s
narcissistic investment in portraiture as well as its materialism.
But it was the critic for Le Courrierd es Spectaclesw ho offered the
most vehement and adamantly literal attack on the nudity in
the Sabines. Permitting art no metaphorical latitude, the
author “C.Z.” could not forgive David for portraying warriors
unrealistically: no people, antique or “savage,” placed naked
men in circumstances requiring clothing.8
For literal-minded, post-Revolutionary critics like C.Z.,
classicism was no more than a foreign and anachronistic set of
customs.9 Despite its heritage as France’s most respected
aesthetic tradition, classicism’s conventions could be ridiculed
in 1799 as an affectation alien to French habits and
values. Moreover, the risk posed by a painting like the Sabines
was not simply that it was anachronistic but that it rendered
the ruling class vulnerable, all too easily provoking workingclass
ridicule of bourgeois pretensions. Burlesquing the
pedantic affectations of elites had been a mainstay of comedy
since the seventeenth century, but here male nudity is the
focus of the social critic. C.Z., tongue in cheek, evoked the
stuff of panicky nightmares: “A dressed hero is far more
imposing. If you send him nude in the middle of a public
place, I strongly doubt that the dressed people who surround
him, will see him with eyes other than those of his valet de
chambre, and you know how difficult it is to be a hero in the
eyes of the latter.”10
C.Z. astutely denigrated the classical hero by redefining
him in specifically contemporary French terms. Romulus and
Tatius became vulnerable, naked Frenchmen stripped of
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314 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
clothing and class authority before a (disrespectful) crowd of
dressed domestic servants. Although David had argued that it
was customary among ancient painters, sculptors, and poets
to represent gods and heroes nude, it was clear to C.Z. that
such a custom inverts class prerogatives: so the elite must go
bare while the common people enjoy the privileges of
clothing! If the reasoning is unsophisticated, it better underscores
the extent to which the reception of nudity could
depend on class standing.
Chaussard’s Defense
Between David’s text and the critics of nudity there is an
incommensurable gap. If the artist privileges classical aesthetic
criteria with little thought to the discrepancy between
ancient cultures and his own, the hostile critics privilege
French social practices as the circumscribing conditions of art
making and feign ignorance of the French academic pictorial
tradition. However, David’s most eloquent republican champion,
the Ideologue Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, offered a
more complex assessment of the Sabines.11 In contrast to
David, who presumed that the tableau could produce a
unified public appreciative of his antiquarian references and
deployment of nudity, Chaussard argued that the controversial
reception of the male nudes appropriately differentiated
strata of French society.12 The republican critic admitted that
David’s sublime language of antiquity, particularly his male
nudes, would be understood solely by an elite, but he believed
the painting ameliorated a divided society by offering different
bases of appeal: “While [David’s] enemies go to the
painting to seek flaws; his rivals to seek torments; his emulators
to seek lessons; the philosopher to seek an object of
profound meditation; the friend of the arts to seek pleasure
mixed with admiration; the multitude throngs to find new
and lively sensations. For [the multitude], it is really only a
spectacle” (Chaussard, 39). Appreciation of antiquity requires
sophistication, but the touching narrative of family
strife and reconciliation requires no special initiation and
appeals to the multitude since “man is above all avid for
strong sensations or emotions” (Chaussard, 3).
Even as he praised David’s accomplishment, Chaussard
betrayed his ambivalence: “The vulgar only seize expressions
of a common and trivial nature; those [expressions] of a
superior order and le beau idealescape them by their elevation,
or overpower and humiliate them by their grandeur. It is the
pathos of the subject that attracts the crowd around this
tableau” (Chaussard, 38). Thus, while an educated segment
of the audience can appreciate le beau ideal and the painting’s
exemplary, elevated style and message, the multitude is
hungry only for the sensations offered by the spectacle of
pathos. Chaussard referred to David’s work as a “drama,” but
he attempted to distance it from the popular spectacle’s more
unruly and boisterous modes of acclaim. The Sabines, he
argued, stunned the multitude into “religious silence” (39).
For Chaussard, David’s painting at once revealed class divisions
and ameliorated them not only by gathering all people
before the canvas but also by transforming the behavior of the
“crowd” into something more closely resembling dignity. The
pathos of the familial drama-women’s emotional intervention
between ennobled men d l’antique-drew the crowd
before the painting, and this was good. But the fit between
crowd and female emotional expressivity had to be mediated,
even transformed, by an intervening model of appropriate
noble behavior. That onerous burden was born by Hersilia
(Fig. 4).
Like Amaury Duval, Chaussard praised this woman in white
for her noble status. Hersilia was distinguished from the
women who surround her not only by her ideal character and
beauty but also by “the dignity of her suffering, the highest
trait characterizing a being and a spirit outside the common
condition” (Chaussard, 8). By contrast, the other women,
who rush forward, disheveled, with burning tears and uncovered
breasts, expressed “passions in common conditions or
vulgar persons” (9). Chaussard was right to differentiate
Hersilia from her emotive chorus.13 In David’s painting, the
central heroine at once divides the warring men from each
other and protects the audience from the hurling propulsion
of the expressive female figures. Hersilia stands, legs and arms
outstretched, like a dam containing the impacted wall of
disorder behind her. Only her left hand fails to reach
Romulus’s shield; this is the weakest point of containment,
and the women and children pour forth through the opening,
the babies tumbling like waves onto the foreground strip
of earth.
Chaussard and David alike relied on Hersilia to mediate
between nobility and vulgarity, between the inexpressive
stilted male heroes and the emotional female chorus. Given
her pivotal role in the reconciliation of antitheses, it comes as
no surprise that David struggled long and hard to give her
form and was never fully satisfied. In a series of preparatory
drawings, the painter progressively tidied up and contained
the agitated rhythms of her figure (Figs. 5, 6). While her
flapping hair and the rippling waves of her bodice initially
radiated out from her form, in the final painting, hair and
costume are circumscribed, polished and made to adhere
closely to the smooth orbs of her head and breasts. Hersilia is
increasingly likened to the two male protagonists in position
and scale as well as pose, the parallel disposition of their legs
establishing a powerful rhythm across the picture’s surface
(with a final piquant note sounded by the leg of the twisting
ephebic youth who retreats at right). Conjoining the tableau’s
female and male perpendicular axes, Hersilia’s cruciform
figure is, therefore, the very fulcrum of the composition. As
the solitary embodiment of feminine nobility, she alone
forces women’s propelling expressivity into the static horizontal
frieze of artful masculine display.
Chaussard’s criticism of the Sabines offered a subtle defense
of David’s classicizing idiom by emptying the male nudes of
narrative signification and displacing expressivity as well as
temporality onto the female figures. The women act-they
intervene-in order that the men may stop acting and
thereby assume the stasis identified with art. The suspension
of the men’s action, the transformation of war into display,
permits the male bodies to become le beau iddal. Hersilia’s
contradictory role is both to enact intervention and to stop
time. She functions to arrest the male protagonists’ activity
but also to dam up women’s emotive narrative momentum. In
so doing, she is meant to reconcile the incommensurable
categories engendered by this splitting of painting’s function
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 315
4 David, Interventiono f theS abines,d etail
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316 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
5 David, preparatory study for Interventiono f theS abines,1 794.
Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, D partement des Arts Graphique
(photo: ? RMN)
6 David, preparatory study for Interventiono f theS abines,1 795.
Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphique
(photo: ? RMN)
into elite aesthetics (statuary) and popular expressivity
(drama). There are risks to this double move, however. As the
hostile criticism of the Sabines attests, the female figures were
not capable of securely metamorphosing naked men into an
autonomous realm of art, nor could Hersilia deflect criticism
from her own form. A heroine’s noble status at the interstices
of (high) art and (popular) spectacle was not so easily
secured.
Chaussard effectively accommodated the dissension between
David and C.Z. concerning the status of male nudity by
reading their aesthetic disagreement as a matter of class
difference. The “grandeur” of nudity, Chaussard implied,
went over C.Z.’s head, but the drama of David’s painting was
pitched downward to his (uninitiated) level. Chaussard attempted
to defend classical nudity by segregating it from
wider society as an inviolate realm of le beau ideal. For the
republican critic, the ultimate achievement of David’s painting
was its capacity to preserve that (masculine) classical ideal
by offering another axis of (feminine) spectacular pathos.
Nonetheless, Chaussard’s argument ultimately failed to preserve
the aesthetic isolation of David’s male nudes. Indeed,
C.Z.’s voice erupted at the end of his text even as he
attempted to refute it. Suddenly, Chaussard, like C.Z., conjured
the abhorrent vision of the Frenchman robbed of
clothes.
There is a man who must dread to see himself nude; it is
the man of our modern ages, it is the being degraded
physically as well as morally, deformed by swaddling, by all
the bonds by which he is and continues to be strangled,
compressed by his clothes, bent under the ridicule of
fashions, branded by idleness, by pleasures and vices.
(Chaussard, 38)
Nothing could be more loathsome than the sight of modern
man stripped bare, not because he would be humiliated
before his servants but because his body had been permanently
inscribed by his (vulgar) cultural practices, particularly
fashion. Unlike David’s figures, contemporary man had been
degraded physically as well as morally by French sartorial
habits, by swaddling clothes, by all his confining bonds. The
male body of the French nation was deformed, bent, branded,
and strangled. Chaussard’s rhetorical violence, recalling the
character of Revolutionary debates, bespoke particular anxiety
concerning the bodies of France’s newborn male citizens.
14
Chaussard’s discourse differs significantly from pre-Revolutionary
attacks against outmoded signs of privilege and social
rank. Pleasure and vice were once associated with the falsity of
makeup and powdered wigs of an unproductive aristocratic
class, but Chaussard’s rhetoric does not target specific social
groups. Instead, his criticism is leveled at the plethora of
improvised and innovative attachments to the body-the
deformation of a whole and intact masculinity by a debased
and artificial set of outward signs. Most significantly, this
socially undifferentiated creature is molded by a commodifled
fashion available to all members of society. The republican’s
text drew on Revolutionary (and Rousseauist) criticism
of nature’s perversion by artificial institutions.15 Among other
things, the Revolution was supposed to have liberated the
bodies of French citizens heretofore oppressed by the artifice
and social stratification of ancien regime dress.16 The paradox,
however, is that the Revolutionary investment in the
body as a natural sign had ushered in an increasingly arbitrary
and ephemeral system of fashion. Unmoored from traditional
class privileges, clothing became a matter of invention.17 Lynn
Hunt has described the Revolutionary preoccupation with
the decoration of the body as an attempt to achieve transparency
(clothing directly signifying the interiority of the Revolutionary
Self).’*s But to invent Revolutionary signs-whether
sartorial or political-was to engender an atmosphere of
intense competition and rapid obsolescence, a habitual restless
revolution. Although the Republic expended enormous
resources in a semiotics of legitimation, the result was a more
conspicuous notion of transience.
Fashion’s pace of innovation and obsolescence only accelerated
during the Directory. Never before had dress changed so
quickly. In the year that David’s exhibition of the Sabines
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 317
7 Cafi of theI ncroyablese,n graving, ca. 1797. Paris, Mus~e
Carnavalet (photo: ? phototheque des Musees de la Ville de
Paris)
opened, one critic bemoaned the speed with which la mode
metamorphosed: this alarming acceleration of market pressures
ruined families, marriages, and virtuous women.19
Chaussard, too, in his social commentary of 1798, Le nouveau
Diable boiteux, likened fashion to the winds.20 The provisionality
and arbitrariness of sartorial styles did not represent an
evacuation of political signification, however. On the contrary,
dress during the Directory became an explicit marker of
political allegiances. Stratified post-Thermidor France produced
a highly inventive and factionalized fashion. While the
male members of the royalist so-called golden youth, those
post-Thermidor dandies known as muscadins and incroyables,
expressed their resistance to the republican government by a
flamboyant elaboration of English styles, the revolutionary
exclusifs flaunted an opposing set of sartorial signifiers (Figs. 7,
8).21 Within this highly politicized and self-conscious semiotic
system, the royalists’ black collars were understood against the
Jacobins’ red collars, the counter-Revolutionaries’ long hairstyles
replete with “dogs’ ears” sideburns against the Jacobin
short haircuts (les t0tes tondues).22 In such a factionalized and
accelerated climate of experimentation, contemporary dress
clearly offered no single “national” set of markers. Rather
than emanating from the court, French fashion, like French
society, was splintered into dissenting camps.
For Chaussard, therefore, David’s male nudes signified a
renunciation of fashion, an ideal distanced from the volatile
inconstancy of ephemeral social practices. Nudity a l’antique
offered a solution to the transient signs of social organization.
As the sculptor Pierre Cartellier later complained in a letter to
Antoine-Denis Chaudet, the “mask” of fashion was subject to
fifty variations in the course of the century.23 Nudity, by
contrast, proposed a certainty, a truth untouched by the
continual revolution of style. Nudity, so the argument went,
“?~,.i~LtT~kJ~
8 The Exclusive, from A. J. de Barruel-
Beauvert, Caricatureps olitiques,
1797-98. Paris, Bibliotheque
Nationale
stood outside time. Nonetheless, Chaussard’s outburst betrays
him: “There is a man who must dread to see himself nude; it is
the man of our modern ages … bent under the ridicule of
fashions.” To describe nudes in terms of contemporary
Frenchmen’s bodies, even in order to oppose them, is to
admit to their relation. Nudity a la grecque inevitably led to the
specter of nakedness in turn-of-the-century France. And even
the naked body was inscribed by its cultural and historical
specificity; it was branded and deformed by its social practices.
There was no retrievable generalized and ideal sign
among real bodies. David’s shift to male nudity from the
antique dress of his pre-Revolutionary tableaux Horatii and
The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, appears to
have been difficult to defend.
David’s Nudes
In the criticism attending David’s Sabines, the nude male
heroes were viewed, on the one hand, as metaphoric idealizations,
whole and complete classical nudes; on the other hand,
as literal and veristic men stripped of clothes. David’s painting
itself must be held responsible for the polarized interpretations
it engendered; Intervention of the Sabines provoked debate
about the status of nudity by juxtaposing two very different
naked male figures (Figs. 9, 10). One of their explicit
differences has been lost due to modifications David made to
the canvas in 1808. Until that date, Tatius’s frontally disposed
figure displayed genitals. Although the painting now deploys
the scabbard in a way that recalls the almost comical contrivances
of drapery typically featured in academies (Fig. 11),
there was no such phallic displacement in the tableau’s initial
presentation. Today, the plunging penile scabbard draws
rather than deflects attention, particularly given the odd
suspension of no fewer than three legs from Tatius’s covered
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318 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
9 David, Interventiono f theS abines,
detail
genitals, but in 1799 Tatius’s uncensored nudity also elicited
comment. David’s unusual decision was noted by the English
visitor Henry Redhead Yorke as he stood before the work:
“Tatius is displayed full to the view in puris naturalibus. He also
wears not only a helmet and sandals, but carries a shield and a
scarlet mantle buckled on the breast, but so contrived as to
exhibit his whole body in a state of nature.”24 In a tradition in
which shading and drapery served gently to veil the genitals,
David’s use of props only accentuated their presence in a way
that seemed to Yorke less natural than deliberately contrived.
Before the 1808 modifications, the Sabine warrior Tatius
was a far more exposed and vulnerable figure than Romulus,
the halfgod. All that remains hidden to the spectator in the
back view of Romulus was displayed in the frontal figure of
Tatius. Although the two men stand in mirrored opposition,
with Hersilia as the whitened screen between them (and their
ephebic equerries as their bracketing complements), their
intimate pairing only highlights their differences.25 Frontally
disposed, Tatius, the mortal man, consists of an awkward,
disjointed set of limbs appended to a short and broad stump
of a torso. He is, moreover, strangely asymmetrical. His bent
right arm and leg compress that side of his body into a
compact unit enclosed by the length of his sword. By contrast,
his left arm and leg are extended but appear no less awkward,
because their lengths are segmented.
Our view of Tatius’s grasp of the underside of the shield
underscores his full visibility-we see the length of his arm
submitted to the mechanical requirements of his armor (like
a mounted specimen in a trompe l’oeil painting). Such details
imbue this slightly scowling, naked warrior with a poignantly
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 319
10 David, Interventiono f theS abines,
detail
prosaic quality. Gravity and tactility play their part. Tatius’s
disproportioned but volumetric body seems cumbersome, a
burden to bear across space, and the metal weapons such
heavy and unforgiving weights. David’s technical difficulties
further exacerbate our sense of the figure’s awkwardness. The
arm holding the shield is ambiguously attached to the
oversize shoulder; the dimunitive head appears to retreat
from the clumsy tangle of drapery, straps, and bulging
muscles at right.
By contrast, the figure of the halfgod Romulus is quite
successfully understated. Our sense of his completeness and
perfection is produced, paradoxically, by the concealment of
his body: deep shadows and a series of substitute forms
occlude the visibility of his anatomy. Unlike the dark, concave
oval held by Tatius (is it an oval or a foreshortened circle?),
Romulus’s luminous and beautifully convex circular shield
hides most of his torso as well as his left shoulder and arm.
11 David, Acadimie of a Man, Called Hector, 1778. Montpellier,
Musee Fabre (photo: ? RMN)
r~l:
Zia
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320 ART BULL.ETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME I.XXX NUMBER 2
12 David, Portraito f Henrietted e VerninacY, ear VIII [ 1799-1800].
Paris, Musee du Louvre (photo: o RMN)
Gently kissing the graceful curve of his silhouetted waist, the
perfect circle stops exquisitely short of severing his body in
two and casts the right half in shadow, rendering it an
abstracted and graceful set of undulating contours. While
Tatius is evenly lit, only a slicing edge of Romulus catches the
light and offers a glimpse of flesh. The flat treatment, even
tonality, and apparent lack of acuity in the shaded side of his
body muffle his corporality but nonetheless heighten the
eroticism of the softly modeled orbs of his buttocks-so
perfectly echoing the softly protruding sphere of the shield as
well as the vertically disposed sword’s sheath. By contrast, as
Yorke aptly suggested, the harshly thrusting sword and scabbard
that bracketed Tatius’s genitals underscore rather than
mitigate the sense of their vulnerability. The juxtaposition of
implements of war and naked male anatomy makes Tatius
seem more, not less, defenseless. His flesh is assailable.
Romulus is protected and fortified by the phallic substitutes
for mere anatomy because the all-too-human referents of
corporal specificity, such as genitals, are cloaked.26
If David’s brochure assimilated Tatius and Romulus by
subsuming both figures within the overarching category of
antique nudity, his painting provoked argument about the
status of its male nudes by offering disparate models of the
unclothed body. Tatius’s figure, unlike that of Romulus, fails
to repress the artist’s toil before a weary model encumbered
by props. By betraying his status as a naked model, the Sabine
warrior proves to be no more than what C.Z. suspected: an
undressed Frenchman, Chaussard’s body branded and inscribed
by the deformations of contemporary practices. Thus,
while Romulus’s seamless figure bolstered classicists’ arguments
about nudity’s ideality, Tatius’s clumsy form fueled
critics’ hostility regarding the absurdities of nakedness. David’s
painting was far more complex than his own published
defense would allow. It seems that neither David nor his critics
were capable of addressing both Tatius and Romulus at once.
The Nudity of Women
If the male nudes were inherently controversial, Hersilia
draped in white like her sisters in David’s tableaux of the
1780s, would seem to offer an acceptably chaste classical
counterpoint. Here at least David seems to have taken no risks
and sustained his pre-Revolutionary iconography of female
dress. While nudity could not keep contemporary references
at bay, at least authentic archaeology might. Significantly,
however, the English visitor Henry Redhead Yorke, who had
commented on Tatius’s nudity, was compelled to slip into
modish French in order to describe Hersilia’s dress: “Between
f~8Y
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~:? 1
~. . l.a Y
x I I
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= =rt-r. ~`1~I~P~_ ,I ,?LY;?t:~-
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13 Costumed e Bal, from CostumeP arisien( Paris, Year VIII
[1799-1800]), pl. 184
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NUDITY A LA
GRECQUE
IN 1799 321
14 Jean-FranCoisJaninet afterJean Guillaume Moitte, Liberty,
1792. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale
these two figures stands Hersilia; she is robed in white ad la
grecque, in other words according to the present fashion.””27
David maintained his pre-Revolutionary style of female
costume in Intervention of the Sabines, but French women’s
sartorial practices had changed radically since the mid-1780s.
In 1783, a critic had contrasted contemporary women’s
toilette to the noble simplicity of a female antique statue, “a
great figure di la grecque, very beautiful, with an antique air,
costume and form of the most exquisite purity, a virginal and
primitive expression, and who seemed to be neither of our
nation nor our century.”28 By the late 1790s, however, the
woman attired la grecque seemed removed neither in space
nor in time. Far from securing history painting’s decorous
distance from current social practices, classical garb offered a
point of contact between past and present in fin de siecle
France. David himself was greatly responsible for such a
collapse of high art and ephemeral fashion. The example of
his paintings combined with his impact as Revolutionary
iconographer had encouraged a pervasive adoption of classical
dress, particularly by women. As Jules David emphasized,
fashionable women were consciously modeling themselves on
the female protagonists populating David’s major pre-
Revolutionary tableaux (David, vol. 1, 336). Paris was filled
with Camillas and the daughters of Brutus. Portraits like
David’s Mme V (1799) corroborate the evidence of contemporary
fashion plates that Frenchwomen had appropriated the
15 Ponce, after Borel, NationalA ssemblyD: edicatedt o women
patriots;T hec hosenm omenti s the offeringo f thef irst patrioticd onation
madeb yw omena rtistso n Septembe7r, 1789. Paris, Bibliotheque
Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes
antique attire previously adorning allegorical personifications
and classical history painting’s heroines (Figs. 12-14). Prior
to the Revolution, such appropriations had continued a
longer tradition of occasional fictional role-playing. Women
masqueraded as Flora for their portraits or theatrically enacted
the classical past at parties, most notably, Marie-Louise-
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s famous supper a la grecque in 1788.29
By the late 1790s, however, dress i l’antique had become
everyday garb. Rather than an elite’s occasional fantasy
costume, the white classical gown had become a widely
adopted and frequently worn fashion.
Hersilia stands, therefore, not only as the solitary embodiment
of ennobled femininity in David’s tableau but also as its
most fashionably chic protagonist. Of all the figures within
the painting, she most closely resembles members of the
audience. If Hersilia bore the burden of integrating elite and
common viewers, what are the implications of her attire’s
simultaneous referentiality to the past and to the present?
How did her up-to-date stylishness a la grecque inflect her
status as ennobled heroine? And what was the relationship
between her contemporaneity and the volatile interpretations
of the male nudes who bracket her?
Nudity i la grecque has seemed thus far to concern the status
of male nudes. However, within Directory debates about
fashion, classicizing nudity was associated above all with the
increasing visibility of female, not male, bodies. Women’s
negating sartorial strategies at the very outset of the French
Revolution had metamorphosed in the late 1790s into a
flirtation with dress that approached undress. On September
7, 1789, women had donned simple white gowns and donated
their ornaments to the state in an attempt to distance
themselves from compromising associations of femininity
with aristocratic ostentation (Fig. 15).30 However, renunciation,
too, is a sartorial choice. Negation leads from the
excesses of ornamentation to the excesses of revealed flesh;
modesty occupies some indeterminable, unrealizable midpoint.
During the Directory, the appropriation of Greek attire
evoked the Revolutionary prescription of female chastity but
47.-
7.
os T ; ?c
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322 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
16 Eulalie Morin, Portraito fJulietteR icamier,1 799. Versailles,
Chaiteau de Versailles (photo: ? RMN)
transgressed it, playfully manipulating but quite wittily rejecting
the virtuous role imposed on women throughout the
Revolution. The staid, classically draped figure of republican
Liberty (Fig. 14) had always been vulnerable to mocking
commentary about women’s lasciviousness.31 During the
hedonistic days of the Directory, the shift from liberty to
license seemed all too inevitable. In 1797, a verse exploited
the inherent ambiguities of the term and gaily described the
“liberties taken” by women’s post-Revolutionary fashion:
Liberty, this is my motto;
All costumes are decent;
Shame to those who are scandalized by them!
Why should we wear gloves,
These women go well without chemises.32
In post-Thermidor France, women had indeed discarded
layers of their underclothing. Much ink was spent mocking
the new choice to be seen in public “sans chemise. “In addition,
Grecian gowns had become increasingly light and transparent
as can be seen in a 1799 portrait by Eulalie Morin ofJuliette
Recamier dressed in such a thin robe a’ la grecque that her
breasts and nipples, like Hersilia’s, are quite clearly visible
(Fig. 16).33 In a witticism of the period, women were flattered
for being “well-undressed” rather than “well-dressed.”’34 A
party game involved disrobing in order to determine which
woman’s costume, including shoes, weighed the least.35 A
number of contemporary paintings by Louis-Leopold Boilly
feature women whose gauzy outfits and abbreviated undergarments
reveal not only arms and cleavage but also, through the
transparent fabric, the fleshy length of their legs, in some
cases deceptively covered by flesh-colored tights (Fig. 17).36
In the late 1790s, nudity was self-consciously performed by
women as an intriguing game of revelation and deception.
The scandals associated with the period’s most fashionable
women are famous. Was it Mme Hamelin or Mme Tallien who
promenaded in the Champs-Elysees “half nude,” arms and
throat revealed, a gauzy cloth covering flesh-colored stockings
in order to fabricate a glimpse of her nakedness? That an
honest man was forced to rescue this exhibitionist from a
jeering crowd offered the press a moralizing pretext to tell the
story.37 But other reports indicate that this fashion was hardly
circumscribed to the chic elite: “Nine-tenths of women are
dressed in white and very negligently assembled. A very small
number seem to be occupied with their toilette and they are
distinguished by bearing their shoulders and a part of their
back nude.”38
Not surprisingly, the Frenchwomen who walked through
the public gardens in transparent and gauzy draperies invited
denunciations of the classical style on the basis of extraaesthetic
criteria. In such attacks, classical garb was deemed
inappropriate to the French climate because it belonged to a
different geography and therefore a different culture. In
1798, for example, a doctor named Desessarts argued in the
press that “he had seen more young girls die since the system
of mudites gazies than in the last forty years.”39 In 1799 another
physician, Victor Broussonet, condemned the unhealthiness
of women’s appropriation of flimsy classical garb in his
brochure De la mode et des habillements. Broussonet asserted
that French women were foolish to adopt the minimal
cladding of ancient Mediterranean cultures in the chilly
climate of Paris: “Respiratory inflammation, colds, the suppression
of menses have been the result of these revolting nudities.
Our women, in imitation of the Romans, have discovered
breasts and shoulders.”40 On September 7, 1799, only months
before the exhibition of the Sabines, the journal Le Publiciste
described another doctor’s attempt to dissuade women from
exposing themselves to such dangers:
In order to dissuade women from the furor of appearing
almost nude in our gardens, the doctor Angrand cites the
death of a young person from a chest illness contracted
these last days at Tivoli. He announces that he is going to
collect a great number of histories of grave illnesses, often
fatal, occasioned by the usage of clothing d la grecque.41
Less than two weeks later, the Journal de Paris published a
letter to the editor from the Institut member Louis-Mathieu
Langlhs who, despite his republican commitments, expressed
hostility toward women’s adoption of antique costume.42
Again, medical reasons were marshaled, but Langlhs emphasized
morality rather than health. In Langlhs’s letter, women’s
Greek fashions were explicitly condemned as “indecent”:
For a long time the moral and physical disadvantages of
the Greek costume when worn in a humid and variable
climate like ours have been pronounced by men of art and
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NUDITY A LA
CGRECQUE
IN 1799 323
17 Boilly, No Agreement,
from the series Follies of
the Day, oil on canvas,
1797. Private collection.
men of good sense. Women themselves have more facts
and observations about this than all the doctors of this
Faculty have collected; but experience is of no use to them
just as it often is no use to us, and nothing is less
astonishing. What do dangers and even death mean to
those who dare to risk modesty, a sentiment more important
to this [feminine] sex than self-preservation? Whether
one dresses di la grecque or d la romaine, I dare predict the
result will never be Cornelias.43
Langle’s’s argument registers the contradictions of post-
Revolutionary French culture: the experimental identification
with antiquity as an exemplary model coexisted with an
increasing suspicion of its outward signs. Cornelia is virtuous,
but dressing like her has its moral and physical risks. Appropriating
gowns a l’antique will not transform Frenchwomen into
their virtuous ancient counterparts; in fact, to the contrary.
The mere choice to dress d la grecque is proof of a lack of
modesty. If the women’s donation of jewels in 1789 had
equated the virtuous self-sacrifice of the Roman women with
their simple white clothes, such a conflation of antique
clothing and exemplary behavior was no longer possible in
1799. Classical dress was now seen only as a particularly
exhibitionist and immoral fashion choice, and one moreover
that leveled the differences between women in troubling ways.
In 1799, Pierre-Louis Roederer, one of the most eloquent
critics of women’s classicizing fashion, conjured the dissolution
of traditional distinctions between women in the new
circulation of revealed body parts. According to this republican
theorist, every woman was far too willing to flaunt her
flattering feature: “The assembly of women is not as varied.
There are no longer the old, no longer the ugly. Those who
do not have a figure have such a beautiful throat! Those who
do not have a [beautiful] throat have such beautiful arms!
Here, all is youth, from the age of sixteen to sixty years.”44
Whether young or old, French women were being sexualized
by their titillatingly skimpy and diaphanous garb. Of course,
the effaced distinctions between women were not only those
of age and relative beauty. A woman’s virtue also could no
longer be read by her dress. Flesh apparently eroticized
women equivalently; differences of morality were no longer
inscribed on their bodies. As a government surveillance
report of 1798 made clear, all women, whether prostitutes at
the Palais Royal or virtuous daughters and wives, were
revealing themselves. The honest woman had ceased to offer
the dishonest woman a model for emulation.45
Ultimately, however, the greatest threat posed by women’s
new exhibitionism was not their impact on other women but
the power they inappropriately wielded over men. Roederer,
for one, understood fashion to be the means by which women
exercised their “empire.”’46 This was not merely a matter of
women’s seduction of men but of their substitution of tyranny
for republicanism. Ephemeral fashion is by definition antithetical
to timeless law. The stakes were self-evident: as long as
women-immoral, fashionable, fickle, and tyrannical-are
prominent, there could be no (fraternal) Republic.
It is the independence of women’s morals that has given
them the authority of fashion [la mode]. As long as women
are spectacles in performances, nymphs in promenades,
and goddesses in their palace, there will not be a republic
in France. In vain will the constitution have been established
in accordance with the distinction of political
powers; there will always be a power opposed to all others,
and that is fashion. Fashion will always combat laws,
because laws, if only because they are always a serious
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324 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOIUME
I.XXX
NUMBER 2
18 Adrien-Pierre-FranCoisG odefroy, after F.J. Harriet, Parisian
Tea, ca. 1800. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale
19 Engraving, ca. 1799. Paris, Bibliothe’que Nationale
thing, can never be a la mode. One can attribute the morals
of the European republics of Switzerland and Holland to
the impotence of women to exercise the empire of fashion.
47
What particularly disturbed Roederer were the ways women
insidiously exercised power in culture that they were not
allowed to wield in republican government. “What a contradiction!
You refuse women all political existence, which is very
just, and yet you permit all our habits to be based on their
example!” (Roederer, vol. 4, 383).
By allowing women to exercise their empire over fashion,
men were following their example. If we think back to
Chaussard’s invective concerning degraded modern man, we
can better appreciate his emphasis on the Frenchman suffocating
under his stylish layers. However, to argue that man was
emasculated by succumbing to feminine fashion is to occlude
a source of greater anxiety during this period. In fact, the
Directory witnessed a dramatic divergence in female and
male fashion (Figs. 17-19).48 Men were drowning under
accretions of fabric while women increasingly discarded their
clothes. Even as female citizens approached a state of nudity,
men were encasing their bodies, eclectically appropriating
English fashion either as a sober self-presentation or, through
exaggeration, as the contrary: an excessively self-indulgent
and effete sensualism that emphatically renounced republican
sobriety. The male incroyables, admittedly the most extreme
example, swaddled their outsize physiques in ample
layers of clothing and loosely fitting boots and wrapped their
“delicate” necks in voluminous scarves, framed by huge
collars that rose up the back of the head. Though cleanshaven,
the incroyables’ faces were hidden by long fluffy hair,
which hung down in strands along the jaw like “dogs’ ears,”
and sometimes by large circular eyeglasses (worn whether
needed or not). An incroyable’sa ttire and coiffure, therefore,
covered most of his face and body, rendering the nose and jaw
that emerged from the folds of cloth and hair excessively
prominent, penile and obscene, tips of flesh emerging from
the swaddled and exaggerated length of the neck. During the
Directory, men’s bodies seemed to have been deformed (and
perversely eroticized) by the accretions that enveloped and all
but overwhelmed them.
Fashion, then, may have been associated with women, but a
most disturbing deceit had been enacted. It was men’s bodies,
not women’s, that bore the weight of artifice; they were
sinking within its perverse folds and crevices while women
had co-opted the masculine Republic’s vision of classical
simplicity. To condemn women’s preoccupation with fashion
was partly to deflect attention from the ways in which male
bodies had been more dramatically transformed by la mode. If
men were being suffocated by artifice, women had gallingly
appropriated nudity, that former signifier of the masculine
beau ideal.
This had no small implications for the authority of classicism
in post-Revolutionary France. The status of nudity d
l’antique was profoundly compromised by its appropriation by
women. No longer a term outside contemporary social
practices, nudity itself had been subsumed within the provisional,
politicized, and arbitrary semiotics of a feminized
fashion. Certainly, nudity was thereby trivialized, but it was
also subjected to criticism on the basis of pragmatic criteriahow
startling to worry that classical figures might become
chilly or catch cold! Associated with modish strategies of
female seduction, antique signifiers like nudity were now
condemned on the basis of their inappropriateness to post-
Revolutionary France, a place at once cold, damp, and
desperately in need of a stringent morality to replace the loss
of Church.
By donning classical attire, women had complicated and
intensified longer-standing debates. France was in the process
of deciding. Could classicism represent the French nation?
Was classicism universal in purchase or only archaeologically
specific to a time and place? Could it represent all people or
only an aesthetically initiated elite? Did classicism offer a
secular moral foundation in place of the Church? When
women put on transparent white antique gowns in the 1790s,
they rendered frivolous, ephemeral, and interchangeable
French culture’s most serious, ambitious, and purportedly
universal style. They also redefined its politics. For Roederer,
nudity was republican only if it was male. When female, it
smacked of the ancien regime. Indeed, Roederer saw the
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NUDITY A l.A GRE;CQUE
IN 1799 325
female usurpation of nudity as a desperate attempt on the
part of women to recuperate power lost during the Revolution.
Women were not only prone to tyranny, they were
regressive, wishing no less than a return to France’s forsaken
past:
Women have abused clothing to ruin and oppress men …
but, in abusing nudity, they lose, or at least risk the empire
and rights of their charms.
It is because women have seen their domination in
France vanish with the monarchy that they have risked
even their existence. They did not want the modest
happiness of an American, a Swiss, a Genevan; to regain all
they have lost, they have staked everything they have, down
to their health, and soon even this everything-goes attitude
will be gone.49
Roederer spells it out. Women were drawing attention to
themselves in order to regain the prominence they had
enjoyed under the ancien regime. Indeed, they would risk
anything-even their health-to “ruin and oppress men.”
Roederer understood nudity to be one step too far in a
continuum of fashion wielded by women to dominate men.
For women to abuse nudity was to risk their empire, but
whether they maintained their power or not, significant
damage had been done to the Republic’s iconography: nudity
d l’antique had been metamorphosed into a sign of (feminine)
tyranny rather than (masculine) liberty.
The problem, of course, was that classicism had always been
Janus-faced: gallant mythologies a la rococo competing with
stoic and austere historical iconographies. David’s achievement
of a piercingly lucid “virile” idiom capable of representing
solemn Revolutionary certainties was formidable because
it was convincing, but it must be seen as relatively short-lived,
bracketed on either side by women’s competing appropriations
of antiquity. If antiquity in the hands of David could
signify the austere absolute truths of Corneille, it could also
be Racinian-elegant, pretty, decorative, lightly worn, full of
innuendo, playful, witty, even humorous.50 Against Apollo
Belvedere and heroic Davidian academies lurked the specter of
Mme du Barry, seeking attention yet again (Fig. 20). Less than
thirty years had elapsed since her pretentious, oversize portrait
“as Muse” had been removed from the Salon walls
because of its overly transparent classicizing gown. What was
unacceptable was the way the king’s mistress had audaciously
mapped antiquity’s highest claims onto her own sexualized
body.51
In discussions of fashion in the press and other ephemeral
literature, debates about nudity were commonplace, but
within the context of fashion, classicizing nudity was associated
with women, not their overdressed male counterparts. In
David’s Intervention of the Sabines, women whose antique gowns
fall aside to reveal breasts, legs, and thighs are placed in the
midst of naked men. In the painting, women become the
dressed term opposed to male nudity, yet their clothing could
elicit concerns about current enthusiasms for a lascivious
nudity d la grecque. How should David’s choice simultaneously
to invert and to evoke contemporary practices be interpreted?
Certainly, the painter’s decision to depict his male
heroes nude can be seen as an attempt to define nudity &
20 FranCois-Hubert Drouais, Portrait of Mme du Barry as Muse,
1771. Versailles, Chambre de Commerce
l’antique in masculine terms, to salvage the beau ideal as a
masculine artistic tradition rather than a feminine sartorial
invention. The consequences in 1799 of maintaining his
pre-Revolutionary female iconography can also be seen as
inadvertent: David believed in male nudity, and the moral
ambiguity of his female figures was an unintended result of
changed circumstances. David had maintained his artistic
commitments; it was Frenchwomen who had changed by
habitually dressing like his paintings’ female protagonists.
Nonetheless, David’s preparatory drawings suggest that he
purposely modified Hersilia’s attire, transforming the flapping
layers of her bodice into the final painting’s streamlined,
clinging white gown that not only reveals rosy nipples but
opens to show the expanse of hips and thigh. If the modifications
served partly to circumscribe Hersilia’s “vulgar” expressivity,
they also made her more fashionable, paradoxicallyand
here is David’s inescapable quandary-both more antique
and more up-to-date. The brooches at the shoulders, the
enhancement of a sleeveless look, the simple band below her
breasts, the archaeological sandals: these were all details
recounted in the fashion pages of journals as well as contemporary
descriptions of Paris’s most visible women.52 David
chose to make Hersilia more chic-more like Mme Hamelin
and Mme Tallien promenading in the Tuileries, more like
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326 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
21 Boilly, Make Peace, from the series Follies of the Day, 1797.
Private collection
Boilly’s socialites in his series Follies of the Day of 1797 (Fig.
17).53 In a series of fine-tuned modifications, the painter
enhanced his heroine’s resemblance to a community of
controversial exhibitionists.
That association of Sabines and prominent, morally ambiguous
Directory women could only have been further intensified
by the stories that circulated concerning the identity of
David’s nonprofessional female models. Like many of the
period’s most celebrated women, the sisters de Bellegarde
enjoyed the celebrity of beauty wed to scandalous sexual
mores. Together, they were famous for their compromising
attachment to the world of the studio; they were known, in
Etienne-Jean Delkcluze’s words, “by the singular life they led
in the midst of artists of all genres.”54 Brunette Adele had left
her husband and children in the provinces to become a
highly visible Parisian mistress. While it was generally acknowledged
that she had sat for the bare-breasted kneeling woman
in the Sabines, rumors circulated regarding the extent to
which she had exposed her body to the painter.55Jules David
even claimed that Adele, “vain” about her role as model,
enjoyed appearing in public with her hair arranged to match
that of David’s disheveled figure (David, 336). Married to a
defrocked priest, her blonde sister, Aurore, inevitably invited
stories that she had posed for Hersilia.56 She may have had
some competition. According to Jules David, three society
ladies volunteered for the part. These, then, were some of the
women of fashion who would have inflected the reception of a
painting often characterized as evidence of David’s commitment
to a newly purified, aestheticized classicism confined to
erudite citations.57 Imagine such nouveaux riches women
moving through the Sabines exhibition space, appreciating
their chic couture and resemblance to David’s heroine
reflected in the wall-length mirror, all for the price of a ticket.
Could there have been a better showp01lace to celebrate the
spectacular, exhibitionist pleasures of fashion and the erotics
of public sociability?
To simplify David’s painting into an image of a fractured
public sphere reconciled by the intervention of the Sabine
women’s “private” familial claims is therefore to ignore the
controversies surrounding women during the Directory. Although
David’s painting has been seen as a powerful repression
of Revolutionary feminist claims in its alignment of
femininity and maternity, that latter equation of women and
motherhood was undermined by the painting’s foregrounding
of women’s prominence as public spectacle within Directory
France. In late 1790s Paris, women were visibly disrupting
the Revolutionary fraternity, but not necessarily as mothers.
Indeed, this was the source of anxiety. Roaming spaces
outside the home, women seemed neither securely constituted
by nor constitutive of familial bonds. Modern scholarship
that takes for granted women’s role as representatives of
the private sphere is therefore repeating a reactionary prescription,
not a reality of post-Revolutionary society.58 Thinkers
like Roederer and Louis-Sebastien Mercier championed female
domesticity in response to French women’s perceived
failure to identify themselves with such duties. Ultimately,
Intervention of the Sabines could not circumscribe women’s
prominence to their familial roles. Hersilia and her emotive
chorus were, above all, offering a public performance of
those bonds. Unlike the women in Horatii and Brutus, who
were confined to domestic spaces, the Sabine women were
intended to be moving spectacles within the public sphere of
the ancient battleground as well as the Directory entrepreneurial
exhibition space.
In post-Thermidor France, women’s visibility seemed not
only to flaunt their difference from men but also to constitute
the very source of their power and dominance. For a
Revolutionary like Roederer, the difference of women only
too clearly represented a difference of politics, the haunting
specter of the fraternal Republic’s antithesis: women’s lawlessness-
like fashion, like tyranny, like immorality-fully outside
men’s lawful governance. How then could David’s Intervention
of the Sabines propose that the fashionable woman serve as an
exemplary model? Was this what Revolutionary utopian
aspirations had come to? That promiscuous unregulated
women like the Bellegarde sisters, Fortunee Hamelin, Theresia
Tallien, Josephine Beauharnais, and Anne-Francoise
Lange should offer models of distinction, a distinction of
fashion rather than morality?59 It was only too evident that
dress, not virtue, was inspiring general imitation. And the
distinction of modishness, unlike that of virtue, perpetually
needed to outrun those “nine-tenths” of Frenchwomen who
acted as copycats. To be exemplary because one is fashionable
is to keep moving at the head of a crowd. If antiquity, in the
hands of chic women, had become au courant, it would
inevitably become pass&. Clearly, this kind of exemplarity,
rather than offering France a bedrock foundation of values,
only perpetuated a meaningless overturning of signs.
David was working with volatile materials here: at once
exploiting antiquity’s fashionability and, like Chaussard, trying
desperately to buttress a tradition of the classical masculine
beau iddal that had long served as the foundation of his art
as well as his politics. In 1799, Hersilia would not behave
herself. There was no way David could make her into the
“neutral” emblem of noble maternal femininity that she has
come to represent for many modern scholars. This is not to
say that David as painter and as author of the accompanying
brochure did not try to control her disruptive and competing
force by diminishing its value relative to the masculine nudes.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 327
As Chaussard noted, Intervention of the Sabines aligns masculinity
with timelessness and femininity with temporality.60 The
tableau opposes not only masculine stasis (the horizontal
frieze) to female action (the intersecting narrative eruption)
but also male nudity to female fashion. It is against women’s
temporality and ephemeral appropriation of nudity that
David’s published exegesis concerning “the nudity of [his]
heroes” must be interpreted. The painter’s text directs
attention to the male nudes and renders the female figures
invisible. According to David’s brochure, women’s choices
were not at issue. Instead, viewers were invited to contemplate,
admire, discuss, even debate male nudity. If the female
protagonists could elicit much informal commentary–
gossip-about their dress and the identity of the models, the
male bodies, David cues us, warranted formal critical discussion.
Both painting and brochure spotlighted Hersilia’s bracketing
male counterpoints, but they did so partly by heightening
their controversy. Tatius particularly was meant to goad.
David relied on the shock value of men’s exposed flesh and
genitals in the midst of dressed figures to direct his startled
audience’s attention toward his male heroes.
But it is precisely this reliance on shocking masculine
display that points to the instability of the painting’s gendered
structural oppositions. For Chaussard, stasis signified a realm
of aesthetic ideality contrasted to women’s vulgar and disorderly
activity, but that stillness also resembled the exhibitionism
associated with fashion. Tatius and Romulus were subject
to being read, like fashionable women, as flamboyant if
foolish exhibitionists, resorting to extremism to draw attention
to themselves. Given the fashionability of the Sabine
women and the prevalence of images like Boilly’s Make Peace
(Fig. 21), would not viewers have been predisposed to see
Hersilia as a chic Frenchwoman separating her competing
lovers who abruptly, inexplicably, and quite extravagantly
discard their suits? Would not that wall-length mirror opposite
the painting only enhance this sense of the painted men’s
suddenly exposed nakedness? David, Chaussard, and Roederer
may have insisted that the male nudes were like law, that is,
timeless and universal, but these heroes could also be interpreted
as men who strove to make the most ostentatious of
fashion choices.61
When Male and Female Nudities Meet
In Intervention of the Sabines, David offered an unstable
encounter and made it the very basis of his work’s controversy
as well as its success. This was a risque confrontation between
competing gendered aesthetic and political models: between
contemporaneity and history, between fashion and le beau
iddal, between the ancien regime and the Republic. But the
multivalence of the term nudity d la grecque in 1799 attests to
the incapacity of such categories to remain discrete. Even if
attention could be diverted from the spectacle of women to
the male nudes, those nudes were now embedded within a
public sphere (and pictorial syntax) newly defined to include
women, and women, moreover, who were a la mode. The
presence of stylish women inflected the ways the male nudes
were received. Against fashionable females, the standing male
acadimies now appeared undressed. They also appeared as
objects ofwomen’s vision.
Thus far, my argument has for the most part treated the
masculine and feminine versions of nudity a la grecque as
independent entities, but David’s painting is about their
intimate if anxious confrontation. Note, for instance, Hersilia’s
guarded, strangely birdlike, darting glance at that peacock
Romulus (Fig. 4). One pupil distended, the other
diminished and rushing away, her glassy-eyed gaze fails to
cohere. While her near eye seems directed at an angle toward
us, the far eye retreats to the side, its iris sitting up too high
and too small, cut both by its profile edge and the overemphasized
slice of white. Stare too closely and Hersilia appears
walleyed. Look also at the similarly hooded and ambiguously
muffled asymmetrical gaze of the older woman who faces
Romulus and threatens to tear off her gown and expose her
breasts. Here are women in states of undress regarding a
displayed male nude; indeed, they are the only figures gazing
at Romulus’s exposed body. It is difficult, however, to assess
precisely where they look and what they see there. They alone
enjoy access to Romulus’s other side, that presence or
absence lurking behind (or eclipsed by?) shield and sheath,
buttocks. As viewers by proxy, they heighten the sense of
suspense attending Romulus’s withheld body. Their oddly
uninformative but directed gazes, coupled with Tatius’s frontality,
compel the question: Should the viewer project Tatius’s
anatomy onto the halfgod’s front, assembling his body part by
part (shoulder, arm, chest, hardened stomach, genitals) in an
attempt to reconstruct the man as seen by the women? To do
so is to enact imaginatively a homoerotic conjoining, indeed,
identification, of the two men’s bodies, but such a projection
also subtly compromises the halfgod with the doubts unfurled
by the awkward, “naked” specificities and vulnerabilities of
his foil. Undermined is Romulus’s status as an indivisible,
autonomous, and coherent signifier of phallic perfection,
completeness, and power. Significantly, it is women’s viewing
that initiates the process.
In David’s tableau, women are the privileged beholders not
only of a god (and rapist-cum-husband) but also of the
masculine beau iddal. While the homoerotic appeal of solitary
naked male figures in paintings like Bara (Fig. 3) rendered
the female viewer invisible and irrelevant, David’s insertion of
the Sabine women into the frame of male nudity seems to
have necessitated an anxious appraisal of the relationship
among women, sexuality, and the public sphere. If feminist
scholarship has been preoccupied with the male gaze on the
female object, especially the female nude, and recent inquiries
have focused on the circuit of homoerotic desire for the
male viewer of the male nude, the painting of the Sabines
configures a differently gendered confrontation. Few paintings
have catalyzed such a fervent and anxious preoccupation
on the part of its contemporaries with the female viewer of
masculine flesh.
David’s tableau foregrounds the female spectator not only
in its privileged positioning of women as viewers of Romulus
but also in its very centerpiece, the explosive woman in red
who conspicuously and directly stares at us, thereby wedding
aggressivity and female viewing. The confrontational character
of her level frontal gaze serves as a counterpoint to both
Hersilia’s skittish deflected regard and the rolling asymmetry
of the old woman’s eyes. The power as well as the menace of
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328 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2

22 Henry Fuseli, drawing,
ca. 1800-1805. Zurich,
Kunsthaus
the woman in red resides in the riveting directness of her
stare. But David, even as he so effectively conveys the
compelling intercourse between women’s viewing and our
own, registers the question of its eclipse (or the power of its
revelation): beneath the billowing tent of drapery, the woman’s
clenched hands, hovering precisely at eye level, threaten
to drop (or rise) like a shade over her eyes.
Ultimately, however, the relation between women viewers
and the real world appears to have been far less fraught than
women’s regard of (men’s) art. It is significant that the
fashionable woman figures in the criticism of David’s painting
not as a visible object but as a viewer of art’s male nudity. That
women had become an erotic spectacle in Directory France
was less explicitly discussed than the ways their viewing
impinged on art’s masculine bodies. It was the meeting of
male nudes and actual Frenchwomen that obsessed the male
critics of the Sabines, both negative and positive. It is easy to
discern the specter of women’s confrontation with Tatius’s
exposed genitals in these interchanges. While negative critics
predictably denounced the painting’s capacity to compromise
female members of its audience, David’s supporters repeatedly
described the work’s opponents as prudish, unsophisticated,
and hypocritical women. In his review of the Sabines
exhibition, Charles Landon, for instance, produced a fastidious
female spectator in order to dismantle her position.
According to Landon, some women wanted Tatius to be
further covered, but they were hypocritical inasmuch as they
did not protest the comparable nudity of antique sculptures.
If society was to follow the reasoning of these female spectators,
it would be necessary to censor all the sculptures in
public civic spaces, including the recently arrived spoil of
Napoleonic conquest, the Laocodn.62 (It was precisely this
confrontation between fashionable female viewer and Laoco6n’s
bulging anatomy that delighted Henry Fuseli during
the early 1800s; Fig. 22). The royalist critic for the Journal des
Dibats,Jean-Baptiste-Bon Boutard, made a similar point about
those who believed that male nudity produced dangerous
impressions: “If David’s tableau is immoral, it would be
necessary to relegate to the shadows of storerooms and
museums all the statues that decorate our public gardens and
embellish our palaces.'”63
At stake in these arguments seems to be the status of art
itself. Was the return of the female spectator so decisive that
all male nudes became subject to removal on the basis of
morality? Lest one assume that David’s supporters exaggerated
the extent to which censorship could be enlisted in the
name of female modesty, listen to the polemicist Louis-
Sebastien Mercier, who, besides condemning women’s current
antique fashion, also boldly denounced public sculpture
by conjuring a young girl’s encounter with a titillated Bacchus
on the verge of an erection:
Morality and statues are two incompatible things. And can
one regard as illustrious geniuses, or rather as legislators of
modesty, those artists whose immodest chisel not only
reproduced but even enlarged the sexual parts of statues
mutilated by time?
No! It is not a weakness to be scandalized by such
nudities. One does not have the right to represent to the
eyes of a mother of a family that which one would not dare
make audible to her ears; her young daughter walking at
her sides should not raise her eyes below the lily, symbol of
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 329
her innocence, to contemplate nude the rounded buttocks
of a Bacchus in the spring of his life, and whose amorous
visage indicates that he feels the movement of voluptuousness
spring up.64
Through the young girl’s eyes, Mercier sees antique marble
metamorphose into pulsating sexual arousal. Whether because
of their modesty, their hypocritical prudery, or their
licentiousness, women rewrote art and male nudity by (hetero)-
sexualizing them. Indeed, according to David’s negative and
positive critics alike, women saw sex everywhere. While the
prude may seem the antithesis of the promiscuous undressed
woman, both attest to women’s incapacity to leave inviolate an
aesthetic sphere. Of course, there is no such autonomous
realm of “purity”; the tension between ideality and eroticism
is intrinsic to the representation of naked bodies. But in
post-Revolutionary France, the pressure to acknowledge the
presence of women viewers made the tensions (and capacious
multivalences) inherent to the beau idial, that cobbledtogether
but cherished fiction, crudely manifest. High art and
somatic low could not be held asunder. Perhaps women’s
presence simply provided a vehicle for men to voice their own
fantasies, but the shift from a masculine homoerotic to a
feminine heterosexual model of viewing seems to have been
decisive. If the antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann
could eloquently evoke his own “rising” and “heaving”
reaction to the sensual pleasures afforded by the Apollo
Belvedere without compromising the status of aesthetic discourse,
no such erotic responsiveness on the part of women
could be subsumed within the rubric of aesthetic discrimination
in 1790s France.65 Because it was inextricably bound up
with women’s sexuality, women’s spectatorship threatened to
wrench the heroic male nude into the tawdry realm of
pornography. Did the mere presence of Hersilia, like Mercier’s
young girl, elicit imaginings of Romulus’s springing
“movement of voluptuousness,” a movement, moreover, over
which he had no control?66
Not surprisingly, women’s power to compromise the masculine
beau idial elicited anger on the part of male critics.
Roederer, for one, believed that Mercier’s preoccupation with
public sculpture was misguided. Women, not male statues,
were the problem. In a published letter, he expressed his
impatience: “Citizen, you complain to yourself of encountering
entirely nude statues of marble or bronze in our public
promenades; haven’t you seen in our spectacles, our balls, in
society, a crowd of figures who were neither of marble nor
bronze, even more nude than these statues?”67 According to
Roederer, Bacchus and his inanimate companions had been
upstaged. Neither marble nor bronze, women had made
themselves into living nudes, nudes, moreover, who seemed
to be proliferating, literally taking over the public spaces of
Paris: “our spectacles, our balls, in society, a crowd.” Here was
the real irritation. Women were not only competing for
attention with male art, they were also pretending to require
its removal from view. What! Should gardens no longer
feature heroic male nudes but become the sole province of a
crowd of undressed women? Was there no place any longer
for art, for marble, for bronze? Had female flesh simultaneously
made marble seem flesh, undone its independent
status, and, in a hypocritical feint, taken its very place? Was
this the conspiratorial intention of the alluring half-naked
Frenchwomen who hypocritically demanded the covering of
Tatius’s exposed genitals even as they sought a glimpse in
mirrors hidden within their fluttering fans? 68Certainly the
writer of a letter “To Women dressed a la Grecque and a la
Romaine” published in the Journal des Dames et des Modes in
1799 recognized their ploy and held them responsible:
Women have chosen the costume of Psyche, Venus and her
nymphs. Dressed in an enchanting manner, they attract
and hold our regard. Their breasts whose movements give
birth to our desires, whose delicious forms are hardly
concealed by a light fabric … in order better to draw their
voluptuous contours, everything in this new fashion provokes
voluptuousness; and yet women complain of the
little decency that is preserved near them.69
Involuntarily seduced, unfairly accused of indecency, the
male critic holds women fully responsible for fixing his
regard.
Roederer conflated the nudity of art and the nudity of
Frenchwomen. He saw Mercier as a dupe, scapegoating
Bacchus in the name of women who themselves made a
spectacle of nakedness. Chaussard, by contrast, rebutted
accusations that the nudity of David’s male protagonists
endangered female spectators by significantly differentiating
between women’s nakedness and art’s nudity. Rather than
simply claiming superiority to the inhibitions of polite female
society, Chaussard was willing to address explicitly the intimate
relationship between women’s viewing and fears of
unregulated female sexuality. The critic who attended to the
chorus of “vulgar” women in the picture also devoted a great
deal of time addressing the effects of the painting on their
female counterparts milling about in front of the picture.
Indeed, his defense of nudity solely considered the woman
spectator.
With Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel de Montaigne to
bolster his position, Chaussard argued that the impact of the
unknown on a female imagination was far more dangerous
than a direct confrontation with the naked male body. A nude
fully exposed to the light leads to indifference. Chaussard
quoted Rousseau to argue that the partially draped nude
produces other effects: “Isn’t it known that statues and
paintings only offend the eyes when a mixture of clothing
renders nudities obscene? The immediate power of the senses
is weak and limited: it is by the mediation of the imagination
that they make their greatest ravages” (Chaussard, 34).
David’s nudity was contrasted to the obscene “mixture” of
garments in other kinds of art. The partially clad figure invites
the dangers of women’s fantasies. Consistent with sensationalist
theories of the eighteenth century, Chaussard claimed that
habit blunts the power of sense impressions while imagination
is capaciously damaging.70 Offering a panoply of authorities
from antique philosophy to ethnography to solve the
problem of women’s “heated” arousal and extravagances,
Chaussard emphasized that educating women was far better
than leaving them to guess “according to the liberty and heat
of their fantasy. In place of true parts, women substitute by
heat and by hope other parts triply extravagant.”71 (Witness
the risk of David’s subsequent occlusion of Tatius’s genitals in
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330 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
23 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Sacrificeo f theR ose,c a. 1785-88.
Private collection
my “triply extravagant” imaging of the trio of legs hanging
beneath his scabbard.) Confronted with the philosophical
and social problem of the female gaze, a revered lineage of
great male thinkers all agree it is better that there be no
surprises. Women’s presence in David’s exhibition space was
justified as an Enlightenment project of education.
Chaussard’s enlightened sexual discourse inherits the Revolutionary
concern that private conduct be transparent to
public virtue. His most powerful barbs were reserved for those
male hypocrites who, while anxious about the virtue of
women in the public exhibition, nonetheless exposed their
mothers, wives, and daughters to the lascivious tableaux of
their private cabinet. David’s nudes are measured against the
easel paintings that corrupt female virtue by the licentious
poses of veiled figures. Contrasting the Sabines to Jean-
Honore Fragonard’s Sacrifice of the Rose (Fig. 23), Chaussard
pits the public address and virility of classicism’s male nudity
against the private and libertine Rococo preoccupation with
female seduction. Produced just before the Revolution and
engraved in 1790, Fragonard’s apparently quite lucrative
painting celebrates the loss of woman’s virginity by representing
the swooning ecstasy of a female nude whose transparent
draperies slide down from her uncovered breasts to wrap
around her inner thighs.72 Eyes rolled back, mouth partly
open, the woman’s face mimicsJean-Baptiste Greuze’s formulaic
moneymakers, those endlessly insipid, coy girls whose
mobile features seem to have lost their anatomical moorings
and threaten to slip away (the pictorial melting metaphorically
enacting a lubricated onanism). Visually, the contrast to
the Sabines could not be more startling nor, for David’s
defender, more effective. How could one accuse David’s male
nudes of being obscene
when on the contrary it is figures veiled from head to foot
who express the action most at odds with decency? Such is
this figure who, in the Sacrifice of the Rose, swoons next to an
altar; such are all these compositions so modern, so
libertine, in which preside, for lack of true genius, gross
equivocation, and more dangerous than the cynical paintings
of Aretino, address themselves less to the senses of
vision than to vicious thought, reawakening all disorders
with the aid of seductive allusions, voluptuous signs,
sometimes vague and devious, always expressive and licentious.
Here, here are indecent compositions that corrupt
the heart and trick and pervert the spirit. This man who
deploys them in his cabinet under the eyes of his mother,
wife and daughter, does not fail to proscribe with indignation
the nudity of all these half-gods of antiquity who, in
their general expression, only recall dignity, virtue, heroism.
(Chaussard, 33)
So this is the hypocrisy of C.Z.! Indulging in private pornographic
debauchery while publicly pretending moral outrage
before antique halfgods like Romulus! Lajer-Burcharth has
astutely pointed out the ways classicism accrues authority in
Chaussard’s text by its gendered opposition to Rococo works
(412).73 But Fragonard’s paintings are not the only term
against which David’s nudes are understood. Chaussard
opposes David’s forthright nudes to the erotic metonymies of
diaphanous garments. If the sensual narratives of those
flowing fabrics were indeed facilely and expertly enacted by
Fragonard’s fluid brushwork, they were also, as we know,
performed in the gardens and promenades of Paris by French
women dressed d la grecque. Significantly, the nuditis gazees of
fashionable Parisiennes were less about total revelation (although
this was apparently attempted) than about the seductiveness
of bodies all but revealed through fabric. In Chaussard’s
text, the dangers of veiled seduction evoke not only
Rococo libertinism but current feminine fashion, that style a
la Grecque now made Rococo, that perversion of the former
marker of virtue into a new kind of libertinism.
Roederer was therefore wrong to confuse the nudity of art
and the nudity of partly veiled Frenchwomen. Chaussard is
not duped by Frenchwomen’s appropriation of Greek nudity.
Instead, he seizes on the differences between female and male
nudity & la grecque and polarizes them: Frenchwomen’s halfdraped
bodies were not the same as marble or painted fully
nude gods. Gauzy drapery is seductive because it obscures; it
renders unknown-private-parts of the body while teasingly
implying their presence and accessibility. Full nudity renders
the body public because nothing is hidden from full communal
view. C.Z. believed David’s figures to be “gratuitously
indecent” because they transposed a private state-nakedness
(on which even a servant’s gaze impinged)-into a
public spectacle. For C.Z., privacy made public was indecent.
Chaussard, good Revolutionary that he was, eloquently proposes
the inverse: it is privacy-the hidden, the veiled-that is
obscene. For Chaussard, even a classically draped heroic male
figure could not embody virtue in the ways that a nude could.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 331
Only the body revealed speaks truth, particularly, I would add,
at a time when even drapery a l’antique had become compromised
by female sexuality and the license, superficiality, and
ephemerality associated with not only the ancien regime but
also post-Revolutionary fashion. (Note that Chaussard’s opposition
of veiled and fully revealed refuses to acknowledge the
extent to which Romulus’s body was cloaked by his armor.
Metal weapons, we must presume, do not “deceive” like the
folds of soft muslin.)
Chaussard solely discusses women viewers of male nudity.
Rather than valorizing the male viewer of female objects, he is
concerned to direct attention to the men as appropriate
objects of sight for both sexes. Like David, he seems to say:
look, look at men. Come out, Frenchwomen, from the
dangerously secretive viewing afforded by your duplicitous
fans. Instead, in public view, look directly at art’s nude men.
Significantly, however, Chaussard’s discussion of women’s
viewing of male nudes leads inexorably back to women’s
draped bodies; female bodies necessarily serve as the negative
example. In Chaussard’s text, women are conjured as veiled
bodies and veiled vision. But while Chaussard attempts to
emancipate women’s looking, he and his contemporaries
cannot so much as entertain the notion of women’s full
nudity. Hersilia may be compromised dressed d la grecque but
no one, not even the committed classicist Chaussard, could
“imagine” her stripped bare. If women’s gazes can be
pedagogically sanitized, there seems to be no solution to the
ways women’s bodies are permanently inscribed by sexuality.
Draped or bared, woman is never fully public. The republican
valiantly attempted to salvage Romulus and Tatius; he attempted
to salvage an audience in which genders and classes
mingled; he tried to salvage women’s viewing; but the spectacle
of Hersilia, the great mediator and intervener in her
clinging white gown, continued to pose perplexing problems.
Women’s Intervention
Intervention is no small matter. Women had indeed intervened
in 1799, compromising classicism, compromising nudity,
compromising the (fraternal) Republic. Women had
looked to an artistic tradition that was meant to be exemplary,
and they had imitated its example, but that imitation seemed
to many contemporaries to be confined to dress, not virtuous
conduct. And to make dress exemplary was fundamentally to
overturn the notion of exemplarity as a permanent foundation
of timeless values. Much has been made of the ways
David’s painting inspired masculine emulation on the part of
young male artists, but that Bloomian tale of sons imitating
fathers is not the story most relevant to an understanding of
Intervention of the Sabines.74 Women, too, can emulate, but in
1799 their emulation challenged a lineage-men begetting
men; men looking at men-that had bracketed them out.
Theirs was not the story admirable republicans like Chaussard
and Roederer hoped to tell their male progeny.
But it is wrong in the end to conflate intervention and
emulation; the latter can too easily be denigrated as mindless
aping. Women may have appropriated republican iconography
and thereby corrupted it, but even Roederer, who so
explicitly denounced women’s new tyrannical empire over la
mode, believed that women were not ultimately their own
iconographers-their power was not of their making. In 1798,
Roederer laid the blame at the door of painters.
In a promenade, a half-nude woman and others dressed in
gauze are more than nude…. Yet one must agree that
artists have also contributed to this revolution. At the birth
of the republican system, they had spoken much of Greek
girls, and our women had taken them at their word, for
fear that one would speak to them next of Roman women.
They were so lovable these Greek girls and so boring these
Roman women! One can raise one’s daughter to be a
Roman woman, but one prefers, oneself, to be a Greek girl.
Truthfully, citizen, there is something very harsh and
tyrannical in the authority of painters. Four years ago, they
wanted to make us change our habits because ours were
not picturesque; they arranged the nation for painting,
rather than arranging painting for the nation. Now they
amuse themselves dressing our women as models, chilling
them, giving them colds, in order to have greater ease to
observe the purity of forms in their paintings. Will art
benefit from this? I doubt it. It is very agreeable, I imagine,
to draw beautiful contours; but isn’t it also agreeable to
express modesty, chastity, their triumphs, their difficulties,
their surrender? Painters of talent! it is in virtues, and not
in the license of nudity, that there are treasures for you.75
Frenchwomen may have flattered their vanity by fashioning
themselves as lissome Greek nymphs rather than sturdy
Roman paragons, but it was “tyrannical” painters who had
initiated this national makeover. In search of sinuous contours,
artists were responsible for (un)dressing women, risking
their health and dangerously promoting “the license of
nudity” instead of virtue. Women, the author decides, were
ultimately the malleable materials of the dictatorial artist.
There can be little doubt that Roederer writing in the
spring of 1798 had David in mind. I do not need to rehearse
David’s central role as iconographer of the Revolution and
pageant master for Robespierre. During the Directory, the
phrase “tyrannical painter” would conjure his name above
all. Despite Roederer’s certainty that women a la mode
conspired for power, he finds a way to make David their
puppet master. But even as Roederer’s text robs women of
authorial agency, it also registers the impact of their mimicry.
To the extent that “nudity” was now bound to “license,” it
was also bound to fashionable Frenchwomen undressed d la
grecque. In the controversial reception of David’s Sabines,
theirs was perhaps the most formidable intervention. Of
course, what republican classicism and the masculine beau
iddal lost in terms of authority, David’s coffers won in boxoffice
sales. Although he would not exhibit another painting
featuring classical male nudes for fifteen years, the scandal of
nudity & la grecque in turn-of-the-century Paris amply paid for
his country house.76
Who then risked whose health? At the onset of the
Napoleonic Empire, the author of The Friend of Women; or,
Letter ofa Doctor concerning the influence of the clothing of women on
their morals and health. . .. offered David’s example to justify
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332 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
24 David, Le Sacre, 1805-7.
Paris, Musee du Louvre
(photo: ? RMN)
his denunciation of women’s loose and revealing clothing,
but his parable of 1804 inverts Roederer’s tale of 1798.
According to this author, the Sabines may have made David
wealthy, but he had paid the price of his own physical
well-being:
I can only cite with some confidence the works of doctors
who are especially devoted to proving the dangers of
immorality. Yet there is some reason to infer from the
slackness [la mollesse] of clothing that of morals, and from
the latter a bad influence on health, when we see David,
surrounded by royal luxury and fallen women, struck by a
shameful affliction.77
By 1804, it seemed clear that Roederer’s tyrannical puppet
master had fallen into the seductive, regal fold of loose and
luxuriant women. Hersilia, it turns out, had led ineluctably to
the coronation of Josephine by a wan, swaddled and ermineblanketed
hero. Sick, royal, and feminine, David was ready to
paint Le Sacre for the Salon of 1808 (Fig. 24). David, in the
midst of painting that homage to the flowing satins, velvets,
and fashionable stuffs of the Empire, succumbed to public
approbation and painted over Tatius’s genitals.
Assistant professoro f history of art at U.C. BerkeleyD, arcy Grimaldo
Grigsbyi s currentlyw orkingo n a booke ntitledE xtremities in Paint:
Representing Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (1789-
1830). Her essay “Rumor, Contagion and Colonization in Gros’s
Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804)” was published in Representations
51 (Summer 1995). [History of Art Department, University of
California at BerkeleyB, erkeleyC, alif 94720]
Frequently Cited Sources
Aulard, Alphonse, Paris pendant la riaction thermidorienne et sous le directoire:
Recueils de documents, 5 vols. (Paris, 1898).
Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, 1799, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David
(Paris: Pougens, Year VIII [1799-1800]), in Collection Deloynes (Paris:
Biblioth~que Nationale, 1980), microform, vol. 21, no. 597.
Crow, Thomas, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995).
David, Jules, Le peintre Louis David 1748-1825: Souvenirs et documents inidits
(Paris, 1880-82).
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, “David’s Sabine Women: Body, Gender and Republican
Culture under the Directory,” Art History, 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430.
Musee du Louvre,Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825, exh. cat., Paris, 1989.
Roederer, Pierre-Louis, Oeuvresd u ComteP L. Roedererv, ol. 4 (Paris, 1856).
Notes
This article is largely based on chap. 4 of my dissertation “Classicism,
Nationalism and History: The Prix Dicennaux of 1810 and the Politics of Art
under Post-Revolutionary Empire,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1995.
I would like to thank Thomas Crow, Pat Simons,Joel Isaacson, and David Bien
for their comments at that time as well as readers of this altered version:
foremost among them, Todd P. Olson, but also Erika Najinski, Jeannene
Prybylski, Anne Wagner, Margaret Waller, and the readers for Art Bulletin. I
would also like to thank my efficient research assistant Heather MacDonald.
Margaret Waller generously shared her unpublished material on related
issues. Funding was provided by Fulbright, Lurcy, Social Science Research
Council, and Kress Two-Year Institutional Fellowships. Translations are mine
unless otherwise indicated. For Gregoria.
1. Stefan Germer, “In Search of a Beholder: On the Relation of Art,
Audiences and Social Spheres in Post-Thermidor France,” Art Bulletin 79
(Mar. 1992): 19-36 at 34; Dorothy Johnson, Jacques-Louis David: Art in
Metamorphosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 124.
2. See Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “David’s Sabine Women: Body, Gender and
Republican Culture under the Directory,” Art History 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430
at 413 (author’s emphasis) and 424 (emphasis added); see also Erica Rand,
“Depoliticizing Women: Female Agency, the French Revolution, and the Art
of Boucher and David,” Genders 7 (Spring 1990), 47-68. Alex Potts has also
emphasized the centrality of the male as “an ideal object of desire and an ideal
subjectivity with which the male spectator can identify”; Potts, “Beautiful
Bodies and Dying Heroes: Images of Ideal Manhood in the French Revolution,”
History Workshop3 0 (Autumn 1990): 1-21; repr. in revised form in his
Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994), 229.
3. Mus6e du Louvre, 336.
4. In his brochure, David stated that even prior to the exhibition he had
encountered criticism of the nudity and that it would certainly be repeated
(“An objection that has already been made to me and that will not fail to be
repeated”), Le tableau des Sabines, exposi publiquement au palais national des
sciences et des arts …. (Paris, Year VIII [1799-1800]), 15; cited in Daniel
Wildenstein, Documents compMmentaireas u catalogue de l’oeuvre de Louis David
(Paris: Foundation Wildenstein, 1973), 150.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 333
5. See below for controversies concerning the nudity of the male figures. A
number of statements in the press assimilated David’s private entrepreneurial
exhibition to spectacular entertainments subject to a government tax; his
defenders valiantly attempted to deny the appropriateness of such a conflation
of art and spectacle. The controversy intensified rather than diminished over
the years;b y 1801, even David’sa rdent supporter Pierre-Jean-BaptistCe haussard
criticized the deleterious effects commercial exhibitions would have on
the public salon; see Journald esA rts,3 0 Fructidor,Y earI X [Sept. 17, 1801]. For
the vicissitudes of the painting’s initial reception, see Mus6e du Louvre,
328-32; for later controversies,p articularlyd uring the debates catalyzedb y the
1810 decennial competition, see DarcyG rimaldoG rigsby,” ClassicismN, ationalism,
and History,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1995, chap. 4.
6. A.D. [AmauryD uval], La DicadeP hilosophiqu1e3 (10 Pluviose, Year VIII
[Jan. 30, 1800]). According to Duval, clothed figures should be painted by
women and mediocre painters. The Ideologues were a disparate group of
liberal social and political theorists generally committed to Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac’s theory of sensationalism. Self-appointed inheritors of the Enlightenment
philosophetsh, ey dominated the national Institute’sC lasso f Morala nd
Political Sciences. Even as they lost favor under Napolkon, particularly after
the Concordat of 1801, they continued to express their Enlightenment ideas
through their organ, the journal La DicadeP hilosophiquSe.e e Joanna Kitchin,
Un journal “philosophique”:L a Dicade (1794-1807) (Paris: M.J. Minard, 1965);
and Marc Regaldo Un milieu intellectuel: La Dicade Philosophique, 5 vols. (Paris:
Diffusion, H. Champion, 1976). Concerning the masculine beau idial in this
period, see Regis Michel, LeB eaui dial, exh. cat., Mus&ed u Louvre,P aris,1 989;
Potts, 1990, 1994 (as in n. 2); Thomas Crow, “Observations on Style and
History in French Painting of the Male Nude,” in VisualC ultureI:m agesa nd
Interpretationesd, . Norman Bryson et al. (Hanover,N .H.: WesleyanU niversity
Press, 1994), 141-67, repr. in expanded form in EmulationM: akingA rtistsf or
RevolutionaryF ranceb y Thomas Crow (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995); Whitney Davis, “The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet’s Sleep of
Endymion,”in Bryson et al, 168-201; Marie-PierreF oissy-Aufrareet al, La Mort
de Bara (Avignon: Fondation du Mus6e Calvert, 1989); Abagail Solomon-
Godeau, “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation,” Art History 16, no. 2
(une 1993): 286-312; and idem, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1997); as well as Carol Ockman, “Profiling
Homoeroticism: Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon,” Art Bulletin
75 (June 1993): 259-74; and idem, Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the
SerpentinLe ine (New Haven:Y ale UniversityP ress, 1995).
7. Abagail Solomon-Godeau in her book Male Trouble(a s in n. 6), 195-99,
has also briefly noted the eruption of negative criticism of male nudity in this
period. While she emphasizes the “entirely male formations” within which the
male nude was “produced, received, commissioned, sold, discussed, celebrated
or criticized” (199), I focus on the ways women-actual and
imagined-impinged on the “masculine character of the artistic sphere.”
8. Mariani, letter to the editor, Journal des Arts, 15 Pluvi6se, Year VIII [Feb. 4,
1800]: 9: “There you are, bourgeois gentlemen! You love draped chiffons
better than beautiful forms. / As for me, / Nothing is more beautiful than the
nude, / the nude alone is amiable.” See also the anonymous brochure Critique
du tableau des Sabines du Citoyen David, discussed in Mus6e du Louvre, 336; and
C.Z., Le Courdiedre sS pectacle8s, F rimaire,Y earI X, [Nov. 29, 1800], 3.
9. Another anonymous critic, who lamented the lack of paintings commemorating
France’sm ilitaryg lories, was particularlyt roubled by the inappropriateness
of portraying military heroes nude. The dialogic conceit he used hardly
masks the author’s dismay and contempt; artistic precedents cannot justify a
choice that is at once indecent and ahistorical. The dialogue juxtaposes the
public’s criteria of morality and historical accuracy to the artist’s intraaesthetic
commitments to the acadimie and visual precedents; La Revue du
Museum: Dialogue entre Damon et un peintre (Paris, 1799), 8-10, in Collection
Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform, vol. 21, no. 562,
142-44.
10. C.Z. (as in n. 8)
11. Chaussard, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David (Paris, Year VIII [1799-
1800]), Deloynes Collection, 21, no. 597. An Ideologue, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste
Chaussard replaced Amaury Duval as La Decade Philosophique’s art critic in
1798. The fervor with which he embraced the Revolution is suggested by a play
he wrote in 1791 aptly entitled La France rigndtre, which bore the epigraph
“One does not enlighten men with the torch of hatred but with the flame of
Reason.” His Enlightenment faith in rationality accompanied a profound
commitment to antiquity and a complete disavowal of Christianity, to the
extent that he replaced his “superstitious” hyphenated Christian surname
with Publicola in 1792. Nevertheless, during theJacobins’ rule, Chaussard was
thrice placed on Robespierre’s execution list because he remained a committed
Girondist. Concerning Chaussard, see Grigsby (as in n. 5), chaps. 4, 6. See
also the highly informative essay by Marc Regaldo, “Profil perdu: L’idiologue
Chaussard,” in Approches des Lumires: Milanges offerts d Jean Fabre (Paris:
Klinksieck, 1974), 381-401; E. Hereau, “Ndcrologie: Pierre-Jean-Baptiste
Chaussard,” Revue Encycloptdique 21 (1824): 251-53; Regaldo (as in n. 6);
Kitchin (as in n. 6); Adrian Rifkin, “History, Time and the Morphology of
Critical Language, or Publicola’s Choice,” in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in
Nineteenth-CenturyF rance, ed. Michael Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1994), 29-42.
12. Stefan Germer and Hubertus Kohle emphasize the split address of the
painting in “From the Theatrical to the Aesthetic Hero: On the Idea of Virtue
in David’s Brutus and Sabines,” Art History 9, no. 2 (June 1986): 168-84.
13. Amaury Duval (as in n. 6), 228, also explicitly described Hersilia in terms
of class hierarchy: “Each of these women has a particular expression that
indicates the rank she occupies in society. The suffering of Hersilia is noble.”
14. In another passage of his essay regarding the Sabines, 30, Chaussard
spells out his conviction that the French people did not enjoy the physical
vigor and perfection of the Greeks. Exhorting David to go to Greece itself,
Chaussard nostalgically evokes the beauty of the southern peoples relative to
the northern.
15. Chaussard’s condemnation of fashion’s deformation of modern man
resembles other kinds of texts that brought the philosophe’ms edical discourse
to the examination of “unnatural” social practices. For instance, in Dr.
Clairian’s 1803 publication entitled Recherches et considirations medicales sur les
vitements des hommesp articulibrements ur les culottes. … (Paris, 1803), a physician
addressed fears that restrictivem ale culottes( breeches) risked the disappearance
of the French race.
16. See, for example, Socidt6 Populaire et R6publicaine des Arts, Considerations
sur les avantages de changer le costume franfais (Paris, n.d.): “Under the
empire of despots, the useless class of idle rich determined the form to give to
clothing…. Free men will not follow the airs of these frivolous beings….
[The free man] enters into the spirit of French regeneration to restore the
costume to its original goal and the morals of equality.” See also the
Convention’s decree of October 29, 1793, concerning the newfound freedom
from vestimentaryc odes, cited in Philippe Perrot, Fashioningt heB ourgeoisieA:
History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 20.
17. For the debates about dress during the Revolutionary period and the
history of fashion from Revolution to Empire, see Nicole Pellegrin, Les
vitements de la liberti: Abicidaire des pratiques vestimentaires en France de 1780 d
1800 (Aix-en-ProvenceA: linea, 1989); William Olander, “Pour transmettre:
la posterit6: French Painting and Revolution, 1774-1795,” Ph.D. diss., New
York University, 1983, 218-19; Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution
(New York:H olmes and Meier, 1988);J. Renouvier, “Costume,”i n Histoired e
l’artp endantl a revolution(P aris:V veJ . Renouard, 1863), 463-80; Lynn Hunt,
“Rdvolutionf rancaise et la vie priv6e,” in Histoired e la vie pridvee, d. Philippe
Aries and Georges Duby (Paris: Seuil, [1985]), 21-52; Margaret Waller,
“Disembodiment as a Masquerade: Fashion Journalists and Other ‘Realist’
Observersi n DirectoryP aris,”L ‘EspriCt riateur3 7, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 50-60;
Raymond Gaudriault, RIpertoire de la gravure de mode franfaise des origines d 1815
(Paris:P romodis, 1988); Philippe S6guy,H istoired esm odess ous l’Empir(eP aris:
Promodis;C ercle de la Librairie,1 988); FrancoisB oucher, Histoired u costume
en Occident de l’antiquiti d nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 335-50; Ruth
Turner Wilcox, TheM odei n Costume(N ew York:S cribner, 1958), 220-45; The
Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire 1789-1815, exh. cat.,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989.
18. See Lynn Hunt, “The Rhetoric of Revolution in France,” History
WorkshopJourn1a5l (Spring 1983): 78-94; and idem (as in n. 17), 24-26.
19. FranCois Poultier, “Physionomie de Paris,” Amis des Lois, 30 Vent6se,
Year VI [March 20, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 578.
20. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, Le nouveau Diable boiteux: Tableau philosophiquee
t moradl eP aris( Paris,Y earV II [ 1798-1799]), vol. 2, 233. The rapidityo f
fashion’s transformation led a journal to bemoan mockingly during a quiet
summer: “For eight days, at least, fashion has been of an eternal constancy”
Miroir8, Fructidor,Y earV [Aug. 25, 1797], cited in Aulard,v ol. 4, 305.
21. See, for example, the engravings in Caricaturepso litiquesb y Antione-
Joseph de Barruel-Beauvert( Paris,Y earV I [1797-98]).
22. For example, the Bureau Central reported on 29 Prairial,Y earV I (June
16, 1798): “It is certain that, restrained by severe surveillance, an incurable
class of opponents [frondeurso] f the government and egoists for whom the
good or the bad of our political situation is altogether a matter of indifference,
having no other means of signaling their opposition to republican principles,
have affected a dress extraordinary in some aspects: green collars, black
collars, purple collars, then ties, then leaded canes; if they have not, for lack of
opportunity, seved as a sign of rallying among royalists, they were at least so
many tacit insults to these [republican] principles”; cited in Aulard, vol. 4,
720. See also Le Pddacteur of 3 Fructidor, Year V [August 19, 1797], cited in
ibid., 301; Sdguy (as in n. 17), 34, and Edmond andJules de Goncourt, Histoire
de la soci~t• fran~aise pendant le Directoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 304-5;
Boucher (as in n. 17), 338.
23. Pierre Cartellier to Antoine-Denis Chaudet, letter of May 7, 1804, in H.
Jouin, “Lettres inddits d’artistes fran•ais du XIX sidcle,” Nouvelles Archives de
l’ArtFranfais,
3d ser., 16, (1900): 7-8.
24. Henry Redhead Yorke, France in Eighteen Hundred and Two, ed. J.A.C.
Sykes (London, 1806), 124.
25. These differences resemble but also deviate from the paradigm of the
older active partner (erastes) and the passive youthful love object (eromenos)
characteristic of ancient vase painting. For a bibliography of this literature and
a consideration ofJ.-A.-D. Ingres’s exaggeration of that implicit opposition in
his early work, see Ockman, 1993 (as in n. 6).
26. Romulus’s figure accords therefore with Jacques Lacan’s assertion that
“the phallus can only play its role as veiled”;Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of
the Phallus,” in Feminine Sexuality:Jacques Lacan and the “EcoleF reudienne, “ed.
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334 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton; Pantheon, 1982),
74-85.
27. Yorke (as in n. 24), 124.
28. La morte de trois milles ans au Salon de 1783 (1783) 4, in Collection Deloynes
(Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1980) micoform, vol. 13, no. 286, 178.
29. See Elisabeth Vig6e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, ed. Claudine Herrmann, (Paris:
Des Femmes, 1984) vol. 1, 85-88; and also the account by Aime Martin in
Pierre de Nolhac, Madame Vigie-Lebrun: Peintre de Marie-Antoinette (Paris:
Goupil, 1912), 129-35; this event is briefly mentioned by Mary Sheriff, The
Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigie-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics ofArt (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47-48.
30. The women, artists and wives of artists, were self-consciously performing
history painting, citing and enacting antique precedents celebrated, for
instance, in Nicolas-Guy Brenet’s painting Piety and Generosity of Roman Women;
Brenet’s tableau hung next to David’s painting of masculine martial sacrifice,
Oath of the Horatii, in the Salon of 1785. That the Frenchwomen donating
jewels in 1789 modeled themselves on classical women was widely noted by
contemporary observers; for instance, Courrier Francais 65 (Sept. 18, 1789):
313; and Ruvolutions de Paris9 (Sept. 5-12, 1789): 19-22, which described these
women as “retracing among us the virtues of Greece.” I interpret the act of the
donation as a double move, at once distancing women and art from ornament
and luxury. However, if their sacrifice was likened to men’s sacrifice to the
state, it was far less sustainable; the negation of ornament can only be
performed once. Regarding the donation, see Vivian Cameron, “Approaches
to Narrative and History: The Case of the Donation of September 7, 1789, and
Its Images,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 413-32; the event
was described in “Origines des dons patriotiques, faites A la nation,”
RNvolutions de Paris 9 (September 5-12, 1789): 19-22; and by the group’s
spokesperson, Mme Moitte, in two brochures, L’dme des Romaines dans les
femmes franraises and Suite de l’dme des romaines dans lesfemmes franfaises (Paris,
1789), as well as Journal inidit de Madame Moitte, ed. Paul Cottin (Paris, n.d.),
1-3. I have analyzed this donation at length in an unpublished paper entitled
” ‘L’&clat des sacrifices’: Ornament, Painting and Female Citizenship in the
Donation of September 7, 1789.”
31. During the Revolution, one writer reveals the ways that (female) sign
and (abstract) signified were conflated; he protests a young woman representing
Reason at the Festival of Reason surely must have represented Liberty:
“For the senses and the philosophical imagination are both equally shocked at
the idea of a woman-especially a youthful woman-representing Reason”;
quoted in Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 101-2. See also Darcy
Grimaldo Grigsby, “Liberty’s Fragmented Body: Revolutionary Politics and
the Instability of Allegory; An Analysis of the Initial Reception of Delacroix’s
Le 28juillet, Libertieguidant le peuple,” M.A. thesis, University of Michigan, 1989;
and Marcia Pointon, “Liberty on the Barricades: Women, Politics and
Sexuality in Delacroix,” in Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting
1830-1908, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59-82.
32. Armand Charlemagne, Le monde incroyable, quoted in Renouvier (as in n.
17), 476.
33. See also an anonymous portrait, ca. 1800, in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., reproduced in Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 126. Renouvier (as in n.
17), 476, describes the trend thus: “That which best dresses a woman is
nudity.” See also Lucet, La Correspondance des Dames, vol. 2, (Paris, Year VIII
[1799-1800]). Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has discussed women’s risque selfrepresentation
in relation to Girodet’s retaliation against Mlle Lange in 1799;
see her “Le rh6torique du corps f6minin sous le Directoire: Le cas d’Anne-
Francoise Elizabeth Lange en Danae,” in Les femmes et la Rivolution franCaise,
ed. Marie-France Brive (Toulouse: Presses Universitaire de Miraie, 1990), vol.
2, 221-25.
34. Quoted in Walter Markov, Grand Empire: Virtue and Vice in the Napoleonic
Era (New York: Hippocrene, 1990), 204.
35. “Their entire outfit, inclusive of shoes and jewelry, was not supposed to
weigh more than half a pound. The record was said to be held by the delightful
wife of Hamelin, a Swiss army contractor, who strolled through the Tuileries
gardens arrayed in nothing but a gossamer veil until the importunate gawking
of passers-by compelled her to retire”; quoted in ibid.
36. See Journal des Dames et des Modes, 9 Pluvirse, Year VI [Jan. 28, 1798].
According to Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 153 n. 31, Mme Tallien preferred
flesh-colored tights with gold spangles that glinted under her transparent
robes. Mme Tallien, nie Thirisia Cabarrus, was the daughter of a prominent
Spanish banker and wife of the Revolutionary journalist and politician
Jean-Lambert Tallien; her salon played a central role in Thermidorian high
society. David Kunzle states that this period’s scanty, thin muslin gowns were
also sometimes “dampened to adhere sculpturally to the body”; Kunzle,
Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight-Lacing and OtherForms of
Body-Sculpturei n the West( Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1982), 105.
37. La Petite Poste de Paris, 3 Messidor, Year V [June 21, 1797], cited in
Maurice Lescure, Madame Hamelin: Merveilleuse et turbulent Fortunde (1776-
1851) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 38. A few days later L’Ami du Peuple of 5
Messidor, Year V [June 23, 1797] published a commentary on this incident
that ended with an exhortation to “the imprudent” that “it is necessary at
least to respect the people, and that, if one is dissolute, it is necessary to hide it;
if one is well-behaved, it is necessary to appear so”; quoted in Aulard, vol. 4, p.
189, as well as in Lescure, 38. The incident is discussed by Waller (as in n. 17),
as well as Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33). According to Louis Madelin, La France
du Directoire (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1922), Mme Hamelin attempted “to replace
the fashion of the sans-culottes with that of the sans-chemise.” Here is the duc
de Broglie in his memoirs: “Like many others, I saw Madame Tallien …
disguised as Diana with her half-naked breast, wearing cothurns on her feet,
and dressed, if I may use the term, in a tunic which scarcely covered her
knees”; de Broglie, Personal Recollections of Duc de Broglie 1785-1820, trans.
Raphael Ledos de Beaufort (London, 1887), vol. 1, 21.
38. Courrier des Spectacles, 11 Thermidor, Year V [July 28, 1797], 251. A.
Charlemagne’s poem (as in n. 32) also points to this pervasive adoption of
Greek costume when he asks, “Who is this Greek with big arms?” and
discovers, on overhearing her argot, that she is Mme Angot, that greatly
popular symbol of the crude female arriviste.
39. Dr. D6sessarts, Paris, Oct. 1798, quoted in Srguy (as in n. 17), 51.
40. Dr. Victor Broussonet, De la mode et des habillements (1799, 2d ed., 1806).
Arguments of these sorts would be sustained over the course of the decade. In
1804, for example, a pamphlet entitled L’ami desfemmes ou lettres d’un m~decin
listed numerous examples of women who had died because of their irrational
commitment to the unhealthy vagaries of classicizing fashion.
41. Le Publiciste, 21 Fructidor, Year VII [Sept. 7, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. 5,
715.
42. In Louis-Mathieu Langlks, Voyage de Thunberg au cap de Bonne-Espirance,
aux iles de la Sonde et auJapon (Paris, 1796), vol. 4, 59.
43. Louis-Mathieu Langls, letter to the editor, Journal de Paris, 3e jour
compl6mentaire, Year VII [Sept. 19, 1799], quoted in Aulard, vol. 5, 737. That
feminine Greek styles were commonly associated with indecency is corroborated
as well by a fashion column of thejournal Miroir, which two years earlier
juxtaposed the new style of gown (significantly, named les robes d l’hypocrite) to
the dresses d l’antique: “They are perhaps more decent than the gowns d la
grecque”; quoted in Aulard, vol. 3, 751.
44. Pierre-Louis Roedere, Journal de Paris, 15 Fructidor, Year VII [Sept. 1,
1799], quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 396. Called “leader of the philosophes” by a
contemporary, Roederer was hostile to both the nobility and clergy and thus
embraced the Revolution. A moderate member of the Jacobin club, he
equivocally supported constitutional monarchy and opposed the execution of
the king. After the fall of the Girondists, he went into hiding, only to reemerge
after Thermidor. He supported Bonaparte but soon became disillusioned and
fell out of favor during the Consulate; nonetheless he was appointed a count
by Napoleon in 1808. See Thierry Lentz, Roederer 1754-1835 (Paris: Serpenoise,
1989); Roederer’s writings were published between 1853 and 1859 as
Oeuvresd u ComteP L. RoedererV. ol. 4 includes the essays on fashion cited in this
article.
45. “Immorality impeded by surveillance has been less apparent outdoors,
and the arrest of twenty-four prostituted women has at least dammed up this
scandal. One sees with regret that the women most disposed by their
attractions and their morality to win the admiration which they seek, affect
appearances contrary to the virtue of their own sentiments and thereby
involuntarily embolden by their example those known to be the most
shameful”; Bureau Central report, 4 Messidor, Year VI [une 22, 1798], cited
in Aulard, vol. 4, 745.
46. See Elizabeth Colwill, “Transforming Women’s Empire: Representations
of Women in French Political Culture, 1770-1807,” Ph.D. diss., SUNY,
Binghamton, 1990.
47. Roederer, Journal d’Economie Publique, de Morale et de Politique, 10
Frimaire, Year V [Oct. 31, 1796], quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 382.
48. Chaussard himself recognized the Directory’s striking opposition of
male and female fashion in a dialogue in Le nouveau Diable boiteux (as in n. 20),
vol. 2, 232-33. The man accuses the woman of showing too much and relying
on la mode as a “magic talisman,” and the woman responds that the man, too,
succumbs to fashion: “… and if I tremble from cold, don’t you suffocate from
heat?”
49. Roederer, letter addressed to Louis-Sbastien Mercier, Journal de Paris,
13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807-8, quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 382:
“elles ont fait, pour regagner tout ce qu’elles avaient perdu, un va-tout oii elles
ont mis jusqu’d leur sante; et ce va-tout sera bient6t perdu.” Roederer’s
statement was deemed interesting enough to have been reported and
recounted in another journal, L’Ami des Lois, 14 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 3,
1798], also cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 595.
50. Concerning the strategic opposition of Corneille and Racine in the late
18th century, see Crow, 33-45.
51. See T. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 176-77.
52. See, for example, the first issue of Tableau Gindral du Gozt, des Modes et
Costumesd e Paris par Une Socidtdd ‘Artistese t Gens de Lettres, 1 Vendimiaire, Year
VII [Sept. 22, 1798], which describes the Roman-style white tunic, specifying
that “nudity” (sleevelessness) had replaced sleeves even in harsh weather.
Here is the duchesse d’Abrantes’s description of Mme Tallien: “She had taken
to wearing a sort of semi-Grecian costume that became her admirably. It was
plain, almost severe, and she wore it with consummate grace…. Her only
adornment was a long, ample robe of muslin falling in large folds about her
limbs and modeled after the drapery of a Grecian statue. Only, the robe was of
choice Indian muslin and fashioned, no doubt, more elegantly than those of
Aspasia and Poppea. It was caught up at the bosom, and the sleeves were drawn
back over the arms and fastened with old-fashioned cameo brooches. Similar
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 335
brooches adorned her shoulders and her waist”; d’Abrantes, Histoire des Salons
de Paris, quoted in L. Gastine, Madame Tallien: Notre Dame de Thermidor
(London: John Lane, the Bodely Head, 1913), 188-89. In 1801 Roederer
made light of the ways female dress had come to be minimally clasped by such
brooches in a mock dialogue between a pin and a needle in which the needle
lamented its lack of employment: women’s clothing was now only pinned
together, often with cameo brooches, intended as the pin complained, only to
be unclasped, Journal de Paris, 21 Fructidor, Year IX [Sept. 8, 1801], in
Roederer, vol. 4, 400-401.
53. Concerning Boilly’s series, see Susan Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Liopold
Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995), 70-75.
54. Etienne-Jean Del6cluze, Journal de Delcluze 1824-1828, ed. R. Baschet
(Paris: Bernard Grosset, 1948), 338.
55. Louis Hautecoeur, Louis David (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1954), 180.
56. Truthful ones, according to Pierre-Maximillien Delafontaine’s manuscript
at Paris, Bibliothque de l’Institut, ms 3784; see also Hautecoeur (as in
n. 55), 180 n. 40.
57. See Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 88-95; Germer and Kohle
(as in n. 12), 179-80.
58. There is now a large bibliography concerning women’s relation to the
public sphere during the Revolutionary period; see, for example,Joan Landes,
Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press 1988); Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses:
Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); as well asJohanna
Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New
York: Roufledge, 1995). There are fewer studies concerning the status of
women during the post-Revolutionary years; see Geneviive Fraisse, Reason’s
Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
59. Concerning the scandal of Girodet’s vengeful, satiric denunciation of
the licentiousness and venality of one such fashionable parvenu, Mlle Lange,
at the Salon of 1799, see George Levitine, “Girodet’s DNaenwa ,: The
Iconography of a Scandal,” Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 57-59 (1969-
70): 69-79; Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33); and Crow, 233-36.
60. I am indebted to Stefan Germer’s discussion of the painting’s two axes,
which he relates to Emile Benveniste’s distinction between r&it and discours;
Germer (as in n. 1), 33-34.
61. Romulus, despite his nudity, still bears the traces of the incroyable’s
foppish elegance, with his “dogs’ ears” sideburns, distinctive full-lipped
profile, and ornamentation condensed and displaced onto the serpentine red
feather and luxuriant gold accessories. Tatius may have appeared naked to
many, but, in his own way, Romulus too was au courant in 1799.
62. Charles Landon, Journal des Arts, no. 34 (20 Niv6se, Year VII[IJ an. 10,
1800]): 4.
63. Boutard, Journal des Dibats, 13 Ventose, Year VIII [Mar. 4, 1800]: 2-3,
quoted in Collection Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform,
vol. 21, no. 598, 787-88. A popular vaudeville specifically took as its subject
women’s hypocritical relation to David’s tableau. The brunt of the satire is the
relatively educated woman artist whose fundamentally vulnerable moral
position is exploited by an amorous young man in pursuit of her daughter.
Tricked by the male suitor, the foolish mother leaves her daughter defenseless
in the foyer of David’s exhibition because she does not dare expose her to
painted male nudes. Of course, the daughter is abducted and the play ends
with a parodic tableau vivant of David’s painting. See C. C. Jouy, Longchamp,
and Dieu-La-Foy, Le tableau des Sabines: Vaudeville en un acte (Paris, 1800).
64. Chapter C”LNXuXdXiti,, ” in Le Nouveau Paris, ed. J.-C. Bonnet
(Mercure de France, 1994), p. 649; this essay was largely based on two articles
which appeared in Journal de Paris on 9 and 12 Germinal, Year V [Mar. 29 and
Apr. 1, 1797]: 790-91 and 803-4 respectively. That Mercier’s complaint had
both currency and longevity is attested by J. B. Pujoulx’s discussion of the
nudity of statues in his publication Paris d lafin du XVIIIe sitcle (Paris, 1801), 12.
65. Of course, homoerotic readings could also at particular historical
junctures require similar censorship or obfuscation. For example, in the
particularly homophobic atmosphere of early-19th-century England, Lord
Byron was compelled to masquerade his erotic response to the Apollo Belvedere
as that of a female viewer (a tactic he repeatedly deployed in his writings).
Nevertheless, I would insist that in late-18th-century France, the homoerotic,
exclusively masculine paradigm of viewing dominated aesthetic discourse.
Alex Potts has described the restraints placed on homoerotic readings of art in
Potts, 1994 (as in n. 2), esp. 118-31; concerning Byron, see Louis Crompton,
Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985).
66. In her recently published book The Exceptional Woman, Mary Sheriff
discusses 18th-century thinkers’ preoccupation with the female gaze on the
male object, and in a particularly amusing passage addresses Denis Diderot’s
account of embarrassing sexual arousal while modeling nude for the female
painter Mme Terborch; Sheriff (as in n. 29), 115-20, esp. 118.
67. Roederer, Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807,
quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 386.
68. According to Jules David, 360, men’s behavior before David’s tableau
was markedly different from that of the fashionable women who feigned
modesty and embarrassment by covering their eyes with a fan cleverly
concealing a viewing glass, thereby at once hiding and directing their gaze:
“The men of fashion prided themselves on observing and signaling in loud
voices all the beauties and all the faults [of the picture], designating each
muscle by its name and insisting with an entirely masculine liberty on the
amplitude or meagerness of forms. They have been described to us as passing
an attentive eye-glass over all the details of the tableau. As for the women who
did not attain this high degree of freedom, a fan in which a mirror was placed
permitted them to control appropriately the reflections made around them
and to hide their confusion, all the while satisfying their curiosity.” Without
clothing that differentiated the wife from the whore, women were called on to
perform their virtue. If their “look” was sexually alluring, the ways they
dispensed their sight might prove their modesty. The elaborate contrivance of
the fan was meant to secure their status as women for whom the public
contemplation of genital nudity was no familiar event. Standing between
mirror and tableau, these women would have been highly aware of eyes all
about them evaluating their performance of modesty with fluttering fans. The
challenge of deception, looking while pretending not to, was exacerbated by
the intense visibility they acquired when doubled in the reflection. If the sense
of surveillance was heightened, so, too, would have been the titillating sense of
risk and illicit pleasure. Moreover, the mirror reflection, while alternately
obfuscating the canvas or providing a long-distance, crystallized view (depending
on the size of the crowd), also offered the viewer a tantalizing opportunity
to see herself touching, intersecting, approaching, or abandoning the naked
men. The mirror permitted the performance of intimate dalliances, thereby
both heightening the eroticism and the sense of the nakedness of the male
protagonists.
69. De Cailly, Journal des Dames 25 (10 Pluviose, Year VII [Jan. 29, 1799]):
398-400.
70. While the preoccupation with the impact of violent sensations on
pregnant women was dissipating during the early 19th century, contemporaneous
tracts on the effects of women’s imagination on their progeny spanned
this period; see, for example, Benjamin Bablot, Dissertation sur le pouvoir de
limagination des femmes enceintes (Paris, 1788), and, during the Empire,
Jean-Baptiste DemanCgoenosni,d vrations physiologiques sur le pouvoir de
limagination maternelle durant la grossesse
a
…, 2 vols. (Paris, 1807). For a recent
discussion of this obsession, see Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 7-8.
71. Chaussard, 43-44. The author argues that young children are nude
without corrupting their innocence; in the past, pious girls consecrated to the
religion of humanity nursed entirely naked patients without offending their
chaste regard; and even in Rome, “Catholic prejudice” supports the exhibition
of nude statues. In a footnote, Chaussard also quotes Montaigne’s Essays
at length. The 16th-century thinker solely addressesjustifications for women’s
viewing of naked men and in turn cites many different kinds of evidence,
including Plato’s order that both sexes of all ages present themselves nude at
the gymnasium; the example of Indian women, who see men nude in order to
cool their sense of vision; and Lacedaemonian women, who, he claims, were
more virginal than Frenchwomen and who saw young men exercise naked
every day. Montaigne also refutes the purported claim of the women Pohfg u
that their nudity was an invention to attract men, concluding they lost more
allure than they gained; he ends his argument by citing Livy, “Livy said that to
a good woman a nude man is nothing more than an image.”
72. According to Pierre Rosenberg, the work was probably painted between
1785 and 1788. When Fragonard died in 1806, The Sacrifice of the Rosewas one
of only three works listed in his obituary in the Journal de Paris (the others were
its possible pendant, another late work, The Fountain of Love, and his early,
solitary large-scale history painting, Callirhoes).A ccording to Charles Landon,
these works “brought him enormous sums of money”; quoted in Rosenberg,
Fragonard, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum ofArt,
NewYork, 1988, 548-53.
73. Larger-Burcharth (as in n. 2), 412.
74. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of lnfluence: A Theory of Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973); Bryson (as in n. 57); and Crow.
75. Roederer,Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798], quoted in
Roederer, vol. 4, 386-87.
76. Musie du Louvre, 335.
77. P.-J. Marie de Saint-Ursin, L’ami des femmes; ou, Lettre d’un m?decin,
concernant l’influence de l’habillement desfemmes sur leurs moeurs et leur
sant.
…
(Paris, 1804), 46.
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Summary and Analysis of Grigsby’s Argument
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Based on: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Nudity à la grecque in 1799,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 80, no. 2 (June 1998), pp. 311-35

summarize Grigsby’s argument in 1-2 paragraphs and then use the rest of your response to evaluate the effectiveness of her argument. How does she reveal the connections between art, fashion, politics, and morality? How does she structure her argument and what kind of evidence does she use? What did you find most interesting about her argument, or what did you find most unconvincing and why?
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Nudity à la grecque in 1799
Author(s): Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 311-335
Published by: College Art Association
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Nudity a la grecque in 1799
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Wake up the women at the right ofJacques-Louis David’s Oath
of the Horatii of 1785 and place them between the male
warriors (Fig. 1). Now remove the men’s clothes. This is the
startling, even preposterous, double move of David’s Intervention
of the Sabines of 1799 (Fig. 2). If David’s martyr portraits of
isolated, unconscious, and eroticized male bodies, like his
Death ofJoseph Bara of 1793 (Fig. 3), astutely and economically
offered an iconography for the radical fraternal Republic, his
transposition of the solitary male nude into a syntax that
prominently included dressed women proved problematic.
The tableau’s awkward character derives from the tensions
not only between female dress and male nudity but also
between the women’s action and the men’s friezelike stasis,
between the pathos now displaced onto the female figures
and the technical precision lavished on the evacuated husks
of the standing male academies.
Scholarship has for the most part treated the novel conjunction
of naked male bodies and newly central female protagonists
as separate issues. While the nudes have been described
in terms of David’s stylistic development toward a greater
classical Greek purism, the Sabine women’s prominence has
been interpreted as affording a familial basis for the reconciliation
of a divided and warring post-Revolutionary France.
Aesthetic priorities (male nudity) and narrative saliency
(female intervention) have often been held asunder.
Historians have also typically emphasized the success rather
than the tensions of David’s stilted and theatrical painting.
That success, we have been told, hinged on women’s capacity
1 Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785. Paris, Mus&e du Louvre (photo: ? Reunion des Musees Nationaux, RMN)
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312 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
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to integrate a fractured society. As daughters of the Sabines
and wives of the Romans, the Sabine women were objects of
exchange that unified a new people. Marginalized from the
public sphere of the radical Jacobin fraternal order, women
during the Directory could be shuffled onto center stage in
order strategically to represent another familial basis for
community. This has been the emphasis of scholars like
Stefan Germer, who has argued that women, “confined to the
private sphere all along,” could embody “a new ethical
foundation for society,” and Dorothy Johnson, who has
characterized the work as an “image of savage and primordial
maternity,” which celebrates “women’s primordial and essential
role in the creation of civilization.”‘ By contrast, Ewa
Lajer-Burcharth has emphasized women’s feminist activism
during the French Revolution and David’s reliance on women
as figurations of disorder. However, she, too, has argued that
the Intervention of the Sabines ultimately contains the threat
posed by women by binding them to the roles of mothers and
wives, effectively circumscribing their activity within a family
configuration. According to Lajer-Burcharth, David’s tableau
represents above all a “defense of the patrilinearity of the
family” and thereby functions “as a kind of safeguard image,
indeed a ‘salutary imago’ of the male republican self at the
end of the revolution.”2
These accounts take as their premise the success of David’s
tableau. Their deconstruction of its ideological workings
depends on the assumption that the painting matched its
audience’s needs, that David with typical savvy enabled a
society undergoing rapid change to redefine itself. Indeed, we
rely on David’s paintings to tell us about those social and
political transformationsW. e understand them to be constitutive
of such shifts. Problems arise, however, when his paintings
are extricated from the field of contention in which they were
made and received. In his best pictures, David almost always
took risks that were hotly debated. This was part and parcel of
his art’s productive work; its eloquence and intelligence
resided in David’s capacity to locate such hot spots, such vital
sites of dissension and anxiety. In fact, David’s Interventiono f
theS abinesd id not reconcile its fractured audience. Displayed
at eye level, opposite a mirror, in a commercial exhibition, the
painting was certainly a box-office success, attracting some
fifty thousand visitors over its unprecedented five-year run.3
But the votes made by admission fees are evidence less of
consensus than of interest, and that interest, this paper will
argue, derived from the work’s controversy, its failure to
deploy antiquity as a unifying metaphorical language. Ironically,
David’s very success in giving revolution antique form
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 313
ultimately led to classicism’s loss of authority. Nudity a la
grecque in 1799 could not be disengaged from the dramatic
return of women to center stage.
The Nudity of Heroes
The controversies surrounding David’s tableau are well known,
if not sufficiently interrogated. David himself mapped them
out in a brochure distributed to all paying visitors, thereby
situating the work within an exhibitory frame of dissension.
The artist felt compelled to offer long, erudite textual
arguments replete with important antecedents to defend the
innovative entrepreneurial exhibition and the nudity of his
tableau’s male protagonists.4 David’s text arguably attempted
to control debate as well as to instantiate it. In fact, contemporaries
seized his terms and continued to dispute both choices
for years.5 I would argue that the controversies were interrelated
and that the scandal of David’s tableau resided in the
ways it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public
spectacle. Indeed, it was the commercial presentation of
antiquity as a site of nakedness and the mingling of genders
and classes that made David’s epic painting such a provocation
to the critics of Directory France.
For David, the nude signified art because it signified
antiquity. In his “Note on the Nudity of My Heroes,” the
painter described the nude as a greater artistic achievement
than the clothed figure and offered a classical pedigree for
the ideal form. He explicitly stated that his goal was to paint a
work that the Greeks and Romans would not have found
foreign to their customs. Significantly, the artist presumed
that authenticity, even transparency, to the classical world
would be valued in modern France. To speak to the ancients
was to speak to Frenchmen, but the signs of that veracity
(male nudity) required an exegesis, even a defense, appended
to the brochure that addressed his fellow countrymen.
David’s goal, that the ancients would not find his
painting foreign to their customs, admitted the possibility of
disparate cultural boundaries, but his unexamined assumption
that Frenchmen would respect and understand the
language of the ancients refused to acknowledge such fundamental
difference. The painter’s profound faith in the sociopolitical
efficacy and relevance of classicism could not fully
control the paradox between universalist and relativist models
of culture. David would never know whether the ancients
found his tableau foreign to their customs, but he certainly
discovered that many of his countrymen considered it alien to
their own.
As classical ideal, nudity held out a promise to transcend
the messy particularities of actual social relations. For David,
nudity was the guarantor of art’s aesthetic power to ameliorate
a stratified and fractured society. During the Directory, in
spite of the crisis of the Terror, it was still possible to believe in
the wholeness of the body. The dream of transparency to an
embodied truth was imagined by the Ideologue Amaury
Duval: “The dressed man is a mask; he is only himself
undressed; it is men one must paint and not the simulacra of
men.”6 Nonetheless, the faith expressed by David and Duval
was under siege in 1799.7 For some of their contemporaries,
nudity exacerbated rather than alleviated class tensions.
While Lajer-Burcharth has asserted that David’s idealized
3 David, TheD eath ofJosephB ara, 1793. Avignon, Mus&eC alvet
(photo: ? RMN)
nudes offered the bourgeois male viewer an illusory fiction of
“a unified and autonomous self” (410), a number of David’s
critics believed the nudity of his tableau’s figures to be in
conflict with bourgeois interests and taste.
Most simply, this was a matter of a failure on the part of the
bourgeoisie to appreciate the artistic language of antiquity.
That failure was implicitly criticized in a dialogue in the
Journal des Arts. After an amateur declared he found the figure
of Tatius at left “Beautiful, but too nude,” an art student
vaunted his commitment to nudity as part of his artistic
credentials. The student ridiculed the amateur’s “bourgeois”
preference for draped chiffon, an implicit jab at that class’s
narcissistic investment in portraiture as well as its materialism.
But it was the critic for Le Courrierd es Spectaclesw ho offered the
most vehement and adamantly literal attack on the nudity in
the Sabines. Permitting art no metaphorical latitude, the
author “C.Z.” could not forgive David for portraying warriors
unrealistically: no people, antique or “savage,” placed naked
men in circumstances requiring clothing.8
For literal-minded, post-Revolutionary critics like C.Z.,
classicism was no more than a foreign and anachronistic set of
customs.9 Despite its heritage as France’s most respected
aesthetic tradition, classicism’s conventions could be ridiculed
in 1799 as an affectation alien to French habits and
values. Moreover, the risk posed by a painting like the Sabines
was not simply that it was anachronistic but that it rendered
the ruling class vulnerable, all too easily provoking workingclass
ridicule of bourgeois pretensions. Burlesquing the
pedantic affectations of elites had been a mainstay of comedy
since the seventeenth century, but here male nudity is the
focus of the social critic. C.Z., tongue in cheek, evoked the
stuff of panicky nightmares: “A dressed hero is far more
imposing. If you send him nude in the middle of a public
place, I strongly doubt that the dressed people who surround
him, will see him with eyes other than those of his valet de
chambre, and you know how difficult it is to be a hero in the
eyes of the latter.”10
C.Z. astutely denigrated the classical hero by redefining
him in specifically contemporary French terms. Romulus and
Tatius became vulnerable, naked Frenchmen stripped of
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314 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
clothing and class authority before a (disrespectful) crowd of
dressed domestic servants. Although David had argued that it
was customary among ancient painters, sculptors, and poets
to represent gods and heroes nude, it was clear to C.Z. that
such a custom inverts class prerogatives: so the elite must go
bare while the common people enjoy the privileges of
clothing! If the reasoning is unsophisticated, it better underscores
the extent to which the reception of nudity could
depend on class standing.
Chaussard’s Defense
Between David’s text and the critics of nudity there is an
incommensurable gap. If the artist privileges classical aesthetic
criteria with little thought to the discrepancy between
ancient cultures and his own, the hostile critics privilege
French social practices as the circumscribing conditions of art
making and feign ignorance of the French academic pictorial
tradition. However, David’s most eloquent republican champion,
the Ideologue Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, offered a
more complex assessment of the Sabines.11 In contrast to
David, who presumed that the tableau could produce a
unified public appreciative of his antiquarian references and
deployment of nudity, Chaussard argued that the controversial
reception of the male nudes appropriately differentiated
strata of French society.12 The republican critic admitted that
David’s sublime language of antiquity, particularly his male
nudes, would be understood solely by an elite, but he believed
the painting ameliorated a divided society by offering different
bases of appeal: “While [David’s] enemies go to the
painting to seek flaws; his rivals to seek torments; his emulators
to seek lessons; the philosopher to seek an object of
profound meditation; the friend of the arts to seek pleasure
mixed with admiration; the multitude throngs to find new
and lively sensations. For [the multitude], it is really only a
spectacle” (Chaussard, 39). Appreciation of antiquity requires
sophistication, but the touching narrative of family
strife and reconciliation requires no special initiation and
appeals to the multitude since “man is above all avid for
strong sensations or emotions” (Chaussard, 3).
Even as he praised David’s accomplishment, Chaussard
betrayed his ambivalence: “The vulgar only seize expressions
of a common and trivial nature; those [expressions] of a
superior order and le beau idealescape them by their elevation,
or overpower and humiliate them by their grandeur. It is the
pathos of the subject that attracts the crowd around this
tableau” (Chaussard, 38). Thus, while an educated segment
of the audience can appreciate le beau ideal and the painting’s
exemplary, elevated style and message, the multitude is
hungry only for the sensations offered by the spectacle of
pathos. Chaussard referred to David’s work as a “drama,” but
he attempted to distance it from the popular spectacle’s more
unruly and boisterous modes of acclaim. The Sabines, he
argued, stunned the multitude into “religious silence” (39).
For Chaussard, David’s painting at once revealed class divisions
and ameliorated them not only by gathering all people
before the canvas but also by transforming the behavior of the
“crowd” into something more closely resembling dignity. The
pathos of the familial drama-women’s emotional intervention
between ennobled men d l’antique-drew the crowd
before the painting, and this was good. But the fit between
crowd and female emotional expressivity had to be mediated,
even transformed, by an intervening model of appropriate
noble behavior. That onerous burden was born by Hersilia
(Fig. 4).
Like Amaury Duval, Chaussard praised this woman in white
for her noble status. Hersilia was distinguished from the
women who surround her not only by her ideal character and
beauty but also by “the dignity of her suffering, the highest
trait characterizing a being and a spirit outside the common
condition” (Chaussard, 8). By contrast, the other women,
who rush forward, disheveled, with burning tears and uncovered
breasts, expressed “passions in common conditions or
vulgar persons” (9). Chaussard was right to differentiate
Hersilia from her emotive chorus.13 In David’s painting, the
central heroine at once divides the warring men from each
other and protects the audience from the hurling propulsion
of the expressive female figures. Hersilia stands, legs and arms
outstretched, like a dam containing the impacted wall of
disorder behind her. Only her left hand fails to reach
Romulus’s shield; this is the weakest point of containment,
and the women and children pour forth through the opening,
the babies tumbling like waves onto the foreground strip
of earth.
Chaussard and David alike relied on Hersilia to mediate
between nobility and vulgarity, between the inexpressive
stilted male heroes and the emotional female chorus. Given
her pivotal role in the reconciliation of antitheses, it comes as
no surprise that David struggled long and hard to give her
form and was never fully satisfied. In a series of preparatory
drawings, the painter progressively tidied up and contained
the agitated rhythms of her figure (Figs. 5, 6). While her
flapping hair and the rippling waves of her bodice initially
radiated out from her form, in the final painting, hair and
costume are circumscribed, polished and made to adhere
closely to the smooth orbs of her head and breasts. Hersilia is
increasingly likened to the two male protagonists in position
and scale as well as pose, the parallel disposition of their legs
establishing a powerful rhythm across the picture’s surface
(with a final piquant note sounded by the leg of the twisting
ephebic youth who retreats at right). Conjoining the tableau’s
female and male perpendicular axes, Hersilia’s cruciform
figure is, therefore, the very fulcrum of the composition. As
the solitary embodiment of feminine nobility, she alone
forces women’s propelling expressivity into the static horizontal
frieze of artful masculine display.
Chaussard’s criticism of the Sabines offered a subtle defense
of David’s classicizing idiom by emptying the male nudes of
narrative signification and displacing expressivity as well as
temporality onto the female figures. The women act-they
intervene-in order that the men may stop acting and
thereby assume the stasis identified with art. The suspension
of the men’s action, the transformation of war into display,
permits the male bodies to become le beau iddal. Hersilia’s
contradictory role is both to enact intervention and to stop
time. She functions to arrest the male protagonists’ activity
but also to dam up women’s emotive narrative momentum. In
so doing, she is meant to reconcile the incommensurable
categories engendered by this splitting of painting’s function
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 315
4 David, Interventiono f theS abines,d etail
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316 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
5 David, preparatory study for Interventiono f theS abines,1 794.
Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, D partement des Arts Graphique
(photo: ? RMN)
6 David, preparatory study for Interventiono f theS abines,1 795.
Paris, Mus&e du Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphique
(photo: ? RMN)
into elite aesthetics (statuary) and popular expressivity
(drama). There are risks to this double move, however. As the
hostile criticism of the Sabines attests, the female figures were
not capable of securely metamorphosing naked men into an
autonomous realm of art, nor could Hersilia deflect criticism
from her own form. A heroine’s noble status at the interstices
of (high) art and (popular) spectacle was not so easily
secured.
Chaussard effectively accommodated the dissension between
David and C.Z. concerning the status of male nudity by
reading their aesthetic disagreement as a matter of class
difference. The “grandeur” of nudity, Chaussard implied,
went over C.Z.’s head, but the drama of David’s painting was
pitched downward to his (uninitiated) level. Chaussard attempted
to defend classical nudity by segregating it from
wider society as an inviolate realm of le beau ideal. For the
republican critic, the ultimate achievement of David’s painting
was its capacity to preserve that (masculine) classical ideal
by offering another axis of (feminine) spectacular pathos.
Nonetheless, Chaussard’s argument ultimately failed to preserve
the aesthetic isolation of David’s male nudes. Indeed,
C.Z.’s voice erupted at the end of his text even as he
attempted to refute it. Suddenly, Chaussard, like C.Z., conjured
the abhorrent vision of the Frenchman robbed of
clothes.
There is a man who must dread to see himself nude; it is
the man of our modern ages, it is the being degraded
physically as well as morally, deformed by swaddling, by all
the bonds by which he is and continues to be strangled,
compressed by his clothes, bent under the ridicule of
fashions, branded by idleness, by pleasures and vices.
(Chaussard, 38)
Nothing could be more loathsome than the sight of modern
man stripped bare, not because he would be humiliated
before his servants but because his body had been permanently
inscribed by his (vulgar) cultural practices, particularly
fashion. Unlike David’s figures, contemporary man had been
degraded physically as well as morally by French sartorial
habits, by swaddling clothes, by all his confining bonds. The
male body of the French nation was deformed, bent, branded,
and strangled. Chaussard’s rhetorical violence, recalling the
character of Revolutionary debates, bespoke particular anxiety
concerning the bodies of France’s newborn male citizens.
14
Chaussard’s discourse differs significantly from pre-Revolutionary
attacks against outmoded signs of privilege and social
rank. Pleasure and vice were once associated with the falsity of
makeup and powdered wigs of an unproductive aristocratic
class, but Chaussard’s rhetoric does not target specific social
groups. Instead, his criticism is leveled at the plethora of
improvised and innovative attachments to the body-the
deformation of a whole and intact masculinity by a debased
and artificial set of outward signs. Most significantly, this
socially undifferentiated creature is molded by a commodifled
fashion available to all members of society. The republican’s
text drew on Revolutionary (and Rousseauist) criticism
of nature’s perversion by artificial institutions.15 Among other
things, the Revolution was supposed to have liberated the
bodies of French citizens heretofore oppressed by the artifice
and social stratification of ancien regime dress.16 The paradox,
however, is that the Revolutionary investment in the
body as a natural sign had ushered in an increasingly arbitrary
and ephemeral system of fashion. Unmoored from traditional
class privileges, clothing became a matter of invention.17 Lynn
Hunt has described the Revolutionary preoccupation with
the decoration of the body as an attempt to achieve transparency
(clothing directly signifying the interiority of the Revolutionary
Self).’*s But to invent Revolutionary signs-whether
sartorial or political-was to engender an atmosphere of
intense competition and rapid obsolescence, a habitual restless
revolution. Although the Republic expended enormous
resources in a semiotics of legitimation, the result was a more
conspicuous notion of transience.
Fashion’s pace of innovation and obsolescence only accelerated
during the Directory. Never before had dress changed so
quickly. In the year that David’s exhibition of the Sabines
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 317
7 Cafi of theI ncroyablese,n graving, ca. 1797. Paris, Mus~e
Carnavalet (photo: ? phototheque des Musees de la Ville de
Paris)
opened, one critic bemoaned the speed with which la mode
metamorphosed: this alarming acceleration of market pressures
ruined families, marriages, and virtuous women.19
Chaussard, too, in his social commentary of 1798, Le nouveau
Diable boiteux, likened fashion to the winds.20 The provisionality
and arbitrariness of sartorial styles did not represent an
evacuation of political signification, however. On the contrary,
dress during the Directory became an explicit marker of
political allegiances. Stratified post-Thermidor France produced
a highly inventive and factionalized fashion. While the
male members of the royalist so-called golden youth, those
post-Thermidor dandies known as muscadins and incroyables,
expressed their resistance to the republican government by a
flamboyant elaboration of English styles, the revolutionary
exclusifs flaunted an opposing set of sartorial signifiers (Figs. 7,
8).21 Within this highly politicized and self-conscious semiotic
system, the royalists’ black collars were understood against the
Jacobins’ red collars, the counter-Revolutionaries’ long hairstyles
replete with “dogs’ ears” sideburns against the Jacobin
short haircuts (les t0tes tondues).22 In such a factionalized and
accelerated climate of experimentation, contemporary dress
clearly offered no single “national” set of markers. Rather
than emanating from the court, French fashion, like French
society, was splintered into dissenting camps.
For Chaussard, therefore, David’s male nudes signified a
renunciation of fashion, an ideal distanced from the volatile
inconstancy of ephemeral social practices. Nudity a l’antique
offered a solution to the transient signs of social organization.
As the sculptor Pierre Cartellier later complained in a letter to
Antoine-Denis Chaudet, the “mask” of fashion was subject to
fifty variations in the course of the century.23 Nudity, by
contrast, proposed a certainty, a truth untouched by the
continual revolution of style. Nudity, so the argument went,
“?~,.i~LtT~kJ~
8 The Exclusive, from A. J. de Barruel-
Beauvert, Caricatureps olitiques,
1797-98. Paris, Bibliotheque
Nationale
stood outside time. Nonetheless, Chaussard’s outburst betrays
him: “There is a man who must dread to see himself nude; it is
the man of our modern ages … bent under the ridicule of
fashions.” To describe nudes in terms of contemporary
Frenchmen’s bodies, even in order to oppose them, is to
admit to their relation. Nudity a la grecque inevitably led to the
specter of nakedness in turn-of-the-century France. And even
the naked body was inscribed by its cultural and historical
specificity; it was branded and deformed by its social practices.
There was no retrievable generalized and ideal sign
among real bodies. David’s shift to male nudity from the
antique dress of his pre-Revolutionary tableaux Horatii and
The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, appears to
have been difficult to defend.
David’s Nudes
In the criticism attending David’s Sabines, the nude male
heroes were viewed, on the one hand, as metaphoric idealizations,
whole and complete classical nudes; on the other hand,
as literal and veristic men stripped of clothes. David’s painting
itself must be held responsible for the polarized interpretations
it engendered; Intervention of the Sabines provoked debate
about the status of nudity by juxtaposing two very different
naked male figures (Figs. 9, 10). One of their explicit
differences has been lost due to modifications David made to
the canvas in 1808. Until that date, Tatius’s frontally disposed
figure displayed genitals. Although the painting now deploys
the scabbard in a way that recalls the almost comical contrivances
of drapery typically featured in academies (Fig. 11),
there was no such phallic displacement in the tableau’s initial
presentation. Today, the plunging penile scabbard draws
rather than deflects attention, particularly given the odd
suspension of no fewer than three legs from Tatius’s covered
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318 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
9 David, Interventiono f theS abines,
detail
genitals, but in 1799 Tatius’s uncensored nudity also elicited
comment. David’s unusual decision was noted by the English
visitor Henry Redhead Yorke as he stood before the work:
“Tatius is displayed full to the view in puris naturalibus. He also
wears not only a helmet and sandals, but carries a shield and a
scarlet mantle buckled on the breast, but so contrived as to
exhibit his whole body in a state of nature.”24 In a tradition in
which shading and drapery served gently to veil the genitals,
David’s use of props only accentuated their presence in a way
that seemed to Yorke less natural than deliberately contrived.
Before the 1808 modifications, the Sabine warrior Tatius
was a far more exposed and vulnerable figure than Romulus,
the halfgod. All that remains hidden to the spectator in the
back view of Romulus was displayed in the frontal figure of
Tatius. Although the two men stand in mirrored opposition,
with Hersilia as the whitened screen between them (and their
ephebic equerries as their bracketing complements), their
intimate pairing only highlights their differences.25 Frontally
disposed, Tatius, the mortal man, consists of an awkward,
disjointed set of limbs appended to a short and broad stump
of a torso. He is, moreover, strangely asymmetrical. His bent
right arm and leg compress that side of his body into a
compact unit enclosed by the length of his sword. By contrast,
his left arm and leg are extended but appear no less awkward,
because their lengths are segmented.
Our view of Tatius’s grasp of the underside of the shield
underscores his full visibility-we see the length of his arm
submitted to the mechanical requirements of his armor (like
a mounted specimen in a trompe l’oeil painting). Such details
imbue this slightly scowling, naked warrior with a poignantly
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 319
10 David, Interventiono f theS abines,
detail
prosaic quality. Gravity and tactility play their part. Tatius’s
disproportioned but volumetric body seems cumbersome, a
burden to bear across space, and the metal weapons such
heavy and unforgiving weights. David’s technical difficulties
further exacerbate our sense of the figure’s awkwardness. The
arm holding the shield is ambiguously attached to the
oversize shoulder; the dimunitive head appears to retreat
from the clumsy tangle of drapery, straps, and bulging
muscles at right.
By contrast, the figure of the halfgod Romulus is quite
successfully understated. Our sense of his completeness and
perfection is produced, paradoxically, by the concealment of
his body: deep shadows and a series of substitute forms
occlude the visibility of his anatomy. Unlike the dark, concave
oval held by Tatius (is it an oval or a foreshortened circle?),
Romulus’s luminous and beautifully convex circular shield
hides most of his torso as well as his left shoulder and arm.
11 David, Acadimie of a Man, Called Hector, 1778. Montpellier,
Musee Fabre (photo: ? RMN)
r~l:
Zia
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320 ART BULL.ETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME I.XXX NUMBER 2
12 David, Portraito f Henrietted e VerninacY, ear VIII [ 1799-1800].
Paris, Musee du Louvre (photo: o RMN)
Gently kissing the graceful curve of his silhouetted waist, the
perfect circle stops exquisitely short of severing his body in
two and casts the right half in shadow, rendering it an
abstracted and graceful set of undulating contours. While
Tatius is evenly lit, only a slicing edge of Romulus catches the
light and offers a glimpse of flesh. The flat treatment, even
tonality, and apparent lack of acuity in the shaded side of his
body muffle his corporality but nonetheless heighten the
eroticism of the softly modeled orbs of his buttocks-so
perfectly echoing the softly protruding sphere of the shield as
well as the vertically disposed sword’s sheath. By contrast, as
Yorke aptly suggested, the harshly thrusting sword and scabbard
that bracketed Tatius’s genitals underscore rather than
mitigate the sense of their vulnerability. The juxtaposition of
implements of war and naked male anatomy makes Tatius
seem more, not less, defenseless. His flesh is assailable.
Romulus is protected and fortified by the phallic substitutes
for mere anatomy because the all-too-human referents of
corporal specificity, such as genitals, are cloaked.26
If David’s brochure assimilated Tatius and Romulus by
subsuming both figures within the overarching category of
antique nudity, his painting provoked argument about the
status of its male nudes by offering disparate models of the
unclothed body. Tatius’s figure, unlike that of Romulus, fails
to repress the artist’s toil before a weary model encumbered
by props. By betraying his status as a naked model, the Sabine
warrior proves to be no more than what C.Z. suspected: an
undressed Frenchman, Chaussard’s body branded and inscribed
by the deformations of contemporary practices. Thus,
while Romulus’s seamless figure bolstered classicists’ arguments
about nudity’s ideality, Tatius’s clumsy form fueled
critics’ hostility regarding the absurdities of nakedness. David’s
painting was far more complex than his own published
defense would allow. It seems that neither David nor his critics
were capable of addressing both Tatius and Romulus at once.
The Nudity of Women
If the male nudes were inherently controversial, Hersilia
draped in white like her sisters in David’s tableaux of the
1780s, would seem to offer an acceptably chaste classical
counterpoint. Here at least David seems to have taken no risks
and sustained his pre-Revolutionary iconography of female
dress. While nudity could not keep contemporary references
at bay, at least authentic archaeology might. Significantly,
however, the English visitor Henry Redhead Yorke, who had
commented on Tatius’s nudity, was compelled to slip into
modish French in order to describe Hersilia’s dress: “Between
f~8Y
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~:? 1
~. . l.a Y
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13 Costumed e Bal, from CostumeP arisien( Paris, Year VIII
[1799-1800]), pl. 184
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NUDITY A LA
GRECQUE
IN 1799 321
14 Jean-FranCoisJaninet afterJean Guillaume Moitte, Liberty,
1792. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale
these two figures stands Hersilia; she is robed in white ad la
grecque, in other words according to the present fashion.””27
David maintained his pre-Revolutionary style of female
costume in Intervention of the Sabines, but French women’s
sartorial practices had changed radically since the mid-1780s.
In 1783, a critic had contrasted contemporary women’s
toilette to the noble simplicity of a female antique statue, “a
great figure di la grecque, very beautiful, with an antique air,
costume and form of the most exquisite purity, a virginal and
primitive expression, and who seemed to be neither of our
nation nor our century.”28 By the late 1790s, however, the
woman attired la grecque seemed removed neither in space
nor in time. Far from securing history painting’s decorous
distance from current social practices, classical garb offered a
point of contact between past and present in fin de siecle
France. David himself was greatly responsible for such a
collapse of high art and ephemeral fashion. The example of
his paintings combined with his impact as Revolutionary
iconographer had encouraged a pervasive adoption of classical
dress, particularly by women. As Jules David emphasized,
fashionable women were consciously modeling themselves on
the female protagonists populating David’s major pre-
Revolutionary tableaux (David, vol. 1, 336). Paris was filled
with Camillas and the daughters of Brutus. Portraits like
David’s Mme V (1799) corroborate the evidence of contemporary
fashion plates that Frenchwomen had appropriated the
15 Ponce, after Borel, NationalA ssemblyD: edicatedt o women
patriots;T hec hosenm omenti s the offeringo f thef irst patrioticd onation
madeb yw omena rtistso n Septembe7r, 1789. Paris, Bibliotheque
Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes
antique attire previously adorning allegorical personifications
and classical history painting’s heroines (Figs. 12-14). Prior
to the Revolution, such appropriations had continued a
longer tradition of occasional fictional role-playing. Women
masqueraded as Flora for their portraits or theatrically enacted
the classical past at parties, most notably, Marie-Louise-
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s famous supper a la grecque in 1788.29
By the late 1790s, however, dress i l’antique had become
everyday garb. Rather than an elite’s occasional fantasy
costume, the white classical gown had become a widely
adopted and frequently worn fashion.
Hersilia stands, therefore, not only as the solitary embodiment
of ennobled femininity in David’s tableau but also as its
most fashionably chic protagonist. Of all the figures within
the painting, she most closely resembles members of the
audience. If Hersilia bore the burden of integrating elite and
common viewers, what are the implications of her attire’s
simultaneous referentiality to the past and to the present?
How did her up-to-date stylishness a la grecque inflect her
status as ennobled heroine? And what was the relationship
between her contemporaneity and the volatile interpretations
of the male nudes who bracket her?
Nudity i la grecque has seemed thus far to concern the status
of male nudes. However, within Directory debates about
fashion, classicizing nudity was associated above all with the
increasing visibility of female, not male, bodies. Women’s
negating sartorial strategies at the very outset of the French
Revolution had metamorphosed in the late 1790s into a
flirtation with dress that approached undress. On September
7, 1789, women had donned simple white gowns and donated
their ornaments to the state in an attempt to distance
themselves from compromising associations of femininity
with aristocratic ostentation (Fig. 15).30 However, renunciation,
too, is a sartorial choice. Negation leads from the
excesses of ornamentation to the excesses of revealed flesh;
modesty occupies some indeterminable, unrealizable midpoint.
During the Directory, the appropriation of Greek attire
evoked the Revolutionary prescription of female chastity but
47.-
7.
os T ; ?c
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322 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
16 Eulalie Morin, Portraito fJulietteR icamier,1 799. Versailles,
Chaiteau de Versailles (photo: ? RMN)
transgressed it, playfully manipulating but quite wittily rejecting
the virtuous role imposed on women throughout the
Revolution. The staid, classically draped figure of republican
Liberty (Fig. 14) had always been vulnerable to mocking
commentary about women’s lasciviousness.31 During the
hedonistic days of the Directory, the shift from liberty to
license seemed all too inevitable. In 1797, a verse exploited
the inherent ambiguities of the term and gaily described the
“liberties taken” by women’s post-Revolutionary fashion:
Liberty, this is my motto;
All costumes are decent;
Shame to those who are scandalized by them!
Why should we wear gloves,
These women go well without chemises.32
In post-Thermidor France, women had indeed discarded
layers of their underclothing. Much ink was spent mocking
the new choice to be seen in public “sans chemise. “In addition,
Grecian gowns had become increasingly light and transparent
as can be seen in a 1799 portrait by Eulalie Morin ofJuliette
Recamier dressed in such a thin robe a’ la grecque that her
breasts and nipples, like Hersilia’s, are quite clearly visible
(Fig. 16).33 In a witticism of the period, women were flattered
for being “well-undressed” rather than “well-dressed.”’34 A
party game involved disrobing in order to determine which
woman’s costume, including shoes, weighed the least.35 A
number of contemporary paintings by Louis-Leopold Boilly
feature women whose gauzy outfits and abbreviated undergarments
reveal not only arms and cleavage but also, through the
transparent fabric, the fleshy length of their legs, in some
cases deceptively covered by flesh-colored tights (Fig. 17).36
In the late 1790s, nudity was self-consciously performed by
women as an intriguing game of revelation and deception.
The scandals associated with the period’s most fashionable
women are famous. Was it Mme Hamelin or Mme Tallien who
promenaded in the Champs-Elysees “half nude,” arms and
throat revealed, a gauzy cloth covering flesh-colored stockings
in order to fabricate a glimpse of her nakedness? That an
honest man was forced to rescue this exhibitionist from a
jeering crowd offered the press a moralizing pretext to tell the
story.37 But other reports indicate that this fashion was hardly
circumscribed to the chic elite: “Nine-tenths of women are
dressed in white and very negligently assembled. A very small
number seem to be occupied with their toilette and they are
distinguished by bearing their shoulders and a part of their
back nude.”38
Not surprisingly, the Frenchwomen who walked through
the public gardens in transparent and gauzy draperies invited
denunciations of the classical style on the basis of extraaesthetic
criteria. In such attacks, classical garb was deemed
inappropriate to the French climate because it belonged to a
different geography and therefore a different culture. In
1798, for example, a doctor named Desessarts argued in the
press that “he had seen more young girls die since the system
of mudites gazies than in the last forty years.”39 In 1799 another
physician, Victor Broussonet, condemned the unhealthiness
of women’s appropriation of flimsy classical garb in his
brochure De la mode et des habillements. Broussonet asserted
that French women were foolish to adopt the minimal
cladding of ancient Mediterranean cultures in the chilly
climate of Paris: “Respiratory inflammation, colds, the suppression
of menses have been the result of these revolting nudities.
Our women, in imitation of the Romans, have discovered
breasts and shoulders.”40 On September 7, 1799, only months
before the exhibition of the Sabines, the journal Le Publiciste
described another doctor’s attempt to dissuade women from
exposing themselves to such dangers:
In order to dissuade women from the furor of appearing
almost nude in our gardens, the doctor Angrand cites the
death of a young person from a chest illness contracted
these last days at Tivoli. He announces that he is going to
collect a great number of histories of grave illnesses, often
fatal, occasioned by the usage of clothing d la grecque.41
Less than two weeks later, the Journal de Paris published a
letter to the editor from the Institut member Louis-Mathieu
Langlhs who, despite his republican commitments, expressed
hostility toward women’s adoption of antique costume.42
Again, medical reasons were marshaled, but Langlhs emphasized
morality rather than health. In Langlhs’s letter, women’s
Greek fashions were explicitly condemned as “indecent”:
For a long time the moral and physical disadvantages of
the Greek costume when worn in a humid and variable
climate like ours have been pronounced by men of art and
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NUDITY A LA
CGRECQUE
IN 1799 323
17 Boilly, No Agreement,
from the series Follies of
the Day, oil on canvas,
1797. Private collection.
men of good sense. Women themselves have more facts
and observations about this than all the doctors of this
Faculty have collected; but experience is of no use to them
just as it often is no use to us, and nothing is less
astonishing. What do dangers and even death mean to
those who dare to risk modesty, a sentiment more important
to this [feminine] sex than self-preservation? Whether
one dresses di la grecque or d la romaine, I dare predict the
result will never be Cornelias.43
Langle’s’s argument registers the contradictions of post-
Revolutionary French culture: the experimental identification
with antiquity as an exemplary model coexisted with an
increasing suspicion of its outward signs. Cornelia is virtuous,
but dressing like her has its moral and physical risks. Appropriating
gowns a l’antique will not transform Frenchwomen into
their virtuous ancient counterparts; in fact, to the contrary.
The mere choice to dress d la grecque is proof of a lack of
modesty. If the women’s donation of jewels in 1789 had
equated the virtuous self-sacrifice of the Roman women with
their simple white clothes, such a conflation of antique
clothing and exemplary behavior was no longer possible in
1799. Classical dress was now seen only as a particularly
exhibitionist and immoral fashion choice, and one moreover
that leveled the differences between women in troubling ways.
In 1799, Pierre-Louis Roederer, one of the most eloquent
critics of women’s classicizing fashion, conjured the dissolution
of traditional distinctions between women in the new
circulation of revealed body parts. According to this republican
theorist, every woman was far too willing to flaunt her
flattering feature: “The assembly of women is not as varied.
There are no longer the old, no longer the ugly. Those who
do not have a figure have such a beautiful throat! Those who
do not have a [beautiful] throat have such beautiful arms!
Here, all is youth, from the age of sixteen to sixty years.”44
Whether young or old, French women were being sexualized
by their titillatingly skimpy and diaphanous garb. Of course,
the effaced distinctions between women were not only those
of age and relative beauty. A woman’s virtue also could no
longer be read by her dress. Flesh apparently eroticized
women equivalently; differences of morality were no longer
inscribed on their bodies. As a government surveillance
report of 1798 made clear, all women, whether prostitutes at
the Palais Royal or virtuous daughters and wives, were
revealing themselves. The honest woman had ceased to offer
the dishonest woman a model for emulation.45
Ultimately, however, the greatest threat posed by women’s
new exhibitionism was not their impact on other women but
the power they inappropriately wielded over men. Roederer,
for one, understood fashion to be the means by which women
exercised their “empire.”’46 This was not merely a matter of
women’s seduction of men but of their substitution of tyranny
for republicanism. Ephemeral fashion is by definition antithetical
to timeless law. The stakes were self-evident: as long as
women-immoral, fashionable, fickle, and tyrannical-are
prominent, there could be no (fraternal) Republic.
It is the independence of women’s morals that has given
them the authority of fashion [la mode]. As long as women
are spectacles in performances, nymphs in promenades,
and goddesses in their palace, there will not be a republic
in France. In vain will the constitution have been established
in accordance with the distinction of political
powers; there will always be a power opposed to all others,
and that is fashion. Fashion will always combat laws,
because laws, if only because they are always a serious
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324 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOIUME
I.XXX
NUMBER 2
18 Adrien-Pierre-FranCoisG odefroy, after F.J. Harriet, Parisian
Tea, ca. 1800. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale
19 Engraving, ca. 1799. Paris, Bibliothe’que Nationale
thing, can never be a la mode. One can attribute the morals
of the European republics of Switzerland and Holland to
the impotence of women to exercise the empire of fashion.
47
What particularly disturbed Roederer were the ways women
insidiously exercised power in culture that they were not
allowed to wield in republican government. “What a contradiction!
You refuse women all political existence, which is very
just, and yet you permit all our habits to be based on their
example!” (Roederer, vol. 4, 383).
By allowing women to exercise their empire over fashion,
men were following their example. If we think back to
Chaussard’s invective concerning degraded modern man, we
can better appreciate his emphasis on the Frenchman suffocating
under his stylish layers. However, to argue that man was
emasculated by succumbing to feminine fashion is to occlude
a source of greater anxiety during this period. In fact, the
Directory witnessed a dramatic divergence in female and
male fashion (Figs. 17-19).48 Men were drowning under
accretions of fabric while women increasingly discarded their
clothes. Even as female citizens approached a state of nudity,
men were encasing their bodies, eclectically appropriating
English fashion either as a sober self-presentation or, through
exaggeration, as the contrary: an excessively self-indulgent
and effete sensualism that emphatically renounced republican
sobriety. The male incroyables, admittedly the most extreme
example, swaddled their outsize physiques in ample
layers of clothing and loosely fitting boots and wrapped their
“delicate” necks in voluminous scarves, framed by huge
collars that rose up the back of the head. Though cleanshaven,
the incroyables’ faces were hidden by long fluffy hair,
which hung down in strands along the jaw like “dogs’ ears,”
and sometimes by large circular eyeglasses (worn whether
needed or not). An incroyable’sa ttire and coiffure, therefore,
covered most of his face and body, rendering the nose and jaw
that emerged from the folds of cloth and hair excessively
prominent, penile and obscene, tips of flesh emerging from
the swaddled and exaggerated length of the neck. During the
Directory, men’s bodies seemed to have been deformed (and
perversely eroticized) by the accretions that enveloped and all
but overwhelmed them.
Fashion, then, may have been associated with women, but a
most disturbing deceit had been enacted. It was men’s bodies,
not women’s, that bore the weight of artifice; they were
sinking within its perverse folds and crevices while women
had co-opted the masculine Republic’s vision of classical
simplicity. To condemn women’s preoccupation with fashion
was partly to deflect attention from the ways in which male
bodies had been more dramatically transformed by la mode. If
men were being suffocated by artifice, women had gallingly
appropriated nudity, that former signifier of the masculine
beau ideal.
This had no small implications for the authority of classicism
in post-Revolutionary France. The status of nudity d
l’antique was profoundly compromised by its appropriation by
women. No longer a term outside contemporary social
practices, nudity itself had been subsumed within the provisional,
politicized, and arbitrary semiotics of a feminized
fashion. Certainly, nudity was thereby trivialized, but it was
also subjected to criticism on the basis of pragmatic criteriahow
startling to worry that classical figures might become
chilly or catch cold! Associated with modish strategies of
female seduction, antique signifiers like nudity were now
condemned on the basis of their inappropriateness to post-
Revolutionary France, a place at once cold, damp, and
desperately in need of a stringent morality to replace the loss
of Church.
By donning classical attire, women had complicated and
intensified longer-standing debates. France was in the process
of deciding. Could classicism represent the French nation?
Was classicism universal in purchase or only archaeologically
specific to a time and place? Could it represent all people or
only an aesthetically initiated elite? Did classicism offer a
secular moral foundation in place of the Church? When
women put on transparent white antique gowns in the 1790s,
they rendered frivolous, ephemeral, and interchangeable
French culture’s most serious, ambitious, and purportedly
universal style. They also redefined its politics. For Roederer,
nudity was republican only if it was male. When female, it
smacked of the ancien regime. Indeed, Roederer saw the
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NUDITY A l.A GRE;CQUE
IN 1799 325
female usurpation of nudity as a desperate attempt on the
part of women to recuperate power lost during the Revolution.
Women were not only prone to tyranny, they were
regressive, wishing no less than a return to France’s forsaken
past:
Women have abused clothing to ruin and oppress men …
but, in abusing nudity, they lose, or at least risk the empire
and rights of their charms.
It is because women have seen their domination in
France vanish with the monarchy that they have risked
even their existence. They did not want the modest
happiness of an American, a Swiss, a Genevan; to regain all
they have lost, they have staked everything they have, down
to their health, and soon even this everything-goes attitude
will be gone.49
Roederer spells it out. Women were drawing attention to
themselves in order to regain the prominence they had
enjoyed under the ancien regime. Indeed, they would risk
anything-even their health-to “ruin and oppress men.”
Roederer understood nudity to be one step too far in a
continuum of fashion wielded by women to dominate men.
For women to abuse nudity was to risk their empire, but
whether they maintained their power or not, significant
damage had been done to the Republic’s iconography: nudity
d l’antique had been metamorphosed into a sign of (feminine)
tyranny rather than (masculine) liberty.
The problem, of course, was that classicism had always been
Janus-faced: gallant mythologies a la rococo competing with
stoic and austere historical iconographies. David’s achievement
of a piercingly lucid “virile” idiom capable of representing
solemn Revolutionary certainties was formidable because
it was convincing, but it must be seen as relatively short-lived,
bracketed on either side by women’s competing appropriations
of antiquity. If antiquity in the hands of David could
signify the austere absolute truths of Corneille, it could also
be Racinian-elegant, pretty, decorative, lightly worn, full of
innuendo, playful, witty, even humorous.50 Against Apollo
Belvedere and heroic Davidian academies lurked the specter of
Mme du Barry, seeking attention yet again (Fig. 20). Less than
thirty years had elapsed since her pretentious, oversize portrait
“as Muse” had been removed from the Salon walls
because of its overly transparent classicizing gown. What was
unacceptable was the way the king’s mistress had audaciously
mapped antiquity’s highest claims onto her own sexualized
body.51
In discussions of fashion in the press and other ephemeral
literature, debates about nudity were commonplace, but
within the context of fashion, classicizing nudity was associated
with women, not their overdressed male counterparts. In
David’s Intervention of the Sabines, women whose antique gowns
fall aside to reveal breasts, legs, and thighs are placed in the
midst of naked men. In the painting, women become the
dressed term opposed to male nudity, yet their clothing could
elicit concerns about current enthusiasms for a lascivious
nudity d la grecque. How should David’s choice simultaneously
to invert and to evoke contemporary practices be interpreted?
Certainly, the painter’s decision to depict his male
heroes nude can be seen as an attempt to define nudity &
20 FranCois-Hubert Drouais, Portrait of Mme du Barry as Muse,
1771. Versailles, Chambre de Commerce
l’antique in masculine terms, to salvage the beau ideal as a
masculine artistic tradition rather than a feminine sartorial
invention. The consequences in 1799 of maintaining his
pre-Revolutionary female iconography can also be seen as
inadvertent: David believed in male nudity, and the moral
ambiguity of his female figures was an unintended result of
changed circumstances. David had maintained his artistic
commitments; it was Frenchwomen who had changed by
habitually dressing like his paintings’ female protagonists.
Nonetheless, David’s preparatory drawings suggest that he
purposely modified Hersilia’s attire, transforming the flapping
layers of her bodice into the final painting’s streamlined,
clinging white gown that not only reveals rosy nipples but
opens to show the expanse of hips and thigh. If the modifications
served partly to circumscribe Hersilia’s “vulgar” expressivity,
they also made her more fashionable, paradoxicallyand
here is David’s inescapable quandary-both more antique
and more up-to-date. The brooches at the shoulders, the
enhancement of a sleeveless look, the simple band below her
breasts, the archaeological sandals: these were all details
recounted in the fashion pages of journals as well as contemporary
descriptions of Paris’s most visible women.52 David
chose to make Hersilia more chic-more like Mme Hamelin
and Mme Tallien promenading in the Tuileries, more like
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326 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
21 Boilly, Make Peace, from the series Follies of the Day, 1797.
Private collection
Boilly’s socialites in his series Follies of the Day of 1797 (Fig.
17).53 In a series of fine-tuned modifications, the painter
enhanced his heroine’s resemblance to a community of
controversial exhibitionists.
That association of Sabines and prominent, morally ambiguous
Directory women could only have been further intensified
by the stories that circulated concerning the identity of
David’s nonprofessional female models. Like many of the
period’s most celebrated women, the sisters de Bellegarde
enjoyed the celebrity of beauty wed to scandalous sexual
mores. Together, they were famous for their compromising
attachment to the world of the studio; they were known, in
Etienne-Jean Delkcluze’s words, “by the singular life they led
in the midst of artists of all genres.”54 Brunette Adele had left
her husband and children in the provinces to become a
highly visible Parisian mistress. While it was generally acknowledged
that she had sat for the bare-breasted kneeling woman
in the Sabines, rumors circulated regarding the extent to
which she had exposed her body to the painter.55Jules David
even claimed that Adele, “vain” about her role as model,
enjoyed appearing in public with her hair arranged to match
that of David’s disheveled figure (David, 336). Married to a
defrocked priest, her blonde sister, Aurore, inevitably invited
stories that she had posed for Hersilia.56 She may have had
some competition. According to Jules David, three society
ladies volunteered for the part. These, then, were some of the
women of fashion who would have inflected the reception of a
painting often characterized as evidence of David’s commitment
to a newly purified, aestheticized classicism confined to
erudite citations.57 Imagine such nouveaux riches women
moving through the Sabines exhibition space, appreciating
their chic couture and resemblance to David’s heroine
reflected in the wall-length mirror, all for the price of a ticket.
Could there have been a better showplace to celebrate the
spectacular, exhibitionist pleasures of fashion and the erotics
of public sociability?
To simplify David’s painting into an image of a fractured
public sphere reconciled by the intervention of the Sabine
women’s “private” familial claims is therefore to ignore the
controversies surrounding women during the Directory. Although
David’s painting has been seen as a powerful repression
of Revolutionary feminist claims in its alignment of
femininity and maternity, that latter equation of women and
motherhood was undermined by the painting’s foregrounding
of women’s prominence as public spectacle within Directory
France. In late 1790s Paris, women were visibly disrupting
the Revolutionary fraternity, but not necessarily as mothers.
Indeed, this was the source of anxiety. Roaming spaces
outside the home, women seemed neither securely constituted
by nor constitutive of familial bonds. Modern scholarship
that takes for granted women’s role as representatives of
the private sphere is therefore repeating a reactionary prescription,
not a reality of post-Revolutionary society.58 Thinkers
like Roederer and Louis-Sebastien Mercier championed female
domesticity in response to French women’s perceived
failure to identify themselves with such duties. Ultimately,
Intervention of the Sabines could not circumscribe women’s
prominence to their familial roles. Hersilia and her emotive
chorus were, above all, offering a public performance of
those bonds. Unlike the women in Horatii and Brutus, who
were confined to domestic spaces, the Sabine women were
intended to be moving spectacles within the public sphere of
the ancient battleground as well as the Directory entrepreneurial
exhibition space.
In post-Thermidor France, women’s visibility seemed not
only to flaunt their difference from men but also to constitute
the very source of their power and dominance. For a
Revolutionary like Roederer, the difference of women only
too clearly represented a difference of politics, the haunting
specter of the fraternal Republic’s antithesis: women’s lawlessness-
like fashion, like tyranny, like immorality-fully outside
men’s lawful governance. How then could David’s Intervention
of the Sabines propose that the fashionable woman serve as an
exemplary model? Was this what Revolutionary utopian
aspirations had come to? That promiscuous unregulated
women like the Bellegarde sisters, Fortunee Hamelin, Theresia
Tallien, Josephine Beauharnais, and Anne-Francoise
Lange should offer models of distinction, a distinction of
fashion rather than morality?59 It was only too evident that
dress, not virtue, was inspiring general imitation. And the
distinction of modishness, unlike that of virtue, perpetually
needed to outrun those “nine-tenths” of Frenchwomen who
acted as copycats. To be exemplary because one is fashionable
is to keep moving at the head of a crowd. If antiquity, in the
hands of chic women, had become au courant, it would
inevitably become pass&. Clearly, this kind of exemplarity,
rather than offering France a bedrock foundation of values,
only perpetuated a meaningless overturning of signs.
David was working with volatile materials here: at once
exploiting antiquity’s fashionability and, like Chaussard, trying
desperately to buttress a tradition of the classical masculine
beau iddal that had long served as the foundation of his art
as well as his politics. In 1799, Hersilia would not behave
herself. There was no way David could make her into the
“neutral” emblem of noble maternal femininity that she has
come to represent for many modern scholars. This is not to
say that David as painter and as author of the accompanying
brochure did not try to control her disruptive and competing
force by diminishing its value relative to the masculine nudes.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 327
As Chaussard noted, Intervention of the Sabines aligns masculinity
with timelessness and femininity with temporality.60 The
tableau opposes not only masculine stasis (the horizontal
frieze) to female action (the intersecting narrative eruption)
but also male nudity to female fashion. It is against women’s
temporality and ephemeral appropriation of nudity that
David’s published exegesis concerning “the nudity of [his]
heroes” must be interpreted. The painter’s text directs
attention to the male nudes and renders the female figures
invisible. According to David’s brochure, women’s choices
were not at issue. Instead, viewers were invited to contemplate,
admire, discuss, even debate male nudity. If the female
protagonists could elicit much informal commentary–
gossip-about their dress and the identity of the models, the
male bodies, David cues us, warranted formal critical discussion.
Both painting and brochure spotlighted Hersilia’s bracketing
male counterpoints, but they did so partly by heightening
their controversy. Tatius particularly was meant to goad.
David relied on the shock value of men’s exposed flesh and
genitals in the midst of dressed figures to direct his startled
audience’s attention toward his male heroes.
But it is precisely this reliance on shocking masculine
display that points to the instability of the painting’s gendered
structural oppositions. For Chaussard, stasis signified a realm
of aesthetic ideality contrasted to women’s vulgar and disorderly
activity, but that stillness also resembled the exhibitionism
associated with fashion. Tatius and Romulus were subject
to being read, like fashionable women, as flamboyant if
foolish exhibitionists, resorting to extremism to draw attention
to themselves. Given the fashionability of the Sabine
women and the prevalence of images like Boilly’s Make Peace
(Fig. 21), would not viewers have been predisposed to see
Hersilia as a chic Frenchwoman separating her competing
lovers who abruptly, inexplicably, and quite extravagantly
discard their suits? Would not that wall-length mirror opposite
the painting only enhance this sense of the painted men’s
suddenly exposed nakedness? David, Chaussard, and Roederer
may have insisted that the male nudes were like law, that is,
timeless and universal, but these heroes could also be interpreted
as men who strove to make the most ostentatious of
fashion choices.61
When Male and Female Nudities Meet
In Intervention of the Sabines, David offered an unstable
encounter and made it the very basis of his work’s controversy
as well as its success. This was a risque confrontation between
competing gendered aesthetic and political models: between
contemporaneity and history, between fashion and le beau
iddal, between the ancien regime and the Republic. But the
multivalence of the term nudity d la grecque in 1799 attests to
the incapacity of such categories to remain discrete. Even if
attention could be diverted from the spectacle of women to
the male nudes, those nudes were now embedded within a
public sphere (and pictorial syntax) newly defined to include
women, and women, moreover, who were a la mode. The
presence of stylish women inflected the ways the male nudes
were received. Against fashionable females, the standing male
acadimies now appeared undressed. They also appeared as
objects ofwomen’s vision.
Thus far, my argument has for the most part treated the
masculine and feminine versions of nudity a la grecque as
independent entities, but David’s painting is about their
intimate if anxious confrontation. Note, for instance, Hersilia’s
guarded, strangely birdlike, darting glance at that peacock
Romulus (Fig. 4). One pupil distended, the other
diminished and rushing away, her glassy-eyed gaze fails to
cohere. While her near eye seems directed at an angle toward
us, the far eye retreats to the side, its iris sitting up too high
and too small, cut both by its profile edge and the overemphasized
slice of white. Stare too closely and Hersilia appears
walleyed. Look also at the similarly hooded and ambiguously
muffled asymmetrical gaze of the older woman who faces
Romulus and threatens to tear off her gown and expose her
breasts. Here are women in states of undress regarding a
displayed male nude; indeed, they are the only figures gazing
at Romulus’s exposed body. It is difficult, however, to assess
precisely where they look and what they see there. They alone
enjoy access to Romulus’s other side, that presence or
absence lurking behind (or eclipsed by?) shield and sheath,
buttocks. As viewers by proxy, they heighten the sense of
suspense attending Romulus’s withheld body. Their oddly
uninformative but directed gazes, coupled with Tatius’s frontality,
compel the question: Should the viewer project Tatius’s
anatomy onto the halfgod’s front, assembling his body part by
part (shoulder, arm, chest, hardened stomach, genitals) in an
attempt to reconstruct the man as seen by the women? To do
so is to enact imaginatively a homoerotic conjoining, indeed,
identification, of the two men’s bodies, but such a projection
also subtly compromises the halfgod with the doubts unfurled
by the awkward, “naked” specificities and vulnerabilities of
his foil. Undermined is Romulus’s status as an indivisible,
autonomous, and coherent signifier of phallic perfection,
completeness, and power. Significantly, it is women’s viewing
that initiates the process.
In David’s tableau, women are the privileged beholders not
only of a god (and rapist-cum-husband) but also of the
masculine beau iddal. While the homoerotic appeal of solitary
naked male figures in paintings like Bara (Fig. 3) rendered
the female viewer invisible and irrelevant, David’s insertion of
the Sabine women into the frame of male nudity seems to
have necessitated an anxious appraisal of the relationship
among women, sexuality, and the public sphere. If feminist
scholarship has been preoccupied with the male gaze on the
female object, especially the female nude, and recent inquiries
have focused on the circuit of homoerotic desire for the
male viewer of the male nude, the painting of the Sabines
configures a differently gendered confrontation. Few paintings
have catalyzed such a fervent and anxious preoccupation
on the part of its contemporaries with the female viewer of
masculine flesh.
David’s tableau foregrounds the female spectator not only
in its privileged positioning of women as viewers of Romulus
but also in its very centerpiece, the explosive woman in red
who conspicuously and directly stares at us, thereby wedding
aggressivity and female viewing. The confrontational character
of her level frontal gaze serves as a counterpoint to both
Hersilia’s skittish deflected regard and the rolling asymmetry
of the old woman’s eyes. The power as well as the menace of
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328 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2

22 Henry Fuseli, drawing,
ca. 1800-1805. Zurich,
Kunsthaus
the woman in red resides in the riveting directness of her
stare. But David, even as he so effectively conveys the
compelling intercourse between women’s viewing and our
own, registers the question of its eclipse (or the power of its
revelation): beneath the billowing tent of drapery, the woman’s
clenched hands, hovering precisely at eye level, threaten
to drop (or rise) like a shade over her eyes.
Ultimately, however, the relation between women viewers
and the real world appears to have been far less fraught than
women’s regard of (men’s) art. It is significant that the
fashionable woman figures in the criticism of David’s painting
not as a visible object but as a viewer of art’s male nudity. That
women had become an erotic spectacle in Directory France
was less explicitly discussed than the ways their viewing
impinged on art’s masculine bodies. It was the meeting of
male nudes and actual Frenchwomen that obsessed the male
critics of the Sabines, both negative and positive. It is easy to
discern the specter of women’s confrontation with Tatius’s
exposed genitals in these interchanges. While negative critics
predictably denounced the painting’s capacity to compromise
female members of its audience, David’s supporters repeatedly
described the work’s opponents as prudish, unsophisticated,
and hypocritical women. In his review of the Sabines
exhibition, Charles Landon, for instance, produced a fastidious
female spectator in order to dismantle her position.
According to Landon, some women wanted Tatius to be
further covered, but they were hypocritical inasmuch as they
did not protest the comparable nudity of antique sculptures.
If society was to follow the reasoning of these female spectators,
it would be necessary to censor all the sculptures in
public civic spaces, including the recently arrived spoil of
Napoleonic conquest, the Laocodn.62 (It was precisely this
confrontation between fashionable female viewer and Laoco6n’s
bulging anatomy that delighted Henry Fuseli during
the early 1800s; Fig. 22). The royalist critic for the Journal des
Dibats,Jean-Baptiste-Bon Boutard, made a similar point about
those who believed that male nudity produced dangerous
impressions: “If David’s tableau is immoral, it would be
necessary to relegate to the shadows of storerooms and
museums all the statues that decorate our public gardens and
embellish our palaces.'”63
At stake in these arguments seems to be the status of art
itself. Was the return of the female spectator so decisive that
all male nudes became subject to removal on the basis of
morality? Lest one assume that David’s supporters exaggerated
the extent to which censorship could be enlisted in the
name of female modesty, listen to the polemicist Louis-
Sebastien Mercier, who, besides condemning women’s current
antique fashion, also boldly denounced public sculpture
by conjuring a young girl’s encounter with a titillated Bacchus
on the verge of an erection:
Morality and statues are two incompatible things. And can
one regard as illustrious geniuses, or rather as legislators of
modesty, those artists whose immodest chisel not only
reproduced but even enlarged the sexual parts of statues
mutilated by time?
No! It is not a weakness to be scandalized by such
nudities. One does not have the right to represent to the
eyes of a mother of a family that which one would not dare
make audible to her ears; her young daughter walking at
her sides should not raise her eyes below the lily, symbol of
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 329
her innocence, to contemplate nude the rounded buttocks
of a Bacchus in the spring of his life, and whose amorous
visage indicates that he feels the movement of voluptuousness
spring up.64
Through the young girl’s eyes, Mercier sees antique marble
metamorphose into pulsating sexual arousal. Whether because
of their modesty, their hypocritical prudery, or their
licentiousness, women rewrote art and male nudity by (hetero)-
sexualizing them. Indeed, according to David’s negative and
positive critics alike, women saw sex everywhere. While the
prude may seem the antithesis of the promiscuous undressed
woman, both attest to women’s incapacity to leave inviolate an
aesthetic sphere. Of course, there is no such autonomous
realm of “purity”; the tension between ideality and eroticism
is intrinsic to the representation of naked bodies. But in
post-Revolutionary France, the pressure to acknowledge the
presence of women viewers made the tensions (and capacious
multivalences) inherent to the beau idial, that cobbledtogether
but cherished fiction, crudely manifest. High art and
somatic low could not be held asunder. Perhaps women’s
presence simply provided a vehicle for men to voice their own
fantasies, but the shift from a masculine homoerotic to a
feminine heterosexual model of viewing seems to have been
decisive. If the antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann
could eloquently evoke his own “rising” and “heaving”
reaction to the sensual pleasures afforded by the Apollo
Belvedere without compromising the status of aesthetic discourse,
no such erotic responsiveness on the part of women
could be subsumed within the rubric of aesthetic discrimination
in 1790s France.65 Because it was inextricably bound up
with women’s sexuality, women’s spectatorship threatened to
wrench the heroic male nude into the tawdry realm of
pornography. Did the mere presence of Hersilia, like Mercier’s
young girl, elicit imaginings of Romulus’s springing
“movement of voluptuousness,” a movement, moreover, over
which he had no control?66
Not surprisingly, women’s power to compromise the masculine
beau idial elicited anger on the part of male critics.
Roederer, for one, believed that Mercier’s preoccupation with
public sculpture was misguided. Women, not male statues,
were the problem. In a published letter, he expressed his
impatience: “Citizen, you complain to yourself of encountering
entirely nude statues of marble or bronze in our public
promenades; haven’t you seen in our spectacles, our balls, in
society, a crowd of figures who were neither of marble nor
bronze, even more nude than these statues?”67 According to
Roederer, Bacchus and his inanimate companions had been
upstaged. Neither marble nor bronze, women had made
themselves into living nudes, nudes, moreover, who seemed
to be proliferating, literally taking over the public spaces of
Paris: “our spectacles, our balls, in society, a crowd.” Here was
the real irritation. Women were not only competing for
attention with male art, they were also pretending to require
its removal from view. What! Should gardens no longer
feature heroic male nudes but become the sole province of a
crowd of undressed women? Was there no place any longer
for art, for marble, for bronze? Had female flesh simultaneously
made marble seem flesh, undone its independent
status, and, in a hypocritical feint, taken its very place? Was
this the conspiratorial intention of the alluring half-naked
Frenchwomen who hypocritically demanded the covering of
Tatius’s exposed genitals even as they sought a glimpse in
mirrors hidden within their fluttering fans? 68Certainly the
writer of a letter “To Women dressed a la Grecque and a la
Romaine” published in the Journal des Dames et des Modes in
1799 recognized their ploy and held them responsible:
Women have chosen the costume of Psyche, Venus and her
nymphs. Dressed in an enchanting manner, they attract
and hold our regard. Their breasts whose movements give
birth to our desires, whose delicious forms are hardly
concealed by a light fabric … in order better to draw their
voluptuous contours, everything in this new fashion provokes
voluptuousness; and yet women complain of the
little decency that is preserved near them.69
Involuntarily seduced, unfairly accused of indecency, the
male critic holds women fully responsible for fixing his
regard.
Roederer conflated the nudity of art and the nudity of
Frenchwomen. He saw Mercier as a dupe, scapegoating
Bacchus in the name of women who themselves made a
spectacle of nakedness. Chaussard, by contrast, rebutted
accusations that the nudity of David’s male protagonists
endangered female spectators by significantly differentiating
between women’s nakedness and art’s nudity. Rather than
simply claiming superiority to the inhibitions of polite female
society, Chaussard was willing to address explicitly the intimate
relationship between women’s viewing and fears of
unregulated female sexuality. The critic who attended to the
chorus of “vulgar” women in the picture also devoted a great
deal of time addressing the effects of the painting on their
female counterparts milling about in front of the picture.
Indeed, his defense of nudity solely considered the woman
spectator.
With Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel de Montaigne to
bolster his position, Chaussard argued that the impact of the
unknown on a female imagination was far more dangerous
than a direct confrontation with the naked male body. A nude
fully exposed to the light leads to indifference. Chaussard
quoted Rousseau to argue that the partially draped nude
produces other effects: “Isn’t it known that statues and
paintings only offend the eyes when a mixture of clothing
renders nudities obscene? The immediate power of the senses
is weak and limited: it is by the mediation of the imagination
that they make their greatest ravages” (Chaussard, 34).
David’s nudity was contrasted to the obscene “mixture” of
garments in other kinds of art. The partially clad figure invites
the dangers of women’s fantasies. Consistent with sensationalist
theories of the eighteenth century, Chaussard claimed that
habit blunts the power of sense impressions while imagination
is capaciously damaging.70 Offering a panoply of authorities
from antique philosophy to ethnography to solve the
problem of women’s “heated” arousal and extravagances,
Chaussard emphasized that educating women was far better
than leaving them to guess “according to the liberty and heat
of their fantasy. In place of true parts, women substitute by
heat and by hope other parts triply extravagant.”71 (Witness
the risk of David’s subsequent occlusion of Tatius’s genitals in
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330 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
23 Jean-Honore Fragonard, Sacrificeo f theR ose,c a. 1785-88.
Private collection
my “triply extravagant” imaging of the trio of legs hanging
beneath his scabbard.) Confronted with the philosophical
and social problem of the female gaze, a revered lineage of
great male thinkers all agree it is better that there be no
surprises. Women’s presence in David’s exhibition space was
justified as an Enlightenment project of education.
Chaussard’s enlightened sexual discourse inherits the Revolutionary
concern that private conduct be transparent to
public virtue. His most powerful barbs were reserved for those
male hypocrites who, while anxious about the virtue of
women in the public exhibition, nonetheless exposed their
mothers, wives, and daughters to the lascivious tableaux of
their private cabinet. David’s nudes are measured against the
easel paintings that corrupt female virtue by the licentious
poses of veiled figures. Contrasting the Sabines to Jean-
Honore Fragonard’s Sacrifice of the Rose (Fig. 23), Chaussard
pits the public address and virility of classicism’s male nudity
against the private and libertine Rococo preoccupation with
female seduction. Produced just before the Revolution and
engraved in 1790, Fragonard’s apparently quite lucrative
painting celebrates the loss of woman’s virginity by representing
the swooning ecstasy of a female nude whose transparent
draperies slide down from her uncovered breasts to wrap
around her inner thighs.72 Eyes rolled back, mouth partly
open, the woman’s face mimicsJean-Baptiste Greuze’s formulaic
moneymakers, those endlessly insipid, coy girls whose
mobile features seem to have lost their anatomical moorings
and threaten to slip away (the pictorial melting metaphorically
enacting a lubricated onanism). Visually, the contrast to
the Sabines could not be more startling nor, for David’s
defender, more effective. How could one accuse David’s male
nudes of being obscene
when on the contrary it is figures veiled from head to foot
who express the action most at odds with decency? Such is
this figure who, in the Sacrifice of the Rose, swoons next to an
altar; such are all these compositions so modern, so
libertine, in which preside, for lack of true genius, gross
equivocation, and more dangerous than the cynical paintings
of Aretino, address themselves less to the senses of
vision than to vicious thought, reawakening all disorders
with the aid of seductive allusions, voluptuous signs,
sometimes vague and devious, always expressive and licentious.
Here, here are indecent compositions that corrupt
the heart and trick and pervert the spirit. This man who
deploys them in his cabinet under the eyes of his mother,
wife and daughter, does not fail to proscribe with indignation
the nudity of all these half-gods of antiquity who, in
their general expression, only recall dignity, virtue, heroism.
(Chaussard, 33)
So this is the hypocrisy of C.Z.! Indulging in private pornographic
debauchery while publicly pretending moral outrage
before antique halfgods like Romulus! Lajer-Burcharth has
astutely pointed out the ways classicism accrues authority in
Chaussard’s text by its gendered opposition to Rococo works
(412).73 But Fragonard’s paintings are not the only term
against which David’s nudes are understood. Chaussard
opposes David’s forthright nudes to the erotic metonymies of
diaphanous garments. If the sensual narratives of those
flowing fabrics were indeed facilely and expertly enacted by
Fragonard’s fluid brushwork, they were also, as we know,
performed in the gardens and promenades of Paris by French
women dressed d la grecque. Significantly, the nuditis gazees of
fashionable Parisiennes were less about total revelation (although
this was apparently attempted) than about the seductiveness
of bodies all but revealed through fabric. In Chaussard’s
text, the dangers of veiled seduction evoke not only
Rococo libertinism but current feminine fashion, that style a
la Grecque now made Rococo, that perversion of the former
marker of virtue into a new kind of libertinism.
Roederer was therefore wrong to confuse the nudity of art
and the nudity of partly veiled Frenchwomen. Chaussard is
not duped by Frenchwomen’s appropriation of Greek nudity.
Instead, he seizes on the differences between female and male
nudity & la grecque and polarizes them: Frenchwomen’s halfdraped
bodies were not the same as marble or painted fully
nude gods. Gauzy drapery is seductive because it obscures; it
renders unknown-private-parts of the body while teasingly
implying their presence and accessibility. Full nudity renders
the body public because nothing is hidden from full communal
view. C.Z. believed David’s figures to be “gratuitously
indecent” because they transposed a private state-nakedness
(on which even a servant’s gaze impinged)-into a
public spectacle. For C.Z., privacy made public was indecent.
Chaussard, good Revolutionary that he was, eloquently proposes
the inverse: it is privacy-the hidden, the veiled-that is
obscene. For Chaussard, even a classically draped heroic male
figure could not embody virtue in the ways that a nude could.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 331
Only the body revealed speaks truth, particularly, I would add,
at a time when even drapery a l’antique had become compromised
by female sexuality and the license, superficiality, and
ephemerality associated with not only the ancien regime but
also post-Revolutionary fashion. (Note that Chaussard’s opposition
of veiled and fully revealed refuses to acknowledge the
extent to which Romulus’s body was cloaked by his armor.
Metal weapons, we must presume, do not “deceive” like the
folds of soft muslin.)
Chaussard solely discusses women viewers of male nudity.
Rather than valorizing the male viewer of female objects, he is
concerned to direct attention to the men as appropriate
objects of sight for both sexes. Like David, he seems to say:
look, look at men. Come out, Frenchwomen, from the
dangerously secretive viewing afforded by your duplicitous
fans. Instead, in public view, look directly at art’s nude men.
Significantly, however, Chaussard’s discussion of women’s
viewing of male nudes leads inexorably back to women’s
draped bodies; female bodies necessarily serve as the negative
example. In Chaussard’s text, women are conjured as veiled
bodies and veiled vision. But while Chaussard attempts to
emancipate women’s looking, he and his contemporaries
cannot so much as entertain the notion of women’s full
nudity. Hersilia may be compromised dressed d la grecque but
no one, not even the committed classicist Chaussard, could
“imagine” her stripped bare. If women’s gazes can be
pedagogically sanitized, there seems to be no solution to the
ways women’s bodies are permanently inscribed by sexuality.
Draped or bared, woman is never fully public. The republican
valiantly attempted to salvage Romulus and Tatius; he attempted
to salvage an audience in which genders and classes
mingled; he tried to salvage women’s viewing; but the spectacle
of Hersilia, the great mediator and intervener in her
clinging white gown, continued to pose perplexing problems.
Women’s Intervention
Intervention is no small matter. Women had indeed intervened
in 1799, compromising classicism, compromising nudity,
compromising the (fraternal) Republic. Women had
looked to an artistic tradition that was meant to be exemplary,
and they had imitated its example, but that imitation seemed
to many contemporaries to be confined to dress, not virtuous
conduct. And to make dress exemplary was fundamentally to
overturn the notion of exemplarity as a permanent foundation
of timeless values. Much has been made of the ways
David’s painting inspired masculine emulation on the part of
young male artists, but that Bloomian tale of sons imitating
fathers is not the story most relevant to an understanding of
Intervention of the Sabines.74 Women, too, can emulate, but in
1799 their emulation challenged a lineage-men begetting
men; men looking at men-that had bracketed them out.
Theirs was not the story admirable republicans like Chaussard
and Roederer hoped to tell their male progeny.
But it is wrong in the end to conflate intervention and
emulation; the latter can too easily be denigrated as mindless
aping. Women may have appropriated republican iconography
and thereby corrupted it, but even Roederer, who so
explicitly denounced women’s new tyrannical empire over la
mode, believed that women were not ultimately their own
iconographers-their power was not of their making. In 1798,
Roederer laid the blame at the door of painters.
In a promenade, a half-nude woman and others dressed in
gauze are more than nude…. Yet one must agree that
artists have also contributed to this revolution. At the birth
of the republican system, they had spoken much of Greek
girls, and our women had taken them at their word, for
fear that one would speak to them next of Roman women.
They were so lovable these Greek girls and so boring these
Roman women! One can raise one’s daughter to be a
Roman woman, but one prefers, oneself, to be a Greek girl.
Truthfully, citizen, there is something very harsh and
tyrannical in the authority of painters. Four years ago, they
wanted to make us change our habits because ours were
not picturesque; they arranged the nation for painting,
rather than arranging painting for the nation. Now they
amuse themselves dressing our women as models, chilling
them, giving them colds, in order to have greater ease to
observe the purity of forms in their paintings. Will art
benefit from this? I doubt it. It is very agreeable, I imagine,
to draw beautiful contours; but isn’t it also agreeable to
express modesty, chastity, their triumphs, their difficulties,
their surrender? Painters of talent! it is in virtues, and not
in the license of nudity, that there are treasures for you.75
Frenchwomen may have flattered their vanity by fashioning
themselves as lissome Greek nymphs rather than sturdy
Roman paragons, but it was “tyrannical” painters who had
initiated this national makeover. In search of sinuous contours,
artists were responsible for (un)dressing women, risking
their health and dangerously promoting “the license of
nudity” instead of virtue. Women, the author decides, were
ultimately the malleable materials of the dictatorial artist.
There can be little doubt that Roederer writing in the
spring of 1798 had David in mind. I do not need to rehearse
David’s central role as iconographer of the Revolution and
pageant master for Robespierre. During the Directory, the
phrase “tyrannical painter” would conjure his name above
all. Despite Roederer’s certainty that women a la mode
conspired for power, he finds a way to make David their
puppet master. But even as Roederer’s text robs women of
authorial agency, it also registers the impact of their mimicry.
To the extent that “nudity” was now bound to “license,” it
was also bound to fashionable Frenchwomen undressed d la
grecque. In the controversial reception of David’s Sabines,
theirs was perhaps the most formidable intervention. Of
course, what republican classicism and the masculine beau
iddal lost in terms of authority, David’s coffers won in boxoffice
sales. Although he would not exhibit another painting
featuring classical male nudes for fifteen years, the scandal of
nudity & la grecque in turn-of-the-century Paris amply paid for
his country house.76
Who then risked whose health? At the onset of the
Napoleonic Empire, the author of The Friend of Women; or,
Letter ofa Doctor concerning the influence of the clothing of women on
their morals and health. . .. offered David’s example to justify
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332 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
24 David, Le Sacre, 1805-7.
Paris, Musee du Louvre
(photo: ? RMN)
his denunciation of women’s loose and revealing clothing,
but his parable of 1804 inverts Roederer’s tale of 1798.
According to this author, the Sabines may have made David
wealthy, but he had paid the price of his own physical
well-being:
I can only cite with some confidence the works of doctors
who are especially devoted to proving the dangers of
immorality. Yet there is some reason to infer from the
slackness [la mollesse] of clothing that of morals, and from
the latter a bad influence on health, when we see David,
surrounded by royal luxury and fallen women, struck by a
shameful affliction.77
By 1804, it seemed clear that Roederer’s tyrannical puppet
master had fallen into the seductive, regal fold of loose and
luxuriant women. Hersilia, it turns out, had led ineluctably to
the coronation of Josephine by a wan, swaddled and ermineblanketed
hero. Sick, royal, and feminine, David was ready to
paint Le Sacre for the Salon of 1808 (Fig. 24). David, in the
midst of painting that homage to the flowing satins, velvets,
and fashionable stuffs of the Empire, succumbed to public
approbation and painted over Tatius’s genitals.
Assistant professoro f history of art at U.C. BerkeleyD, arcy Grimaldo
Grigsbyi s currentlyw orkingo n a booke ntitledE xtremities in Paint:
Representing Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (1789-
1830). Her essay “Rumor, Contagion and Colonization in Gros’s
Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804)” was published in Representations
51 (Summer 1995). [History of Art Department, University of
California at BerkeleyB, erkeleyC, alif 94720]
Frequently Cited Sources
Aulard, Alphonse, Paris pendant la riaction thermidorienne et sous le directoire:
Recueils de documents, 5 vols. (Paris, 1898).
Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, 1799, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David
(Paris: Pougens, Year VIII [1799-1800]), in Collection Deloynes (Paris:
Biblioth~que Nationale, 1980), microform, vol. 21, no. 597.
Crow, Thomas, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995).
David, Jules, Le peintre Louis David 1748-1825: Souvenirs et documents inidits
(Paris, 1880-82).
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, “David’s Sabine Women: Body, Gender and Republican
Culture under the Directory,” Art History, 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430.
Musee du Louvre,Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825, exh. cat., Paris, 1989.
Roederer, Pierre-Louis, Oeuvresd u ComteP L. Roedererv, ol. 4 (Paris, 1856).
Notes
This article is largely based on chap. 4 of my dissertation “Classicism,
Nationalism and History: The Prix Dicennaux of 1810 and the Politics of Art
under Post-Revolutionary Empire,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1995.
I would like to thank Thomas Crow, Pat Simons,Joel Isaacson, and David Bien
for their comments at that time as well as readers of this altered version:
foremost among them, Todd P. Olson, but also Erika Najinski, Jeannene
Prybylski, Anne Wagner, Margaret Waller, and the readers for Art Bulletin. I
would also like to thank my efficient research assistant Heather MacDonald.
Margaret Waller generously shared her unpublished material on related
issues. Funding was provided by Fulbright, Lurcy, Social Science Research
Council, and Kress Two-Year Institutional Fellowships. Translations are mine
unless otherwise indicated. For Gregoria.
1. Stefan Germer, “In Search of a Beholder: On the Relation of Art,
Audiences and Social Spheres in Post-Thermidor France,” Art Bulletin 79
(Mar. 1992): 19-36 at 34; Dorothy Johnson, Jacques-Louis David: Art in
Metamorphosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 124.
2. See Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “David’s Sabine Women: Body, Gender and
Republican Culture under the Directory,” Art History 14 (Sept. 1991): 397-430
at 413 (author’s emphasis) and 424 (emphasis added); see also Erica Rand,
“Depoliticizing Women: Female Agency, the French Revolution, and the Art
of Boucher and David,” Genders 7 (Spring 1990), 47-68. Alex Potts has also
emphasized the centrality of the male as “an ideal object of desire and an ideal
subjectivity with which the male spectator can identify”; Potts, “Beautiful
Bodies and Dying Heroes: Images of Ideal Manhood in the French Revolution,”
History Workshop3 0 (Autumn 1990): 1-21; repr. in revised form in his
Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994), 229.
3. Mus6e du Louvre, 336.
4. In his brochure, David stated that even prior to the exhibition he had
encountered criticism of the nudity and that it would certainly be repeated
(“An objection that has already been made to me and that will not fail to be
repeated”), Le tableau des Sabines, exposi publiquement au palais national des
sciences et des arts …. (Paris, Year VIII [1799-1800]), 15; cited in Daniel
Wildenstein, Documents compMmentaireas u catalogue de l’oeuvre de Louis David
(Paris: Foundation Wildenstein, 1973), 150.
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 333
5. See below for controversies concerning the nudity of the male figures. A
number of statements in the press assimilated David’s private entrepreneurial
exhibition to spectacular entertainments subject to a government tax; his
defenders valiantly attempted to deny the appropriateness of such a conflation
of art and spectacle. The controversy intensified rather than diminished over
the years;b y 1801, even David’sa rdent supporter Pierre-Jean-BaptistCe haussard
criticized the deleterious effects commercial exhibitions would have on
the public salon; see Journald esA rts,3 0 Fructidor,Y earI X [Sept. 17, 1801]. For
the vicissitudes of the painting’s initial reception, see Mus6e du Louvre,
328-32; for later controversies,p articularlyd uring the debates catalyzedb y the
1810 decennial competition, see DarcyG rimaldoG rigsby,” ClassicismN, ationalism,
and History,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1995, chap. 4.
6. A.D. [AmauryD uval], La DicadeP hilosophiqu1e3 (10 Pluviose, Year VIII
[Jan. 30, 1800]). According to Duval, clothed figures should be painted by
women and mediocre painters. The Ideologues were a disparate group of
liberal social and political theorists generally committed to Etienne Bonnot de
Condillac’s theory of sensationalism. Self-appointed inheritors of the Enlightenment
philosophetsh, ey dominated the national Institute’sC lasso f Morala nd
Political Sciences. Even as they lost favor under Napolkon, particularly after
the Concordat of 1801, they continued to express their Enlightenment ideas
through their organ, the journal La DicadeP hilosophiquSe.e e Joanna Kitchin,
Un journal “philosophique”:L a Dicade (1794-1807) (Paris: M.J. Minard, 1965);
and Marc Regaldo Un milieu intellectuel: La Dicade Philosophique, 5 vols. (Paris:
Diffusion, H. Champion, 1976). Concerning the masculine beau idial in this
period, see Regis Michel, LeB eaui dial, exh. cat., Mus&ed u Louvre,P aris,1 989;
Potts, 1990, 1994 (as in n. 2); Thomas Crow, “Observations on Style and
History in French Painting of the Male Nude,” in VisualC ultureI:m agesa nd
Interpretationesd, . Norman Bryson et al. (Hanover,N .H.: WesleyanU niversity
Press, 1994), 141-67, repr. in expanded form in EmulationM: akingA rtistsf or
RevolutionaryF ranceb y Thomas Crow (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995); Whitney Davis, “The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet’s Sleep of
Endymion,”in Bryson et al, 168-201; Marie-PierreF oissy-Aufrareet al, La Mort
de Bara (Avignon: Fondation du Mus6e Calvert, 1989); Abagail Solomon-
Godeau, “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation,” Art History 16, no. 2
(une 1993): 286-312; and idem, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1997); as well as Carol Ockman, “Profiling
Homoeroticism: Achilles Receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon,” Art Bulletin
75 (June 1993): 259-74; and idem, Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the
SerpentinLe ine (New Haven:Y ale UniversityP ress, 1995).
7. Abagail Solomon-Godeau in her book Male Trouble(a s in n. 6), 195-99,
has also briefly noted the eruption of negative criticism of male nudity in this
period. While she emphasizes the “entirely male formations” within which the
male nude was “produced, received, commissioned, sold, discussed, celebrated
or criticized” (199), I focus on the ways women-actual and
imagined-impinged on the “masculine character of the artistic sphere.”
8. Mariani, letter to the editor, Journal des Arts, 15 Pluvi6se, Year VIII [Feb. 4,
1800]: 9: “There you are, bourgeois gentlemen! You love draped chiffons
better than beautiful forms. / As for me, / Nothing is more beautiful than the
nude, / the nude alone is amiable.” See also the anonymous brochure Critique
du tableau des Sabines du Citoyen David, discussed in Mus6e du Louvre, 336; and
C.Z., Le Courdiedre sS pectacle8s, F rimaire,Y earI X, [Nov. 29, 1800], 3.
9. Another anonymous critic, who lamented the lack of paintings commemorating
France’sm ilitaryg lories, was particularlyt roubled by the inappropriateness
of portraying military heroes nude. The dialogic conceit he used hardly
masks the author’s dismay and contempt; artistic precedents cannot justify a
choice that is at once indecent and ahistorical. The dialogue juxtaposes the
public’s criteria of morality and historical accuracy to the artist’s intraaesthetic
commitments to the acadimie and visual precedents; La Revue du
Museum: Dialogue entre Damon et un peintre (Paris, 1799), 8-10, in Collection
Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform, vol. 21, no. 562,
142-44.
10. C.Z. (as in n. 8)
11. Chaussard, Sur le tableau des Sabines, par David (Paris, Year VIII [1799-
1800]), Deloynes Collection, 21, no. 597. An Ideologue, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste
Chaussard replaced Amaury Duval as La Decade Philosophique’s art critic in
1798. The fervor with which he embraced the Revolution is suggested by a play
he wrote in 1791 aptly entitled La France rigndtre, which bore the epigraph
“One does not enlighten men with the torch of hatred but with the flame of
Reason.” His Enlightenment faith in rationality accompanied a profound
commitment to antiquity and a complete disavowal of Christianity, to the
extent that he replaced his “superstitious” hyphenated Christian surname
with Publicola in 1792. Nevertheless, during theJacobins’ rule, Chaussard was
thrice placed on Robespierre’s execution list because he remained a committed
Girondist. Concerning Chaussard, see Grigsby (as in n. 5), chaps. 4, 6. See
also the highly informative essay by Marc Regaldo, “Profil perdu: L’idiologue
Chaussard,” in Approches des Lumires: Milanges offerts d Jean Fabre (Paris:
Klinksieck, 1974), 381-401; E. Hereau, “Ndcrologie: Pierre-Jean-Baptiste
Chaussard,” Revue Encycloptdique 21 (1824): 251-53; Regaldo (as in n. 6);
Kitchin (as in n. 6); Adrian Rifkin, “History, Time and the Morphology of
Critical Language, or Publicola’s Choice,” in Art Criticism and Its Institutions in
Nineteenth-CenturyF rance, ed. Michael Orwicz (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1994), 29-42.
12. Stefan Germer and Hubertus Kohle emphasize the split address of the
painting in “From the Theatrical to the Aesthetic Hero: On the Idea of Virtue
in David’s Brutus and Sabines,” Art History 9, no. 2 (June 1986): 168-84.
13. Amaury Duval (as in n. 6), 228, also explicitly described Hersilia in terms
of class hierarchy: “Each of these women has a particular expression that
indicates the rank she occupies in society. The suffering of Hersilia is noble.”
14. In another passage of his essay regarding the Sabines, 30, Chaussard
spells out his conviction that the French people did not enjoy the physical
vigor and perfection of the Greeks. Exhorting David to go to Greece itself,
Chaussard nostalgically evokes the beauty of the southern peoples relative to
the northern.
15. Chaussard’s condemnation of fashion’s deformation of modern man
resembles other kinds of texts that brought the philosophe’ms edical discourse
to the examination of “unnatural” social practices. For instance, in Dr.
Clairian’s 1803 publication entitled Recherches et considirations medicales sur les
vitements des hommesp articulibrements ur les culottes. … (Paris, 1803), a physician
addressed fears that restrictivem ale culottes( breeches) risked the disappearance
of the French race.
16. See, for example, Socidt6 Populaire et R6publicaine des Arts, Considerations
sur les avantages de changer le costume franfais (Paris, n.d.): “Under the
empire of despots, the useless class of idle rich determined the form to give to
clothing…. Free men will not follow the airs of these frivolous beings….
[The free man] enters into the spirit of French regeneration to restore the
costume to its original goal and the morals of equality.” See also the
Convention’s decree of October 29, 1793, concerning the newfound freedom
from vestimentaryc odes, cited in Philippe Perrot, Fashioningt heB ourgeoisieA:
History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 20.
17. For the debates about dress during the Revolutionary period and the
history of fashion from Revolution to Empire, see Nicole Pellegrin, Les
vitements de la liberti: Abicidaire des pratiques vestimentaires en France de 1780 d
1800 (Aix-en-ProvenceA: linea, 1989); William Olander, “Pour transmettre:
la posterit6: French Painting and Revolution, 1774-1795,” Ph.D. diss., New
York University, 1983, 218-19; Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution
(New York:H olmes and Meier, 1988);J. Renouvier, “Costume,”i n Histoired e
l’artp endantl a revolution(P aris:V veJ . Renouard, 1863), 463-80; Lynn Hunt,
“Rdvolutionf rancaise et la vie priv6e,” in Histoired e la vie pridvee, d. Philippe
Aries and Georges Duby (Paris: Seuil, [1985]), 21-52; Margaret Waller,
“Disembodiment as a Masquerade: Fashion Journalists and Other ‘Realist’
Observersi n DirectoryP aris,”L ‘EspriCt riateur3 7, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 50-60;
Raymond Gaudriault, RIpertoire de la gravure de mode franfaise des origines d 1815
(Paris:P romodis, 1988); Philippe S6guy,H istoired esm odess ous l’Empir(eP aris:
Promodis;C ercle de la Librairie,1 988); FrancoisB oucher, Histoired u costume
en Occident de l’antiquiti d nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 1965), 335-50; Ruth
Turner Wilcox, TheM odei n Costume(N ew York:S cribner, 1958), 220-45; The
Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire 1789-1815, exh. cat.,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989.
18. See Lynn Hunt, “The Rhetoric of Revolution in France,” History
WorkshopJourn1a5l (Spring 1983): 78-94; and idem (as in n. 17), 24-26.
19. FranCois Poultier, “Physionomie de Paris,” Amis des Lois, 30 Vent6se,
Year VI [March 20, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 578.
20. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, Le nouveau Diable boiteux: Tableau philosophiquee
t moradl eP aris( Paris,Y earV II [ 1798-1799]), vol. 2, 233. The rapidityo f
fashion’s transformation led a journal to bemoan mockingly during a quiet
summer: “For eight days, at least, fashion has been of an eternal constancy”
Miroir8, Fructidor,Y earV [Aug. 25, 1797], cited in Aulard,v ol. 4, 305.
21. See, for example, the engravings in Caricaturepso litiquesb y Antione-
Joseph de Barruel-Beauvert( Paris,Y earV I [1797-98]).
22. For example, the Bureau Central reported on 29 Prairial,Y earV I (June
16, 1798): “It is certain that, restrained by severe surveillance, an incurable
class of opponents [frondeurso] f the government and egoists for whom the
good or the bad of our political situation is altogether a matter of indifference,
having no other means of signaling their opposition to republican principles,
have affected a dress extraordinary in some aspects: green collars, black
collars, purple collars, then ties, then leaded canes; if they have not, for lack of
opportunity, seved as a sign of rallying among royalists, they were at least so
many tacit insults to these [republican] principles”; cited in Aulard, vol. 4,
720. See also Le Pddacteur of 3 Fructidor, Year V [August 19, 1797], cited in
ibid., 301; Sdguy (as in n. 17), 34, and Edmond andJules de Goncourt, Histoire
de la soci~t• fran~aise pendant le Directoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 304-5;
Boucher (as in n. 17), 338.
23. Pierre Cartellier to Antoine-Denis Chaudet, letter of May 7, 1804, in H.
Jouin, “Lettres inddits d’artistes fran•ais du XIX sidcle,” Nouvelles Archives de
l’ArtFranfais,
3d ser., 16, (1900): 7-8.
24. Henry Redhead Yorke, France in Eighteen Hundred and Two, ed. J.A.C.
Sykes (London, 1806), 124.
25. These differences resemble but also deviate from the paradigm of the
older active partner (erastes) and the passive youthful love object (eromenos)
characteristic of ancient vase painting. For a bibliography of this literature and
a consideration ofJ.-A.-D. Ingres’s exaggeration of that implicit opposition in
his early work, see Ockman, 1993 (as in n. 6).
26. Romulus’s figure accords therefore with Jacques Lacan’s assertion that
“the phallus can only play its role as veiled”;Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of
the Phallus,” in Feminine Sexuality:Jacques Lacan and the “EcoleF reudienne, “ed.
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334 ART BULLETIN JUNE 1998 VOLUME LXXX NUMBER 2
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton; Pantheon, 1982),
74-85.
27. Yorke (as in n. 24), 124.
28. La morte de trois milles ans au Salon de 1783 (1783) 4, in Collection Deloynes
(Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1980) micoform, vol. 13, no. 286, 178.
29. See Elisabeth Vig6e-Lebrun, Souvenirs, ed. Claudine Herrmann, (Paris:
Des Femmes, 1984) vol. 1, 85-88; and also the account by Aime Martin in
Pierre de Nolhac, Madame Vigie-Lebrun: Peintre de Marie-Antoinette (Paris:
Goupil, 1912), 129-35; this event is briefly mentioned by Mary Sheriff, The
Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigie-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics ofArt (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 47-48.
30. The women, artists and wives of artists, were self-consciously performing
history painting, citing and enacting antique precedents celebrated, for
instance, in Nicolas-Guy Brenet’s painting Piety and Generosity of Roman Women;
Brenet’s tableau hung next to David’s painting of masculine martial sacrifice,
Oath of the Horatii, in the Salon of 1785. That the Frenchwomen donating
jewels in 1789 modeled themselves on classical women was widely noted by
contemporary observers; for instance, Courrier Francais 65 (Sept. 18, 1789):
313; and Ruvolutions de Paris9 (Sept. 5-12, 1789): 19-22, which described these
women as “retracing among us the virtues of Greece.” I interpret the act of the
donation as a double move, at once distancing women and art from ornament
and luxury. However, if their sacrifice was likened to men’s sacrifice to the
state, it was far less sustainable; the negation of ornament can only be
performed once. Regarding the donation, see Vivian Cameron, “Approaches
to Narrative and History: The Case of the Donation of September 7, 1789, and
Its Images,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 19 (1989): 413-32; the event
was described in “Origines des dons patriotiques, faites A la nation,”
RNvolutions de Paris 9 (September 5-12, 1789): 19-22; and by the group’s
spokesperson, Mme Moitte, in two brochures, L’dme des Romaines dans les
femmes franraises and Suite de l’dme des romaines dans lesfemmes franfaises (Paris,
1789), as well as Journal inidit de Madame Moitte, ed. Paul Cottin (Paris, n.d.),
1-3. I have analyzed this donation at length in an unpublished paper entitled
” ‘L’&clat des sacrifices’: Ornament, Painting and Female Citizenship in the
Donation of September 7, 1789.”
31. During the Revolution, one writer reveals the ways that (female) sign
and (abstract) signified were conflated; he protests a young woman representing
Reason at the Festival of Reason surely must have represented Liberty:
“For the senses and the philosophical imagination are both equally shocked at
the idea of a woman-especially a youthful woman-representing Reason”;
quoted in Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 101-2. See also Darcy
Grimaldo Grigsby, “Liberty’s Fragmented Body: Revolutionary Politics and
the Instability of Allegory; An Analysis of the Initial Reception of Delacroix’s
Le 28juillet, Libertieguidant le peuple,” M.A. thesis, University of Michigan, 1989;
and Marcia Pointon, “Liberty on the Barricades: Women, Politics and
Sexuality in Delacroix,” in Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting
1830-1908, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59-82.
32. Armand Charlemagne, Le monde incroyable, quoted in Renouvier (as in n.
17), 476.
33. See also an anonymous portrait, ca. 1800, in the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., reproduced in Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 126. Renouvier (as in n.
17), 476, describes the trend thus: “That which best dresses a woman is
nudity.” See also Lucet, La Correspondance des Dames, vol. 2, (Paris, Year VIII
[1799-1800]). Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has discussed women’s risque selfrepresentation
in relation to Girodet’s retaliation against Mlle Lange in 1799;
see her “Le rh6torique du corps f6minin sous le Directoire: Le cas d’Anne-
Francoise Elizabeth Lange en Danae,” in Les femmes et la Rivolution franCaise,
ed. Marie-France Brive (Toulouse: Presses Universitaire de Miraie, 1990), vol.
2, 221-25.
34. Quoted in Walter Markov, Grand Empire: Virtue and Vice in the Napoleonic
Era (New York: Hippocrene, 1990), 204.
35. “Their entire outfit, inclusive of shoes and jewelry, was not supposed to
weigh more than half a pound. The record was said to be held by the delightful
wife of Hamelin, a Swiss army contractor, who strolled through the Tuileries
gardens arrayed in nothing but a gossamer veil until the importunate gawking
of passers-by compelled her to retire”; quoted in ibid.
36. See Journal des Dames et des Modes, 9 Pluvirse, Year VI [Jan. 28, 1798].
According to Ribeiro (as in n. 17), 153 n. 31, Mme Tallien preferred
flesh-colored tights with gold spangles that glinted under her transparent
robes. Mme Tallien, nie Thirisia Cabarrus, was the daughter of a prominent
Spanish banker and wife of the Revolutionary journalist and politician
Jean-Lambert Tallien; her salon played a central role in Thermidorian high
society. David Kunzle states that this period’s scanty, thin muslin gowns were
also sometimes “dampened to adhere sculpturally to the body”; Kunzle,
Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight-Lacing and OtherForms of
Body-Sculpturei n the West( Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1982), 105.
37. La Petite Poste de Paris, 3 Messidor, Year V [June 21, 1797], cited in
Maurice Lescure, Madame Hamelin: Merveilleuse et turbulent Fortunde (1776-
1851) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 38. A few days later L’Ami du Peuple of 5
Messidor, Year V [June 23, 1797] published a commentary on this incident
that ended with an exhortation to “the imprudent” that “it is necessary at
least to respect the people, and that, if one is dissolute, it is necessary to hide it;
if one is well-behaved, it is necessary to appear so”; quoted in Aulard, vol. 4, p.
189, as well as in Lescure, 38. The incident is discussed by Waller (as in n. 17),
as well as Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33). According to Louis Madelin, La France
du Directoire (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1922), Mme Hamelin attempted “to replace
the fashion of the sans-culottes with that of the sans-chemise.” Here is the duc
de Broglie in his memoirs: “Like many others, I saw Madame Tallien …
disguised as Diana with her half-naked breast, wearing cothurns on her feet,
and dressed, if I may use the term, in a tunic which scarcely covered her
knees”; de Broglie, Personal Recollections of Duc de Broglie 1785-1820, trans.
Raphael Ledos de Beaufort (London, 1887), vol. 1, 21.
38. Courrier des Spectacles, 11 Thermidor, Year V [July 28, 1797], 251. A.
Charlemagne’s poem (as in n. 32) also points to this pervasive adoption of
Greek costume when he asks, “Who is this Greek with big arms?” and
discovers, on overhearing her argot, that she is Mme Angot, that greatly
popular symbol of the crude female arriviste.
39. Dr. D6sessarts, Paris, Oct. 1798, quoted in Srguy (as in n. 17), 51.
40. Dr. Victor Broussonet, De la mode et des habillements (1799, 2d ed., 1806).
Arguments of these sorts would be sustained over the course of the decade. In
1804, for example, a pamphlet entitled L’ami desfemmes ou lettres d’un m~decin
listed numerous examples of women who had died because of their irrational
commitment to the unhealthy vagaries of classicizing fashion.
41. Le Publiciste, 21 Fructidor, Year VII [Sept. 7, 1799], cited in Aulard, vol. 5,
715.
42. In Louis-Mathieu Langlks, Voyage de Thunberg au cap de Bonne-Espirance,
aux iles de la Sonde et auJapon (Paris, 1796), vol. 4, 59.
43. Louis-Mathieu Langls, letter to the editor, Journal de Paris, 3e jour
compl6mentaire, Year VII [Sept. 19, 1799], quoted in Aulard, vol. 5, 737. That
feminine Greek styles were commonly associated with indecency is corroborated
as well by a fashion column of thejournal Miroir, which two years earlier
juxtaposed the new style of gown (significantly, named les robes d l’hypocrite) to
the dresses d l’antique: “They are perhaps more decent than the gowns d la
grecque”; quoted in Aulard, vol. 3, 751.
44. Pierre-Louis Roedere, Journal de Paris, 15 Fructidor, Year VII [Sept. 1,
1799], quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 396. Called “leader of the philosophes” by a
contemporary, Roederer was hostile to both the nobility and clergy and thus
embraced the Revolution. A moderate member of the Jacobin club, he
equivocally supported constitutional monarchy and opposed the execution of
the king. After the fall of the Girondists, he went into hiding, only to reemerge
after Thermidor. He supported Bonaparte but soon became disillusioned and
fell out of favor during the Consulate; nonetheless he was appointed a count
by Napoleon in 1808. See Thierry Lentz, Roederer 1754-1835 (Paris: Serpenoise,
1989); Roederer’s writings were published between 1853 and 1859 as
Oeuvresd u ComteP L. RoedererV. ol. 4 includes the essays on fashion cited in this
article.
45. “Immorality impeded by surveillance has been less apparent outdoors,
and the arrest of twenty-four prostituted women has at least dammed up this
scandal. One sees with regret that the women most disposed by their
attractions and their morality to win the admiration which they seek, affect
appearances contrary to the virtue of their own sentiments and thereby
involuntarily embolden by their example those known to be the most
shameful”; Bureau Central report, 4 Messidor, Year VI [une 22, 1798], cited
in Aulard, vol. 4, 745.
46. See Elizabeth Colwill, “Transforming Women’s Empire: Representations
of Women in French Political Culture, 1770-1807,” Ph.D. diss., SUNY,
Binghamton, 1990.
47. Roederer, Journal d’Economie Publique, de Morale et de Politique, 10
Frimaire, Year V [Oct. 31, 1796], quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 382.
48. Chaussard himself recognized the Directory’s striking opposition of
male and female fashion in a dialogue in Le nouveau Diable boiteux (as in n. 20),
vol. 2, 232-33. The man accuses the woman of showing too much and relying
on la mode as a “magic talisman,” and the woman responds that the man, too,
succumbs to fashion: “… and if I tremble from cold, don’t you suffocate from
heat?”
49. Roederer, letter addressed to Louis-Sbastien Mercier, Journal de Paris,
13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807-8, quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 382:
“elles ont fait, pour regagner tout ce qu’elles avaient perdu, un va-tout oii elles
ont mis jusqu’d leur sante; et ce va-tout sera bient6t perdu.” Roederer’s
statement was deemed interesting enough to have been reported and
recounted in another journal, L’Ami des Lois, 14 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 3,
1798], also cited in Aulard, vol. 4, 595.
50. Concerning the strategic opposition of Corneille and Racine in the late
18th century, see Crow, 33-45.
51. See T. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 176-77.
52. See, for example, the first issue of Tableau Gindral du Gozt, des Modes et
Costumesd e Paris par Une Socidtdd ‘Artistese t Gens de Lettres, 1 Vendimiaire, Year
VII [Sept. 22, 1798], which describes the Roman-style white tunic, specifying
that “nudity” (sleevelessness) had replaced sleeves even in harsh weather.
Here is the duchesse d’Abrantes’s description of Mme Tallien: “She had taken
to wearing a sort of semi-Grecian costume that became her admirably. It was
plain, almost severe, and she wore it with consummate grace…. Her only
adornment was a long, ample robe of muslin falling in large folds about her
limbs and modeled after the drapery of a Grecian statue. Only, the robe was of
choice Indian muslin and fashioned, no doubt, more elegantly than those of
Aspasia and Poppea. It was caught up at the bosom, and the sleeves were drawn
back over the arms and fastened with old-fashioned cameo brooches. Similar
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NUDITY A LA GRECQUE IN 1799 335
brooches adorned her shoulders and her waist”; d’Abrantes, Histoire des Salons
de Paris, quoted in L. Gastine, Madame Tallien: Notre Dame de Thermidor
(London: John Lane, the Bodely Head, 1913), 188-89. In 1801 Roederer
made light of the ways female dress had come to be minimally clasped by such
brooches in a mock dialogue between a pin and a needle in which the needle
lamented its lack of employment: women’s clothing was now only pinned
together, often with cameo brooches, intended as the pin complained, only to
be unclasped, Journal de Paris, 21 Fructidor, Year IX [Sept. 8, 1801], in
Roederer, vol. 4, 400-401.
53. Concerning Boilly’s series, see Susan Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Liopold
Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995), 70-75.
54. Etienne-Jean Del6cluze, Journal de Delcluze 1824-1828, ed. R. Baschet
(Paris: Bernard Grosset, 1948), 338.
55. Louis Hautecoeur, Louis David (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1954), 180.
56. Truthful ones, according to Pierre-Maximillien Delafontaine’s manuscript
at Paris, Bibliothque de l’Institut, ms 3784; see also Hautecoeur (as in
n. 55), 180 n. 40.
57. See Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 88-95; Germer and Kohle
(as in n. 12), 179-80.
58. There is now a large bibliography concerning women’s relation to the
public sphere during the Revolutionary period; see, for example,Joan Landes,
Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press 1988); Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses:
Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); as well asJohanna
Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New
York: Roufledge, 1995). There are fewer studies concerning the status of
women during the post-Revolutionary years; see Geneviive Fraisse, Reason’s
Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
59. Concerning the scandal of Girodet’s vengeful, satiric denunciation of
the licentiousness and venality of one such fashionable parvenu, Mlle Lange,
at the Salon of 1799, see George Levitine, “Girodet’s DNaenwa ,: The
Iconography of a Scandal,” Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 57-59 (1969-
70): 69-79; Lajer-Burcharth (as in n. 33); and Crow, 233-36.
60. I am indebted to Stefan Germer’s discussion of the painting’s two axes,
which he relates to Emile Benveniste’s distinction between r&it and discours;
Germer (as in n. 1), 33-34.
61. Romulus, despite his nudity, still bears the traces of the incroyable’s
foppish elegance, with his “dogs’ ears” sideburns, distinctive full-lipped
profile, and ornamentation condensed and displaced onto the serpentine red
feather and luxuriant gold accessories. Tatius may have appeared naked to
many, but, in his own way, Romulus too was au courant in 1799.
62. Charles Landon, Journal des Arts, no. 34 (20 Niv6se, Year VII[IJ an. 10,
1800]): 4.
63. Boutard, Journal des Dibats, 13 Ventose, Year VIII [Mar. 4, 1800]: 2-3,
quoted in Collection Deloynes (Paris: Bibliothique Nationale, 1980) microform,
vol. 21, no. 598, 787-88. A popular vaudeville specifically took as its subject
women’s hypocritical relation to David’s tableau. The brunt of the satire is the
relatively educated woman artist whose fundamentally vulnerable moral
position is exploited by an amorous young man in pursuit of her daughter.
Tricked by the male suitor, the foolish mother leaves her daughter defenseless
in the foyer of David’s exhibition because she does not dare expose her to
painted male nudes. Of course, the daughter is abducted and the play ends
with a parodic tableau vivant of David’s painting. See C. C. Jouy, Longchamp,
and Dieu-La-Foy, Le tableau des Sabines: Vaudeville en un acte (Paris, 1800).
64. Chapter C”LNXuXdXiti,, ” in Le Nouveau Paris, ed. J.-C. Bonnet
(Mercure de France, 1994), p. 649; this essay was largely based on two articles
which appeared in Journal de Paris on 9 and 12 Germinal, Year V [Mar. 29 and
Apr. 1, 1797]: 790-91 and 803-4 respectively. That Mercier’s complaint had
both currency and longevity is attested by J. B. Pujoulx’s discussion of the
nudity of statues in his publication Paris d lafin du XVIIIe sitcle (Paris, 1801), 12.
65. Of course, homoerotic readings could also at particular historical
junctures require similar censorship or obfuscation. For example, in the
particularly homophobic atmosphere of early-19th-century England, Lord
Byron was compelled to masquerade his erotic response to the Apollo Belvedere
as that of a female viewer (a tactic he repeatedly deployed in his writings).
Nevertheless, I would insist that in late-18th-century France, the homoerotic,
exclusively masculine paradigm of viewing dominated aesthetic discourse.
Alex Potts has described the restraints placed on homoerotic readings of art in
Potts, 1994 (as in n. 2), esp. 118-31; concerning Byron, see Louis Crompton,
Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985).
66. In her recently published book The Exceptional Woman, Mary Sheriff
discusses 18th-century thinkers’ preoccupation with the female gaze on the
male object, and in a particularly amusing passage addresses Denis Diderot’s
account of embarrassing sexual arousal while modeling nude for the female
painter Mme Terborch; Sheriff (as in n. 29), 115-20, esp. 118.
67. Roederer, Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798]: 807,
quoted in Roederer, vol. 4, 386.
68. According to Jules David, 360, men’s behavior before David’s tableau
was markedly different from that of the fashionable women who feigned
modesty and embarrassment by covering their eyes with a fan cleverly
concealing a viewing glass, thereby at once hiding and directing their gaze:
“The men of fashion prided themselves on observing and signaling in loud
voices all the beauties and all the faults [of the picture], designating each
muscle by its name and insisting with an entirely masculine liberty on the
amplitude or meagerness of forms. They have been described to us as passing
an attentive eye-glass over all the details of the tableau. As for the women who
did not attain this high degree of freedom, a fan in which a mirror was placed
permitted them to control appropriately the reflections made around them
and to hide their confusion, all the while satisfying their curiosity.” Without
clothing that differentiated the wife from the whore, women were called on to
perform their virtue. If their “look” was sexually alluring, the ways they
dispensed their sight might prove their modesty. The elaborate contrivance of
the fan was meant to secure their status as women for whom the public
contemplation of genital nudity was no familiar event. Standing between
mirror and tableau, these women would have been highly aware of eyes all
about them evaluating their performance of modesty with fluttering fans. The
challenge of deception, looking while pretending not to, was exacerbated by
the intense visibility they acquired when doubled in the reflection. If the sense
of surveillance was heightened, so, too, would have been the titillating sense of
risk and illicit pleasure. Moreover, the mirror reflection, while alternately
obfuscating the canvas or providing a long-distance, crystallized view (depending
on the size of the crowd), also offered the viewer a tantalizing opportunity
to see herself touching, intersecting, approaching, or abandoning the naked
men. The mirror permitted the performance of intimate dalliances, thereby
both heightening the eroticism and the sense of the nakedness of the male
protagonists.
69. De Cailly, Journal des Dames 25 (10 Pluviose, Year VII [Jan. 29, 1799]):
398-400.
70. While the preoccupation with the impact of violent sensations on
pregnant women was dissipating during the early 19th century, contemporaneous
tracts on the effects of women’s imagination on their progeny spanned
this period; see, for example, Benjamin Bablot, Dissertation sur le pouvoir de
limagination des femmes enceintes (Paris, 1788), and, during the Empire,
Jean-Baptiste DemanCgoenosni,d vrations physiologiques sur le pouvoir de
limagination maternelle durant la grossesse
a
…, 2 vols. (Paris, 1807). For a recent
discussion of this obsession, see Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 7-8.
71. Chaussard, 43-44. The author argues that young children are nude
without corrupting their innocence; in the past, pious girls consecrated to the
religion of humanity nursed entirely naked patients without offending their
chaste regard; and even in Rome, “Catholic prejudice” supports the exhibition
of nude statues. In a footnote, Chaussard also quotes Montaigne’s Essays
at length. The 16th-century thinker solely addressesjustifications for women’s
viewing of naked men and in turn cites many different kinds of evidence,
including Plato’s order that both sexes of all ages present themselves nude at
the gymnasium; the example of Indian women, who see men nude in order to
cool their sense of vision; and Lacedaemonian women, who, he claims, were
more virginal than Frenchwomen and who saw young men exercise naked
every day. Montaigne also refutes the purported claim of the women Pohfg u
that their nudity was an invention to attract men, concluding they lost more
allure than they gained; he ends his argument by citing Livy, “Livy said that to
a good woman a nude man is nothing more than an image.”
72. According to Pierre Rosenberg, the work was probably painted between
1785 and 1788. When Fragonard died in 1806, The Sacrifice of the Rosewas one
of only three works listed in his obituary in the Journal de Paris (the others were
its possible pendant, another late work, The Fountain of Love, and his early,
solitary large-scale history painting, Callirhoes).A ccording to Charles Landon,
these works “brought him enormous sums of money”; quoted in Rosenberg,
Fragonard, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum ofArt,
NewYork, 1988, 548-53.
73. Larger-Burcharth (as in n. 2), 412.
74. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of lnfluence: A Theory of Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973); Bryson (as in n. 57); and Crow.
75. Roederer,Journal de Paris, 13 Germinal, Year VI [Apr. 2, 1798], quoted in
Roederer, vol. 4, 386-87.
76. Musie du Louvre, 335.
77. P.-J. Marie de Saint-Ursin, L’ami des femmes; ou, Lettre d’un m?decin,
concernant l’influence de l’habillement desfemmes sur leurs moeurs et leur
sant.
…
(Paris, 1804), 46.
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