Courbet, Bronzino, and Blasphemy

Abstract

A BURIAL AT ORNANS, Courbet's major painting for the Salon of 1850, was first exhibited to the public it pictures, the townsfolk of Ornans, in the chapel of the seminary that was Courbet's own first school (fig. 1). Before going on to the riotous reception in Paris that has been so widely described in recent years, the painting was next displayed in the concert hall of the market building in the departmental capital of Besangon where Courbet had gone to college. We may suppose that it was not without some little pride that Courbet set up his monumental tableau historique before his neighbors and coregionalists on the first legs of its much touted progress to the Salon in Paris.' In this paper I propose to consider an aspect of the local context of Ornans and Besangon that will perhaps illuminate some of the obscurities that still surround Courbet's Burial and his subsequent pictorial practice. Moreover, I mean Courbet's pictorial practice as described here to stand as an instance of a larger (and still continuing) semiological struggle with the entrenched discourses of authority--religion, sexuality, politics, decorum--that in my view came to characterize the most challenging and subversive representations of midcentury realism in France. As I see it, Courbet's strategy was decisively to differentiate his revolutionary images over and against the iconological and formal traces of what was in his time the canonical, and hence inescapable, art of the past. Before Courbet the most famous native son of Ornans was Nicholas