Peinture et belles antiques dans la première moitié du siècle. Les statues vivent aussi

Abstract

René Démoris : Painting and classical beauties in the first half of the century. Statues are also alive. The art of the Rococo period, from La Fosse to Boucher in painting, had a strange reception in France ; it was violently attacked in the middle of the 18th Century, often considered in the 19th Century as the symbol of the frivolous aristocratic Enlightenment and sometimes later accused of being an art of enslave¬ ment abandoning the very purpose of art. We here try to analyse, in connection with a major reference for classical aesthetics — the relation to classical beauties as models — the position of artists who did not rebel against academic principles but who, by their practise, did in fact question the artistic ideology which developed from Du Bos to Diderot ; this ideology attributed certain social or moral aims to painting, a field in which writers wished to seize power and did in fact do so. The violence of the reactions to Rococo painting can be explained less by a relatively discreet immorality than by the latent critical charge of this artistic practice and its obsessions.