Peinture et littérature autour de 1800. Le mythe de Phèdre / Hippolyte chez le Baron Pierre Narcisse Guérin, Germaine de Staël et August Wilhelm Schlegel

Abstract

In her novel Corinne or Italy, Germaine de Staël focuses on relations between painting and literature at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the most striking examples that she takes, there is the famous portrait Phaedra and Hippolytus by David’s pupil, Pierre Narcisse Guérin. When analysed in the light of the comparison between Phaedra by Racine and Euripides’one, written in French by A. W. Schlegel and published in 1807 in Paris by publisher Tourneisen, the opposition between French “high tragedy”, prevailing since the 17th century, and the young German romantic school, is obvious. According to Schlegel, the superiority of ancient Hippolytus is clear. Furthermore, Euripides should no longer be regarded as the apex of the Attic triad but truly as the manifestation of a decline with heavy consequences.This stance clearly diminishes Racine’s importance. From the viewpoint of literary history, it leads to dismissing the French of the Great Century from the history of European drama to the benefit of Shakespeare and Calderón. Above all, it rejects the conception of tragedy held by French playwrights from Corneille to Voltaire in the name of a more recently introduced notion of “tragic”. Oblivious to generic categories, the latter is detrimental to a philosophical conception of human condition based on the unreconcilable conflict between necessity and individual freedom.