The Other Side of Vertu

Abstract

Despite the tendency to assume that French art of the immediately pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary period bristled with Republican heroes and stoic martyrs, an examination of the titles in the Salon livrets indicates, on the contrary, that erotic or pastoral subjects derived from classical mythology were equally prevalent, despite concerted efforts on the part of the authorities to foster more serious, if not exalted subject matter. Furthermore, and even more surprising, while Republican and Jacobin discourse relentlessly excoriated a baleful effeminacy identified with the ancien régime and its dissolute aristocracy, and equally relentlessly celebrated the values of patriotic manliness (la vertu mâle et répub-licaine), French elite cultural production provides countless examples of a very different type of male ideality: specifically, the imagery of ephebic youth, poignant, passive, androgynous, and more or less feminized—either morphologically or narratively, as in stories featuring role reversals.1 Moreover, an examination of the neoclassical art produced in Rome from the 1770s on makes it quite clear that the French production of androgynous ephebes had numerous predecessors which were later adapted by French artists for revolutionary as well as for more purely aesthetic purposes. The ubiquity and appeal of this feminized ideal of masculinity—for Winckelmann, the apogee of male perfection—would thus seem to contradict an “official” discourse of masculinity concerned to celebrate values more readily associated with Cato or Brutus than with Ganymede or Paris. How should this contradiction be historically addressed?