Tea at Trianon: Restoring American Statuary

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Restoring American Statuary

From First Things:

The Garden of Heroes could serve a useful cultural purpose if it teaches patrons, artists, and the public about the work past sculptors have done in commemorating eminent Americans and the great events of American history. If the original works cannot be loaned or donated, the garden should display high-quality replicas.

A great place to start would be with copies, perhaps in an open-air, roofed portico or pavilion, of Houdon’s brilliant portrait busts of eminent personages of the Revolution and Early Republic: Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lafayette, John Paul Jones, Robert Fulton, and Fulton’s friend and benefactor, the writer and diplomat Joel Barlow. (The White House owns the Barlow bust.) Houdon’s busts and his Washington statue are endowed with an inner radiance because they were conceived tectonically, from the inside out. Even the clothed portions of the Washington statue reflect scrupulous attention to the underlying anatomical structure. As a young man, Houdon modeled a life-sized flayed figure, or écorché, in plaster as a study for a statue of John the Baptist. Such anatomical discipline, which plays out in the geometric precision of the forms comprising Houdon’s figures, is scarcely to be found among contemporary figurative sculptors, whose figures are modeled tonally—in terms of the interplay of light and shade on their surfaces—rather than tectonically. This tonal modeling can result in a surface that assumes an autonomous, expressionistic value independent of the underlying form, an anti-classical technique for which Rodin, the founder of modernist sculpture, is well known. Rodin has many “realist” adepts doing their slapdash thing these days. Caveat emptor. (Read more.)