The Decline of Le Beau Idéal & the Male Nude in the 19th century/Emergence of the Italian Model.
“The male nude fades out in the nineteenth century. The male body is determinedly and nervously covered up; and as the male goes out of focus, the female nude becomes the central symbol of art. For the first time, nude is automatically taken to mean a woman,” Margaret Walters.1
The cause of the “disappearing male” to use Walters’s phrase meant that the notion of the beau idéal faded too because of that ideal of art was thought to be present in the male body, at least until 1830. Why this “crisis in representation”?2 Whatever the precise reasons for the disappearing male, the signs were that it was undergoing a period of transition marked by changes in style and new attitudes towards the practice of posing. Analysing a number of paintings by Paul Delaroche and Leon Benouville, Waller has shown these works register the decline of the beau idéal due to greater interest in physiognomy, which heralded a greater degree of realism in both portraits and narrative pictures.3 Delaroche’s hemistyle which shows a huge amount of painters on either side of Apelles and four allegorical female nudes representing the Greek, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance, mixes beau idéal and the emergent realistic attitude towards the body. Apelles whose body conforms to the beau idéal, is flanked by two male nudes whose bodies do not; their sagging flesh is the complete opposite of the virile nudes found in, for example, Ingres’s earlier 1801 Prix de Rome winner the Ambassadors of Agamemnon which are based on somatic types as well the styles of Greek sculpture, the epitome of the beau idéal 4But when we compare Ingres’s classical epic with Benouville’s Christ in the Praetorium, there are even greater disparities since most of the models in the religious painting came from different races which not only alludes to the influx of different peoples in Paris, but also a broader view towards the choice of model in studio practice.5 Here we have an Andalusian, a Neapolitan, as well as a black man.6 The inclusion of mixed race models seems to chime with Benouville’s realistic ambitions which are also seen in a curious painting (above) showing the classical 17th century painter Nicolas Poussin drawing some Italian women from real life on one of his walks along the river Tiber; but it need hardly be said that Poussin’s models were the antique, the classical sculptures that surrounded him in Rome, not flesh and blood models!7 Benouville won the Prix de Rome in 1845, but this work was painted after his return to Paris which begs the question: were these Roman women based on sketches of models in Rome during Benouville’s tenure there; or are they models garnered from the group of Italian immigrants who came to France in the 1850s?8
1Margaret Walters, The Nude Male: A New Perspective, (Paddington Press, 1978), 228.
2The phrase is Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s. In her Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (Thames and Hudson, 1997, 43f) Solomon- Godeau computes the ratio of male nudes to female ones in the French Salon over a forty year period from 1781 to 1831, the time of the July Monarchy.
3Waller, Invention of the Model, 14f.
4Solomon-Godeau’s, Male Trouble, 62.
5Waller, Invention of the Model, 13f.
6In this connection, it should be noted that there was a famous black model, Joseph from Haiti, who figures in a drawing by one of Ingres’s students Chassériau, a drawing that contains an instruction from the master to the pupil: it stressed Ingres wanted “a portrait of the model identical in the rendering of form and colour.” Ibid, 15. And Lather’s entry in Dictionary of Artist’s Models, 15f.
7The idea is that Poussin found his motif for his Saving of Moses in a scene from everyday life, which given his classical predilections, seems highly unlikely.
8On Italian models and French artists, Waller, Invention of the Model, 89f. And Lathers, Bodies of Art, 34, who notes that a distinction was made between Italian models in Rome and Italian models in Paris.
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