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Life
Class 1752
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source: Bad
Art
author: Quentin Bel
1989 printed in Great Britain / University
of Chicago Press
pages 121 - 122 |
I would like to try to describe the aspect of the
life room in that academy as Reynolds saw it when he visited the Academie
Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture on his way home from Italy in 1752.
Imagine a fairly big room, big enough to hold
about a hundred people, high too, but it is hard to estimate its proportions,
for all the light comes from one vast lantern suspended above the model.
The students sit in a semi-circle around the throne and on two raised tiers.
The model has been set in a pose taken from the antique. He is a man, always
a man.
In fact, always the same man - M. le modele du
roi he calls himself, and he is entitled to wear a sword when he
wears anything at all. He has held his job for forty years and in
that time has passed through countless avatars - Hercules, Ganymede, Apollo
and Dionysus, the students being instructed to plump him up a bit if he
is to be Herculean, to fine him down when he is a mere stripling. Nor is
that the extent of his metamorphoses - he has been Ceres, Diana and Venus.
For if you look amongst the boys and young men
who crowd the benches you will see some elderly, unsuccessful academicians
who come here to get a free model. If for their historical pictures they
require a nymph then, like the students, they must make the additions and
subtractions, for to the academic artist, nature is only a starting point
after all.
Only once in all the year does a lady sit on the
model's throne. She is a virtuous young person elegantly dressed and, in
drawing her, the young men compete for the prix d'expression established
by M. de Caylus.
If we look further into the establishment we shall
find ruin and disorder. Anatomy and perspective are neglected, the students
are riotous, the casts are defaced and broken, the very skeleton in the
academic cupboard lacks half its bones. And , if we listen, we may
hear from beyond its walls the voice of criticism. "Since we have had an
Academy of Painting," says Voltaire, " we have had no great artists".
And "These seven cruel years at the Academy‘ exclaims Diderot, "what does
the student learn from them ? - a manner"
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