Painting "Olympia", Edouard Manet - description. Sexual secrets of "Olympia": a guide to the most scandalous picture of Edouard Manet Biography

Edward Mane. Olympia. 1863, Paris.

"Olympia" by Edouard Manet is one of the most famous works of the artist. Now almost no one argues that this is a masterpiece. But 150 years ago, it created an unimaginable scandal.

Visitors to the exhibition literally spat at the picture! Critics warned pregnant women and the faint of heart against viewing the canvas. For they risked experiencing extreme shock from what they saw.

It would seem that nothing foreshadowed such a reaction. After all, Manet was inspired by a classic work for this work. Titian, in turn, was inspired by the work of his teacher Giorgione "Sleeping Venus".

In the middle: Titian. 1538 Uffizi Gallery, Florence. At the bottom: Giorgione. Venus is sleeping. 1510 Old Masters Gallery, Dresden.

Nude bodies in painting

Both before Manet and during the time of Manet, there were plenty of naked bodies on the canvases. At the same time, these works were perceived with great enthusiasm.

"Olympia" was shown to the public in 1865 at the Paris Salon (the most important exhibition in France). And 2 years before that, the painting by Alexander Cabanel “The Birth of Venus” was exhibited there.

Alexander Cabanel. Birth of Venus. 1864, Paris.

The work of Cabanel was received with enthusiasm by the public. The beautiful naked body of the goddess with a languid look and flowing hair on a 2-meter canvas is few who can be left indifferent. The painting was bought on the same day by Emperor Napoleon III.

Why did Olympia Manet and Venus Cabanel produce such different reactions from the public?

Manet lived and worked in the era of Puritan morals. Admiring the naked female body was extremely indecent. However, this was allowed if the depicted woman was as less real as possible.

Therefore, artists were so fond of depicting mythical women, such as the goddess Venus Cabanel. Or Oriental women, mysterious and inaccessible, such as Ingra's Odalisque.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Large odalisque. 1814 .

3 extra vertebrae and a sprained leg for the sake of beauty

It is clear that the models who posed for both Cabanel and Ingres, in reality, had more modest external data. Artists frankly embellished them.

At least that's evident with Ingres' Odalisque. The artist added 3 extra vertebrae to his heroine in order to stretch the camp and make the curve of the back more spectacular. Odalisque's arm is also unnaturally elongated to harmonize with the elongated back. In addition, the left leg is unnaturally twisted. In reality, it cannot lie at such an angle. Despite this, the image turned out to be harmonious, although very unrealistic.

Too frank realism of Olympia

Manet went against all the above rules. His Olympia is too realistic. Before Manet, perhaps, he only wrote like this. He portrayed his own, though pleasant in appearance, but clearly not a goddess.

Maha is a representative of one of the lowest classes in Spain. She, like Olympia Manet, looks at the viewer confidently and a little defiantly.

Francisco Goya. Maha naked. 1795-1800 .

Manet also depicted an earthly woman instead of a beautiful mythical goddess. Moreover, a prostitute who looks at the viewer with an appraising and confident look. Olympia's black maid holds a bouquet of flowers from one of her clients. This further emphasizes what our heroine does for a living.

The appearance of the model, called ugly by contemporaries, is in fact simply not embellished. This is the appearance of a real woman with its own shortcomings: the waist is barely distinguishable, the legs are a little short without the seductive steepness of the hips. The protruding belly is not hidden by thin thighs.

It was the realism of the social status and appearance of Olympia that so outraged the public.

Another Courtesan Manet

Manet has always been a pioneer, as he was in his time. He tried to find his own way in creativity. He strove to take the best from the work of other masters, but he never engaged in imitation, but created his own, authentic. Olympia is a prime example of this.

Manet and subsequently remained true to his principles, trying to depict modern life. So, in 1877 he paints the picture "Nana". Written in . On it, a woman of easy virtue powders her nose in front of a client waiting for her.

Edward Mane. Nana. 1877 Hamburg Kunsthalle Museum, Germany.

Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)

Metropolitan art lovers rejoice: April 19 at the State Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin presented one of the masterpieces of world art - the painting by the French impressionist Edouard Manet "Olympia". It will be possible to see the canvas, which has become a sensation in the world of painting, with your own eyes until June 17, but it is already easy to predict now: the line to the museum will be long and, perhaps, it will beat the legendary one in its length.

For those who will not be able to be in the museum these days, or for those who want to get acquainted with the cultural pearl in advance, the editors of the site have created a guide to Olympia. With its help, you will find out what details you should pay special attention to, and you will understand what offended the artist's contemporaries so much.

1865, May 1st, three o'clock in the afternoon, the Paris Salon is the most famous art exhibition in France, founded by Louis XIV. It was here that the beau monde gathered and discussed innovative art, most often unhurried and restrained. However, in 1865 the scenario changed dramatically. The public went on a rampage and demanded to immediately remove the picture of Edouard Manet "Olympia" from their eyes. "Pornography!" the ladies were horrified. “The brunette is disgustingly ugly, her skin is like that of a corpse”, “a female gorilla made of rubber”, “batignolles laundress”, “a sign for a booth in which they show a bearded woman”, “yellow-bellied odalisque”, critics echoed them from the newspaper pages .

The author was accused of immorality, licentiousness, immorality: on his canvas there is an absolutely naked woman on the sofa, in a cheeky pose, her hand is in a piquant place. As if calling and beckoning, and boldly, even brazenly. The crowd roared, calling for the destruction of "shame". The most courageous even rushed to the picture in the hope of breaking the "shame": the guards had to get their weapons to subdue the rabid moralists. Later, the painting was hung on the ceiling, and then Manet's inventive enemies tried to pierce it with sharp umbrellas, but, fortunately, failed.

The mood of fierce critics was instantly picked up by those who did not understand art at all, did not know the name of the master and hardly ever visited exhibitions at least once in their lives. The artist was humiliated and crushed. The worst thing is that the genius did not expect such a reaction in any way, she knocked him out of the rut, he abandoned painting for a while, went to Spain. A wall grew between him and the aesthetic beau monde: Manet seemed not to be seen, his works were rejected only because he was the author. However, the high-profile scandal in many ways helped the master become famous. People recognized and remembered his name, and among his fellow artists, he became an authority thanks not only to his talent, but also to his courage.

Titian, "Venus of Urbino" (1538)

The plot of Olympia, which embarrassed the French hypocrites, Edouard Manet borrowed in many respects from Titian, only transferred his "Venus of Urbino" to his reality. This became the main claim of critics, because previously a naked woman could only appear in canvases on mythological themes. The master loved freedom, and despised any creative fetters. With impudence unprecedented for those times, he drew a townswoman and undressed her.

Critics were outraged by the expression on the face of Manet's heroine. If the Titian Venus has it embarrassed, then here, on the contrary, Olympia looks straight, not hiding her eyes, which also became a challenge to generally accepted standards.

Now we are unlikely to be able to determine her belonging to a certain environment by the accessories of a resting lady, but then, just looking at the picture, the audience understood: the artist depicted a prostitute. Another slap in the face of a prim society.

A flower in her hair, a massive bracelet, a black lace with a white pearl around her neck, a certain style of slippers, a scarf with tassels - all these are attributes not of a respectable resident of Paris, but of a courtesan. Previously, painters never put anti-heroes at the center of their works.

Manet deliberately depicted Olympia as flat, deliberately lightened, non-voluminous, in defiance of existing artistic traditions. In fact, Olympia is a white spot on a dark background, contrasting with the rest of the figures. Moreover, she is skinny! And the then fashion associated female beauty exclusively with rounded shapes.

The right edge of the picture also attracts attention, where a black cat with a rearing tail is depicted. This is a kind of hello to the poet Charles Baudelaire, a friend of Manet. Baudelaire considered cats to be messengers of other realities, mysterious creatures, guardians of witchcraft magic. Also, of course, there is a resemblance to Titian's white dog: there is virtue, and here vice.

Sexual overtones are also obvious: a raised tail is a symbol of male flesh. Once upon a time, critics attributed another negative quality to the beast: in their opinion, the cat could stain a clean bed with its paws, and this is already unsanitary!

If you study the color of the picture, it is virtuoso. What is the bouquet in the hands of a black woman standing behind the heroine. If you take it out of the context of the picture, it becomes an independent masterpiece.

Later on, Manet will be said to have produced a "color spot revolution". Also, one cannot help but pay attention to the many shades of black, graceful transitions and chiaroscuro. The darkness of the background, the dark-skinned servant, as it were, pushes Olympia to the fore, creating the necessary contrast.

The artist did not set himself the goal of destroying the pillars of classical painting to the ground. He only wanted his compatriots to understand that art is not a historical concept at all. It lives next to us, both heroes and those who do not reach the high-profile title can become its participants. Each person is a creation of nature, and this fact a priori confirms that any of us is an object of art. The main thing is talent and the ability to see beauty.

The first artist to create his work based on the painting by Manet was Paul Cezan. His painting "Modern Olympia", like Manet's masterpiece, is on display at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, from where it will be brought to the capital.

Olympia by Edouard Manet brought to Moscow

Location: The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Volkhonka, 12

Let's start our conversation with a picture that recently came to Moscow and St. Petersburg, so many of us had the happy opportunity to see it live. This is Olympia by Edouard Manet: a large oil painting measuring 130 × 190 cm, it depicts a naked woman reclining on a bed facing us, in the company of a black maid with a huge bouquet of flowers in her hands and a small black cat. The naked woman looks straight at us with a confident look, the maid turned slightly to her, as if asking what she should do with such a magnificent bouquet, and the cat bristled, obviously unhappy that someone approached the bed.

Olympia was painted in 1863 and first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1865. At the Salon, she gave rise to a monstrous scandal, after which she returned to the artist’s studio, and only many years later, after Manet’s death, his friends bought Olympia from his widow and presented it to the French state, which for several decades did not dare to exhibit the painting. But today, Olympia hangs in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and is considered not just a masterpiece, but a turning point in the formation of modern painting.

Can this picture impress the modern viewer, who has seen all kinds of exhibitions - both feces, and sperm, and plasticized corpses - that artists of our days use as a medium? On its own, most likely not. But after all, she shouldn’t do this: Manet didn’t expect to impress us, but his contemporaries.

Will the methods of traditional art-knowledge help us to experience this picture more acutely? If we look into the professional catalog, we will find a set of firmly established facts about the creation, exposure and perception of Olympia. As a matter of fact, I have already stated this set of firmly established facts. It is undoubtedly very useful, but clearly insufficient for understanding the picture.

Another important tool of traditional art history is a formal analysis, or, more simply, an explanation of how a picture is made. To disassemble the composition or features of the artist's work with color and form, when we do not have the image itself in front of our eyes, is a rather meaningless matter, but I will still say a few words about this.

Art historians have repeatedly emphasized that Manet's manner of writing differed sharply from the academic school. Against the background of the most carefully painted paintings of salon artists, his picture seemed to be an unfinished sketch, which critics sometimes reproached him for. For a more complete perception of the picture, this is undoubtedly important to take into account. Moreover, we have the opportunity to experience, albeit not in such an acute form, the visual experience experienced by a contemporary of the Impressionists. The hanging of pictures in the Hermitage's General Staff Building helps with this. You come to the Impressionists after a large exhibition of paintings from the 19th century. Usually they run through it with an unseeing look. If we spend a couple of hours carefully examining academic canvases carefully written out in the smallest detail, we can achieve an almost physical sensation of changing optics. When we move into the halls of the Impressionists, the muscles of the lens that are responsible for focusing will relax, the mind, tired of attention to detail, will calm down, and the eyes, dry from stress, will again fill with moisture, and we will begin to unconsciously absorb the sensation of light and color. Of course, this renewal of our own spectator optics partly explains the stunning effect that the Olympia had on visitors to the Paris Salon.

But if we look at the critical reviews of contemporaries about this picture, we will understand that it was not only a matter of a new manner of writing. We know about 70 immediate and mostly emotional responses from critics and journalists. The incredibly sharp reaction of contemporaries to this picture was traditionally explained, firstly, by the fact that Manet depicted in the picture a courtesan, a cocotte, or, simply speaking, an expensive prostitute - moreover, this prostitute boldly looks defiantly into our eyes. Secondly, they say that Manet depicted the nakedness of a real woman, without embellishing her at all and without disguising her as an ancient nymph or Venus herself. Thirdly, they mention that Manet explicitly quoted Titian in his painting “Venus of Urbino”, thereby vulgarizing a great example of classical art.

However, a closer look at the history of modern European art, and in particular at the French art of the first half of the 19th century, that is, for the period that immediately preceded the appearance of Olympia, will not confirm these theses. Artists were not afraid to depict courtesans, and the most titled collectors willingly bought such images and exhibited them not in secret, but in quite front rooms. In particular, the heroine of Titian's Venus, which was written for the Duke of Urbino, was considered a courtesan until the end of the 20th century; the picture was even called “pornography for the elite”, but at the same time it was considered the pearl of the Uffizi Gallery, it was exhibited in the center of the so-called Tribune - the hall where the main masterpieces of the Medici collection were collected.

Francisco Goya. Nude swing. Spain, circa 1797-1800

Modern Manet critics have identified in Olympia an orientation not only to Titian's Venus of Urbino, but also to Goya. Goya's "Nude Maja" was written for the first minister of Spain, Manuel Godoy. Goya's Maja, like Manet's Olympia, did not contain any mythological attributes. Goya portrayed his contemporary - reclining, naked and looking straight into the eyes of the viewer. Goya's painting was often condemned for its frank sensuality, but the extraordinary skill of the artist was always recognized. Nobody admired Olympia.

If we look at the history of the Paris Salon, we will find that images of courtesans were exhibited there many times. For example, 15 years before Manet, Jean-Leon Gerome exhibited an impressive canvas under the modest title "Greek Interior", but in fact it depicted naked hetaerae who were waiting for a client in a Greek lupanaria Lupanar- "brothel" in Latin. The name comes from the word lupa- she-wolf..

Jean-Leon Gerome. Greek interior. France, 1848 Musée d'Orsay / Wikimedia Commons

Criticism threatened Jerome with a finger, but nothing like the Olympia scandal happened, and Jerome himself continued to pleasantly shock the public and from year to year exhibited more and more new images of naked concubines - whether in the slave market or in the harem.

The image of the odalisque concubine - not a priestess, but a slave of love - was very popular in France. On many canvases, the viewer’s gaze is boldly met by naked beauties who are spread out or bent in seductive poses. The beginning of the tradition was laid by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: in 1814 (commissioned, by the way, by Napoleon's sister Caroline Murat), he painted a painting called "The Great Odalisque".

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Large odalisque. France, 1814 Musee du Louvre / Wikimedia Commons

On this large canvas, the naked beauty was depicted from the back: she cast a defiant half-turn look at the viewer over her shoulder. The painting was exhibited at the Salon and drew criticism. However, the artist was criticized not for nudity, which was also not covered by mythological attributes, but for violation of anatomical proportions: three extra vertebrae were found in the odalisque. The picture seemed, therefore, not realistic enough.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Odalisque with a slave. France, 1839 Fogg Art Museum / Wikimedia Commons

In 1839, Ingres returned to the image of the odalisque and depicted a naked beauty in the company of a dressed slave playing the lute. Apparently, he wanted to contrast the sensuality of the naked body, which calls for the pleasures of the flesh, with the sublime enjoyment of music. A pair of a naked odalisque and a dressed slave with a lute in her hands may remind us of Pushkin's couple of passionate Zarema and pure Mary in the Fountain of Bakhchisarai.

The disciples and imitators of Ingres picked up this iconography, but slightly simplified its message: a naked concubine began to be depicted in the company of a dressed dark-skinned man or woman with a lute in her hands: it was just a game on the contrast of dark and white skin, a dressed and naked body, a man and women. And this obscured the original opposition between the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the spirit. In the paintings of the mid-19th century, this technique is used regularly: the nakedness and whiteness of the skin of the odalisque are effectively shaded by a dressed and dark-skinned figure.

Maria Fortuny. Odalisque. Spain, 1861Museu Nacional d "Art de Catalunya / Wikimedia Commons

Theodore Chasserio. Reclining odalisque. France, 1853 artnet.com

François Leon Benouville. Odalisque. France, 1844Musee des beaux-arts de Pau / Wikimedia Commons

It seems to me that Manet in "Olympia" cheerfully beat this iconographic tradition: the Negro servant holds not a lute, but a bouquet, but this bouquet resembles an inverted lute in shape.

Salon artists portrayed courtesans without oriental flair: for example, the interior of Alphonse Lecadre's painting of 1870, in which a naked woman languidly stretched out on a white fur cape, may well be the interior of a brothel.

Alphonse Lecadre. Reclining Nude. France, 1870 Sotheby's

At the Paris Salon of 1870, Lecadre exhibited a painting whose whereabouts are unknown today, but we can imagine it thanks to the admiring description of a French critic:

“How well the breasts are drawn out, we see their softness, traces of hugs left on them, traces of kisses; those breasts drooped, stretched out with pleasure. There is a tangible physicality in the forms of this girl, we feel the texture of her skin, conveyed by a powerful impasto ... "

To all these arguments, it can be objected that the images of naked women we mentioned endowed them with outstanding beauty - ideal classical or exotic romantic, but beauty, which cannot be said about Manet's Olympia. However, there were exceptions to this rule as well. I will quote the description of the painting by Fernand Humbert, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1869, that is, four years after Olympia. It depicted a reclining naked woman from North Africa. The critic wrote about her:

“The pose is the most bizarre, I agree, the head is undoubtedly terrible, and I am ready to admit, since you insist on it, that her body cannot be called seductive. But what an amazing drawing! With what richness of shades the change in skin tone is conveyed. And what is the modeling of the body - a tender belly, graceful hands, soft folds of dangling breasts. We feel how the flesh of this nude is drowning in exquisite red pillows. This is a true woman of the East - a soft and dangerous animal.

In 1863, that is, two years before the Olympia, Paul Baudry exhibited at the Salon a large oil painting, The Pearl and the Wave.

Pierre Baudry. Pearl and Wave. France, 1862 Museo Nacional del Prado / Wikimedia Commons

On it, in primordial nudity, the famous Parisian cocotte Blanche d'Antigny stretched out. The father of anarchism, the philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote indignantly about this painting:

“This is the embodiment of prostitution: Cupid's shameless blue eyes, a cheeky face, a voluptuous smile; it seems that she says, like walking tabloid girls: “If you want, handsome, let’s go, I’ll show you something.”

And yet this candid picture was bought by Emperor Napoleon III.

It is quite possible that Manet was not cunning when he said that he did not expect such a reaction to his Olympia at all: from the point of view of what could be depicted in the picture, he did nothing criminal. In addition, it was not in vain that the strict jury of the Salon allowed his painting to be exhibited. His contemporaries, with great pleasure, depicted or examined the images of naked priestesses or slaves of love, not only in mythological or oriental, but also in quite modern surroundings. These canvases could be painted both in a polished academic manner and in a free romantic one. The images of naked women did not always correspond to the ideals of classical beauty, their poses were quite frank, and their gazes directed at the viewer were not distinguished by modesty. Criticism could scold the artists for their lack of morality, or they could admire the bestial sensuality of the depicted woman.

But "Olympia" caused a completely different reaction. I will give a few examples. A certain Amedeus Cantalube called Olympia “a likeness of a female gorilla, a grotesque rubber figure with black contours, a monkey on a bed, completely naked, in the pose of Titian’s “Venus” with the same position of the left hand, the only difference is her brush, squeezed by something like a shameless convulsion."

Another critic, Viktor de Jankovic, wrote:

“The artist depicted, under the name of Olympia, a young woman lying on a bed; all her clothes are a ribbon in her hair and a hand instead of a fig leaf. On her face is the imprint of premature experience and vice, her body the color of decaying flesh recalls all the horrors of the mortuary.

The critic, writing under the pseudonym Ego, was no less severe:

“A courtesan with dirty hands and wrinkled legs lies dressed in a Turkish slipper and a red cockade in her hair; her body is a terrible corpse color, its contours are drawn in charcoal, green eyes, bloodshot, as if challenging the public under the protection of an ugly black woman.

Critics unanimously insisted that Olympia was dirty, her body did not know water, was soiled with coal, its contours were black, that she was soiled by a black cat that left marks on the bed. Her hand looks like an ugly toad, and - oh horror! - it lacks a finger, most likely lost due to a venereal disease.

The bitterness and outright injustice of these reviews (Olympia, by the way, has all five fingers in place) make us think that the causes of the conflict lie beyond aesthetics. It seems that the problem was not in what and how was depicted on the canvas by Manet, but in what this picture represented.

In order to reveal the content of representation, we must inevitably go beyond the traditional history of art and turn to the history of social relations. With regard to Olympia, the outstanding Anglo-American art critic T.J. Clark was the first to do this in his book “Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. Unfortunately, this outstanding book has not yet been translated into Russian, but its first chapter was included in an anthology of visual culture studies called The World of Images. Images of the World” - I prepared it at the European University in St. Petersburg, and it is about to be published. In fact, Clark's observations became the starting point for my reading of this picture.

Clark recalled that prostitution was an acute social problem, which was very actively discussed in France in the 1860s. Publicists and moralists complained that Paris had been taken over by an army of prostitutes; doctors warned about the danger of moral and physical infection, and writers and poets enthusiastically investigated the social type and psychology of a prostitute.

The surge in prostitution in Paris was the result of a large-scale restructuring of the city, which was started by Baron Haussmann: there were a lot of alien workers in the city who needed a female body. However, urbanization made social boundaries permeable and blurred traditional morality: not only workers willingly resorted to the services of prostitutes, but also respectable bourgeois, and brave officers, and - oh horror! - the color of the aristocracy. “Men play on the stock exchange, and women prostitute” - this is how French writers of the 1860s described their era.

Prostitution was legalized and regulated as much as possible. Prostitutes were officially divided into two categories: the so-called public girls (this is a literal translation of the official concept la fille publique) - they worked in brothels - and bi-let girls ( Fille en carte), that is, street prostitutes who, at their own peril and risk, looked for clients on the streets or waited for them in cafes. Both categories were required to register with the police and undergo regular mandatory medical examinations. However, the control system was not omnipotent: both small fish slipped away from it - women who worked occasionally as prostitutes, and large fish - the so-called kurti-zan-ki, or ladies of the half world: more attractive and successful, they sold themselves at a high price. and were not inferior in the luxury of clothing and lifestyle to secular ladies.

The fact that Olympia is not a public prostitute, and certainly not a street prostitute, is indicated by many details: this is an expensive silk shawl on which she so casually stretched out (and, by the way, she was pierced by a bristling black cat with sharp claws); this is a massive gold bracelet on her arm (and bracelets of this style were usually given as a keepsake and contained a miniature portrait, photograph, or strand of hair of the giver); it is a luxurious bouquet brought to her by a client who has just entered; an orchid or, as some researchers suggest, a camellia in her hair (this flower came into fashion after the Dumas son's novel The Lady of the Camellias; by the way, one of the heroines of this novel, a Parisian courtesan, was called Olympia).

The American researcher Phyllis Floyd saw in Olympia Manet a portrait resemblance to Marguerite Bellanger, a courtesan who became the mistress of Emperor Napoleon III: the same round face with a perky expression and a bold look, the same proportions of a miniature boyish body. According to Floyd, giving his Olympia a resemblance to the mistress of Napoleon III, Manet could count on success with a connoisseur of painting, who was initiated into the backstage life of the court, especially since the emperor’s connection with a former prostitute was infamous.

Marguerite Bellanger. Photographer André-Adolf-Eugene Disderi. Around 1870 Wikimedia Commons

But even if this is only a research hypothesis and the similarity of Olympia with the most famous kept woman of France of that time is exaggerated, the heroine Manet undoubtedly represented a woman who, in modern terms, has her own small business and is quite successful in it. The fact is that French law gave women very few economic rights. In 19th-century France, prostitution was one of the few ways a woman could officially earn money through self-employment rather than wage labor. A prostitute in Manet's France is a self-employed woman who trades in what cannot be taken away from her, namely her own body. In the case of Olympia, this is a woman who sells it quite successfully.

Let us recall one of the most characteristic details in the appearance of Olympia: this is a black velvet on the neck, which sharply separates her head and body. The large eyes of Olympia look at the client who has entered the room, in the role of which the viewer turns out to be approaching the picture, she looks at us with an evaluating and self-confident look. Her lying body is relaxed and would be fully accessible to our eyes, if the strong grip of the hand did not block access to that part of the body, for the use of which we still have to pay. The client evaluates Olympia, and Olympia evaluates the client, and judging by the position of the not-womanly strong hand, she has not yet decided whether they will agree on the price (recall how Olympia's hand scared the critics who called her "monstrous toad "). This was the key difference between Olympia and all the rest of the naked courtesans: submissive or perky, excited or tired of love, they invited the viewer to enter into an erotic game and forget about its business side.

Olympia made me remember that prostitution is a business with its own rules, in which each side has its own rights. Cold and frankly indifferent to sensual pleasures, Olympia completely disposed of her body, which means that, with mutual consent, she could gain power over both the client’s sexual desire and his money. Manet's painting made one think about the strength of the two pillars of the bourgeois ethos - honest business and love passion. Most likely, that is why Olympia so scared his contemporaries.

So, in order to understand the picture of Manet, we had to first of all look at it with the eyes of his contemporary and reconstruct the social circumstances that were reflected in its content. This is a new approach to the study of art, which is usually called the term "visual research" ( visual studies) or "visual culture studies" ( visual culture). Adherents of this approach believe that a full understanding of art is impossible in isolation from culture in the broadest, anthropological sense of the word, that is, culture as “a multi-component whole, which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, laws, and all other skills and customs that are acquired by a person in society ”- such a definition was given to her by the English anthropologist Edward Tylor back in the second half of the 19th century.

It would seem that the links between art and culture are something taken for granted, and not a single art critic would deny them. However, art history is a relatively young discipline, for a long time art historians occupied a modest place on the sidelines of the “big” historical science, and in order to strengthen its right to be called an independent discipline, at the beginning of the 20th century, art history began to try to isolate its object and derive specific laws. for the description and analysis of art. This meant, firstly, the separation of painting and sculpture from literature, theatre, music and dance; secondly, the demarcation between "high", folk and mass culture; and thirdly, the fact that art history broke all connection with philosophy, aesthetics and psychology.

As a result, the set of possible analytical approaches to a work of art was reduced to three. Firstly, it is a positivist reconstruction of the history of a work of art (by whom, when and under what circumstances it was created, bought, exhibited, and so on). The second approach is a formal analysis of the appearance of a work of art. The third is a description of its intellectual and emotional content: without this description, even in the most reduced form, both positivists and formalists rarely do. However, it is precisely in the case of this third approach that we begin to feel especially sharply the separation from the whole of culture: very often, when trying to describe the content of the picture, the history of culture, which we just solemnly put out the door , quietly returns through the window. If this does not happen, then knowledge about the history of culture is replaced by the personal cultural and emotional experience of the art historian himself - that is, he begins to talk about how he personally sees this work of art.

At the end of the twentieth century, it became fashionable to justify such a triumph of subjectivity from the standpoint of historical relativism. Since we will never know for sure what the artist wanted to say with his work; since we cannot believe his personal testimonies, since even they can be questioned; since we will never know how its contemporaries really reacted to a work of art, because even here we can doubt the length of their statement, then all that remains for us is to describe how we personally we see art, counting on the fact that it will be interesting and useful to our readers.

Supporters of an objective approach to history say that yes, we may never know how things really were, but nevertheless we can strive to establish this with the maximum degree of probability, and for this we must develop criteria for testing our hypotheses. One of the most important criteria for such verification is the relationship between a work of art and the culture that gave birth to it. In doing so, we get a double benefit: on the one hand, the study of a work of art in a historical context allows us to better understand this work itself; on the other hand, this understanding enriches our knowledge of the historical context as well.

With this approach to the history of art, it is seen as part of the visual culture of the era - and is connected with other types of art, and with popular culture, and with the whole set of knowledge, beliefs, beliefs, skills and practices that make up our vision of the world. It is this new approach that is presented in our course.

Sources

TJ Clark. View from Notre Dame Cathedral. The world of images. World images. An Anthology of Visual Culture Studies. Ed. Natalia Mazur. SPb., M., 2018.

Clark T.J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. New York, 1985 (latest edition: 2017).

Floyd Phylis A. The Puzzle of Olympia. Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. No. 3-4. 2012.

Reff T. Manet: Olympia. New York, 1977.

Decryption

Titian. Venus Urbinskaya. Italy, 1538 Galleria degli Uffizi / Wikimedia Commons

In the last lecture, we already mentioned Titian's Venus of Urbino: it was she who served as one of the models for Manet's Olympia. French criticism believed that Titian, unlike Manet, managed to portray the Venetian courtesan in her pristine nakedness, without going beyond the bounds of decency. True, representatives of the Anglo-Saxon Victorian culture had a different opinion and looked at the "Venus of Urbino" less condescendingly. For example, Mark Twain's "Venus of Urbino" pissed off no less than the French - "Olympia". Here is what he wrote about this picture in his travel notes “Walking in Europe”:

“... Here you enter [the Uffizi Gallery] and head to the small Tribune gallery - the most visited in the whole world - and you see on the wall the most sinful, most depraved, most indecent picture that the world knows - Titian's Venus. And it's not even that the goddess lay naked on the bed - no, it's all about the position of one of her hands. I imagine what a cry would rise up if I dared to describe her posture - and meanwhile Venus lies in this position in which her mother gave birth, and everyone who is not lazy can devour her eyes - and she has the right to lie like that, for this is a work of art, and art has its privileges. I watched the young girls sneaking glances at her; watched the young men in self-forgetfulness keep their eyes on her; I watched how weak old people cling to her with greedy excitement.<…>
There are many images of female nudity that do not cause impure thoughts in anyone. I know this very well, and this is not about them. I just want to emphasize that Titian's "Venus" does not belong to them. I think that it was written for bagnio[of the toilet room], but it seemed to the customers too fencey, and it was rejected. Such a picture will seem too overbearing anywhere, and it is appropriate only in a publicly accessible public gallery.

Mark Twain looked at Titian's painting through the eyes of an American viewer of the late 19th century, who, like fire, was afraid of any frank manifestations of sensuality and had no practical experience of interacting with classical art. It is known that European art dealers who sold old master paintings and sculpture to America in the early twentieth century were forced to cover up nudity in paintings and statues so as not to scare off the client.

Surprisingly, professional art historians, who talked about the "Venus of Urbino" in the last quarter of the twentieth century, did not go far from Mark Twain. Some of them called such paintings "pornography for the elite", and the women depicted in them - "banal pin-up girls pin-up girl- a girl from a poster (usually erotic content) pinned to the wall. who were looked upon as "mere sexual objects". This is a rather strong point of view, which is based on very poor argumentation. Its adherents refer primarily to the fact that the first buyer of this painting, the young Duke Guidobaldo della Rovere, the future Duke of Urbino, in 1538, in a letter to his agent, simply called this painting "La donna nuda", or "Naked Woman". However, this argument can be countered with an analogous and no less compelling one: the first historiographer of Italian Renaissance painting, Giorgio Vasari, author of the Lives of Famous Italian Artists, saw this picture 30 years after the letter from the Duke of Urbino in his own chambers in the Urbinsky Palace and wrote about her as "a young Venus with flowers and excellent fabrics around, very beautiful and well-made."

The second argument is the gesture of the left hand of Venus. There is a centuries-old tradition, dating back to the ancient statue of Venus by Praxiteles, to portray the goddess of love, who bashfully covers her bosom with her hand from the gaze of an immodest spectator. In art history, this pose is called the "gesture of the bashful Venus", or Venus pudica. But the fingers of Titian's Venus are not extended, like those of the bashful Venus, but half-bent. Mark Twain did not exaggerate anything: this Venus does not cover, but caresses herself.

An image of this kind from the point of view of a modern viewer is a clear obscenity. However, ideas about decency, firstly, change very much from era to era, and, secondly, are largely determined by the genre of the work of art.

The wonderful American researcher of Venetian painting, Rona Goffen, convincingly proved that the "Venus of Urbino" most likely belongs to the genre of the wedding portrait. A wedding portrait is a canvas that the groom ordered in order to commemorate the very fact of the wedding. This, in essence, is an analogue of a modern photo session, without which, as many believe, weddings can not be arranged. Visual fixation of such a significant event was practiced already in the Renaissance: rich and noble families ordered such canvases from the best artists of their time - they were hung in the houses of the newlyweds in the most prominent place and considered the erotic component to be quite decent and appropriate -noy, given the reason for which these paintings were created. To understand how our modern ideas about decency differ from Renaissance Italy, it is enough to compare a modern wedding photo session with what the artists of the 15th-16th centuries depicted in wedding portraits.

Botticelli. Venus and Mars. Italy, circa 1483

Around 1483, Botticelli painted a wedding portrait depicting Venus and Mars lying opposite each other. Venus is fully clothed, and the nakedness of the sleeping Mars is delicately draped. Nevertheless, the producers of posters and other reproductions of this picture, as a rule, reproduce only the image of the waking Venus, cutting off the right half, on which the sleeping Mars lies exhausted. The fact is that Mars, apparently, is sleeping, tired of their recent closeness, and the expression on Venus's face can be described with something like a phrase from a joke: "What about talking?" The fact that Botticelli and his contemporaries seemed to be a good joke, quite appropriate for a wedding portrait, makes us (or, in any case, poster makers) blush.

Giorgione. Sleeping Venus. Italy, around 1510 Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister / Wikimedia Commons

Around 1510, Giorgione depicted a naked sleeping Venus in a wedding portrait - this is the so-called Venus of Dresden. However, he died before he could finish this magnificent canvas, and Titian had to finish it. He added the landscape background of “Venus” by Giorgione and, apparently, it was from here that he borrowed both the pose of the recumbent Venus and the position of her left hand: the fingers of both Venuses are slightly bent and cover the bosom, and about both naked beauties we can say that they do not cover, and caress themselves. It is curious, however, that it is not customary to doubt the divinity of Venus Giorgione, and Venus Titian is considered a woman of reduced social responsibility.

Titian. Heavenly love and earthly love. Italy, around 1514 Galleria Borghese/Wikimedia Commons

In another wedding portrait by Titian “Heavenly Love and Earthly Love”, the same woman is depicted in two forms: earthly love sitting on the left is dressed in a white bridesmaid dress, in her right hand she holds a wedding bouquet of roses and myrtle, and with her left hand she holds a silver casket - in such caskets in the 16th century, Venetian brides received wedding gifts. On the right, the same beauty is depicted naked in the form of heavenly love: she looks at the dressed bride and raises a lamp to heaven, as if calling her (and herself) to eternal love, which is higher than earthly blessings. However, even in this picture there was a place for ambiguous jokes: earthly love and heavenly love sit at the two ends of an antique marble sarcophagus, which has been turned into a water reservoir. An iron tap is built into the sarcophagus next to the coat of arms of the groom, from which water flows. A charming winged baby - either putto, or Cupid himself - pushes water with his hand so that it flows faster from a protruding tap. This joke was all the more appropriate because the bride to whom the portrait was intended was getting married a second time; her first marriage was fruitless and ended in her husband's death. The sarcophagus is an obvious emblem of death, and the fountain is of life, but what does a protruding pipe from which water flows mean, the modern viewer understands as well as Titian's contemporary. Another ambiguous joke was the image of unusually large and well-fed rabbits grazing on the lawn for earthly love - most likely, it was a wish for a fruitful marriage.

Lorenzo Lotto. Venus and Cupid. Italy, 1520s

An even more 'picky' joke, in the words of Mark Twain, we will find in the wedding portrait by Lorenzo Lotto, which was also painted before the Venus of Urbino. In the painting by Lotto, a reclining naked Venus in a wedding crown and veil holds a wreath in her hand, and little Cupid looks at her with lust and either pisses or ejaculates so that the jet enters this wreath - this is such an emblem of a happy married life . Above the head of Venus hangs an unusually sensual shell - a symbol of the female vagina. Lotto's painting is a funny joke and at the same time a wish for a fruitful and happy marriage.

So, the ideas of what is decent to depict in a wedding portrait in the era of Titian were very different from what seems decent to us today. Wedding portraits had a place for what today we consider a very loose joke, if not vulgarity. True, it is important to clarify that in this case we were not talking about a portrait in the modern sense of the word: under no circumstances would a decent Venetian, and even more so a bride, pose naked for an artist (in such portraits she was replaced by the so-called corporal double).

And here we come to a curious division between who exactly is depicted in the picture, and what exactly it represents. We do not know anything about the personalities of the models of Titian and his contemporaries - it is likely that courtesans served as models for such paintings. However, even if the wedding portrait depicted a courtesan, the picture did not represent a woman living off adultery, but a happy and prolific marriage.

The interior of Titian's Venus of Urbino clearly speaks of this: his goddess is depicted against the backdrop of a rich home interior. The central place in it is occupied by a massive chest cassone: in Florence and Venice of the XV-XVI centuries, such chests - carved or painted - were always made in pairs by order of the groom or father of the bride, in order to put the dowry in them. Two maids - that's another sign of a rich house - put away in a chest cassone Venus dress. At the feet of the goddess, a small spaniel sleeps peacefully, which did not wake up at our approach: it means that not an uninvited guest entered the room, but the owner of the house.

Edward Mane. Olympia. France, 1863 Musée d'Orsay / Wikimedia Commons

Manet varied and played on this motif in his Olympia: he replaced the peacefully sleeping dog with a bristling black cat, which is not at all happy about the client who entered the room. Manet also played on the symbolic meaning of this motif: the dog in the portrait of a married woman is a stable symbol of marital fidelity, and “pussy” in French is one of the most common euphemisms for describing female genital organs.

Titian. Portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere. 1538 Galleria degli Uffizi / Wikimedia Commons

As for the dog "Venus of Urbino", it could well be a realistic portrait of a pet. Exactly the same spaniel sleeps on the table next to Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, mother of the young owner of the Venus of Urbino, and this Titian painted a portrait of her at the same time as Venus. It is extremely doubtful that Titian would paint the same domestic dog next to the mother of the duke and the corrupt courtisan-coy, knowing that these paintings would be located in the same castle.

Let's return to the gesture of Venus, which so outraged Mark Twain. If we go beyond the boundaries of art history and, following Rhona Goffin, use medical treatises of the 16th century to interpret this picture, we will find one curious circumstance. In medical treatises - from the ancient authority of Galen to the Padua professor of anatomy Gabriel Fallopio, whom we know as the discoverer of the fallopian tubes, women were directly or hinted at to arouse themselves in front of marital intimacy - in order to in order to better achieve conception. The fact is that in those days it was believed that there was not only male, but also female ejaculation, and conception occurs only if both the man and the woman reach an orgasm. Conception within the framework of legal matrimony was the only justification for carnal intimacy. Venus of Urbino behaves in the way that the wife of the owner of this painting, the Duke of Urbino, could behave in the ideas of that time, so that their marriage would soon bring happy offspring.

To understand the picture, it is important to know some of the circumstances of the marriage between Guidobaldo della Rovere and his very young wife Giulia Varano. This is a dynastic marriage: it was concluded when Guidobaldo was 20 years old, and Giulia - only 10. For dynastic marriages, such a difference in age was common, since it was assumed that the consummation of the marriage would occur no earlier than the bride reached puberty. The young bride lived under the same roof with her husband, but did not share the marriage bed with him until she became a woman. The features of the marriage between Guidobaldo and Giulia are consistent with the content of Titian's painting: the sensual image of a naked beauty, who joyfully awaits her husband in the matrimonial bedroom, could be a consolation for the duke and parting words for his bride.

Why did art critics for many years consider the "Venus of Urbino" to be an image of an unusually sensual courtesan, which was supposed to excite and delight the male customer? Their point of view is ahistorical: its supporters are sure that special efforts are not needed to understand a painting of this kind - the modern viewer (by default male), in their opinion, looks at this picture in the same way as Titian's contemporaries.

Proponents of a new understanding of art as part of culture and a new method of visual research (and Rona Goffin belongs to them, and TJ Clark, whom we spoke about in the previous lecture in connection with Manet's Olympia) proceed from the fact that our vision of images is mediated our life and cultural experience. We perceive pictures based on our own experience, and consciously or unconsciously build on the message that is embedded in the image, based on the culture in which we live. In order to see the picture as the artist and his public saw it, we must first of all reconstruct their experience of interacting with the images, and not expect that we will perceive the content of these images, based on our experience, absolutely correctly.

Now let's apply the same approach to a famous painting by a Russian artist. The picture of Ivan Kramskoy "Unknown" is very fond of being reproduced on posters, postcards and candy boxes. This is an image of a beautiful young woman who is riding in an open double carriage along Nevsky Prospekt. She is dressed expensively and to her face; from under a fashionable hat, large shiny black eyes look directly at us with an expressive “talking” look. What does this look say?

Ivan Kramskoy. Unknown. Russia, 1883 State Tretyakov Gallery / Wikimedia Commons

Our contemporaries usually admire the aristocracy of the depicted woman and believe that this look is full of inner dignity or even somewhat arrogant, they are looking for some tragic story about the destructive power of beauty behind the picture. But Kramskoy's contemporaries looked at the picture in a completely different way: it was obvious to them that aristocrats did not dress in the latest fashion (in high society, the pursuit of fashion was considered a sign of the nouveau riche). And even more so, aristocrats do not ride alone in an open double carriage along Nevsky Prospekt. Critic Stasov immediately recognized in this picture the image, as he said, "cocotte in a carriage."

It is quite significant that the wrong name was attached to the picture: instead of "Unknown", it is often called "The Stranger". Apparently, this error is based on an analogy with Blok's poem "The Stranger". But Blok's stranger is also a prostitute who waits for customers in a restaurant. The look of the heroine of Kramskoy is a look-invitation; a subtle artist-psychologist could well put into it both a shade of challenge and a shade of humiliated, but not disappeared dignity, but these psycho-logical overtones do not cancel the main task of the portrait: the realist artist represented a certain social type on it - this is a cocotte, not an aristocrat. The Alexandrinsky Theater in the background of the picture is perhaps another sign of the social context: unsuccessful actresses often became cocottes. The depiction of the theater could be an allusion to the theatricality with which we are trying to cover up the true nature of depravity.

Thus, relying on the universal understanding of paintings and neglecting the historical vision, we run the risk of mistaking the cocotte for an aristocrat, and the goddess, symbolizing a happy marriage, for pornography for the elite. To avoid such mistakes, you need to look at the paintings with the “eye of the era”: this concept and the method behind it were invented by the wonderful English art critic Michael Baxandall, which we will talk about in the next lecture.

Sources

Goffin R. Sexuality, space and social history in Titian's Venus of Urbino.

Mushamble R. Orgasm, or Love Joys in the West. A history of pleasure from the 16th century to the present day. Ed. N. Mazur. M., 2009.

Arasse D. On n'y voit rien. Paris, 2000.

Titian's Venus of Urbino. Ed. R. Goffen. Cambridge; New York, 1997.

Decryption

Antonello da Messina. Annunziata. Around 1476 Galleria Regionale della Sicilia, Palermo / Wikimedia Commons

I can’t remember where I first saw a reproduction of the Annunziata by Antonello da Messina: in Russia this painting is not very famous, although in Italy it is put on a par with the Mona Lisa, and sometimes even higher. It seems that at first she did not make a special impression on me, but then she began to be remembered so insistently that I decided to look at her live anyway. It turned out to be not so easy: the painting is stored in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, and this, with all my love for Sicily, is not the most affectionate city for tourists. I got to Palermo at the end of the summer, but it was still very hot. I've lost my way several times, wading between mopeds parked across the sidewalk and clothes dryers lined up on the street. In the end, one of the venerable matrons, who sat on white plastic chairs right in front of the doors of their houses, had to call for help, and she, having mercy on turisti stupidi, sent one of the tanned children running around her to show me the way. And then I finally got into the shady inner courtyard of a Gothic palazzo with the finest marble columns of loggias, went up to the second floor and in one of the far rooms I saw a small (only 45 × 35 cm) picture covered with bulletproof glass.

"Annunziata" stands on a separate pedestal slightly diagonally to the wall and to the window on the left. This arrangement echoes the composition of the painting itself. This is a chest-length image of a young girl, almost a girl, who is sitting at a table facing us. The lower border of the picture is formed by a wooden hundred-top, located slightly at an angle to the plane of the picture. On the table-top on the pu-pit-re lies an open book, the pages of which are lifted from nowhere by a gust of draft. From left to right, a bright light falls on her figure and on the book, contrasting them against a dark background without the slightest detail. The head, shoulders and chest of the girl are covered with a bright blue kerchief, the rigid folds of which turn her body into a kind of truncated cone. The plat goes down low on the forehead, completely covers the hair and leaves only the face, part of the neck and arms open. These are beautifully shaped hands, but the fingertips and nail sockets are slightly darkened from homework. The girl's left hand holds the kerchief on her chest, and the right one fluttered towards us, as if breaking out of the plane of the picture.

In the face of the girl there is neither the angelic charm of the Madonnas of Perugino, nor the ideal beauty of the Madonnas of Raphael and Leonardo, this is an ordinary face with a faint southern flavor: I just saw such faces on the streets of Palermo, and one of the girls I met on the street for sure called Annunziata, Nunzia or Nunziatina - a name that literally means "received the good news", and is common today in southern Italy. The face of the girl in the picture is unusual in its expression: it is pale with the pallor of deep excitement, the lips are tightly compressed, the dark eyes look to the right and slightly down, but their gaze is slightly defocused, as happens with a person who is completely immersed in himself.

The impression of the original "Annunziata" was even stronger than I expected, but the feeling of misunderstanding became more acute. The pleasure of pure contemplation of the picture was clearly not enough for me: it seemed to me that the picture insistently speaks to the viewer, but its language is incomprehensible to me. I grabbed the Italian annotated catalog of Antonello da Messina and learned from it a lot of curious things about the history of perception of this painting by art historians. It turned out that in the 19th century, a weak copy of this painting, stored in Venice, was considered the original, and the Palermitan original, on the contrary, was considered a copy. By the beginning of the 20th century, this hypothesis was forgotten at once, realizing its obvious absurdity, but another one was put forward instead: the Palermitan "Annunziata" was considered as a preparatory stage for another version of the same composition, which is now stored in Munich, since the supposedly rigid geometrism of the Palermitan Madonna was characteristic of a novice artist, and after a stay in Venice, da Messina overcame him.

Antonello da Messina. Annunziata. 1473 Version held in Munich. Alte Pinakothek/Wikimedia Commons

It took the authority of Roberto Longhi, an art critic famous for his ability to recognize the hand of a master, to reject this absurd hypothesis as well. Today, no one doubts that the Munich Annunziata, indeed marked by the clear influence of the Venetian school, is much weaker than the absolutely original Palermitan.

In addition, I learned with some amazement that a number of well-known art-Vedas believed that since the Archangel Gabriel was not in the picture, this could not be an image of the Madonna at the time of the Annunciation. They believed that this was not the Mother of God, but some kind of saint from Messina. Here my confidence in the learned catalog was exhausted, and I decided that it was better to live in ignorance than armed with this kind of scholarship.

My suffering ended when a book finally fell into my hands, in which there was not a word about the “Annunziata” by Antonello da Messina, but thanks to it I looked at all the painting of the Italian Renaissance with a new look. It was Michael Baxandall's painting and experience in 15th-century Italy: an introduction to the social history of pictorial style, first published in 1972. It was from her that the rise of interest in the study of visual culture began. Today, this book has become what the author wanted to see it - an introduction to the history of art for any aspiring art critic or cultural historian, but it took a couple of decades to be recognized even in Western science, and in Russia its translation is only being prepared. to print.

Baxandall named his method of image analysis period eye, or "view of the era". Creating this method, he relied on other art historians, primarily on the idea of ​​art as an integral part of culture in a broad anthropological sense, which was developed by the school of Abi Warburg (Baksandall himself belonged to it). Closely associated with this school, Erwin Panofsky argued that the style of art and the style of thinking of a certain era are interconnected: Gothic architecture and scholastic philosophy are products of one era and one style of thinking. However, Panofsky could not or did not want to show what caused the connection between them.

Anthropologists came to the aid of art historians: the American anthropologist Melville Herskovitz and his colleagues argued that our visual experience does not arise from direct contact with reality, but is formed by a system of indirect inferences. For example, a person living in a "carpenter's world", that is, in a culture where things are mostly created with a saw and an ax, gets used to treating sharp and obtuse angles perceived by our retina as derivatives of rectangular objects. (on this, among other things, the conventionality of pictorial perspective is based). A person who grew up in a culture where there is no saw or ax, and hence there are much fewer rectangular objects, perceives the world differently and, in particular, does not understand the conventions of pictorial perspective.

Baxandall has complicated this approach. For anthropologists, a person living in the “carpenter's world” is a passive object of environmental influence; his visual habits are formed unconsciously and against his will. The Baksandall spectator lives in a society in which his visual perception skills are formed; some of them he learns passively, and some he masters actively and consciously, in order to use these skills later in a whole range of social practices.

Visual skills, as Baksan-dall showed, are formed under the influence of social and cultural experience. We are better at distinguishing shades of color if they have special names, and we have experience in distinguishing them: if you ever had to buy white paint for repairs, you will much better feel the difference between lacquer white and matte white. An Italian of the 15th century felt even more acutely the difference between shades of blue. Then blue was obtained through the use of two different dyes - ultra-marine and German blue. Ultramarine was the most expensive paint after gold and silver. It was made from crushed lapis lazuli, which was delivered at great risk from the Levant. The powder was soaked several times, and the first infusion - rich blue with a lilac tint - was the best and most expensive. German blue was made from a simple copper carbonate, it was a color that was far from being so beautiful and, even worse, unstable. The first and most saturated infusion of ultramarine was used to depict especially valuable elements of the picture: in particular, it went on the clothes of the Virgin.

When I read these pages of Baxandall's book, I understood why the woman in the painting by Anto-nello da Messina could not be a Saint of Messina: the intense blue color of her veil told the Quattro Cento man in no uncertain terms that only the Mother of God was worthy of wearing it. . The contrast between the hands of the Virgin Mary, darkened from work, and the literally precious board created an additional semantic nuance.

The regular geometric shape of a truncated cone, which the rigid folds of the board give to the body of the Virgin, was often found in Quattro Cento painting. Baxandall explained it this way: the eye of a Quattrocento man who went through elementary school (and, say, in the Republic of Florence, all boys aged six to eleven received primary education), was trained by many years of exercises that developed in him the ability to divide in mind complex bodies into simple ones - like a cone, a cylinder or a parallel-lele-piped - to make it easier to calculate their volume. Without this skill, it was impossible to live in a world where goods were not packed in standard containers, but their volume (and, therefore, price) was determined by eye. The standard task for a 15th century arithmetic textbook was to calculate the amount of fabric required to sew a cloak or tent, that is, a truncated cone.

Of course, this does not mean that the artist invited his viewers to count in his mind the amount of fabric that went into the veil of the Virgin. He relied on the habit formed in the mind of his contemporary to perceive the forms depicted on the plane as three-dimensional bodies. The shape of the cone and the slightly diagonal position of the body of the Virgin Mary in relation to the plane of the picture create the effect of a volume rotating in space, which the Italian of the 15th century most likely felt more strongly than we do.

Another very important difference between us and the quattrocento is related to different experiences of biblical events. For us, the Annunciation is one event: the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel with the good news to the Virgin Mary, so we habitually look for the figure of the archangel in the image of the Annunciation, and without it, a miracle is not a miracle for us. A man of the 15th century, thanks to the explanations of learned theologians, perceived the miracle of the Annunciation as an extended drama in three acts: an angelic mission, an angelic greeting and an angelic conversation. The preacher in the church, where a respectable parishioner went regularly, explained to him the content of each stage: how the Archangel Gabriel was sent with the good news, how he greeted the Virgin Mary and what she answered him. The subject for numerous images of the miracle of the Annunciation in paintings and frescoes was the third stage - the angelic conversation.

During the angelic conversation, the Virgin Mary experienced five psychological states, each of which was described in detail and analyzed in the sermons for the feast of the Annunciation. During his life, any respectable Italian of the 15th century had to listen to several dozen such sermons, which, as a rule, were accompanied by indications of the corresponding images. The artists relied on the reasoning of the preachers, and the preachers pointed out during the sermon to their paintings and frescoes, as today the lecturer accompanies his lecture with slides. For us, all Renaissance images of the Annunciation look more or less the same, and the parishioner of the 15th-16th centuries took special pleasure in distinguishing psychological nuances in the depiction of the drama experienced by the Virgin Mary.

Each of the five states of the Virgin Mary was traced back to a description from the Gospel of Luke - these were excitement, reflection, questioning, humility and dignity.

The Evangelist wrote that, having heard the greeting of the angel (“Rejoice, Blessed One! The Lord is with you; blessed are you among women”), the Mother of God was embarrassed. It is easiest for an artist to depict the confusion of the soul with an impulse of the whole body.

Filippo Lippi. Annunciation. Around 1440Basilica di San Lorenzo / Wikimedia Commons

Sandro Botticelli. Annunciation. 1489Galleria degli Uffizi / Wikimedia Commons

About such paintings, Leonardo da Vinci indignantly wrote:

“The other day I saw an angel who, it seemed, intended with his annunciation to drive the Mother of God out of her room by means of movements expressing such an insult that can only be inflicted on the most despicable enemy; and the Mother of God seemed to want to throw herself out of the window in despair. Let this be remembered by you so that you do not fall into the same mistakes.

Despite such warnings, the artists willingly allowed themselves a little mischief in depicting the first stage of the angelic conversation. For example, Lorenzo Lotto depicted the Virgin Mary and her cat fleeing from the archangel in horror.

Lorenzo Lotto. Annunciation. Around 1534 Villa Colloredo Mels / Wikimedia Commons

And in Titian, the Virgin Mary brushes off the archangel with her hand, as if telling him: “Fly, fly away from here.”

Titian. Annunciation. 1559-1564 years San Salvador, Venice / Wikimedia Commons

The second state of the Virgin Mary - meditation - the Evangelist Luke described as follows: she "... pondered what kind of greeting it would be" (Luke 1:29). The archangel told her: “... You have found grace from God; and behold, thou shalt conceive in the womb, and thou shalt bear a Son, and thou shalt call His name: Jesus” (Luke 1:30-31), whereupon Mary asked him: “How will it be when I do not know a husband?” (Luke 1:34). And this was the third state of angelic conversation, called questioning. It is not easy to distinguish between the second and third states in the images of the Annunciation, since meditation and questioning were indicated by a very similar gesture of a raised brush: here you see several images of the second and third stages of the Annunciation - try to guess which one.

Fra Carnevale. Annunciation. Around 1448National Gallery of Art, Washington

Alessio Baldovinetti. Annunciation. 1447Galleria degli Uffizi / Wikimedia Commons

Andrea del Sarto. Annunciation. 1513–1514Palazzo Pitti / Wikimedia Commons

Hendrik Goltzius. Annunciation. 1594The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fourth state of the Virgin Mary, called humility, is a touching moment of her acceptance of her fate: she resigned herself to her with the words “Behold, the Servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). The image of this state is very easy to distinguish: as a rule, the Virgin Mary folded her arms on her chest in a cross and bowed her head. There were artists who specialized in depicting this particular stage, for example, Fra Beato Angelico. See how he could vary the same theme.

Fra Beato Angelico. Annunciation. Around 1426Museo Nacional del Prado / Wikimedia Commons

Fra Beato Angelico. Annunciation. Fresco. 1440–1443

Fra Beato Angelico. Annunciation. Fresco. 1438–1440Basilica di San Marco, Firenze / Wikimedia Commons

The fifth (and last) state was the most difficult to depict: it came after the angel left the Virgin Mary, and she felt that she had conceived Christ. That is, at the last and decisive stage of the miracle of the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary should have been depicted in solitude and conveyed her state at the moment of the conception of the God-man. Agree, this is a difficult task. Sometimes it was solved very simply - depicting golden rays of light directed into the bosom of the Virgin Mary or to her right ear, since some theologians then claimed that the conception of Christ occurred through the ear. This is how the last stage of the Annunciation was depicted, for example, by Carlo Crivelli.

Carlo Crivelli. Annunciation. 1482 Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie / Wikimedia Commons

In the painting by Antonello da Messina, the Mother of God is flooded with a powerful stream of light from the left. At some point, this seemed not enough, and Annunziata added a golden halo, which, fortunately, was removed during the last restoration.

Now we understand better the amazing expression on Annunziata's face - pallor, excitement, self-absorption, tightly compressed lips: it seems that, simultaneously with the happiness of conception, she foresaw the torment through which her son would go through. And the trace of the archangel, which art historians so lacked, is on the picture: most likely, it was he, flying away, who created that gust of wind that turned the pages of the book on the music stand.

Let's say a few words about the appearance of the Virgin Mary. The appearance of her son, Christ, was more or less firmly defined. First of all, there were several precious relics like Veronica's board - the so-called vera icona(the board that Saint Veronica gave to Christ going to Golgotha ​​so that he could wipe off sweat and blood - his features were miraculously imprinted on this board). In addition, during the Renaissance, a Greek forgery was highly trusted - a description of the appearance of Christ in the report of the never-existing governor of Judea, Publius Lentulus, to the Roman Senate.

The appearance of the Virgin Mary, despite the existence of several icons allegedly painted from her by St. Luke, was the subject of heated debate. The hottest debate was whether she was white-skinned or swarthy. Some theologians and preachers argued that, since only that appearance can be called perfect, in which the features of all human types were combined, the Virgin Mary could not be either a blonde, or a brunette, or a redhead, but combined all three shades - hence the dark golden hair of many Madonnas. But there were many who believed that the Virgin Mary had dark brown hair - for three reasons: firstly, she was Jewish, and the Jews are dark-haired; secondly, on the icons of St. Luke, her hair is dark brown; and thirdly, Christ's hair was dark, therefore, his mother, most likely, was dark-haired. Antonello da Messina refused to take any side in these disputes: his Annunziata's hair is completely covered by a blue kerchief. No extra thought should distract us from the expression of her face and hands.

You can talk about the language of her hands for a very long time. The left hand, squeezing the boards on the chest, can speak of traces of excitement and reflection, and of a aching feeling in the chest. It is even more difficult to interpret the gesture of the right hand that fluttered towards us, but we can try to guess what served as a model for it.

By this time, a stable type of image of the blessing Christ, the so-called Salvator Mundi- The savior of the world. These are small chest portraits, in which the main emphasis is on the expression of Christ's face and on the gesture of his two hands: the left one is pressed to the chest or holds on to the edge of the frame, creating the strongest effect of presence, and the right one is raised up in a gesture of blessing.

Antonello da Messina. Blessing Christ. 1465–1475National Gallery, London / Wikimedia Commons

Hans Memling. Christ in the crown of thorns. Around 1470Palazzo Bianco/Wikimedia Commons

Hans Memling. Christ blessing. 1478Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Wikimedia Commons

Sandro Botticelli. Resurrected Christ. Around 1480 Detroit Institute of Art

If we compare the gestures of Christ and Annunziata in the paintings of Antonello da Messina, we will see a certain similarity between them, but not a coincidence. It can be carefully assumed that in this similarity-dissimilarity there is an echo of the reasoning of Catholic theologians about the similarity, but not the coincidence of the nature of the immaculate conception of Christ and the Virgin Mary, as well as about the similarity and difference of their ascension to heaven. Yes, Messina was a native of Sicily, where Byzantine influence was always strong, and after the fall of Constantinople in the second half of the 15th century, many Orthodox Greeks settled. The Orthodox Church looks at the nature of the Virgin Mary differently than the Catholic Church, which a native of Quattrocento Italy could not have been unaware of. It is impossible to deduce from the Annunziata exactly how da Messina and his client viewed these disagreements, but the similarity of the bust image format itself Salvator Mundi and the Annunziata are quite obvious, and the gestures of their hands are quite similar, although not identical: it can be assumed that behind this unique artistic decision there is a sense of the importance of the question of the divine nature of the Virgin Mary.

A legitimate doubt may arise: am I overcomplicating such a small portrait-type image by loading it with narrative content? I think no. And here I will refer to the work of another eminent art critic, Sixten Ringbom, who was friends with Baxandall and influenced him. Unfortunately, the works of this remarkable Finnish art critic, who wrote in English, are almost unknown to us, and yet his influence on the renewal of art criticism was very profound.

Ringbaum found that a certain type of pictorial composition became very popular in the 15th century, which he aptly called dramatic close-up ( dramatic close-up). This is a half-length or chest image of Christ or the Virgin alone or accompanied by several figures, which, as it were, are snatched from a larger composition. Such images combine the functions of an image-icon and a narrative (that is, an image that tells a certain story).

Andrea Mantegna. Bringing to the temple. 1465–1466Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin / Wikimedia Commons

Albrecht Durer. Christ among the scribes. 1506Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza / Wikimedia Commons

Giovanni Bellini. Pieta. 1467–1470Pinacoteca di Brera / Wikimedia Commons

The rapid growth in the popularity of such images in the 15th century was associated with the development of new forms of individual piety. Simplifying somewhat, Ringbom's conjecture can be stated as follows. At the end of the 14th and in the 15th century, the practice of indulgences arose and spread, which were given for reading a certain number of prayers in front of a certain image. Among such images belonged the blessing Christ ( Salvator Mundi) and some types of images of the Virgin - for example, the Madonna of the rosary. In order to read such prayers many times every day, it was better to have these images at home. Rich people ordered paintings of a size that could be hung in the bedroom or taken with them on a trip, while the poor were content with cheap woodcuts.

At the same time, the practice of empathic meditation on the main events of the life of Christ began to spread: believers spent whole hours getting used to the events of the Gospels. For this, visual stimuli were useful to them: another argument for acquiring a painting or woodcut. Half-height images were cheaper and at the same time made it possible to achieve a stronger psychological effect: a close-up made it possible to consider all the physiognomic details and catch the psychological state of the characters, and this was necessary in order to achieve a state of tenderness and experience spiritual purification - this was the main goal of religious meditation.

The small format and close-up of the "Annunziata" by Antonello da Messina is explained by the fact that it was an image intended for home use. The artist knew that the owner (or owners) of this painting would spend many hours in front of it, and he applied all his skill to ensure that his painting endlessly spoke to their mind and heart. Perhaps we will never be able to experience the emotional and intellectual experience of interacting with the "Annunziata" of a contemporary of Antonello da Messina. But, using the observations of Baksandall and Ringbom, we can at least partly understand it. And it is a great pleasure and a great joy.

Sources

Baksandall M. Painting and experience in 15th-century Italy: an introduction to the social history of pictorial style. Per. from English. Natalia Mazur, Anastasia Forsilova. M., in print.

Mazur N. About Sixten Ringbom. World of images, images of the world. An Anthology of Visual Culture Studies. M., 2018.

Ringbom S. Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth Century Devotional Painting. Abo, 1965.

Antonello da Messina. L'opera completa. A cura di M. Lucco. Milano, 2006.

Decryption

Edgar Degas. Little dancer at the age of 14. 1881 Bronze copy of 1919-1921. The Clark Art Institute

At the Paris Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, Edgar Degas exhibited a sculpture entitled "Little Dancer at the age of 14". If you have ever seen her - in reality or in a photograph - you are unlikely to forget her. It is impossible to take your eyes off the little dancer, but at the same time you are haunted by the feeling that, looking at her, you are doing something wrong. Degas achieved this effect in a variety of ways. First, he used materials for this sculpture more appropriate in a wax museum than in an art exhibition: he made it from wax, painted it in the color of human flesh, dressed in a real corset and tutu, and put a wig of human hair on his head. Unfortunately, the wax original was found to be too fragile, and although miraculously preserved, it is not on display. However, after the death of Degas, the heirs commissioned 28 bronze copies, which today can be seen in many museums. However, although these bronze sculptures are dressed in real ballet tutus, they are still not able to convey the life-like effect that Degas achieved using colored wax and real hair. Moreover, to exhibit the sculpture, he ordered a special glass showcase, in which not works of art were usually displayed, but anatomical preparations.

The face and body of the little dancer have nothing in common with the canons of classical beauty, which have been preserved for the longest time in sculpture. She has a sloping forehead, too small chin, too high cheekbones, disproportionately long arms, thin legs and flat feet. Critics immediately dubbed her "monkey" and "rat". Remember how Manet's Olympia, which we talked about in the first lecture, was called by the same Parisian critics a gorilla? Manet did not count on such a comparison at all and was wounded by it, but Degas received exactly the response that he sought. What did he want to say with his sculpture?

To answer this question, we need to remember the long tradition of interpreting a person's character based on his resemblance to this or that animal. This tradition was first described by the Lithuanian-French art historian Jurgis Baltrušaitis, who aptly called it zoophysiognomy, and we will follow him in this name.

The desire to look for similarities with one or another animal in the appearance and character of a person dates back to ancient times - most likely, to the times of the cults of totem animals. In Antiquity, the first attempt was made to put these observations in the form of science. Ancient physiognomists argued as follows: animals do not pretend, the habits of some of them are well known to us; a person is secretive, and it is not easy to recognize the secret traits of his character, but his resemblance to this or that animal allows you to penetrate his soul. I am quoting a treatise that has long been attributed to Aristotle himself:

“Bulls are slow and lazy. They have a broad nose tip and large eyes; slow and lazy people with a wide tip of the nose and big eyes. Lions are generous, they have a round and flattened tip of the nose, relatively deep-set eyes; magnanimous are those who have the same facial features.”

And here is another example from the treatise of Adamantius:

“The owners of small jaws are treacherous and cruel. Snakes have small jaws and have these same vices. A disproportionately large mouth is inherent in people who are gluttonous, cruel, insane and impious. That's the way dogs are grazing."

Zoophysiognomy made the usual path for ancient science from West to East, and then back - from East to West. When the so-called dark ages began in Europe, ancient physiognomic treatises were translated into Arabic. In Islamic culture, ancient physiognomy met with its own tradition, which was closely connected with astrology and palmistry, and then returned to Europe in the form of a synthesis in translations from Arabic into Latin at the end of the 13th century. . As a result, simple observations of the habits of people and animals turned into a doctrine of the relationship of temperaments with the signs of the zodiac: people are born under the signs of the stars, which determine their character and appearance; four human temperaments correspond to the four elements, four seasons and four animals: the nature of the phlegmatic is close to water, spring and the lamb, the nature of the choleric is close to fire, summer and the lion, the nature of the sanguine-ni-ka is close to air, autumn and the monkey , the nature of the melancholy face - the earth, winter and the pig.

But the repertoire of Renaissance zoophysiognomy was much wider: it was believed that all the characters of animals were reflected in man, because man is a microcosm that repeats the structure of the macrocosm. For Renaissance art, knowledge of zoophysiognomy is a necessary part of the view of the era, which we talked about in past lectures. For example, the Italian sculptor Donatello used the zoophysiognomic code when creating a monument to the famous condottiere Erasmo da Narni, based on the nickname Gattamelata. A monument to him was erected in the square in front of the cathedral in Padua.

Donatello. Equestrian statue of the condottiere Erasmus da Narni, nicknamed Gattamelata (detail). Padua, 1443-1453 Wikimedia Commons

Donatello gave the condottiere's head a distinct resemblance to a predator from the cat family. Judging by the nickname of this condottiere ( gatta in Italian yang - "cat", and melata means "spotted" among other things), it can be assumed that in life he looked like a leopard, or at least a cat. A wide and sloping forehead, widely spaced eyes, a flat face with a small and tightly compressed mouth and a small chin - all these cat features can be attributed to the true appearance of the condottiere, but Donatello strengthened this similarity with a habit: he gave the head of the statue a characteristic the inclination of the head and the dispassionately concentrated expression of the cat's eyes.

Donatello's example was followed by Andrea Verrocchio, who created a statue of another condottiere, Bartolomeo Colleoni. Its original adorns the square in front of the Zanipolo Cathedral in Venice, and a full-size copy stands in the Italian Courtyard of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where the face of the condottiere can be perfectly seen from the gallery.

Andrea Verrocchio. Equestrian statue of the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni (detail). Venice, 1480s Wikimedia Commons

The impression that the statue makes on an unprepared modern viewer was very well manifested in Anton Nosik's post "A kind word about the Bronze Horseman." Looking into the face of the statue, Nosik confessed:

“... this acquaintance, frankly, does not leave a pleasant impression. Looking at the metal face of an elderly warrior, it is difficult to get rid of the first impression that in life we ​​would hardly want to make friendship or acquaintance with this arrogant and cruel old man.

After that, Nosik wrote a long and passionate post, in which he cited many facts from Colleoni's biography to prove that in life he was brave, generous and moderately cruel. But a man of the Renaissance had only one glance at the head of the monument, to which the sculptor gave a distinct resemblance to an eagle, in order to understand the true character of the condottiere, knowing absolutely nothing about his biography. Renaissance treatises on zoophysio-gnomics taught him: "The owner of an aquiline nose is magnanimous, cruel and predatory, like an eagle." This is exactly the conclusion that Nosik himself came to.

It is characteristic that Verrocchio, like Donatello, not only used Colleoni's resemblance to an eagle (and a large hooked nose, judging by other images, was a hallmark of the condottiere), but also enhanced this resemblance with the help of a characteristic bird-like turn of the head and a keen gaze wide open eyes.

A more difficult task had to be solved by Benvenuto Cellini when creating a bronze bust of Cosimo Medici, to which he tried to give the resemblance to a lion. Since there was a bit of a lion in the appearance of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the sculptor gave a hint to his viewers by depicting two lion muzzles on the Medici armor. But in the proud landing of the head and the turn of the shoulders, he still managed to achieve the formidable imposingness of the king of beasts.

Benvenuto Cellini. Bust of Cosimo de' Medici. 1548 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Wikimedia Commons

The equestrian statue or bust of the ruler is a work of art intended for the general public, so the signs of character in them are unambiguous. The artist could allow great subtlety in a private portrait: surely many will easily remember Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine”, where the expression of the intelligent and attentive face of the beautiful Cecilia Gallerani and the muzzle of the animal she holds in her hands are surprisingly similar.

Leonardo da Vinci. Lady with an ermine. Around 1490 Muzeum Czartoryskich w Krakowie / Wikimedia Commons

Leonardo recorded here not so much the deep and unchanging traits of character as mobile emotions. He was very interested in the similarities in the expression of emotions in humans and animals. His drawings of three heads with an expression of rage have been preserved - a horse, a lion and a man; they are really remarkably similar.

Leonardo da Vinci. Sketches for the Battle of Anghiari. Around 1505 Royal Collection Trust / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018

The experiments of artists with the zoophysiognomic code were of a disparate nature until the first illustrated treatise entitled “Human Physiognomy” by the Italian Giambattista della Porta was printed in Naples in 1586. This treatise was an immediate and resounding success: it was translated into other European languages ​​and went through dozens of editions throughout the 17th century. Della Porta laid out the basic principle of zoophysiognomy in the form of a syllogism. Big premise: each kind of animal has its own figure, corresponding to its properties and passions. The minor premise is that the constituents of these figures are also found in man. Conclusion: a person endowed with an external resemblance to the beast will be similar to him and character.

Della Porta not only illustrated his work with parallel images of people and animals, he drew on historical material - portraits and busts of historical characters, about whose characters it is customary to think that they are well known to us. So, he compared Plato with a dog, and Socrates with a deer. From the dog, Plato has a high and sensitive nose, as well as a wide and forward-looking forehead, which indicates natural common sense. The flattened nose of a deer betrays the voluptuousness of Socrates - and so on. A nose with a beak, according to della Porta, could speak of different inclinations depending on which bird the resemblance is observed with: a crow or quail nose speaks of shamelessness, a cock's nose of voluptuousness, an eagle's nose of generosity. Signs of character are not only appearance, but also habits: if a person keeps his back straight, walks with his head held high and at the same time slightly moves his shoulders, he looks like a horse, and a horse is a noble and ambitious animal.

The explications for these paintings say that a parrot is a sign of prosperity in the house, it was brought from across the sea and sold at a high price. This is true, but how to explain the special popularity of these particular paintings by Miris and Dow, from which dozens of copies were made? Perhaps the customer of the picture was pleased to see evidence of his wealth and well-being on it, but why were those who had nothing to do with either the parrot or the lady in the picture so willingly bought a copy of it? Looking more closely at the paintings of Miris and Dow, as well as at a dozen more images of the same subject by Dutch and French artists of the 17th-18th centuries, we will notice one curious detail: the women in them are endowed with a slight resemblance to parrots both in facial features and in general expression.

The court culture, which reached its peak under the "sun king", strictly regulated the expression of feelings: the face of an experienced courtier did not betray his emotions against his will. A person who wanted to succeed at court had to be able not only to hide his emotions, but also to read the emotions of others. It is natural that it was Louis' favorite painter who created the most perfect system for conveying emotions. At the same time, he relied on the reasoning of the French philosopher Rene Descartes and compared the expression of emotions in humans and animals.

Descartes reasoned as follows: the soul is immaterial, and the body is material. How, then, in the body are manifested by the intangible nature of the movements of the soul, that is, emotions? The pineal gland in our brain is responsible for this: it influences the movement of animal spirits that spread throughout the body and determine its position, and therefore the expression of emotions in body language. Based on Descartes, Lebrun argued that the part of the face where passions are most clearly expressed is the eyebrows, since they are located closest to the pineal gland and are most mobile. When the soul is attracted to something, the pineal gland is excited and the eyebrows begin to rise; conversely, when the soul is disgusted, the eyebrows lose contact with the pineal gland and droop. The pineal gland has the same effect on the eyes, mouth and all facial muscles, as well as on the general position of the body. When we talk about a person that he has risen or fallen, we are describing precisely that change in external appearance that Lebrun, following Descartes, associated with the movement of animal spirits - towards the pineal gland or away from it.

From the book "Dissertation sur un traité de Charles Le Brun concernant le rapport de la physionomie humaine avec celle des animaux"

A new flowering of physiognomy and zoophysiognomy began at the end of the 18th century and captured the entire first half of the 19th century. This was facilitated by the work of the Swiss pastor Johann Caspar Lavater, one of the most influential scientists in Europe at the end of the 18th century. After his death in 1801, an English magazine wrote: “There was a time when no one would have dared to hire a servant without carefully checking the facial features of this young man or girl with the descriptions and engravings of Lavater.” Lavater's main work - the magnificently illustrated multi-volume "Physiognomic Fragments" - appeared in the main European languages ​​\u200b\u200bin the last third of the 18th century, and then was reprinted many times.

The number of Lavater's followers in the first half of the 19th century is incalculable. Balzac kept his treatise on the table and constantly referred to him when describing the appearance of the characters in The Human Comedy. In Russia, Lavater's admirers were Karamzin, Pushkin and Gogol. Remember how Gogol described Sobakevich? This is a pure example of a zoophysiognomic portrait:

“When Chichikov glanced askance at Sobakevich, this time he seemed to him very similar to a medium-sized bear. To complete the resemblance, his tailcoat was completely bear-colored, the sleeves were long, the pantaloons were long, he stepped with his feet and at random and stepped incessantly on other people's legs.<…>... Sobakevich had a strong and marvelously worn image: he held him more down than up, did not turn his neck at all, and because of such a non-turn, he rarely looked at the one with whom he spoke, but always either at the corner of the stove, or at the door . Chichikov glanced sideways at him once more as they passed through the dining room: honey! perfect bear! Such a strange rapprochement is needed: he was even called Mikhail Semenovich.

Lavater summarized the observations of his predecessors and used the illustrations for the treatise della Porta and Lebrun's drawings. However, in his understanding of zoophysiognomy there was one important difference from the approach of his predecessors: Lavater was not interested in animal signs in a person, but in human signs in an animal. He superimposed the image of man on the image of the beast in order to interpret the nature of the animal, and not vice versa. Lavater passionately defended the insurmountability of the boundary separating man from beast:

“Is it possible to find in a monkey the same expression of majesty that shines on the forehead of a man with his hair pulled back?<…>Where can you find eyebrows drawn with such art? Their movements, in which Lebrun found the expression of all the passions and which actually say much more than Lebrun thought?

Lavater's pathos can be explained by the fact that during the Enlightenment, the boundary between man and beast became more and more unsteady. On the one hand, thinkers of the 18th century became interested in the fate of the so-called wild children - children who, due to various circumstances, were deprived of human education and grew up in the forest, alone or together with wild animals. After returning to society, they, as a rule, could neither adapt to human life, nor master the human language. Although physically they undoubtedly belonged to the human race, from a moral point of view they were closer to animals. The great systematizer of the plant and animal world, Carl Linnaeus, attributed them to a special species of Homo ferus, a species that, in his opinion, constituted an intermediate link between Homo sapiens and the orangutan.

On the other hand, in the second half of the 18th century, amazing successes were achieved in animal training. In the equestrian circus, which gained immense popularity first in England and then in other European countries, smart horses pretended to be dead and resurrected when the trainer urged them to return to the service of the fatherland. It turned out that horses are perfectly able to shoot from a cannon at the command of a trainer. Then it was discovered that other animals were capable of performing even more complex actions: a monkey dressed in a French uniform and nicknamed General Jacot danced on a rope and ceremoniously drank tea in the company of Madame Pompadour, whose role was played by a suitably dressed dog.

Today, all this seems like child's play to us, but for a person in the second half of the 18th - first half of the 19th century, learned animals and feral children were strong arguments that testified to the bestial nature of man: it turned out that a person easily loses his human appearance and turns into a beast if he is deprived of the society of his own kind in childhood; and once wild, he is not able to achieve the same successes that are achieved by learned animals that surpass him in dexterity and quick wits. Apparently, it was precisely this pessimistic feeling that Lavater tried to resist, insisting on the insurmountability of the boundary between man and beast.

In the art of that time, the understanding of the closeness of man to the animal world was reflected in the fashion for the so-called animal caricature. It arose during the French Revolution, but it reached its real heyday in the 30-40s of the 19th century, when it was picked up by such first-class artists as Paul Gavarni and in France, Wilhelm von Kaulbach in Germany, in England. Separate drawings or whole series called “Menacles”, “Natural History Cabinet”, “Zoological Sketches” and so on depicted animals that were dressed in human clothes and behaved in exactly the same way as people. Recently, in a wonderful translation, the book “Scenes of the Private and Public Life of Animals” was published: the essays included in it were published in Paris in the early 40s of the 19th century with wonderful illustrations by Granville.

Wikimedia Commons

For romantic art, the genre of the burlesque beast was nothing more than fun, but on the scale of this fun one can feel a nervous foreboding of a decisive verdict on faith in the special nature of man, which distinguishes him from the animal. This verdict in the late 50s of the XIX century was the discovery of Neanderthals and the promulgation of the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin. Neanderthals began to be considered as an intermediate link between the anthropoid ape and man, and individual external signs of Neanderthals or primates began to be looked for in separate races or social types.

The last third of the 19th and the first third of the 20th century is the darkest era in the history of zoophysiognomy, when the resemblance of a person to an animal began to be used as a diagnostic tool. Based on a comparison of the skulls of apes and humans, the lower character of the Negroid and Mongoloid races was postulated. The theories of the famous Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso were based on a comparison of the external structure of the human body and animals. Lombroso set himself the same task as the physiognomists of previous centuries: he tried, on the basis of external signs, to diagnose a person's character, or rather, his propensity to commit crimes. He considered such signs to be traits that bring humans closer to animals. Lombroso argued that the body structure of violent criminals is characterized by monkey features: massive and protruding jaws, prominent brow ridges, too high cheekbones, too wide, short and flat chin, a special shape of the ears, disproportionately long arms and flat feet without expression. feminine uplift. A propensity for crime could be given out by a too small and sloping chin and sharp long incisor teeth - like in rats. Lombroso argued that prostitutes are distinguished by extraordinary tenacity of legs - another atavism characteristic of monkeys, and the morphological structure of the body separates prostitutes from ordinary women even more clearly than a criminal from ordinary people.

So we are back to Degas' Little Dancer, created after Lombroso's theories gained fame in France. In the guise of a 14-year-old dancer there was a distinct resemblance to a monkey, and in the habit and expression of her face thrown back, reduced by a strange grimace, to a rat. Animal features spoke of the fact that before us is a child of vice, endowed with criminal inclinations from birth. So that the viewer would not have any doubts about this, Degas placed in the same room the pastel portraits of criminals he made - they wore the same animal-like features as the little dancer. Thus, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, zoophysiognomy turned into an instrument of social persecution: resemblance to an animal became the basis for sentencing entire races or individuals.

Fortunately, this gloomy page in the history of zoophysiognomy was not the last. In parallel with the desire to look for the traits of the beast in man, the reverse trend developed - to look for the traits of man in the beast. Charles Darwin's book On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, gave a new impetus to interest in the similar manifestation of emotions in man and animals, which we spoke about in connection with the works of Leonardo. A very important conclusion that the reader of Darwin's book came to was that animals are capable of experiencing complex emotions that are extremely close to human ones, and that is why man and animals sometimes understand each other so well.

Darwin's book was well known to artists who used it with more or less ingenuity. I think that many will easily remember the painting by Fedor Reshetnikov “Again the deuce”, which is included in the textbooks of their native speech.

Fedor Reshetnikov. Again a deuce. 1952 State Tretyakov Gallery / Fyodor Reshetnikov

Around the boy, who returned from school with another bad mark, a cheerful dog is jumping: it is very likely that Reshetnikov copied him from an illustration for Darwin's book, which depicts a dog caressing its owner.

Illustration for Charles Darwin's book On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London, 1872 Wikimedia Commons

Reshetnikov's painting, as you know, repeats the plot of Dmitry Yegorovich Zhukov's painting "Failed" in 1885. The plot is much more dramatic: a high school student who fails his final exam is met by a widowed mother, a sick sister, and a portrait of his late father on the wall.

Dmitry Zhukov. Failed. 1885 Volsky Museum of Local Lore / Wikimedia Commons

Look at the pose of the dog in Zhukov's painting. This is not a redrawing from Darwin's book, but a surprisingly subtle depiction of the complex emotions of a dog: there is love for the boy, and bewilderment due to the fact that a beloved owner has made such a mistake, and sympathy for family grief. However, the impetus for Zhukov's subtle observations, most likely, also served as illustrations for Darwin's book.

This technique was very fond of the most talented Russian portrait painter. The women who posed for him with their dogs turned out to be ridiculously similar to their pets - appreciate the similarity in the facial expressions of Sofya Mikhailovna Botkina and her beloved pug.

Valentin Serov. Portrait of Sophia Botkina. 1899 State Russian Museum / artpoisk.info

Serov's sketches for the portrait of Prince Yusupov with an Arabian stallion are no less expressive.

Valentin Serov. Portrait of Prince Felix Yusupov. 1909 State complex "Palace of Congresses"

A photograph has been preserved in which the prince and the horse pose together for the artist in the Arkhangelskoye estate. It clearly shows with what enthusiasm Serov began work from the horse's head, leaving the head of the prince for later. As a result, Felix Feliksovich Yusupov turned out to be very similar to his Arabian horse, but there was nothing offensive in this, because the horse, according to all physiognomic treatises, is a noble and ambitious animal.

Prince Felix Yusupov posing for a portrait with an Arabian horse for Valentin Serov. 1909 State Museum-Estate "Arkhangelskoe" / humus.livejournal.com

The zoophysiognomic code continued to be used in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries - however, now it is more common in cinema, advertising and clips.

In four lectures, I tried to show the advantages of a historical approach to art over the practice of so-called pure contemplation. Proponents of pure contemplation assure us that art can be enjoyed without much thought about its content, and artistic taste can be developed by looking at beautiful works of art. However, firstly, ideas about beauty change greatly from era to era and from culture to culture, and secondly, not all works of art aim to embody the ideal of beauty.

It's amazing how much sentimental nonsense is written on the Internet about Degas' "Little Dancer 14". Popular journalists and bloggers are struggling to prove that this sculpture is sweet and touching, that the artist secretly admired his model, and even that the grimace on the face of a little dancer accurately conveys the expression on the face of a teenager who has to do something against his will. All these arguments are caused by modern ideas about political correctness in the broadest sense of the word: we are afraid to admit that a great artist could look at his 14-year-old model with the eyes of a social pathologist and not feel the slightest sympathy for her.

What do we gain from knowing the visual culture behind Degas sculpture? We stop deceiving ourselves, we appreciate his sculpture for what it contains, and not for what we try to attribute to it, and perhaps we ask ourselves how much we tend to be ready to judge a person's inclinations by his appearance.

Thus, the first conclusion to which I incline you is to abandon pure contemplation and the search for beauty in any work of art. It is much easier (and often much more interesting) to look at a work of art as a message, or, in other words, as a communicative act.

From this follows the second conclusion: the imaginary addressee of this message for the artist in the vast majority of cases was his contemporary - a person who belonged to the same culture, possessed the same stock of knowledge, beliefs, habits and skills that were activated when he considered image. To understand the artist’s message, one must look at his work with the “eye of the era”, and for this it is necessary to think about what the culture of that era was like in general and what were its ideas about what could and should have been an object of art in particular.

For example, the models for Manet's Olympia and Titian's Venus of Urbina were most likely courtesans, that is, in the literal sense, both paintings depict the same thing, but at the same time they broadcast opposite messages: Titian's painting most likely represents is a wedding portrait and represents the wish for a happy and prolific marriage. Despite the rather frank gesture of the hand of his Venus, she did not shock her contemporaries at all. Manet's Olympia represents an element of the capitalist ethos that his contemporaries did not want to see in the picture: legal prostitution was an honest business born of the demand for passionate love.

"The View of the Age" enriches not only the intellectual, but also the emotional experience of our interaction with the picture. As we saw in the example of Antonello da Messina's Annunciata, the artist achieved a strong emotional effect, balancing between the familiar and the unusual, between what his viewer expected to see in the depiction of the miracle of the Annunciation, and what the artist did for the first time. In order to see the trace of the Archangel Gabriel in the pages lifted by the wind or the sign of the presence of God in the harsh light flooding the picture on the left, we need to know what stages the miracle of the Annunciation included in the sermons of the 15th century, and knowing these stages and recognizing in the picture depicting the last of them, we will understand the extraordinary expression on the face of the Mother of God and feel more sharply what the miracle of the Annunciation meant for the Italian Quattrocento.

So I bring you to the main conclusion: the knowledge of visual culture does not in the least prevent you from admiring works of art and admiring them. Pure contemplation is the joy of the loner. Pleasure based on understanding is shared pleasure, and it is usually twice as strong.

Sources

Baltrushaitis Yu. Zoophysiognomy. The world of images. World images. An Anthology of Visual Culture Studies. SPb., M., 2018.

Callen A. The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas. New Haven, 1995.

Kemp M. The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. Chicago, 2007.

In the pandan, earrings are matched to the pearl, and on the right hand of the model there is a wide gold bracelet with a pendant. The girl's legs are decorated with graceful pantalette shoes.

The second character on Manet's canvas is a dark-skinned maid. In her hands she holds a luxurious bouquet in white paper. The black woman is dressed in a pink dress that contrasts brightly with her skin, and her head is almost lost among the black tones of the background. A black kitten settled down at the foot of the bed, serving as an important compositional point on the right side of the picture.

Olympia was modeled by Manet's favorite model, Quiz Myuran. However, there is an assumption that Manet used in the picture the image of the famous courtesan, mistress of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte Marguerite Bellange.

Edouard Manet 081.jpg

Edouard Manet:
Venus Urbinskaya
Copy of a painting by Titian

Olympia Study Paris.JPG

Edouard Manet:
Sketch for Olympia
Sanguina

Olympia Study BN.JPG

Edouard Manet:
Sketch for Olympia
Sanguina

Edouard Manet:
Olympia
Watercolor 1863

Edouard Manet:
Olympia
Etching 1867

Edouard Manet:
Olympia
Etching with aquatint 1867

Edouard Manet:
Olympia
Woodcut

Iconography

Predecessors

Olympia was one of the most famous nudes of the 19th century. However, Olympia has many well-known examples that preceded it: the image of a reclining naked woman has a long tradition in the history of art. The direct predecessors of Manet's Olympia are " Sleeping Venus"Giorgione 1510 and" Venus Urbinskaya» Titian 1538. Nude women are painted on them in almost the same pose.

"Olympia" by Manet reveals a great resemblance to the painting by Titian, because it was from her that Manet wrote a copy during the years of his apprenticeship. Both Venus of Urbino and Olympia are depicted at home; as in the painting by Titian, the background of Manet's Olympia is clearly divided into two parts by a vertical in the direction of the bosom of a reclining woman. Both women equally lean on their right hand, both women's right hand is decorated with a bracelet, and the left hand covers the bosom, and the gaze of both beauties is directed directly at the viewer. In both paintings, a kitten or a dog is located at the feet of the women and there is a maid. Manet already used a similar manner of quoting with the transfer of the Renaissance motif to modern Parisian realities when creating " Breakfast on the Grass".

The direct and open look of naked Olympia is already known from Goya's Naked Maja, and the contrast between pale and dark skin was already played out in the painting Esther or Odalisque by Leon Benuville in 1844, although in this picture the white-skinned woman is dressed. By 1850 nude photographs of reclining women were also widely circulated in Paris.

Giorgione - Sleeping Venus - Google Art Project 2.jpg

Giorgione:
Sleeping Venus

Leon Benouville Odaliske.jpg

Leon Benouville:
Esther or Odalisque

Manet was influenced not only by painting and photography, but also by Charles Baudelaire's poetry collection Flowers of Evil. The original idea of ​​the painting was related to the poet's metaphor " Catwoman”, passing through a number of his works dedicated to Jeanne Duval. This connection is clearly seen in the original sketches. In the finished picture, a bristling cat appears at the feet of the woman with the same expression as the mistress's eyes.

Title of the canvas and its subtext

One of the reasons for the scandalousness of the canvas was its name: the artist did not follow the tradition of justifying the nudity of a woman in the picture with a legendary plot and did not call his nude a "mythological" name like " Venus" or " Danae". In 19th century painting Numerous Odalisques appeared, the most famous of which, of course, is The Great Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, but Manet neglected this option as well.

On the contrary, the style of the girl's few jewelry and the style of the girl's shoes indicate that Olympia lives in modern times, and not in any abstract Attica or the Ottoman Empire.

The very name that Manet gave the girl is also unusual. A decade and a half earlier, in 1848, Alexandre Dumas published his famous novel The Lady of the Camellias, in which the main antagonist and colleague of the heroine of the novel bears the name Olympia. Moreover, this name was a household name: the ladies of the demimonde were often called that. For the artist's contemporaries, this name was associated not with the distant Mount Olympus, but with.

This is confirmed by the symbolic language of the picture:

• In the Titian painting "Venus of Urbino", the women in the background are busy preparing the dowry, which, together with the sleeping dog at the feet of Venus, should mean home comfort and fidelity. And at Manet, a black maid carries a bouquet of flowers from a fan - flowers are traditionally considered a symbol of a gift, a donation. The orchid in Olympia's hair is an aphrodisiac.
• Pearl jewelry was worn by the goddess of love Venus, the jewelry around the neck of Olympia looks like a ribbon tied on a wrapped gift.
• A bowed kitten with a raised tail is a classic attribute in the depiction of witches, a sign of bad omens and erotic excesses.
• In addition, the bourgeois were especially outraged that the model (a naked woman), contrary to all norms of public morality, did not lie down modestly with her eyes downcast. Olympia appears before the viewer not dormant, like George's Venus, she looks him straight in the eye. Her client usually looks directly into the eyes of a prostitute, in this role, thanks to Manet, everyone who looks at his Olympia turns out to be.

Who came up with the idea to name the painting "Olympia" remains unknown. In the city, a year after the creation of the picture, the poem “ Daughter of the Island"and poems by Zachary Astrukdedicated to Olympia. This poem is listed in the catalog of the Paris Salon in 1865.

Zachary Astruc wrote this poem inspired by a painting by his friend. However, it is curious that in the 1866 portrait by Manet, Zachary Astruc is depicted not against the background of Olympia, but against the background of Titian's Venus of Urbino.

Scandal

paris salon

For the first time, Manet tried to present his work at the Paris Salon in 1859. However, his Absinthe Lover was not admitted to the salon. In 1861, at the Paris Salon, two works by Manet won the favor of the public - "Guitarero" and "Portrait of Parents". In 1863, Manet's works again did not pass the selection of the jury of the Paris Salon and were shown as part of the Salon of the Rejected, where Breakfast on the Grass was already at the epicenter of a major scandal.

Probably, Manet was going to show "Olympia" at the Paris Salon in 1864, but since the same nude Quiz Meuran was again depicted on it, Manet decided to avoid a new scandal and offered to the Paris Salon of 1864 instead of "Olympia" " Bullfight Episode" and " Dead Christ with angels”, but they were also denied recognition. It was only in 1865 that Olympia was presented at the Paris Salon along with The Mockery of Christ.

New writing style

Because of "Olympia" Manet broke out one of the biggest scandals in the art of the XIX century. Scandalous turned out to be both the plot of the picture and the pictorial manner of the artist. Manet, who was fond of Japanese art, refused to carefully study the nuances of light and dark, which other artists aspired to. Because of this, contemporaries could not see the volume of the depicted figure and considered the composition of the picture to be rough and flat. Gustave Courbet compared Olympia to the Queen of Spades from a pack of cards, fresh out of her bath. Manet was accused of immorality and vulgarity. Antonin Proust later recalled that the painting survived only thanks to the precautionary measures taken by the exhibition administration.

No one has ever seen anything more cynical than this Olympia, wrote a contemporary critic. - This is a female gorilla, made of rubber and depicted completely naked, on a bed. Her hand seems to be cramping obscenely ... Seriously speaking, I would advise young women in anticipation of a child, as well as girls, to avoid such impressions.

The canvas exhibited at the Salon caused a stir and was subjected to wild mockery from the crowd, agitated by the criticism that had fallen from the newspapers. The frightened administration placed two guards at the picture, but this was not enough. The crowd, laughing, howling and threatening with canes and umbrellas, was not frightened even by the military guard. Several times the soldiers had to draw their weapons. The painting gathered hundreds of people who came to the exhibition only to curse the painting and spit on it. As a result, the painting was hung in the farthest hall of the Salon to such a height that it was almost invisible.

The artist Degas said:

The life path of the canvas

• - the picture is painted.
• - the painting is exhibited in the Salon. After that, for almost a quarter of a century, it is kept in the author's workshop, inaccessible to outsiders.
• - the painting was exhibited at the exhibition on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. A wealthy American expresses a desire to buy it for any money. Manet's friends collect 20,000 francs by subscription and buy Olympia from the artist's widow to bring it as a gift to the state. Not too happy with such a gift, the authorities, after some resistance, nevertheless accept the gift and deposit it in the storerooms of the Luxembourg Palace.
• - Without too much noise, "Olympia" is transferred to the Louvre.
• - finally, the picture still takes pride of place in the newly opened Museum of Impressionism.

Painting influence

The first artist to create his work based on Olympia was Paul Cezanne. However, in his Modern Olympia”He went a little further, depicting, in addition to the prostitute and the maid, also the client. Paul Gauguin painted a copy of Olympia in 1891, Olympia inspired both Edgar Degas and Henri Fantin-Latour. In his parody of Olympia, Pablo Picasso replaced a dressed maid with two naked men.

Throughout the 20th century, the motif of Olympia was in great demand among a variety of artists. These include Jean Dubuffet, René Magritte, Francis Newton Souza, Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck, Félix Vallotton, Jacques Villon and Herrault. Larry Rivers wrote a black Olympia in the city and called his creation " I like Olympia in Black Face". In the 1990s three-dimensional Olympia appeared. American artist Seward Johnson created a sculpture based on Olympia Manet called " Confrontational Vulnerability».

In 2004, a cartoon depicting George W. Bush. in the pose of Olympia, was removed from the exhibition of the Washington City Museum.

Filmography

• "The Model with a Black Cat" film Alain Jaubert from the cycle "Palettes" (France, 1998).

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Notes

Links

• in the Musée d'Orsay database (fr.)

An excerpt characterizing Olympia (painting by Manet)

Bilibin was a man of about thirty-five, single, of the same society as Prince Andrei. They had known each other in St. Petersburg, but they got to know each other even more closely during Prince Andrei's last visit to Vienna with Kutuzov. As Prince Andrei was a young man, promising to go far in the military field, so, and even more so, Bilibin promised in the diplomatic one. He was still a young man, but no longer a young diplomat, since he began to serve at the age of sixteen, he had been in Paris, in Copenhagen, and now occupied a rather significant place in Vienna. Both the chancellor and our envoy in Vienna knew him and cherished him. He was not one of those many diplomats who are obliged to have only negative virtues, not to do famous things and speak French in order to be very good diplomats; he was one of those diplomats who love and know how to work, and, despite his laziness, he sometimes spent his nights at his desk. He worked equally well, whatever the essence of the work. He was not interested in the question “why?”, but in the question “how?”. What the diplomatic matter was, he did not care; but to draw up skillfully, aptly and gracefully a circular, memorandum or report - in this he found great pleasure. The merits of Bilibin were valued, in addition to written works, also for his art of addressing and speaking in higher spheres.
Bilibin loved conversation just as he loved work, only when the conversation could be elegantly witty. In society, he constantly waited for an opportunity to say something remarkable and entered into a conversation only under these conditions. Bilibin's conversation was constantly sprinkled with originally witty, complete phrases of common interest.
These phrases were prepared in Bilibin's internal laboratory, as if on purpose, of a portable nature, so that insignificant secular people could conveniently memorize them and transfer them from living rooms to living rooms. And indeed, les mots de Bilibine se colportaient dans les salons de Vienne, [Bilibin's reviews diverged in Viennese living rooms] and often had an impact on so-called important matters.
His thin, emaciated, yellowish face was all covered with large wrinkles, which always seemed to be as cleanly and painstakingly washed as the tips of fingers after a bath. The movements of these wrinkles constituted the main play of his physiognomy. Now his forehead was wrinkled in wide folds, his eyebrows went up, then his eyebrows went down, and large wrinkles formed on his cheeks. Deep-set, small eyes always looked directly and cheerfully.
“Well, now tell us your exploits,” he said.
Bolkonsky in the most modest way, never mentioning himself, told the case and the reception of the Minister of War.
- Ils m "ont recu avec ma nouvelle, comme un chien dans un jeu de quilles, [They accepted me with this news, as they accept a dog when it interferes with the game of skittles,] he concluded.
Bilibin grinned and loosened the folds of his skin.
- Cependant, mon cher, - he said, examining his nail from afar and picking up the skin above his left eye, - malgre la haute estime que je professe pour le Orthodox Russian army, j "avoue que votre victoire n" est pas des plus victorieuses. [However, my dear, with all due respect to the Orthodox Russian army, I believe that your victory is not the most brilliant.]
He continued all the same in French, pronouncing in Russian only those words that he contemptuously wanted to emphasize.
- How so? You, with all your weight, attacked the unfortunate Mortier with one division, and this Mortier is slipping between your hands? Where is the victory?
“However, speaking seriously,” answered Prince Andrei, “we can still say without boasting that this is a little better than Ulm ...
“Why didn’t you take us one, at least one marshal?”
- Because not everything is done as expected, and not as regularly as in the parade. We thought, as I told you, to go to the rear by seven o'clock in the morning, and did not arrive even at five in the evening.
"Why didn't you come at seven o'clock in the morning?" You should have come at seven o'clock in the morning, - Bilibin said smiling, - you should have come at seven o'clock in the morning.
“Why didn’t you convince Bonaparte by diplomatic means that it was better for him to leave Genoa? - Prince Andrei said in the same tone.
“I know,” Bilibin interrupted, “you think it’s very easy to take marshals while sitting on the sofa in front of the fireplace.” It's true, but still, why didn't you take it? And do not be surprised that not only the Minister of War, but also the august emperor and King Franz will not be very happy with your victory; and I, the unfortunate secretary of the Russian embassy, ​​do not feel any need to give my Franz a taler as a token of joy and let him go with his Liebchen [darling] to the Prater ... True, there is no Prater here.
He looked directly at Prince Andrei and suddenly pulled the collected skin off his forehead.
“Now it’s my turn to ask you why, my dear,” said Bolkonsky. - I confess that I don’t understand, maybe there are diplomatic subtleties beyond my weak mind, but I don’t understand: Mack loses an entire army, Archduke Ferdinand and Archduke Karl do not give any signs of life and make mistakes after mistakes, finally, one Kutuzov wins a real victory, destroys the charme [charm] of the French, and the Minister of War is not even interested in knowing the details.
“It is from this, my dear. Voyez vous, mon cher: [You see, my dear:] hooray! for the tsar, for Russia, for the faith! Tout ca est bel et bon, [all this is fine and good,] but what do we, I say, the Austrian court, care about your victories? Bring us your good news about the victory of Archduke Charles or Ferdinand - un archiduc vaut l "autre, [one archduke is worth another,] as you know - at least over a company of Bonaparte's fire brigade, this is another matter, we will thunder into cannons. Otherwise this , as if on purpose, can only tease us. Archduke Karl does nothing, Archduke Ferdinand is covered with disgrace. You leave Vienna, you no longer defend, comme si vous nous disiez: [as if you told us:] God is with us, and God is with you, with your capital. One general whom we all loved, Schmit: you bring him under a bullet and congratulate us on the victory! ... You must admit that it is impossible to imagine more irritating than the news that you bring. comme unfait expres. [This is as if on purpose, as if on purpose.] Besides, well, if you won a brilliant victory, even if Archduke Charles won, what would change the general course of affairs? It's too late now that Vienna is occupied by French troops.
- How busy? Vienna busy?
- Not only busy, but Bonaparte is in Schönbrunn, and the count, our dear Count Vrbna, goes to him for orders.
Bolkonsky, after fatigue and the impressions of the journey, the reception, and especially after dinner, felt that he did not understand the full meaning of the words that he heard.
“Count Lichtenfels was here this morning,” Bilibin continued, “and showed me a letter detailing the French parade in Vienna. Le prince Murat et tout le tremblement ... [Prince Murat and all that ...] You see that your victory is not very joyful, and that you cannot be accepted as a savior ...
“Really, it doesn’t matter to me, it doesn’t matter at all! - said Prince Andrei, beginning to understand that his news of the battle near Krems really had little importance in view of such events as the occupation of the capital of Austria. - How is Vienna taken? And what about the bridge and the famous tete de pont, [bridge fortification,] and Prince Auersperg? We had rumors that Prince Auersperg was defending Vienna,” he said.
- Prince Auersperg stands on this, on our side, and protects us; I think it protects very poorly, but still protects. Vienna is on the other side. No, the bridge has not yet been taken and, I hope, will not be taken, because it is mined and ordered to be blown up. Otherwise, we would have been in the mountains of Bohemia long ago, and you and your army would have spent a bad quarter of an hour between two fires.
“But this still does not mean that the campaign is over,” said Prince Andrei.
- I think it's over. And so the big hats here think, but dare not say it. It will be what I said at the beginning of the campaign, that it’s not your echauffouree de Durenstein, [Durenstein’s clash,] not gunpowder that will decide the matter at all, but those who invented it, ”Bilibin said, repeating one of his mots [words], loosening his skin on the forehead and pausing. - The only question is what the Berlin meeting of Emperor Alexander with the Prussian king will say. If Prussia enters an alliance, on forcera la main a l "Autriche, [force Austria,] and there will be war. If not, then the only thing is to agree on where to draw up the initial articles of the new Samro Formio. [Campo Formio.]
“But what extraordinary genius! - Prince Andrei suddenly cried out, squeezing his small hand and hitting it on the table. And what a blessing this man is!
— Buonaparte? [Buonaparte?] - Bilibin said inquiringly, wrinkling his forehead and thus making it feel that now it will be un mot [a word]. - Bu onaparte? - he said, striking especially on u. - I think, however, that now that he prescribes the laws of Austria from Schönbrunn, il faut lui faire grace de l "u. [I need to save him from and.] I resolutely make an innovation and call it Bonaparte tout court [just Bonaparte].
“No, no joke,” said Prince Andrei, “do you really think that the campaign is over?
- That's what I think. Austria was left in the cold, but she was not used to this. And she will repay. And she was left in a fool because, firstly, the provinces were ruined (on dit, le Orthodox est terrible pour le pillage), [they say that the Orthodox are terrible in terms of robberies,] the army is defeated, the capital is taken, and all this pour les beaux yeux du [for the sake of beautiful eyes,] Sardinian majesty. And therefore - entre nous, mon cher [between us, my dear] - I can smell that we are being deceived, I can smell relations with France and projects for peace, a secret world, separately concluded.
– It can't be! - said Prince Andrei, - that would be too disgusting.
- Qui vivra verra, [Let's wait and see] - Bilibin said, unraveling his skin again as a sign of the end of the conversation.
When Prince Andrei came to the room prepared for him and, in clean linen, lay down on down jackets and fragrant heated pillows, he felt that the battle he had brought news of was far, far away from him. The Prussian alliance, the betrayal of Austria, the new triumph of Bonaparte, the exit and parade, and the reception of Emperor Franz for the next day occupied him.
He closed his eyes, but at the same moment cannonade, firing, the sound of carriage wheels crackled in his ears, and here again the musketeers stretched by a string descend from the mountain, and the French fire, and he feels his heart tremble, and he rides forward next to Schmitt, and the bullets whistle merrily around him, and he experiences that feeling of tenfold joy in life, which he has not experienced since childhood.
He woke up...
“Yes, it all happened!…” he said happily, smiling childishly to himself, and fell into a sound, young sleep.

The next day he woke up late. Resuming the impressions of the past, he remembered, first of all, that today he had to introduce himself to Emperor Franz, remembered the Minister of War, the courteous Austrian adjutant's wing, Bilibin, and the conversation of the previous evening. Dressing in full dress uniform, which he had not worn for a long time, for a trip to the palace, he, fresh, lively and handsome, with a bandaged hand, entered Bilibin's office. There were four gentlemen of the diplomatic corps in the office. With Prince Ippolit Kuragin, who was the secretary of the embassy, ​​Bolkonsky was familiar; Bilibin introduced him to others.
The gentlemen who visited Bilibin, secular, young, rich and cheerful people, both in Vienna and here, made up a separate circle, which Bilibin, who was the head of this circle, called ours, les nеtres. This circle, which consisted almost exclusively of diplomats, apparently had its own interests of high society, relations with certain women, and the clerical side of the service, which had nothing to do with war and politics. These gentlemen, apparently, willingly, as their own (an honor that they did to a few), accepted Prince Andrei into their circle. Out of courtesy, and as a subject for entering into conversation, several questions were put to him about the army and the battle, and the conversation again crumbled into inconsistent, merry jokes and gossip.
“But it’s especially good,” one said, describing the failure of a fellow diplomat, “it’s especially good that the chancellor told him directly that his appointment to London was a promotion, and that he should look at it that way. Do you see his figure at the same time? ...
"But what's worse, gentlemen, I betray Kuragin to you: a man is in misfortune, and this Don Juan, this terrible man, is taking advantage of this!"
Prince Hippolyte was lying in a Voltaire chair, with his legs over the handle. He laughed.
- Parlez moi de ca, [Well, well, well,] - he said.
Oh, Don Juan! Oh snake! voices were heard.
“You don’t know, Bolkonsky,” Bilibin turned to Prince Andrei, “that all the horrors of the French army (I almost said the Russian army) are nothing compared to what this man did between women.
- La femme est la compagne de l "homme, [A woman is a man's friend,] - said Prince Hippolyte and began to look at his raised legs through a lorgnette.
Bilibin and ours burst out laughing, looking into Ippolit's eyes. Prince Andrei saw that this Ippolit, whom he (he had to confess) was almost jealous of his wife, was a jester in this society.
“No, I have to treat you with Kuragins,” Bilibin said quietly to Bolkonsky. - He is charming when he talks about politics, you need to see this importance.
He sat down next to Hippolyte and, gathering his folds on his forehead, started a conversation with him about politics. Prince Andrei and others surrounded them both.
- Le cabinet de Berlin ne peut pas exprimer un sentiment d "alliance," Hippolyte began, looking around significantly at everyone, "sans exprimer ... comme dans sa derieniere note ... vous comprenez ... vous comprenez ... et puis si sa Majeste l "Empereur ne deroge pas au principe de notre alliance… [The Berlin cabinet cannot express its opinion on the alliance without expressing… as in its last note… you understand… you understand… however, if His Majesty the Emperor does not change the essence of our alliance…]
- Attendez, je n "ai pas fini ... - he said to Prince Andrei, grabbing his hand. - Je suppose que l" intervention sera plus forte que la non intervention. Et…” He paused. - On ne pourra pas imputer a la fin de non recevoir notre depeche du 28 Novembre. Voila comment tout cela finira. [Wait, I didn't finish. I think that intervention will be stronger than non-intervention. And ... It is impossible to consider the case as completed by the non-acceptance of our dispatch of November 28th. How will this all end?]
And he let go of Bolkonsky's hand, showing by the fact that now he had completely finished.
- Demosthenes, je te reconnais au caillou que tu as cache dans ta bouche d "or! [Demosthenes, I recognize you by the pebble that you hide in your golden lips!] - said Bilibin, whose hat of hair moved on his head with pleasure .
Everyone laughed. Hippolyte laughed the loudest. He was apparently suffering, suffocating, but he could not help laughing wildly, stretching his always motionless face.
- Well, gentlemen, - said Bilibin, - Bolkonsky is my guest in the house and here in Brunn, and I want to treat him as much as I can with all the joys of life here. If we were in Brunn, it would be easy; but here, dans ce vilain trou morave [in that nasty Moravian hole], it is more difficult, and I ask you all for help. Il faut lui faire les honneurs de Brunn. [I need to show him Brunn.] You take over the theatre, I take over society, you, Hippolyte, of course, take over the women.
- We must show him Amelie, lovely! one of ours said, kissing the tips of his fingers.
“In general, this bloodthirsty soldier,” Bilibin said, “should be turned to more philanthropic views.
“I can hardly take advantage of your hospitality, gentlemen, and now it’s time for me to go,” Bolkonsky said, looking at his watch.
- Where?
- To the emperor.
- O! about! about!
- Well, goodbye, Bolkonsky! Goodbye, prince; come to dinner earlier, - voices followed. - We take care of you.
“Try as much as possible to praise the order in the delivery of provisions and routes when you speak with the emperor,” said Bilibin, escorting Bolkonsky to the front.
“And I would like to praise, but I can’t, as far as I know,” answered Bolkonsky smiling.
Well, talk as much as you can. His passion is audiences; but he does not like to speak and does not know how, as you will see.

At the exit, Emperor Franz only gazed intently into the face of Prince Andrei, who was standing in the appointed place between the Austrian officers, and nodded his long head to him. But after leaving yesterday's adjutant wing, courteously conveyed to Bolkonsky the emperor's desire to give him an audience.
Emperor Franz received him, standing in the middle of the room. Before starting the conversation, Prince Andrei was struck by the fact that the emperor seemed to be confused, not knowing what to say, and blushed.

They challenged bourgeois morality, and he himself came from a prosperous wealthy family, and the opinion of his father was very important to him.

He copied the masterpieces of old masters in the Louvre for a long time and was very eager to exhibit in the official Salon, and his works shocked with unusual plots and a free pictorial manner.

Biography. Stormy start

Born in Paris in 1832. Father is a high-ranking official of the Ministry of Justice, mother is the daughter of a prominent diplomat. He was given every opportunity to get an education and start a solid career. But studying at prestigious boarding houses and colleges is not for him. Fifteen-year-old Eduard tries to enter the seafarer, fails and goes to sea as a cabin boy to try out the next year. During the voyage, he draws a lot, since then Manet's paintings often contain marine motifs.

He fails his exams again. The father sees his son's work and resigns himself to the fact that he will not be an official or a prosperous bourgeois. Eduard becomes a student of the fairly well-known academic master Thomas Couture, studies pictorial classical masterpieces in different cities of Europe, and spends a lot of time in the Louvre. But the style of Manet's first significant works is not traditional.

First exhibitions

To exhibit at the Paris Salon of Painting means to receive professional recognition. It is visited by up to half a million spectators. The works, selected by a commission specially appointed by the government, guarantee the artist fame, and, consequently, orders and income.

Manet's painting "Absinthe Drinker" (1858-59) was rejected by the jury of the Salon, the realistic theme turned out to be too unusual, the artist handled perspective and halftones too freely - sacred concepts for the academic school.

But in 1861, two paintings by Manet at once - "Portrait of Parents" and "Guitarero" are exhibited at the Salon. The recognition of specialists and lovers of painting was especially important for the artist's father.

"Breakfast on the Grass"

For the Salon of 1863, Manet painted an amazing picture. The composition and plot were inspired by Raphael's Judgment of Paris and Giorgione's Country Concert. At first, the artist called the canvas "Bathing", but then it became known as "Breakfast on the Grass". Manet's painting became an event.

The canvas is quite large, which at that time suggested the use of a battle or multi-figure biblical story. And we see a picnic scene of two men and two women, one of whom, in the background, is swimming in the lake. The men, dressed in evening costumes, are carried away by a conversation among themselves, and do not seem to notice the defiant nakedness of a woman nearby. Her clothes are casually thrown off on the grass, her body is dazzling under the bright frontal light, and there is no escape from her defiant gaze directed at the viewer.

Each viewer saw his "Breakfast on the Grass". Manet's painting is enigmatic. The surrounding landscape is painted without perspective and shadows, like scenery in a provincial theater. The bather is clearly out of scale with her surroundings. A bird, frozen above those sitting, like a target in a shooting range, looks like a bullfinch, but a bullfinch in summer? Obviously there is some kind of story, but the artist does not try to explain it, leaving the viewer to speculate his own.

The characters of the outrageous picnic had a portrait resemblance to specific people from the artist's environment: his brother Gustav and brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhof. The female model also had a name - Quiz Meran, and a specific fame, which was hinted at by a frog in the lower left corner of the picture - a symbol of voluptuousness. The scandal was huge.

Outcast Salon

The jury of the Salon of 1863 was stricter than ever. Manet's paintings were rejected. Less than half of the five thousand submitted works were selected, and the artists complained to the emperor himself. The then-ruling Napoleon III personally examined the rejected paintings and did not find much difference from the accepted ones. He recommended that an alternative exhibition be arranged. The salon of the outcasts was visited by no less spectators than the official one.

Manet's painting became a sensation. They admired her, but the majority scolded her, laughed at her, parodied her, there were not only indifferent ones. This was repeated in 1865 with another masterpiece by Manet.

"Olympia"

Again, the master was inspired by a masterpiece of the past. This time it was Titian's Venus of Urbino. Venus Manet has the body of Quiz Meran, far from ancient proportions. It was she who made the visitors of the Salon resent - faithful spouses and respectable ascetics. I had to put a policeman to protect the canvas from the pricks of umbrellas and spitting.

Venus became known as Olympia. Manet's painting evoked direct associations among contemporaries with the courtesan from Dumas's novel The Lady of the Camellias. Only those who did not think about moral principles could immediately appreciate the master's magnificent painting skills, the expressiveness of the composition, and the exquisite palette.

Manet Impressionist

Around the artist, a society of those who would become the personification of the brightest artistic trend in painting - impressionism gradually took shape. Edouard Manet is an artist whose paintings were not exhibited at exhibitions along with Degas, Renoir, Cezanne. He considered himself independent of any unions and associations, but he was friends and worked together with other representatives of the style.

And most importantly, he shared their views on painting, when the ability to see and express the finest nuances in nature and in man becomes the main thing for an artist.