Lot n° 108
Estimation :
3000 - 4000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 2 730EUR
GIRODET-TRIOSON Anne-Louis (1767-1824).
MANUSCRIT autograph signed "Girodet-Trioson", Rapport sur les ouvrages de peinture, architecture, et gravure en pierre et en médaille lu à la seance publique de l'Academie Royale des beaux arts du 5 octobre 1816; 8 pages in-fol. preserved in a folder titled and signed.
Important report on the shipments of the boarders of the French Academy in Rome, written by one of the most recent members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. [Elected on May 20, 1815 to the Institute, Girodet and eleven other artists were excluded during the second Restoration for "reasons of economy" (Pasquier, Minister of the Interior); they were reinstated by the royal order of March 21, 1816, which reorganized the Institute. The manuscript, carefully edited, shows a few rare erasures and corrections, including three check marks; it was used for printing].
The rapporteur recalls the history of the "French School of Rome", a "nursery of great artists" founded by Louis XIV, shaken by the Revolution but now stable. He evokes the rules and principles that should guide the artist, who should be motivated by the desire to please and touch: Prometheus formed man from clay, but Minerva gave him a soul. "It is this soul, this sacred fire, which guides the artist even in his perception [...] it is this soul which directs his hand, when it traces the sublime and varied characters of beauty, always in harmony with determined inclinations, and consequently intimately linked to moral ideas. It is through her that grace, that divine and indefinable gift, exhales like a sweet perfume from her slightest conceptions"... A passage on the duty of the Academy to supervise its boarders "in the puberty of talent" has been slightly crossed out in pencil...
Girodet then summarizes the judgments of the academic commissions on the submissions, stressing the importance of the "moral impressions" that should result from the works. Thus, the Academy would have liked to find in PICOT's Psyche, "the approximate idea of this airy, sylph-like being, of which the ancients had made the symbol of the soul"; it disapproves in M. PALLIÈRE's Prometheus, "the stature of the soul". PALLIÈRE, "the athletic stature", difficult to suppose in "the superior man whose audacious genius stole the fire of Heaven"; and she regrets that the "great stile" of M. de FORESTIER's Anacreon is not accompanied by "the riotous inspirations which should have arisen abundantly from such a graceful subject"... However, in La Mort d'Abel, DROLLING "has perfectly observed the conventions, and felt the expression of his subject: bold, picturesque disposition; true, pathetic action, the noblest qualities of art are almost all noticed there"... The details and the effect produced by this painting announce to the French school "one more skilled master"...
Recalling the importance of antique studies for architects, Girodet praised the archaeological work of the resident architects, and the studies of Messrs Suys, Caristie, Gauthier, Brandt and Desboeufs. After regretting that the work of the sculptors and composers of music had not arrived, he ends with a heartfelt tribute to Louis XVIII: "The worthy son of Henri IV, after having, like that good and wise hero, snuffed out the torch of civil discord, and poured the salutary and inexhaustible beauty of his gentle and beneficent virtues on the wounds that were once still bloody, has closed the temple of Janus, and reopened and raised the sanctuary of Minerva"... The Louvre "is repopulated" with his voice of masterpieces, and an expiatory chapel rises, whose walls "which the genius of the arts awaits with impatience, will speak in an eloquent language to our descendants, of the valour and piety of our ancestors; And the young favourites of Minerva of whom I have just spoken, instructed by learned lessons, aroused by great examples, inflamed above all by those high virtues, hereditary in the hearts of our magnanimous princes like the throne of St. Louis in their august house, these happy pupils, who have become skilful teachers, will consecrate from age to age the noble talents which the vivifying eyes of the monarch will have hatched in them, to the glory of religion, of virtue, of the Sovereign and of the country...
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