The Influence of Lavater and Girodet's Expression Des Sentiments De L'Ame

1. This article is partially based on a chapter of the author's doctoral thesis, Girodet-Trioson, an Iconographical Study, submitted in May 1952 to Harvard University, and now deposited in Widener Library. I should like to express here my great appreciation for the help and advice so generously given to me by Professor Frederick B. Deknatel. In the writing of the present article, I feel particularly indebted and grateful for the encouragement and the invaluable assistance of Miss Agnes Mongan.

Abstract

IN his review of the Salon of 1824, Stendhal vehemently cries out: “Je demande une âme à la peinture,”² and he criticizes the school of David, because this school “ne peut peindre que les corps; elle est décidément inhabile à peindre les âmes.”³ This criticism, written the very year of David's death, must have had a particularly bitter taste for the aging but faithful disciples of the painter of the Horaces. Facing what Chaussard called “une invasion gothique”⁴ of Romantic emotionalism, these die-hard classicists were still thinking of themselves as real champions of “l'expression des sentiments de l';âme.”⁵ The frustrated striving of the Davidians to become “painters of the soul”⁶ is one of the most frequently forgotten phases of art history. Yet it has a deep significance because it corresponds to one of the essential aspects of Pre-Romanticism. The aim of the present article is to examine one episode of this particular phase of Neo-Classical development: the influence of Lavater's physiognomical theories on the art and the writings of Girodet-Trioson, a well-known pupil of David.