Girodet's Déluge, a Case Study in Art Criticism

Abstract

With curious glances, the waves of Louvre visitors pause in front of Girodet's huge painting Une Scène du Déluge. The work is ignored by most art history textbooks, the standard examples for Girodet being his Funérailles d'Atala and the Endymion. Yet Une Scène de Déluge, as Girodet preferred to call it (see below), was one of the focal points of French art in 1806 and 1810, evoking an important sampling of criticism during a period of significant change in painting. The Déluge was the sensation of the Paris Salon of 1806, and in 1810 won the most important of two prizes for painting in the Prix Décennaux, Napoleon's great effort to reward and encourage achievement in science, literature, and the arts. The aim of this paper is to investigate the criticism of the painting and to see how such criticism reflected the past and forecast the future.1 The sources are articles in periodicals and independently published brochures from 1806, 1810, and, to a lesser extent, 1814. Most are relatively short and anonymous.

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Notes on contributors

Dale G. Cleaver

Dale G. Cleaver is Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.