October 2021 - Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

The art world is a funny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolted-on, world-renowned big name like your Rembrandts and your Van Goghs, you might find yourself in or out of fashion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many people outside (and probably inside) of France have never heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s preeminent academic painters in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Bouguereau executed some 822 known paintings during his career, often portraying quintessentially classical and mythological subjects: Cupid and Psyche, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick religious works, pastorals, and coyly erotic nudes. His portraits were rendered with near-photographic verisimilitude and with a consummate level of skill and craft. Given that a high percentage of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bodies of work ever produced by any artist. So what went wrong?

Well, Bouguereau represented the “old guard”, an upholder of traditional values and indeed one who contrived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being rejected by the ‘Salon de Monsieur Bouguereau’. In other words, he was a dinosaur and destined to be overshadowed by the Impressionists and the modernists of the dawning new century; his reputation sank after his death and for many years his work was regarded as irredeemably passé. He has, however, recently achieved something of a rehabilitation, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auction room. Quite right too, he was brilliant.

A representative work is this 1894 piece, Bacchante. A bacchante was a priestess or follower of Bacchus, the god of wine and intoxification, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depicted as wild women, running through the forest, tearing animals to pieces, and engaging in other acts of frenzied debauchery, Bouguereau here chooses to portray his Bacchante ‘before the party’!

Back in 2006 I went to Rome, visited the tombs of Keats and Shelley, sat on the Spanish Steps, had my camera stolen on the subway (holidays are often mixed affairs, after all), discovered a penchant for liquorice liqueur, marvelled at the Coliseum, got a sore neck looking up at St Mark’s Cathedral and the glorious Sistine Chapel…and spent some time in contemplation of the famous fresco that is the subject of today’s blog. The School of Athens is one of four wall frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, the apartment in the Vatican palace whose walls and ceiling were painted by Raphael between 1508 and 1511.

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) was commissioned by Pope Julius II, the same man who also commissioned Michelangelo to paint the nearby Sistine Chapel (this Pope clearly knew his painters), and, like that work, the Stanza della Segnatura is an embodiment of all that was great about the classical spirit of the Renaissance. It’s hard to think of a better symbol for the marriage of art, philosophy, and science that was the hallmark of the Italian Renaissance than The School of Athens.

The frescoes depict the themes of philosophy, theology, literature and justice, and personifications of the same four themes decorate the ceiling. The School of Athens, representing philosophy, is notable for its accurate perspectival projection, which Raphael learned from Leonardo da Vinci (whose likeness Raphael used for the central figure of this painting, Plato). The two central figures are Plato and Aristotle, each holding a copy of one of their books (Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), and around them is an assortment of figures from the worlds of philosophy and the natural sciences, including Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid and Ptolemy. If you’re ever in Rome, be sure to visit the Stanza della Segnatura, but do look after your camera!