The Judgment of Paris (66 page)
Despite favorable reviews and the admiring throngs, Meissonier was therefore left looking to his laurels as it became clear that the triumphs of 1855 an 1867 were not to be repeated in Vienna. As a student of history, he could have glimpsed the possibility of a grisly parallel between Napoléon's military endeavors and his own artistic career. In Meissonier's opinion, Napoléon's greatest triumph had been the Battle of Friedland, not simply because of the virtuoso tactics and crushing finality of the victory but because prior to 1807 the Emperor, as Meissonier wrote, "made no mistakes."
15
Perfection had followed perfection. But Friedland was also, Meissonier believed, the beginning of the end, the setting of the course that would lead Napoléon inescapably to the abyss of Waterloo.
Meissonier returned to Poissy in the summer of 1873 and, in a gesture typical of the almost maniacal craftsman that he was, restored
Friedland
to his easel. Despite his years of effort, the painting was still, in his opinion, something less than perfect; and it was perfection, he always claimed, that lured him forward.
F
RANCE HAD A new President by the time Meissonier returned from Vienna. Adolphe Thiers resigned on May 24, 1873, following a no-confidence motion in the National Assembly prompted by monarchist opposition to his appointment to the cabinet of three republicans. A day later the Assembly's conservative majority elected a man much more to their tastes: Marshal Patrice MacMahon, the general who two years earlier had crushed the Commune.
In his inaugural address, delivered on May 26, the sixty-five-year-old MacMahon stated that the aim of his government was "the restoration of a moral order in our country"
1
A religious revival was already under way in France. Over the previous year, dozens of trainloads of pilgrims had traveled south to Lourdes, where in 1858 visions of the Virgin Mary had been revealed to a fourteen-year-old named Bernadette Soubirous; and the first national pilgrimage to Lourdes, complete with a torchlight procession, was planned for July 21, 1873.
2
The Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc had been appearing to young women throughout the country, while the sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet was working on a bronze equestrian statue of Saint Joan, clad in armor and holding a standard, that was destined for the Place des Pyramides.
In keeping with this "moral order," MacMahon's administration launched plans for a number of large architectural projects. A new church, the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, would be built in Montmartre, on the spot where Generals Lecomte and Clement-Thomas had been executed. Funded by public subscription, it would serve, as the deputies in the National Assembly affirmed, "as witness of repentence and as a symbol of hope." The government also announced plans to rebuild the Vendôme Column. This latter project, expected to cost hundreds of thousands of francs, would be funded not by public subscription but rather—very much against his wishes—by Gustave Courbet. To that end, the government ordered the sequestration of his property in both Paris and Ornans, at which point Courbet fled into exile in Switzerland. There, according to a friend, he began "drowning himself' in white wine.
3
The government of moral order also had plans for yet another grand artistic project. Charles Blanc was dismissed as Director of Fine Arts in December 1873, a victim, according to
Le Temps,
of "malice and political prejudice." His crime, the newspaper maintained, was to be a republican, "and the presence of a republican at the head of the fine arts was, it would seem, a scandal that the government of the moral order could no longer support."
4
His replacement was a man with irreproachable conservative credentials, the Marquis de Chennevières. Deprived of his responsibilities at the Salon early in 1870, Chennevières had spent the previous few years working as a curator at the Musée du Luxembourg and raging in the newspapers against socialism, atheism and the evils of the Commune.
5
Returned to a position of power, he immediately set about commissioning artists to work on his pet project: the decoration of the church of Sainte-Geneviève, otherwise known as the Panthéon.
Sainte-Geneviève possessed a confusing history that oscillated between the sacred and the profane. Commissioned in the 1750s by King Louis XV, it was raised on the site of a shrine dedicated to the patron saint of Paris, a nun who had averted an attack on the city by Attila the Hun. However, construction had not been completed until 1791, at which point the revolutionaries seized the church, incinerated the remains of Sainte-Geneviève, and transformed the building into a secular temple, the Panthéon, under whose neoclassical dome the great men of France, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, could be buried. The building was reconsecrated as a church in 1821, only to be secularized again in 1831. It then reverted back to the Catholic Church in 1852, one year after the physicist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault suspended a 220-foot-long pendulum from its dome in order to demonstrate the rotation of the earth on its axis. In 1871 the church was damaged by a shell during the Prussian bombardment; two months later the Communards replaced the cross on its dome with the Red Flag, vandalized the remaining relics, and turned the building back into a temple.
Though by 1873 it was known once more as the church of Sainte-Geneviève, Chennevières was anxious to imprint an indelibly and unmistakably Christian identity on the building in order to forestall any future attempts at secularization. Since Paul Chenavard's proposed mural decorations, begun in 1848, had come to nothing, Chennevières immediately ordered a series of religious murals for the church's walls and vaults. Painters involved in the project were Cabanel, Gérôme and Baudry, all experienced muralists. Also receiving a commission was Meissonier, who possessed no experience whatsoever in the medium. He had become obsessed with murals, however, to the point where as his new mansion rose on the Boulevard Malesherbes he began fantasizing about covering its ceilings and walls with historical and allegorical scenes. "Last night I could not sleep," he wrote, "and I lay awake thinking of the paintings I would put on the walls of my house. Over one door,
Painting
and
Music;
over the other,
Sculpture
and
Architecture. . . .
Won't my staircase be magnificent, with an allegory of
The Poet
on one wall and
Homer Appearing to Dante
on the other?"
6
Learning of the plans for Sainte-Geneviève, Meissonier had approached Chennevières to let him know of his wish to participate. Chennevières later recalled how Meissonier's name was therefore put forward for consideration: "I can assure you," he claimed, "that no one began to laugh, and no one thought of the size of his paintings."
7
Meissonier thereby found himself, in the spring of 1874, engaged to decorate a thirty-nine-foot-high wall on the left side of the high altar with a scene entitled
The Liberation of Paris by Sainte-Geneviève.
He was duly given a history lesson by the church's abbot, who recounted the tale of how a barge loaded with bread destined for starving Parisians besieged by the Huns was miraculously saved from destruction after Sainte-Geneviève waved her arm and turned a jagged rock in the middle of the Seine into a serpent.
The story of Sainte-Geneviève and Attila the Hun had obvious resonances after the siege of Paris by the Prussians—all the more so given that General Trochu, the Military Governor of Paris during the siege, claimed Sainte-Geneviève had come to him in a vision, offering to save the city once again. Meissonier was less than enthused, however, about the pictorial possibilities of the episode of the rock and the serpent: "It really is impossible to get up any enthusiasm for such a theme!"
8
He was delighted, even so, at the prospect of decorating the wall of such an important building, and of proving himself in the most prestigious of all painting techniques. Yet the commission did raise a few eyebrows. Chennevières and his colleagues may not have laughed, but not everyone was so restrained at the thought of the "painter of Lilliput" tackling such a grand design. "Can one imagine a more absurd fantasy?" scoffed Pierre Véron, editor of
Le Charivari,
who predicted a disastrous outcome.
9
Mural painting presented enormous challenges to an artist. Working on the surface of a high wall or curved vault, where the design needed to be incorporated into the architecture, was a more complex and demanding operation than even the largest easel painting. More challenging still was a mastery of technique. Italian Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo had worked in the medium known as
buon fresco.
The
word fresco,
meaning "fresh," refers to the fact that the artist painted on a patch of wet plaster that was troweled onto the surface of the wall each day as he began work. The frescoist was forced to complete his scene, necessarily only a few feet square, in the eight or twelve hours in which this patch of plaster would dry. The technique had the advantage of durability, since the pigments would be, in effect, locked in stone once the plaster had dried. Yet it had the considerable disadvantage of requiring great speed and accuracy, since once the plaster dried the painter was unable to make corrections to his work, short of chipping it from the wall and starting again. For these reasons fresco was, according to one Italian Renaissance artist, "the most manly, most certain, most resolute and most durable" method of painting.
10
Few nineteenth-century mural painters worked in fresco, however. The exact technique, transmitted from master to pupil in Renaissance workshops, was no longer completely understood, especially outside Italy. When monumental frescoes were ordered in the 1840s for the embellishment of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament in London, the Commissioners on the Fine Arts were obliged to send the painter William Dyce to Italy to investigate the lost techniques of the Old Masters. Nor was the medium understood any better in France. When Delacroix received a commission to decorate a room in the Palais Bourbon, he understood so little of fresco painting that he went to a former Benedictine abbey in Normandy and conducted a series of experiments on its walls. The upshot of his investigations was a method very different from that practiced by Michelangelo and Raphael, whose technique did away with the need for binders such as oils, glues or egg whites. Delacroix, in contrast, developed a procedure by which he suspended his pigments in melted wax before adding them to the dry masonry. Better suited than fresco to the damper, cooler French climate, this wax emulsion allowed him the luxury of revising and retouching his mural. Likewise, when Ingres worked on his mural
The Golden Age
at the Château de Dampierre in the 1840s, he mixed his pigments with oil—something his idol Raphael would never have done—before adding them to dried plaster.
11
A proud and superlative craftsman, Meissonier no doubt looked forward to the numerous manual and technical stages of mural painting. Like any nineteenth-century muralist, however, he needed to experiment with techniques before going to work on his wall in Sainte-Geneviève. He also needed to bring together a team of painters to help him prepare designs and, when the time came, to assist him on the scaffold. Help was at hand, fortunately, as he conscripted into service both his son Charles and his pupil Lucien Gros. He then set about making the first studies and drawings for
The Liberation of Paris.
The elaborate preparations must have been daunting even for the painter of
Friedland,
since murals required not only scores of compositional sketches but also cartoons—full-scale drawings that served as the templates from which the final design was transferred to the wall. Murals were always, therefore, a labor of years. Ingres had executed as many as 500 separate drawings for
The Golden Age,
which consumed six years of work. Delacroix had spent seven years on his murals in the church of Saint-Sulpice, while Baudry's thirty-three scenes for Garnier's new opera house were almost ten years in the making. Hundreds, even thousands, of hours of work would therefore be required before the first brushstroke of paint could be added to the wall of Sainte-Geneviève, the thirty-nine-foot-high canvas across which Meissonier believed he would inscribe his magnificent legacy.
At the end of December 1873, four days after the appointment of Chennevières as Director of Fine Arts, a group of artists banded together to launch a new artistic enterprise that would coincide almost exactly with the mural commissions for Sainte-Geneviève. Courbet's exclusion from the 1872 Salon and his subsequent exile from France, as well as their prolonged disenchantment with the Salon system in general, had finally determined Camille Pissarro and his "nucleus of painters" to test their fortunes elsewhere.
Despite the onset of the moral order, by the end of 1873 the signs looked favorable for at least a few members of the École des Batignolles. Édouard Manet sold paintings worth 22,000 francs in the months following his success at the 1873 Salon, while Claude Monet had earned 24,800 francs from sales of his paintings over the previous twelve months, double his income for 1872. These sales had been possible in part because in 1873 the French economy was in remarkably rude health considering the events of the previous three years. In September 1873 the Germans, who had been occupying sixteen
départements,
finally left the country. Showing remarkable resilience, the French had discharged the entire five-billion-franc indemnity in a little more than two years. These reparations had been paid so promptly thanks largely to the profits from a booming wine industry, since Louis Pasteur had discovered that pasteurizing wine—briefly heating it to fifty-five degrees Celsius to kill off the microscopic organisms—made it last longer and travel better. The result was an increase in exports to countries such as Britain and America.