![]() It followed from overarching principles of decorum or convenance, whereby the accessories of a composition were to be truthful and appropriate to the main subject and its time and place, and the pursuit of historical exactitude was certainly one way the artist could demonstrate his learning. The historical accuracy claimed by the genre archéologique, as practiced by the likes of Gérôme, had to some extent always been an important criterion for academic history painting. ![]() In the process, however, he redefined history painting as a private, subjective dream space that disrupted its traditional identity as an eminently public genre emphasizing discursive clarity and narrative legibility. As I will elaborate here, he conceived of this strategy as part of his broader efforts to reassert the rights of poetry and imagination in art and thereby reinvigorate the French tradition of history painting, which many mid-nineteenth-century commentators felt to be moribund. Against the supposed claims of such work to historical authenticity, Moreau formulated a principle of "archeological allegory," which entailed the use of archeological source material in highly eccentric, deliberately anachronistic ways in his compositions. One of the clearest artistic symptoms of this positivism for Moreau was the cultivation of archeological accuracy in popular modes of historical genre painting, evident in the painstakingly researched and rendered décors, furnishings, props and costumes of works like Ingres's Antiochus and Stratonice or the subsequent néo-grec paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme (figs. Heir to various idealist philosophical traditions, and also clearly anticipating later Symbolist ideology, Moreau persistently condemned his modern era as materialist and positivist. Recent scholarship, particularly the work of Peter Cooke, has done much to draw attention to Gustave Moreau's ambitions as a history painter in the French academic tradition, thereby challenging received notions of his position as an isolated precursor of Symbolism. Jean-Léon Gérôme, A Greek Interior, 1850. The immensity and ambiguity of these structures reinforces the sense of wonderment that inspired generations of artists, writers, and others to reassess the majesty and grandeur of classical design.Fig. Populated with indistinguishable figures that emphasize the scale and complexity of the scenes, the final series features greater detail and stronger tonal contrasts, enhancing the works’ sinister character. ![]() These etchings were issued as a collection of fourteen around 1749–50 and then reissued-after significant reworking-as a set of sixteen in 1761. The artist employed the same strategy-representing realistic settings imbued with an innovative creative spirit-in several other works. Chief among them is his highly unusual series of prints called Imaginary Prisons. Piranesi’s oeuvre reflects a singular combination of remarkable imagination and a deep understanding of construction, which helped to cultivate an unprecedented appreciation of Roman architecture. He derived the principal inspiration for this vast production of etchings from firsthand examinations of classical antiquities as well as from Renaissance and Baroque structures. The artist infused both conventional topographical scenes of wellknown buildings and ideal reconstructions with novel compositional devices, exaggerating scale and manipulating perspective through the use of multiple vanishing points. Throughout his career, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) produced carefully prepared views in and around Rome. ![]()
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