Aaron Wile

Mythologie galante, a sensual mode of mythological painting that is one the defining developments of eighteenth-century French art, is usually associated with aristocratic resistance to Louis XIV. This article examines three mythological paintings created by Charles de La Fosse for one of the king’s pleasure palaces in 1688, long identified as a major turning point towards mythologie galante, in order to reassess the origins and meaning of the genre. Situating the paintings within the long arc of Louis XIV’s representational politics, I propose that the collapse of the fiction of the king’s two bodies during the second half of his reign and the subsequent redefinition of the king’s public and private spheres allowed La Fosse to develop a new mythological idiom based in touch, intimacy, and sentiment. The resulting works contravened painting’s traditional role under absolutism to form royal subjects, redefining it as a medium of sympathetic encounter. La Fosse’s paintings open up, from this perspective, an alternate account of modern art and subjectivity – one that took shape not in opposition to absolutist culture but from its very heart.

In 2019 Girodet’s lost entry for the 1786 Grand prix de peinture came to light and was acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The painting, which depicts a rarely represented incident from the story of Coriolanus – a subject that may have had contemporary political relevance –
was not awarded the prize, probably because Girodet was regarded as being too close to Jacques- Louis David, a relationship to which the work may allude.

Cette étude se propose de réexaminer la peinture religieuse de Charles de La Fosse à la lumière de la notion de grâce, comprise dans sa double signification de secours surnaturel de Dieu et de charme indéfinissable. Les grâces divine et esthétique étaient intimement liées au début de l’époque moderne, mais, à la fin du xviie siècle, leur rapprochement était devenu intenable. S’appuyant sur une constellation de débats théologiques, artistiques et rhétoriques contemporains, notre étude tente d’expliquer en quoi la peinture religieuse de La Fosse est symptomatique des rapports de plus en plus ténus entre les deux conceptions. En s’attachant à intégrer ces dernières, ses peintures s’exposent aux problèmes que la grâce présente et en deviennent un véhicule involontaire de l’émergence d’une autonomie picturale moderne.

Watteau's fêtes galantes break with key aspects of academic art theory in early eighteenth-century France, particularly as put forward by Roger de Piles, to elicit an experience of reverie in the spectator. Watteau's formal innovations inaugurated a new relationship between painting and beholder that opened up a new sphere of subjective experience, linking the artist's enterprise with the rise of modern interiority.