French Sculpture.

The tradition of stone sculpture appears to be very ancient in France, at least in the south, for some reliefs decorated with schematized figures, from Entremont (Aix, Mus. Granet) and Ensérune (Ensérune, Mus.; both 2nd century BC), for example, predate the arrival of the Romans in the mid-1st century BC. The Romans introduced monumental sculpture, as seen in the decoration of many triumphal arches, steles and statues, for example at ARAUSIO (Orange) and Arles . Votive objects in wood and terracotta were common, while bronzeworking is attested by figures of a local character. After the barbarian invasions of the 4th century AD, the practice of these crafts declined.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. Before c 1500.
B. c 1500-c 1600.
C. c 1600-c 1700.
D. c 1700-c 1814.
E. c 1814-c 1900.
F. After c 1900.

A. Before c 1500.
(1) Early medieval.
(2) Gothic.

(1) Early medieval.
Under the Merovingians the marble workshops of the Pyrenean quarries continued to produce sculpted capitals and sarcophagi, for example at JOUARRE ABBEY. Generally, however, stone sculpture was confined to reliefs for screens, as in the mid-7th-century choir-screen from St Pierre-aux-Nonnains, Metz (now Metz, Mus. A. & Hist.), decorated mainly with ornamental interlace, foliate and geometric motifs, although occasionally biblical subjects and Christian symbols appear. In the Carolingian period, stucco was also worked, for example at Germigny.
The development of stone sculpture in the 11th century did not follow a uniform progression. Shortly before 1050, at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire sculptors carved foliate capitals close to the Corinthian form, which were sometimes enlivened by narrative scenes. In Languedoc, apart from some early experiments in the Pyrenees, as at SAINT-GENIS-DES-FONTAINES, large-scale figure sculpture was developed only at the workshop of BERNARDUS GELDUINUS at St Sernin, Toulouse, at the end of the 11th century. The question of the beginnings of Romanesque sculpture in France is complicated by the difficulties of dating related buildings in northern Italy, but the Italian developments in sculpture must have preceded those of France. Cluny Abbey, however, by reason of its importance, must also have exercised a wide influence extending as far as Italy.
A monumental carving style first appeared on capitals. In Normandy and northern France, they were carved mainly with ornamental motifs, foliage, faces and interlace, then, towards the end of the 11th century, with geometric motifs. Elsewhere in France-on the Loire, in Burgundy and Languedoc-historiated capitals appear, but the first great sculptured portals are found only from c. 1100. One of the earliest, the Porte Miègeville at St Sernin, Toulouse, bears the Ascension on the lintel and tympanum. The portal at St Pierre, Moissac is subdivided by a carved trumeau and bears themes drawn from the Apocalyptic vision, with a deeper relief in the upper part to render the carvings more visible. The figures are placed hierarchically and are packed in to fill the surface. No attempts were made realistically to represent proportion and expression, nor anatomy, draperies and perspective. Romanesque sculpture consists of highly schematized scenes, which respond to spiritual rather than to naturalistic concerns.
Sculptors' styles were remarkably varied, however, and there are great differences between the angular, agitated figures at Autun Cathedral in Burgundy and the more massive and static appearance of either the cloister figures at Moissac in Languedoc or in the sculpture at Ste Foy, Conques, in the Rouergue. Furthermore, large religious scenes on portals and capitals were mixed with a fantastic repertory of animals, monsters and hybrid figures, which reveal popular traditions, eastern influences and barbarian and pagan reminiscences. In Burgundy, sculpture from Cluny Abbey (the hemicycle capitals and fragments from the west portal; influenced the whole region. Its sense of relief, dynamism and attention to expression are seen also at the portals of Ste Madeleine, Vézelay, as well as at Autun, where the Last Judgement is, quite exceptionally, signed, by GISLEBERTUS. In western France, in Poitou and Saintonge, portals rarely have tympana but the archivolts and wall surfaces of façades are covered with reliefs and friezes, as at ST PIERRE, AULNAY, and Notre-Dame-la-Grande, Poitiers. South-eastern France is characterized by sculpture of Classical inspiration at SAINT-GILLES-DU-GARD ABBEY and at St Trophîme, Arles, where figures in high relief stand under architraves.
For carving in wood, lime, poplar and walnut were most popular. Some remarkable large-scale statues in wood were produced in this period: Virgin-reliquaries seated on thrones, for example at St Philibert, Tournus and Saint-Nectaire (Puy-de-Dôme), and coloured figures of the crucified Christ, as at St Pierre, Moissac, and Le Puy. These stylized and hieratic figures, with their simplified facial features, have a profoundly religious grandeur.

(2) Gothic.
Gothic sculpture originated in the Ile-de-France at the same time as the new architectural style, in the mid-12th century, while Romanesque was still perpetuated in southern France. The portals of SAINT-DENIS ABBEY are mutilated, but the west ('Royal') portal of Chartres Cathedral exemplifies the new style. The hierarchical positioning of the figures and the stylized forms are Romanesque characteristics, but these are now combined with rigorous composition and the perfect adaptation of the sculptures to the architectural setting: column statues fit their embrasures exactly; tympana are less crammed with figures; reliefs are more vigorous and the iconographic programme is more coherent. This style was highly influential in the second half of the 12th century, with repercussions as far away as Santiago de Compostela Cathedral (Portica de la Gloria) in northern Spain.
Around 1200 the influence of Classical sculpture is suggested by attempts to represent more coordinated and supple forms, idealized facial types and fine, simple draperies. This style can be seen at Sens Cathedral and, at the beginning of the 13th century, on the transept portals of Chartres Cathedral (see Chartres, fig. 4) and in the Visitation workshop on the west front of Reims Cathedral. Iconographic themes had also evolved. The Coronation of the Virgin, represented for the first time at Senlis Cathedral (c. 1170), was connected with the Glorification of Christ and the Triumph of the Church. In the 13th century, additional subjects included local saints, biblical scenes and the illustration of scientific knowledge and daily life. The façade of Amiens Cathedral constitutes a typical example of the monumental sculpture of the great cathedrals: the trumeau Christ (the 'Beau Dieu') and the Last Judgement on the central portal are flanked by portals dedicated to the Virgin and to diocesan saints. Figure sculpture was henceforth reserved for façades and abandoned on capitals.
Towards the middle of the 13th century, statuary on portals and in interiors became more independent of the architecture, at the cathedrals of Reims and Bourges, for example, and the Apostles in the Sainte-Chapelle. Later medieval portals show a development towards more ornamental forms: niches with tall canopies, pierced tympana and low-relief panels. Tombs were surmounted by effigies, and altarpieces, initially of modest size, grew increasingly larger.
The styles of sculpture also changed and reflected the evolution of contemporary thought. Figures were humanized and became more animated and expressive, as in the work of the JOSEPH MASTER and Reims at Reims Cathedral in the mid-13th century. Although verisimilitude of facial features and perspective were not predominant artistic concerns, effigies and donor statues demonstrate an increasing interest in portraiture. At the same time a style characterized by elegant, idealized figures with elongated proportions and sinuous forms was emerging, which can already be seen in the Virgin (c. 1250) on the north-transept portal of Notre-Dame, Paris. It has been associated with the tastes of princely patrons, and in the 14th century it was combined with artistic influences from Italy, notably through contact with Angevin Naples and the Avignon papacy, to form the so-called International Gothic, a courtly, refined and slightly unreal style, represented in such sculptures as the fireplace statues in the hall of Jean, Duc de Berry's palace in Poitiers. There was also more secular sculpture in the 14th century, the result of increasing lay patronage; and owing to the survival of royal and aristocratic accounts, the names of sculptors begin to be known, many revealing Netherlandish origins: JEAN PÉPIN DE HUY, JEAN DE LIÈGE (I), ANDRÉ BEAUNEVEU of Valenciennes and JEAN DE CAMBRAI.
From the end of the 14th century, a new stylistic tradition, characterized by agitated gestures and movements, and coarser, more sorrowful expressions, developed alongside this courtly style. Religious crisis, the misfortunes brought on by epidemics and war, and a more personal devotional emphasis have all been associated with its formation. New subjects were represented, first in eastern France: the Virgin of Mercy, the Ecce homo and the Entombment. The style is exemplified especially in the work of CLAUS SLUTER, who arrived (c. 1385) at the Burgundian court in Dijon from the Netherlands. The statues of his ducal patrons for the portal and the prophets for the Well of Moses at the Charterhouse of Champmol introduced a new realism, which was combined with a lyrical vigour in the voluminous, deep and strongly shadowed draperies.
The influence of Sluter's honest and dramatic style is seen in all subsequent 15th-century sculpture. The Burgundian court at Dijon became an international centre, where Sluter's nephew, Claus de Werve from the northern Netherlands, Juan de la Huerta from Spain and Antoine Le Moiturier from France succeeded one another as ducal sculptors. A more elegant and sober style was maintained in the Bourbonnais and the Loire Valley with Jacques Morel, to whom is sometimes attributed the delightful alabaster effigy of Agnès Sorel (d 1450) in Loches Castle, and with Michel Colombe, sculptor of the funerary monument of Francis II, Duke of Brittany, and his Wife, Marguerite de Foix (1499-1507) in Nantes Cathedral. The two influences spread, sometimes juxtaposed, as in the statues of the Albi Cathedral choir-screen, or even combined, as in the Entombment (1496) in the Benedictine abbey church at Solesmes. The design of the Entombment shows, moreover, the arrival in France of Italian decorators, who executed the framing pilasters and introduced Renaissance motifs into France. The first wave of Italian influence was in Provence, geographically close to Italy, where Francesco Laurana was summoned from Naples by René I, Duke of Anjou, and where, in Avignon and Marseille, he worked until 1481. In Normandy, Cardinal Georges I d'Amboise, Archbishop of Rouen and Viceroy of Milan, brought Italian sculptors to the château of Gaillon, where they worked from 1502. In the Ile-de-France and the Loire Valley they were imported by Charles VIII (reg 1483-98) and Louis XII (reg 1498-1515) in the aftermaths of their campaigns in Italy. Guido Mazzoni was the first Italian Renaissance sculptor to work at the French Court, arriving from Naples in 1495. His major work, the tomb of Charles VIII in Saint-Deris Abbey, near Paris, sculpted after the King's death in 1498, was destoryed in 1798, but engravings show a sarcophagus, a kneeling king and four angels of a somewhat French pattern, with Italianate roundels along the sides.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
H. Focillon: L'Art des sculpteurs romans (Paris, 1931)
A. Gardner: Medieval Sculpture in France (Cambridge, 1931)
M. Aubert: La Sculpture française au moyen-âge (Paris, 1946)
E. Panofsky: Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St Denis and its Art Treasures (New Jersey, 1946)
L. Reau: L'Art réligieux du moyen âge: La Sculpture (Paris, 1946)
J. Evans: Art in Medieval France (London, 1948)
L. Lefrancois-Pillion: L'Art du XIVe siècle en France (Paris, 1954)
T. Muller: Sculpture in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain, 1400-1500, Pelican Hist. A. (Harmondsworth, 1966)
R. Branner: Chartres Cathedral (New York, 1969)
Y. Christe: Les Grands Portails romans (Geneva, 1969)
W. Forsyth: The Entombment of Christ: French Sculptures of the XVth and XVIth Centuries (Cambridge, 1970)
W. Sauerländer: Gotische Skulptur in Frankreich, 1140-1270 (Munich and Paris, 1970; Eng. trans., London, 1972)
Les Fastes du gothique: Le Siècle de Charles V (exh. cat., ed. F. Baron; Paris, Grand Pal., 1981)
E. Vergnolle: Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire et la sculpture du XIe siècle (Paris, 1985)

2. c 1500-c 1600.
At Cardinal Georges I d'Amboise's château at Gaillon the influence of Italian artists was felt initially through imported works of art, heralded by the arrival in 1506 of the Garden Fountain (dismantled 1759) carved specifically for the location by Antonio della Porta and his nephew Pace Gagini. The tomb of Raoul de Lannoy and Jeanne de Poix (1507-8) in the parish church of Folleville in Picardy, also carved in Italy by della Porta and Gagini, is decorated along the face of the monument with roundels, flanked with putti, in a chastely simple manner that is characteristically Italian and oddly at variance with the richly ornamented Gothic niche in which the sarcophagus has been placed. In the Ile-de-France a series of royal tombs commissioned from Italian sculptors by Charles VIII, Louis XII and Francis I introduced a national taste for the Italian manner, generally modified through the continuance of local traditions. The tomb commissioned in 1502 by Louis XII from Girolamo Viscardi of Genoa and other Italian sculptors in memory of the dukes of Orléans (ex-church of the Celestine, Paris; Saint-Denis Abbey) is derived from a French type, with a reclining figure on the sarcophagus. However, the tomb's most striking feature, the Twelve Apostles in classical niches along the sides of the sarcophagus, inserted in the place of the traditional weepers, has no precedent in French art. Louis XII's own tomb in Saint-Denis, commissioned by Francis I from Antonio Giusti (1479-1519) and Giovanni Giusti (1485-1549) and completed in 1531, is even more frankly Italianate, translating the traditional French gisants into Italian statuettes and emphasizing the four sides of the monument with large statues of seated Virtues facing outwards, suggesting some knowledge of Michelangelo's designs for the tomb of Julius II (completed 1547; Rome, S Pietro in Vincoli).
The first French sculptor to imitate the Italians with equal skill was Michel Colombe, although his development is difficult to assess, since the earliest surviving sculptures with which his name is associated were made in the early 16th century when he was already in his sixties. The most elaborate is the funerary monument of Francis II, Duke of Brittany, and his Wife, Marguerite de Foix (1499-1507; Nantes Cathedral; for illustration. It was originally attributed to Jérôme de Fiesole, who may have been responsible for some of the Italianate details, while the involvement of the painter Jean Perréal, who had a knowledge of contemporary Italian painting and who is accredited with the general design of the monument, must also explain some of the Italian influence in the ornament. Nevertheless, the conception of the tomb, flanked with the four Cardinal Virtues, is purely French and is derived from the vigorous tradition of Gothic sculpture in the area around Tours, where Colombe is recorded as being active from 1473. The result is a remarkably homogeneous fusion of influences. Colombe's relief altarpiece of St George and the Dragon, carved within a frame of arabesques and bucrania by Jérôme Pacherot, was commissioned by Cardinal Georges I d'Amboise for the chapel at the château of Gaillon. It is more purely Italianate and probably reflects both the taste of the Cardinal and the concentration of work by Italian sculptors in Normandy in the period when it was carved.
During the early part of the 16th century most of the secular work inspired by Italian sources tended to be ornamental, while religious work tended to be figurative. This tendency was dramatically altered by the advent of the second generation of Italian sculptors in France, centred on Francis I's new château at Fontainebleau (rebuilding and enlargements begun 1528: ROSSO FIORENTINO arrived in 1530 to work there, and FRANCESCO PRIMATICCIO came in 1532. The Galerie François I in the château, with its rich combination of panels in fresco and stucco figures in high relief, marked the arrival of a wall-painting tradition deriving from the work of Raphael, Michelangelo and Giulio Romano, in which the element of sculpture was given a new emphasis. Although stone-carving played little part in the work at Fontainebleau, the elegant, elongated figures in stucco, which have an essential role in the overall aesthetic effect, had a lasting influence on the French tradition of sculpture in stone or bronze.
The development of this distinctively French variant of international MANNERISM was reinforced by the arrival of Benvenuto Cellini at the French Court in 1540. The two certain works that survive from his stay in France, the Nymph of Fontainebleau (c. 1542-3; Paris, Louvre) and the gold and enamel salt of Francis I (1540-43; Vienna, Kunsthistoriche. Museum.; benvenuto, show a debt to Michelangelo's reclining allegorical figures on the Medici tombs (begun 1521) in the New Sacristy of S Lorenzo, Florence, transforming them into an elegant, decorative ideal that was much admired and imitated in France long after Cellini had returned to Italy in 1545. The style was developed by PIERRE BONTEMPS, who worked with Primaticcio at Fontainebleau; by JACQUIOT PONCE, who collaborated on the tombs of Francis I (1559-62) and Henry II and Catherine de' Medici (both Saint-Denis Abbey;); by Jean Goujon, whose high-relief sculpture (1552-5; in situ but restored) on the Cour Carrée of the Palais du Louvre and reliefs (vertical ones in situ; horizontal ones Paris, Louvre; see Goujon, jean,) on the Fountain of the Innocents (1547-9; Paris, Place des Innocents; see Fountain,) transposed the style of the Fontainebleau stuccoists to Paris; and by GERMAIN PILON, much of whose work derives from his early association with Primaticcio. Although Pilon's style shares a common source with Goujon's, the former's sculpture marks a break with the linear, elegant manner of the latter, adopting an expressive realism in his tomb sculptures for Henry II and Chancellor René de Birague (bronze, 1584-5) and Valentine Balbiani (marble, 1573-4; both Paris, Louvre). This realism was widely imitated by his followers, including Barthélemy Prieur in the bronze Monument for the Heart of Constable Anne de Montmorency (1571; Paris, Louvre) and the marble and bronze wall monument to Christophe de Thou (1582-5; Paris, Louvre; Saint-Denis Abbey) and Barthélemy Tremblay, Simon Guillain and Jean Warin, whose work continued the tradition of Pilon well into the 17th century.
C. c 1600-c 1700.
As the importance of Fontainebleau declined in the early 1600s, portraiture became the most significant form of sculpture. The most important work of this period, Giambologna's bronze equestrian statue of Henry IV (destr. 1796), erected on the Pont Neuf in Paris in 1614, was the first in a line of equestrian portraits of successive monarchs from Henry IV to Louis XVI, all ultimately derived from the antique statue of Marcus Aurelius (2nd century AD; Rome, Mus. Capitolino). Apart from Bernini, whose brief visit to Paris in 1665 led to the production of an absurdly unsatisfactory equestrian statue of Louis XIV, which was later altered by François Girardon but survives in the gardens at the château of Versailles, Italian sculptors were not, on the whole, employed by the French Court after 1614. However, Italian influences remained so strong in the early decades of the 17th century that it is difficult to distinguish a specifically French style of sculpture that was distinct from the Italian or Italo-Flemish manner prevalent in French sculpture during this period. For example, the robust elegance of the four bronze Slaves, made by Pietro Francavilla for the base of the statue of Henry IV on the Pont Neuf but not cast until 1618, betrays the sculptor's training in the studio of Giambologna and is characteristic of the Mannerist tendency in French sculpture, which remained strong in Paris until the return of JACQUES SARAZIN from Rome in 1628. Sarazin had worked in Rome since 1610 and had acquired first-hand knowledge of the work of Carlo Maderno, Domenichino and François Du Quesnoy. Like Simon Vouet, who returned from Rome in the same period and became an important influence on the next generation of painters, Sarazin established the classicizing ideals of early 17th-century Italian art in France through his many pupils. His quiet manner, combining solid academic forms, lightly idealized, with ample, well-modelled draperies, partly based on the Antique, adapted easily to different circumstances and was equally effective in the architectural sculpture on the Pavillon de l'Horloge of the Palais du Louvre; in the four large stucco angels on the high altar of St Nicolas-des-Champs, Paris (c. 1629; in situ); or in the bronze groups designed by him for the Monument for the Heart of Henri II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé (1648-63; ex-St Paul-St Louis, Paris; Chantilly, Musee Condé; for illustratiions. . These works are all characterized by a formal beauty, combined with study from the model and a classical restraint, which dominated sculpture in the second half of the 17th century.
Contemporary Italian sculpture also influenced work in Paris, largely through the brothers François Anguier and Michel Anguier and their younger contemporary PIERRE PUGET, who went to Italy long after Sarazin had returned and absorbed the later influences of Bernini, Alessandro Algardi and Pietro da Cortona. Puget, probably the most accomplished sculptor of the three, might have filled a role equal to that taken by Charles Le Brun in Court painting, but Jean-Baptiste Colbert's refusal to employ him in the team of sculptors at the château of Versailles limited his immediate influence. His Milo of Crotona Attacked by a Lion (marble, 1670-82; Paris, Louvre), which combined elements of Bernini's work with a debt to the antique Laokoon (Rome, Vatican, Mus. Pio-Clementino), brought him a late celebrity when it was set up in the gardens at Versailles. However, he did not follow this with work of much significance, and his Italianate Baroque style was short-lived.
The huge enterprise at Versailles, which became the focus of French sculpture in the second half of the 17th century, was dominated by Sarazin's pupils. The earliest sculptural work was commissioned for the gardens in the early 1660s, changing as the design for the château and the gardens became more ambitious. In the first instance the work was confined to decorative terms and a handful of statues, executed by Louis Lerambert II, the Anguier brothers, Thibault Poissant, Nicolas Legendre, Philippe de Buyster and others. However, when Colbert placed Le Brun in control of the overall planning in 1666, important commissions were awarded to Le Brun's protégés, the sculptors FRANÇOIS GIRARDON, Thomas Regnaudin, Gaspard Marsy, Balthazard Marsy and Jean Tuby.
In the same year Colbert sent Charles Errard le fils to Rome as the first director of the new Académie de France. Most of the great names among the sculptors of the succeeding generations (Nicolas Coustou, Robert Le Lorrain, Edme Bouchardon, Lambert-Sigisbert Adam (ii), René-Michel Slodtz and their successors) went to this academy, having won the Prix de Rome in France. This system made an institution from a practice common for nearly a century and ensured the continuing influence of contemporary Italian art and Classical sculpture on the work of French sculptors.
Like his many rivals, Girardon had been to Rome in the late 1640s. His debt to the classicizing style of Sarazin is evident in the marble group Apollo Tended by the Nymphs, commissioned from him in 1666 for the Grotto of Thetis at Versailles (moved to the Bosquet des Bains d'Apollon, 1774), which is replete with references to the Antique but is composed more like a painting than a sculpture. Similarly, Girardon's relief of the Bath of Nymphs (lead, formerly gilded, 1668-70; in situ) for the gardens at Versailles is like a translation into sculpture of Domenichino's Diana with Nymphs at Play (1618; Rome, Gal. Borghese). His Rape of Proserpina (marble, 1677-99; Versailles, Château) is derived from Bernini's group of the same subject (1621-2; Rome, Gal. Borghese) but is tamed by a certain restraint that 17th-century French sculptors habitually imposed on the freer inventions of their Italian contemporaries.
Girardon remained the most prominent of the sculptors working at Versailles until he was eclipsed by ANTOINE COYZEVOX, whose lighter manner was more in keeping with the direction of Court taste after the fall of Le Brun than the formalized style of Girardon. Coyzevox's style derives from the same sources-Sarazin, Bernini and the Antique-but of these, the Antique was the least sustained. Unusually, he had not been to Italy, and he acquired his knowledge of Bernini at second-hand or through Bernini's portrait bust of Louis XIV (1665; Versailles, Château), which became the pattern for his own many portrait busts. His monuments for the tombs of Cardinal Mazarin (with Jean Tuby and Etienne Le Hongre; 1689-93; Paris, Chapel of the Inst. France; and Jean-Baptiste Colbert (with Tuby; 1685-93; Paris, St Eustache) include bronze figures that derive from Sarazin but have an added liveliness.

4. c 1700-c 1814.
Sculpture, more than any other art in 18th-century France, depended on the patronage of the Crown, and with the suspension of the work at Versailles in the last years of the 17th century, the scope for new sculpture was restricted. The laying out of gardens (begun 1679) for the royal residence at the château of MARLY (1679-83; destr. 19th century) provided new opportunities for Antoine Coyzevox and for the younger generation of the Coustou brothers, Nicolas and Guillaume and for RENÉ FRÉMIN and ROBERT LE LORRAIN. These sculptors followed the pattern of François Girardon and his contemporaries, making the obligatory trip to Rome and returning to France more ostensibly influenced by the work of Bernini and 17th-century painters than by the works of the Ancients. The sculptures commissioned for Marly are, in the main, light-hearted, following the example of Coyzevox's Flora, Pan and a Hamadryad (all Paris, Louvre), commissioned in 1708 to form a group with Nicolas Coustou's seated marble figures of Adonis, the Nymph with a Quiver and the Nymph with a Dove (all 1708-10; Paris, Louvre). Nicolas Coustou's Apollo and Guillaume Coustou's Daphne (both 1711-14; Paris, Louvre) were directly inspired by Bernini's Apollo and Daphne (1622-4; Rome, Gal. Borghese). The pair of horse-tamers (marble, 1739-45; both Paris, Louvre; copies Paris, Place de la Concorde, sculpted by Guillaume Coustou towards the end of his life for Marly, seem, self-consciously, to mark his distance from Coyzevox, who had made a pair of horses earlier for the site, which were found to be too small (marble, 1701-2; both Paris, Louvre; copies Paris, Jard. Tuileries). Coyzevox's pair soar upwards, with figures of Fame and Mercury lightly perched on their backs. Coustou's pair are completely different in character, more in the heroic manner of Pierre Puget's work, which was admired in the 18th century and imitated in academic circles but was not, otherwise, taken as a model for public monuments, where charm and elegance were in higher favour. For most of Guillaume Coustou's life, the influence of Coyzevox was dominant. The work of Coyzevox's pupil Jean-Louis Lemoyne was a continuation of his master's style well into the 18th century, adding impressionistic effects that appear to have been inspired by contemporary painting. His Baptism of Christ (1731; Paris, St Roch) is composed like a painting, with a frontal emphasis and unified, pictorial effect. This is also evident in Robert Le Lorrain's relief of the Horses of Apollo on the former stables of the Hôtel de Rohan, Paris (1736-7; in situ), which creates an effect of dramatic turmoil within a shallow space. This tendency was inspired, above all, by the example of Bernini, whose attempt to create a synthesis of painting, architecture and sculpture attracted imitators at the Académie de France in Rome. The work of René-Michel Slodtz and also of Lambert-Sigisbert Adam sometimes depends directly on Bernini. Adam's Neptune Calming the Waves (Paris, Louvre), his morceau de réception for admission to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1737, was deeply marked by the bravura of Bernini's original, which Adam, with his brother Nicolas-Sébastien Adam, turned to again in the Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite (lead, completed 1740) for the Bassin de Neptune in the gardens at Versailles.
Adam's reputation did not survive the mid-century reaction against this style of sculpture, when the less theatrical manner of Edme Bouchardon became fashionable among connoisseurs. Bouchardon had won the Prix de Rome in 1722 and accompanied his fellow prizewinner, Adam, to Italy in 1723. While Adam competed successfully for public commissions in Rome (he was the original choice as sculptor to execute the Trevi Fountain), Bouchardon made his reputation by making marble portrait busts. The fountain in the Rue de Grenelle, the work that first brought him success in Paris, was commissioned by the city in 1739. Although not universally liked, it decisively marked the beginning of a reaction against Adam's style. The seated figure of the city of Paris at the centre of the group, reminiscent of the antique figure of Rome on the Capitoline Hill (in situ), is dwarfed by the large, severely simple base. The low reliefs of putti, representing the Seasons, on left and right of the main group, recall 17th-century prints by Charles Errard le fils and Jacques Stella, or François Du Quesnoy's famous relief of the Bacchanale of Children (1626; Rome, Gal. Doria-Pamphili) and suggest an inclination towards the art of the grand siècle, which underlies a number of aspects of the mid-century reaction against the Rococo. Much of Bouchardon's later work was not completed, and his reputation rested less on what he achieved and more on what he came to represent in the reaction against the Rococo that gathered strength in the 1750s. The fountain in the Rue de Grenelle closely anticipates the forms of architecture, sculpture and the decorative arts that became fashionable in the middle decades of the century through the efforts of Bouchardon's friends and admirers, the Comte de Caylus, Charles-Nicolas Cochin and the Abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc. The naturalism, smooth finish and simple, circular base of Bouchardon's Cupid Cutting a Bow out of Hercules' Club (marble, completed 1750; Paris, Louvre; is an early example of the style of sculpture in high favour at Court in the 1750s, with the emergence of LOUIS-CLAUDE VASSÉ, Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain, Guillaume Coustou, JACQUES-FRANÇOIS-JOSEPH SALY, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Jean-Jacques Caffiéri, and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle.
ETIENNE-MAURICE FALCONET, who characterized this reaction towards nature, simplicity and the Antique more than any other sculptor, was not obviously prepared for this role by his background. Taught by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, the least 'antique' of French sculptors, he never visited Italy and took Puget's Milo of Crotona Attacked by a Lion (1670-82; Paris, Louvre) as his early model. However, he responded to the new 'Greek' taste of the 1750s, publicly despised the work of Bernini (which he could hardly have known) and produced figures of nymphs and bathers, smoothly finished with a sensuous elegance that is the equivalent in sculpture of Joseph-Marie Vien's classicizing naturalism in painting. These figures translated easily into porcelain statuettes that were produced at the Sèvres factory, where Falconet was appointed director of the sculpture studios in 1757. Through Sèvres the new style was popularized and was above all pioneered in interior decoration and the decorative arts, where the extremes of Rococo had always been much more visible than in the world of sculpture, which remained closely linked throughout to academic principles. Jean-Baptiste Pigalle was the frankest naturalist of this generation. The subject of his marble and bronze tomb of Maurice, Maréchal de Saxe (1753-76; Strasbourg, St Thomas), is Baroque in inspiration but transformed in every detail by the study of nature. Pigalle's marble statue of Voltaire, Nude (1770-76; Paris, Louvre) represents the extreme instance of this tendency to rework traditional antique themes from nature.
The naturalism of Pigalle and his contemporaries found expression in portraiture, which was practised in the second half of the 18th century with new concentration by artists who produced some of its most memorable works. The series of sculpted portraits of the Great Men of France (the 'Grands Hommes'), inaugurated by the Comte d'ANGIVILLER in 1777, was the equivalent in sculpture of the paintings from national history that he commissioned in the hope that they would encourage virtuous emulation among the citizens of France. The commissions were distributed among the best and most promising sculptors: Clodion, PIERRE JULIEN, Caffiéri, JEAN-BAPTISTE STOUF, Charles-Antoine Bridan LOUIS-PHILIPPE MOUCHY, Jean-Guillaume Moitte, AUGUSTIN PAJOU, Jean-Antoine Houdon and others. Only 27 of the series were completed and they were never installed together as Angiviller had planned. Nevertheless, the enterprise, like a number of Angiviller's initiatives, had far-reaching consequences in the history of public statuary in France and elsewhere.
JEAN-ANTOINE HOUDON, whose early career in Rome seemed to promise a career in figurative sculpture, became a specialist in portraiture, sculpting a large number of marble busts and a smaller number of full-length figures-straightforward likenesses-to which he added a vitality and spontaneity that recall the pastels of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Apart from his Flayed Man (or Ecorché au bras tendu; plaster version, 1766-7; Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein; later and modified bronze version, Paris, Ecole N. Sup. Beaux-Arts.), which became a staple accessory in art classes throughout Europe, his remaining works, including Winter (c. 1783-5; Montpellier, Mus. Fabre) and his elegant Diana the Huntress (plaster version, 1776; Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein; later marble and bronze versions, Lisbon, Mus. Gulbenkian; Paris, Louvre; San Marino, CA, Huntington Lib. & A.G;), are exercises in the graceful style of Falconet and his contemporaries, which Pajou and Pierre Julien practised successfully through the reign of Louis XVI into the Revolutionary period.
The career of CLODION, Houdon's contemporary at the Académie de France in Rome, was established largely outside the world of official commissions by supplying the collectors' market with terracotta statuettes of nymphs, satyrs and putti derived from the types of Boucher's paintings and Falconet's statues and reduced to a pleasing formula. Before the Revolution, Clodion was involved in two major decorative schemes, supplying statues, along with Houdon and LOUIS-SIMON BOIZOT, for the dining-room of the Château de Maisons and reliefs on the façade of a courtyard in the Hôtel Bourbon-Condé in Paris. The reliefs of putti in the courtyard recall Bouchardon's reliefs in the Rue de Grenelle but, like Bouchardon, Clodion returned to the 17th century for his model, taking his ideas from Poussin and Du Quesnoy. On a superficial assessment, his art seems the type of frivolous decoration that might have been condemned by the taste of the Revolutionary era. Although Clodion survived unscathed, the loss of rich patrons was a severe blow to him, as it was to all artists; he responded by turning more intensively than ever to producing his terracotta statuettes, which were evidently popular throughout the Directory (1795-9) and the Consulate (1799-1804).
With the revival of public works in the Consulate and the First Empire (1804-14), Clodion received for the first time an important share in State commissions. The building works of the Empire, in particular, provided work for sculptors on an unprecedented scale: work on the Panthéon, the Palais du Luxembourg, the Louvre, the Vendôme column and numerous lesser monuments and buildings in Paris required the assistance of an army of sculptors. Series of portrait busts for the Senate in the Palais du Luxembourg and for the Palais des Tuileries (destr. 1871), and portraits of the Emperor Napoleon and his courtiers and their families made this a golden age for portrait sculptors. Despite the hostility of Jacques-Louis David, Houdon's portraits also survived the Revolution. On occasion, he showed a willingness to adapt to changing taste: in his terracotta herm bust of Napoleon as Emperor (1806; Dijon, Mus. Beaux -Arts.) he placed the subject on a rectangular base, undraped, like an ancient Roman emperor, in keeping with the fashionable simplicity of early 19th-century sculpture. His talent for such portraits was widely admired, but his Diana of 1776, of which he exhibited a bronze version in 1802, was criticized for lacking the 'ideal and severe character' that was expected from images inspired by myth and ancient history.
At the end of the 18th century, the Antique set a standard for judging and executing sculpture to an unprecedented extent. It had always been admired and used as a source of inspiration since the reign of Francis I but did not become an exclusive source of ideas until the late 18th century, when Roman statues, above all, provided artists with a repertory of models. The contribution of Jean-Guillaume Moitte to Angiviller's series of the Great Men, his statue of Jean-Dominique Cassini (Paris, Mus. Observatoire) commissioned in 1787 represents the subject in the guise of an antique philosopher, barefoot and draped in a cloak that covers his knees like a toga. This work anticipated a host of statues, sculpted over the next two decades, which were similarly based on the work of the Ancients, sometimes to the point of pastiche. This tendency was appropriately seen in its purest form among the statues commissioned for the Senate in the Palais du Luxembourg, Paris, which included Cincinnatus (Paris, Palace Luxembourg) by Antoine-Denis Chaudet, Camillus by Pierre-Charles Bridan and Aristides (plaster, exh. Salon 1804; untraced) by PIERRE CARTELLIER, all imitated from the free-standing statuary of ancient Rome. As a consequence, the nature and value of ancient sculpture were never more hotly debated than they were during this period, when the Antique became a measure by which all statuary was judged. The severity and heroism of ancient art was admired and imitated, but its grace and elegance, the qualities in which Clodion excelled, were equally admired, promoting a fashion for a smooth ideal that is as common in the paintings of Anne-Louis Girodet and his followers as it is in the sculpture of the First Empire. It was not the grace of Houdon's Diana that disturbed critics at the Salon of 1802 but the inappropriate realism and modernity of the figure. If Bernini was out of fashion in 1802, so too was the realism that succeeded his influence in French sculpture of the mid-18th century. In Italy Antonio Canova's art followed a similar path, from the early naturalism of Daedalus and Icarus (1778-9; Venice, Correr) to the polished Hellenistic ideal of Cupid Awakening Psyche (1783-93; Paris, Louvre; replica with variations, 1794-6; St Petersburg, Hermitage. In 1802 Canova was invited to Paris by Napoleon to sculpt his portrait, but his influence had preceded him. By this date he was the most famous living sculptor in Europe, and echoes of his work appear in numerous paintings and sculptures in France at the turn of the century. Canova's polished, graceful ideal is also found in Chaudet's Cupid Playing with a Butterfly (completed by Cartellier, exh. Salon 1817; Paris, Louvre), in François-Joseph Bosio's Nymph Salmacis, in Cartellier's Modesty (marble, exh. Salon 1808; Amsterdam, Hist. Mus.), in Psyche and Zephyr (1814; Paris, Louvre) by Henri-Joseph Ruxthiel (1775-1837) and in Joseph Chinard's portrait busts of Juliette Récamier (marble, life-size, 1802; Lyon, Mus. B.-A.;and Fanny Perrin with the Attributes of Psyche (Clermont-Ferrand, Mus. Bargoin). The cult of the Antique brought the question of contemporary costume and the virtue of nudity more sharply into focus than ever before. The sculptors, supported by Canova's friend and admirer Quatremère de Quincy, insisted on the heroic ideal, in opposition to elements at Court who argued the case for modern dress. The Emperor's rejection in 1811 of Canova's monumental nude portrait (1803-6; London, Apsley House; bronze replica, 1809; Milan, Brera; put an effective stop to this tendency, but it did not imply dismissal of all aspects of Canova's art, which was admired, as Girodet's paintings were, for some years after the fall of the Empire. Indeed, such sculptors as Jean-Pierre Cortot and the arch-classicist François-Joseph Bosio continued to practise Canova's ideals during the period of the Bourbon Restoration (1815-30), producing works that adapted the classical ideal of imperial allegory to serve the alliance of Monarchy and Church. Reaction against Canova and the sculptors of his generation finally came during the late 1820s and early 1830s in France.

E. c 1814-c 1900.
(1) Influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
(2) Public statuary and the influence of government.
(3) Romanticism, academicism and 'national' sculpture.
(4) Challenges to Beaux-Arts classicism.

(1) Influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
For the greater part of the 19th century French sculpture was dominated by the training of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Although histories of painting in the period have largely dismissed the Ecole as retardatory and nugatory, for sculpture-always more dependent on 'official' support-it was crucial. Its hegemony was challenged by the more artisanal courses offered by the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin (or 'Petite Ecole'), especially after 1831 when Jean-Hilaire Belloc (1786-1866) took over the direction of this lesser rival, but up to the 1880s the history of French sculpture is preponderantly the history of the winners of the Prix de Rome: David d'Angers, François Rude, James Pradier, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Henri Chapu, Alexandre Falguière, Louis-Ernest Barrias and Antonin Mercié.
By mid-century it was increasingly felt that the series of concours (competitions) punctuating the curriculum and culminating in the Prix de Rome were an outdated and inaccurate yardstick for gauging student potential. An attempt to reform the system in 1863 largely misfired, the reformers only partially succeeding in their aim of breaking the hold of the Institut de France over the Ecole, since most of the professors were members of both bodies. They did, however, bring to an end the system of apprenticeship, in which students had learnt their craft in the private studios of their chosen masters, and sculpture studios were established within the Ecole itself. An attempt to modify the concours and the regulations affecting envois (works sent back from Rome by prizewinners) foundered against strong internal opposition. The rigours of the training in Paris, based on study from life and from antique models, were somewhat lessened when the successful student reached Rome; there is conspicuously greater variety in sculptors' Roman envois than in their Prix de Rome entries, the latter executed under duress within the precincts of the Ecole. These envois include some of the most striking works of the 19th century-Pradier's Bacchante (marble, exh. Salon 1819; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.), Guillaume's Anacreon (marble, exh. Salon 1852; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay), Carpeaux's Ugolino and his Children (version, bronze, 1857-63; Paris, Jard. Tuileries), Chapu's Christ with Angels (plaster, 1857; Le Mée-sur-Seine, Mus. Chapu), Mercié's bronze group Gloria victis (plaster version, exh. Salon 1874; Paris, Petit Pal.); although some of them met with doctrinaire strictures from members of the Institut or from the professors on the grounds either that their subjects were neither classical nor biblical or that their style was too personal, such departures were a common occurrence and were in most cases accepted as indications of the qualities expected of laureates. In the Ecole itself the range of source material was widened, particularly from the 1840s, to include a generous selection of casts of Quattrocento, High Renaissance and post-Renaissance works. Casts of Greek works up to the Early Classical period were also acquired. Concessions were thus made to eclecticism but none to the contemporary world. Modern subject-matter was formally proscribed for student envois in 1872, and to this has been ascribed the growing interest among Ecole-trained sculptors in allegory as a vehicle-however indirect-for commentary on modern life and events.
Government patronage, whether through a ministry, the Court or municipal or regional bodies, provided the most dependable source of employment for sculptors. The history of sculpture in this period is closely linked with changing political regimes and the projects that they initiated: the instability and transience of these regimes imposed on sculptors the necessity of adapting to new conditions in order to survive, a situation that brought into focus the question of the artist's social and political commitment. In the course of the century two sculptors in particular stood out for their refusal to compromise: David D'Angers, during the July Monarchy (1830-48) and in the early years of the Second Empire (1852-70); and
Jules Dalou, after the Commune of 1871. In both cases fidelity to Republican ideals earned them periods of exile.

(2) Public statuary and the influence of government.
Training in sculpture at the Ecole did not accord in detail with the requirements of public statuary. Intended to inculcate elevated precepts and aesthetic ideals, it provided in only a general sense a suitable rhetorical language for the polemical or propagandist aims of the State, which in practice often called for an ability to convey specific political messages, through portraits, scenes of recent history or allegory. Overt political propaganda is most evident in works produced between 1815 and 1848. The government of the restored Bourbons revived projects initiated under the ancien régime and embarked on a series of monuments expressing national expiation for regicide and the Reign of Terror. Jean-Pierre Cortot and François-Joseph Bosio returned to pre-Revolutionary types of allegory and apotheosis in the sculpture of the Chapelle Expiatoire in Paris (e.g. Cortot's Marie-Antoinette Succoured by Religion, marble, c. 1825) and in the commissions of Charles X's government for statues of Louis XVI (begun 1827; Paris, Place de la Concorde) by Cortot and of Louis XVIII (1826; Paris, Pal. Bourbon) by Bosio.
Following the Revolution of 1830 the new government of Louis-Philippe commandeered and adapted to its own ends schemes proposed in the previous decade, notably the decoration of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Madeleine, both in Paris, and the Porte d'Aix in Marseille. The government also returned Ste Geneviève, Paris, to the secular function of the Panthéon, which it had enjoyed between 1791 and 1821, with a new pediment (1830-37) commissioned from David d'Angers; undertook the sculptural embellishment of the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile; and instituted a programme of polemical decorations at the Palais Bourbon. Considered overall, this group of schemes was impressively orchestrated; it suppressed all that was anti-Revolutionary in the Restoration projects, acknowledging the existence of Napoleon as Emperor, while extolling the military prowess of Bonaparte as General, promoting a State-sanctioned Catholic morality (hardly recognized as such by Catholic critics), reassimilating Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a selected group of Revolutionary figures among the great men of the nation, and representing in staid allegories the moderate principles of constitutional monarchy.

(3) Romanticism, academicism and 'national' sculpture.
The climate of liberalism in the Salons of the early 1830s permitted younger sculptors, some of them affiliated with the Romantic tendency, to come before the public. Prix-de-Rome winner, François Rude, created a precedent for moderate emancipation from classical canons in the treatment of the nude, exhibiting relaxed Neapolitan genre subjects (see fig. 39). Antoine-Louis Barye and Christophe Fratin (1800/02-64) launched what was to become another vogue, Animalier Sculpture. Other forms of local colour-literary, geographical and historical-along with a colouristic handling of bronze emerged in the works of the Romantic sculptors Antonin-Marie Moine, Auguste Préault, Etienne-Hippolyte Maindron, Théodore Gechter, Jean-Bernard Du Seigneur (1808-66) and Jean-Jacques Feuchère. When Salon juries from 1836 began to suppress the more interesting work of this loose-knit school, some of its followers found alternative outlets in the expanding market for statuettes and decorative domestic sculptural ornament. Another alluring feature of the statuette trade was its accommodation of fashion and topicality, in the caricatures of Jean-Pierre Dantan, for example, and in delicate portrayals of stage personalities by Jean-Auguste Barre and others. Neither was the classical repertory neglected in this type of sculpture, the largest contribution coming from James Pradier, whose mythological themes were interspersed with modern erotic genre subjects.
Remaining aloof from such commercial endeavours, David d'Angers, Antoine Etex and Rude maintained an individualist concept of a 'national' sculpture that led them finally into opposition with the July Monarchy. David d'Angers increasingly turned his attention to the task of honouring great men in commemorative statues, tombs, busts and portrait medallions. The commissioning of such statues in France dated back to the years just prior to the Revolution. The restored Bourbon monarchy gave the activity a wider, national, base by erecting statues in the subjects' places of birth. David d'Angers's achievement was in bringing his personal initiative to bear in the choice of subject and location, stimulating local interest and sponsorship but sometimes giving his own labours free of charge.
The last major monument erected under the July Monarchy, the tomb of Napoleon I in the church of the Invalides, Paris, was characterized by an extreme aesthetic conservatism. The sculptors involved were Pradier (marble Victories, 1843-52), Duret (bronze allegories flanking door to the tomb, c. 1843) and Pierre-Charles Simart (marble allegorical reliefs and marble and bronze portrait statue, 1846-52). Such conservatism, which paradoxically the short-lived Second Republic (1848-52) did nothing to undermine, was inherited by the Second Empire (1852-70). The resurgence of academicism was accompanied by a comparative diffidence on the part of Napoleon III's government about political statements interpreted in monumental form. A lack of ideological content was compensated for by the sheer quantity of State commissions that were dedicated mainly to enlivening the surfaces of focal metropolitan buildings. 335 sculptors were employed between 1852 and 1857 on the restoration and extension of the Musée du Louvre, Paris; 131 sculptors worked from 1860 to 1875 on the Paris Opéra. Images of Napoleon III and of his imperial forebears appeared in the Louvre programme, but particular statements were swamped by an abundance of abstracted personifications and portraits of worthies. At the end of the 1860s the floridity of Charles Garnier's architectural conception of the new Opéra found in Carpeaux's allegorical group representing Dance (stone, 1866-9; in situ; a true sculptural counterpart, at least in the judgement of futurity: the immediate response from both the architect and the public was shock at what they deemed its excess and a demand for its removal.
During the July Monarchy the family of Louis-Philippe, notably Ferdinand-Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, had played its part, through personal patronage, in promoting the 'minor' Romantic genres in sculpture. Similarly, in the Second Empire certain sculptors received Court approval, which helped them to make their mark in both the private and the public domains. The florid styles of Carpeaux and ALBERT-ERNEST CARRIER-BELLEUSE were as much embedded in the tradition of decorative sculpture as in the traditions of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It was the support that both these sculptors received from the imperial household that in the later years of the Empire established their styles as a viable alternative to academic orthodoxy. Of the two, only Carpeaux succeeded in forging, from an eclectic grounding, a truly personal style that was excitable and impressionistic and that transcended its sources; Carrier-Belleuse, inventive enough in decorative composition, was usually content with a pastiche of the Renaissance or Rococo periods.
In certain cases, sculptors during the Second Empire were compelled to subordinate personal originality to the demands of archaeological reconstruction, since it was in the 1850s that Adolphe-Napoléon Didron and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc introduced a more historically enlightened note into the restoration of such ancient monuments as Notre-Dame in Paris and the château of Pierrefonds in Oise. The erudite medievalism of Viollet-le-Duc's chief sculptural assistant, Geoffrey Dechaume (1816-92), is but one of the historicisms practised in this eclectic period.
In creating Ugolino and his Children, Carpeaux revitalized the sculpted nude, sharing this ambition with a group of young sculptors who took their inspiration from Michelangelo and the 15th century and subsequently became known as 'Les Florentins'. Two members of the group, Alexandre Falguière and Paul Dubois (i), studied in Rome in the early 1860s and were preoccupied with the youthful male figure and with anatomical characterization as opposed to the normative idealization encouraged by the Ecole. After 1870 ANTONIN MERCIÉ and Louis-Ernest Barrias reinforced their early endeavours, and it was their emphasis on modelling and on emotive effects that informed much of the sculpture exhibited in the annual Salons between the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and the beginning of the 20th century. Rodin, in his early works, was clearly indebted to them, his Age of Bronze (version, bronze, 1875-7; London, V&A; and St John the Baptist (version, bronze, 1878; Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyp.) both finding their closest counterparts in the pieces exhibited by Mercié in the Salons of the early 1870s.
During the Third Republic (1871-1946), up to World War I, there was a tremendous increase in the number of commemorative statues being produced in Paris and the provinces, instigated mainly by the initiatives of regional and municipal governments, as for example the two monuments to the Republic commissioned by the City of Paris from Léopold Morice (1846-1920) (1883; Paris, Place de la République) and Jules Dalou (bronze, 1879-99; Paris, Place de la Nation;. Societies also commissioned works from sculptors, as for example the Société des Gens de Lettres, which commissioned Rodin's monument to the writer Honoré de Balzac (plaster, exh. Salon 1898; rejected by the Société; bronze version erected 1939, Paris, intersection Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse). In the case of war memorials or monuments of national interest a local contribution or a fund raised from public subscription might be augmented by funds from the central government. From this period the biggest concentration of sculpture within the City of Paris was a municipal project, the Hôtel de Ville, requiring the collaboration of 230 sculptors. The building was embellished with many portraits of famous men and women of Paris, the sculptures combining costume pageantry with a new emphasis on realism.
In outdoor commemorative monuments of the last two decades of the 19th century, such as Dalou's monument to Delacroix (bronze, unveiled 1890) in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, or Barrias's monument to Victor Hugo (inaugurated 1902; mostly destr. 1942) in the Place Victor-Hugo, Paris, elaborateness of composition and dramatic silhouette were the dominant trends. The variety of solutions proposed was a consequence of the increase in the numbers of such statues, as well as of the desire to educate through imagery. Here, as in the architecture of the same period, a total accommodation with the vocabulary of the Baroque was made. For David d'Angers, responsible for so many commemorations earlier in the century, the simple ingredients of a full-length portrait statue with subordinated attributes, an inscription and, optionally, reliefs on the pedestal illustrating incidents from the life of the subject, had been sufficient. To this type sculptors of the Third Republic added a wealth of allegory and of symbolic and anecdotal detail, such as had been used on tombs in the 17th and 18th centuries.

(4) Challenges to Beaux-Arts classicism.
The sculptural mood of the 1870s was elegiac, a response to France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). After the establishment of the Third Republic, public statuary in particular entered an ebullient and ingratiating phase. Rodin's début as an exhibitor at the Salon coincided with the elegiac phase, and against a background of what he saw as the charlatanism and false poetry of most Salon exhibits he pursued his own introverted researches in preparation for the unfinished Gates of Hell (bronze, 1880-1917; Paris, Mus. Rodin;. Some of his projects for commemorative monuments take the allegorizing mode of his contemporaries to its furthest limit; others, like that to Balzac, incorporated symbolism in a single figure. However, he always made the monumental rhetoric his own, endowing it with a personal feeling above all for the language of the body itself, developed through his immense output of drawings and experimental models. At the same time he aknowledged his debt both to Michelangelo and to medieval sculptors, while retaining links with the more immediate traditions of the 19th century. This occurred at a time when, simultaneously with the erection of statues to great writers of the Romantic movement, a reassessment was underway of the achievement of earlier Romantic sculptors, some of whom were still active in Rodin's youth.
In the 1880s, within the Ecole, the innate conservatism of the more official sculptors made them ideal bulwarks of the establishment. In 1864 the post of Directeur of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts had been taken up by the sculptor Jean-Baptiste-Claude Eugène Guillaume; in 1878 it had passed to another sculptor, Paul Dubois (i), who retained it until his death in 1905, after which long-overdue reforms were finally introduced. However, in practice, the ascendancy of Rodin, who had been refused admission to the Ecole, and of Dalou, who had been a disappointed runner-up in the Prix de Rome, was an indication of the loosening of the grip of the Ecole on sculpture at large. Furthermore, at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881 EDGAR DEGAS showed his startlingly veristic wax sculpture of the Young Dancer of Fourteen (version, bronze, Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans-van Beuningen), a work closer in many ways to both contemporary and historic Italian sculpture than to anything then being produced in France. It took a critic of the originality of Joris-Karl Huysmans to appreciate the challenge being posed to the system. It was the first occasion in which an innovative painter-sculptor had cared to show his sculpture to the public at large; the vigorous modelling power of Théodore Gericault and Honoré Daumier remained a secret known only to frequenters of studios. After the Young Dancer of Fourteen, Degas, like them, chose not to exhibit his sculpture and turned exclusively to small-scale and experimental work in three dimensions.
A problem of the period that was brought into focus by Rodin in his marbles was that of authenticity. The deputing of the final execution of carved works to assistants or professional praticiens had been practised before the 19th century, but as the technical aspects of sculpture became more developed and the entrepreneurial systems facilitating the division of tasks became more sophisticated, a reaction set in, exacerbated by the virtuosic appearance at the Salons of a number of marble showpieces depicting mythological subjects by such sculptors as Denys Puech and Laurent-Honoré Marqueste (1848-1920). The reaction had already been registered by the Ecole, where classes in stone- and marble-carving were instituted in 1883, but it was in the exhibitions of sculpture at the Salons of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts during the 1890s that a more fundamental revision made its appearance, such Symbolist sculptors as Jean Dampt, Jean Carriès, Jules Desbois and Pierre Roche preferring the dual identities of poet and craftsman to the grandiose conception of statuaire and finding alternatives to marble in wood, pewter, ceramic, wax, gypsum, ivory, lead and combinations of these. Such experiments with mixed-media and polychromed sculpture were not practised exclusively by those who favoured an Arts and Crafts approach. Polychromy had been tentatively espoused by Neo-classical sculptors earlier in the century, after the publication in Paris in 1815 of Antoine Quatremère de Quincy's account of the ancient Greeks' use of colour in sculpture, Le Jupiter olympien, and experimentation of this kind had increased around mid-century. Sometimes the motive was archaeological, as with Simart's chryselephantine reconstruction of the Athena Parthenos (1846) for the château of Dampierre, Marne (in situ); sometimes it was to contribute to a work's voluptuous charge, as in Auguste Clésinger's Woman Bitten by a Snake (exh. Salon 1847; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay), in which the white marble of the subject's body was originally set off against a bed of tinted flowers. A more consistent commitment to coloured sculpture, exploiting gorgeous combinations of bronze, marbles and semi-precious stones, had been demonstrated from the mid-1850s by Charles Cordier in his busts of ethnic types, and in the final decade of the 19th century this ostentatious and materialistic polychromy was practised by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Barrias. Degas and Gauguin, the painter-sculptors connected with the Impressionist movement, both used polychromy in their three-dimensional work; but although Gauguin's use of wood and ceramic and of colour to enhance the Symbolist import of his sculpture validates a comparison with the work of more conventional Symbolist sculptors, the hostile reception to such works as the polychromed wood reliefs Soyez mystérieuses (Paris, Mus. d'Orsay) and Soyez amoureuses et heureuses (Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), which he showed in 1891 at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels, and the rejection in 1895 of his stoneware statuette Oviri (1894; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay; from the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, showed how far beyond the boundaries of Europe his primitivism had taken him, as opposed to the restricted European travels of other fellow sculptors.
In the 1890s two other, quite opposed, challenges to the closed world of Beaux-Arts classicism emerged. On the one hand, social-realistic representations in sculpture no longer had aesthetic and political inhibitions, as evidenced in the work of Jules Dalou, who led the way in the 1890s with his projects for a Monument to Workers (unexecuted; preparatory clay sketches, Paris, Petit. Pal.); on the other there was a fundamentalist classicism proposed by ARITIDE MAILLOL. It was the latter-the line of least resistance, in a sense-that was to prove the more enduring, providing a link between the long tradition of classically inspired sculpture in France and the formalist researches of the 20th century.
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