Luxury After the Terror by Iris Moon;

Author:Iris Moon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 2022-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Errant Subjects

Rome and antiquity beckoned to all of the young artists toiling in ancien régime Paris, and Parent heeded the call, going straight to Italy without telling the comte d’Angiviller. He secretly traveled to Florence and then Rome, in search of private patrons. With little in the way of resources, he wrote a letter of contrition in the summer of 1783 to the comte from Florence, imploring the powerful director for financial assistance. Parent wrote of his devastation: “Not knowing what would become of me, little by little I made my way to Italy in order to escape from the misfortunes that beset me. . . . That is why I sought shelter in the sanctuary of the arts that is Rome.”23 While he was in Florence in 1784, he likely encountered Gibbons’s masterpiece carving for the Medici at the Palazzo Pitti, which possibly inspired his own carvings, all the while attempting to secure a modest “gratification” from the grand duke of Tuscany before traveling onward to Rome, “without support, without protection, continuing to go to the Académie de France every day.”24 He wrote once again to d’Angiviller, this time from Rome, hoping to use the money that had been reserved for his studies in Paris to stay for a year in Rome and learn how to sculpt marble.25 Given the difficulty of winning a spot at the Académie de France in Rome, d’Angiviller was none too pleased with Parent’s request, primarily because the sculptor had neglected his studies in favor of attempting to make money on the private art market. He wrote to Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, the director of the Academy in Rome, that the only support he could offer the delinquent artist was a return fare to Paris. As the coup de grâce, in a separate letter the director chastised Parent for having used his royal pension to make a profit instead of furthering his own education. Had he used his funding properly toward his studies, he would not have found himself “in the same city, after having been dragged around like an errant subject, without shame, and whose talents, too little matured by proper studies, interrupted perhaps forever your career.”26 D’Angiviller’s comments were not completely unfounded. Parent’s first académies, or anatomical studies, made in Florence and Rome in 1783 suggest he could indeed have used a little more training in mastering the figure, one of the key exercises that distinguished academic artists from their artisanal counterparts. In one example, Parent depicted what appears to be a blacksmith at the forge with disheveled hair (fig. 42). His hunched torso inelegantly terminates in a lumpy pair of buttocks that resemble a sack of potatoes more than taut, muscular masses. The word “Rome” is visible in between his legs.

This brief glimpse of antiquity in the flesh without the disciplinary tools of the academy shaped and delimited Parent’s career, in a manner similar to that of Dugourc. While his clandestine journey to Italy and his unrealistic demands of d’Angiviller effectively foreclosed the

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