Le relief, un genre renouvelé? Microlecture des Carnets de David d'Angers

• Autores: Claire Barbillon
• Localización: Revue de l'art, ISSN 0035-1326, Nº. 162, 2008, págs. 43-50
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • In his Carnets, writetn between 1828 and 1855, the sculptor Davud d'angers bring a fundamental theoretical contribution to the debate on relief sculpture. This artistic form, complex in its formal ambiguity between two and three dimensionality, maintains closer relations with the other arts, painting and architecture than with sculpture in the round. Its place is particularly important during the period covered by the Carnets, when Romanticism appeared and developed in sculpture, and commands for public monumental sculpture, often featuring reliefs, were multiplied.

    Close to the theoretical contributions of the sculptor Griffoul-Dorval, those Quatremère de Quincy as well asof Humbert de Superville, David, however, sustained an original conception. Analyzing Antique bas-relief, he included the analysis of Egyptian art, non-realist and colossal, praised Greek bas-relief in its mastery on the intelligibility of the symbol and rejected Roman art, assimilated with the Baroque spirit whose decadence he globally fustigated. The central idea which emerges from the body of texts constituted by the Carnets is that of the plane, both a technique and a style. The realization of reliefs according to the recommendations of David should provide an inmediate intelligibility and render its status as monumental writing, of "sacerdotal explanation for the centuries", which contributes, with the statue itself, in the bringing on of the apotheosis of the person.