Resumen de The visual culture of fashion and the classical ideal in post-Revolutionary France
In her little-known painting "A Study of a Woman after Nature" (1802), Marie-Denise Villers exploited a conjuncture between masculine-inflected ideals of Neoclassical art and feminine-inflected ideas of fashionability in the post-Revolutionary poriod in France by making a feature of female dress while emulating the standards of history painting. The artist's confident synthesis of idioms is examined in the context of Albertine Clément-Hémery's memoir of a women's art studio. Walter Benjamin's notion of "gestus" is enlisted as a means of understanding how the quite different image cultures invoked in this work communicated social ideas.
