L'âme de la peau Claude-Ferdinand Gaillard, graveur des surfaces

• Autores: Emmanuel Pernoud
• Localización: Revue de l'art, ISSN 0035-1326, Nº. 208, 2020, págs. 30-38
• Idioma: francés
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• Resumen

  • As famous in his time as he is forgotten today, the burin engraver Claude-Ferdinand Gaillard (1834- 1887) was distinguished both by his reproductions of works of art and by his portraits after nature. These engravings have been compared to photographs realized by others means in a context of competition between professional engravers and the new photomechanical processes (Stephan Bann). It is another direction that this article intends exploring by returning to the insistence of the art critics of the period on the skill displayed by Gaillard in his interpretation of surfaces, of the textures of paintings and of sculpture in the case of the reproduction of works of art, and of the skin on the faces in his portraits. The origin of this meticulous work of surfaces can be traced to the copies of frescoes executed by the young Gaillard at the sites of Pompeii in the beginning of the 1860s. The future engraver demostrated a unique realism in his work of transcription, faithfully registering the alterations that the mural paintings had suffered. With no less realism, his engraved portraits detailed their model's skin, taking advantage of the successive states to methodically explore the thin depth. This approach to the body can be compared to the clinical view of his naturalist contemporaries; it stands apart by its spiritual purpose, intimately tied to the religious convictions of the engraver