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International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS), 15th International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh, England, 14 - 19 July 2019, pp.8-9
The social and political tides of eighteenth-century France left their marks of oil on exuberant canvases. The sensuous construct of civility of the enlightened isle of Cythera became, at the end of the century, a chimère for Revolutionary artists. After all, as Harold Mah remarked in Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany 1750- 1914, “One can never be certain that virtue lies behind the sensuous surface.” (2003, p. 53) However, the late eighteenth-century reinventors of French aesthetics, and of its moral signification, could not eradicate corporal and sensory visions because they aimed to speak to the reenergized bodies of the Republic.
While the gravitational fields of the French society continued to shift as the century advanced, certain cultural and aesthetic references, as Diderot, remained in currency and influenced the sensory culture of the latter part of the century. Consequently, this paper argues that a haptic regime developed, albeit subtly, in late eighteenth-century French painting. It aims to demonstrate that the revival of Greco-Roman sources and the narrative formulas of the à l’antique style allowed a reconsideration of surfaces as tactile and kinesthetic provocateurs beyond the sensual definitions of the Rococo. It aims to show, ultimately, that artists like Peyron, David and Guérin introduced haptic focuses that opened new paths of signification for the late eighteenth-century French citizen-beholder.