Study (Flandrin)
Encyclopedia
Prix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
in 1832, a bursary which provided the winner with a trip to Rome to concentrate on their vocation. There, Flandrin produced this study
Study (drawing)
In art, a study is a drawing, sketch or painting done in preparation for a finished piece, or as visual notes. A study can have more impact than a more-elaborately planned work, due to the fresh insights the artist is gaining while exploring his/her subject. The excitement of discovery can give a...
, which he sent back to Paris in 1837, in fulfillment of the bursary's requirements for the student to submit works in the tradition of various genres. In 1857, Napoleon III purchased the painting, which is now in the collection of Paris's Louvre
Louvre
The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
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The painting gained attention among contemporary French art critics, and remains one of Flandrin's best-known works, despite being produced relatively early in his career. The subject is an unidentified youth, an "ephebe
Ephebos
Ephebos , also anglicised as ephebe or archaically ephebus , is a Greek word for an adolescent age group or a social status reserved for that age in Antiquity....
", who sits nude on a rock with his arms wrapped around his legs and his head resting on his knees, eyes closed. There is a sea in the background, and no distinguishable landmarks locate the figure. The enigmatic scene provides no explanation for the figure's pose: Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
(1811–1872) commented that the young man could be shipwrecked on a deserted island, or be a shepherd
Shepherd
A shepherd is a person who tends, feeds or guards flocks of sheep.- Origins :Shepherding is one of the oldest occupations, beginning some 6,000 years ago in Asia Minor. Sheep were kept for their milk, meat and especially their wool...
who has lost his flock. Ultimately, any explanation for this scene is left to the imagination, leading to comparisons with Surrealist art in the twentieth century.
In examining the influence of German aesthetic theory
Aesthetic Theory
Aesthetic Theory is a book by the 20th century German philosopher Theodor Adorno which was culled from drafts written between 1961 and 1969, ultimately published posthumously in 1970...
on French art
French art
French art consists of the visual and plastic arts originating from the geographical area of France...
, critic Elizabeth Prettejohn
Elizabeth Prettejohn
Elizabeth Prettejohn is an art historian and author of several books about art history. Her books have included "Rossetti and his Circle" , "The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites" and "Art for Art's Sake" . She has also co-edited and coauthored books...
finds that the roundedness of form and "flawless" modeling of flesh would have met with Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art...
's approval as an examplar of the beautiful. Prettejohn compares the figure's almost circular pose and sparse framing with that of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
's Vitruvian Man
Vitruvian Man
The Vitruvian Man is a world-renowned drawing created by Leonardo da Vinci circa 1487. It is accompanied by notes based on the work of the famed architect, Vitruvius. The drawing, which is in pen and ink on paper, depicts a male figure in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and...
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Vital to the painting's spread were reproductions based on an 1887 engraving by Jean-Baptiste Danguin that was commissioned by the state. As awareness of the work grew, the painting became an icon
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
of homosexual culture in the 20th century, although the work would not have been intended to evoke such a theme. The scene is intimate, yet the figure is, according to one author, "self-absorbed, passive, alienated—undoubtedly contribut[ing] to the persistence of certain homophobic clichés." Photographers Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun was a French artist, photographer and writer. Her work was both political and personal, and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality.-Early life:...
adopted the pose in a photograph of the lesbian Cahun, c. 1911. The painting was similarly evoked in early twentieth-century art photography by F. Holland Day
F. Holland Day
Fred Holland Day was an American photographer and publisher. He was the first in the U.S.A. to advocate that photography should be considered a fine art.-Life:...
and Wilhelm von Gloeden
Wilhelm von Gloeden
Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden was a German photographer who worked mainly in Italy. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys, which usually featured props such as wreaths or amphoras suggesting a setting in the Greece or Italy of antiquity...
, and later by Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...
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