Figure 5.1 JeanAntoine Houdon: Winter, or The Chilly Woman, marble, height 145 cm, 1783. Musée
Fabre, Montpellier.
Source: Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France/Bridgeman Images.The work was disturbing in all kinds of ways that unsettled conservative moral and aesthetic hierarchies.
It represented an adolescent girl with a water urn in a morally spurious tradition of antique sculpture,
specifically the Callypgian Venus (Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks), a Roman statue from the first or
second century BCE believed to be a copy of a Greek original; one version of this sculpture was on
display at Versailles. In the 1760s, Greuze’s portraits of ingénues or partundressed “innocents” had
achieved popularity through their combination of vulnerability (stimulating the moral “sensibility” of the
viewer) with a frisson of sexual appeal. By the 1780s, however, not only was social unrest a real concern
in France, but Louis XVI had also launched a crusade against licentious art of the kind found in the novels
of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) in which predatory sexual behavior featured heavily. Increasingly,
art critics distinguished between the “legitimate” nudity of elevated history subjects; for example, gods
and goddesses representing human and divine attributes, or biblical subjects such as Adam and Eve, and
more suspect representations, including the partially clothed or suggestively disrobing female figure
(Wrigley, 1993, 309–313).
Houdon’s sculpture raised issues connected with the distinction made in our own times by Kenneth Clark
(1903–1983) in his The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1956, 1–25) between the aesthetic qualities of the
“nude” and a less morally acceptable form of “nakedness.” It was common in the 1780s for neoclassical
nudes to invoke ideas of androgyny or sexlessness as a means of editing out of the human body any
individual characteristics and emphasizing an antiqueinspired process of idealization. But Houdon’s
figure is given a smile that seems to be complicit with the male gaze and undermines any pretensions to
“higher” ideals. She also offends contemporary concerns with female modesty and the physiological
vulnerability of adolescents as described in Pierre Virard’s 1776 medical text Essay on Adolescent Girls
(Essai sur la santé des filles nubiles). According to Virard, such girls “... should never forget that they
carry a treasure [i.e. their virginity] in fragile vases” (Virard, 1776, 38, my translation). The vase was a
common emblem of the womb and in Houdon’s sculpture it has been shattered by freezing water. The
moral reference did little, however, to absolve the work from a charge of licentiousness, in the morally
conservative, official artistic culture of the 1780s. Rather, the sculpture played on persistent libertarian
tendencies to take pleasure in art from the immoral (Ganofsky, 2015, 24–25).
Ways of Looking, Ways of Seeing
Ways of looking at art had moral implications. Eighteenthcentury art often drew attention to its own
artifice, its ability to conjure up illusions that could deceive the eye. Such works exploited contemporary
obsessions with popular entertainment such as fair pavilions, street theater, masquerade, fancy dress and
magic lanterns The Eidophusikon, an entertainment developed in London by PhilipJacques de
Loutherbourg, consisted of images made to appear as if in motion, through the use of mirrors and pulleys,
and combined modern technology with “high art” themes. The “panorama” (a term invented in 1788 by
Robert Barker, 1739–1806) became a popular tourist attraction consisting of a 360degree painted
representation of a view – in Barker’s case A View from the Top of Carlton Hill, Edinburgh (Macmillan,
1986, 144; Porter, 2000, 267–268). The crowds also loved puppeteers, magicians and alchemists. A
preference for experiencing popular diversions was often associated most closely with the “common”
people and with the “lower” genres, such as topographical landscape and still lifes, which gave priority
to conjuring up illusions of real objects and places. Contemporary audiences were also interested in more