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| Charles Le Brun Study for Alexander ca. 1660-61 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Louis de Boullogne the Elder Académie 1654 drawing private collection |
"The debate began in 1665 in the wake of Gianlorenzo Bernini's visit to the Académie. Concise mention of this is made in the minutes: The said Sieur Bernini confirmed by his opinion the feelings of the company in relation to the education of students, namely that, before studying from life, their minds should be filled with beautiful ideas from the Antique."
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| Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne Studies for Dead Christ before 1681 drawing private collection |
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| Charles de La Fosse Figure with Violin ca. 1680-90 drawing private collection |
"Study of the model constituted the main form of instruction offered by the Académie for more than a century and a half. . . . The specificity of the Académie, indeed its monopoly, lay entirely in teaching how the male human body should be drawn. In his lecture on the Laocoön of August 1670, Michel Anguier presented the human body as a microcosm of the entire world: The ancient philosophers were well aware that to discover the secrets of nature was one by one to lift the veils from the face of the Creator, since by the knowledge of his creatures they came to know the Creator; in the same way, the Greek sculptors, formed in this erudite school, followed this beautiful path in ridding their figures of the veils constituted by clothing and of any other thing that might hide the most beautiful and accomplished of all creatures, whom they called an epitome of the world, filled with divinity; whom the sages of Egypt called an adorable animal, Pythagoras the measure of all things, Plato the marvel of marvels, and Zoroaster the statue and masterpiece in which nature's most audacious endeavor appears."
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| Louis de Boullogne the Younger Reclining River God ca. 1695-1715 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Louis de Boullogne the Younger Figure of Christ 1708 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
"François Quatroux took up this idea and used it for his own purposes: I propose to take as my subject in this lecture the human body, a picture in epitome of everything contained in this great world, and which is, for the purposes of this subject, called microcosm or the world in small, made by the hand of the All-Powerful. Those who knew the human body knew the entire universe. The same discourse, now in secular form, was taken up by Charles-Nicolas Cochin a century later: Any degree of superiority, not only in the arts but indeed in all the professions that depend on them, is relative to the superiority that the artist has acquired in the art of the human figure. . . . No one who has not begun by profound study of nature and the nude can rise above the mediocre."
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| Louis de Boullogne the Younger Académie 1710 drawing Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University |
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| Louis de Boullogne the Younger Académie before 1715 drawing private collection |
"Teaching on this subject gave rise to a recurrent debate within the Académie: should the student draw the body of the model as he saw it, or should he add what he knew about anatomy and proportions? Everyone argued that simply reproducing the model was impossible: no model could sustain a pose for two hours; flexed muscles inevitably relaxed – and only five minutes' rest was granted during each pose. The student had to sketch his outline rapidly at the beginning of the session, before the model made excessive use of the support supplied. A draftsman could draw the muscles only if he already knew them; they were not, for the most part, readily visible. Cochin explained this clearly: That it should be so difficult to draw what one has before one's eyes may seem astonishing but will be less surprising if one notes that the draftsman, though drawing from the life, can draw only from memory; it is not so much nature that he copies, since he no longer sees that nature when he casts his eye down on the paper; it is the image that he has formed of it and he retains this image with greater or lesser detail, according to the level of his knowledge."
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| Nicolas de Largillière Two Figures struggling together ca. 1709-1710 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Jean-Antoine Watteau Figure Study ca. 1715-16 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Jean-Antoine Watteau Figure Study ca. 1717 drawing Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Charles-Antoine Coypel Académie ca. 1750 drawing Harvard Art Museums |
"To draw the model was necessarily to interpret it, and the principal question was how far interpretation should go – in particular, whether one could draw nature properly without first studying anatomy and the Antique. More generally, academicians wondered in what order to train their students. Should they first impart technical competence, teaching them to draw accurately what they saw, before encouraging them to bestow greater nobility on their figure? Or should they first teach the basis of the grand manner, since training students to reproduce nature in all her petty detail might prevent them acquiring that manner at a later stage?"
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| A.J. Defehrt after Jean-Honoré Fragonard Académie ca. 1762-77 engraved illustration to the Encyclopédie Art Institute of Chicago |
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| A.J. Defehrt after Jean-Honoré Fragonard Académie ca. 1762-77 engraved illustration to the Encyclopédie Art Institute of Chicago |
"These arguments illustrate what was at stake in drawing from life. It was a form of teaching more theoretical than practical, whether administered by "naturalists" or enthusiasts for the improvement of nature."
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| Anne-Louis Girodet Figure reclining on Divan ca. 1793 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
– texts and quoted passages from The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture: The Birth of the French School, 1648-1793 by Christian Michel, published in France in 2012, translated by Chris Miller and published by Getty Research Institute in 2018