Less than a
year after the July Revolution of 1830, which resulted in Louis Philippe
becoming "le roi des français", a riot broke out on 14 Feb. 1831, in
protest against a mass being held in the medieval church of Saint Germain
l'Auxerrois on the eleventh anniversary of the assassination of the Duc de
Berry, the father of Henri Duc de Bordeaux, the Bourbon heir to the French
throne. In the process the church was badly damaged. As it had now become
something of a political "hot spot", it was deconsecrated and only
returned to the cult on 13 May 1837. Its restoration, undertaken from 1838 on
by the architects J.-B.-A. Lassus and E.-H. Godde, became a testing ground for
the many restorations of gothic structures which were to follow later in the
century. Certain aspects of the restoration came under attack for flouting true
medieval principles. Amongst these anachronistic features was the iconographically
novel Angel of Judgement which Marochetti sculpted for the gable of the
West front. What we now have is a replacement, but the original statue was put
in position in the Autumn of 1841. Historians of the church knew that, until
the 18th century, this gable had been crowned by a statue of St Michael
Overcoming Satan. The most historically correct course of action would
therefore have been to commission a new St Michael. According to a learned
contemporary commentator, Nicolas-Michel Troche, this had been the solution
first mooted (La Quotidienne, 11 Dec. 1841). Marochetti, who he describes as "one of
our greatest statuaries", had presented a sketch, showing St Michael
"armed to the teeth, treading down the spirit of evil". Despite
general agreement on the excellence of its execution, this design was turned
down, because of a suggestion made, Troche supposed, with the best of intentions,
that "this image could give rise to certain political allusions capable of
disturbing the peace". It has been surmised that a St Michael figure could
be read as representing the forces of law and order triumphing over dissension.
However, a more precise explanation of why such a figure could cause offence
lay in the fact that St Michael had become a sort of patron saint of the
legitimist cause. The Duc de Bordeaux, the so-called "enfant du
miracle", had been born after the death of his father, on 29 September
1820, which was St Michael's day, and consequently the belief had sprung up
that St Michael had miraculously facilitated the birth of this Bourbon heir to the
throne. Marochetti himself would have been well aware of this interpretation of
the subject. He was acquainted with the legitimist sculptor, Félicie de Fauveau,
a friend of the widowed Duchesse de Berry, for whom sculptures and prints of St Michael
were part of her stock-in-trade.
L'Artiste, in Autumn 1840 (2nd series, Vol.
VI, 13th number, pp.197-8) states that Marochetti had been commissioned by the
City of Paris to create "a figure of an angel" for Saint Germain
l'Auxerrois. Le Courrier (28 Nov. 1841) announced its delivery at the
church. By 11 Dec. 1841, when the article by N.-M. Troche appeared in La
Quotidienne, the statue was in position on the gable. It was a graceful figure
of an angel, in Conflans stone, mounted on a tortoise, holding in its left hand
a trumpet, which it is ready to put to its lips, and with its right arm
stretched out towards the North [in fact it is extended towards the South]. The angel wore a gracefully draped tunic,
which left parts of the body uncovered, and which was held in at the waist by a
knotted girdle, whose loose ends fell at the front. The concave wings of the
angel were very prominent and "of a beautiful effect". Troche concluded
his description by saying that this figure represented "the meeting point between antique statuary
and that of the middle-ages, but it possessed none of the characteristics of
the Christian aesthetic".
The figure
as we see it today, is a replacement, carved meticulously after the original,
in a more durable Chauvigny stone by René-Albert Baucour (1878-1948) in 1928.
Baucour tried but failed to find an original plaster model from which to work.
The one thing we can see that the present statue lacks is the trumpet, which,
in the original, was probably a metal accessory. It is likely that Baucour's search for the original plaster model for the angel was confined to France. If so his failure to find it is explained by an article in the Athenaeum (no.2191, 23 Oct.1869, p.535). The article describes a number of works which had been deposited, following Marochetti's death at the South Kensington Museum, all of which, over the years the museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) has disposed of. Amongst the models in this collection was "the Angel of the Last Judgement, in a declamatory attitude, and profoundly antipathetic to all English notions of that tremendous personage".
Nicolas-Michel
Troche could not explain the fact that the Angel of Judgement was represented
standing on the back of a tortoise. It made no sense to him that an ethereal,
winged creature was supported by a sluggish and slow moving earthbound reptile.
One Marochetti scholar, Caroline Hedengren-Dillon, has ingeniously suggested
that this is Marochetti's version of the renaissance Italian impresa,
which carries the motto "Festina Lente", or "Make Haste
Slowly" a sort of lifestyle injunction, which she believes the sculptor
would have been applying to his own career, implying that, slowly, and with
persistence, he would achieve success. It is true that the Angel of
Judgement does resemble some of the representations of that impresa,
which show a female figure holding up a sail to catch the wind, whilst standing
on a tortoise. It is an interesting idea, but one which awaits completely
satisfying documentary proof, and it might be argued that the missing trumpet would have been at cross purposes with such a reading of the figure.
In the light
of Troche's account of the early stages of this commission, we may ask whether
Marochetti's St Michael Overcoming Satan, which was installed in the
church at Champmotteux in 1838 (see entry) relates in any way to the sculptor's
first sketch of the gable figure for Saint Germain l'Auxerrois. (for a discussion of this work in the context of Marochetti's angelic oeuvre, see Caroline Hedengren-Dillon, "Les Anges de Carlo Marochetti", in Tribune de l'Art, 14 June 2018, available online)
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