User:Jahsonic/Cabanel's marzipan Venus, comfort food for the bourgeois
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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19th century art saw the battle of several -isms. At the beginning of that century, the most notable battle was that between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, which later art critics have made out to be the battle between Ingres, leader of the Neoclassicists and the younger Delacroix, leader of the Romantics.
The novelist cum art critic Emile Zola, who was a defender of modern, thus Romantic art, saw in Cabanel's Venus of 1863 all the evils of Neoclassicism. In his essay "Nos peintres au Champ-de-Mars," he called Cabanel's painting a "goddess, drowned in a river of milk, resembling a delicious courtesan, not made of flesh and bone - that would be indecent - but of a sort of pink and white marzipan" (La déesse noyée dans un fleuve de lait ... non pas en chair et en os - ce serait indécent - mais en une sorte de pâte d'amande blanche et rose).
Marzipan is sweet and gives stomach ache in the short run and toothache in the long run. This kind of academic art was the comfort food of the bourgeois.
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