Bernard Vouilloux's 'Le Tableau vivant' Traces the History of Living Pictures

Bernard Vouilloux's dense 350-page study 'Le Tableau vivant' explores the history of the tableau vivant, from its origins in aristocratic salons of the late 18th century to its triumph in Second Empire theaters. The book intertwines this history with the legend of Phryné, the Athenian courtesan who modeled for Apelles and Praxiteles and was saved by her lawyer baring her body. Gérôme's painting 'Phryné devant l'Aréopage' (1861, Hamburg, Kunsthalle) serves as a guiding thread. Vouilloux reexamines the history of rhetoric from ancient treatises to 18th-century texts, focusing on the question of the means of writing versus painting. The anecdote of a woman's nudity before judges allows analysis of pictorial representation between ideal and reality, 'nu' and 'nudité', and painting's ends between delight and desire. The book engages with Freud, Bataille, linguistics, semiotics, Baudelaire, Zola, Diderot, Kant, Derrida, Damisch, Quintilian, and Cicero. N. Laneyrie-Dagen reviews the work.