Casting Hugo into History

David d'Angers's concept of the relationship between history and art, as it is reflected in the pediment of the Pantheon and the busts he made of Victor Hugo, and Hugo's own representations of history in his poetry and drawings point to a fundamental tension within Romanticism regarding Republican idealism. Nash reads the poems Hugo dedicated to David as a critique of the sculptor's neoclassical treatment of the status of genius and suggests that they anticipate the stylistic incoherences of Rodin's monument to Hugo at the end of the century.