Stendhal et l'idéal moderne

The volume concludes with an essay on Stendhal, whose commentaries on antique sculpture mark a clear break with those of Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, and the German Romantics. Like Balzac, he believes that art should reflect contemporary moral qualities, should be expressive not of physical force, but of feelings: love, suffering, tenderness, gaiety. Lombardo points out that Stendhal admired sculptors like Michelangelo and Canova, who adapted antique models for the representation of the affective life, and that his own writing style is, paradoxically, both classical in its restraint and "modern" in its expressiveness, its "feu de la saillie." (In French)