Musée Goncourt: Manette Salomon and the Nude

The reputation of the Goncourt brothers in nineteenth century France is firmly based on the transvaluation of aesthetic criteria in their writings. Their novel Manette Salomon contains their requirements for a painting whose modern originality would free art from what they considered the moribund classicism emanating from the Academy. By considering the verbal recreations of Manette Salomon's posing as the nude model it is possible to define the function of description that the Goncourts required for the art as well as the literature of their time. This imagery as delineated in the novel is placed against the critical reception of the nude in the painting of their time in an effort to demonstrate the complex ideology of the human form as it was understood by the artists and writers of France in their efforts to define the aesthetic of modernism. (TAD)