Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
French
(1824-1898)
Click to Enlarge Image
Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
An Allegory of the Sorbonne, 1886
Black chalk on two sheets of tracing paper, joined vertically, laid down on card
23.4 x 58.2 cm
Presented by Sir Michael and Lady Sadler, 1925
WA 1942.106


When Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes accepted the commission in 1886 to paint a mural for the main building of Paris’ New Sorbonne, he accepted with it a charge that was rife with history. Representing learning, knowledge and optimism posed an even more challenging endeavor, as he would be responsible for visually rendering the new identity of the New Sorbonne.  

The Sorbonne had been under royal sponsorship since 1253 until the French  Revolution when it was  transferred to state control.  In the 1880s, the main building of the New Sorbonne was built. It was a structure that inherently embodied the conflicts between royalism and republicanism, Catholicism and secularism, that French higher education faced. The government minister, Jules Ferry, who commissioned Puvis de Chavannes was the same man who was directly responsible for initiating reforms in the 1880s meant to secularize France. Propagating the values of liberty, equality and fraternity to the bourgeois Republic would find its most tenable foundation in the school system.[i]  Puvis de Chavannes was to paint the mural that would be mounted in the New Sorbonne’s hemispherical Grande Amphithéâtre,[ii] in the literal space in which the Republic’s secularizing reforms would be manifested.  It was here that great minds would gather and intellectual progressivism would be achieved, while the mural would stand in front of both students and civilians as testimony to the possibility of the French academic spirit.

It has been said that the inspiration for the Allegory of the Sorbonne mural came to Puvis de Chavannes in a flash of inspiration.[iii] But his numerous studies, of which this black chalk composition is a part, do little to substantiate this belief. Puvis de Chavannnes’ preliminary drawings document an evolution of compositional schemes he worked out. His loose chalk marks are far more frenzied and dynamic than the controlled line of the mural for which he is recognized. This drawing is a more advanced composition, dating from the autumn of 1886, many months, and studies, after he accepted the commission in May. Rendered on two sheets of tracing paper attached at the center, Puvis de Chavannes had probably traced a previous composition and was experimenting with different figures and their positioning across this arcadian grove of academe. His figures represent all of the intellectual disciplines of the university, the humanities, the theoretical and the applied sciences in mostly female personifications much like Raphael’s male Parnassus. All but one of the figures in this drawing would be spread out more thinly across the panorama in the eventual final mural, though most were moved and some were reversed.

Recessed in the center of the study sits  “l’antique Sorbonne” a secular Madonna, and the “Virgin of Science,” who at once replaces the religious origins of the Sorbonne and personifies this laicization of education. Her veils allude to reculsivivity and withdrawal, the qualities of life, which were not religious, that lead to concentration of the mind. She is flanked by Spiritualism who raises her arm to the Ideal.  Multiple of the same poetic muses recline on the grass while humanized academic disciplines act out their specializations in contemporary French context. Science,[iv] on the right, is drawn with hesitation, both her back and front face outward simultaneously, and forces of modern electricity in the form of radiating lines spring forth from her head.

Though the antique Sorbonne occupies the actual center of the drawing, Youth and Old Age drinking from the spring are most emphasized. Puvis de Chavannes described this section as a “vivifying spring” from which “Youth drink avidly” and “the Aged take new strength.” Transferring the source of inspiration from young to old would have been symbolic in attempts to correlate the young and their access to knowledge and truth with the French terre from which they both emanate. By promoting the idea that knowledge was based in the material world of nature and in France, rather than transcendental truths, Puvis de Chavannes aligned himself with the secularism of the New Sorbonne. 

Ironically, in 1968, the final Allegory of the Sorbonne was vandalized by student revolutionaries who correctly interpreted the mural to be the embodiment of order, stasis and impenetrability of establishment ideas -- exactly the ideals it was initially intended to convey. [v]



[i] Jennifer Shaw. Dream States, Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France. New Haven. Yale University Press. 2002. p. 99.

[ii] Aimée Brown Price. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. New York. Rizzoli. International Publications Inc. 1994. p. 199.

[iii] Jon Whiteley. Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum Volume VII. Oxford. Oxford University Press. 2000. p. 410-11.

[iv] Shaw p. 102-107.

[v] Price p. 200.


Rochelle Behrens

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