PRESIDING DIVINITIES: IDEAL SCULPTURE IN ... - Indiana University

one manual of tableaux suggested that a “living statue” of Nydia could simply be copied
from “Rogers’ celebrated sculpture.” 35 Such manuals, which were published by the dozen
during the second half of the nineteenth century, claimed to cultivate, "…a love for the
beautiful in art, poetry and music, and awaken a quicker sense of the grace and elegance
of familiar objects, pictures, statuary, etc." 36 By observing tableaux vivants, Americans
could practice correct ways of viewing. Like ideal sculptures, these sentimental
performances encouraged refined behavior and sympathetic bonding within the home.
For the women who performed tableaux vivants, the experience must have
profoundly affected the way they viewed ideal sculptures. Performers of the popular
"statuary tableaux" coated themselves with cocoa butter and powdered chalk, wrapped
themselves in white muslin, mounted pedestals and assumed the poses of real or
imagined ideal statues. Even ordinary tableaux required performers to assume a fixed
pose and hold it for a minute or more. Such performances encouraged a sense of bodily
empathy with works of art. The nineteenth-century art theorist Hippolyte Taine wrote,
"… it is sympathy or involuntary semi-imitation which renders the work of art possible;
without this it is not understood, not born.'" 37 By placing themselves in the positions of
sculptures, women could more successfully identify with the subjects of these works,
35 Dick’s Parlor Exhibitions (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1882), 43. For further
references to tableaux involving Nydia, see "Godfrey's White Queen," The Living Age,
143 (25 October 1879): 210, and Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: A.A. Knopf,
1922), 80. An illustration of Nydia being performed as a tableau appears in The Quarterly
Illustrator 2 (1894): 97.
36 Tony Denier, Parlor Tableaux; or Animated Pictures (New York: Samuel French,
1869), v.
37 Quoted in James D. Phelam, "The Old World Judged by the New," Overland Monthly
and Out West Magazine 17 (April 1891): 480.
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