Animus Classics Journal: Vol. 2, Issue 2

18 Wenke (Coco) Huang
two idealized and idolized youth engages them in an aesthetic and
ideological conversation, which potently disrupts and segregates the
original pairing of Paris and Helen in Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s
dual portraits. Comparatively, the timid and docile Helen appears
visually smaller than the male figures, and silently withdraws into the
periphery. The heroine of countless tales and legends thus recedes to a
secondary position in the spatial configuration, and consequently the
representational hierarchy of the gallery. The heterosexual partnership
gives place to an almost narcissistic self-reflection of the male allegorical
figure. Indeed, at the moment Canova’s sculpture captures, Paris
himself suffices to represent ideal beauty in the absence of the three
goddesses, and his gaze seems more introspective than observant in his
decision-making. This formal and ideological gender monopoly reflects
the increasing masculinization in the expression of desired human virtues
and corporeal beauty in late 18th and early 19th-century Europe,
and it further reveals the exclusive relationship between Canova and
Quatremère de Quincy in an equally gender-biased art circle at the
time. 14 This representation of Paris, an allegorical “connoisseur of beauty,”
was especially suitable as a gift from the sculptor to the art critic,
both of whom were highly influential in the European art world. 15 While
the former was the supervisor of the Greco-Roman sculptures at the
Vatican from 1815 to 1822, the latter served as the permanent secretary
of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts from 1816 to 1839; the sculptural
masterpiece of the former enjoyed immense popularity across Europe,
and the archeological and theoretical writings of the latter exerted great
influence on the neoclassical art discourse. 16
In his 1995 book Emulation, American art historian Thomas Crow
explores the intellectual and emotional dynamics among French neo-
14 Crow, “Introduction,” 1.
15 Wardropper and Rowlands, 40.
16 Wardropper and Rowlands, 44.