Sculpter <em>Salammbô</em>

Harkness, N

doi:10.15122/isbn.978-2-406-06258-5.p.0135

Sculpter Salammbô

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Nigel Harkness

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.

Abstract

In a letter he wrote to Sainte-Beuve in December 1862 responding to the latter’s criticisms of Salammbô, Flaubert mounted a vigorous defence of his novel before admitting the ‘enormous flaw’ which he saw in the completed text and which he summarised with the phrase, ‘le piédestal est trop grand pour la statue’ [‘the pedestal is too big for the statue’]. Critical work on Salammbô has been hesitant in responding to Flaubert’s sculptural analogy for his novel. By contrast, in the late nineteenth-century, sculptors were more numerous than their painter counterparts in responding to the sculptural themes and style of Salammbô, and in taking the text as inspiration for their work. We can identify at least 16 sculptures in the period 1869-1900, the majority of which were exhibited at the annual ‘Salons’ of the Société des Artistes Français and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Most of these works are now forgotten, indeed many are now lost, and they have not been the subject of any sustained critical analysis. The purpose of this paper will be to explore the ways in which Flaubert’s novel is translated from the written page to marble, to compare the different sculptural representations across a thirty year period, and to consider what light they cast on the sculptural poetics of Flaubert’s novel.