Aux limites de l'Histoire. Le Grand Genre a l'epreuve des regles de l'art

During the reign of Louis the XVth, history painters elaborated an art grounded in the reinterpretation of academic doctrine (from the Poussinesque idea of novelly to the valorisation of the human figure). Nonetheless this painting led to expressive and representational modalities that disrupt entirely the rules governing the grand genre its form (narrative), its function (moral), its conventions (decorum and verisimilitude). The history of painting becomes non-narrative, plesurable, and borrows its vocabulary from other artistic genres. The new artistic ideal that emerges in the 1780s in response to the denunciation of the crisis of the grand genre in its traditional formulation thus reveals itself to be surprisingly well grounded in the aesthetics of the reign of Louis the XVth that it was supposed to supplant.