Satan by Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807-1853)
The emblematic subject of the heyday of French Romanticism, our Satan, far from being a monstrous or repulsive creature, has a very human appearance, a muscular body and a face whose pensive sadness arouses pity rather than reproach. He is quite similar to the image given by Delacroix in an 1827 drawing, Méphistophélès dans les airs (Paris BNF), intended to illustrate Goethe’s Faust. Seated, wrapped in his wings, head bent, he rests his left elbow on his thigh, chin resting in the palm of his hand, and holds his broken sword in his right hand. His pose is probably inspired by Dürer’s famous engraving of Melancholy, of which the artist owned a copy. Feuchère’s decorative sense of detail rivals that of medieval gargoyles: horned forehead, hooked nose, oversized ears, clawed feet, spine…
Initially conceived as a mantelpiece, with Satan placed centrally between two bat-shaped vases, Feuchère presented the plaster model at the Salon of 1834 (no. 2243), and the small bronze version at the Salon the following year (no. 2037). The small model was also included in the Centenaire de l’Art Français exhibition in 1900 (the copy now in the Musée de Douai).
In his review of the 1834 Salon, illustrated by Feuchère’s drawing of Satan, painter and art critic Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps praised it (cf. art. cit. Le Musée, 1934, p. 74): ‘(…) among all the angels and demons, there is one figure that unquestionably deserves particular attention because of the original character with which it has been imprinted, because of the novelty of its composition and the conscientious work with which it is rendered. It is Satan by M. Feuchère, a personification, full of vigor and passion, of the evil genius grappling with his impotence’.
Featuring on the cover of one of the great landmark exhibitions of nineteenth-century sculpture, ‘The Romantics to Rodin’, to which Rodin’s Thinker is matched on the back of the catalog, Feuchère’s bronze occupies an important place in Romantic sculpture and illustrates its influence on Rodin’s work.
Satanic subjects were highly prized by Romantic artists in the 1830s, drawing their sources from literary writings such as Dante’s Inferno (1303-1321), Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), as well as Goethe’s Faust (1808), inspiring artists of the period to create compositions such as Delacroix’s Méphistophélès (1827), Jean-Jacques Flatters’ sculptures (1827), Marochetti’s (1831) and Duseigneur’s (1831).
Paradis perdu, republished in French in 1805 and translated by Chateaubriand, seems to be the sculptor’s main source here. In Canto IV, the poet describes Satan after the fall, a fallen angel who has lost everything in his defiance of God, prey to misfortune and doubt, and bitterly reflects on his former greatness. Feuchère’s Satan illustrates this perfectly. Looking down, gnawing his fingers, immersed in an abyss of reflection, he seems to protect himself in his folded wings. His immense wings accentuate his isolation. Satan symbolizes failed man, plunged by the original fall into destitution and solitude, but also the dark side that lies dormant in each and every one of us. What’s more, Satan is akin to the artist himself, whose works defy the Creator, only to be met with perpetual doubt. Like the rebellious angel, Romantic artists feel like social outcasts: their superior genius isolates them from a world that cannot understand them. In an 1843 drawing of Dante composing the Divine Comedy, Feuchère depicts the poet in a very similar posture. The work was to have a prestigious lineage, with Carpeaux’s Ugolin (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) and Rodin’s The Thinker (Paris, Musée Rodin).
Several copies of Satan are known, mainly in bronze, while plaster casts are much rarer. In the 1830s, the taste for small bronzes developed and the trade flourished. Feuchère, who came from a family of bronzemakers, took part in this craze. These bronzes can be found at LACMA (Los Angeles) (Fig.2), the Musée de la Vie Romantique (Paris) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Brussels).