Anka Muhlstein, 'The Pen and the Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels', 2017:
"I have often wondered why nineteenth-century French novelists were so often obsessed with painters and painting, while in the 1700s Diderot was the only writer of his generation to take an interest in art criticism. What a striking contrast that not one well-known novelist of the 1800s failed to include a painter as a character in his work. This is fair enough for Balzac and Zola, who had ambitions to bring every aspect of society to life, but read Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Anatole France, Huysmans, Maupassant, Mirbeau, and of course Proust, and you enter a world in which painting is surprisingly important. What is more, all these novelists explored not only how a painter sees things but also how he looks at them, and this produced a new way of writing. “I would just have liked to see you dismantle the mechanism of my eye. I enhance the image, that much is sure, but I don’t enhance it as Balzac does, any more than Balzac enhances it as Hugo does,” Émile Zola told his protégé Henry Céard, highlighting the visual nature of novels at the time.1 This was essentially a French phenomenon; it has no real equivalent in England, Germany, or Russia. In the United States, it was not until the end of the century that painting became a literary subject in the work of Henry James. In England, Woolf would be the first to write about the influence painting had on literature...."
हे मराठीत का घडले नाही , फ्रेंच कादंबरीचा मोठा प्रभाव ह ना आपटे यांच्या सारख्या लेखकांवर असून सुद्धा ? वि का राजवाडे, विलास सारंग त्यांच्या अत्यंत प्रभावी समीक्षेत सुद्धा याचा उल्लेख सुद्धा करीत नाहीत.
The Raising of the Cross, 1610-1638 by Peter Paul Rubens
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary (1857)
Referenced painting: The Raising of the Cross by Rubens and various religious images
Importance: In scenes such as Emma’s visit to the Rouen cathedral, Flaubert weaves references to sacred paintings and stained glass. Emma’s romantic and aesthetic ideals are informed by her exposure to religious and historical art, reflecting her escapist tendencies.