ABSTRACT

I am going to begin with an anecdote from Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir . Those of you who have read the book will remember the calamitous marriage between Gervais and Coupeau. After getting this cheap wedding they decided that they would go for a walk before having the banquet, but then it rained, so some know-all says instead ‘Let’s go to the museum’—at that stage that meant the Louvre as there was no otherand off they go. They pass through the Assyrian Gallery and they think the stone carving is much better done by Parisians in the 1870s than it was by the Assyrians. Then they have a certain amount of respect for the gallery when they see a haughty attendant with a red waistcoat and goldbraided uniform. They walk respectfully through the French Gallery nonstop, but they are struck dumb and motionless when they get a small lecture from an old woman on The Raft of the Medusa’. In the gallery of the Apollo the polished floor particularly impresses them and of course they are, by this stage, beginning to snigger at the naked women. They go into the Long Gallery where, says Zola, centuries of art passed before their dazed ignorance.