1. See Erienne Moreau-Nélaron, Millet raconté par lui-meme, Paris, 1921, 1:33-44; and Alfred Sensier, La Vie et l'oeuvre de J.-F. Millet, ed. Paul Mantz, Paris, 1881, pp. 72-74. See also Lucien Lepoittevin, Jean-François Millet, portraitiste: Essai et catalogue, Paris, 1971, I, no. 42; and the exhibition catalogues Jean-François Millet 1814-1875, Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg, 1971, no. 19; and Lucien Lepoittevin, Cent cinquantième anniversaire de la naissance de Jean-François Millet 1814-1875, Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg, 1964, no. 28.

2. See Sensier, La Vie et l'oeuvre, p. 73.

3. Letter from Paris, April 9, 1841, quoted in Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 1:36.

4. Quoted in Moreau-Nélaton, 1:39. In a letter to the mayor of Cherbourg, July 19, 1841 (ibid.), Millet requested that the Moses be exhibited.

5. Ibid.

3. Letter from Paris, April 9, 1841, quoted in Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 1:36.

4. Quoted in Moreau-Nélaton, 1:39. In a letter to the mayor of Cherbourg, July 19, 1841 (ibid.), Millet requested that the Moses be exhibited.

5. Ibid.

3. Letter from Paris, April 9, 1841, quoted in Moreau-Nélaton, Millet raconté par lui-même, 1:36.

4. Quoted in Moreau-Nélaton, 1:39. In a letter to the mayor of Cherbourg, July 19, 1841 (ibid.), Millet requested that the Moses be exhibited.

5. Ibid.

6. See Paul Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes, Paris, 1977, and Le Sacre de l'écrivain, 1750-1830, 2d ed., Paris, 1985. The Romantics identified poetry with legislation. Shelley, for example, declared in "A Defense of Poetry" (1821) that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" ( The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley, ed. Harold Bloom, New York, 1966, p. 448). Gert Schiff brought this reference to my attention.

7. Emile Barrault, Aux artistes. Du passé et de l'avenir des beaux-arts, Paris, 1830, p. 78.

8. Philippe Busoni, "Michel-Ange," L'Artiste, 1st series, VI, 1833, p. 294.

9. Lepoittevin attributes the comment to Moreau-Nélaton in Millet, portraitiste, I, cat. no. 42.

10. See Klaus Herding, Courbet: To Venture Independence, trans. John William Gabriel, New Haven, Conn., 1991, chap. 3.

11. Journal de Eugène Delacroix, ed. André Joubin and Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, Paris, 1932, 2:19-20 (April 16, 1853).

12. See Fig. 84 for the portrait Herbert had in mind. See also Herbert's catalogue Jean-François Millet, Hayward Gallery, London, 1976, no. 8, p. 42.

13. In the 1840s the Saint-Simonian high priest Père Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864) urged the sect's official musician, Félicien David, to compose an oratorio on the subject of Moses. Reference to Moses was especially pertinent to Enfantin, for he viewed his role in the leadership of mankind as that of a new Moses, a self-image reinforced by his belief that the building of the Suez Canal in Egypt would help realize his utopia. David's Moïse au Sinaï, intended by Enfantin to spread the Saint-Simonian gospel, was received unenthusiastically when it premiered at the Paris Opera on March 24, 1846. See Dorothy Veinus Hagan, Félicien David, 1810-1876: A Composer and a Cause, Syracuse, N.Y., 1985, pp. 87-102. See also Jacques-Gabriel Prod'homme, "Correspondance inédite

de Félicien David et du Père Enfantin (1845),'' Mercure de France, LXXXV, May 1, 1910, pp. 67-86.

14. See Bénichou, Le Sacre de l'écrivain, pp. 288-300. For this aspect of Hugo's thought see also Bénichou, Les Mages romantiques, Paris, 1988, pp. 273-530; and Maurice Z. Shroder, Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism, Cambridge, Mass., 1961, chap. 2.

15. Victor Hugo, Odes et ballades, ed. Pierre Albouy, Paris, 1969, p. 202.

16. Hugo. Odes et ballades, p. 156.

17. Although Vigny was part of this ultra-royalist circle and served during the Restoration as an officer in the Bourbon army, his poetry lacks the militant counter-revolutionary piety of Hugo's early work.

18. See Fernande Bartfeld, Vigny et la figure de Moïse, Paris, 1968; and Bénichou, Le Sacre de l'écrivain, pp. 370-71. The poetic license of Vigny's "Moïse" was anticipated by the republican academician Népomucène Lemercier in his epic poem Moyse, the last of his hymns to four great representatives of poetry, war, science, and legislation that also included Homère and Alexandre (both 1800) and Atlantiade (dedicated to Newton; 1812). Moyse includes a meeting between Moses and Job—an innovation that allowed the author "to enrich my painting with the variety of colors offered by a combination of two of the most beautiful books of the Bible." See Lemercier, Fragments d'un poème intitulé: Moïse, sur la délivrance des Israélites. Lus par M. Le Mercier ç l'Académie française, le 24 août 1819, Paris, 1819, p. 6.

19. Alfred de Vigny, Oeuvres poétiques, ed. J.-P. Saint-Gerand, Paris, 1978, pp. 65-66.

20. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l'histoire universelle, ed. Jacques Trucher, Paris, 1966, pp. 182-83.

21. Charles Magnin, "Poèmes, par M. le comte Alfred de Vigny. Seconde et troisième éditions," Le Globe, October 21, 1829, p. 667.

22. Alfred de Vigny, letters of December 21 and December 27, 1838, in "Lettres à une puritaine, I," ed. P. Godet, Revue de Paris, IV, August 15, 1897.

23. See A. Duvivier, "Liste des élèves ... de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts qui ont remporté les grands prix," Archives de l'art français, Documents, 1857-58, 5:273. See also Philippe Grunchec, Le Grand Prix de Peinture: Les concours des Prix de Rome de 1797 à 1863, Paris, 1983.

24. For the painting by Subleyras (Louvre inv. no. 7999, on deposit in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes) and for other engravings of the work, see the exhibition catalogue Olivier Michel and Pierre Rosenberg, Subleyras, 1699-1749, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 1987, no. 4, pp. 147-49. Both Roger's Brazen Serpent and the engraving in Landon reverse the composition of Subleyras's painting.

25. Moses is similarly prominent in a version of the subject painted in 1819 for the city of Paris by C.-L.-F. Smith reproduced in C. P. Landon, Annales du Musée, vol. 1 of Salon de 1819, Paris, 1819, p. 7. Landon complained that with the gray sky and background of the

work Moses was not set into relief. The work has apparently been removed from the Church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, to which it was sent by the Préfecture de la Seine (Archives de la Seine, 10624, 72, 1).

26. "Concours pour le Grand Prix de Peinture," L'Artiste, 1st series, XII, 1836, p. 97.

27. The version of this subject that I reproduce as Fig. 90 (now in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) had been engraved. See Anthony Blunt, The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue, London, 1966, no. 22, p. 19. Blanchard's entry recalls another version of the subject by Poussin (Hermitage, Leningrad), reproduced in Musée de peinture et de sculpture, vol. 10, Paris, 1831, p. 683. According to the Journal des artistes another contestant, Jean-Baptiste-Auguste Leloir, also quoted from Michelangelo's Moses. See Grunchec, Le Grand Prix de Peinture, p. 395.

28. The same critic approved the way another contestant (Louis-François-Marie Roulin) had understood that " Moses must be detached from the crowd and dominate it" ("Concours," pp. 97-98).

29. See the edition of Chateaubriand's Moïse by Fernande Bassan (Paris, 1983); Charles Comte, "Chateaubriand poète," Mémoires de la Société des sciences morales de Seine-et-Oise, 1894, pp. 15-51; and Anna Louise Catharina Kromsigt, "Le Thàätre biblique à la veille du romantisme (1789-1830)," Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam, 1931, pp. 86-87.

30. Moïse, tragédie en cinq actes en vers, in Oeuvres complètes de Chateaubriand, Paris, Garnier [1929-38], 3:575-76.

31. "Le Moïse de M. de Chateaubriand," L'Artiste, 1st series, VII, 1834, pp. 281-82.

32. See Virginie Ancelot, Les Salons de Paris, 2d ed., Paris, 1858, pp. 195-96.

33. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l'empire [1861], ed. Maurice Allem, Paris, 1948, 2:77.

34. See Freud's essay "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1914).

35. Joseph de Maistre, Cinq paradoxes (1795), in Oeuvres complètes de Joseph de Maistre, Lyon, 1893, 7:320. See also Francesco Milizia, De l'Art de voir dans les beaux-arts [1786], trans. from the Italian by Général Pommereul, Paris, Year VI [1797-98], pp. 2-3.

36. Falconet knew the work only through "models, drawings, and engravings." See "Observations sur la statue de Marc-Aurèle" (1770) in Oeuvres d'Etienne Falconet statuaire, Lausanne, 1781, 1:321, 324.

37. Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges Seroux d'Agincourt, Histoire de l'art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IV ^e siècle jusqu'à son renouvellement au XVI ^e siècle, vol. 3, Paris, 1823, p. 41. Regarding this work, see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, Ithaca, N.Y., 1980, pp. 71-73. Quatremère de Quincy was similarly enthusiastic about the Moses, despite its lack of reference to the art of classical antiquity. See Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, Dictionnaire historique de l'architecture, Paris, 1832, 1:254. The international reach of this revised opinion is suggested by Washington Allston's choice of the Moses as the model for a grandiose image of prophetic inspiration, Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecies to the Scribe

Baruch (1820; Yale University Art Gallery). See the exhibition catalogue by William H. Gerdts and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., "A Man of Genius": The Art of Washington Allston (1779-1843), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1979, p. 119.

38. Gustave Planche, "Michel-Ange," in Portraits d'artistes, Paris, 1853, 1:76-77. See Pontus Grate, Deux critiques d'art de l'époque romantique: Gustave Planche et Théophile Thoré, Figura 12, Stockholm, 1959.

39. Dumas, "Michel-Ange," L'Artiste, 3d series, III, 1845, p. 388; previously published in Michel-Ange, suivi de Titien Vecelli, Brussels, 1844. Another comparison of Vigny's poem and Michelangelo's statue was made by Charles Magnin, who in the "bitter and somber prayer" of Vigny's Moses perceived "a breadth, an assurance, a facility with the colossal that recall and seem to explain the Moses of Michelangelo'' ("Poèmes, par M. le comte Alfred de Vigny," p. 667).

40. Dumas, "Michel-Ange," pp. 387-88.