Resumen de Réalisme optique et progrès esthétique: la fin d'un rêve.
From the 1880s onwards references to waxwork museums abound in criticisms of the Salons, where waxworks act as a foil in discussions about realism. Portraiture, modern costume, and genre scenes provide the main topics of this debate and modern iconography, especially anatomical drawing, provide new referential models for artists. In the domain of public monuments to great men and funeral effigies, the statue plays an increasingly ambiguous role as a simulacrum of the person represented. Realism was thought to be responsible for the decline of monumentality in sculpture, the lack of iconographic inventiveness, the loss of style and the analysis becomes clearer in the scandals following the exhibition of works such as Degas' La petite danseuse de quatorze ans. The fear that sculpture would simply vanish from the figurative arts played a major role in the respective redefinition of painting and sculpture, the formulation of the relationship between figuration and optical vision and, lastly, the function of the Arts.
