“ ‘. . . for even in the last century, realism made such strides that we can no longer endure it! I’ve even heard that a certain Courbet, at one of his last exhibitions, showed himself, face to the wall, in the performance of one of the most hygienic but least elegant actions of life! Enough to scare away Zeuxis’s birds!’ ”

(Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863), trans. Richard Howard.)