We try here to bring close together two works in narrative prose of the nineteenth century, two works very different from the viewpoint of their status, their length, their date and their references however very similar in the prospect they offer about art: the famous Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac and The Masterpiece by Zola, a kind of contradictory epic of artistic creation. The main issues: the problematic function of the feminine model, the author’s function (creative and self-destructive manliness) and the paradoxical resort to incompletion in structure and result.