© Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Two hundred years ago today, 9 December, one of the most celebrated French artists of the early nineteenth century died in Paris. He was known in full as Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, shortened simply to Girodet. Born in the town of Montargis, about seventy miles (110 km) south of Paris, his parents died when he was a young man, and after a false start in a military career, he became a pupil of Jacques-Louis David in Paris.
In 1789, Girodet won the prestigious Prix de Rome with his religious painting of Joseph Recognised by his Brothers.
His account of the happy resolution of Joseph’s time in Egypt, told in the Old Testament book of Genesis (chapter 45), is busy indeed. Joseph was by this time the Vizier, and had recognised his brothers, but they didn’t recognise him until he told them who he was. Joseph stands at the right, in front of his golden throne, his arm reaching out to reunite with his family.
His prize was to transfer to the French Academy in Rome, where he studied until 1793. On his return, his paintings won him acclaim at the Salon, and his reputation was made. Unfortunately, this coincided with the start of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. However, his relationship with David – a key figure in the Revolution who was adept at protecting himself against all the odds – and his popular following, ensured his safety. When the rule of the Directory (Directoire) was established in 1795, Girodet continued to flourish.
In 1798, he came into conflict with one of his models. Mademoiselle Lange, as she was known to the public, had made her official debut as an actress at the Comédie-Française in 1788, and by 1793 had risen to take the title role in the popular Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, by Nicolas-Louis François de Neufchâteau. Unfortunately that play fell foul of the revolutionaries, and the Committee of Public Safety shut it down and arrested the actors and author.
Mlle Lange had a tense few months afterwards, spending some time in prison, but friends in high places kept her well away from the guillotine, and she was eventually released to return to work at the Théâtre Feydeau. When the Directory came to power she started an affair with the supplier to the French army, who kept her in style in one of his houses. She was also the mistress of a banker, by whom she had a daughter. There were rumours of an affair with Paul Barras, a Director of the Directory, but those may not have been true.
In 1798, Girodet painted Mlle Lange’s portrait as Venus, but his model decided afterwards that his painting was unflattering. She refused to pay the artist, and demanded that the painting should be removed from view at the Salon where it was being exhibited.
It’s hard to understand her case. Perhaps Girodet had been a little too obviously ingenious in not showing her face in the mirror being held by the putto, but the rest of the portrait is surely as flattering as possible, and free of any critical elements. Girodet’s revenge was swift and sweet. In a matter of a few days, he painted a second portrait which, the story says, was hung in the Salon in place of the original. It shows Mlle Lange as a money-grabbing prostitute, unable to see her own faults.
Her new role as Danaë was perhaps not as biting as it might have been. Danaë was the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and Queen Eurydice, whose father wanted a male heir. To keep Danaë childless, he locked her away in an underground chamber. But Zeus wanted her, so he impregnated her in the form of golden rain that fell from the roof of her cell, resulting in her son Perseus.
As a motif in painting, Danaë had come to be represented as a reclining, beautiful, nude woman, on whom a stream of golden coins was falling, and it was that stream which Girodet wanted to exploit. It could have only one reading in this context: that Mlle Lange sold her body in return for money, and Girodet was happy to be even more explicit.
At the lower left of the tondo is a turkey, representing Michel-Jean Simons, her final lover by whom she had a son in 1797, and who married her, hence the ring on the turkey’s foot. A scroll by that is apparently the script for the play Asinaria, by the Roman Titus Maccius Plautus, whose title means the one with the asses, a comedy about mistresses, lovers and money.
At the lower right is the severed head of one of her previous lovers, and a white dove, wounded on one wing by one of the falling coins, and being strangled by a gold collar bearing the word Fidelitas, meaning fidelity.
In its upper reaches, there’s a spider in its web, catching some of the coins. Mlle Lange herself wears peacock feathers, a symbol of her vanity. But most barbed of all, she holds up a mirror that is cracked, and in which there is no reflection at all. With her gaze concentrated on the falling coins, she has no interest in looking at what she has become.
Mlle Lange, now Madame Simons, lived in his Château de Bossey in Switzerland, her stage career over. Her husband died a decade later, a ruined man, and she died in solitary obscurity six years afterwards.
Girodet went on to paint some of the most famous portraits of Napoleon and his family, and to teach many pupils, including Alexandre-Marie Colin and Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, who were to be influential in painting in the nineteenth century. I don’t think that anyone tried to mess with him again.
In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid.
This is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties that you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury which might have foretold Orestes’ fate, but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her.
Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.
Girodet’s painting of the Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation, Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes was probably completed in 1802, and is perhaps the most elaborate and complex painting inspired by the bogus Scottish poet Ossian. It’s unclear how those French war heroes became involved with Ossian, but an extraordinary mixture of myths and legends from contrasting cultures.
His Aurora and Cephalus (1805) shows the goddess abducting Cephalus at dawn, and taking him up into the sky still asleep.
In 1810, Girodet painted the only reasonably accurate account of The Revolt of Cairo of 21 October 1798, in which Napoleon massacred as many as five thousand of its residents. Most were killed when French cannons fired at the Al-Azhar Mosque where they were seeking refuge. This is a late oil sketch for the finished painting.
In the following years, Girodet’s health started to decline, and with it his artistic output. By 1812 he could only manage a single submission for the Salon, and on the ninth of December, 1824, he died in Paris at the age of only 57.
Painting war and conflict is demanding on composition and technique, but how about painting peace? In this week’s two articles examining how to read visual art, I show how some of the masters have risen to that challenge. This article shows examples based on myths and ancient history, and tomorrow’s comes more up to date with more recent events.
One popular approach to depicting the abstract is to use deities from classical mythology who are already associated with war, peace and related concepts.
Jacopo Tintoretto’s marvellous painting of Minerva and Mars from 1578 is an early example of Minerva (in blue) pushing the god of war (in black armour, at the right) away from her, as her right hand rests on the shoulder of Peace, with Prosperity at the left edge of the canvas.
It was Peter Paul Rubens who excelled in this, as an important international diplomat living at a time of wars throughout Europe, and a master of mythological art.
In the young Rubens’ The Triumph of Victory (c 1614), made when he was the finest painter in Flanders, Mars is almost glorified.
The Treaty of Antwerp had been signed in 1609, and the city was flourishing in the Twelve Years’ Truce that ensued. Rubens painted this in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars dominates, his bloody sword resting on the thigh of Victoria, the personification of victory. She reaches over to place a wreath of oak or laurel on Mars, and holds a staff in her left hand. At the right, Mars is being passed the bundle of crossbow bolts that make up the attribute of Concord. Under the feet of Mars are the bodies of Rebellion, in the foreground, who still holds his torch, and Discord, on whose cheek a snake is crawling. The bound figure resting against the left knee of Mars is Barbarism.
In 1629-30, when Rubens was acting as envoy to King Philip IV of Spain and trying to agree peace between Spain and King Charles I of England, he painted Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), one of his greatest narrative paintings, as a gift with a message for the king of England.
Its central figures are those of Demeter (Ceres), here in the role of Pax (the personification of peace), and Athena, behind her. In attendance are Mars, Hymen, Plutus, and Alecto (one of the Furies), with sundry Bacchantes, a Satyr, putti, and the attributes of Bacchus and Mercury. It’s like an away day from Olympus, or part of an index to Ovid.
If the use of classical deities is too indirect, another approach is to paint historical events of conflicts being resolved in peace.
Early in the history of Rome, its new citizens were overwhelmingly men, and devised a plan to abduct the wives of the nearby Sabine people. That inevitably took the Sabines to war under their king and general Tatius, who led them in their march against Rome. Their task wasn’t easy, as in those days its citadel was on the Capitol hill, a strongpoint for defence. The captain of the guard there had a daughter named Tarpeia. In return for the golden armlets that Sabine warriors wore on the left arm, Tarpeia betrayed the city of Rome by leaving its gates open at night, allowing the Sabines to enter.
As the Sabines swarmed in, Tatius told them to leave what they carried on their left arm with Tarpeia. As they also carried their shields, many misunderstood the command, and Tarpeia was buried under so many shields and golden armlets that she was crushed to death. She was buried where she fell, and that became known as the Tarpeian Rock, the place from which traitors and other enemies of Rome were thrown to their deaths.
With the Sabines in possession of the Capitol, Romulus challenged them to fight. There followed a series of indecisive battles, until Romulus was struck on the head by a rock, and his troops started to retreat to the Palatine hill. He had just regained order and commanded his forces to stand and fight, when the abducted Sabine women invaded the battlefield.
Guercino’s Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius (1645) concentrates on the three figures of Tatius, Hersilia, and Romulus, and tucks the rest of the battle away in the distance behind them.
Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) is unusual among depictions of this episode in showing its resolution, rather than the seizure of the women that brought the conflict about. David shows Roman and Sabine men joined in battle in front of the great walls of Rome, with the Sabine women and their children mixed in, trying to restore peace. Looming over the city is the rugged Tarpeian Rock, where the body of Tarpeia was reputed to have been left buried.
Highlighted in her brilliant white robes in the foreground, and separating two of the warriors, is the daughter of the Sabine king Tatius, Hersilia, whom Romulus married. The warriors are, of course, her father and her husband, and the infants strategically placed by a nurse between the men are the children of Romulus.
David started this painting when he was imprisoned following his involvement in the French Revolution. He intended it to honour his estranged wife, who had continued to visit him during his incarceration, and to make the case for reconciliation as the resolution of conflict.
Moving swiftly on to the rule of Charlemagne in Europe in the late eighth century, we come to his prolonged and bloody series of campaigns against the Saxons in Germany.
Charlemagne forced the Engrians to submit to him in 773, pushing on later to Sigiburg. A series of revolts led by Widukind ensured that his forces were kept busy. This turned more savage in 782, when his courts started to hand down death penalties to Saxon pagans who refused to convert to Christianity, and Charlemagne ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners in the Massacre of Verden. After a further three years of war, the Saxons were finally subdued, and Widukind submitted to baptism. Over a millennium later, Ary Scheffer painted Charlemagne Receives the Submission of Widukind at Paderborn in 785 (1835).
In 1175 and 1176, the emperor Barbarossa was defeated at Alessandria and in the Battle of Legnano, where he was wounded and nearly killed. The following year, he was reconciled with Pope Alexander III, and had to humble himself before the Pope in Venice. He also established permanent peace with the Lombards in the second Treaty of Konstanz, in 1183.
The Rathaus in Konstanz has a series of remarkable external murals showing key moments in history, including this undated painting of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa concludes peace in Constance with the Lombards. Although the name Barbarossa appears in the inscription below, his beard doesn’t appear to be in the slightest bit red, as he shakes hands to seal the peace with the leader of the Lombards.
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