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| Photos courtesy of the author
with the kind assistance of Céline Dauvergne. |
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Girodet
(1767-1824)
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 22 September 2005-2 January 2006
The Art Institute of Chicago, 11 February 2006-30 April 2006
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 22 May 2006-27 August 2006
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal, 12 October 2006-21 January
2007
Girodet (1767-1824)
Sylvain Bellenger
Paris: Editions Gallimard / Musée du Louvre Edition, 2005
495 pp; 175 b/w figures and 300 color illustrations; index
49 € (hard cover)
ISBN 2-35031-038-8 |
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The art of the brilliant French maverick
Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824) was first presented to the
modern public almost forty years ago, in a legendary exhibition held
at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montargis, the painter's birthplace
100 kilometers south of Paris. For the occasion the Montargis museum
was completely emptied, and almost the entire Girodet holdings of
the Louvre transferred and installed there. Major loans were secured,
and in the end the exhibition included fifty paintings, fifty drawings
and numerous prints, illustrated books and documents. A handy catalogue
was published, and there were lengthy exhibition reviews in the Art
Bulletin and the Burlington Magazine. Held the same year
as the Ingres exhibition in Montauban (1967), the Girodet retrospective
proved to be an important event of that golden age of early nineteenth-century
French painting exhibits, which culminated in 1974 with the international,
traveling exhibition David to Delacroix. |
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After the
success of the Girodet exhibition, the Musée des Beaux-Arts
in Montargis was renamed the Musée Girodet. In 1983 an exhibition
of Girodet drawings was held there, and a few years later in 1989,
Sylvain Bellenger, the director of the Musée Girodet at the
time, organized an exhibition of Girodet and Ossianism. Since the
1989 exhibition it has been the driving ambition of Sylvain Bellenger
to mount a major retrospective of Girodet's art. Fifteen years later
his goal has finally been realized: Girodet opened at the Louvre
in September 2005 and will travel on to Chicago, New York and Montreal
in the course of the next year and a half. The wait has been well
worth it, especially for those of us unable to see the 1967 retrospective—the
Girodet exhibition is a triumph (fig. 1). |
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As the Louvre retrospective amply
demonstrates, Girodet was the most creatively and unpredictably subversive
of all of David's students. Even before he had fully mastered David's
reforms, he began to reject the tenets of David's sober rational program,
and explore the possibilities of an art that was more imaginative,
poetic and above all idiosyncratic. Girodet entered David's atelier
at the age of seventeen in 1784. The following year he painted The
Death of Camilla, an exemplary student demonstration of Davidian
artistic and moral principles. In the history paintings that immediately
follow, however, there are already hints of rebellion, in the form
of subtle, pictorial innovations that undermine the aesthetic rigor
and stoic heroism of David's reformatory classical style. In the first
room of the Louvre exhibition, the visitor can study Girodet's earliest
attempts to liberate himself from the Davidian straitjacket. Here
one finds Girodet's Prix de Rome of 1789, Joseph Recognized by
his Brothers (figs. 2 and 3), along with two earlier history paintings
of 1787 and 1788 respectively: another Old Testament scene, Nebuchadnezzar
Orders the Execution of the Sons of Zedekiah, and a scene from
early Roman history, The Assassination of Tatius, King of the Sabines.
In these three paintings, one is struck by the delicacy of Girodet's
color; he has renounced David's somber earth colors in favor of more
recherché tints—iridescent lavender, rose, and cream—all
brightened by a more evenly diffused lighting. Enlarging his search
for greater artistic refinement, Girodet has also replaced David's
simply folded, hanging mantles with elegant, flowing draperies. There
are compositional and spatial transformations as well. Girodet has
collapsed David's geometrically ordered stage sets, and arranged his
actors along single shallow planes, with a marked emphasis on linear
grace and a complicated surface design of rhythmically interlocked
human forms. Meanwhile, Girodet's narrative has become more urgently
dramatic, the gestures and movement of his figures more pressing,
and their expressions more intense than in his classically restrained
Camilla of 1785. Yet the overall impression of these history
paintings remains one of preciosity, and even Girodet's dynamic passages
of violence and brutality are curiously elevated to a more rarefied
world of art and artifice. |
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As a recipient of the 1789 Prix de
Rome, Girodet left for the French Academy in Rome in the spring of
1790. Once arrived, he began almost immediately to work on The
Sleep of Endymion (figs. 4 and 5), the painting that marks in
many respects the completion of his first phase of pictorial experimentation,
and stands as his true declaration of independence from David. Surprisingly,
Girodet's earlier history paintings do little to prepare us for either
the inventiveness of Endymion, or the ingeniousness of the
poetic conceit that is the primary source of the picture's striking
originality. Instead of appearing at her beloved's side wearing a
human aspect, Girodet's Diana/Luna manifests herself as a pale, silvery
moonbeam that enters the bucolic scene through branches carefully
parted by an obliging Cupid, and tenderly caresses the graceful form
and soft flesh of the sleeping Endymion. Correggio's Jupiter and
Io comes to mind, where Zeus, having metamorphosed into a cloud,
descends to make love to the ecstatic nymph Io. The two paintings
share a related search for the most extreme refinement of erotic sensuality.
Regardless of his sources, Girodet's softly sensuous ideal of male
beauty, his oblique other-worldly light and his arbitrary treatment
of nature are all far removed from the ruddy muscular heroes, the
incisive theatrical lighting and the austere realism associated with
David's revolutionary art. Even before Endymion was completed
Girodet wrote: "I have not yet told M. David what I intend to
send to the Academy. In the meantime, I will write to him before the
exhibition, for I prefer that he learn it from me. I am attempting
to distance myself from his genre as much as possible…."
(p. 213). Indeed Girodet has taken David's proposition with its rational,
objective handling of moralizing antique themes and turned it on its
end, willfully transforming the model into a fanciful vehicle for
subjective poetic expression. Some writers on Girodet consider The
Sleep of Endymion the first masterpiece of French romantic painting.
This may well be true. The Endymion generally hangs upstairs
in the great nineteenth-century French painting gallery in the Louvre,
but the picture benefits immensely from having been re-hung in its
own spotlighted darkened room in the Louvre's temporary exhibition
gallery. Not only is the painting's unsightly degraded bitumen all
but invisible, but the new installation is more conducive to the private
contemplation the picture demands. In the exhibition the Endymion
has the look and feel of a highly wrought object of art, appropriately
displayed in a black velvet box. |
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Still in Rome, and very soon after
completing Endymion, Girodet was at work on a new history painting,
Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes (fig. 6). The
subject is a patriotic one: the King of Persia's emissaries, laden
with gold and gifts, fail to persuade the celebrated Greek physician
to come to the rescue of their plague-ravaged states. The picture
was painted for Dr. Trioson, Girodet's close friend, tutor and future
adoptive father. Although Girodet's Hippocrates does develop
some of the tendencies found in his earlier history paintings, he
does not occupy himself in his new composition with further evolving
or mastering a single heretical style. Instead, Girodet seems determined
here to break new ground, and undertake yet another experimental effort
to sabotage the canons of David's severe program. In his Hippocrates
Girodet devotes exceptional, even obsessive attention to the archaeological
accuracy of the painting's architectural décor, furnishings
and props, as well as that of the exotic costumes, coiffures and even
the beards of his Persian ambassadors. Girodet's concern with detailed
historical reconstruction is complemented by an equally keen interest
in elaborating a wide variety of human expression. Each one of the
emissaries surrounding Hippocrates has a distinctly different psychological
response to the physician's adamant refusal to aid their king and
country. The envoys' charged expressions, that far exceed the noble
restraint of David's stoic actors, range from anger and astonishment
to grief and resignation. Working together, Girodet's novel pictorial
priorities lend a literal, anecdotal quality to his new history painting,
and the Hippocrates uncannily anticipates the entertaining
and histrionic academic paintings of the mid-nineteenth century neo-Greeks. |
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In January 1793, Girodet narrowly
escaped a violent attack on the French Academy that had been provoked
by the French Revolutionary Army's Italian campaign. Fearing for his
life, he fled Rome for Naples, where he found himself liberated from
the constraints of the Academy, and determined to pursue a long-standing
enthusiasm for the art of landscape painting. Writing from Naples
in March 1793 Girodet announced: "This spring and summer . .
. my project is to travel through the environs of Naples, and stay
there long enough to extract from this countryside everything of interest
that it offers for art. It was in the environs of Rome, that I was
going to devote myself this year to the study of landscape, a universal
genre of painting to which all others are subordinate" (p. 233).
At the sale of Girodet's atelier after his death, there were twenty-four
painted landscapes and over a hundred landscape drawings. Only five
of Girodet's landscape paintings have since been identified: three
are in the Musée Magnin in Dijon, and two in the Louvre exhibition,
one from a private collection and the other from the Musée
Girodet.1 All five demonstrate Girodet's acute sensitivity
to light; his View of Vesuvius (fig. 7), delicately illuminated
by an early morning light that plays over the pale green slopes of
the volcano, is the finest of the lot. Girodet drew extensively out
of doors in nature, and at least one of his landscapes in the Musée
Magnin, the impressive Gulf of Sorrento, is evidence that Girodet
subscribed to his older contemporary Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes'
program of executing oil sketches in the open air, to capture the
momentary effects of light, shadow and atmosphere associated with
different times of day and changing weather. While the two landscapes
in the exhibition have a more composed studio quality, the Magnin
sketch displays the freshness and unpretentiousness of the plein-air
studies painted by Valenciennes and his followers in the Italian countryside
during the 1780s and 90s. Unfortunately, Girodet did not follow up
his interest in landscape after his return to France, but when more
of his Italian paintings, and especially his oil sketches are identified,
Girodet's brief, but intense experience with the art of landscape
may well no longer be considered a minor chapter in his career. |
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Girodet returned to Directoire Paris
in 1795 after a five-year absence. He took quarters in the Louvre,
and began his struggle to obtain recognition and success in a radically
changed French society. Girodet's first commission came through the
architect Charles Percier, a friend and colleague of Girodet from
the French Academy in Rome, for a panel to decorate the salon of a
Parisian hotel particulier designed by Percier for the finance
minister Benoît Gaudin. For the subject of his large decorative
panel (fig. 8) Girodet chose the myth of Danaë from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
The beautiful Danaë has been confined to a tower by her father
Acrisius, who has been warned by an oracle that his daughter will
one day give birth to his slayer. But Zeus, outsmarting Acrisius,
descends to Danaë one night as a shower of gold and she bears
him a son, Perseus. Girodet's new commission was a further occasion
for him to demonstrate his gift for poetic fantasy and sophisticated
erotic sensuality. Girodet's Danaë is reminiscent of Endymion,
which had enjoyed considerable success at the Salon of 1793. In both
panels Girodet has imaginatively modified his classical literary sources.
In his Danaë, Girodet's Jupiter has become a more gallant
seducer than in the original Greek myth; he descends to Danaë
not as a degrading downpour of gold coins, but rather as a gentle
shower of precious jewels and perfumed flowers. And instead of reclining
as she does in most prototypes, Danaë stands on her bed, nude,
under a starry sky, as jewels magically attach themselves around her
neck, arms, wrists and fingers (fig. 9). Quantities of dainty, painstakingly-described
flowers—attesting to Girodet's lifelong interest in botany—adorn
her hair and bed. Enraptured, Danaë gazes upward to admire herself
in a mirror held up by a cupid, who points a torch toward her heart
with his other hand. The Danaë has belonged to the Leipzig
Museum since the mid-nineteenth century and did not travel to the
1967 retrospective. Nor for that matter did the next works shown in
the Louvre exhibition: four decorative allegorical paintings of the
seasons, commissioned by Percier and Fontaine to ornament a small,
inlaid, wood paneled cabinet of their design for Charles IV of Spain,
in the Royal Casa del Labrador at Aranjuez. The Four Seasons
are closely related stylistically to the Danaë panel.
They all share qualities of cool grace, linear sinuosity and a hard,
enameled look of painted porcelain. Not since the school of Fontainebleau
has French painting witnessed such a precious, arbitrary manner. Girodet's
Summer (fig. 10) is a little masterpiece. Floating on a deep
blue-black ground, the figure of Summer is clothed in a billowing,
diaphanous, chartreuse-colored drapery, and a tightly woven headdress
of meticulously painted flowers. A garland of miniature flowers hangs
around her neck, and stretches across a lyre that she is playing with
one hand. In her other hand she holds Cupid's arrow, while a pair
of butterflies hovering behind the strings of the lyre, and a pair
of doves partially enveloped by drapery, court under the spell of
the music. |
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Girodet returned to the theme of Danaë
in his next picture, but before considering this remarkable little
gem some background is necessary. In the Salon of 1799 Girodet entered
a recent portrait he had painted of the celebrated actress Mlle Lange.
The portrait was not well received by the critics and the public,
who found it an unflattering likeness. Gossip began to circulate.
And as a consequence, Mlle Lange asked Girodet to remove the portrait,
claiming that the picture was compromising her reputation as a Parisian
beauty of the day. Girodet promptly collected the picture, slashed
it, and had it beautifully wrapped and delivered to Mlle Lange. Three
months later, and two days before the closing of the Salon, Girodet
reappeared with a new painting in the original oval frame entitled
Danaë, Daughter of Acrisius (fig. 11). There was little
doubt in the minds of the fashionable Salon audience that Girodet
had maliciously cast Mlle Lange in the role of Danaë. A scandal
immediately ensued. |
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Girodet's uncommissioned Danaë
is at once a poisonous personal vendetta, and a dazzling allegorical
satire of the greed and immorality of a newly enriched Directoire
society. The spellbinding iconography of the painting has been extensively
analyzed by Girodet specialist George Levitine, and further interpreted
in the exhibition catalogue.2 These findings can only be
briefly summarized here. Unlike his Danaë of the previous year,
who had been purified of any aura of venality, Girodet's modern Danaë,
Mlle Lange, nude except for a bright orange turban and a jaunty aigrette,
lovingly collects the large gold coins that fall from a web above
her head into a sheer, bright blue drapery. She is assisted by a similarly
outfitted redheaded girl cupid, the actress' natural daughter with
a previous lover. At Danaë's feet stands an adoring besotted
turkey, Mlle Lange's husband Michel Simons, a rich arms merchant,
whose tail feathers are being plucked by a cupid to fashion his own
aigrette. Beneath Danaë's couch sits the mask of a satyr blinded
by gold coins that have lodged in his eye sockets: the actress' current
lover, the marquis de Lethaud, an unscrupulous speculator better known
as the "comte de Beauregard" (fig. 12). A dove, wearing
a collar inscribed "Fidelity," has been winged by a falling
coin and lies bleeding at Danaë's side. Meanwhile, another dove,
whose collar is inscribed "Constance," manages to escape
in the rear of the picture, where butterflies are seen burning their
wings in the flame of a lamp set before a statuette of "Abundance."
Resembling a sumptuous inlay of richly colored semi-precious stones,
Girodet's exquisitely painted and magically lighted Danaë
is as intricate in conception and execution as a Bronzino allegory.
The picture remained in Girodet's atelier until his death. Today it
is one of the prized possessions of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts,
without a doubt one of the wittiest, most ingenious and beguiling
pictures of its age. |
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Girodet's talent for allegory found
its most bizarre expression in his Apotheosis of French Revolutionary
War Heroes (fig. 13). Commissioned in 1801 by Percier and Fontaine
to decorate a salon of Napoleon's chateau de Malmaison, in Rueil,
west of Paris, the painting was intended to honor the memory of the
French Republican officers who had died for their country, and to
celebrate an imminent peace after ten years of Revolutionary Wars.
But in a wild, unprecedented flight of fantasy, Girodet determined
to glorify his fallen generals and heroes as opalescent shades, in
the act of being received into an ethereal, airborne Elysium by the
ancient Celtic bard Ossian, and the warriors and maidens that populate
his tormented mournful ballads. It is hard to imagine today the tremendous
stir that was made in the mid- eighteenth century by the alleged discovery
of Ossian's epic poems, and their translation from Gaelic into English
by the Scott James Macpherson. Although the authenticity of the manuscripts
was questioned almost immediately, and in the end the whole affair
proved to be a hoax and the texts forgeries, the phenomenon of Ossianism
only grew with controversy. Ossian was Napoleon's favorite poet and
he carried an Italian translation of the poems into battle as First
Consul. He once confided, "Alexander chose Homer for his poet,
Augustus chose Virgil, for me I had only Ossian, the others were taken!"3
Napoleon was single-handedly responsible for the mode of Ossianism
in painting during the Consulate and the Empire. Through Percier and
Fontaine, he commissioned not only Girodet's painting, but also its
pendant by Gérard, Ossian Invoking Spirits with his Harp
on the Banks of the Lora. And later in 1812, Napoleon ordered
a ceiling painting from Ingres for his bedroom in the Quirinal Palace,
the celebrated Dream of Ossian. But neither Ingres nor Gérard
produced works remotely approaching the eccentric inventiveness of
Girodet's mad Apotheosis. Originally, Girodet planned to paint
a purely Napoleonic allegory inspired by the failed attempt on the
First Consul's life in December of 1800. But Percier discouraged him
from pursuing the project, and proposed he paint a subject from Ossian
as a pendant to his rival Gérard's painting. Girodet acquiesced,
but insisted in turn on incorporating an exalting Revolutionary theme.
The result is a real tour de force, a hallucinatory vision of seemingly
irreconcilable crossed purposes: apotheosizing contemporary French
military heroes and evoking the fantastic romantic world of Ossian's
Celtic legends. The painting is iconographically so complicated that
Girodet felt obliged to publish a lengthy, mind-numbing description
of the painting in the livret of the 1802 Salon. Yet in the
end, Girodet's Ossian has its own poetic logic, and his vast
agglomeration of astonishing details achieves a kind of overall visual
unity that is perhaps unique to this composition. Finally Girodet's
Apotheosis both captures and anticipates something of the madness
and unreality of the whole Napoleonic venture—a fitting tribute,
not without irony, to that most extravagant dreamer of all.4 |
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In the next room of the Louvre exhibition
the visitor finds a selection of ten of Girodet's Ossianic drawings.
There is an obvious debt in these drawings to both Fuseli and Flaxman,
whose work Girodet knew well from his Roman sojourn. The real innovation
of these drawings may well be, as the cataloguer Carter Foster suggests,
a technical one, the pervasive heightening with white gouache that
imparts such a strange, disembodied quality to these works (fig. 14). |
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After viewing the Ossian in
Girodet's atelier, David is reported to have exclaimed, "Oh that!
He is mad, Girodet. . . He is mad, or I don't understand anything
about painting. His figures are made of crystal. . . What a shame
with his beautiful talent, he gives us nothing but insanities. . .
He has no common sense" (239). Journalists and the public, baffled
by Girodet's improbable, convoluted program essentially agreed with
David's criticism, and the picture was removed before the closing
of the 1802 Salon. In his next major Salon painting, Scene from
a Deluge of 1806 (fig. 15), Girodet's figures are as solid and
material as they were evanescent in his Ossian, and his new
theme is as direct and accessible as it had been hermetic and obscure
four years earlier in 1802. The Scene from a Deluge caused
a great commotion at the 1806 Salon, and later in 1810, its fame was
such that it was awarded the prize for the best picture of the decade,
ahead of David's Sabines. Girodet insisted that the theme of
his uncommissioned painting was not a biblical or literary one, but
rather a subject that should be thought of more in terms of a contemporary
fait divers. In the Deluge five members of a desperate,
ill-fated family, all spectacularly appended to one another like daring
aerial gymnasts, are on the verge of losing hold and plunging to their
deaths in the rising water below. The Deluge is not distinguished
by Girodet's signature traits of aesthetic refinement and poetic fantasy,
but on the contrary the picture is unexpectedly vivid, melodramatic
and sensational—the original eye-popping, heart-stopping cliff-hanger.
From the beginning some critics regretted the introduction of these
unorthodox qualities in Girodet's new Salon painting, and in a particularly
severe judgment of the Deluge, David declared the painting
a threat to the dignity and idealism of art, that if unchecked, would
lead the genre of history painting to the ridiculousness of melodrama.
The terrible suspense of the scene centers on the dead tree from which
the whole family is acrobatically suspended. The tree has just split
and the family's lot hangs by a thread. Girodet has adapted a head
from Michelangelo's Last Judgment for that of the anguished
father. But the effect is decidedly un-Michelangelesque: the father's
wildly exaggerated expression of utter terror is a purely psychological
response to an immediate predicament, brought about by a natural catastrophe.
His look does not convey true Michelangelesque terribilità,
a super human state of inner spiritual torment. Furthermore, the strong
feelings of the sublime generated by Girodet's scene are evoked, as
Sylvain Bellenger argues, through an unbearable emotional suspense
that violates the laws of classical restraint. Girodet is consciously
exploiting the contemporary Parisian mode for melodrama, and his primary
goal here is to thrill and terrify his modern Salon audience. After
the relative failure of the Ossian in the 1802 Salon, Girodet
was undoubtedly determined to prevail at a future Salon, and his huge,
four and a half meter high Deluge, with its over-life-size
figures, was carefully calculated both to win over and get even with
an uncultivated Parisian public he had come to disdain. |
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There is important evidence that Girodet intended
his Deluge to be comprehended on another level, as a modern
allegory of political deception and betrayal. In September 1806 Girodet
wrote of his Salon painting for the Journal de Paris: "How
many people, set upon the reefs of the world and in the midst of social
tempests, entrust, like this family, their health and fortune to rotten
supports" (p. 289). In 1806 it would have been difficult not
to read the Revolution for "social tempests" and Napoleon
for "rotten supports," and thereby interpret the tragic
scene in the following terms: in a desperate attempt to escape years
of Revolutionary wars and social turmoil, France latches on to Napoleon,
only to discover that the new support is a rotten one, and that France
is about to fall back into a state of chaos. Girodet's allegorical
reading of the Deluge, however, was not alluded to by contemporary
journalists, who may have feared censorship, or simply been unable
to make the connection. For without the help of Girodet's own words,
his veiled critique of Napoleonic adventurism is perhaps no more readily
discerned in the Deluge than it was in his Apotheosis
of four years earlier.5 |
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In the Louvre exhibition the Deluge
is shown in a spotlit black room like the one constructed for the
Endymion. But now the visitor has the impression of standing
before a diorama, one of those enormous realistically painted canvases
that were viewed by the nineteenth-century public in darkened rooms,
and were lighted in order to give the figures an illusion of dramatic
movement. The diorama, like the melodrama enjoyed an immense vogue
in the early nineteenth century, and one suspects that Girodet would
approve of the Louvre's temporary installation of his sensationalist
painting. |
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Two years after exhibiting Scene
from a Deluge, Girodet repeated his success at the Salon with
The Funeral of Atala (fig. 16), a picture that would become
a veritable icon of early French romantic painting. Based on Chateaubriand's
Atala ou les amours de deux sauvages dans le desert of 1801,
Girodet's painting narrates the tragic denouement of the converted
Christian Atala's impossible love for the pagan Indian boy Chactas.
Atala, who as a girl had taken a vow of chastity, poisons herself
rather than succumb to her passion for Chactas. In Girodet's scene,
Atala is being lowered into her grave by Père Aubry and Chactas,
who lovingly embraces her in a heart-rending farewell. The painting
was commissioned from Girodet by Louis-François Bertin, the
director of the influential opposition Journal des débats,
who had been relieved of his position and sent into exile by Napoleon.
Bertin's desire to offer an homage to his Royalist friend Chateaubriand
occasioned nothing less than "the meeting between the most literary
painter and the most pictorial writer of the time" (p. 302).
With his Atala Girodet created a narrative art that was an
ideal vehicle for the melancholy and sentimentality of early romanticism.
Probably Girodet's single most prophetic work, the Funeral of Atala
anticipates countless romantic, academic paintings of the 1820s to
1840s, by artists of the juste milieu like Ary Scheffer and
Horace Vernet. For all the popularity and promise of his Atala,
however, Girodet did not follow it up with further paintings inspired
by French romantic literary themes. Girodet was an excellent illustrator,
and a selection of his finished drawings for illustrated editions
of Virgil and Racine, which are displayed in specially conceived rooms
of the Louvre exhibition, bear witness to his talents for this genre
(fig. 17). But, when it came to choosing subjects for his more ambitious
paintings, Girodet clearly found that ancient Greek myths and fantastic
Celtic legends allowed him greater freedom to invent his own poetic
conceits, than the more constraining literary prose and dramatic,
narrative poetry of his romantic contemporaries. |
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In what is by far his most imposing
history painting, The Revolt in Cairo (1810, fig. 1), Girodet
demonstrates that even a modern historic event has the capacity to
fire his quirky imagination. Commissioned in 1809 by Napoleon, through
Vivant Denon, to decorate the galerie de Diane in the Tuileries Palace,
The Revolt in Cairo reenacts a minor, but especially bloody
episode of the Egyptian campaign: the 1798 uprising in Cairo of indigenous
Mamelukes against their French occupants. The revolt was swiftly repressed,
and it is the brutal crushing of the insurrection by French Revolutionary
soldiers, rather than the uprising itself, that is the proper subject
of Girodet's painting. Girodet's assigned military theme, however,
posed an exceptional challenge: the 1798 revolt in Cairo was a poorly
documented event with few eye witness accounts, and there were neither
celebrated French officers, nor daring heroic feats associated with
the incident. But as we shall see, Girodet managed to capitalize on
what would have been a severe handicap for most of his contemporaries,
and turn the limitations of the commission to his distinct advantage. |
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Due to its size, over five meters
wide, Girodet's Revolt is shown in the rotunda of the Louvre
at the entrance to the exhibition. The painting has been cleaned to
reveal Girodet's remarkable gifts as a colorist. Indeed, the splendid
uniforms of the French soldiers, and the exotic costumes of the Mamelukes
provided Girodet with an unequaled opportunity to indulge his penchant
for deep, saturated color and striking surface textures. In no other
painting does Girodet's fascination with contrasting colors of human
skin receive such stunning and disturbing expression. The Revolt
is an overwhelming assemblage of riveting, closely observed details,
all precisely painted and polished to a brilliant mineral hardness.
On the right side of the painting, to take only the most famous passage,
the expiring bey, arrayed in layers of lavender-colored silks, woolen
paisley shawls, and a great rose-colored, fur-lined robe, collapses
on the arm of his fierce, naked Arab servant (fig.18). At the servant's
side, a red-turbaned, otherwise naked Moor raises a flashing, gold-embossed
steel dagger with his right hand, and supports himself by wrapping
his left arm around the extended bare thigh of the bey's servant.
In his left hand the Moor holds a grisly trophy, the beautiful, mask-like,
severed head of a French officer. |
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Next to the great Napoleonic battle paintings
by Gros, Girodet's Revolt seems curiously detached, un-heroic
and unreal. Girodet's scene is highly charged and intensely ferocious,
but the fury, savagery and suffering of the frenzied confrontation
have all been subjected to a process of aesthetic rarefaction and
abstraction. On the left, a superbly outfitted hussar leaps into the
scene like a prince in a French romantic ballet. Other figures are
elegantly disposed or posturing, whether charging, recoiling, agonizing
or dead. Girodet's rhetoric of violent movement and gesture is idealized,
but not baroque in tendency, and neither for that matter is his conception
of pictorial space and structure. His crowded, chaotic composition
is devoid of any rational geometric schema. The scene is drastically
compressed from all sides and teems with fierce, intricately entangled
soldiers and Mamelukes, who twist and turn, attack and slaughter one
another in a series of narrow, receding corridors of space. Girodet's
compositional eccentricities call to mind those of roman battle relief
sculptures and mannerist battle murals; and his Revolt does
not look forward to either Géricault's baroque compositions
with their powerful, plunging, diagonal axis, or the sweeping synthetic
visions of Delacroix's orientalist paintings. Girodet's Revolt
is sui generis. He was commissioned by Napoleon to paint an essentially
undocumented battle, one that was "without generals, without
heroes, without destiny and without any historical consequences"
(p. 308). But in the end, the commission turned out to be perfectly
suited to Girodet's special genius—it allowed him to give free
reign to both his aberrant aesthetic instincts and his strange, troubling
imagination. |
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In a room set aside for official portraits we
find Girodet's portrait of Chateaubriand meditating upon the ruins
of Rome (fig. 19). Painted in 1808, Girodet's portrait of the pensive,
melancholy author became, like Atala, which was created a year
earlier, an icon of French romantic painting and was diffused through
many copies. |
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Another exceptional painting in this room of rather
uneven works is the curious, provocative portrait of Citizen Belley,
"the first representation of a black man to be shown in the official
position of an occidental legislator" (p. 324). The portrait
of Belley (fig. 20) is also the first painting Girodet executed after
his return to France in 1795. It is apparently uncommissioned, and
therefore must have originated with a concerted effort on Girodet's
part to manifest strong Republican convictions in an ever-treacherous
Revolutionary Paris. In February 1794 the Revolutionary Convention
voted to abolish slavery in the French colonies. This momentous event
had been preceded some months earlier by the emancipation of slaves
on the French Caribbean island of San Domingo, following a decisive
victory of the Republican army over the white colonists and slave
owners. One of the military heroes of the campaign was the former
slave Jean-Baptiste Belley, who was subsequently elected a representative
to the Convention and sent to France in 1794. In Citizen Belley,
painted about 1797, Girodet has succeeded in transforming his portrait
into a clever, startlingly original history painting. Outfitted in
the uniform of a French deputy, Belley leans on a pedestal supporting
a gleaming, white marble bust of the French philosophe and historian,
Abbé Guillaume Raynal. Raynal, who had died in 1796, was the
author of an influential treatise published in 1770 that became a
major cornerstone of the abolitionist movement in France. But the
potent Republican message of Girodet's "history painting"
is curiously undermined by the picture's peculiar and unsettling aura.
As Robert Rosenblum has observed, the disquieting effects of the Belley
portrait derive from the artist's deliberate intensification not only
of the whiteness of the bust and the blackness of the sitter, but
also of the textural differentiation between marble and flesh.6
Girodet's willful, anti-Davidian predilection for dazzling contrasts
of heightened color and magnified surface textures can be observed
in many of his paintings, and this surreal tendency to artistic hyperbole,
which found its ultimate expression in The Revolt in Cairo,
is one of the hallmarks of Girodet's art. |
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Unfortunately the spirit of Republican egalitarianism
commemorated in Girodet's double portrait did not survive in France
for long; and as a consequence Belley's own fate was to have a tragic
twist. Deputy Belley continued his political career until 1797 when
he was replaced by another black representative. He promptly returned
to military life, and was sent back to San Domingo as part of a French
expedition to restore order on the island, and check the growing independence
of its self-appointed governor Toussaint-L'Ouverture. This mission
failed and Belley returned to France, where in 1802 he joined a second
expedition to San Domingo, organized this time by Napoleon as First
Consul, and led by Napoleon's brother-in-law General Leclerc. Upon
arrival in San Domingo, Leclerc had secret orders to disarm and arrest
all black soldiers and officers, regardless of whether they were fighting
for the Consular army or the rebel Toussaint-L'Ouverture. Belley was
arrested and incarcerated in April 1802. Toussaint surrendered in
May, and was arrested in June. A month later, in July 1802, slavery
was reestablished in the French colonies, where it continued unabated
until the Second Republic (1848). Meanwhile, Belley was eventually
transferred to a prison in France, where he died in 1805. It is hard
to guess what Girodet's response to these deplorable events could
have been. He went on to paint portraits of Napoleon and his family,
and when the Bourbons were restored to the throne of France, he was
commissioned by Louis XVIII to paint portraits of Vendéan heroes
who had valiantly fought against the Revolutionary army for church
and king. Looking at these rather mediocre portraits in the exhibition
one is struck more than anything else by Girodet's opportunism and
cynicism. After his youthful Republican fervor, especially during
his student years in Italy, Girodet seems to have grown rather jaded
and indifferent to the constantly changing, unpredictable world of
politics and power. |
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In the corridor leading from the room of official
portraits, the visitor comes upon a group of portraits with a decidedly
more intimate and engaging character (fig. 21). Among these "family"
paintings are three portraits of Dr. Trioson's son Benoît Agnès,
painted one after another at three-year intervals. The most captivating
of the trio depicts Benoît Agnès at the age of ten (fig.
22). Standing and leaning casually against a chair, the curly-haired
boy looks away from the viewer with a withdrawn, melancholic but ultimately
impenetrable air. Girodet reserves a more profound disclosure of the
child's inner state of mind and psychological make-up for the odd,
haphazard seeming still-life he has composed on the seat and back
of the chair. From the boy's right hand dangles a neglected, open
Latin grammar resting on the side of a violin. With closer scrutiny
of the still life, the viewer finds that the pages of the grammar
book have been covered with defiant doodles, and that the original
bridge of the violin has been mischievously replaced by a broken half
of a walnut shell (fig. 23). Further details are no less peculiar
and telling: a large beetle crawls along the strings of the violin,
his leg tethered by a long piece of twine that winds repeatedly around
a porte-crayon stuck in a hunk of bread, and then leads finally
to a butterfly that has been carefully pinned to the back of the chair.
The portrait conveys not only Girodet's genuine sympathy for his young
sitter, but also what one senses is a strong identification on the
artist's part with Benoît Agnès's recalcitrance, his
melancholic independence and his playful fantasy. The cataloguers
of the exhibition speculate that the Trioson portrait may be a projection
of Girodet's early personal history. Indeed, the portrait seems to
have been the occasion for Girodet to evoke memories of his own precocious
discovery of an artistic vocation. Girodet played the violin and studied
drawing from a very early age; and the painting's whimsical, symbolic
anchoring of a hard, glossy-shelled beetle and a contrastingly delicate,
powdery-winged butterfly to a draftsman's pencil may well recall a
first awareness of the strange artistic propensities that Girodet
would never outgrow. Girodet drew and painted numerous self-portraits,
and these paintings and drawings are the subject of an excellent essay
by Jean-Loup Champion for the exhibition catalogue (p. 96-107). But
Girodet's portrait of the ten-year-old Benoît-Agnès is
perhaps the most personal of all of his works—a work that is
ultimately more revealing than any of Girodet's own inscrutable self-portraits. |
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Looking back over the Girodet exhibition, one
is constantly struck by the singular restlessness and capriciousness
of Girodet's mind, and by his uncanny ability to reinvent himself
again and again, in picture after picture. Girodet seems forever wary
of trapping himself within a single artistic or narrative style, or
even within a uniform visionary art, no matter how bizarre the imagery
may be. Girodet had many students in his atelier, but he never formed
a school, or if in a sense he did, he was its only member. Girodet
is often called a romantic precursor, and this claim is certainly
true; but Girodet was an unreliable and at times even a perverse one.
In 1819, the year of Géricault's Raft, when romantic
tendencies in France where finally gathering force, Girodet sent his
last important history painting to the Paris Salon: the graceful,
coolly sensual Pygmalion and Galatea (fig. 24), the purest,
most conventional neo-classical picture he ever painted, and a lovely
final homage to a tradition that was now in its death throes. David
complained that Girodet was too learned for his own good, that he
had no common sense, and that in any event he was a total madman.
Girodet was fiercely independent and rebellious by nature, although
to be sure his highly sophisticated artistic revolt remained a palace
revolt, and he was unconcerned with either proclaiming a collective
enthusiasm for the glorious revolutionary events and exploits of his
age, communicating a readily accessible critique of Napoleon's catastrophic
adventurism, or expressing a genuine compassion for the terrible sufferings
and misfortunes of his fellow man. As a painter he believed first
and foremost in the validity of his own idiosyncratic, artistic impulses
and subtle, vagarious imagination. And when he was misunderstood,
offended or his vanity piqued by a vulgar patron or an uncultivated
Salon public, his art became brilliantly vindictive and manipulative,
satirical and ironic. Girodet's individualism was extreme, and in
its unique way both heroic and modern; and it is above all this authentic
quality of radical individualism that makes Girodet not a mere precursor,
but a major artist of his time. |
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There are a few deceptions in the Louvre exhibition.
Both the room of Oriental studies entitled "Heads and Turbans,
Amazons and Odalisques," and the room of commissioned portraits
that follows are rather disappointing. Many of these otherwise attractive
pictures sorely lack the mind-stretching, intellectual dimension of
Girodet's more ambitious paintings. On the other hand, for sheer eye-ravishing
beauty few paintings of the period surpass Girodet's voluptuous portrait
of the Comtesse de Bonneval (figs. 25 and 26), formerly in the collection
of Mario Praz. Girodet's early Death of Camilla of 1785, his
first important Davidian exercise, is curiously absent from the retrospective.
The painting would have served as an instructive foil for the more
experimental history pictures that immediately followed it. In addition,
two essential drawings, which were both in the 1967 retrospective,
were not borrowed for the present exhibition: the self-portrait of
1824 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orleans) and the moving deathbed
scene of his beloved adoptive father Dr. Trioson (Musée Girodet,
Montargis)—one of the very few works in which the pathologically
secretive Girodet confides deep, private emotion. But these criticisms
are minor. This exemplary exhibition is a revelation and it is certain
to elevate Girodet to the more prominent position in the history of
French painting he deserves. |
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Finally, it should be noted that the catalogue
of the exhibition includes a biography/chronology of Girodet by Bruno
Chenique. Originally commissioned to write a chronology along the
lines of the one he compiled for the 1991 Gericault exhibition, the
inimitable Bruno Chenique produced a manuscript of over two million
characters (1500 pages). Fortunately, rather than cut the manuscript,
the publisher decided to put the entire invaluable document on a CD-Rom,
which has been placed in a pocket at the end of the catalogue. |
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Brooks Beaulieu |
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1. The "disappearance" of the majority of Girodet's
landscape paintings is probably due to the fact that the pictures
are unsigned, and likely sit unattributed or misattributed in the
countless public and private collections of neo-classical landscape
painting—a field where attributions are often extremely difficult
to make with any certainty. The cataloguers of the exhibition believe
that with a systematic study of the motifs in Girodet's Italian
notebooks more of these landscapes will eventually be recognized.
2. George Levitine, "Girodet's New Danaë: The
Iconography of a Scandal," The Minneapolis Art Bulletin
58 (1969), 69-77.
3. Cited in Sylvain Bellenger et al, La légende d'Ossian
illustrée par Girodet. Exh. cat. (Montargis: Musée
Girodet, 1989), 15.
4. On Ossian, Napoleon and Girodet, see Bruno Foucart's preface
in Ibid, 5-6
5. For further discussion of this interpretation of the Deluge,
see p. 289 of the exhibition catalogue.
6. Robert Rosenblum, 19th-Century Art (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1984), 65.
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© 2005–6 Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
and Brooks Beaulieu. All Rights Reserved. |
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