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Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History
David to Delacroix: The Rise of Romantic Mythology
In this beautifully illustrated study of intellectual and art history, Dorothy Johnson explores the representation of classical myths by renowned French artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, demonstrating the extraordinary influence of the natural sciences and psychology on artistic depiction of myth.
Highlighting the work of major painters such as David, Girodet, Gerard, Ingres, and Delacroix and sculptors such as Houdon and Pajou, David to Delacroix reveals how these artists offered innovative reinterpretations of myth while incorporating contemporaneous and revolutionary discoveries in the disciplines of anatomy, biology, physiology, psychology, and medicine. The interplay among these disciplines, Johnson argues, led to a reexamination by visual artists of the historical and intellectual structures of myth, its social and psychological dimensions, and its construction as a vital means of understanding the self and the individual's role in society. This confluence is studied in depth for the first time here, and each chapter includes rich examples chosen from the vast number of mythological representations of the period. While focused on mythical subjects, French Romantic artists, Johnson argues, were creating increasingly modern modes of interpreting and meditating on culture and the human condition.
Highlighting the work of major painters such as David, Girodet, Gerard, Ingres, and Delacroix and sculptors such as Houdon and Pajou, David to Delacroix reveals how these artists offered innovative reinterpretations of myth while incorporating contemporaneous and revolutionary discoveries in the disciplines of anatomy, biology, physiology, psychology, and medicine. The interplay among these disciplines, Johnson argues, led to a reexamination by visual artists of the historical and intellectual structures of myth, its social and psychological dimensions, and its construction as a vital means of understanding the self and the individual's role in society. This confluence is studied in depth for the first time here, and each chapter includes rich examples chosen from the vast number of mythological representations of the period. While focused on mythical subjects, French Romantic artists, Johnson argues, were creating increasingly modern modes of interpreting and meditating on culture and the human condition.
- GenresArt
260 pages, Hardcover
First published January 27, 2011
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Dorothy Johnson
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Dorothy Johnson is the Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa.
Dorothy Johnson is the Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa.
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January 7, 2018
Dorothy Johnson explores the development of Romantic Mythology throughout the 18th and 19th Century, linking it to the wider cultural change as interest in the Graeco-Roman past developed, caused by translations of literary texts (eg., Virgil, Ovid, Sappho, and Anacreon and the lyric poets Bion and Moschus), and the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Earlier in the eighteenth century, in accord with a perdurable European tradition, mythology had been an integral part of the privileged world of the king and court, with familiarity with the stories of mythology (referred to as 'fables') being an essential part of educated high culture in the eighteenth century. By the middle of the 18th Century, with the advent of Neoclassicism and moral severity, such amatory (see below) subjects were unfit for the new moral mission of art. That is, mythology is no longer seen as “something feigned and invented in order to instruct and entertain” but rather revelatory of a kind of truth—in fact, a truth equal in value to historical truth, and one that can also reveal the nature of ancient religions.
During the 1790s, at the very time when religious subject matter becomes untenable due to Revolutionary and Republican ideologies, myth takes on a new momentum, particularly myths
related to eros and desire. Notably, Jacques-Louis David, one of the most important artists of the period and the one most directly associated with political subjects in the 1780s and 1790s, would launch a new direction in mythological painting that gave impetus to the rise of Romantic mythology in French art.
"David celebrates the power of eros in his depiction of Paris, comely son of Priam and prince of Troy, and Helen, whom he had abducted from her husband, the Greek king Menelaus. David represents the lovers in a postcoital moment in an intimate bedroom scene."
David’s Loves of Paris and Helen announced a new path for mythic representation to follow, Girodet’s Endymion built upon this momentum and took it to the next level.
Girodet was particularly fascinated with the role of eros and desire. His mythological production was vast, and he sought to enrich the iconography of myth through continual innovations. A considerable number were directly related to his lifelong project of illustrating the ancient poets, whose works he translated into French himself.
With Endymion, Girodet announced one of his lifelong projects— namely, to use myth as a means of revealing truths of human nature. He was in accord with comparative mythographers of the period who sought to uncover or reveal the profound psychological and biological human truths that myths contain. And Eros often serves an important function in this revealing.
Girodet, in his quest for originality, dramatically transformed the canonical pictorial versions of the myth in many ways. Jupiter’s seduction of Danae as a shower of gold coins had captivated
the imagination of painters from the Renaissance onward because of its overtly erotic theme.
"A child Eros has also appeared on the scene with his torch to press against Danae’s heart and ignite her passion. Eros here again is in the role of revealer, for he holds up a mirror so that Danae can observe the jewels as they attach themselves to her neck. She sees her reflection in the mirror and must understand the Petrarchan conceit that her own beauty outshines the jewels. Eros, in fact, holds up the mirror to the self."
Girodet’s meditations on the Danae myth led him to depart from the literary and visual sources in order to give greater psychological depth and subtlety to the myth, as he had done in Endymion.
Just a year after he completed his Night of Danae (above), Girodet created a radically different version of the theme. The mythologised portrait of Mlle Lange as Danae (1799) is a parody of the myth itself and satire.
Anne-Françoise Elisabeth Lange had achieved notoriety during the Directory as an actress known for her numerous love affairs with the nouveau riche. Upon seeing this painting critics denounded Girodet for his destructive use of myth as parody during a period when mythological themes in painting were being acclaimed for their thought-provoking psychological dimensions.
"Because she is so intent on the loving contemplation of the gold coins, she does not look into the vanity mirror that she holds. She has no self-insight, and, in fact, the mirror is cracked, further suggesting her inability to know herself."
Transforming the well-known actress into Danae and parodying the myth to critique, satirize, and bring to light Lange’s lust and greed, reveals his capacious understanding of myth and its many Graeco-Roman traditions, from the serious, mysterious, sacred, and tragic to the ludic and parodic.
Girodet's parodic subversion of a well-known myth also opened the doors to a leading development in Romantic mythology in early nineteenth-century France (e.g., David's Amor and Psyche - below). Furthermore, Girodet reasserted myth as a vehicle to critique itself, to call into question the received meanings and values of the time-hallowed narratives, inherited from classical antiquity.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, we see Eros most frequently depicted as a child, an antique tradition in poetry and the visual arts revived during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
The seemingly indomitable reign of the child deity who presided over fantasies of sensuality and love during the first half of the eighteenth century, however, would begin to be questioned and redefined as a result of cultural and aesthetic changes that developed after the middle of the century in France.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the adolescent Eros became more popular and prominent. Some scholars have theorized that the depiction of the ephebic adolescent mythic male emerged during the French Revolution as an antithesis to the iconic image of the powerful Hercules. The prevalence of the theme of the ephebic male can be related to the eighteenth-century fascination with the nature of sexuality and sexual identity, the manifestations of erotic development and attraction, both heterosexual and homosexual, and the quest to understand the physiological, psychological, and emotional states that accompany desire.
In mid- to late eighteenth-century France, the human body became a renewed site for attention and study by artists. Through this, artists hoped to achieve beauty, to perfect the representation of the human form through an understanding of the body’s inner and outer structures. The disciplines of art and anatomy were coming to be seen once again as closely aligned. For instance, Jean-Antoine Houdon used his observation of the female nude from life, as well as his profound understanding of what lies beneath the skin, in his life-size representation of the goddess Diana
"Critics of the time were startled Houdon’s emphasis on her athleticism—her victorious, triumphal nature that seemed to present an affront and a challenge to the spectator."
Houdon’s knowledge of anatomy made the difference in bringing a divinity from the mythological past into the modern world. His emphasis on anatomical realism humanizes Diana and integrates her into the world of the mortal body.
This interest in the scientific domains of human biology, physiology, history, and culture, led to more interest in the identity of the self, and the location of human personality. Self-identity of profound interest.
"Philippe Pinel, one of the founders of modern psychiatry. In his Medical/Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation or Mania, which appeared in 1800, he used the varied manifestations of psychological suffering throughout the body as one way to better understand the loss of self-control and self-identity"
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres explored this idea through his painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx
"Sophocles’ play raises the quintessential issue of free will versus fate in a manner never surpassed. Ingres recognized that the entire narrative rests upon the truth hidden from Oedipus—he explains the riddle that no one had been able to unravel—the central enigma of man’s identity. But Ingres seems to have been fascinated with the paradox of Oedipus—he solves the riddle of man’s identity yet is ignorant of his own"
Ingres also reveals that an important aspect of human identity, present although subdued in the painting, has to do with sexuality, for in all versions of his composition Oedipus’s head directly confronts the protruding breasts of the Sphinx, which are at his eye level. The purposeful Oedipus ignores this erotic enticement, which might cloud his reason (eros imperils logos), for his mind is set on solving the riddle. Rather than be distracted by her breasts, he looks directly into her eyes. This locking of the gaze reveals the battle of mind and will.
"man is the measure of all things, the center of the universe. Through his intelligence, he can overcome all obstacles and be master of his own identity."
A major goal of many artists of the period from David to Delacroix was to bring the imaginary figures of the mythic past into psychological proximity to their audience and, at the same time, to capture the enchantment of the magical, mysterious world of the mythic imagination. Mythical beings lived again in the visual arts because they brought us knowledge about ourselves, revealing truths of eros and desire, youth and young love, the relationship of self-identity to sexual identity, and the mysterious nature of suffering and death, as well as of extreme psychological states that could lead to depression, suicide, and murder.
Myth in 1800 France was considered a serious mode of knowledge about self and society. It could be used as a window to help shed light on and understand modern concerns. It was not a compendium of fanciful stories of no relevance to contemporary life but instead a repository of deep psychological meanings and truths of immense heuristic value. Myth was, as well, a hermeneutical tool that helped to reveal the nature of humankind and the role of the human in the cosmos.
"Myth is the primordial language natural to these unconscious processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery.” - Jung
Favourite passage
"David emphasizes the helplessness and vulnerability of some of the infants and the anger and independence of others, who emulate the warriors by wrestling with each other, proleptic of their own destinies to become warriors and soldiers, like their Roman fathers and Sabine uncles. The most startling infant is the baby with the philosophical gaze who lies in the immediate foreground next to a fallen sword and looks out at the spectator thoughtfully. He will be the future philosopher of Rome, if the children are saved."
Earlier in the eighteenth century, in accord with a perdurable European tradition, mythology had been an integral part of the privileged world of the king and court, with familiarity with the stories of mythology (referred to as 'fables') being an essential part of educated high culture in the eighteenth century. By the middle of the 18th Century, with the advent of Neoclassicism and moral severity, such amatory (see below) subjects were unfit for the new moral mission of art. That is, mythology is no longer seen as “something feigned and invented in order to instruct and entertain” but rather revelatory of a kind of truth—in fact, a truth equal in value to historical truth, and one that can also reveal the nature of ancient religions.
During the 1790s, at the very time when religious subject matter becomes untenable due to Revolutionary and Republican ideologies, myth takes on a new momentum, particularly myths
related to eros and desire. Notably, Jacques-Louis David, one of the most important artists of the period and the one most directly associated with political subjects in the 1780s and 1790s, would launch a new direction in mythological painting that gave impetus to the rise of Romantic mythology in French art.
"David celebrates the power of eros in his depiction of Paris, comely son of Priam and prince of Troy, and Helen, whom he had abducted from her husband, the Greek king Menelaus. David represents the lovers in a postcoital moment in an intimate bedroom scene."
David’s Loves of Paris and Helen announced a new path for mythic representation to follow, Girodet’s Endymion built upon this momentum and took it to the next level.
Girodet was particularly fascinated with the role of eros and desire. His mythological production was vast, and he sought to enrich the iconography of myth through continual innovations. A considerable number were directly related to his lifelong project of illustrating the ancient poets, whose works he translated into French himself.
With Endymion, Girodet announced one of his lifelong projects— namely, to use myth as a means of revealing truths of human nature. He was in accord with comparative mythographers of the period who sought to uncover or reveal the profound psychological and biological human truths that myths contain. And Eros often serves an important function in this revealing.
Girodet, in his quest for originality, dramatically transformed the canonical pictorial versions of the myth in many ways. Jupiter’s seduction of Danae as a shower of gold coins had captivated
the imagination of painters from the Renaissance onward because of its overtly erotic theme.
"A child Eros has also appeared on the scene with his torch to press against Danae’s heart and ignite her passion. Eros here again is in the role of revealer, for he holds up a mirror so that Danae can observe the jewels as they attach themselves to her neck. She sees her reflection in the mirror and must understand the Petrarchan conceit that her own beauty outshines the jewels. Eros, in fact, holds up the mirror to the self."
Girodet’s meditations on the Danae myth led him to depart from the literary and visual sources in order to give greater psychological depth and subtlety to the myth, as he had done in Endymion.
Just a year after he completed his Night of Danae (above), Girodet created a radically different version of the theme. The mythologised portrait of Mlle Lange as Danae (1799) is a parody of the myth itself and satire.
Anne-Françoise Elisabeth Lange had achieved notoriety during the Directory as an actress known for her numerous love affairs with the nouveau riche. Upon seeing this painting critics denounded Girodet for his destructive use of myth as parody during a period when mythological themes in painting were being acclaimed for their thought-provoking psychological dimensions.
"Because she is so intent on the loving contemplation of the gold coins, she does not look into the vanity mirror that she holds. She has no self-insight, and, in fact, the mirror is cracked, further suggesting her inability to know herself."
Transforming the well-known actress into Danae and parodying the myth to critique, satirize, and bring to light Lange’s lust and greed, reveals his capacious understanding of myth and its many Graeco-Roman traditions, from the serious, mysterious, sacred, and tragic to the ludic and parodic.
Girodet's parodic subversion of a well-known myth also opened the doors to a leading development in Romantic mythology in early nineteenth-century France (e.g., David's Amor and Psyche - below). Furthermore, Girodet reasserted myth as a vehicle to critique itself, to call into question the received meanings and values of the time-hallowed narratives, inherited from classical antiquity.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, we see Eros most frequently depicted as a child, an antique tradition in poetry and the visual arts revived during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
The seemingly indomitable reign of the child deity who presided over fantasies of sensuality and love during the first half of the eighteenth century, however, would begin to be questioned and redefined as a result of cultural and aesthetic changes that developed after the middle of the century in France.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the adolescent Eros became more popular and prominent. Some scholars have theorized that the depiction of the ephebic adolescent mythic male emerged during the French Revolution as an antithesis to the iconic image of the powerful Hercules. The prevalence of the theme of the ephebic male can be related to the eighteenth-century fascination with the nature of sexuality and sexual identity, the manifestations of erotic development and attraction, both heterosexual and homosexual, and the quest to understand the physiological, psychological, and emotional states that accompany desire.
In mid- to late eighteenth-century France, the human body became a renewed site for attention and study by artists. Through this, artists hoped to achieve beauty, to perfect the representation of the human form through an understanding of the body’s inner and outer structures. The disciplines of art and anatomy were coming to be seen once again as closely aligned. For instance, Jean-Antoine Houdon used his observation of the female nude from life, as well as his profound understanding of what lies beneath the skin, in his life-size representation of the goddess Diana
"Critics of the time were startled Houdon’s emphasis on her athleticism—her victorious, triumphal nature that seemed to present an affront and a challenge to the spectator."
Houdon’s knowledge of anatomy made the difference in bringing a divinity from the mythological past into the modern world. His emphasis on anatomical realism humanizes Diana and integrates her into the world of the mortal body.
This interest in the scientific domains of human biology, physiology, history, and culture, led to more interest in the identity of the self, and the location of human personality. Self-identity of profound interest.
"Philippe Pinel, one of the founders of modern psychiatry. In his Medical/Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation or Mania, which appeared in 1800, he used the varied manifestations of psychological suffering throughout the body as one way to better understand the loss of self-control and self-identity"
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres explored this idea through his painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx
"Sophocles’ play raises the quintessential issue of free will versus fate in a manner never surpassed. Ingres recognized that the entire narrative rests upon the truth hidden from Oedipus—he explains the riddle that no one had been able to unravel—the central enigma of man’s identity. But Ingres seems to have been fascinated with the paradox of Oedipus—he solves the riddle of man’s identity yet is ignorant of his own"
Ingres also reveals that an important aspect of human identity, present although subdued in the painting, has to do with sexuality, for in all versions of his composition Oedipus’s head directly confronts the protruding breasts of the Sphinx, which are at his eye level. The purposeful Oedipus ignores this erotic enticement, which might cloud his reason (eros imperils logos), for his mind is set on solving the riddle. Rather than be distracted by her breasts, he looks directly into her eyes. This locking of the gaze reveals the battle of mind and will.
"man is the measure of all things, the center of the universe. Through his intelligence, he can overcome all obstacles and be master of his own identity."
A major goal of many artists of the period from David to Delacroix was to bring the imaginary figures of the mythic past into psychological proximity to their audience and, at the same time, to capture the enchantment of the magical, mysterious world of the mythic imagination. Mythical beings lived again in the visual arts because they brought us knowledge about ourselves, revealing truths of eros and desire, youth and young love, the relationship of self-identity to sexual identity, and the mysterious nature of suffering and death, as well as of extreme psychological states that could lead to depression, suicide, and murder.
Myth in 1800 France was considered a serious mode of knowledge about self and society. It could be used as a window to help shed light on and understand modern concerns. It was not a compendium of fanciful stories of no relevance to contemporary life but instead a repository of deep psychological meanings and truths of immense heuristic value. Myth was, as well, a hermeneutical tool that helped to reveal the nature of humankind and the role of the human in the cosmos.
"Myth is the primordial language natural to these unconscious processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery.” - Jung
Favourite passage
"David emphasizes the helplessness and vulnerability of some of the infants and the anger and independence of others, who emulate the warriors by wrestling with each other, proleptic of their own destinies to become warriors and soldiers, like their Roman fathers and Sabine uncles. The most startling infant is the baby with the philosophical gaze who lies in the immediate foreground next to a fallen sword and looks out at the spectator thoughtfully. He will be the future philosopher of Rome, if the children are saved."
December 9, 2018
A great work on ancient Graeco-Roman mythology and its representations in French art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book expresses beautifully how the use of myth was a way of tackling real life concerns and the understanding of modern life. The chapter on Girodet's work was of particular interest to me because I find him sadly to be a bit more underappreciated, and that has meant I've long wanted to delve more into his work.
"...that myth circa 1800 in France was considered a serious mode of knowledge about self and society. It could be used as a window to help shed light on and understand modern concerns. It was not a compendium of fanciful stories of no relevance to contemporary life but instead a repository of deep psychological meanings and truths of immense heuristic value. Myth was, as well, a hermeneutical tool that helped to reveal the nature of humankind and the role of the human in the cosmos. It is not adventitious that the founders of psychoanalysis depended so heavily upon mythology to instantiate their psychoanalytical findings. Freud's love of Greek mythology was well known, and the insights he gained from the mythological realm were freely attested to. Jung thought that myth was the quintessential language of the unconscious and discussed eloquently what mythological consciousness could contribute to the elucidation of the unconscious. He wrote: “Myth is the primordial language natural to these [unconscious] psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery.” I would probably not go so far as Jung on this point, nor would I be qualified to do so, but I will go so far as to say, and I hope that I have begun to show, that without a deeper understanding of mythology and, above all, what it meant to the people of the time, we cannot hope to understand French Romantic art, which made such profound use of mythology, described by Sallustius in his incomparable phrase, “the stories that never were and always are.”
"...that myth circa 1800 in France was considered a serious mode of knowledge about self and society. It could be used as a window to help shed light on and understand modern concerns. It was not a compendium of fanciful stories of no relevance to contemporary life but instead a repository of deep psychological meanings and truths of immense heuristic value. Myth was, as well, a hermeneutical tool that helped to reveal the nature of humankind and the role of the human in the cosmos. It is not adventitious that the founders of psychoanalysis depended so heavily upon mythology to instantiate their psychoanalytical findings. Freud's love of Greek mythology was well known, and the insights he gained from the mythological realm were freely attested to. Jung thought that myth was the quintessential language of the unconscious and discussed eloquently what mythological consciousness could contribute to the elucidation of the unconscious. He wrote: “Myth is the primordial language natural to these [unconscious] psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery.” I would probably not go so far as Jung on this point, nor would I be qualified to do so, but I will go so far as to say, and I hope that I have begun to show, that without a deeper understanding of mythology and, above all, what it meant to the people of the time, we cannot hope to understand French Romantic art, which made such profound use of mythology, described by Sallustius in his incomparable phrase, “the stories that never were and always are.”
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