Mythology and woman: why did 19th-century painters paint them dying?

[00:00:00]Seventeen women painted by the great masters of the nineteenth century.

[00:00:05]Seventeen stories.

[00:00:07]And one detail that art history has taken more than a hundred years to say out loud.

[00:00:13]Almost all of them die.

[00:00:14]The academic painting of the nineteenth century, the painting of Zherohm, Cabanel, Moreau, Siemiradzki, Leighton, Collier, Waterhouse, portrayed women more often as creatures to be judged than as creatures to be admired.

[00:00:30]This is not a contemporary suspicion.

[00:00:33]It is what the paintings themselves say when you place them side by side.

[00:00:38]More often looked at and judged than admired by the brush.

[00:00:42]The academies of Paris, London, Vienna and Munich forbade their female students from drawing nude bodies from life.

[00:00:51]The ban was not fully lifted until the end of the century, almost in eighteen ninety-seven.

[00:00:58]Meanwhile, the Paris Salon rewarded year after year the historical mythological nude.

[00:01:05]That genre in which a naked body could pass for high culture if it came wrapped in an ancient moral.

[00:01:12]Women left the canvas naked only under cover.

[00:01:16]Like Lucretia just before the dagger.

[00:01:19]Like Phryne stripped before the tribunal.

[00:01:22]Like Andromeda chained to the rock.

[00:01:25]Classical culture was the permission the Salon granted to look.

[00:01:29]Four women punished for feeling.

[00:01:31]Dido, queen of Carthage.

[00:01:34]She flees Tyre after the murder of her husband and founds one of the great cities of the Mediterranean.

[00:01:41]When a storm sent by the goddess Juno drives the ships of Aeneas to her coast, she welcomes him as a guest.

[00:01:49]She loves him.

[00:01:50]But Aeneas must leave to found Rome by command of Jupiter, and he goes.

[00:01:56]Dido takes her own life with the same sword he had given her.

[00:02:00]Joseph Stallaert, in eighteen seventy-two, paints her on the bed where they had made love, pointing with her last strength towards the Trojan ships sailing away at dawn.

[00:02:12]Ariadne, princess of Crete.

[00:02:14]She gives Theseus the thread to escape the labyrinth of the Minotaur and flees with him.

[00:02:21]Theseus abandons her sleeping on the island of Naxos.

[00:02:25]Some versions of the myth claim it was Athena herself who ordered the hero to leave her, so that he could fulfill his destiny in Athens.

[00:02:35]John William Waterhouse paints her in eighteen ninety-eight lying on the shore, languishing, still unaware that she is alone.

[00:02:44]Calypso.

[00:02:45]A goddess.

[00:02:47]She holds Ulysses on her island of Ogygia for seven years, offering him immortality if he stays.

[00:02:55]Ulysses goes home.

[00:02:56]Calypso remains on the beach, divine and silent.

[00:03:00]Arnold Böcklin paints her beside the hero, eighteen eighty-three, in one of the most melancholy images of German symbolism.

[00:03:09]Eurydice.

[00:03:10]She dies of a snake bite on her wedding day to Orpheus.

[00:03:14]The musician descends into the underworld and, with his song, persuades Hades to let him take her back.

[00:03:22]One condition: not to look at her until they reach the surface.

[00:03:27]Orpheus turns.

[00:03:29]Eurydice is lost again, now forever.

[00:03:32]Frederic Leighton paints the moment of the final farewell.

[00:03:37]Camille Corot paints her advancing through mists towards the light she will never reach.

[00:03:43]Four women punished for reigning.

[00:03:45]Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae.

[00:03:48]While her husband Agamemnon is besieging Troy for ten years, she prepares her revenge.

[00:03:55]Before sailing, Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to obtain favorable winds.

[00:04:02]When he returns, she murders him in the bath together with his new lover, the prophetess Cassandra.

[00:04:09]John Collier, in eighteen eighty-two, paints her stepping out of the crime, her tunic spattered with blood and the eyes the painter himself described as wild.

[00:04:21]And he gives her a deliberately androgynous figure.

[00:04:24]The model was not a woman.

[00:04:26]It was a male student from Balliol College, Oxford, who had played Clytemnestra in a university production two years earlier.

[00:04:34]When a woman dares pick up the axe, the painter says without saying it, she ceases to look like a woman.

[00:04:42]Cleopatra, last Pharaoh of Egypt.

[00:04:45]When the Romans close in, she chooses how to die before others choose for her.

[00:04:50]Alexandre Cabanel, in eighteen eighty-seven, paints her testing poisons on condemned slaves to decide which one to use on herself.

[00:05:00]A calm composition, almost museum-like, about the spectacle of another body.

[00:05:06]Messalina, empress of Rome, wife of Claudius.

[00:05:11]Suetonius, Juvenal and Tacitus turned her into a byword for unbridled lust.

[00:05:18]Executed in the year forty-eight by order of the emperor himself.

[00:05:23]French academic painting returned again and again to her figure as the icon of female excess punished by the State.

[00:05:32]Salome, princess of Judea.

[00:05:35]She danced before Herod Antipas and demanded as her reward the head of the Baptist on a platter.

[00:05:42]Gustave Moreau paints her in eighteen seventy-six in his watercolor The Apparition, where the severed head floats in the air with a halo, visually echoing the head of Medusa brandished by Perseus in the bronze of Cellini.

[00:05:58]Beauty turned vision, woman turned mystical destructive force.

[00:06:04]The writer Huysmans immortalized this Salome in his novel Against Nature, eighteen eighty-four, and the image spread across Europe.

[00:06:13]Three women punished for knowing more.

[00:06:16]Cassandra, prophetess of Troy.

[00:06:18]Apollo grants her the gift of prophecy in exchange for her surrender to him, and when she refuses, he does not take the gift away but adds a curse: no one will ever believe her.

[00:06:31]She saw Troy fall before it fell, and no one listened.

[00:06:36]When the Achaeans take the city, Ajax rapes her in the temple of Athena.

[00:06:41]Agamemnon takes her as spoil and lover.

[00:06:44]Clytemnestra murders her in Mycenae.

[00:06:48]Cassandra dies without having convinced anyone in her entire life.

[00:06:53]Solomon J. Solomon paints her in eighteen eighty-six at the very moment when Ajax tears her from the altar.

[00:07:02]The technique is prodigious.

[00:07:04]The subject, atrocious.

[00:07:06]Medea, sorceress of Colchis.

[00:07:09]She helps Jason steal the Golden Fleece.

[00:07:13]When Jason abandons her for another woman, she kills her own children.

[00:07:18]Euripides already wrote this story.

[00:07:21]Frederick Sandys, Delacroix, Feuerbach, Mucha and Waterhouse painted her, each with his own touch.

[00:07:30]The abandoned sorceress who turns her pain into a weapon against the one thing the father loved.

[00:07:37]Circe, daughter of the Sun, sorceress of the island of Aeaea.

[00:07:42]She turns Ulysses' companions into pigs.

[00:07:45]Waterhouse, in eighteen ninety-two, paints her in his canvas Circe Invidiosa with a grave face, without superhuman malice, almost jealous.

[00:07:57]He does not present her as a monster, but as a woman trapped in her own nature, condemned to a solitude she herself laments.

[00:08:07]One of the few humanizations in the repertoire.

[00:08:10]Four women punished for being looked at.

[00:08:13]Lucretia, Roman matron.

[00:08:15]Raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last king of Rome.

[00:08:20]Before taking her own life, she made her husband and her kinsman Brutus swear they would avenge her.

[00:08:27]The revenge overthrew the monarchy and founded the Roman Republic, in the year five hundred and nine before Christ.

[00:08:35]Eduardo Rosales, in eighteen seventy-one, paints her death in a large Spanish format kept in the Prado Museum.

[00:08:44]Casto Plasencia, some years later, paints the exact moment Brutus swears revenge.

[00:08:52]Lucretia is the female body that had to die for a constitution to be born.

[00:08:57]Phryne, Athenian hetaira of the fourth century before Christ.

[00:09:03]Brought to trial for impiety.

[00:09:05]The legend says her lawyer Hyperides, seeing the case lost, tore off her cloak before the Areopagus, and the judges, struck by her beauty, acquitted her.

[00:09:16]Jean-Léon Zherohm, in eighteen sixty-one, paints the exact moment of the disrobing.

[00:09:23]Phryne covers her face with a gesture.

[00:09:27]And here is the detail that changes the painting.

[00:09:30]That same gesture, that same posture of shrinking, Zherohm had used and would go on using in his paintings of oriental slave markets.

[00:09:40]The same pose for the classical heroine and for the merchandise.

[00:09:45]The gesture of shame turned into iconographic device so that the male spectator of the Salon could look with permission.

[00:09:53]The work scandalized at the time.

[00:09:56]It was called indecent and pornographic.

[00:09:58]And it became one of the icons of the century.

[00:10:02]Andromeda, princess of Ethiopia.

[00:10:05]Her mother Cassiopeia offends the Nereids by boasting of her beauty, and as punishment Poseidon sends a sea monster that will only be appeased if Andromeda is given to him, chained to a rock.

[00:10:19]Perseus saves her at the last moment.

[00:10:22]But the image the nineteenth-century painting repeats again and again is not the rescue.

[00:10:29]It is the chained naked body, waiting.

[00:10:31]Leighton, Burne-Jones, Doré, Chassériau.

[00:10:35]The perfect mythological excuse for the monumental female nude.

[00:10:39]The Christian Dirce.

[00:10:41]The work of Henryk Siemiradzki, eighteen ninety-seven.

[00:10:45]It measures almost five and a half meters wide.

[00:10:48]It hangs in the National Museum of Warsaw.

[00:10:51]In the Greek myth, Dirce was tied by the sons of Antiope to the horns of a wild bull as punishment.

[00:10:59]Nero, that strategist of spectacle, decided in the first century to recreate the myth live inside his circus of the Vatican, replacing the mythical Dirce with a real young Christian woman.

[00:11:13]Siemiradzki paints the exact moment after: the bull motionless, defeated, almost ashamed, the naked body of the martyr lying on the sand, and Nero leaning from his palanquin with the cold curiosity of a collector.

[00:11:29]The emperor did not invent suffering.

[00:11:32]He quoted it.

[00:11:33]He turned a classical myth that had served for centuries to think about justice into the script of a real spectacle, with a real body.

[00:11:44]And Siemiradzki, two thousand years later, paints that scene with the golden light of Polish academic painting, not to celebrate it, to accuse it.

[00:11:55]Beauty used as a reproach.

[00:11:57]Two women who survive only to lose everything.

[00:12:01]Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons.

[00:12:05]She arrives at Troy at the end of the war to fight against the Achaeans.

[00:12:10]Achilles kills her in combat.

[00:12:12]And when he lifts her helmet and sees her face, he falls in love with her dead.

[00:12:18]Wilhelm Tischbein paints her in eighteen twenty-three in the very gesture of the posthumous love.

[00:12:25]Achilles leaning over the body of the woman he has just pierced with his spear.

[00:12:30]Andromache, wife of Hector.

[00:12:33]When the Achaeans take Troy, her son Astyanax is thrown from the walls so no descendant of the enemy remains.

[00:12:42]And she is given as a slave to Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles.

[00:12:47]The man who had killed her husband.

[00:12:49]Frederic Leighton, in eighteen eighty-eight, paints her dressed in black in the midst of a crowd, holding a pitcher of water.

[00:12:58]Alone in the middle of the multitude.

[00:13:00]It is the canvas of a woman who has not finished dying.

[00:13:04]When you place them together, patterns emerge.

[00:13:08]Those who loved too much pay with their lives.

[00:13:12]Those who reigned die badly.

[00:13:14]Those who knew more were branded as witches.

[00:13:17]Those who carry a man's desire carry his guilt.

[00:13:20]And the witnesses survive only to lose everything.

[00:13:24]Academic painting did not invent these punishments.

[00:13:29]It inherited them from Homer, from Euripides, from Ovid, from Virgil.

[00:13:35]But it staged them with prodigious technique, again and again, throughout an entire century.

[00:13:42]And it always chose the exact moment.

[00:13:45]The rape.

[00:13:45]The dagger.

[00:13:47]The poison.

[00:13:48]The severed head.

[00:13:49]The body on the sand.

[00:13:51]The lover who walks away.

[00:13:52]In nineteen seventy-one, the art historian Linda Nochlin wrote an essay that changed the conversation.

[00:14:00]It was called Why have there been no great women artists?

[00:14:04]And the answer was not talent.

[00:14:06]It was structure.

[00:14:07]The closed academies.

[00:14:09]The Salons rewarding a single kind of gaze.

[00:14:13]The forbidden models.

[00:14:14]The nonexistent professional heirs.

[00:14:17]A male elite deciding for centuries what was painted, how it was painted and who it was painted for.

[00:14:25]And this repertoire we have just seen, seventeen women of myth and ancient history painted in the worst moment of their lives by men who held the monopoly of the canvas, is the best proof of what Nochlin was saying.

[00:14:40]The beauty with which they are painted is not an excuse.

[00:14:44]It is what makes the story unforgettable.