Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson French School, 1767-1824

 

 

Anne-Louis Girodet was born in Montargis in 1767 into a middle-class family, close to the royal family whose estates they administered. His father was the son of a royal notary, bailiff and judge. In 1747, he bought a position as auditor of the Orleans apanage. In 1758, he acquired the lands and seigneury of Le Verger, with which he endowed his eldest son, who thus took the name Girodet du Verger, while Anne-Louis the younger son was in turn called Girodet de Roussy, after a small acre of woodland forming part of this property.

 

An important figure in the young painter's family circle was the physician Benoît François Trioson, also attached to the service of the House of Orleans and resident in Paris. Charged by his father with overseeing Anne-Louis’ education, he played a very important role in the young artist's life after his father's death in 1784. After the death of his wife and children, Dr. Trioson adopted Girodet in 1809, who then took the name Girodet de Roussy-Trioson and inherited his adoptive father's estate in 1816.

 

A natural predisposition for drawing led the teenager to enroll as a pupil at the Royal Academy of Painting at the age of sixteen, in 1783. After the death of his father (in 1784), Girodet joined the studio of the painter Jacques-Louis David, a real incubator of talented artists, where he rubbed shoulders with painters such as Drouais, Gros, Gérard, Fabre, Hennequin and Isabey. The young Girodet was one of the main painters of the second version of the Oath of the Horatii, commissioned by the Count of Vaudreuil.

 

After several unsuccessful attempts, Girodet won the Prix de Rome. Eager to free himself from David's tutelage, he left for Rome in April 1790, arriving on May 30 after a 6-week journey. Revolutionary unrest spread to the venerable Académie, and the boarders decided to remove the fleurs-de-lis from the pediment of its headquarters in the Palazzo Mancini, replacing them with an allegory of the Republic. This decision ignited a firestorm and the Académie was ransacked by the Roman mob on January 13, 1793, leading to the dispersal of the boarders and to its closure. Girodet and his comrade Péquignot left Rome for Naples.

 

Arriving in Naples on January 18, 1793, Girodet spent thirteen months there, one of the most difficult periods of his life. His health deteriorated rapidly; the symptoms of syphilis contracted from Roman prostitutes were compounded by those of tuberculosis. Treated by Doctor Cirillo, who provided him with medical certificates allowing him to pursue his stay, the seriousness of his condition forced him to spend the winter of 1794 in Naples. Girodet left the city for Venice on March 31, 1794 where he stayed for a year before returning to Paris, where he arrived on October 13, 1795.

 

Girodet then became close to the Bonaparte family and to the new power, becoming, along with Gros, Prud'hon and Horace Vernet, one of the leading painters of the Empire.[1] In 1809, he was commissioned to paint The Revolt at Cairo, one of his masterpieces originally destined for the Galerie de Diane in the Palais des Tuileries. We shall see the many similarities between this painting and our drawing.

 

2. Description of the drawing

 

We feel that it is worth mentioning, in relation to this drawing, Sylvain Bellenger's conclusion to his contribution to the catalog of the 2005 Louvre exhibition: “less a guardian of classicism, Girodet seems to us to be its excess [...]. His art, with its excess of literary intentions, learned refinement and often dazzling virtuosity, is linked to the specific mannerism of the end of an era. [...] Disavowed by David for his oddity, Girodet would be saved by it: as he noted in one of his handbooks “originality excites curiosity”.”

 

In our drawing, Girodet depicts a subject evoked in Pindar's Twelfth Pythian Ode and in Book V of Ovid's Metamorphoses: Perseus, surrounded by the inhabitants of the island of Seriphos, brandishes Medusa's head and turns them into rocks. The battle between Perseus and the inhabitants of Seriphos takes place during a feast at which Perseus recounts his exploits, including the rescue of Andromeda, who has become his wife. Then Phineas, Andromeda's uncle, arrives to punish Perseus for marrying his niece to whom he was engaged. A battle breaks out at the banquet, and Perseus' first victims are Atys and Lycabas, two of Phineas' supporters whose bodies now lie strewn across the floor. Perseus owes his salvation to a decisive weapon: Medusa's severed head, which freezes his assailants into rock.

 

Girodet's depiction is particularly delightful. It pits Perseus, depicted in heroic nudity, against Phineas and his followers, who seek to flee at the sight of Medusa's head. The assertive treatment of Perseus' athletic body contrasts with the multitude of characters sketched around him in a creative whirlwind.

 

In the background of this warlike scene, Girodet gently depicts Andromeda fainting in the arms of her father Cepheus.

 

3. From the 1783 Perseus to the Revolt at Cairo, a complex iconographic journey

 

The Musée de Montargis holds a drawing executed by Girodet in August 1783 as an early version of our Perseus, which was inspired by several paintings by Jean-Baptiste Regnault on the same theme exhibited at the Salon.

 

The description in the Musée de Montargis’s website states that Girodet kept this subject in mind for a long time, reworking it, as evidenced by a handwritten note in a notebook dating from the 1800s. Our drawing, which therefore probably dates from the very early years of the 19th century, bears witness to the artist's progress since his training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

 

The figure of Perseus seems to have been inspired by the Belvedere Apollo, one of the most famous sculptures of antiquity housed in the Vatican Museums. With his left hand grasping the decapitated head of Medusa, he opposes the frightened Phineas, whose arms are raised to the sky. The latter seems to us to be a foreshadowing of the figure of the Moor in The Revolt at Cairo, a painting in which we find the same opposition between two principal combatants, around whom the battle rages.

 

It is amusing to note a kind of inversion between these two main characters: the hussar (who replaces Perseus in The Revolt at Cairo) is now clad in his full uniform, and it's the Moor (who replaces Phineas, who was clad in a short toga) who is entirely naked, his leg and torso now constituting one of the painting's main focal points!

 

Another preparatory drawing for The Revolt at Cairo reveals similarities between the body of Atys or Lycabas depicted face down under Perseus' foot and the body of a hussar on which the Moor is leaning.

 

The presence in The Revolt at Cairo of the severed head of a hussar with braided blond hair is also probably an echo of our drawing, as the soldier's headdress evokes that of Medusa bristling with snakes.

 

4. Framing

For this vigorous drawing, we have chosen a Louis XVI period frame in gilded and carved wood, with ribbon motifs.

Girodet 1767 - 1824 - catalog of the exhibition held at the Musée du Louvre - Editions du Louvre 2005