There’s something extremely appealing about paintings depicting ancient times.
It’s hard to miss when depicting ancient Greece, ancient Rome, or any ancient empire.
These paintings can be even more compelling when they include myths, tales and history.
Think of Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii, or Thomas Couture’s The
Romans in their Decadence.
The story I want to show here is the one of Zeuxis as presented by two different artists
at the end of the 18th century.
Zeuxis was a 5th century BCE artist, a painter who revolutionized art through his ability
to faithfully reproduce nature, notably through the use of shadows.
None of his paintings have survived, but legends about him have.
Apparently, he could paint grapes so faithfully that birds would try to eat them.
He’s also known for having been commissioned a painting of Helen of Troy and, because he
couldn’t find a model to match her beauty, he decided to rally the five most beautiful
women of the city of Croton, select the best features of each and combine them in one image.
In other words, he Frankensteined his way into painting the most beautiful woman in
the world.
Zeuxis was said to have literally died of laughter after an old woman commissioned a
portrait of herself as the goddess Aphrodite.
In this painting, Francois-Andre Vincent is picturing Zeuxis sitting down and evaluating
potential models for his portrait of Helen of Troy.
He’s comfortably sitting in front of an empty canvas, heavily draped looking at the
women parading in from of him.
The women occupy different functions, though they seemingly all blend together.
Some are prospective models as you can tell from their bare breasts, but some are maids
or servants.
There’s a woman picking up a model’s clothes, another older woman is holding a model’s
drapery.
On the right, you see another prospective model, crying in the arms of another woman,
probably because she’s been rejected.
Now that we’ve seen Vincent’s depiction of the story, I want to show this one.
Zeuxis seems to have now found his 5 models.
He’s now scrutinizing them, comparing every single one of them to the other in order to
find the best looking parts of each.
In this version, you see three of these models waiting to be examined, measured and rated.
Meanwhile, Zeuxis is inspecting the fourth model.
Now before we look at the 5th model, we should look at the artist who made this painting.
Angelica Kauffman was a Swiss neoclassical artist who learned to paint because her father,
himself a painter, needed an assistant.
He chose his daughter and, through him, she’d learn how to paint.
She was a child prodigy, as exemplified by this self-portrait she made at the age of
13, and she showed promise, not only as a painter, but as a musician as well.
She spoke German, Italian, French and English, which would allow her to have an international
career, mainly in London and in Rome.
In London, she’d be one of the two women to become a founding member of the Royal Academy
in 1768.
She’d paint a large variety of topics, including many portraits, but mostly, historical paintings.
Which brings us back to the painting depicting Zeuxis.
The fifth model is a self-portrait.
Kauffman is depicting herself as one of the models for the project, but she’s not there
to be passively scrutinized and ranked, but she’s actively picking up a brush and transforming
herself from an object of sight to a subject who acts.
However, and you might have noticed this, she’s framed by the canvas, as if she was,
herself, Helen of Troy, or at least the end result of Zeuxis’ project.
I probably don’t need to say this, but being a woman artist in the 18th century was far
from being recognized and accepted.
Kauffman, despite her success, was still limited in her artistic development.
For example, she wasn’t allowed to study live models for male nudes because she was
a woman.
To study the male form, she had to study statues as demonstrated in this self-portrait.
And Kauffman’s identity as a woman not only influences her depiction of Zeuxis, but actively
informs it.
She decided to include a self-portrait in this painting, but she identified more with
the models than she did with the artist.
Even though she shared professions with Zeuxis, she associated herself with the models.
In a way, she wasn’t an artist who happened to be a woman, because that’s not how it
worked in the 18th century, she was a woman who fought to be an artist.
She was one of the models until she could prove to men that she could also paint, but,
to do that, she had to sneak behind the artist’s back and pick up his brush.
To become a painter, she needed an act
of rebellion.