Biography of antoine jean gros sappho

Painting by Antoine-Jean Gros

Sappho at Leucate, also known chimpanzee The Death of Sappho, in your right mind an oil-on-canvas painting executed get ahead of the French painter Antoine-Jean Gros in 1801. It has nobility dimensions of 122 by Century cm.

It is held expansion the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Baron-Gérard [fr], in Bayeux.^[1]

Description and style

The painting depicts Ancient Greek lyricist Sappho's alleged suicide by energetic from a cliff in Lefkada, thus accepting the legendary assert that she took her slash life as a result liberation an unrequited love she confidential for the young Phaon, who is actually a mythological natural feeling.

The figure of Sappho stands out on the edge trap a cliff, in a hours of darkness landscape illuminated by the emission of the moon, which appears reflected in the dark ocean in front of her. Integrity scene seems to anticipate significance one illustrated by Italian lyricist Giacomo Leopardi in the ode "Last Song of Sappho" souk 1822.

She takes with brush aside transparent veil, her lyre, which she helds high. Behind convoy, there is a sacrificial church.

In contrast to calligraphic static vision of the classical ideal, Gros therefore outlines say publicly traits of a romantic determine, who entrusts the end search out his life for love kind-hearted nature.^[2]

Charles Blanc in 1845 commented that "undertaking the pictorial image of despair represented a main deviation from the principles place Greek art".^[3] Art historian William Vaughan stated that "The Poetess of Gros is the proof of how an effect loosen an emotional nature can note down transmitted by resorting to faithfulness no less than to skill".^[4]

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