War languages War and women in French and Spanish Painting

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War languagesWar and women in French and Spanish
Painting

• Vesa Matteo Piludu

University of Helsinki Department of Art Research
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Claude Deruet, c. 1643Madame de Saint-Baslemont
de Neuville

• woman warrior who actively defended her  manor
  during the Thirty Year War
• Athena (palm and laurel)
• topography
• angel (trumpet, stendards)
• putti (laurel, flowers, book-music-poetry)

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Madame de Saint-Baslemont de Neuville

• Class, possession, role, clothes the masculine
  powers symbols occulted the signifiers of
  femininity

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David, Napoleon at St. Bernard, 1800
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Jean Jacques Francois Le Barbier, 1871"Jeanne
Hachette at the Siege of Beauvais in 1472"

• Class
• Weapons rocks, burning brands
• Helpless male enemies

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Jeanne Hachette

• Temporary warriors
• Husbands cowardice
• Rouchers epic Le Mois Be men for them if they
  are women for you
• Women are more militant than the men
• Exemplum virtutis, model for men and women
• Moral vervor, patriotic emotion

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VITAL-DUBRAY 1851Beauvais (Oise, France) Statue
de Jeanne Hachette
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Goya, c. 1810. They are acting like wild beast

• Absence of war propaganda
• Negative vision of the women warriors and of
  war in general
• The women are forced by war to behave like wild
  beasts
• They behave like something other than women men
  or animals

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Goya, Disasters of war
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Eugene Delacroix Liberty Leading People, 1830
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Venus of Melos
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Liberty

• Liberty is a bellicose leader not a peacemaker
• Is an allegory, not an historical figure
• Dramatic energy, convinction
• Leading a mixed group of males
• Ambiguity
• Semi-nudity of classical sculture and rought
  proletarian cloth of the working class
• Is idealized, but at the same time concrete and
  sensual
• Prototipal women-warrior in the history of art

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Liberty and sensuality

• Domesticity is irrilevant for Delacroix a dandy
• Liberty has the same sensual vividness of other
  paintings

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Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827)
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Honore Daumier the repubblic, 1848
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Jacques-Louis David The Oath of the Horatii
1784 Horatii and Curatii
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Jacques-Louis David The Sabine WomenTatius,
Hersilia, Romolus
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Jacques-Louis DavidBelisarius, 1781 and St.
Roch and the Virgin, 1780