War languagesWar and women in French and Spanish Painting

Vesa Matteo Piludu

University of Helsinki

Department of Art Research

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)

Madame de Saint-Baslemont de Neuville

Class, possession, role, clothes: the masculine power’s symbols occulted the signifiers of femininity

David, Napoleon at St. Bernard, 1800

Jean Jacques Francois Le Barbier, 1871"Jeanne Hachette at the Siege of Beauvais in 1472"

Class

Weapons: rocks, burning brands

Helpless male enemies

Jeanne Hachette

Temporary warriors Husband’s cowardice

Roucher’s 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

VITAL-DUBRAY 1851Beauvais (Oise, France) Statue de Jeanne Hachette

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

Goya, Disasters of war

Eugene Delacroix: Liberty Leading People, 1830

Venus of Melos

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

Liberty and sensuality

Domesticity is irrilevant for Delacroix: a dandy

Liberty has the same sensual vividness of other paintings

Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827)

Honore Daumier: the repubblic, 1848

Jacques-Louis David: The Oath of the Horatii 1784 Horatii and Curatii

Jacques-Louis David: The Sabine Women:Tatius, Hersilia, Romolus

Jacques-Louis David:Belisarius, 1781 and St. Roch and the Virgin, 1780