Making trouble for art history: the queer case of Girodet.(We're Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History)

On the precipitous threshold of the bloodiest and most radical phase of the French Revolution, the neoclassical painter and would-be man of letters Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824) invented and made public a bewildering image of erotic contemplation of the male body. The Sleep of Endymion [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] was painted while in exile in Italy in 1791 and was subsequently exhibited in the Salon of 1793 in Paris. There, amidst the political and historical upheaval, it caused a sensation and gave the artist a reputation for consummate poetic genius with the brush and canvas.(1) The bulk of contemporary criticism of the painting focused almost exclusively on the work's unusual luminosity and poetic mood and did not address the obvious feature of a marked sexual manipulation and feminized disposition of the male body. The work depicts a torpid Endymion presented with all of the attributes of sensuality historically bestowed upon women in painting. His frontal display invites the viewer to witness the transformative reaction of his body to the caresses and penetration of ethereal moonbeams. His curly ringlets of hair flow delicately over his shoulders as his head lolls back in ecstatic abandon. There is unspoken communication between the protagonist and the overgrown Cupid at the left, the meaning of whose enigmatic smile is heightened by a pronounced raking light that not accidentally caresses his youthful buttocks. The indolent mood, nocturnal ambiance, sensual treatment, placement of the bodies, and even the choice of myth itself all serve to mark the male form with an intense erotic purpose and import that had not been so unashamedly visualized prior to this. The painting is an evocative and self-consciously crafted attempt by the artist to fashion a new visual interpretation of a staid mythological theme within the masculinized aesthetic framework of neoclassicism. I contend that the crucial meaning of The Sleep of Endymion resides not so much in the fact of the appearance of an androgynized male body in 1791, but rather in a subjectivity brought to bear by the artist on the traditional structuring of history and cultural practice. It is this consciously marked subjectivity, coupled with the fashioning of art as agency for multivariant levels of resistance and modern identity formation, that makes Girodet and his work intriguing and yet troubling for art history. The Sleep of Endymion is both a highly original image in its own day and a demonstrative piece for the working out of what is labeled today as psychosexual dynamics. The painting is particularly threatening because it sets a precedent for bringing to center stage a serious consideration of homoerotic sexualities in art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In 1810, several years after the appearance of Endymion, Girodet's brush brought forth yet another curious image that featured a bravura performance of same-sex erotics through an array of invented protagonists in the manly arena of war. Whereas The Sleep of Endymion had been created under the strain of conflict between a tumultuous revolutionary reality and antirevolutionary sentiment on the artist's part, Revolt at Cairo [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] was born out of a clash between a masculinist Napoleonic command ethos and the artist's disillusionment with that contemporary reality. Revolt at Cairo is a monumental and supposedly illustrative history painting of an incident in Cairo during Napoleon Bonaparte's Egyptian campaigns of 1798-99 in which French soldiers and the indigenous populace clashed. Amidst a cacophony of heated emotions and cool masculine verve, a muscular, dark, and naked Arab is shown supporting the limp and languid body of an overdressed dying pasha. At the fighting Arab's feet is a grimacing black man who amorously clutches his companion's leg while flailing a dagger and holding aloft the severed head of a French officer. It is the interrelationship between these theatrically foregrounded and dramatically lit figures that gives Revolt its highly erotic charge. Revolt at Cairo is not a history painting in the true sense of the term, but is instead a visual exercise in the construction of a subjective identity politics for the artist through focus on alternate forms and possibilities of male-to-male relationships. The painting is also a creative site of ambiguity and tension. It becomes a …