War languages War and women in French and Spanish Painting Vesa Matteo Piludu University of Helsinki Department of Art Research
Claude Deruet, c Madame 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 1851 Beauvais (Oise, France) Statue de Jeanne Hachette
Goya, c ”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