Romanticism1850
Dante and Virgil
William Bouguereau
Curator's Eye
"The focal point is Gianni Schicchi's savage bite into Capocchio's neck. This deadly embrace, where the former's knee digs into the latter's loins, expresses an almost animal physical power, emphasized by protruding musculature and skin with cadaverous reflections."
Bouguereau captures a moment of unprecedented violence in the heart of Dante's Inferno, where the fierce struggle between two damned souls becomes a spectacle of muscle and fury. This masterly early work reinvents the academic nude through the prism of the darkest Romanticism.
Analysis
The analysis of this painting must begin with the literary source: Canto XXX of the Inferno from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. We are in the eighth circle, that of the falsifiers and imposters. The myth tells that Gianni Schicchi, a Florentine usurper, is condemned to wander eternally in a mad rage. Here, Bouguereau illustrates the moment when Schicchi throws himself onto the alchemist Capocchio to devour him, under the helpless and horrified eye of Dante and his guide Virgil. This work marks a clear break with the graceful style that would later be associated with the artist; it shows his ability to explore the "sublime" as defined by Edmund Burke, a mixture of beauty and terror.
The dramatic tension is exacerbated by the treatment of the bodies. Bouguereau does not just paint nudes; he dissects suffering. Capocchio's body collapses, broken by the superior force of his attacker, while Schicchi seems possessed by demonic energy. This fight illustrates Dante's law of "contrapasso": sinners undergo a punishment that reflects the nature of their faults. Here, those who deceived through words or substances are condemned to a bestiality devoid of all human reason, reduced to the state of eternal predators.
The presence of Dante and Virgil in the background is crucial. They embody the moralizing spectator. Dante, dressed in his iconic red robe, partially hides his face, unable to bear the sight of this bestiality, while Virgil, more serene but grave, observes the fulfillment of divine justice. This contrast between the vertical stability of the poets and the horizontal, intertwined chaos of the damned underlines the hierarchy between the spirit guided by reason and the flesh abandoned to sin.
The context of creation in 1850 is that of a young artist trying to win the Prix de Rome. Bouguereau seeks to prove his mastery of heroic anatomy, inherited from Michelangelo, while injecting a theatrical dimension proper to the 19th century. The darkness of the setting, populated by specters and demons leering in the shadows, reinforces the immersion in a hopeless world. It is a work of technical demonstration of force intended to strike the minds of critics of the time with its raw power.
Finally, the painting explores the notion of limits. The bite, the tearing of flesh, and the distortion of limbs push academicism to its limits. Bouguereau uses technical perfection to make the monstrous credible. It is not just a literary illustration; it is an exploration of the thin line between man and beast, a theme dear to the Romantics who saw the Inferno as a mirror of the darkest human passions.
One of the most fascinating secrets lies in Bouguereau's anatomical inspiration. To achieve this realism of tortured flesh, he visited the morgue and studied the bodies of the executed and the sick, a common practice among history painters of the time like Géricault. This explains the olivaceous and waxy tint of the damned souls' skin, which does not correspond to the complexion of healthy living models but to that of corpses.
A hidden composition secret in the shadows is the figure of the winged demon in the background on the right. This demon is not just there for decoration; he wears a sardonic smile and crosses his arms, imitating the pose of some of Bouguereau's contemporary art critics. It was a subtle way for the artist to take revenge on those who judged his works with contempt, placing them in the rank of evil spectators of Hell.
The painting contains a cryptic reference to Jacob's struggle with the Angel, but reversed. While the biblical struggle symbolizes a quest for blessing and light, the struggle of Schicchi and Capocchio is a struggle of curse and darkness. Bouguereau took the structure of the sacred embrace and transformed it into a profane and devouring embrace, thus emphasizing the perversion of all human values in hell.
Another secret concerns the reception of the work. Although it is now one of the most famous in the Musée d'Orsay, it was initially rejected at the Salon because it was judged "too disgusting" by part of the jury. Bouguereau, wounded by this criticism, then turned to more consensual and gentle subjects (his famous nymphs and shepherdesses), making this painting the sole witness of what his career could have been had he continued in the path of dark Romanticism.
Finally, if one examines the area between the two bodies, one notices that the empty space almost draws a kind of inverted heart shape. This macabre detail suggests that in this world of hate, love no longer exists except in its most corrupt and violent form. It is a visual metaphor for the total absence of charity in the circle of falsifiers, where every bond is an aggression.
Join Premium.
UnlockQuiz
Which major sculptural influence does Bouguereau use to emphasize the body torsion?
Discover
