SCHEFFER, Ary

Gaston de Foix, Duc de Nemours (1489-1512), also known as The Thunderbolt of Italy, was a French military commander noted mostly for his brilliant six-month campaign from 1511 to 1512 during the War of the League of Cambrai. In the decisive Battle of Ravenna on 11 April 1512 Gaston led a cavalry charge against a recalcitrant Spanish infantry unit. He was shot and killed, but the Spanish lost nearly their entire army in the battle.

This painting is a sketch to Scheffer’s large historical composition which became an event in the Salon of 1824 and together with Delacroix’s Massacre of Chios proclaimed the birth of French Romantic painting.

Scheffer became particularly well-known as a painter of Goethe’s Faust, a contemporary drama with roots in a sixteenth-century story. Scheffer’s interest in the Faust story can be traced back to 1825, and between 1831 and 1858 he painted eight major compositions with themes from Faust, most of them episodes centring on Marguerite.

The subject of Faust and Marguerite in the garden of her neighbour Martha who looks on with Mephistopheles comes from Part One of Goethe’s Faust. The exquisitely painted Marguerite, beautiful and innocent, has a finely modeled torso, exuding a sinuous sensuality of which she appears unaware. Faust, determined to seduce her and transformed by Mephistopheles’ magic into a handsome youth, places his head close to her while bringing about her seduction and ultimate ruin.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

Charles Gounod: Faust, Ballet music

During the Bourbon restoration monarchy (I814/15-1830) Scheffer took an increasingly active part in politics. A supporter of liberal reform, he was a fierce opponent of the conservative Bourbon regime. The Greek independence movement excited his imagination and he produced six works inspired by their struggle against the Turks. Of these the Souliot Women (Salon of 1827) and the Greek Women Imploring for Help are two of the most notable. In the latter, the desperate women, fleeing the aftermath of the Battle of Misslonghi, take shelter in a cave, praying for help.

Fr�d�ric Fran�ois Chopin (1810-1849) was a Polish pianist and composer. He is widely regarded as one of the most famous, influential and admired composers for the piano.

He was born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin in the village of ¯elazowa Wola, Poland, to a Polish mother and French expatriate father. Hailed as a child prodigy in his homeland, Chopin left for Paris at the age of 20. In Paris, he made a career as a performer and teacher as well as a composer, and adopted the French variant of his name, “Fr�d�ric-Fran�ois”. He had a turbulent 10-year relationship with the French writer George Sand from 1837 to 1847. Always in fragile health, he succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 39.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Fryderik Chopin: Waltz No 7 In C Sharp Minor Op 64, No 2

This painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1833.

G�ricault’s death at the age of thirty-three came about as a result of an infection following a riding accident, but the circumstances were never satisfactorily explained, and G�ricault was thought to have neglected various ailments from which he was already suffering, and even to have attempted suicide. He had struggled to win artistic recognition, and there seemed a tragic inevitability about his end. It was fitting that the Salon of 1824 - often called the ‘Romantic’ Salon for including so many icons of the movement - should also have contained the moving memorial to G�ricault painted by Ary Scheffer. Mourned by his friends, the painter lies on his deathbed in his small room in the rue des Martyrs, his favourite sketches and pictures on the wall above - indeed a martyr to art.

The painting illustrates a famous episode from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno, in which Dante and Virgil see Paolo and Francesca condemned to the darkness of Hell with the souls of the lustful. This is the prime version of a composition Scheffer repeated several times and it has a frame which he specially devised to suit the subject.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 16 minutes):

Franz Liszt: Dante-sonata

The painting is a copy by the artist of a painting first executed in 1822.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 16 minutes):

Franz Liszt: Dante-sonata