Phryne before the Areopagus

Her robe pulled away, Phryne stands naked before her judges and hides her face with her hands. Gérôme's version of the ancient trial scandalised the Salon of 1861 and turned her into an international icon.

The story behind the painting

Phryne was an ancient Greek hetaira, a courtesan, tried for impiety. According to legend, she was acquitted after her defender Hypereides removed her robe so that the sight of her beauty would move the judges to pity. Gérôme's title places the trial in the court of the Areopagus, but the ancient sources do not: the comic playwright Posidippus, in his play The Ephesian Woman, says it took place in the Heliaia. French artists had painted the trial since the mid-18th century, and Gérôme's 1861 version was directly influenced by Charles Gleyre, in whose studio he had worked, and by Victor Mottez.

What to look for

The oil painting measures 80 by 128 cm. Phryne stands nude at the centre, her hands covering her face. Hypereides, on the left, holds up her robe, and the jurors sit on the right, leaning in to look. In the middle of the composition stands a golden statue of Athena, her name inscribed in Greek on the pedestal. Gérôme worked from photographs of his model, Marie-Christine Leroux, which he commissioned from Nadar. Watch the faces of the old men as much as the woman: the picture is about looking.

Meaning and intent

Like The Snake Charmer and Slave Market in Ancient Rome, this is one of several Gérôme paintings that show an audience watching a prurient spectacle. At the Salon of 1861 it was considered indecent and pornographic. It was especially controversial for showing Phryne covering her face in shame, the same pose Gérôme used for enslaved women in his Eastern slave market scenes. The gesture changes the legend: instead of a triumphant beauty, we see a woman exposed, and the judges' gaze, and ours, is put on trial too.

Legacy

It became the most famous 19th-century image of Phryne. The scandal made it widely reproduced and caricatured, with an engraving by Léopold Flameng, a sculpture by Alexandre Falguière and a drawing by Paul Cézanne all based on it. In the United States, Matt Morgan's Living Statues restaged it as a tableau vivant, and in 1884 Bernhard Gillam drew Phryne Before the Chicago Tribunal, with candidate James G. Blaine in her place. By the century's end, Phryne was an international cultural icon. The painting was given to the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1910.