Coreso sacrificándose para salvar a Calírroe

Jean-Honoré Fragonard · 1765

Coreso sacrificándose para salvar a Calírroe - Jean-Honoré Fragonard

A priest raises the knife, but turns it on himself instead of the woman he loves. With this huge, theatrical canvas the young Fragonard won his place in the Académie royale, long before the playful scenes that made him famous.

The story behind the painting

Fragonard painted the work in 1765 as his reception piece for the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Shown at the Salon of 1765, it earned him entry to the Académie. He was then thirty-three and was seen as one of the great hopes for reviving French history painting, the grand genre. The picture has often been described as his attempt to reconcile his exuberant style with academic demands. A preparatory sketch is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Angers, and Fragonard later drew the subject again in chalk, a sheet now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What to look for

The canvas is vast, about 309 by 400 cm, and it is staged like a sacrifice in a theatre. There is a raised altar, red drapery and huge columns that evoke antiquity. A strong light picks out the main figures against the shadowy temple. At the base of the altar Callirhoe lies unconscious, and Coresus, lit against the darkness, prepares to take his own life. Around them, attendants recoil, their gestures running from fear to grief. Look up, too: allegorical figures of Love and Despair hover above, deepening the emotion of the scene.

Meaning and intent

The story comes from Pausanias's Description of Greece. Coresus, a priest of Dionysus in Calydon, loved the maiden Callirhoe, who rejected him. To punish her, the god sent a plague on the city, and the oracle declared that only her sacrifice could end it. Fragonard chose the climax, when Coresus, acting as sacrificing priest, plunges the knife into his own heart rather than kill her. The composition shows the theatrical staging common in French history painting of the time, influenced by artists such as Gabriel François Doyen and Charles-André van Loo.

Legacy

The painting was an immediate success at the Salon and was praised by critics including Denis Diderot. It established Fragonard within the academic tradition, and the Marquis de Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, then commissioned a companion piece as a design for tapestry at the Gobelins. Louis XV acquired the canvas, and it stayed in royal hands until it entered the national collection after the French Revolution. It is now in the Louvre. A ricordo version has belonged to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid since 1816.

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Sobre el artista

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806)

Departamento de Pinturas del Museo del Louvre · poignard · templo

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