Androcles
Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.
Analysis
Jean-Leon Gérôme painted the subject of Androcles and the lion in the cave at the moment that Androcles removes the bloody thorn from the lion’s paw. Typical of Gérôme, it is very small.
A word on Gerome: When he wasn’t fantasizing about the East, Gérôme typically painted anecdotes. What do I mean by this? The image is nearly entirely the story. Gerome is purported to paint like photography; indeed, he frequently copied from photographs, as evident in his detailed renderings of Islamic architecture, which lent his work the guise of naturalism as he stripped bare pale-skinned women at the slave market. Gerome seems to think that a photograph can not deceive. He wrote on photography: “It is thanks to photography that Truth has finally come out of her well. She will never go back.” But Gerome has forgotten about the man behind the curtain. Gerome’s realism is a pseudoscience; his renderings of women are a direct pictorial projection of an inner image; the image did not originate from photography, which is self-authenticating, but rather sexual fantasy. Ethnography by a white man who is obsessed with his absence in the image. Gerome was always trying to fuck his work of art (see: four times he painted galatea, twice directly, twice in spirit).
Gerome is best known for Orientalism, but his paintings of the Romans were much better, and are just as sexually charged if you know where to look. The Roman paintings are shocking because of their sheer brutality. In this sense, the Romans echo the brutality of the imaginary orient: Their law is senseless violence, and our violence is law. See: Regnault, Execution without Trial.
So what was the deal with the lions? The Romans imposed a public and ferocious form of capital punishment, damnatio ad bestias, which involved unleashing a lion upon the condemned, watched by spectators. It is the subject of Gerome’s work The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, and The Retreating Lions. In these paintings, we see the purity of the Christian martyrs, persecuted for their faith and yet unwavering in the face of impending doom, as well as the purity of the primitive beasts, who are only brutal at the design of man; both gaze upwards at God.
Gérôme identified with the lion: it was his second given name, and his patron saint Jerome was frequently depicted with a lion. Once, he was described in a Paris Art publication as “a lion who painted other lions.” In the maturity of his career, he frequently painted lions. In Two Majesties, a lonely, solitary lion gazes at the setting sun; it echoes his later work Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, where Napoleon pauses in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza, decaying, sun-beaten, the silent remnant of a dying empire; in the distance, the army of a new empire approaches. Again and again, in his paintings of great beasts in the desert, time stands still, just like it does for the Orientals indigenous to the deserts of his “photographic” landscapes, who are so poor they can’t travel, and must merely hover still around the sparse desert resources (unlike the Europeans, the panoptic creatures surrounding the orient, lords of space and time).
Figures
15.
Ibid.