Tomb of archimedes12/22/2023 When she does return with the shield and armour, Achilles is still lamenting over Patroclus, worried now that his friend’s body will decay if he returns to battle. His mother Thetis visits Achilles during this, to console him in his grief, and promises to return with impregnable armour forged by the god Vulcan (Hephaestus). Patroclus is killed there, and Achilles laments over his corpse. In Achilles’ absence, his close friend Patroclus leads a battle in which he wears Achilles’ armour. Achilles resents this, and withdraws from involvement in the fighting. At the start of the account in the Iliad, Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, has decided that he will take Briseis for himself. This first version, painted in 1804 and now in Los Angeles, is the tighter composition and shows some influence, perhaps, by the more neo-classical narrative works of David.ĭuring the Trojan War, Achilles, the son of Thetis and greatest of the Greek warriors, took Briseis as a prize of war. If Archimedes’ tomb lacked contemporary relevance, West’s two paintings of Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles were more appropriate. Benjamin West (1738–1820), Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles (1804), oil on canvas, 68.6 x 50.8 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Once again, his style owes much to Nicolas Poussin, but his subject can’t be construed as even allegorical history. In the distance is the city of Syracuse on its coastal plain, and beyond it the smoking cone of the active volcano, Mount Etna. West shows Cicero wearing a white toga, speaking in front of the tomb, as workers with sickles clear the undergrowth from it. The Roman described the cylindrical column with a sphere mounted on top, which is shown partly obscured in West’s painting, and a symbol of Archimedes’ mathematical achievements. It was a second version of a painting which he had made in 1797, and apparently little-changed from the first.Ĭicero wrote in his Tusculan Disputations (book 5, sections 64-66) that he located Archimedes’ grave, neglected and buried in undergrowth, near the Agrigentine Gate of Syracuse, on the Italian island of Sicily. Wikimedia Commons.Ĭicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes, painted in 1804, the year that Napoleon became Emperor of the French, is a decidedly strange choice of subject. Now that his adopted country was making more history than it had for a long time, surely he would rally to the cause? Benjamin West (1738–1820), Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes (1804), oil on canvas, 125.7 × 182.2 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Having declared his famous painting of The Death of General Wolfe to be a revolution in history painting, he had painted anything but modern history since. Although by then he had become the second President of the Royal Academy in London, he had failed so far in his bid to become a ‘modern’ history painter. Britain was in crisis by the time that war with the French was declared in 1803, and the American painter Benjamin West (1738–1820) turned sixty-five.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |