Edward Poynter and the Romans of the Decadence
Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs, his Israel in Egypt, and his Lesbia, along with the Roman paintings of his contemporaries John William Waterhouse and Edward John Poynter, belong to a specific Victorian sub-genre that might be called moral archaeology: the use of meticulously researched ancient settings to explore contemporary anxieties about gender, sexuality, empire, and the relationship between civilization and decadence. These paintings are not straightforwardly about Rome or Egypt or Greece. They are about Victorian England, using the distance of antiquity as a frame that permitted the examination of subjects that contemporaneity made difficult.
The Romans of the Decadence by Thomas Couture, painted in 1847 and now in the Orsay in Paris, is the ur-text of this tradition: a vast canvas showing Romans in the middle of a banquet that has clearly been going on for some time, the guests in various states of dishevelment and intoxication, the central figure a young woman whose expression combines exhaustion and contempt. The painting’s sources are explicitly identified — classical columns, Roman costumes, the architectural vocabulary of imperial Rome — and its moral argument is explicit: this is what happens at the end of a civilization, when the productive energies that built it have been consumed by the pleasures it produced. The living figures are contrasted with the statues of earlier Romans behind them, who observe the scene with the disapproval of their virtuous ancestors.
Couture’s painting was understood by its original audience as simultaneously about Rome and about France — about the Second Empire’s political culture, about the moral drift that the revolutionary tradition had both produced and been corrupted by. Rome’s decadence was a mirror in which contemporary French culture could see its own anxieties reflected at a sufficient distance to be examined without the immediate discomfort of direct address. This is the mechanism that makes ancient Rome such a durable vehicle for contemporary moral argument: the historical distance provides cover for the contemporary critique.
Poynter’s Roman paintings are less overtly moralistic and more overtly sensuous, which is their own form of Victorian complexity. His Faithful unto Death — a Roman soldier standing at his post as Pompeii burns around him — is the obverse of the decadence theme: the virtuous Roman who maintains his duty at the cost of his life, presented as an implicit critique of a present that has lost the capacity for such commitment. The painting was enormously popular and was reproduced in school primers as a moral exemplum — the Roman soldier as model for Victorian schoolboys. The historical research that produced the painting’s accurate equipment and architectural setting was in the service of a moral argument that had nothing to do with Rome and everything to do with the cultural anxieties of imperial Britain.
Waterhouse’s paintings of classical subjects — his Circe, his Hylas and the Nymphs, his Lady of Shalott — are not Roman but belong to the same tradition of classical-as-contemporary-by-other-means. The dangerous woman of Greek mythology — Circe, Medea, the Sirens — served as a vehicle for Victorian anxieties about female sexuality and its threat to male civilization in ways that the classical setting made artistically respectable. The ancient world provided a library of dangerous women whose dangers could be explored in paint because they were safely historical. The same subject matter in a contemporary setting would have been scandalous.
What unites the Victorian academic painters who used Rome as their primary setting — Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Gérôme, Couture — is the dual function of their classical research. The accuracy was genuine: these artists studied archaeology, corresponded with scholars, traveled to classical sites. The accuracy served as the credential for the fantasy, and the fantasy was always partially about the present. Rome was both a historical subject and a contemporary argument, and the paintings work as both simultaneously, which is why they retain their interest long after the specific Victorian anxieties that generated them have been superseded. The moral arguments are dated. The paintings are not.