Emma Hamilton and Late Eighteenth-Century European Art by Ersy Contogouris

Author:Ersy Contogouris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Figure 3.13Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun (1755–1842), Lady Hamilton as Ariadne, also known as Lady Hamilton as a Reclining Bacchante, 1790. Oil on canvas, 135 × 158 cm. Private collection.

Vigée-Le Brun portrays Emma in a light diaphanous white dress that clings revealingly to her body and exposes her thighs more than it hides them. Her neck, left shoulder, and left breast are completely exposed, while her left arm conceals her bared breast from the viewer. Strands of her famously long hair lie suggestively between her thighs, in a throwback to the Venus of Urbino’s (1538) hand that simultaneously covers and draws attention to her pubic region (Ittershagen). Unlike Rehberg, Vigée-Le Brun does not repress Emma’s sensuality. On the contrary, Emma openly displays her powerful sexual allure. She has used it to symbolically conquer the leopard that lies eviscerated beneath her like a trophy, its sharp teeth and claws now harmless.

The thick red curtain on the upper portion of the painting suggests the setting is a stage. Looking at the portrait more closely, we realize the cave looks artificial, as the light that shines on Emma comes from within it. The moss that covers both the cave floor and the rock upon which Emma leans looks like perfectly manicured grass. Emma’s dress, moreover, is similar to what she is described as wearing while performing her Attitudes. All these elements, together with the presence in the paintings of attributes of both Ariadne and a bacchante, suggest Emma might be represented here in the middle of a performance, enacting a transformation from Ariadne to a bacchante. This would explain Vigée-Le Brun’s description of the painting as an “Ariane gaie.”

We can imagine the powerful effect on the audience of the emotional contrast from the expression of despair of the abandoned Ariadne to that of the life-affirming pleasure of the bacchante. This explanation is supported narratively, by the next episode in the myth of Ariadne. After Theseus abandoned her, Ariadne met Bacchus, whom she married, becoming, in a way, a bacchante. The wine goblet Emma holds, which looks almost like a chalice, should be read as a symbol of the moment the wedding is concluded. In the depiction by the French early eighteenth-century painter Nicolas Bertin of The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, the protagonists seal their union by drinking wine (Hauschild 33–34).19 Such narrative continuity was not the norm in Emma’s Attitudes, when her changes from one character to the other often took her spectators by surprise, but it did sometimes happen.

What all the representations of Emma attitudinizing have in common is that they show her ability to embody different characters and to transform from one to the other. Underlying these successive transformations was a continuous cyclical re-enactment of the myth of Galatea: as she alternated between stasis and movement, Emma seemed to metamorphose into marble, then flesh, then back to marble. Through this alternation, the Attitudes set in motion a certain flux between spectators and performer, one that allowed Emma to assert her authorship of her performances and achieve a level of control over her audience.

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