You probably don’t usually bother to read the technical details at the head of these notes, but may I ask you to spare a glance at the measurements of this painting? That’s not a typing slip: those are metres, not centimetres or feet. What’s more, this is a second version of the subject, and unlike most repeats or replicas it’s not smaller but much larger than the first, which is 3.8 x 7 metres. We are dealing here with an artist obsessed by extremes, not only of scale but frequently, too, of emotion. Something of that, too, comes across in this colossal work, illustrating a moment in Homer’s Iliad.
Born in what is now Belgium, Antoine Joseph Wiertz was attracted to, and characteristically overwhelmed by, the genius of a local hero, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who was one of the fathers of the High Baroque, painting some of the grandest and most dramatic historical and allegorical pictures of the seventeenth century. By the early nineteenth century, when Wiertz’s career began, Baroque had been largely replaced by the chaster Grecian forms and rhythms of Neo-classicism, but he managed to combine the two very different styles to produce this wildly over-dramatic mêlée of tortured bodies.
Pain was central to his worldview: human life a receptacle for agony of both body and mind. Wiertz often brought his fevered imagination to bear on the moments of existence that combined the two most exquisitely. He was fascinated by the precise moment of death, when consciousness encounters oblivion, and analysed it in several canvases. A huge diptych presents the instant of death by suicide and the immediately following experiences of the soul. In this preoccupation, he was ahead of his time, defining one of the recurrent themes of Symbolist art in the later nineteenth century.
Insofar as he is known today outside Belgium it is for a picture, Buried Alive, in which a man opens his coffin to find himself in a bone-infested sepulchre. Another favourite subject is the confrontation between living beauty – a voluptuous young woman – and deathly corruption: a rotting skeleton. All these excesses can be viewed in the museum that the corporation of Brussels awarded Wiertz: a rare honour that seems to reflect more the scale of his ambition than his actual achievement as an artist, and no doubt lies behind Aubrey Beardsley’s otherwise baffling accolade to J M W Turner as “the Wiertz of landscape painting”.
Beardsley, I assume, was thinking, perhaps ironically, of Turner’s comprehensive representation in the National Gallery, rather than his undeniably dramatic account of the natural world.
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