The Battle of the Amazons
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| The Battle of the Amazons (second version) |
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| Anselm Feuerbach , 1873 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 405 × 693 cm |
| Germanic National Museum |
The Battle of the Amazons (second version) is a painting by the German painter Anselm Feuerbach . The work created in 1871 and completed in 1873, measuring 4.05 by 6.93 meters, is now in the Germanic National Museum and is owned by the city of Nuremberg . Feuerbach painted the picture during a long stay in Rome .
The subject of the picture goes back to the legend of the Amazons in the Trojan War .
background
First Battle of the Amazons (oil study)
Feuerbach's first work on the Battle of the Amazons was written at the end of 1856 and completed in 1857. But as early as 1845 Feuerbach had been working on a similar battle scene: the storming of the Germanic camp in the battle of the Raudian fields . The work with brushes in various shades of brown and opaque white over pencil on light brown paper is his first battle picture. On September 29, 1845 it was finished in the dimensions 29.7 by 38.3 cm and is now in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin . Feuerbach's acquaintance and biographer Julius Allgeyer aptly judged the drawings for the German battle as “testimony to childish clumsiness” in terms of conception and execution, but also sees the connection with the later versions of the battle of the Amazons “as it were in embryonic form”. He and Feuerbach had only met in Rome a few weeks earlier.
The first version of a battle of the Amazons, which Feuerbach created in 1856-57, has the shape of a transverse oval, which the artist preferred in the early phase of his time in Rome. Feuerbach solved the compositional problems of this form in comparison to his nymph pictures. The landscape - a barren stretch of coast - builds up gradually from the background to the foreground. The S-shaped figures form two groups in which individual theatrical productions are put together. The scene appears well-composed and ordered, although the subject of the picture is expected to be confusion and turmoil. In his 1944 monograph on Feuerbach, the art historian Ulrich Christoffel praised Feuerbach's dynamic surface feel and his “sense of the contrapuntal distribution of mass and light”. In his 1991 work on Feuerbach, Jürgen Ecker describes the oil study as a compositional experiment by Feuerbach and less as a credible representation of the subject. The oil study measuring 53 by 64.5 cm is now in the State Museum for Art and Cultural History in Oldenburg .
Preparatory work for the first version of the painting
After completing the oil study in 1857, Feuerbach continued to think about depicting a battle of the Amazons. In a letter to his stepmother Henriette Feuerbach on January 10, 1860, he describes his enthusiasm for the composition of his first draft for the Battle of the Amazons and expresses his determination to pursue the subject.
In the 1860s, Feuerbach worked continuously towards the first version of the painting of the Battle of the Amazons: In the "Städelschen Kunstinstitut Frankfurt" there is a partial depiction of the scene, an attached sheet in the Munich sketchbook in the "Staatliche Graphische Sammlung" and in Hamburg, Leipzig and Dresden some chalk depictions of female nudes.
Feuerbach's acquaintance with Anna Risi , known as “Nanna” , fell in the period between the oil study and the first version of the painting of the “Battle of the Amazons ”. She is his lover and most important model until 1865.
Creation, structure and reception of the first version of the painting
On February 3, 1868, he announced in a letter that he was busy with his work Orpheus and Eurydice and that he would tackle the Battle of the Amazons the next week. On March 12th of this year, Feuerbach announced the production of a framework for the Battle of the Amazons . At this point he had already started to paint on canvas, but he still lacked studies of nature, especially horses. In the same letter he reports to his stepmother that for this reason he intends to spend a lot of time in the Heidelberg Marstall. Finally Feuerbach stopped working on the picture and did not mention it in his letters for the whole year. In an undated letter, probably dated February 1869, he reported that he would start the battle in eight days. In October 1869, Feuerbach decided to finish the picture undisturbed, but did not finish it in December either.
Again, the battle takes place in a barren coastal landscape composed in the course of the two picture diagonals. The focus of the action is to the left of the center of the picture and forms a right triangle. The staggered superimposition of two compositional principles creates a tension in the picture that does not come from the characters of the battle - as in the first battle of the Amazon in 1857. The hostile powers are not aligned with one another in battle order and formation, but rather scatter over the picture in individual actions. The large number of quotations used in the picture does not contribute to the tension either: there are derivatives of Michelangelo's reclining figures of the Medici graves, the landscape in the right third of the picture has the same motif as Feuerbach's pen drawing Medea kills her children ( Ashmolean Museum , Oxford ). The first version of the painting of the Battle of the Amazons measured 1.20 by 2.77 meters and was last in the National Gallery in Berlin before it was moved to a flak tower in Charlottenburg and destroyed during the Second World War.
When Feuerbach's acquaintance and former prospect Konrad Fiedler discovered this battle of the Amazons in Feuerbach's studio in late autumn 1869, he reacted cautiously and embarrassed. Feuerbach soon set to work on his second version of the painting of the Battle of the Amazons.
Further development to the second painting version
In the autumn of 1870, Feuerbach laconically announced in a letter that he would start work on his banquet and the Battle of the Amazons on December 1st and work on nature without further studies. On February 2, 1871, he reported that he had made five portfolios of hand drawings with over 250 drafts for the battle. He described the rapid progress of the preparatory work for the life-size version of the painting of the Battle of the Amazons and proudly proclaimed: “The battle will have a demonic effect.” For most of the Amazons shown, Feuerbach's lover Lucia Brunacci was the model. The many studies showed Feuerbach's serious concern for a credible figurative representation in his second and final version of the Battle of the Amazons. In November 1871 Feuerbach announced the completion of the painting, in January and February 1872 he went through it meticulously and corrected subtleties.
When Feuerbach moved to Vienna in 1873 as part of his appointment to the “ Academy of Fine Arts ”, he had the banquet and the battle of the Amazons forwarded immediately. He immediately put the battle picture, which according to Feuerbach's testimony, took up almost the entire studio, and was taken with the nobility and the size of his work “despite the nudities”. In November 1873 the picture was varnished.
The paintings
The subject of the picture goes back to the legend of the Amazons in the Trojan War , as it is passed down to us from the epic Iliad , which is ascribed to the Greek poet Homer . Under the leadership of their Queen Penthesilea , they come to the aid of the Trojan King Priam , who is attacked by the Greeks under the leadership of King Menelaus of Sparta . In the fight against the Greeks, Penthesilea is killed by the legendary warrior Achilles , who falls in love with her when he takes off the helmet of the dying Amazon. Contrary to the custom, according to which the corpses of the enemy are left to the scavengers after the battle, Achilles hands over the corpses of Penthesilea to the Trojans.
Again, Feuerbach's free treatment of the legendary material does not show a battle in the real sense. Although the two large, opposing directions of movement suggest two clashing orders of battle, the figures in the second version of the Battle of the Amazons are only added together in individual scenes. The band of Amazons jumping up to the left in the background attack a group of men further to the right, but the futility of this attack is evident from the fact that the men are only wounded. Even if this scene seems meaningless in terms of content, it still has a formal function: It introduces the movement scene in the background, which continues in the clouds and ends in the horse racing away to the right. The vulture in the left part breaks the direction of movement. While in the first version of the painting the bay took up the entire right third of the picture, in the second version Feuerbach reduced it to a narrow coastal strip, the Porto d ' Anzio , in which he also included the landscape section with the fleeing horse. The only calm in the right third of the picture is a small scene: a white horse leans over the corpse of a woman.
The individual fights in the foreground are all decentralized. A trapezoid to the right of the lower left corner towards the center of the picture quickly catches the viewer's gaze: it is dominated by a monumental figure from behind, which goes back to Michelangelo's Leda. It remains untouched by what is happening in the alley and is distributed, resting in itself, the different directions of movement in the foreground. Five Amazons are grouped around them, some wounded, some fallen, forming a frame around the figure on the back. This frame forms the inner part of two ellipses that wrap around the figure on the back. In the area around them, Feuerbach's endeavor to prove his acquired skills in the representation of different body shapes is evident.
The woman lying to the right of the figure on the back can be recognized by her headdress as the Amazon queen Penthesilea. The position of your head on the vertical is significant. Unlike most of the fallen Amazons, who are depicted naked, Penthesilea wears a costly robe and, like the fighting Amazons, has bared her right breast. Here Feuerbach breaks with tradition, because in ancient depictions the Amazons wear their left breasts bared. The reason for this break is unclear. In her right hand lies the battle ax of the exhausted Amazon queen, with her left she tries to hold on to an older warrior. She is leaning on her shield, and her helmet, decorated with peacock feathers (like the rider on the left), lies next to her in the foreground and is overlapped by the lower edge of the picture. Through her expression, Penthesilea reminds of the origin of her name, suggested by Homer, from the Greek πένθος (pénthos, "suffering"). Otherwise, however, their representation has little to do with the ancient specifications. Their fall indicates the defeat of the Amazons, but the confrontation with Achilles does not occur. The attitude of Penthesilea leads on to another main motif of the painting, which expresses suffering and sympathy even more than the Amazon queen.
The group of two men next to Penthesilea is another main subject of the painting. A wounded youth with wolf skin, which is carried by all men in the picture as a trophy for the wolf hunt, is carried from the battlefield by an older man in a shed shirt. The group of Achilles with Penthesilea on the sarcophagus of the Amazons (2nd century AD, Vatican collections) was the inspiration for the posture of the two figures. A letter dated November 1, 1870, in which Feuerbach told his stepmother that he had acquired a photograph of the sarcophagus, proves his knowledge of the depiction. According to Marianne Arndt, individual motifs can be found on ink and blotting paper sketches that Feuerbach made during this period. Arndt also put forward the thesis that Feuerbach acted entirely in the canon of Carl Ludwig Fernow , who wrote in his treatise On the Purpose, Territory and Limits of Dramatic Painting , published in Zurich in 1806 : “When our gaze wanders in the wild tumult of battle and is tired from the various scenes of the fight, then he rests with quiet contemplation on the touching group of the father who finds his son killed in battle. "Christoffel, who (according to Ecker wrongly) describes the youth as an Amazon, compares the couple with the ancient scene of Menelaus with the dead Patroclus in his arms. He therefore traces it back to the Pasquino group (before 100 BC; copy in Palazzo Braschi, Rome), which Ecker considers to be not unlikely. Ecker attributes the young man's lower body and legs to formal suggestions from Michelangelo's Pietà Palestrina ( Galleria dell'Accademia , Florence). He sees the group as a retarding moment in the narrative of the picture, which, due to the unstable posture, causes the composition of the picture to tilt, concludes it at the same time and creates tension. As the reason for the delay in the plot, he cites "Penthesilea's left, which is the warrior, and the man's brief pause in the recovery of the wounded".
The next dominant figure rises to the right of the two men. An Amazon raises a battle ax on the back of a white horse jutting out into the picture. She is hindered by a warrior who has been pushed back, and the rider's blow is evidently aimed at the warrior who is harassing her comrade in battle. In posture and expression, the rider's head bears a resemblance to the head of Laocoon (Vatican Collections, Rome). It forms the right border of a pyramidal construction, the top of which is the Amazon in the middle distance on the rearing horse. The black, gray, brown and violet tones of the black horse appear almost ghostly against the evening sky and, through his posture, points to what is happening in the foreground. His weight and the far reaching front hooves are aimed at the alley with the wounded.
A close fight is staged to the left below the black horse: two Amazons harass a bronze-skinned opponent with a spear and battle ax, who desperately but senselessly braces himself against them. Feuerbach could have taken the inspiration for this scene from the Arch of Constantine in Rome, where an Amazon wielding a battle ax is depicted in the frieze area “ Trajan in the Battle of the Dacians ”.
The left edge of the alley with the wounded is bounded by a "group chain" (Allgeyer). There is a dark-skinned warrior pulling a pearl necklace out of an Amazon's hair. Allgeyer's comment “Schlachthyäne”, which was thrown out on this scene, suggests Feuerbach's and his circles' view of the Africans at that time. The dark-skinned victim does not defend himself and accepts her fate with a grand gesture. The angle of her left arm is reminiscent of the dying Niobide (around 430 BC, Museo Nazionale Romano ) and the dying slave of Michelangelo ( Louvre , Paris). Particularly on this figure, clear features of Feuerbach's model Lucia Brunacci can be found. The fight to the right of this couple is based on Rubens' Battle of the Amazons ( Alte Pinakothek , Munich). A quarreling Amazon on horseback who takes on a warrior who strikes a blow completes the group. The back figure, in its three-dimensional execution, is the fruit of extensive studies by Feuerbach and, according to Christoffel, stands for the symbolism of the picture. The discrepancy between Feuerbach's theatrical gestures and the demands of society at the time for “real life” is the main problem for the acceptance of the painting by his contemporaries. In a way, Feuerbach also lagged behind the signs of the times, because even the opera had turned to more realistic forms of representation in the mid-19th century.
Overall, the color scheme of the picture is very restrained and avoids bright tones. In the middle distance with the fallen soldiers and the rescue team, shades of blue, green, purple and pink flash in the otherwise gray and brown surroundings. The alley with the wounded and fallen Amazons is illuminated by a faint streak of light. Towards the edges of the picture, the action darkens to purple and brown tones.
Allgeyer particularly notices the presence of the seven when putting the figures together : two times seven female against seven male figures, seven different actions, seven fighting and seven incapacitated Amazons. The fall of Penthesilea as a clear sign of the outcome of the battle lifts this stalemate. For Marianne Arndt, the focus is “no longer on the battle as such, but on its consequences, which also corresponds to the development of Medea's images. Here as there, the ultimate goal is the deepening of the tragic, not the dramatic content. "
In its statements, Feuerbach's execution of the second version of the Battle of the Amazons refers to Friedrich Schiller's poem Nänie , which Johannes Brahms set to music in memory of his friend Anselm Feuerbach. Ecker thinks it is extremely likely that Feuerbach and Brahms reflected on the Nänie together.
reception
From the moment it was completed, the second version of the Battle of the Amazons was considered a benchmark work by Feuerbach. The praise of the Viennese art critic Emerich Ranzoni in the Neue Freie Presse was of great importance to him. Ranzoni speaks of the satisfaction that seized him in view of the second version of the Battle of the Amazons , since in it the artist attests to his deep moral seriousness and its progressive development. He compares the symmetrical but skilfully shifted composition with the “ Cinquecento ”. Although he had criticized Feuerbach's coloring in 1872, he is now also praising progress in it and citing Pietro Aretino's sensational coloring as evidence . The proportions of the figures are also right for him this time. Finally, he appeals to the reader to benevolently and appropriately compare Feuerbach's Battle of the Amazons with Hans Makart's sensational painting Venice pays homage to Catarina Cornaro .
In the same magazine, however, a critical article by Daniel Spitzer soon appeared , who not only criticizes the lack of authenticity of the Amazons in their representation, but also mockingly presents the unnatural coloring of the sky and the lack of dramatic expression of the characters. After this article, Feuerbach lost the courage to continue to hope for a resounding success of his painting. He even wanted to resign from his professorship in Vienna and cancel the exhibition of the Battle of the Amazons . Henriette Feuerbach spoke out in favor of her stepson, but his Viennese colleagues knew how to deal skillfully with the self-centered and vulnerable painter in a way that would benefit them.
In the exhibition on January 15, 1874 in Vienna, at which Feuerbach's Battle of the Amazons and the second version of the banquet were presented to the public for the first time, Feuerbach then lags behind Makart, as Ranzoni feared. This embittered him and made his search for a buyer for the picture more difficult, for which he estimated 40,000 guilders. In a letter from April 1874 he wrote: “The battle has started, it is extremely magnificent, only mangy monkeys can get excited about something like that. I send it without a frame, it doesn't need any. ”During Feuerbach's lifetime, the work was unsold. His stepmother offered it together with his judgment from Paris to the Munich Pinakothek for 20,000 marks, which, however, refused. After Anselm's death, Henriette Feuerbach donated the painting to the city of Nuremberg.
Christoffel considers Feuerbach's second battle of the Amazon to be his most important creation and at the same time "one of the strangest and most brilliant pictures of 19th century German painting". He characterized it as a fusion of several elements of the figure formation into a stylistic structure. He considers the figures to be extremely believable, and he finds the accentuation of the topic in a few distinctive formal and artistic elements.
literature
- Marianne Arndt: Anselm Feuerbach's drawings. Image development studies. Bonn 1968.
- Ulrich Christoffel: Anselm Feuerbach. Munich 1944.
- Jürgen Ecker: Anselm Feuerbach. Life and work, critical catalog of the paintings, oil sketches and oil studies. Hirmer, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7774-5510-5 .
- Daniel Kupper: Anselm Feuerbach. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-499-50499-5 .
- Ursula Peters: Anselm Feuerbach. The Battle of the Amazons. Anzeiger des Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg 1996, pp. 209–212.
- Doris Lehmann: Anselm Feuerbach's Battle of the Amazons. Anzeiger des Germanisches Nationalmuseums Nürnberg 2004, pp. 143–156.
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