Today a painting
connected with two rather mysterious people – both painter and subject.
Few
people remember Rodolfo Amoedo (1857
– 1941), a Brazilian history painter born in Salvador, Bahia. Today, many of his paintings still hang at
the National Museum Museu Nacional de
Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. He
was something of a prodigy, starting in 1873 as a student of Victor Meirelles. A short five years later he won the first
prize at the Brazilian Academy, which allowed him to travel to Paris, where he
lived from 1879 to 1887, studying at the École
des Beaux Arts.
Amoedo was
a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and
also worked with Paul-Jacques-Aimé
Baudry. He was a professor and later director of the Brazilian Academy, where
he taught Eliseu Visconti, among
others. When the Brazilian monarchy fell
in 1889, many of the most traditional masters at the Academy were replaced by
the new Republican Government with the last wave of Academic artists, Amoedo
among them. Amoedo continued to teach in
the classic Academic style, but changing tastes led to replacing the old guard
with masters of a more impressionist bent.
Very soon, the Academic artists were forgotten (as was the case in
France and America), short-changed by the Modernist victors of Art History.
Sadly,
Amoedo lived to be quite an old man, completely forgotten by the art
establishment. He left behind so little
money that his widow had to ask friends to pay for his funeral.
Today’s
picture, The Narrative of Philetas,
was painted in 1887, a more prosperous time in Amoedo’s life. It depicts Philetas (or Philitas) of Cos, a poet-scholar who lived during the
early Hellenistic period of ancient Greece.
He was associated with Alexandria and was selected to tutor to the heir
to the throne of Ptolemaic Egypt.
Philetas
was a frail man, bent and wasted by age; he is often portrayed as an academic
so consumed by his studies that he literally wasted away. As a poet and scholar, his fame continued for
centuries; sadly, most of his poetry and scholarship (which included a text
defining the meaning of rare literary words) has been lost to the mists of
time. He was a “poet and a scholar,”
combining great learning with artistic sensibility and poetic vision. According to legend, he was one of the
driving forces behind the great library of Alexandria, where there stood a
stature of him. Neither statue nor
library survive.
Your
correspondent finds it poignant that a poet whose works are lost to time is
here depicted by the painter who reputation has also suffered the same
fate.
One of
the loveliest things about this painting is how Amoedo compares youth and old
age, life and death. The colors, from
the leaves scattered about the earth to the moss-covered stones and the overall
gray tones of the background, are largely somber except for the vibrant pink
flesh tones of the principal figures.
Amoedo also contrasts the beautiful and supple figure of the reclining
youth against that of the loosely-fleshed and gnarled old man. (Amoedo also wisely highlights the body of
Philetas with dead white, further accenting the differences between old and
young.)
Notice,
too, the blossoms under the torso of the youth and the how the vibrant
pink-and-white flowers behind the young people seem to lose their coloration
the closer they are to Philetas. Amoedo
also poses the youths on a rock opposite from Philetas, creating a literal
chasm between them.
Also
striking is the face of Philetas, who is depicted with greater care and
attention than that of the young couple – though the young woman is clearly
drawn with grace and color, her bland and lovely brow is no match for the real
“character” of the picture, the old scholar.
There is
a great deal I admire in this picture, starting with how delicately Amoedo drew
the old man’s hands and the courage he had in showing an old body in all of its
compromised flesh. Though neither supple
nor young, Philetas overwhelms the picture with his presence – there is power
in his old flesh. Amoedo also creates a
classic triangle between the reclining boy, the old man and the gray tree to
trap our eye and maintain our interest as a viewer.
If the picture has a misstep, it would be the brownish tree in the immediate background between Philetas and the woman. It seems to me a miscalculation on Amoedo’s part – it intrudes on the remote nature of the background, and looks as if he did not trust his own best instincts. But it is a small flaw in an otherwise beautiful work, not just for the skill of its drawing, but its beautiful and delicate coloration, as well.
I find
the figure of the woman to be interesting – almost as if it was added as an
afterthought. The figure seems to be too
bathed in white, as if Amoedo blocked out a white bit on the finished painting
and put her there; also, her feet seem to be added to the stone, rather than
obscured by it. She even skews the
triangular frame of boy, man and tree. I
may be wrong – but something to my eye says that she is a latter addition to
the composition.
If the picture has a misstep, it would be the brownish tree in the immediate background between Philetas and the woman. It seems to me a miscalculation on Amoedo’s part – it intrudes on the remote nature of the background, and looks as if he did not trust his own best instincts. But it is a small flaw in an otherwise beautiful work, not just for the skill of its drawing, but its beautiful and delicate coloration, as well.
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