We Stood In Amazement...

Seven years ago Erica, Thom and Myself traveled to Paris France, Nice France and Amsterdam. While in Paris we spent an entire day visiting Musée du Louvre (or The Museum Louvre) There hangs on the wall The Mona Lisa, not such an attractive site - only because it's perched in a Plexiglas box with thousands of tourists video taping and snapping photos of one of the worlds best known pieces of artwork.

But in the next room from Mona, the room with life size religious based paintings were these extremely life like beautiful pieces that took our breaths away. As we stood in amazement we all commented on how this one piece (above) of work stood out way past Mona and her followers, yet it seemed no one appreciated it as much as we did. We stood for several minutes staring at this one piece - so life like - so real - The three of us feverishly searched the museums gift shops that day - to learn more of this - to take it with us. That day we only found a 12 x 16 print of this beautiful painting and left the Louvre with little information. Since bringing it home we have encased it in a great frame and it's hung several years in our home, our friends comment on it, ask questions and stare very deeply into it. We give little information because we ourselves didn't know that much of it...Until now.

I have spent the last hour searching again for something on this painting at The Louvre Web site (http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home_flash.jsp?bmLocale=en ) and finally discovered the story of this great work.

It's a copy and paste but I think you'll agree, it's a beautiful story:

A young woman torn between love and religion In the sunset, in a cave, the old hermit, Father Aubry, is supporting the corpse of the half-caste Atala. Chactas the Indian, stricken with grief, clings passionately to the young woman's knees. Atala, torn between her love for Chactas and the vow she took to remain a virgin and a Christian, committed suicide. With a crucifix clutched in her hand and the drapery of her dress clinging to her bust, she is both pure and sensual. After their all-night vigil, the two men will bury her in the cave. A verse from the Book of Job is carved on the cave wall: "When it is yet in flower, and is not plucked with the hand, it withereth before all herbs." Girodet drew his subject from Chateaubriand's Atala, or the Loves of Two Savages in the Wilderness (1801), set in America in the 17th century. This novel by the first French romantic novelist was published in his hugely popular The Genius of Christianity. The book celebrated Catholicism at the time when Bonaparte signed the Concordat with the Church. The exoticism, the defense of the innocence of primitive peoples and the religious sentiment that characterized the novel are all transposed into the picture. Girodet has not merely illustrated a single scene from Chateaubriand's novel, he has synthesized several passages. He has also forsaken the antique subjects dear to his master, David, for new subject matter: for Girodet, unlike David, painting no longer has a moral or political function.

Girodet 1767–1824A chance to rediscover the forgotten genius of Anne-Louis Girodet, this exhibition gathers one hundred of his strange, poetic, and sensual works. David's dissident pupil, Girodet was influential at the beginning of the 19th century in France, bearing witness to both the Revolution and the Empire.