My conference paper

[lobelia321]

I wrote a draft outline of the paper today!



The first two slides I'll show will be:
Camuccini, Death of Caesar, completed 1818
Gerome, Death of Caesar, 1867

If you can't see the pics, try the links:
Camuccini:
http://www.francescomorante.it/images/301_2.jpg

Gerome:
http://www.artrenewal.org/images/artists/g/Gerome_Jean-Leon/large/The_Death_of_Caesar.jpg

Camuccini:




Gerome:

If we take simply the content into account, there'd be no difference between the early picture and the later one; they both show the same topic: The Death of Caesar. Yet they are very different pictures.

The early painting by Camuccini has Caesar at its centre. He forms the focus of the classical pyramidal grouping. He is distinguished by the colour of his clothing and by his expansive gesture. He is an active protagonist.

By contrast, the Caesar in Gerome's painting, completed 50 years later, is no longer an active protagonist. He is dead. He's a corpse. He's not at the centre of the composition but off to one side in the bottom left-hand corner. In fact, the painting has no immediately obvious centre of attention. Attention is dispersed over the canvas: corpse, toppled chair, assassins in background, seated senator at right. The setting has become a protagonist in its own right: the fallen chair, the bloody dagger, the scrolls -- these props are as important for the visual plot of this picture as are the human figures.

Both paintings are based on the same textual sources, primarily the ancient Roman histories by Plutarch and Suetonius (the 'Parallel Lives' and 'The Twelve Caesars', respectively; Shakespeare was another source but Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' itself closely follows the story as told by Plutarch). But the "fruitful moment" (Lessing) chosen for each painting is taken from a very different part of the story.

Camuccini chose the dramatic highpoint: the actual killing. We see Caesar in the process of *being killed*. Gerome chose the moment *after*. We, the viewers, are asked to reconstruct the actual murder by using props, figures and setting as clues to piece together our tale. The toppled chair is a trace of the "before" (we imagine the struggle). The opening to the street in the far background is the immediate future: the public space into which the senators are about to run and where they will proclaim Caesar's death to the people. Camuccini's painting, by contrast, all takes place in the here and now; there are hardly any hints to any 'before' or any 'after'.

In the painting by Gerome, the Death of Caesar has been transformed from an exemplum virtutis (example of Republican virtue -- the senators assassinate Caesar to prevent him from making himself emperor and tyrant) into an eyewitness report of the scene of a crime.

I will then go on to show further examples of how deaths in the second half of the 19th century were painted as crime scenes, and I'll link that to contemporary press reports of crime, and to detective and mystery stories.

Does that sound at all interesting and/or convincing?