Ekphrasis and the autonomy of painting: On Charles Le Brun's Entrance of Alexander

Abstract

This article re-assesses Charles Le Brun's Entrance of Alexander as a visual explication of the rhetorical topos of ekphrasis. The Entrance provides a meta-theory of painting that I will call ‘epic painting’. In short, Le Brun's canvas becomes a realized ‘Shield of Achilles’. Extra-academic attempts to establish the yet undefined relationship between Poussin and ‘the literary’ provide the context in which to understand Le Brun's painterly intervention. The Entrance provides both an example and a template for the continuation of the classical literary tradition through the means available to the medium of paint. Analysing the theory of painting implicit in the strategic use of artistic antecedents, alongside the more explicit theory of painting found in Le Brun's lecture on Poussin's Israelites Gathering the Manna, this article argues that Le Brun understood the painted canvas to be a coherent, ordered, and autonomous space. Thus, Le Brun's painting makes several counter-intuitive claims: that Louis XIV's ‘imperial’ ambitions are the precondition for painting's continued production and ambitions; that painting could pictorialize what the ancients only imagined and described verbally; and that the forms of the classical past, as interpreted by Poussin, could provide the tools necessary for a new and vital artistic practice.