From Museum to Menagerie: Théodore Géricault and the Leonine Subject

Abstract

Théodore Géricault's The Head of a Lioness resists art historical conventions of picturing lions by encouraging up‐close engagement with a wild animal who can paradoxically be construed as both sensually alluring and patently dangerous. The sentience of Géricault's leonine subject would have been impossible to achieve without direct encounters with live lions during the work's elaboration. The act of seeing and depicting this animal in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, a public, state‐controlled space, emerged from a carefully orchestrated set of relationships and transactions involving international diplomacy, public policy, and scientific inquiry.