La reconstruction des Grecs anciens chez Alma-Tadema : enjeux et résistances

Abstract

This article addresses Alma-Tadema’s reconstructions of scenes set in ancient Greece. His Greek subjects raise issues pertaining to the transition in the contemporary pictorial context from history painting to historical genre. Alma-Tadema was influenced by the Flemish genre painters and by the French Néo-Grec movement and his reconstructions of Greek history are in fact everyday-life scenes. They privilege social experience over noble action and simple emotions over elevated sentiment, and so fitted the Victorian taste for genre. Yet perusal of the critical reception of his works shows that the commentators still established distinctions between Greek and Roman subjects—notably because Greece was still expected to conform to a number of aesthetic conventions as well as to gendered or racialist considerations. Moreover, because Alma-Tadema and a number of critics frequently established analogies between the ancients and Alma-Tadema’s contemporaries, the painter in fact held an ambiguous mirror up to his contemporaries. His reconstitutions of Greece tackle unorthodox sexual mores and depicted physical types that were perceived as inappropriate for the Greeks. They therefore went against the aesthetic codes that subsisted when representations of the Greeks were concerned, which raised aesthetic and ideological expectations that were less prominent in the case of Roman subjects.