Women in the Louvre

As mentioned above, women in Rome and Greece had to survive in highly patriarchal societies. 

The rights of women fell far behind their male counterparts. This extremely sexist society barred women from political agency and even from owning land.  

In Greece, married women of the upper classes wouldn’t even be able to leave the house unaccompanied. 

Despite this terrible treatment of women, both Greece and Rome also gave us many triumphant depictions of female goddesses. 

This dichotomy has been explored in great detail by critics, but when you actually stand in witness to the awe-inspiring statuary showing women as icons of power — it strikes you all over again.  

The same civilizations that gave us the likes of The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus de Milo, and Diana the Huntress resisted giving women any level of equality in society. 

 Masterpieces from ancient Greece, the Venus (Venus de Milo, Venus of Arles) show us the female deity of Beauty and Love with an almost geometric face and a perfect spiral figure.

The Venus de Milo was sculpted near the end of the 2nd century. When it was brought to the Louvre in 1820, it quickly gained a following in Europe as one of the best examples of Hellenistic art — in part due to a promotional campaign by the French government.  

Many statues survive from ancient Greece and Rome. I can show where too look in a statue to finally understand why they are unique and preserved in the Louvre today.

The Model for Venus of Arles, was so beautiful that she was sued for profanity. For her defense, her lawyer showed her naked body to the Judges. Once they have seen her perfect beautiful body, they instantly freed her. 

In Greece, the search for the perfect beauty has gone too far. One artist in the Louvre invited all women from Greece and select the five most beautiful women, in order to construct Helen of Troy, also know for her Ideal Beauty.

The Greek, Roman and French sculptures are highly detailed and precise. Thus, they will be very helpful for us to understand during the tour the traits of what is considered beautiful and how did they evolve as we walk in the Greek Roman Sculptures dept.

We will separate the Greek myths from the truths (what is sculpted exactly and what we understand today) about the beauty of women. 

This Roman statue from the 1st or 2nd century CE of the huntress goddess Diana is an unbelievably complete copy of an earlier Greek statue (made sometime around 325 BCE). 

It shows the huntress reaching for an arrow from her quiver, confident and poised. A leaping deer acts as her familiar.  

Again, it reminds us of the troubling difference between the portrayal of women in art and the reality of their lives  in Roman society. 

Here, a female goddess is shown as a capable character ready to strike — an image that arises out of the imagination of an artist living at a time when women knew great hardship and limitation based on their sex. 

By the 19th century, women were still not seen as equals in Europe, though painting often used female subjects.  

Leading romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798 - 1863) created what is considered his magnum opus in 1830. In Liberty Leading the People, the ideal of liberty is not a man but a woman. She charges onward over the casualties of war, holding aloft the tricolor flag of the Republic.  

Much as the ancient Greeks used the female form to personify victory, Delacroix relies on a female subject to embody the philosophy and drive of the July Revolution, which deposed King Charles X.  

But Liberty is not presented as a completely unreal goddess. Instead, she is given a hearty realness, making her as much a woman of the lower classes as an embodiment of a concept. This approach gives the painting far more weight — both visually and emotionally. By making Liberty a full human being, we are much more committed to the drama of the scene.   

Behind her is a class coalition of bourgeois, student, and proletarian soldiers, and they rally around Liberty as their leader. This active role for a woman, especially in a battle scene, was almost unheard of up until this point, but it would become much less rare in generations to come. 

Here, the influence of Chassériau’s teacher Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 - 1867) can be felt alongside the growing affinity for Delacroix. 

Ingres loved orientalist scenes — paintings that depict “the East” as a foreign, unknowable, and mysterious region. 

The orientalists were predominantly focused on the erotic side of beauty, but all kinds of beauty can be found at the Louvre. 

When we focus on the way specifically feminine beauty is portrayed, we see the changing pressures and demands made on women through time as well as the celebration of the female form.  

The beautiful German Lady of Erhart:

Gregor Erhart’s Saint Mary Magdalene (c. 1515 - 1520) is a wooden sculpture that gives an intimate look at this early follower of Jesus Christ. Her fantastically long hair provides a great deal of movement to an otherwise still moment of introspection. Mary Magdalene is shown caught in a reverie, a thought, a day dream, a moment of grief. With every detail, Erhart emphasizes the beauty of the Saint.  

The bust of Marie Antoinette:

The feminine ideal keeps changing as you move through the Louvre’s timeline. Once you get to the late 18th century, as with Louis-Simon Boizot (1743 - 1809) and his Bust of Marie Antoinette (1781), we see elaborate fashion project beauty and standing.  

It is during the late 18th and 19th century that women in Europe began to gain more access to the world of art. And the emergence of talented women artists allowed them to show viewers life from their own point of view.   

While we often think of the struggle for gender equality mostly playing out at the end of the 19th and through the 20th century, a lot of groundwork had already been laid by women pioneering their own paths through the French Royal Academy.  

The Academy and Salon system of France had restrictions against female participation, and this greatly reduced the amount of their art shown to the public. 

There were no doubt plenty of women masters, but their work was never given the same notoriety in society — purely on the grounds of sex.  

Nevertheless, many persevered and gave us works of lasting importance: 

In Still Life with Tuft of Marine Plants, Shells and Corals (1769), you can see her extraordinary attention to detail, texture, composition, and color. It is deeply moving and dense with emotional content, something no artist had been able to do in the genre. The exotic shapes of aquatic life also lend a startling charisma. 

The Louvre honored her and shed the light on her painting of Still Life with Tuft of Marine Plants, Shells and Corals during an amazing art exhibit about Things in Still Life - "Les Choses" - Although it is crowded, you can get close to many amazing works until Jan 23, 2023.

Pastels are a dry technique, easy to learn compared to paintings and it was left to women mostly. But, here, you can see her great portraiture at the Louvre of the Painter François-André Vincent (1795) as if his expressions are telling us something about his personality.

Though this does not rise to the heights of a work like Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (1785), it gives a hint of the brilliance that Adélaïde Labille-Guiard fought to share with the world. 

As a portrait artist, her strength lies in balancing likeness with glamor.   
Though she reached the heights of celebrity near the end of the 18th century, her deep connection to royalty forced her to flee during the French Revolution.  
Self-Portrait with Daughter Julie (1786) is a tender look into the life of the artist and her daughter. The warmth between them, and the way Vigée Le Brun captures the magic of childhood, make this remarkable piece shine