16
Alexander, Charles Le Brun, and Oliver Stone
E. J. Baynham
It might be helpful to give some background to this chapter.1 One focus of this volume is the Macedonian conqueror’s Nachleben and how he has been perceived in western culture, and when I was initially approached by the editors, I thought that Charles Le Brun’s spectacular series of Alexander paintings which he produced for King Louis XIV of France between 1660 and c. 1668–73 would be an appealing topic.2
Following on from these early conceptions, Oliver Stone’s movie Alexander appeared – to an overwhelmingly hostile critical reception (some of it unfair and misguided) and box office failure in several countries.3 It seemed to me that Stone and Le Brun offer some interesting parallels; both are artists, albeit in different media, and both have an objective in historical narrative in a primarily visual context. Fundamentally, both are storytellers. Both saw Alexander as an iconic figure and as a hero, although their respective interpretations of the “heroic” appear to coincide in some aspects and differ vastly on others. The artist and the director emphasize Alexander’s bravery on the field, Le Bran by his vivid depictions of Alexander’s face in battle, Stone by the recurring theme that the Macedonian king was “beyond fear” and hence, in that respect, was truly “liberated.” There is also a strong affiliation between war and masculinity in both Le Brun’s paintings and Stone’s film. The most powerful emotional bond is the one between the king and his comrade-in-arms, Hephaestion, whereas the strongest female characters, Olympias and Roxane, are shown as fiercely loving, but also possessive and ultimately treacherous.
Ironically, Alexander is often depicted in early modern European art with rather feminine features, and owing to an apparent iconographical misidentification of an earlier image, Le Brun’s most famous painting, The Queens of Persia before Alexander, shows the Macedonian conqueror as particularly girlish. The Persian women are shown with great tenderness and sympathy, but despite their prominence, they are mere foils to the painting’s main message – Alexander’s power and his clemency.4
For Le Brun and the Sun King, Alexander offered a noble role model – but only as one part of a rich and complex culture of propaganda directed at the glorification of the French monarch.5 For Stone, Alexander remains a deeply flawed character – for all his magnificence, charisma, and ability to inspire devotion and strong passion in others.
One should, of course, note that neither Le Brun nor Oliver Stone worked entirely on his own. The annual televised Academy Awards ceremony offers a notorious example of effusive acknowledgment from gushing recipients, which reminds the viewer that the production of any large-scale film involves hundreds of people, from ground support staff to key financiers and technical experts. But the director is the guiding mind, and in a very early exchange between Stone and his historical adviser, Robin Lane Fox, the former remarked that he had to have a scene in his mind, “right down to the details.”6 Likewise, a large staff of assistant painters would have worked on several of Le Brun’s vast canvases, as his duties as First Painter included substantial administrative commitments. However, he probably painted the most important particulars personally, and both the preliminary drawings and the overall concept of the scene and its realization would have been his own.
The Hollywood director and French court painter faced similar broad problems in terms of the parameters of their respective media. Cinema is not “history” any more than history painting, which in Le Brun’s time was considered the highest expression of the genre.7 The whole of Alexander’s life and reign cannot be shown on celluloid (or on the stage) in less than three hours, any more than it can be shown on a single canvas. Le Brun was not trying to tell a new story so much as to represent episodes – either from ancient history, classical literature, or the Scriptures – which were already well known to his audience. Although he was working within a historical framework for the Alexander series, he was essentially creating a work of drama,8 with his own interpretation of characters and their motives – not unlike a director and a cast of actors.
The problem of selection – what to omit and what to highlight – has challenged other dramatists and film directors. Terence Rattigan’s 1948 stage play on Alexander, Adventure Story, is performed as a series of vignettes from the king’s entire reign with little linkage. Robert Rossen’s 1956 filmAlexander the Great (starring Richard Burton) concentrated on Alexander’s early life, with comparatively little attention given to the invasions of northeast Asia and India.
Stone’s approach was to use a “narrator-mediator” – Alexander’s general Ptolemy (played by Anthony Hopkins), in his old age as king of Egypt, who as he dictates his official history of Alexander to his secretary Cadmus (David Bedella), nevertheless offers an insider’s details, in much the same way as Robert Graves’ Roman emperor Claudius in the well-known novels. Such a device provides exposition and can bridge gaps; the film can omit or merely refer to some important events in Alexander’s life, while depicting others.9 There is also a certain degree of historical and dramatic neatness. Ptolemy’s history, although lost, was a dominant part of the ancient Alexander tradition; likewise, Ptolemy’s “unofficial” version offers Stone a good opportunity for imaginative, dramatic speculation. It is perhaps not surprising that Alexander’s Ptolemy says nothing which appears either in attested fragments of the real Ptolemy Soter’s history of Alexander, or in Arrian, for whom Ptolemy was a major source. The line between what Cadmus is supposed to be writing down and what is off the record is deliberately blurred. Cadmus himself is a fictitious creation – a kind of scholar’s joke on Lane Fox’s part,10 which underscores the artificial nature of the film. Stone and Lane Fox are reminding the audience that Alexander is entertainment.
However, there are inevitable and obvious historical inaccuracies in both Le Brun’s and Stone’s visions of the Macedonian conqueror. The historicity of Le Brun’s paintings, and especially his debt to the ancient writers, will be discussed further on in this chapter; suffice to say for now that we can highlight anachronisms in weaponry, equipment and costume. Le Brun’s Persians are a mixture: they sometimes wear turbans, sometimes appear dressed in flowing tunics or Greek-style chitons. Also, in keeping with early modern European artistic portrayals of ancient military dress, Alexander and his Macedonians wear tunics, cuirasses, and helmets that often look more generically Roman than Greek. Ancient iconographical sources on the Persians were even more limited; there were some descriptions of Persian dress, accessories, and regalia in literary sources like Herodotus, Curtius, and Xenophon. But western knowledge of the remains of the great Achaemenid palace complex at Persepolis, with its carved reliefs of kings, nobles, and tribute-bearers, lay a century in the future;11 likewise the Alexander Mosaic – a major iconographical source for Macedonian and Persian weaponry and dress – was not discovered until 1831.12 Although Le Brun himself endorsed the principle of artistic freedom, he was also interested in reproducing authentic details.13 Our ancient writers tell us that the Persians were great archers and that the Great King’s costume was purple and white; in Le Brun’s painting of the Battle of Arbela, the Persian King Darius, perched high in his elaborate chariot, carries a bow and wears blue and white. In 1719 the Abbé Dubos commented that for his depiction of Alexander in The Queens of Persia Le Brun had based his portrait on a medal which had been inscribed with the Macedonian’s name on the back, but which in fact was a head of the Roman goddess Minerva. According to Dubos, Le Brun realized his error and gave subsequent depictions of Alexander a more masculine appearance, using a bust from Alexandria that was on display at Versailles.14
Unlike Le Brun, Stone’s team had the benefit of being able to draw on a considerable body of archaeological research, and for the most part, the film does try to create an authentic look. There are pure flights of fancy – such as the paintings decorating the walls of Philip II’s secret cavern, where the king supposedly initiates the young prince into ancient mythological traditions. The cavern scene was Stone’s own contribution and, typically, he also had a considerable part in drafting the film’s script.15 Also again, given how frequently Stone explores the protagonist’s often tortuous relationship with parents or parental figures,16 it is perhaps not surprising that one of Alexander’s central themes is the king’s relationship with his parents, especially his passionate, snake-loving mother, Olympias. It is no coincidence that we see a grinning Medea dispatching her children in one scene on the cave wall.
Elsewhere, Alexander displays conflation and blatant changes in locations and personalities, which mostly seem to have been due to artistic whim, pragmatic concerns, and financial considerations. Historically, Antigonus, one of Alexander’s marshals and a contemporary of his father, Philip II, was left as satrap of Phrygia from 333 until Alexander’s death. He never accompanied Alexander on much of his conquests of the Persian empire and India, but became a powerful player in the wars of the Successors after the king’s death. In Stone’s film, Antigonus is with Alexander throughout. Why? Simply because the director liked the idea of a one-eyed general – it adds to the film’s ambiance.17 Ironically, there was a historical character who was also one-eyed, and who did go on the expedition. His name was Antigenes, but he was not as senior a marshal as Antigonus.18 Second, Stone’s team used two Dutch Friesian horses to play the part of Bucephalas, Alexander’s stallion. The standard color of the Friesian breed is black (we are told by Arrian (5.19.6) that Bucephalas was black), but characterized by “feathered” legs (long, trailing hair around the fetlocks), so typical of heavier northern European types. Feathered legs do not appear in any ancient equine iconography – not even on the stocky Persian Nisaean. However, Dutch Friesians are hardy, sweet-natured, and reliable animals – all highly desirable qualities on film location, and they look wonderful on screen.
Finally and perhaps more revealing is this: according to Lane Fox, Alexander’s budget allowed for only two set-piece battles. Stone wanted a contrast between the two clashes in terms of location, style of fighting, and spectacle.19 So they chose Alexander’s final battle against Darius at Gaugamela (as opposed to Granicus or Issus) for the spectacle of an open plains confrontation between two large armies, supposedly totaling over 100,000 (in reality, the human element was supplied by the main cast and about 1,500 extras from the Moroccan army – the rest were digitally created). The other battle had to be completely different, and India seemed an obvious choice (the film location was actually Thailand). Stone conflates the battle against the Indian rajah Porus on the Hydaspes river in 326 with Alexander’s near-fatal wounding during the Macedonian assault on a Malli fortress near the Hydraotes in 325. Instead of alluvial plain, Stone’s battle takes place in thick, eerie jungle (which recalls the director’s Vietnam masterpiece, Platoon), in patchy, broken light, and with Porus’s elephant force, carrying howdahs and garish decorations, emerging suddenly like nightmarish monsters. It is visually very impressive and very dramatic, but hardly history. Interestingly, the climax of the engagement – Alexander on Bucephalas lunging at Porus on his elephant vividly recalls an actual piece of ancient fiction, expressed in both the famous Porus medallions and the Alexander Romance – that the Macedonian and the Indian prince fought a personal duel.20
However, both Le Brun and Stone owe a considerable debt to the ancient historical sources, for all that they adapted the material to suit their own interpretations. The relationship between the ancient texts and the artist is one theme I wish to explore in this chapter. It should be acknowledged here that Le Brun’s composition was also heavily influenced by the work of other artists. One art historian has described the Battles of Alexander series as “enormous pastiches,” drawn from the work of painters like Pietro da Cortona or Rubens.21 Le Brun’s design and the arrangement of his figures in his Battle of Arbela is similar to Cortona’s Victory over Darius (c.1640)22 and in particular two details stand out; an eagle, representing Zeus’ favor (mentioned by Plutarch and Curtius23) flies above Alexander’s head in the middle of the fighting in both works, and Le Brun’s fleeing Persian, looking back over his shoulder in horror on the far right, mimics a young man running in front of Darius’ chariot in Cortona’s painting. The eagle’s iconographic appeal has continued in modern times. In Stone’s Alexander the bird becomes something of a symbol of Alexander himself, or at least his good fortune. At Gaugamela the eagle soars and the camera and the eagle become one; thus offering the audience a spectacular aerial view of the battlefield, which enables us to appreciate both the scope of an ancient clash and its chaos. As Alexander’s fortune declines, the eagle ceases to follow him (it disappears as the army prepares to cross the Hindu Kush into India); finally, when an aging Olympias realizes Alexander is dead, an eagle and a snake, locked together in a struggle outside her window, fatally wound each other and crash to the ground.
But it is unlikely that Le Brun and his contemporaries viewed derivation from existing works in the negative way that we do. In Le Brun’s famous lecture to the Academy on the Expression of the Passions, which the artist presented most likely in 1668, he happily lifts entire passages from René Descartes’s Traité sur les passions de l’ane without apparent formal acknowledgment.24 Imitatio – as with the ancient world – meant that one alluded to or borrowed from one’s peers (and played on the audience’s recognition of the parallels), but ideally one also surpassed one’s predecessors. An assessment of Le Brun’s overall originality is beyond my focus, however; it is also evident that in particular paintings the artist either showed adaptation of certain details which are attested in the ancient traditions, but which do not seem to appear in other artists’ work (like the elephant inAlexander’s Entry into Babylon25) or else were inspired by the written sources – as in his brilliant and subtle demonstration of the friendship between Alexander and Hephaestion.
A subsidiary theme in this discussion is the motif of passion, both as a physical expression of emotion and in a more broadly romantic sense – which is particular to both Le Brun’s work and the film Alexander. Passion both drives and destroys Stone’s protagonist; jealous Roxane, feeling secure because of her pregnancy, strikes at the man whom Alexander loves most, while his restless, relentless desire for conquest eventually exhausts even his most loyal followers, causing them to murder him (at least in old Ptolemy’s account to Cadmus – which he tells his scribe not to record). My last concern is the question of patronage, and the extent to which an artistic vision is driven by the desires of the paymaster. Alexander’s projected budget was US$150 million, and its funding was raised from a wide range of sources, including US, British, French, German, and Japanese investors.26 Stone’s task was to make money – and both the film’s producer, Moritz Borman, and Warner Brothers studio seem to have had different ideas from the director as to box office appeal. One of Alexander’s more notorious aspects, at least in popular opinion, was its emphasis on the king’s bisexuality. In fact, the movie is quite coy – expressing the sexual relationship between Hephaestion and Alexander merely through manly hugs, soulful looks, or the occasional romantic remark – the actual sex scenes, such as Philip’s rape of Olympias or Alexander’s wedding night, are rough and aggressively heterosexual. In a recent article in Cineaste, Stone was asked whether he had to cut any of the homoerotic material and replied, “I wasn’t forced to cut anything. There was some Bagoas stuff that we trimmed, but it wasn’t crucial and it distracted from the more important relationship with Hephaestion.”27
We know from Curtius that Bagoas was a young Persian eunuch and a concubine of Darius, whom Alexander took into his entourage after the surrender of one of Darius’ generals and assassins, Nabarzanes. According to Curtius (6.5.22, 10.1.26–8) he became Alexander’s lover, and a highly influential figure at court. There is some evidence (Plu. Alex. 67.6–7) suggesting that Alexander’s relationship with the beautiful youth was not only well known to his Macedonian followers but approved; at a dancing contest in Carmania, Bagoas won a prize and the Macedonians, cheering loudly, called upon the king to kiss the victor. Bagoas appears in the film in a non-speaking role, and there is only a hint of any sexual relationship between the king and his Persian servant. Anything more explicit was abandoned possibly due to studio pressure about US audience reaction, but in denying the sexuality of Bagoas the film appears to have followed a similar, censorious, path as W. W. Tarn, who effectively tried to write Bagoas out of history (see Ogden, ch. 11).28
As First Painter to Louis XIV, Le Brun perhaps had the greater artistic freedom in the realization of his vision and the ideas of his patrons, Louis’s powerful minister and Le Brun’s chief supporter, Jean Baptiste Colbert, and ultimately the king himself. It is difficult to know whether Le Brun’s patrons were highly prescriptive.
He would have had to present a portfolio of preliminary sketches for approval, and the lavish, romantic tone of the artist’s Alexander series is consistent with the way the Macedonian is portrayed in contemporary literary works, like Racine’s Alexandre le grand – as we shall see. But how much Racine was influenced by Le Brun – or how much both men were left to express the monarch’s general propaganda, as opposed to being given specific directions, is hard to determine. Apparently the young Louis XIV went chaque jour (daily) to visit Le Brun’s studio at Fontainebleau when he was working on his first royal commission, The Queens of Persia before Alexander, 29 and certainly there are examples elsewhere of a patron’s intrusion. We have detailed correspondence from the powerful and wealthy patron, Isabella d’Este (1466–1519) to the artist Pietro Perugino, commissioning a painting (Battle of Love and Chastity) based on Philostratus’ Eikones, which carefully outlines her interpretation (or that of her humanists’) of the text, and how she wanted the scene executed. She was clearly a patron who insisted on a lot of control. But even if Colbert or the Sun King had been as demanding – and the evidence suggests they were not30 – there were ways in which the First Painter may have been able to modify their wishes, just as Perugino was able to (at least to some degree) with Isabella. She originally wanted “several thousand cupids,” but Perugino’s painting depicts fewer than twenty.31
However, it is significant that Le Brun himself was given his letters of nobility in 1662 shortly after he was appointed to the position of First Painter. This post meant that the incumbent was responsible for all paintings and decoration undertaken by the crown for the adornment of royal residences – which for Le Brun included the redecoration of the Louvre, the king’s chateau at Marly, and the palace of Versailles. He was also made director of the Gobelins factory, which was commissioned with producing tapestries, furniture, and metalwork for the King. When Le Brun was put in charge, the factory had a staff of about 200 weavers and fifty painters; this number increased considerably, especially as the expansion and decoration of Versailles got under way.32 Colbert was apparently extremely deferential to Le Brun, and certain contemporaries refer to the First Painter as having established a kind of tyranny, due to Colbert’s unwavering support. Although some artists did work independently for Louis, Le Brun became an important patron in his own right and it was difficult for artists who were not on good terms with him (such as his great rival Pierre Mignard) to get commissions.33
Thus, while one reason for the formation of the Royal Academy for Painting and Sculpture in 1648 was to allow artists control over their own work, the Academy under Colbert and Louis XIV also became an instrument of the state cultural apparatus.34 Le Brun’s task was to please his superiors and, provided he did that, he seems to have been left to get on with it, and this is amply supported by his long tenure in office. He did not lose influence until Colbert died; even then, he retained his title as First Painter, although Colbert’s successor elevated Mignard and Le Brun himself retired from court in 1688.
It might be helpful to set Le Brun’s work within a broader historical context. A. B. Bosworth once commented to me that when the world had produced one megalomaniac (such as Alexander the Great), it was inevitable that another would try to imitate and surpass him. Roman generals like Pompey and Julius Caesar were credited with some celebrated instances of Alexander imitatio, as were several Roman emperors, and Alexander became a cultural myth in Roman literature.35 With a monarch like Louis XIV of France, whose famous epithet, the “Sun King,” does not suggest a shy or reclusive figure, we are in truly ostentatious territory in relation to identification with the Macedonian conqueror. Louis XlV’s association with past heroes did not stop with Alexander; at various times he was also called “a new Augustus (finding Paris brick and leaving it marble), a new Charlemagne, a new Clovis, a new Constantine, a new Justinian (codifying the law), a new St. Louis, a new Solomon and a new Theodosius (for destroying the heresy of the Protestants).”36
While the promotion of Alexander the Great in literature and art at Louis’s court in the seventeenth century is hardly a new or unexplored area, the Macedonian king’s popularity as an artistic subject from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries is striking. This was a time when Europe was dominated by great dynastic monarchies in the countries holding the balance of power, which were not only embroiled in interminable religious conflicts but were also (directly or indirectly) contesting the rich opportunities offered in the New World, the African continent, and the Far East. During the seventeenth century, there was something like only seven years of peace in France alone.
The aristocracy, princes, and condottieri, in addition to their own education, were surrounded by humanists and cortegiani who were themselves steeped in the Classical revival of the Renaissance and who often offered Classical parallels to flatter their patrons. Thus within such a world of autocrats, aristocracy, and virtual continuous warfare, it is perhaps not surprising that Alexander provided inspiration for the court painters and poets of powerful European (mostly French and Italian) royal and noble families.
Alexander as the great conqueror, particularly his magnificent triumphs over Darius and the Persians, offered an obvious field of representation; a relatively early example is Albrecht Aldörfer’s (1480–1538) portrayal of Alexander and the Persian Great King at the battle of Issus, now in the Munich Pinakothek. Other aspects of Alexander’s life were portrayed, the artists at times deriving inspiration directly from the historical traditions. Raphael (1483–1520) executed a wall painting depicting Alexander ordering his copy of the Iliad to be stored in Darius’ precious casket that was part of the booty captured from Issus (Plu. Alex. 26.1); although in this interpretation, the artist’s emphasis is more on the king and his anxious attendants than on the appropriately ostentatious box. Alexander’s apparent courtly or heroic ethics and chivalry were also celebrated: hence the painting now in the Louvre by Domenico Zampieri (1581–1641) showing Alexander’s compassionate treatment of Timocleia, the Theban noblewoman who was raped by a Thracian soldier and who consequently pushed her assailant down a well (Plu. Alex. 12.3–4).37
Louis XIV lavished enormous expenditure on the arts and his reign was particularly rich in culture. Like his predecessors, the king fostered theatrical and literary talent, taking into his service actors and playwrights like Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille. La Fontaine was appointed as First Poet. Le Brun was the king’s senior by some twenty years and had already earned the patronage of Louis’s mother, Anne of Austria, and of Cardinal Mazarin. According to Le Brun’s pupil and earliest biographer, Claude Nivelon(Vie de Charles Le Brun et description détaillée de ses ouvrages, fol. 145)38 the artist successfully realized a religious dream which the queen had had on canvas (Christ on the Cross Surrounded by Angels), which in turn brought the artist other commissions from not only the queen mother herself but also from other wealthy French nobles.
However, it should also be noted that Le Brun, himself the son of a well-known sculptor, began his career at a much earlier age when his work was noticed by Chancellor Séguier; he also received recommendation from the great Nicholas Poussin who at the time held the position of First Painter to Louis XIII. In 1648 Le Brun, at the age of 29, founded the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, an organization that broke away from the old institution of La Maitrise, with its innate conservatism and restricted membership.39 Le Brun also decorated the sumptuous palace of France’s minister for finance, Nicolas Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Fouquet had spent four years and over 18 million francs building his dream home, at a time when the annual revenue of the country was about 30 million francs. According to a famous anecdote, Louis XIV was so outraged by his minister’s extravagance that he decided to arrest him at his own house-warming party but was persuaded by his mother that such a gesture was not appropriate behavior for a guest;40 however, Fouquet was arrested a few days later and spent the rest of his life in prison. Like Alexander’s general Philotas or Henry VIII’s Cardinal Wolsey, Fouquet discovered it was dangerous to upstage a king.
The Queens of Persia before Alexander, or The Tent of Darius as it is alternatively known, is one of Le Brun’s most famous and influential paintings, which did much to secure his favor with the king; it was most likely commissioned at his palace of Fontainebleau in 1660, a year before Louis assumed direct control of the throne, which he did when he was about 21. The painting displays Alexander’s encounter with Darius’ family who were taken captive at Issus in 333, and his respect for them. The story was well represented in the Alexander traditions, with a surprising degree of corroboration in detail between at least three sources.41 Arrian (2.12.7) includes the vulgate version (given by Curtius and Diodorus) as a logos (a tale) but explicitly says he approves of Alexander’s conduct. The gist of the episode is that after the battle of Issus, the young conqueror, attended by his best friend and probable lover Hephaestion, visited the captive royal family in their tent, which had been placed behind the line of the Persian king’s army. Darius III had taken his family along when he went on campaign, possibly because his hold on the throne was insecure, and he feared that they might have been seized as hostages during his absence.42
According to the tradition, the Persian queen mother, Sisygambis, mistook Hephaestion for Alexander because he was the taller, and performed obeisance to him. When her mistake was pointed out, the elderly lady in her confusion and horror tried to bow to Alexander, but he picked her up and, indicating Hephaestion, said, “You did not make a mistake mother; for this man is Alexander too” (“Non errasti,” inquit, “mater; nam et hic Alexander est”: Curt. 3.12.17).
This scene had been portrayed earlier by Paolo Veronese, the sixteenth-century Italian decorative artist, and Le Brun would almost certainly have known the painting, although there were several other artists’ interpretations of the scene.43 Veronese located the meeting in a palace. Oliver Stone visualized the occasion in Babylon, gives Sisygambis’ role to Darius’ daughter, and conflates their meeting with Alexander’s historically attested encounter in 326 with another monarch, the Indian king Porus – where Alexander asks how Porus would like to be treated – to which the latter replies, “Like a king.” Evidently Stone did not want to waste an aphorism that had enthralled Arrian and Plutarch,44 but his focus (as noted earlier) in the Indian battle was on Alexander’s desire to rally his frightened men by attacking Porus personally. Porus is the enemy in this context (as he is in the Alexander Romance); there is to be no reconciliation.
For his own version of the encounter between Alexander and Darius’ family, Le Brun followed the ancient historical tradition and used the setting of a tent (see fig. 16.1). The tent of the royal women is a fairly modest affair, lashed to a tree on its left corner, which in turn forms a backdrop for Hephaestion and Alexander as they approach from the viewer’s left. In the far left corner of the painting, Le Brun partially depicts another tent, larger and more richly decorated (presumably the Great King’s field quarters). It is debatable whether the artist could have known how elaborate an Achaemenid royal pavilion would have been. Athenaeus quotes Chares (FGrH 81 F41), one of Alexander’s courtiers, on the Susa marriage tents, which were said to be even more extravagant than those of the Persians. It is possible that these descriptions were brought to the First Painter’s notice. But he also brings other imaginative insights to the picture. The painting was described in 1663 by the Royal Academy’s scribe André Félibien, whose pamphlet did much to enhance its fame. More importantly, since the painting has now lost much of its original color, tiny detail, and texture through cleaning, Félibien’s commentary offers valuable information.45
Hephaestion in a red cloak stands on the left, a little behind Alexander, and the Persian queen mother remains bowed down in front of him. Alexander appears to be directing his attention to the younger women and, as Félibien noted, Le Brun toned down his colors because he did not want the viewer distracted by too much brightness.46 Further to this, art historians have pointed out that the direction of the light actually falls not upon the rich red of Hephaestion’s cloak, but on the lighter, softer colors – the blues, apricots, and pinks of Darius’ womenfolk.47 Darius’ wife Stateira holds her young son Ochus in her arms (see Curt. 3.11.24, 12.17; D.S. 17.36.2); both of them look pleadingly at Alexander. Le Brun’s Persian women are deliberate portrayals of particular emotions or passions.48 Darius’ two daughters kneel beside Stateira; one wipes her eyes on her dress and the other anxiously joins her hands in supplication. Behind them are handmaidens in turbans and eunuchs; one of the latter lies prostrate in the foreground with his forehead in the dust.49
However, the painting works on a deeper level than mere depiction of emotion. The composition emphasizes the ideal of the hero and, in particular, Alexander’s generosity, magnanimity, self-control or continentia, and especially his clementia. Alexander did not rape or kill his suppliants, especially those of high rank. In particular, as the Romans knew well, clementia underscores power. Clementia, or the capacity to bestow mercy was the trait of a monarch; it implied one man’s elevated position above others. Le Brun may have taken some of his inspiration from Quintus Curtius’ description of the episode, but even with direct attestation, it is always difficult to know how much an artist consulted the sources directly, as opposed to merely receiving paraphrased material from others. Certainly Curtius’ history was available in French translation at least as early as 1614 (Le Brun was born in 1619),50 and Arrian and Plutarch were translated even earlier. Elsewhere, Le Brun seems to show relatively detailed knowledge of other ancient sources like Josephus.51 Moreover, Félibien attended a lot of the Academy’s lectures and recorded the discussion of its members afterward, which tended to touch on a range of topics, from theoretical and technical questions to the biblical Scriptures, other literature, and higher aesthetic issues. Assuming that Félibien has given us a faithful representation of the table-talk, it is clear that Le Brun and his colleagues were well educated and erudite men. If Le Brun had read Curtius himself, he would have known that Alexander’s display ofcontinentia and clementia inspired a rhetorical flourish from the historian where he says that Alexander was at a high point of his virtue; at that time he outshone all previous kings in self-control and clemency; the tragedy was that as his reign and triumphs increased he was unable to resist being corrupted by his good fortune.52
Le Brun’s message thus becomes intriguingly ambivalent: he is flattering his patron Louis by emphasizing the power and virtue of kingship, particularly at a time when that young man was planning to assume absolute control himself,53 yet at the same time he is also sending a warning. Whether or not Quatorze ever read Curtius is unknown (he seems to have recommended Justin to be put on the school curriculum for his son by his mistress),54 The Queens of Persia impressed the king sufficiently enough for him to make Le Brun the official master of all court iconography – much in the same way that the Roman emperor Augustus extolled Virgil and Horace as court poets. As we saw earlier, Augustus offered another parallel for the Sun King; Racine’s dedication to his (1665) playAlexandre le grand admonishes Louis “that history is full of young conquerors and that much more unusual is the accession of a king who at the age of Alexander behaves like an Augustus.”55
Despite the idealism (which is a feature of Le Brun’s work and partly dictated by contemporary artistic principles), there is also subtle symbolism, particularly in expression and gesture. Alexander’s open hand reveals his clemency, while the other, resting on Hephaestion, shows that he is a favorite.56 Moreover, the artist has allowed his audience to see how Sisygambis could make a mistake; in short, the viewer has to figure out who Alexander is.57 The two men are dressed in similar costumes; Hephaestion wears a scarlet cloak, whereas Alexander’s is a lighter shade (“carnation” in Félibien’s description), but embroidered with a gold border, and his cuirass is silver.58 Hephaestion is a little taller (again as our sources tell us);59 nevertheless, Le Brun has also cleverly signaled he is not the king. According to Félibien, Alexander’s cloak is fastened with a clasp of diamonds, whereas Hephaestion wears an agate cameo bearing Alexander’s portrait. Alexander is his beloved, which also recalls Plutarch’s comment (Alex. 47.10) that whereas Craterus was philobasileus (“lover of the king”), Hephaestion was philalexandros (“lover of Alexander”).
La Fontaine celebrated Le Brun as France’s Apelles, thus playing on one of Alexander’s best-known artists, but allusions to the Macedonian king had been fashionable from when Louis was still a child; as early as 1639 the Dauphin’s birth was welcomed as that of “a new Alexander” and even in 1672 when Louis was about 34, he was celebrated as “the invincible Alexander” as France was faring well in war against the Dutch at the time.60
But it is significant that the greatest period of Alexander’s promotion falls mostly within the 1660s and early 1670s, the first ten years or so of Louis’s personal reign, when the king was still in his twenties. In addition to The Queens of Persia, Le Brun painted four other episodes:The Passage of the Granicus, The Battle of Arbela, The Defeat of Porus, and Alexander’s Entrance into Babylon. Alexander was an attractive and pertinent symbol: the identification of youth, display, and conquest offered paramount opportunities for comparison. And that which was not strictly historical could be adapted in the interests of audience entertainment and aesthetic propriety, where a higher priority was placed on verisimilitude rather than accuracy.
The French nobility valued glory, both military and amorous. Thus in contemporary dramatic productions Alexander was portrayed (somewhat incongruously, it might seem to us) as much an ardent lover as a great general. For instance, in Racine’s Alexandre le grand, the king, following a victory, rushes off the battlefield to seek out the coy queen Cléofile (Cleophis of the historical traditions) and, declaring his passion, protests that she fails to understand his violent desire for her (III. vi. 883–4). At a later point in the text, he assures her that he will be back to see her after another “another victory” (“Encore une victoire, je reviens, Madame. . .” : V. i. 1348).61
Alexander was more than a role model for Louis – at times there was outright identification. Some scholars have pointed to the contemporary political allegories inherent between Racine’s Alexandre and the Sun King; moreover Louis actually performed the role of Alexander in a production called Le Ballet royal pour la naissance de Vénus in 1665.62 Also in 1665, the king finally persuaded the famous Italian sculptor Bernini to come to Paris to carve a portrait bust in marble (now at Versailles); from the start Bernini compared Louis’s head to that of Alexander and expressed the allusion through physical and psychological affinities.63
Each of Le Brun’s canvases is quite large. The Queens of Persia is nearly 3 m high by 4.5 m wide. Le Brun was often accorded a big wall to decorate – the dimensions of the gaudy Triumph of Alexander are 4.5 m by 7.07 m while those celebrating Alexander’s battles, The Passage of the Granicus, The Battle of Arbela, and Alexander and Porus are all around 4.7 m by 12.6 m. The Alexander paintings were also produced as tapestries by the Gobelins. Perhaps because the features of Alexander also bore an idealized (if vague) resemblance to his own, Louis XIV insured that copies of the tapestries were given to his brother, to the Duc de Lorraine, to a minister of the king of Denmark, and to Mlle. de Montpensier.64
The Triumph of Alexander, or Alexander’s Entry into Babylon, now in the Louvre depicts Alexander’s march into Babylon when the Persian satrap Mazaeus surrendered the city in 331 (fig. 16.2). Its precise date is uncertain (some time between 1661 and 1665) but it was evidently painted quite rapidly. The extent to which Le Brun (as opposed to his staff) worked on its execution himself is debatable; the memoirs of the Academy of Painting record the artist as being heavily involved with the administration of the king’s various decorative projects at the time.65
But as noted earlier, the concept was probably Le Brun’s, and in many details he was again quite faithful to the sources, particularly Curtius (5.1.17–18) who testifies that the event was a carefully organized pageant. One notes the presence of the Hanging Gardens in the background (see Curt. 5.1.32–3), and the flowers and garlands which Bagophanes, guardian of the citadel, had strewn along the road (5.1.20). Although the elephant, with its ears decorated with jewels and richly caparisoned in blue and silver, pulling Alexander’s chariot is not mentioned in Curtius, we know that elephants were part of the booty captured at the battle of Gaugamela (Arr. 3.15.6). However, probably more than any other painting in the Alexander series, Alexander’s Entry into Babylon best expresses that grandeur and magnificence, calculated to overwhelm the viewer, which the king’s court was so anxious to convey. Everything is so big in the The Entry into Babylon – even the rump of Hephaestion’s horse. Likewise in Stone’s Alexander the king’s climactic entry into a reconstructed Babylon (both the Pinewood studio set and digital recreation) is lush and visually stunning, but here, unlike in Le Brun’s version where a youthful Alexander, a little off-center, alone in a huge cream and gold chariot, dressed in gold and carrying a golden scepter, turns to face the viewer, Colin Farrell, his fellow actors, and the extras are dwarfed by the towering architecture. Babylon is a turning point in Alexander’s fortunes. It is also where he died.
The Passage of the Granicus (now in the Louvre) is another colossal work that was probably begun around the same time as The Triumph of Alexander. In addition to commemorating Alexander’s military prowess, the painting is also interesting for what it reveals about Le Brun’s artistic techniques and theories. The subject is Alexander’s first battle against the combined Persian satrapal forces of Lydia, Ionia, and Hellespontine Phrygia. According to Arrian (1.13.2) and Plutarch (Alex. 16), the Persians had drawn up their line on the opposite bank of the river Granicus and, contrary to advice, Alexander immediately offered them battle, charging across the stream and up the opposite bank. Again, Le Brun has portrayed certain attested details like Alexander’s white plumed helmet (Plu.Alex. 16). He also depicts the Persian horses heavily covered in blankets, a detail which he possibly obtained from Xenophon’s descriptions.66
Le Brun’s keen interest in facial expressions, demonstrated elsewhere by his specialized studies of anatomical configuration and by his famous lecture, is expressed here in the intense aggression of Alexander. In a poignant touch, even Bucephalas, either half-crazed by fear or his master’s ardor, is shown biting Alexander’s opponent Rhoesaces (often interpreted as Memnon in this painting) on the back. In the king’s face we see the military gloire that the French court so passionately sought. Ironically, in another age, the DVD cover of Alexander shows a rearing Bucephalas with Farrell on its back in fierce battle cry, open-mouthed, displaying dazzlingly white teeth, and wearing a helmet shaped like Heracles’ lion-skin cap.
Le Brun evidently planned other Alexander paintings, since a collection of preliminary sketches for subjects like the death of Darius’ wife, the death of Darius, and Alexander and Coenus (i.e., the mutiny on the Hyphasis) was preserved among his folios. It is possible that he continued to give some attention to realizing the drawings on canvas throughout his long career, but was prevented or distracted by other projects.
However, it is also probably fair to say that the image of Alexander became time-expired. There were probably several reasons for this. Although as late as 1699 a magnificent display of fireworks staged by the municipality of Paris celebrated past heroic role models like Alexander and Charlemagne,67 by about 1680 antiquity lost the importance that it had enjoyed earlier in the 1660s and 1670s, and Louis’s image-makers relied less on allegory.68 Not only, as he grew older, did Louis XIV want himself glorified, rather than identifying with another’s glory, but his military campaigns were not always so successful. It is a sad reminder that by 1688 (the year before Le Brun died), the country’s economy was so exhausted by war that Louis himself was forced to melt down much of his own gold and silver masterpieces, thereby destroying a large section of Le Brun’s work. As a further irony, some years after Le Brun’s death, the Gobelins factory was forced to shut down from 1694 to 1699.
Yet Le Brun’s Alexander series survives: lavish, sweeping, colorful, cluttered, and romantic – to individual delight or distaste, but certainly as a legitimate part of the cultural heritage of France’s Grand Siècle. The paintings were meant to be read as stories and although they can be appreciated by an uninformed viewer, they also function on a more sophisticated level. They demand a certain amount of attention, and reward the viewer who invests time in them. Stone’s Alexander likewise deserves some consideration. However, it seems to have become the victim of damnatio memoriae, conspicuously absent from a montage of film clips at the 2006 Academy Awards that commemorated great historical personages, whose stories have been told on the wide screen. It remains to be seen whether Alexander will become a cinema classic or consigned to oblivion.
1 I am grateful to the editors of this volume, Professors Waldemar Heckel and Lawrence Tritle, also to art historians Dr. Christopher Allen and Ms. Raichel Le Goff, as well as Professor A. B. Bosworth, for reading earlier drafts of the chapter, and finally to Dr. Fiona Greenland and Professor Robin Lane Fox, who have shared so much information and insight about the film Alexander.
2 The chronology of the series is controversial: see Hartle 1957: 91ff., esp. n. 7. Le Brun’s most influential modern biographer, Henry Jouin, gives two different dates for Le Brun’s first Alexander painting, The Queens of Persia before Darius: 1660 (Jouin 1889: 133–4) and 1661 (221 n. 1). Most modern art historians accept 1660–1, but see Bryson 1981: 52, who places it a year later in 1662. The issue is not insignificant because it relates to whether Le Brun received his first commission from Louis before or after the king took direct control of the throne. Hartle argues that Le Brun’s last painting in the series, Alexander and Porus, inspired Racine’s Alexandre le grand and must have been completed before 1665; contra: Gareau 1992: 220; Posner 1959: 241–2. Bibliography on each of Le Brun’s Alexander series can be found in Gareau 1992; for a catalogue of Le Brun’s works, see Thuillier and Montagu 1963.
3 The version of Alexander referred to here is that released in 2004, not Alexander: Director’s Cut or the more recent Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut.
4 See below, pp. 305–6.
5 On the careful creation of Louis’s image, see the excellent study by Burke (1992). On the importance of Alexander the Great at Louis’s court, see also Hartle 1957, 1970.
6 Lane Fox 2004: 25.
7 On the high status of history painting in the seventeenth century see Allen 2003: 12–13.
8 Allen 2003: 13.
9 See Crowdus 2005: 12.
10 Lane Fox 2004: 25. In Greek legendary tradition, Cadmus brought the alphabet to Greece from Phoenicia.
11 The first European expedition was by the Danish scholar Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815) who was part of a Danish and Swedish team. Niebuhr’s journey to Persia and the Near East lasted around seven years, from 1761 to 1767 and, remarkably, he was the only survivor – even the local guides who accompanied the Europeans died from infections.
12 See Cohen 1997: 1.
13 During the 1660s several acrimonious disputes took place at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture over what was appropriate for depiction in history painting, one example of which were the debates between Le Brun and several colleagues over whether Poussin should have included camels in his painting of a story from the Scriptures, Israelites Gathering Manna in the Desert. Le Brun defended Poussin’s decision to omit the animals on artistic grounds; however, when pushed in a second debate, he went back to the text of the Old Testament and claimed that as the camels were not mentioned in the camp of the Israelites, Poussin’s exclusion of them had not broken the letter of the Bible (see Bryson 1981: 32–3). For an introduction to the Academy’s perception of artistic guidelines for its professional practitioners, see Duro 1997: 1–17.
14 See Duro 1997: 78–9; Gareau 1992: 110.
15 Stone won early acclaim for his screenplay work – an Academy Award for Midnight Express (1978) – and his films are usually written or co-written by him (see Kunz 1997: xii).
16 Kunz 1997: xvi.
17 Lane Fox 2004: 159.
18 On Antigenes the One-Eyed, see Plu. Alex. 70.4–6; cf. Mor. 339c. He was one of Philip II’s men, who had lost his eye at the siege of Perinthus long before, in 340; in the Moralia the name is given as Atarrhias. Both men were hypaspist officers who were promoted to command late in 331 (Curt. 5.2.5). I am grateful to A. B. Bosworth for access to his forthcoming commentary on Arrian, vol. iii, 7.5.2 ad loc.
19 Lane Fox 2004: 99.
20 See Baynham 1995; Bosworth 1996: 6–8; on the Porus medallions see more recently Holt 2003. There is also a secondary tradition in Arrian (5.14.4–5) that Alexander and Bucephalas were both wounded (fatally in Bucephalas’ case) by Porus’ son.
21 See Allen 2003: 140; cf. the comments by the French critic, P. Marcel, “tableaux de chevalet dému-surés et confus,” in Posner 1959: 237 with n. 4.
22 See Briganti 1962: 81; Frommel and Schütze 1998: 70.
23 Plu. Alex. 33.2–3; Curt. 4.15.26–7.
24 On the lecture’s date, see Montagu 1994: 141–3; see also 157–62 for the relevant extracts from Descartes’s work alongside corresponding sections from Le Brun’s lecture.
25 See below, p. 308.
26 US$11 million was also needed for pre-production expenses; see Lane Fox 2004: 59, 60–2.
27 Crowdus 2005: 23.
28 See Tarn ii. 319–29, esp. 320–3. Tarn’s views were refuted by Badian in a ground-breaking article (Badian 1958b).
29 See Pericolo 2004: 274; cf. Duro 1997: 81; Allen 2003: 137.
30 Burke 1992: 54.
31 Le Goff 2006: ch. 2.
32 Bryson 1981: 30–1.
33 The famous Italian sculptor Bernini described Colbert deferring to Le Brun as though the latter were “his mistress”: see Burke 1992: 54–6 with nn. 27–8.
34 Duro 1997: 82; Allen 2003: 17.
35 See Spencer 2002; also ch. 14.
36 Burke 1992: 35.
37 There is another version of the same episode by Pietro della Vecchia (c.1640); see Spencer 2002: 40.
38 Gareau 1992: 23 with n. 15; cf. Pericolo 2004: 278–81.
39 Jouin 1889: 69; Allen 2003: 124ff.
40 Gareau 1992: 28–9; cf. Allen 2003: 134.
41 See D.S. 17.37.3–38.7; Curt. 3.12.1–26; Plu. Alex. 21; Just. 11.9.12–16. On the tradition, see Bosworth 1980b: 220–2; Atkinson 1980: 248–9.
42 Badian 2000a: 82–3.
43 Caravaggio depicted the episode in brown ink and brown wash in the late sixteenth century, in Alexander and the Family of Darius and Scene with Prisoners; Pierre Mignard, Le Brun’s great rival, also painted his own version in 1689: see Posner 1959: 237 n. 3.
44 Arr. 5.19.2; Plu. Alex. 60.14–15. See Bosworth 1995: 308–10.
45 Gareau 1992: 196; Montagu 1994: 43 with n. 63; Duro 1997: 79. Félibien’s pamphlet, Les Reines des Perses aux pieds d’Alexandre, peinture du Cabinet du Roy (Paris, 1663), was translated into English as early 1703 by William Parsons, who explains in his preface that he has included both French and English texts, “since it [French] is of late Years become as Universal as its Monarch would be.” Louis XIV was still alive at that time. Unfortunately I have not been able to consult Félibien’s other works first-hand.
46 Gareau 1992: 197; Duro 1997: 78.
47 Duro 1997: 79.
48 Allen 2003: 137–8; Gareau 1992: 196.
49 Félibien 1663, cited in Gareau 1992: 196; cf. Parsons 1703: 11.
50 According to the Library of Congress catalog, a translation of Curtius by N. Seguier was published in French and Latin in 1614; Vaugelas’ Latin text with Freinsheim’s supplements, translated into French by M. du Ryer in 1665 appears to have been more popular; it was reissued in Paris in 1668, 1680, 1681, 1682, and again in Amsterdam (its original place of publication) in 1684 and 1699. On the textual transmission of Curtius in general, see Baynham 1998a: 2–5.
51 Joseph. AJ 2.5; see Montagu 1994: 46 with n. 85.
52 Curt. 3.12.18–25; see Baynham 1998a: 125–8.
53 Duro 1997: 80.
54 See Angliviel de La Baumelle 1752: i. 121–5; also Ranum and Ranum 1972: 105ff.
55 Burke 1992: 37; see also 196–7.
56 Félibien 1663, cited in Gareau 1992: 196; see also Parsons 1703: 11.
57 Bryson 1981: 53.
58 Parsons 1703: 5.
59 Curt. 3.12.17; cf. 6.5.29; D.S. 17.37.5.
60 Ferrier-Caverivière 1981: 17 (“l’invincible Alexandre,” 133).
61 Racine 1990: III. vi. 911–12; cf. V. i. 1348; see also Hartle 1957: 389 with n. 8.
62 Cf. Ferrier-Caverivière 1981: 67; Hartle 1957: 387.
63 See Hibbard 1965: 176–8; cf. Cronin 1964: 155.
64 Hartle 1957: 90 n. 1.
65 Gareau 1992: 202.
66 Xen. Cyr. 8.8.19.
67 Burke 1992: 115.
68 Burke 1992: 126, 131, 197.