Cézanne and Hercules

Abstract

Cézanne's art, unlike that of his contemporaries Fantin-Latour and Gustave Moreau, hardly seems to invite a study of the survival of a pagan god in the later nineteenth century. Dominated by genre and bather compositions, his imagery of the figure includes few mythological subjects, and even these are largely the familiar erotic types—Satyrs and Nymphs, Venus and Cupid, Leda and the Swan.¹ Yet it is well known that he continued to read and cherish the classical authors who had played an important part in his education and in his first artistic efforts, as a poet. Thus Gauguin, who painted with him around 1880, described him a few years later as “a man of the South [who] spends whole days on the mountain top reading Virgil and looking at the sky,”² and the poet Larguier, who visited him in Aix as late as 1901, was surprised by his frequent quotations of Latin verse: “Every incident was a pretext for him … to ask of Virgil or Lucretius the support of their participation.”³ Moreover, the gods and heroes of whom Cezanne read in these authors he encountered again, in a tangible form, when copying ancient and Baroque statues in the Louvre, some of which inspired the poses of figures in his own compositions. Among his favorite models were such famous antiquities as the Mars Borghese and the Venus of Milo, which throughout his career he drew repeatedly from various positions.⁴