Page 22 - Jacques Blanchard - Myth and Allegory
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Blanchard’s main inspiration for the painting is Venus’s milky white skin. This is a
plainlyTitian’s composition, which by the first characteristic less obvious in French painting
quarter of the 17 th century had been of the time, but was the stock in trade ofTitian
disseminated in countless workshop copies and Titianesque Venetian painters in general.
and print versions. But while Blanchard’s Having said this, the painting is far from a
formal debt to Titian may be obvious, his own slavish imitation of Titian’s final period,
ambitions for the subject appear to have been because it is also, in fact so appreciably French.
very different. Instead of trying to imitate Apart from the audible echos of Fontainebleau
Titian’s complex and considerably larger in the anatomy, Blanchard employs a silvery
composition - which, in any case would have blue/yellow colour scheme (used so often by
been unsuitable to his specific decorative Vouet in his own work as to be considered a
purpose - Blanchard focuses tightly on the sort of signature) with great subtlety
lovers. Indeed, so much so that his throughout the work, in hue, texture, and
composition is almost solely dependent on contrast. The ice-blue of Venus’s mantle and
their anatomy.Their intimacy is emphasised by the rose-gold and yellow-orange of Adonis’s
a complete lack of recession, or horizon line. costume simmer and glow without
They are anchored at the very front of the overwhelming the virtuoso under-painting in
picture plane by the crude Cyclopian masonry the flesh tones, or the soft yellow-greens of
they sit upon.This is contrasted with the thick the landscape motifs. Indeed, the picture
tree trunk winding sinuously behind them, vividly illustrates Blanchard’s mastery of
suggesting their eventual division. The texture, both in drapery and flesh tones.
landscape itself is communicated with barely
more than two feathery scrims of foliage. eee
Venus’s yearning and Adonis’s attendant lack
of pity is beautifully captured by the kinetic The painting’s strongly baroque rhythm of
interplay of their limbs and draperies. Equally, interlocking limbs, so characteristic of
while Venus appears almost weightless with the Venetian school, was achieved by only a
abandon, Adonis’s resolution is plain in his few northern artists, Rubens being the most
clenched right hand, and firmly planted left successful in this regard. It is interesting to
foot; he is braced against her embrace. note in fact just how similar Blanchard’s Venus
and Adonis is to Rubens’s painting of the same
Adonis’s male ruddiness, which also reflects subject, (Fig.1) which he, in turn had based on
his impatience and mortality, contrasts with Titian’s picture in the Prado. (Fig.2)33 Our
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