This week, with news of California attempting to curb the scourge of “revenge porn” on the Internet, my colleague Diane Richard posted a NewsFlash label beside an MIA painting with scandalous origins: Portrait of Mlle. Lange as Danae, created in 1799 by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson. Seems revenge porn isn’t so new, and you didn’t always need a camera and the Internet to do it, just some brushes, paint, and a nasty sense of satire.
Quick revenge porn primer: Girl breaks up with boy, boy posts nude pics that girl allowed him to take when things were good, girl is embarrassed, can’t get hired, etc. It’s a tricky problem, because it butts up against the First Amendment. Now back to Mademoiselle Lange. It’s the kind of antique bad behavior we tend to grin about today: Miss Lange was an actress, it seems, a beautiful boor who took many wealthy lovers and found the artist Girodet’s first portrait of her rather unflattering. To the point of having it removed from the Paris Salon. And then stiffing him on the bill.
A detail of the painting showing a dove, a symbol of fidelity, being strangled.
Girodet was ticked. Enraged. Snapping brushes over his knee, no doubt. He sought revenge. And he got it with this second, nude portrait. If it seems tame today—one reason we tend to grin rather than grimace at the story—it’s because the context is largely lost on us. Satire doesn’t hold up well. You kinda had to be there in most cases, and in this case that would be the 18th century. Back then, it was an artistic tradition to flatter the subjects of portraits by portraying them as mythological figures. Girodet inverted that tradition by portraying Miss Lange as Danae, one of the mortal lovers of Zeus, who transformed himself into a shower of gold and rained down on her (the original golden shower). Girodet shows her greedily catching the coins.
It gets more sneakily specific: the turkey with a wedding ring represents her husband, whom Miss Lange reportedly married for his fortune. The grotesque mask has the features of one of her lovers. The dove, a symbol of fidelity, is being strangled. And the cracked mirror suggests her inability to see herself as Girodet saw her: a vain, adulterous, avaricious woman.
He painted it in just a few days and stuck it in the Paris Salon where the first portrait had been. Which suggests a few things: first, revenge was swift, even before the Internet; second, don’t spurn (talented) artists; third, regulating revealing photographs, as legislators have proposed in California, may just spur a boom in art materials.