The Silenus Procession

Le Cortège de Silène is the most ambitious of Géricault's mythological drawings in brown ink wash heightened with white gouache on brown paper, several of which are annotated "Rome 1817". Martial-François Marcille, Géricault's first major collector along with Horace His de La Salle, owned at least three of these: L'Étreinte, depicting two sexual acts (a love scene on the front, and the mating of a satyr and a nymph on the reverse), now in the Musée du Louvre, and the two versions of Cortège de Silène shared by Camille and Eudoxe Marcille on the death of their father. A first cousin purchased the former's version, the more accomplished of the two, at his after-death sale in March 1876, bequeathing it to the museum, where it entered a few months later.

The reverse of the old frame bore a label on which were inscribed, in the hand of François-Martial or Camille Marcille, the last three lines of the unfinished poem "Bacchus" by André Chénier (1762-1794), which contains twenty-four lines:

"[...] And the hoarse drum, the sonorous cymbals,

Winding oboes and double crotales

That danced on your noisy path

The faun, the satyr and the young sylvan,

Randomly gathered around old Silenus,

Who, with cup in hand, from the Indian shore,

Always drunk, always dumb, always staggering,

Step by step on his indolent donkey."

Géricault's literary culture is too poorly documented to establish whether his invention of the mythological genre stems from precise literary sources. Chénier's poems were little known to the public until Henri de Latouche published them in 1819, two years after the Cortège de Silène was painted. Yet the connection between the poem and the drawing is not without meaning, given the intellectual affinities between Géricault and Latouche. The republican writer, a sympathizer of the nascent Romantic movement, had devoted an enthusiastic review to Le Radeau de la Méduse the very year Chénier's works were published. To suppose that Le Cortège de Silène was inspired by Chénier's Bacchus would be to date the meeting between the editor of his poetry and the painter to before the latter's stay in Rome (October 1816 - October 1817), but there is currently no evidence of any links between the two men.

In any case, the Idylls of the poet and those of the painter merge in the same vision of a sensual antiquity, exalting the pleasures andart of love, to use a title common to Ovid and Chénier. The novelty of Géricault's brown washes lies first and foremost in their eminently painterly use of a technique that usually lends itself particularly well to the imitation of bas-relief, or at least to the plastic unification of a frieze composition. Here, white gouache and brown wash are strongly contrasted to create the depth of the landscape. Translating the powerful southern sun, the gouache, applied in broad strokes, more heavily charged on the areas receiving the light most directly, defines successive planes in a restricted narrative space, in contrast to the flat areas of brown wash that exploit the paper of the same shade to create penumbra. The black pencil vigorously defines the contours and shapes the bodies by cross-hatching their shadows, to the point of making the dancing partner turn in space in a backlit foreground.

The invention of the Cortège de Silène has sometimes been seen as an extension of the artist's studies of ancient sculpture, but the tenebrism and strong corporality of the figures suggest that it echoes the discovery of the Italian masters, perhaps even more so the Caravaggesque masters who treated the subject (Matia Preti, Ribera), rather than Annibale Carrache (Galerie Farnèse).