JOUVENET, Jean-Baptiste

This canvas depicts Apollo and the Chariot of the Sun with the assembly of the gods.

In Jouvenet’s later work the Baroque tendency is marked. His most important series of canvases consisted of the four colossal pictures of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, The Resurrection of Lazarus, Christ Driving the Traders out of the Temple, and Christ in the House of Simon, painted for St Martin des Champs and put in place in 1706. Most writers attribute the Baroque quality of Jouvenet’s later style to the influence of Rubens.

In one respect, Jouvenet differs from most of his French rivals in religious painting. There is in his work a strong element of naturalism. In the Miraculous Draughty for instance, the piles of dead fish in the foreground are given a prominence and are treated with a relish which would have shocked the Academy in Le Brun’s time; and we are told that, in order to paint the picture, Jouvenet made a special journey to Dieppe to study similar scenes on the spot. The same naturalism is to be seen in Jouvenet’s choice of types for this picture, in which the apostles are the coarse fishermen which a Caravaggesque might have selected.

This bold and vigorous painting, with its magnificent harmony of warm colours, foreshadows the most beautiful of the nineteenth-century Romantic Paintings. Executed for the church of the Capuchins in the Place Louis -le-grande, Paris, it was donated to the Acad�mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1756. During the French Revolution, it was acquired by the Louvre, as were all the other paintings which had belonged to the Acad�mie.

Jouvenet was a forceful portraitist, concerned - as in the pungent characterization of Dr Raymond Finot, exhibited at the Salon of 1704 - to grasp personality rather than the trappings of fine clothes. His strong naturalism is reflected in this remarkable portrait, a moving study of an old, wrinkled face.

The Magnificat (Latin for “[My soul] magnifies [the Lord]”) is a canticle, also known as the Song of Mary. It is one of the eight most ancient Christian hymns and perhaps the earliest Marian hymn. Its name comes from the incipit of the Latin version of the canticle’s text. The most famous representation of the Magnificat in painting is Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat in the Uffizi, Florence.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 33 minutes):

Johann Sebastian Bach: Magnificat in D major, BWV 243

The Golden Legend, drawing on the apocryphal gospels, tells how the Virgin Mary was brought up as a child in the Temple at Jerusalem ‘with other virgins’…and was visited daily of angels’, since it had been foretold to her parents, Joachim and Anne, that their daughter was to be consecrated to the Lord as the ‘chosen vessel’ of Christ’s Incarnation. The theme became popular in the 16th century and remained so after the Counter-Reformation in spite of some disapproval by the Church because of its apocryphal character. Mary is seen in earlier examples teaching her young companions, sewing the priest vestments or being ministered to by angels who bring bread and water. But the favourite theme, especially in Counter-Reformation art, depicts her education in the strict sense, at the knee of her mother Anne, learning to read.

You can view other depictions of the Education of the Virgin in the Web Gallery of Art.

In Jouvenet’s later work the Baroque tendency is marked. His most important series of canvases consisted of the four colossal pictures of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, The Resurrection of Lazarus, Christ Driving the Traders out of the Temple, and Christ in the House of Simon, painted for St Martin des Champs and put in place in 1706. Most writers attribute the Baroque quality of Jouvenet’s later style to the influence of Rubens.

In one respect, Jouvenet differs from most of his French rivals in religious painting. There is in his work a strong element of naturalism. In the Miraculous Draughty for instance, the piles of dead fish in the foreground are given a prominence and are treated with a relish which would have shocked the Academy in Le Brun’s time; and we are told that, in order to paint the picture, Jouvenet made a special journey to Dieppe to study similar scenes on the spot. The same naturalism is to be seen in Jouvenet’s choice of types for this picture, in which the apostles are the coarse fishermen which a Caravaggesque might have selected.

The huge Raising of Lazarus, one of four vast canvases painted by Jouvenet early in the eighteenth century for the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs in Paris, is a tour-de-force of hes realistic vein combined with the elevated and idealized. Here the figure of Christ is somewhat over-bland and insufficiently assertive amid the agitated crowd gathered around the looming rocks of the tomb, but Mary, the sister of Lazarus, takes on the role of heroine, distressed yet decorous, and very consciously posed, in garments of gleaming white, gold, and green, to hold the centre of the stage. She is the embodiment of French academic classicism and could serve in comparable guise in many other pictures of the period. What she gestures towards, however, is dramatic in a different idiom: the stark moment of Lazarus’s return from the dead, with him awakening in the deep cavernous gloom of his burial-chamber, lit only by a single torch, and experiencing hardly less violent and painful astonishment than do the figures gaping around him.