The Entombment of Atala
Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) · 1808
Inside a cave that opens onto a wooded valley, the body of a young woman is being lowered toward a grave. She is Atala, the heroine of Chateaubriand's novel of 1801, wrapped in a white shroud with a crucifix clasped to her breast. At her feet, the young Native American Chactas, half naked in a red loincloth, clutches her knees and buries his face in the cloth. At her head stands Father Aubry, an old missionary in a hooded robe, who supports her shoulders and looks down with grave calm. A cross planted at the mouth of the cave and a verse carved into the rock behind the priest complete the scene.
Girodet lit the group from the cave mouth so that Atala's face and arms glow like marble against the dark rock, and he wrapped Chactas in shadow to show grief through the body rather than the face. Look at the contrast between the closed, hooded shape of the priest and the open despair of the youth, and at the spade and the freshly dug earth at the bottom. The pose of the corpse recalls Renaissance entombments of Christ. Atala had sworn a vow of chastity to her dying mother and poisoned herself rather than break it, and the missionary's task was to teach the pagan Chactas resignation.
The painting was shown at the Salon of 1808, when Chateaubriand's melancholy Christianity was at the height of fashion, and it made Girodet the painter of the new sensibility. Louis the Eighteenth bought it on the sixth of January 1818 for the royal collection, in a single purchase with two other pictures in this room, the Sleep of Endymion and the Scene of the Flood, for forty thousand francs together. Girodet painted a second version with his pupil Pagnest, exhibited in 1814. The canvas remains one of the clearest bridges between David's classicism and the Romantic painting that followed.
Did You Know? The subject comes from a novel published only seven years earlier, Chateaubriand's Atala of 1801.
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