The Sleep of Endymion
Anne-Louis Girodet (1767-1824) · 1791
In a moonlit glade, a young man lies naked and asleep on a leopard skin and drapery, his body glowing under a beam of silver light. He is Endymion, the shepherd loved by the moon goddess Diana, and the goddess appears only as that ray, which slips through the foliage to kiss him. At the left, a laughing adolescent Zephyr with butterfly wings pulls the branches aside to let the light through, and a dog dozes at the bottom. The effect is uncanny: the flesh is pale and smooth, the light seems to come from nowhere, and the whole scene hovers between dream and sculpture.
Girodet painted the picture in Rome between April and October 1791, while a pensioner at the French Academy, and sent it to Paris as his required work. It was shown at the Salon of 1793, again in 1802 and in 1814, and it made his name at once. Fellow pupils of David saw in it a deliberate break with the master's daylight clarity. The state bought it in 1818, with the Flood and Atala, and it is often called the first Romantic painting in France.
Did You Know? The goddess Diana never appears in person; she is the moonbeam that falls on the sleeper.
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