The Mourning of Pallas

The Mourning of Pallas

Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pierre Didot l'ainé's project to revive the art of fine book publishing in the years following the Revolution provided welcome income for a number of David's students. Some of the greatest examples of French Neoclassical book illustration were the result of these ambitious undertakings, most notably the designs for the 1798 edition of Virgil, based on drawings supplied by Girodet and François Gérard. This drawing for Book Eleven of The Aeneid features Aeneas and Iulus mourning Pallas, who had been killed in battle by the Rutilian king Turnus. The elderly Acoetës, who had once served Pallas' father Evander, grieves over the dead body, while Aeneas comforts his son Iulus in the foreground. Inscribed below the image, in Latin, is Aeneas' lament, "Alas! How great a protection is lost to thee, Ausonia [Italy], and what a loss to thee, Iulus!" Responding to the restricted format of book illustration, Girodet reduced Virgil's cast of characters to four, standing for youth, maturity, old age, and death. Pallas' corpse is bathed in ethereal moonlight--an effect for which Girodet had a life-long affection.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.