Study for the Funeral of Pallas 1711 - 1721

Curator: Here we have Antoine Coypel’s "Study for the Funeral of Pallas," a drawing rendered between 1711 and 1721. It resides here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My immediate response to this? Baroque drama! It’s all movement, anguish, and theatricality, but somehow filtered through… a haze. Like a half-remembered dream. Editor: Indeed! This work displays a great command over the Baroque aesthetic. There is, of course, a distinct history to Coypel's influence in the academic world. He eventually became director of the Académie Royale in 1716. Curator: It feels muted. It has the solemnity I would expect, but there is also such visible energy despite that. The cool blue sets a melancholic tone, with frantic movement suggested through these almost violently rendered red chalk figures... Is it the history painting that generates that feeling for me? Because I am really feeling a pull of emotion. Editor: Perhaps so. Pallas’s funeral would have offered an important, recognizable historical subject with which to depict appropriate emotional and political display, reflecting the anxieties around leadership at that moment in time. Consider, also, how death rituals operated in Early Modern Europe; Coypel might have seen opportunity here, and wanted to imbue that with a grand artistic form. Curator: I wonder, did he think this frenetic mark-making created immediacy for his patrons, inviting an intimacy within them for this historical narrative? In many ways, it's a technique he continues to employ as the men strain under the weight of the funeral bier... It is not often that I am affected by watercolor. Editor: Interesting. Watercolors often allowed a relative inexpensive method through which academic studies were distributed and copied to spread these types of history paintings throughout France. Did it lose something in this translation from sketch to dissemination? I am uncertain... Curator: Fascinating—a question of access and artistic intention! Coypel delivers Baroque dynamism even here, however subdued by the watercolours and print. I do find this really thought provoking. Editor: I agree. Coypel invites us to consider the layered relationships between style, technique, historical event, and emotional effect. A deeply political and emotional moment!