Portrait of Mlle. Lange as Danaë

Girodet painted this picture in 1799 after a commission had gone wrong. The actress Anne Françoise Elisabeth Lange, known on stage as Mademoiselle Lange, had asked for a portrait of herself as Venus, but disliked the result and demanded that it be withdrawn from the Paris Salon. Offended, Girodet replaced it with this satirical Danaë, painted in only a few weeks. The scene borrows the mythological episode of the golden shower, in which Zeus visits Danaë as a rain of gold, but turns it into a critique: the actress sits on the edge of her bed gathering gold coins, portrayed as a greedy woman. The details form a dense web of allusions: a turkey wearing a wedding ring, peacock feathers as a sign of vanity, two doves bearing Latin mottoes about fidelity and constancy, a spider catching coins in its web, and a frog that recalls a fable by La Fontaine. The painting caused a considerable stir, and Lange is said to have been deeply upset when she saw it. Today it stands as one of the best-known satirical paintings of its period in French art.

Painter

Anne-Louis Girodet

Date

1799

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

60 × 49 cm

Museum

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis

Genre

satire, historiated portrait, mythological painting, nude

Depicts

nudity, spider, sandal, furniture, The Frog and the Ox, spider web, Danaë, turban

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