The Oath of the Seven Chiefs against Thebes
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (French, 1767–1824)
c. 1800
- Medium
- Black chalks and white chalk with stumping and erasing on light brown wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Overall: 41.8 x 62 cm (16 7/16 x 24 7/16 in.)
- Culture
- France, late 18th, early 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Girodet found inspiration for this drawing in Aeschylus’s Greek tragedy Seven against Thebes. Dramatized with powerful physicality, seven warrior leaders from Argos raise weapons to the war deities Ares and Enyo at the far left as they immerse their hands in the blood of a sacrificed bull, and swear an oath to defeat Thebes. Girodet’s strong black outlines and idealized male nudes are characteristic of Neoclassicism’s calculated restraint. Yet the flash of lightning and the warrior’s impassioned expressions intensify the emotional and psychological content of the scene, anticipating the growth of romanticism in European art during the early 1800s.
