The Ashes of Germanicus and the Skin of Painting: Sublimation and Money in Benjamin West's Agrippina

Figures

Figure 1.

Benjamin West, Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, 1768. Oil on canvas, 64H x 94H in. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Gift of Louis M. Rabinowitz.

Few artists were more famous and influential in the later eighteenth century than Benjamin West, an American colonial (born in Pennsylvania) who moved to London in 1763 and became court painter to George III. By the end of West’s 64-year career, however, his critical reputation had entered the deep decline in which it has mostly remained. The judgment of Lord Byron—that West was “Europe’s worst dauber”—still exists. As a result, West’s paintings have received only limited scholarly attention. ¹ Although his pictures have been expertly catalogued and sometimes interpreted, they have generally not received the kind of close analysis scholars bestow upon difficult, complicated works of art. ² The implicit understanding is that West’s paintings, even when they may contain an allegory or two, are fundamentally straightforward. Yet this understanding obscures some of the provocative tensions in West’s art. For example, his paintings from the 1760s embody two entirely contradictory discourses. On the one hand, like any proficient Continental painter at the time, West sought to employ a Neoclassical aesthetics of sublimation. Bodies in his art tend to be divested of blood, bone, and mortality. His job as a painter, he conceived, was to take us from mere matter to the evanescent realms of pure and universal ideas. On the other hand, as part of a robust British mercantile culture, West recognized that no painting was worth attention if it did not have the sheen, the dazzle, the overall material impressiveness, of a valuable artifact. Thus he equally sought to emphasize the materiality of the very paintings in which the body’s materiality would be, as much as possible, transcended. The result, I will argue, is that the mortal body reappears in—indeed as—the material form of the paintings from which it would seem to have been stricken. The West painting I want to explicate in these terms is one of his most famous, the large picture (64H x 94H in.) painted in 1768 called Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus (figure 1).

The first thing to say about Agrippina is that it does not concern death. This is an odd claim to make because the painting’s very subject concerns mortality. At the behest of a patron, Robert Hay Drummond, the Archbishop of York, West shows a scene from Tacitus’s Annals. Germanicus, a popular and successful Roman general, dies suddenly while with his army in Syria; many believe he has been poisoned to death at the command of the Emperor Tiberius, jealous of Germanicus’s fame. Agrippina, Germanicus’s wife, bears her husband’s ashes back to Rome in an urn; when she and her funerary entourage disembark at Brundisium, a throng of wailing mourners meets them. ³ This is the moment West’s painting shows. Agrippina, at the head of the procession, clutches the urn to her body; her children, little Agrippina and Caligula, clutch her skirts to either side; behind them follow six other mourners. Agrippina and her group have just disembarked from the boat at right; they move to the left, about to pass through a group of mourners that is only the nearest such group amid a surrounding scene of grief, curiosity, and resignation that stretches all the way to distant boats and balconies.

Odd, then, amid all the grief—amid all the cowls, urns, and long Lavaterian looks—that death should also be absent. Consider the painting’s treatment of Germanicus himself. Although the picture is about his death, we do not see Germanicus choking on the poison, as we do in Nicolas Poussin’s Death of Germanicus, a painting whose severe classicizing mode West sought to emulate; we do not see Germanicus’s dead body; and we even do not see Germanicus’s ashes themselves, since they...