Death and Roses

I was keen to see the fifty paintings borrowed from Juan Antonio Prez
Simns collection for the exhibition, A Victorian Obsession, at Leighton
House in Holland Park. In particular, I wanted to see the star attraction of the
show, Lawrence Alma-Tademas The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888).

I have long been aware of the work of Alma-Tadema but until now I have
rarely seen his work in the flesh. This particular masterpiece has not been
seen in London since 1913. Without doubt the picture is the jewel in the
exhibitions rather wonky old crown. There are some competent paintings in
the exhibition by such artist as Millais, Rossetti, Waterhouse and Burne-Jones.
And there are also some under-par pictures as well. The Alma-Tadema
painting was given a room upstairs all to itself and it was flanked along its
adjacent walls by photographs of Greek and Roman furniture and
accoutrements, grapes and flowers, which the artist had commissioned and
to which he referred as a handy reference for the work. Unfortunately, the
management of the house had seen fit to install a scent-blowing machine in
the room which pumped out a cloying miasma of rose perfume; this
permeated the space where Heliogabalus reclined, and it also crept down the
stairs and drifted throughout the rest of the rooms so that the building
smelled like a soap shop. It was a tacky gesture, as if the curators felt that
the painting wasnt spectacular enough on its own to hold the attention of
the contemporary viewer without this sort of fun-fair gimmickry. It was all so
unnecessary. I stood before the painting and was struck by the sheer
brilliance of the technique. I felt like I had been hit in the chest, so amazed
was I at the painters skills. It is a sumptuous, vulgar, quite wonderful
painting. Unlike a lot of the other works, displayed elsewhere in the house,
the picture has not been over-varnished, and so the brushwork and the paint-
marks can be fully enjoyed, especially if one stands inches from the surface
to scrutinise the various techniques employed, as I was able to do in
between waves of mainly old age pensioners who were shuffling about the
gallery rooms in a daze, wearing gallery head-sets.

The subject of the work is a grotesque event staged by the Roman emperor
Elagabalus, also known as Heliogabalus (203 - 222 AD) who came to power
at barely fourteen years old and whose reign was marked by sexual scandal
and religious controversy. He was married five times and he also lavished
gifts on his male lovers. He prostituted himself in brothels and taverns and
even in the imperial palace, where, most intrepidly, he had a special room
set aside for the purpose. The painting depicts the moment when the
emperor had his assembled guests covered in flowers - reportedly violets,
mainly - which were dropped onto them from a false ceiling above the
banquet table. The flowers were so abundant that some of the guests
suffocated to death beneath them. In the painting, Alma-Tadema has
provided far fewer flowers than were used in the actual event and these
have done little more than rouse the sleepy revelers out of their drunken
slumber. The artist has also taken liberties with another detail, substituting
rose petals which he imported from the South of France for violets.

Entering the room and coming face to face with the painting was a
breathtaking moment, and I dont use the term lightly: I actually heard my
breath as it left me in a sigh. The picture shimmers with a lurid, hallucinatory
clarity, as if conjured in a fever-dream. Every aspect of it is set in crystal-
perfection. No object is afforded greater importance than another and so all
glows with a burning hyper-reality. The handling of the flesh of the doomed
guests is simply astounding - some of the best painting of real flesh that I
have ever seen. But, then, all textures within the painting have been
accorded the same degree of loving attention.

And yet, despite the artist's preoccupation with the literal exactitude of every
surface detail in the painting, he never once lapses into the kind of sterile,
dead, 'recording' that afflicts so many of the current crop of contemporary
painters whose goal is to mimic their photographic source material as closely
as possible, and who more often than not end up suffocating all life out of
their endeavours. To the contrary, the Alma-Tadema remains a lusciously
painted object, full of nuance and subtlety, replete with a variety of paint
thicknesses all over its glorious surface, which have been applied by a genius
technician who understood paint extraordinarily well.

Wherever ones eye alights on the picture it is swept around by the ring of
heads of the guests, half buried in the petals, and we end up staring into the
face of the decadent young emperor. He reclines on his belly in the top-third
of the picture, wearing a golden wrap and holding a golden goblet near his
lips. He is surveying the scene below, as his guests are suddenly roused from
their intoxicated slumbers by the first fall of the deadly petals. Immediately
beside him sits his grandmother, who was instrumental in securing his
power. His mother is at the other end of the royal assembly, next to and
intersected by a pillar. She is also lying on her belly: she rather resembles a
late-Victorian sales assistant more than a Roman matron.

The petals have been painted exquisitely. All of them have been given full,
gorgeous attention: none of them has been fudged or approximated. We are
aware of their drift and their delicacy, but we are also aware of their
potential weight, en masse. And in one place we can even see the beautiful
way that the artist has managed to cast their shadow on the couch in front of
the face of the second man along: it is a thrilling and portentous moment.
The doomed figures do not know the danger they are in. They have been
awoken by a seemingly lovely moment, a delicate gesture. The viewer, too,
is at first transported by this rapturous, dream-like scenario which seems so
romantic. But behind the ethereal delicacy is death. We, the viewers, are
implicated in the fate of these unfortunates as we witness their drowsy
awakening: at precisely what point will their pleasure become pain; at what
point will the breathtaking beauty become literally breath-taking?

Two of the male figures in this painting transfixed me. The first is seen in the
lower-right quadrant of the picture. For me, he is one of the most beautiful,
erotic males ever depicted in Victorian painting. He is lying down; his right
hand grips the banquette; his left hand is raised, palm up, as the first
fluttering petals reach him. Behind his head is a cluster of pomegranates -
that Victorian signifier of foreign exoticism and decadence. Consider the
really astonishing painting of this man: the delicate five-oclock-shadow that
blooms across his cheek; the soft veins that one can almost feel beating
beneath his forearms and hand; the gorgeous painting of the golden ring that
he wears on his right thumb.

The second man is no less astonishingly painted. He sits in the far right of
the picture, looking up at the emperor with some suspicion, as if he may be
half aware of the oncoming tragedy. His red hair and beard suggest that he is
a foreign visitor to the court. I stood a foot away from the surface of the
picture in order to soak up the exquisite beauty of these painted men. I hold
it to be the mark of a great artist if they can make me believe I could fall in
love with one of their painted figures. The fact that I did so with not one but
two men in this painting convinced me of Alma-Tademas brilliance. I sat on
the tube train home, with my clothing reeking of soap-shop roses and drifted
into reveries of the great Victorian dual-preoccupation of Death and Sex.