Iconography of Pillage and Captivity in R. Monvoisin: Andromache as an Intertext

Abstract

Two paintings devoted to two moments in the life of a young woman in Chile, her abduction after a dramatic shipwreck and her subsequent captivity, make the French painter ­Raymond Auguste Monvoisin a graphic chronicler of the tensions existing in the country between whites and Mapuches in the mid-19th century. The interpretations of the two paintings focus not only on the national factor (the underlying confrontation), but also on other thematic and pictorial keys, such as the sexuality inherent in the abduction of women and the aesthetic treatment of the figure of the woman by the Orientalist movement. Furthermore, comparative interpretations emphasise the parallels that can be drawn between the protagonist and Helen of Troy and even ­Medea, in connection with another concomitant painting dedicated to the indigenous hero Caupolicán, i.e. in a fundamentally warlike context. However, Monvoisin’s treatment of the condition of women in war is actually shifted to more intimate aspects related to their children, whose intertextual reference point is the figure of Andromache, an important figure in French culture from the work of the playwright Jean Racine.