Angelica Kauffman, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures

0:06Dr. Beth Harris: We're in the galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts looking at one of their most important paintings. This is such a fascinating work from the end of the 18th century and by a woman artist, Angelica Kauffman, who was a history painter, something very rare for women artists. Dr.%20Steven Zucker: And she was phenomenally successful as a professional artist, which required her to navigate a very complicated political and social landscape. But let's begin with the painting. Dr.%20Beth

0:36Harris: So we have a story of an ancient Roman woman. Her name is Cornelia. She's standing here at the center on her left holding the hand of her daughter, Sempronia, and with her right hand gesturing to her two sons. The older one, Tiberius, was known to be mild-mannered in the sources from ancient Rome, and the younger brother more impetuous. Both brothers will grow up to be reformers in the politics of the ancient Roman Republic. To her left sits a woman who's dressed in very rich red clothing and wearing jewelry, who seems to be showing Cornelia her jewels. And the friend asks Cornelia, where are your jewels?

1:17And Cornelia points to her sons and says, "These are my jewels." So Cornelia has the right values that rearing her children, educating her children, is so much more a value than the jewelry displayed by her friend. Dr. Steven Zucker: The little Sempronia seems so enchanted by the jewels.

1:38She's looking down and taking hold of the pearls and seems completely enchanted. Dr. Beth Harris: And I think there's another juxtaposition between the jewelry box and the sewing box. So we have these humble domestic tools compared with these ostentatious jewels. Dr.%20Steven Zucker: Cornelia is painted in such opposition to the woman who is seated. First of all, she's upright, almost like the pillars behind her. She's dressed in white. But look at the neckline. It's straight as opposed to the curve of the woman who's seated beside her. Cornelia is represented as an image of rectitude, a moral center in this painting. There's even a distinction between the activity of the seated woman that is in contrast to the

2:20sense of quiet stillness that Cornelia represents. Dr.%20Beth Harris: The uprightness of her body, the way the drapery falls almost like the fluting of a column, projects her confidence about her role as a mother. And in fact, we know that in the ancient Roman Republic, a statue was erected in honor of Cornelia and her dedication to the education of her children. Dr.%20Steven Zucker: So Cornelia was an important symbol in ancient Rome and then again in Europe in the 18th century.

2:54Dr.%20Beth Harris: Artists, writers, Enlightenment thinkers looked back to the ancient Roman Republic as this period of civic virtue, raising ideas of what is a virtuous kind of government. And here we are in between the American Revolution and the French Revolution, which will ultimately bring about a republic in France. Dr.%20Steven Zucker: The United States was founded on the Roman ideal of a republic.

3:20And so these are ideas that are being discussed in Britain. They're ideas that are being discussed on the continent. And at this moment, they're actually being enacted in the young United States. And so, this painting would have been an opportunity to discuss these issues, to discuss the kind of moral foundation upon which a state should be founded. The figures are set in this grand architectural space. And there's a lovely way that the angle formed by the architecture creates a separation between the female figures on the right and the male figures on the left. Dr.%20Beth Harris: And Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau held that men were able to make the kinds of sacrifices that were necessary for the good of the republic, but that women were incapable

4:03of those kinds of sacrifices because for them, family came first. But what the story of Cornelia so brilliantly did was to show that women could serve the needs of the state by being exemplary mothers. The really fascinating thing is that although these examples of virtue drawn from ancient history did serve the needs of the revolutionaries, it also could serve the needs of Angelica's varied patrons from the English businessman, George Bowles, who commissioned this painting, to the Queen of Naples. And she painted a version of Cornelia for the Queen of Naples.

4:45So these examples of virtuous behavior could really be adopted by anyone along the political spectrum.