Romance and rebellion: the most expressive and wild-tempered artist of his generation, Girodet was commissioned by some of the biggest names in France, and gave free rein to his imagination in executing an impressive array of brilliant paintings.

• Position: Museums Today

IN LATE 1784, 17-year-old Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy entered Jacques-Louis David's studio, which included the most gifted and ambitious young artists of the time. It ruled the artistic life of Paris. Between 1780-97, Jean-Germain Drouais, Francois-Xavier Fabre, Francois Gerard, Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar, Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Francois Topino-Lebrun, Philippe Auguste Hennequin, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres all were admitted to it.

David's first studio was a real school and the great masterpieces created there were models in which master and students all took part. As a result, distinctions between David's work and that of his favorite students sometimes are difficult to ascertain. These students not only witnessed the development of the works, but sometimes helped in their execution. The face of Brutus in "Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of his Sons" was in all likelihood executed by Girodet, while the nurse's face was by Gerard. Fabre probably painted Plato in the "Death of Socrates." Copies of successful paintings were entrusted to students. Thus, Fabre painted a small version of "Belisarius Recognized by a Soldier" and Girodet a version of the "Oath of the Horatii."

Jean-Baptiste Colbert created the French Academy in Rome in 1666 and, from then on, the Prix de Rome was the cornerstone of any artistic career. The final test consisted of producing a painting of a set format on an assigned subject taken from antiquity or Biblical history. While taking the test, candidates were isolated, closed up in a loge for 72 days. It took Girodet four attempts in successive years, from 1786-89, before he was awarded the prize. In 1786, the academicians were disappointed with the uniformity of the results and refused to name a prize-winner. In 1787, Girodet was disqualified for fraud after being denounced by his fellow student Fabre for having brought some drawings into his loge. In 1788, Girodet won second prize. In 1789, the subject was taken from the Bible: "Joseph Recognized by his Brothers." Girodet finally won, while Charles Meynier took second. The Prix de Rome brought with it a scholarship for four years' study in the French Academy in Rome as a king's scholar in the Palazzo Mancini.

"The Dead Christ Supported by the Virgin," often incorrectly called a Pieta, was Girodet's first painting after winning the Prix de Rome and before his departure for Italy. Its dramatic realism, inspired by Annibale Carracci, is close to David's manner in the painting, "Saint Roch Interceding for the Plague-stricken" (1780). The Virgin's face is a reversed variation of the crying nurse in David's "Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of his Sons," painted in the same year, 1789. However, Girodet subtly and sophisticatedly alters the model, which was to become a hallmark of his style. The chiaroscuro effects, grotto, solitude of the figures isolated in their inner grief, and early morning light shining on a cross, "almost invisible at the grotto's entrance, all create new perspectives that Girodet was to exploit in future work. The painting was commissioned by Comte Antoine-Francois de Molleville, Louis XVI's last Minister of the Marine, for the chapel of Our Lady of the Dying of the church Saint-Victor in Montesquieu-Volvestre, the stronghold of the Bertrand de Molleville family.

Painted in Rome in 1791 as an envoi, the Academy's obligatory tests, "The Sleep of Endymion" is more than a simple demonstration of technical mastery; it is a break from David's aesthetic. In this representation of Diana's loves, the goddess is represented as a shaft of light, pure immateriality spreading over the naked body of the young shepherd. By doing away with the female element of the story, the meaning of the myth changes and is crystallized in its most intimate moment--the erotic solitude of Endymion, offered without reserve to his unearthly visitor. The picture becomes both a revelation of, and estrangement from, the other. Sleep, in its suppression of will, objectifies the beloved to near lifelessness. Girodet shifts the myth and, in particular, the painting into the realm of literature, whose concerns it shares: the subjective replaces the political; reason gives way to the supernatural; and poetry stands in for history. Through its aesthetics, the picture can be considered the first painting of the 19th century or the last of the 18th devoted to the loves of the gods.

Girodet had arrived at the French Academy in Rome on May 30, 1790. His first composition, the "Death of Pyrrhus," was to be an exemplum virtutis (a depiction of fortitude), which was uncommon in his work. The unfaltering gaze of Pyrrhus forces his murderer Zopyrus to shield his own eyes as he...