22wife-of-candaules-22-14-08.jpg Drawing by John Gorman

The wife of Candaules, viewed from the back, displays her voluptuous forms, her head down, in front of the door behind which Gyges was hidden when the king ordered to his bodyguard to share with him the incredible beauty of his wife. It seems that the artist has chosen here to depict the scene following this event, and that Candaules has already been murdered by Gyges, the queen desiring a revenge on her husband. It is indeed a dramatic and meditative figure that the artist draws here, a silhouette which the contour is perfectly perceptible, but which the head is concealed, and which the body is marked by the omnipresence of red, as if the king’s blood was covering it. Line disappears under the hatches which invade the entire space, some trails of black appearing here and there, the more impressive one being a strange conical thing which seems to impale the queen. Herodotus, one of the authors who related this story, canceled the name – Nyssia – of the wife of Candaules, because his friend Pesirrhous, who loved a ‘’Nyssia” from Halicarnassus, committed suicide, as he was desperate not to be able to touch her. In this drawing, the artist continues his series of women viewed from the back, though here nobody is responsible of her fate but herself. The conical thing which is empaling her is perhaps, so, an image of the remorse she is filled up with. Or, perhaps, the humiliation she initially endured is intended to reproduce, as if her crime had led her to the Dantean Ninth Circle of inferno, the one where Vulcan is forging the indomitable iron which constitutes the conical object? No past artist, painting this theme, has ever convoked these several layers of meanings, all fusing in a single silhouette of woman, seized in her atrocious loneliness and guilt. One can think of other voluptuous women who has been painted throughout the centuries, mentioning here Rubens, Delacroix and Picasso, as Baroque, Romanticism and its sublime, and Cubism, are both present. Anyway, it is a new kind of drawing one can discover here, the background and the figure intimately linked, and line being only perceptible as the viewer restitutes it mentally, in front of its erasure for the benefit of a coloured surface.