Saint Joan of arts

Verdi and Tchaikovsky composed operas about her. Mark Twain wrote her biography. Sarah Bernhardt adopted her persona on stage. Ingrid Bergman and Jean Seberg played her in movies. French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet fashioned a massive bronze equestrian statue of her for a central square in Paris. Japanese illustrator Yoshikazu Yasuhiko created a series of comic books about her.

And now the municipal art museum in this city where she was burned alive 572 years ago is presenting an exhibition about her: “Joan of Arc: History Paintings.” Gallery after gallery of artworks glorify the French heroine as a peasant, warrior, prisoner and martyr. This is just the latest entry in a centuries-long parade that will have new U.S. entries in the next few years.

The illiterate 17-year-old farm girl credited with leading the French to vanquish the English in the Hundred Years War has long since achieved iconic status. Every French schoolchild knows that she followed what she perceived as divine voices telling her that God had chosen Charles, the ineffectual dauphin, to rule France. As the story goes, she gained the dauphin’s confidence, rallied his dispirited army and effectively put Charles VII on the throne -- only to be tried for heresy and burned at the stake by the English-controlled French church.

All this transpired in two years flat. It took much longer for Joan of Arc to be vindicated by the French legal system and the Catholic Church. Twenty-five years passed before her 1431 trial was nullified, in 1456; nearly five centuries transpired before she was canonized as a saint, in 1920. But the length of the process only emphasizes her staying power.

“In the long history of France, she represents the image of the savior,” says Jean-David Levitte, French ambassador to the United States. Unlike other French national heroes whose flaws are acknowledged along with their virtues, Joan of Arc is perceived as so “pure, decent and generous” that she is beyond criticism, he says.

Far beyond France’s borders, “she has an almost unique standing,” British feminist author Marina Warner writes in her 1981 book “Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism.” “She is a universal figure who is female, but is neither a queen, nor a courtesan, nor a beauty, nor a mother, nor -- until the extremely recent date of 1920 when she was canonized -- a saint. She eludes the categories in which women have normally achieved a higher status that gives them immortality, and yet she gained it.” Evidence of that immortality shows up at the Grand Hotel Jeanne d’Arc in Paris and on the labels of Joan of Arc canned beans, produced by B&G; Foods Inc. in New Jersey. Her image has been appropriated by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front in France and by an American anti-smoking campaign. The title of a new collection of essays, edited by Dominique Goy-Blanquet, says it all: “A Saint for All Reasons.”

Still, the volume of artistic juice squeezed out of Joan of Arc seems to exceed her stature. It’s difficult to think of another historic figure -- apart from Jesus -- who has been such a persistent subject in the arts.

No one has compiled a complete record of all the creative works she has inspired, but the Joan of Arc Center in Orleans, the primary repository of information about her, has a collection of 160,000 documents and an additional 4,500 books, brochures and illustrations. Other sources list some 55 films and 500 plays and musical pieces. Scholars estimate that 50 books on Joan are published every year. On television, CBS presented a Joan of Arc miniseries in 1999, and it will release “Joan of Arcadia,” a new drama series about a contemporary teenage girl who converses with God, this fall.

Paintings, sculptures and other visual artworks are also plentiful, probably numbering in the tens of thousands. Laurent Salome, director of the museum in Rouen, rounded up 88 paintings by 49 artists for the current show, which deals only with the century leading to Joan of Arc’s canonization and doesn’t even cover that period completely. A broader, more literary exhibition, “Joan of Arc: Images of a Legend,” presented at Rouen’s National Library in 1979, offered 500 images.

A woman of mystery

Much of her appeal can be attributed to the fact she is not only a real historical figure but also the star of “a famous story in the timeless dimension of myth,” Warner writes. Endlessly adaptable, her image continues to be shaped by politics, social ideals and fashion.

Transcripts of Joan of Arc’s trials have provided a factual springboard for legions of scholars and creative writers. But no one knows what she looked like, and that has left visual artists free to interpret her as everything from a barefoot mystic to a monumental Amazon to a female Christ. And even though it is known that she cut her hair short before doing battle, she is often portrayed with long, flowing locks.

“The haircut was just too much until the age of Coco Chanel,” says Jeremy Duquesnay Adams, a medieval history professor at Southern Methodist University who has done the English translation and revision of a popular French book, “Joan of Arc: Her Story” by Regine Pernoud and Marie-Veronique Clin. “I love the great hair cascading in ringlets down the back of her armor,” Adams says of the massive bronze equestrian statue in the Place du Martroi in Orleans.

Long hair is essential to the image of “female, nubile virtue,” Warner says in a telephone conversation from London. “Often even at the stake, where they would have pretty much shaved her head, she’s got these long, flowing, virgin-martyr locks.”

The earliest existing image of Joan of Arc is a tiny sketch made in 1429 by Clement de Fauquemberghe, clerk of the Paris Parliament, in the margin of a page recording her first victory, at Orleans. The clerk, who hadn’t seen Joan, portrayed her as a shapely young woman in a scoop-neck dress, grasping a sword in one hand and a flag in the other. More accurate depictions were probably made by artists who painted her portrait and cast medals bearing her likeness during her lifetime, but those works have not survived.

A painting commissioned in 1557 for the Orleans City Hall became Joan of Arc’s more or less official portrait. If she weren’t brandishing a sword and wearing a plumed headdress, a symbol of military victory, she could be mistaken for any well-to-do matron -- “a good bourgeoise,” as Adams puts it. The image stuck for more than 300 years, although some artists who painted her during the French Revolution gave her a Phrygian cap, the close-fitting hat worn by revolutionaries.

But in the 19th century -- as France moved from Napoleon’s rule to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy to a republican form of government -- the national heroine with God on her side became a political symbol, a cult figure and a hot topic for French artists. In the 1870s, after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Joan-themed artworks salved the nation’s wounded pride and represented the spirit of revenge. Bronze sculptures of Joan as a stalwart warrior and compassionate victor popped up in public squares all over the country.

Painters took greater liberties in shaping her image to fit their points of view. In 1854, long before Joan of Arc officially became a saint, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted her wearing armor and a halo at the coronation of Charles VII.

That painting was deemed too fragile to travel from its home at the Louvre to Rouen, but the exhibition offers dozens of other interpretations. In a work by Leon Benouville, she is a sturdy, wide-eyed peasant, transfixed by the voices of angels who swoop down from the sky to give her the sword and the flag she would carry into battle. In another dramatic painting, by Paul Delaroche, Joan is an ailing but perfectly poised little prisoner who glows so brightly in a pitch-black room that she seems to overpower her snarling interrogator, the Cardinal of Winchester.

These two paintings and many others in the show made their debuts at Parisian Salons, the large annual exhibitions where artists strutted their stuff. Joan of Arc also became a favorite subject for public commissions. As the exhibition indicates, Jules-Eugene Lenepveu painted scenes from her life for the Pantheon in Paris and Eugene Grasset designed Joan of Arc stained-glass windows for churches in Orleans and Paris.

Despite her stature as a French heroine who defied the English, she also captured the imagination of English artists, particularly pre-Raphaelites who favored medieval subject matter. The prime example at Rouen is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting “Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance.” It’s a close-up of an impassioned, monumentally scaled woman who wears a brocade robe, presses her weapon to her lips and gazes heavenward -- at the feet of a gilded crucifix.

Throughout the show, Joan’s image ranges from a romantic heroine whose billowing skirts conceal her armor, to a pert but curvaceous Art Deco-style poster girl. Ernest Guerin portrayed her as a demure damsel in a cycle of faux-Gothic illuminations. Alphonse Mucha gave her an Art Nouveau treatment, as a semihysterical muse in a flowery landscape. In the most modern works, by Maurice Denis, she has a trim figure and short hair.

“One of the definite trends is that she gets younger and thinner,” Warner says. “In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1916 film, she was played by Geraldine Farrar, who was a big opera diva at the time. She was monumental, and nobody found that the least bit odd. People expected a warrior-like Joan in big dimensions. But she becomes much more boyish.” By 1957, when Otto Preminger released his film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan,” the star, Jean Seberg, was a petite soldier with a pixie cut.

But no matter how her image may change, Joan of Arc survives both as a national symbol and an artistic muse.

To rank-and-file French people, she is not the only leader credited with saving the nation from disaster, but she is “the greatest and most extraordinary,” says Philippe Rochefort, a Parisian bank executive who maintains an extensive Franco-American Web site with his wife, American writer Harriet Welty Rochefort.

To this day, if one Frenchman confides to another, “I don’t like the English,” the automatic response is likely to be “because they burned Joan of Arc,” Philippe Rochefort says. Far-right extremists have tried to make her stand for the expulsion of all foreigners, but she is such a strong patriotic symbol that she isn’t likely to suffer permanent damage, he says.

In America, interest in Joan of Arc thrives in university history departments and on Web sites maintained by devotees. And even in the visual arts, where Joan of Arc is primarily a 19th century phenomenon, the subject is far from dead.

Museums -- from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- have artworks depicting Joan of Arc in their permanent collections. And two American exhibitions are in the works.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., plans to present “Boutet de Monvel’s Joan of Art: Cult and Context” in early 2005. The show will feature the gallery’s six oil and gold leaf panels by the French artist and his book of 40 color lithographs that inspired the painted panels.

The other show, still in early talking stages, was inspired by the exhibition in Rouen. Edmund P. Pillsbury, who recently took charge of the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, went to Rouen at the suggestion of art historian Richard R. Brettell and came back with an idea for his own project.

“I think it’s a fabulous subject,” Pillsbury says. He initially thought of presenting an edited version of the current show at the Meadows Museum, but there wasn’t time to develop the idea and extend the loans of artworks before the exhibition closed in Rouen.

Now he hopes to organize a different exhibition “with the right group of scholars and the addition of important holdings in American collections,” he says.

“I was intrigued by the exhibition and thought it was an important contribution, not only to the appreciation of taste but to something that was very important in its time but has been forgotten,” he says.

“To say that Joan of Arc could be overlooked seems like a non sequitur, but I think she has been seen as a historical figure, when in fact she is a paradigm of many worthy things that are still relevant today.”