As such a common, everyday tool, rope seldom features prominently in paintings. In yesterday’s article I showed how it wove a thread through Tintoretto’s series of the Passion in the albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. Here I show individual examples where rope attains more of the prominence it deserves.
In Evelyn De Morgan’s early Aurora Triumphans from about 1876, the goddess of dawn reclines at the lower right, the shackles of the night shown as roses roped together, and extend to braiding in her hair. At the lower left, Night is flying away in her dark robes. Above them, three winged angels resplendent in their golden tunics sound the fanfare bringing day. Aurora is triumphant in dispelling Night.
Ropes are common features of wells, where they’re used to raise and lower the vessel containing water. They thus feature in paintings of the personification of truth, when she emerges from a well, according an old allegory.
By far the best-known painting of this allegory is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Truth Coming out of her Well to Shame Mankind from 1896. Although often held that this refers to the Dreyfus Affair, it here refers to a quotation attributed to Democritus, “Of a truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well” (or, more literally, ‘in an abyss’), and is more probably about photography as an art.
Rope gets more interesting when it’s looped and knotted to form a ladder, as often featured in the famous Balcony Scene in William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.
Richard Dadd’s version, in his watercolour Sketch for the Passions: Love from 1853, shows Romeo at peak ascent and about to kiss Juliet, as her rather ugly nurse behind them looks away anxiously.
Ford Madox Brown’s interpretation of this scene is a vertiginous composition, with the couple alone, squeezed rather incredibly onto a balcony smaller than a single bed. At least its rope ladder looks robust enough for the task.
In about 1806, Francisco Goya painted a series of six works telling the story of a friar attacked by a robber, who turns the tables on his assailant.
In the fifth of these paintings, the friar takes control of the situation, as he fires the robber’s flintlock at its owner. El Maragato, the brigand, really has had a bad day: his horse has run off, he’s lost his gun, been overpowered by a friar, and been shot in the buttocks.
Finally, Friar Pedro Binds El Maragato with a Rope, as reinforcements arrive to arrest the bandit, who is now bleeding from the wound in his buttocks and being trussed up for his arrest.
Ropes have a more sinister use when formed into a noose, as the favoured means of execution in several European countries in the past.
The French writer Victor Hugo was a campaigner against capital punishment, and an amateur artist. John Brown, from 1861, is an engraving after Hugo’s original painting showing the body of the famous American abolitionist, who was tried for treason and murder and hanged in 1859. Hugo had tried to obtain a pardon for him, while the writer was in exile on Guernsey, and this engraving appeared subsequently on a pamphlet reprinting two of Hugo’s open letters about the case.
Paul Signac’s Women by the Well (1892) is a combination of landscape with figures, influenced by Puvis de Chavannes, and set in an imagined location near Saint-Tropez. It shows the rope used to retrieve water from this well.
Finally, there are a few paintings that show rope being used for everyday purposes. The Pile Drivers (1902-3) is one of Maximilien Luce’s explorations of the working life of the common man in Paris. Construction work in the French capital continued to be active in the early twentieth century, and these gangs of labourers are pulling on the rope to drive piles into the foundation of buildings on the banks of the River Seine.