The Rape of the Sabine women is an event in early Roman history that has been preserved as a central motif in many works of art throughout the ages. Siemiradzki’s well-executed drawing conveys an intense, dramatic and emotional atmosphere; a representation that the scene rightly deserves.
The Rape - in this context, rape means abduction, rather than the modern meaning of sexual violation - is supposed to have occurred in the early history of the Rome not long after its foundation by Romulus. Romulus and his troops sought to find wives in order to start new families and ensure the future growth of the population. They looked to the Sabines or Sabini, an Italic tribe who lived in the central Apennine region of ancient Italy, but negotiations proved futile as the Sabines feared the emergence of a rival society and refused to allow their women to marry the Romans. Consequently Romulus and his followers planned to abduct the Sabine women. He arranged a magnificent festival to which he invited the inhabitants of neighbouring settlements, including the Sabines, with their wives and children. During the festivities, at a given signal, the young men of Rome broke into the crowd and, choosing only the unmarried maidens of the Sabines, carried them off. According to Plutarch (‘Lives II, 14 and 19) ‘they did not commit this rape wantonly, but with a design purely of forming alliance with their neigbours by the greatest and surest bond.’
The Rape of the Sabines has enjoyed an illustrious reputation amongst many of art’s great masters. Siemiradzki’s vivid and dramatic drawing departs from the Renaissance depiction of the scene, the poetical composition and the accompanying musicians and acrobats have since disappeared. His depiction very much follows in the style of Poussin and the Baroque era; throngs of armoured soldiers, brandishing swords and spears, gather protesting, tearful women into their arms. In the background we see the faint figure of Romulus, arms and legs outstretched his sword aloft as he directs this melee between man and woman. The Rape of the Sabine Women has certain affinities with Poussin’s drawings of the theme in that they both display a demonic intensity, an anarchy which heightens the atmosphere of the scene.
Siemiradzki was a painter of grandiose history pictures. He was born to a Polish szlachta family of a military physician in the village of Novobelgorod (now Pechenegi) near Kharkov, Ukraine. Whilst studying at Kharkov Gymnasium he learned painting under a scion of Karl Bryullov, D. I. Besperchy. He entered the Physics-Mathematics School of Kharkov University but continued his painting lessons from Bespechy. After graduating from the University with the degree of Kandidat he abandoned his scientific career and moved to St. Petersburg to study painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts between the years 1864 and 1870. Upon graduating, he was awarded a gold medal. From 1870, he studied under Karl von Piloty in Munich on a grant from the Academy. In 1871 he moved to Rome, while spending summers at his estate in Strzalkowo, near Czestochowa in Poland.
In 1873 he received the title of an Academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts for his painting Christ and a Sinner on a verse by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy. Three years later, Siemiradzki worked on frescoes for the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (Moscow). In 1879 he offered one of his best-known works, the enormous Pochodnie Nerona (Nero’s Torches), painted in 1876, to the fledgeling Polish National Museum in Kraków. In 1893 he worked on two large paintings for the State Historical Museum in Moscow. He died in Strzalkowo in 1902. Originally he was buried in Warsaw but later his remains were moved to the national Pantheone on Skalka in Kraków.
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