Lawrence Alma-Tadema – Love’s Jewelled Fetter (c.1894)

Description

This work of art has been digitally enhanced without erasing signs of ageing for the sake of authenticity. Digital paintings are very popular right now as an affordable and stylish way to decorate and personalize your home and office.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema – Love’s Jewelled Fetter (c.1894)

“Love’s Jewelled Fetter is distinguished by the gem-hued palette of a riotous azalea bush dominating the foreground and a brilliant azure sea extending towards the horizon. Two beautiful patrician women, arranged on a bronze settee upon a marble terrace under floral garlands, overlook a mountainous coast studded with Roman villas. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema surely sought to convey a calm Bay of Naples, the area described in ancient sources as a popular resort during the early Empire, where the elite escaped from Rome to their villa maritime (luxury villas) nestled among the region’s cliffs.
However, the present work and similar compositions of the period, like Coign of Vantage and Fortunes Favorites, were not directly informed by the artist’s travel to Italy, but by the large Bavarian Lake, Steinberger See, where his friend Georg Ebers, the German Egyptologist, had a villa. The present work’s subject is inspired by the novella, The Amazon (1880) by Alma-Tadema’s friend, the historian Carel Vosmaer, in which the main character is a Dutch artist named Siwart Aisma, based on Alma-Tadema himself.

When Vosmaer accompanied Alma-Tadema on one of his many trips to Italy he remarked on the painter’s “astonishing accuracy, tirelessness and fire: he espied the door grooves, the bolt holes, everything, everything”. Not surprisingly, the plot follows the Dutch antiquary’s obsessive study of Roman sculpture collections, as well as his romance with the poet, Marciana van Buren. Alma-Tadema’s scene illustrates a moment where Marciana, shown in violet robes, extends her hand to a companion to examine her ring (the fetter), a token of her and Aisma’s love. The statue at the upper right of the composition, Spinario, alludes to Aisma’s interests in classical sculpture while aligning with Alma-Tadema’s own (he owned a photograph of the sculpture, and it appears in multiple compositions).

The scene seems to occur under the watchful eye of Aisma, who looms from the portrait hanging above them, inscribed Amo Te Ama Me (I love you, so love me too). The scale and format of the portrait suggests that it is based on a “Mummy portrait,” the naturalistic likeness affixed to Egyptian mummies during the Coptic period, dating from the Roman occupation of Egypt. Ebers was particularly interested in “mummy portraits,” and Alma-Tadema’s inclusion here casts a link across time and space, and further evidence of the artist’s voracious curiosity for the ancient world.”

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