15 ‘People Like Us’ in the Face of History: Cormon’s Les Vainqueurs de Salamine

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the French academic painter Fernand Cormon's Les Vainqueurs de Salamine (1887). It shows how the Persian Wars chimed at this time with a mood of nationalist revanche and military reform. The War Minister General Boulanger enjoyed huge popularity, confronting Germany and passing measures to render the French army a citizen militia on ancient lines; Themistocles himself in the painting resembles Boulanger on his famous curvetting horse. It is little surprise that Cormon's contemporaries read the work as showing the Greeks as ‘people like us’, in their vulnerable bodily reality, their fervent patriotism, and in their supportive womenfolk. The Persian Wars theme here expresses through history painting the aspirations of ordinary members of a community at a critical turning point of world history.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.