Lot 13: LEO REIFFENSTEIN

LEO REIFFENSTEIN AUSTRIAN 1856-DIED BEFORE 1934 EIN GASTMAHL DES HELIOGABAL (THE ROSES OF HELIOGABALUS) signed and dated Leo Reiffenstein / 1891 lower right oil on canvas 400 by 296cm., 157½ by 116½in.

Vienna, Künstlerhaus Wien, Wiener Jahresausstellung, 1892
Salzburg, Mirabellschloss (on extended loan from 1951)
Salzburg, Kongresshaus (on extended loan)
Salzburg, Museum Carolino Augusteum (on extended loan)

Friedrich von Bötticher, Malerwerke des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Dresden, 1901, vol. 2, p. 375, no. 10, listed

Studio of the artist (in the Mirabellschloss, Salzburg); thence by descent to the present owner

This monumental composition, painted in 1891 in a virtuoso display of technical ability by the Austrian artist Leo Reiffenstein and arguably his masterpiece, takes as its theme what appears initially to be a joyful bacchanal under the rule of the Roman emperor Elagabalus (titled Marcus Aurelius Antoninus as emperor, 218 to 222 AD), or Heliogabalus as he named himself.

Elagabalus was murdered by the Praetorian Guard in 222 AD, the very men who served as the emperor's bodyguard. Following Elagabalus's death, a propaganda campaign was instituted against him by his own aunt, Julia Avitus Mamaea, whose son Alexander became his successor. Many spurious stories circulated about Elagabalus's life and character, and his narcissistic and decadent eccentricities were almost certainly greatly exaggerated. The source of Reiffenstein's chef d'œuvre is the most famous of these stories: that Elagabalus, for his own and his companions' amusement, had drowned his assembled guests in a torrent of petals and flowers that fell from a secret trapdoor above their heads.

Placed in the background beneath the arch on the left of the composition, a carved stone bust of an emperor looks impassively upon the unfolding drama and one can assume that this is Reiffenstein's reference to Elagabalus himself. A twisting cascade of roses falls from a point above the picture plane down upon the semi-clad men and women much as the rays of the sun to which Elagabalus' other name, Heliogabalus, refers – Heliogabalus was the Syrian sun god that Elagabalus had tried unsuccessfully to introduce into Rome as the supreme deity. The apparently rapt gaze of the uppermost pair of female figures seems to suggest that the source of the flowers is a superhuman one, although it was altogether more earthly and corrupt: the Emperor's own cunning and degeneracy.

According to Edward Gibbon, the great chronicler of Rome: 'Corrupted by his youth, his country, and his fortune, [Elagabalus] abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments. The inflammatory powers of art were summoned to his aid: the confused multitude of women, of wines, and of dishes, and the studied variety of attitude and sauces, served to revive his languid appetites. [...] The master of the Roman world affected to copy the dress and manners of the female sex' (E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. VI, chapter XL). Because of these stories of Elagabalus' immoral yet aesthetic ways, scenes from his life became popular motifs in nineteenth-century art, particularly in the works of those artists of the Decadent movement. The myth captured so powerfully by Reiffenstein in the present work was perhaps most famously immortalized by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema in his The Roses of Heliogabalus of 1888 (fig. 1), but Reiffenstein's version of the scene is surely of equal power, with its compositional drama, rich attention to detail and the volumetric depths that he creates.

Fig. 1, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888, Private Collection