Arnould de Vuez (1644-1720) , Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot

Arnould de Vuez (1644-1720) Alexandre le grand cutting the Gordian knot, work produced between 1700/1720

Oil on canvas measuring 102 cm by 77 cm
Old frame (missing) measuring l22 cm by 97 cm

The Gordian knot was a legendary knot which tied the shaft of King Gordias' chariot. It was said that whoever managed to untie it would become, according to a prophecy, the master of Asia, which Alexander the Great accomplished by cutting it with a sword.

I thank François Marandet for his attribution Arnould de Vuez (1644-1720)

Our painting brings together all the stylistic characteristics of the painter. Arnould de Vuez (1644-1720) whose production has just been the subject of a retrospective at the Musée de the Hôtel Sandelin, in Saint-Omer (see F. Marandet, Arnould de Vuez, a painter in French Flanders, cat. exp. Saint-Omer, 2020). First trained in Saint-Omer, his hometown, Arnould de Vuez then went to Paris where he was a student of Claude François known as Brother Luc. During the 1670s, he stayed in Italy, particularly in Rome, where he copied Raphael's work extensively. Returning to Paris, he was received as a history painter at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1681 (Allegory of the Union of France and Bavaria; Louvre). The turning point in his career came in 1693, when he decided to settle in Lille. If he then had to work massively for the parishes and abbeys of this city, these religious orders quickly extended to what was then called “French Flanders”, that is to say Douai, Saint-Omer, Cambrai or even Bailleul. Arnould de Vuez's activity in the secular domain seems to have been more limited, even if he was the author of some allegorical paintings as well as portraits of the counts of Flanders for the former Palais Rihour in Lille. As for subjects of ancient history, they seem to have been extremely rare. However, the painting that we present is original in that it illustrates a feature of the life of Alexander the Great recounted in particular by Plutarch. The scene takes place after the rout of the Persians following the passage of the Granicus. Arriving in the town of Gordyum, he discovers a chariot whose particularity is its connected yoke, the local tradition being that the universe would be promised to the one who manages to untie this inextricable knot. By cutting the knot with his sword, Alexander announced his resolution to conquer Asia (Plutarch, Life of Alexander, XXIV). By a sort of coincidence, this episode in the life of the emperor is very precisely what was given to illustrate, in 1677, during the competition of the Academy of Saint-Luc in Rome in which the artist participated. Any hypothesis of a correspondence with the work produced in the circumstances of the competition is excluded, since the illustration of the subject of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot had to take the form of a drawing and not of a painting (formerly in the 'Academia di San Luca, Rome; disappeared in recent years). Furthermore, the tenebrist style of the work clearly betrays the artist's late period and more precisely the decorative cycle of the conclave room of the Palais Rihour in Lille, undertaken from 1711; the paintings are now lost but the corresponding sketches, kept at the Musée de L'Hospice Comtesse, allow us to reconstruct their appearance.