Saint John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia

Painted in 1893 and held at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, this large canvas depicts the confrontation between John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, and the Empress Eudoxia — a conflict that led to Chrysostom's exile and death and became one of the paradigmatic cases of ecclesiastical courage in the face of imperial power. Chrysostom's denunciations of Eudoxia's luxury and moral corruption, which she took as public attacks on herself personally, resulted in his deposition and exile in 404. Laurens, who typically depicted the Church as the oppressive institution in his historical paintings, here reversed the dynamic: Chrysostom stands as the voice of moral authority against imperial vanity, offering the rare case in Laurens's oeuvre of a churchman as hero rather than villain. The Toulouse Augustins location has particular resonance given the Augustinians' historical role in the medieval Church. By 1893 Laurens had achieved the compositional and psychological assurance to render complex face-offs between institutional powers with great subtlety.

The confrontational structure of two powerfully costumed figures in a richly decorated Byzantine setting allowed Laurens to deploy his full range of archival costume research. The contrast between Chrysostom's austere episcopal vestments and Eudoxia's imperial splendor is visually immediate, encoding the moral argument of the subject in purely pictorial terms. Interior light is handled to create drama without melodrama, consistent with Laurens's mature practice.