Iphigenie

Feuerbach's 1862 'Iphigenie' at the Hessian State Museum Darmstadt is the first of several versions he painted of this subject — the Greek heroine exiled to Tauris, priestess of Artemis among a barbarian people, longing to return to her Greek homeland. He painted at least two major versions, including the celebrated 1871 canvas now in Stuttgart, and returned to the subject repeatedly because it perfectly embodied his own experience as a German artist living in voluntary exile in Italy, longing for a recognition his homeland refused him. The Iphigenie subject comes from Goethe's drama 'Iphigenie auf Tauris' (1787), in which the heroine's refusal to practice human sacrifice humanizes the Tauric barbarians — a work central to German classicist culture. Feuerbach's interpretation foregrounds the figure's solitary melancholy against the sea — the sea that separates her from Greece and from home.

The Iphigenie compositions distill Feuerbach's mature style: a single monumental female figure in profile or three-quarter view, against a simplified landscape of sky and sea. The palette is warm and harmonious — Venetian in its amber and gold tones — with the figure's drapery creating controlled.