Der Tod des Hyakinthos

Jean Broc showed this at the Paris Salon of 1801, his very first entry, and it made his name. He had trained under Jacques-Louis David but ran with a fringe group of David's pupils who called themselves the Primitifs, or the Bearded Ones, and wanted an art even purer and more archaic than their teacher's. The subject is the Greek myth of Apollo cradling the dying Hyacinthus, a young man Apollo loved, killed by a discus during a game between them. The wind god Zephyrus, jealous because he loved the youth too, had blown the discus off course. Broc leaves the clues at the bottom of the canvas, the discus at the lower left and a few hyacinth flowers at the right, the blooms that spring from the boy's blood in the story. The two nearly weightless figures stand almost alone against an empty sky, in the pale, hard light Broc's circle prized.