Die Seele zerreißt die Bande, die sie an die Erde fesseln

Prud'hon began this in 1821 and was still working on it when he died in February 1823, so the picture now in the Louvre is nearly the last thing off his easel. It is an allegory of dying. A female figure, the soul, tears free of the red drapery that had bound her to the earth and lifts toward a shaft of light from above, while a serpent coils in the dark ground she is leaving. Prud'hon built her out of an old motif, the winged figure of Victory, and simply took the laurel wreaths out of her hands, so that triumph reads instead as the flight of a soul. The wave-foam and gloom below stay deliberately rough, and the figure rises out of shadow the way he loved to paint.