Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema might be the most ravishing
of all the Victorian academic painters. His luminous
photo-authoritative images of the ancient world are sensually and
historically seductive -- they seem to lay antiquity before us as it
might have appeared in real life were we to be magically transported
back into it.
In truth his visions are romantic, concentrating as
they do on sunny Mediterranean light, color, luxury and spectacle -- but they
convince the eye. His preoccupation with the illusion of spatial depth
draws us imaginatively into the scenes he conjures up, gives us a
visceral sense of participation in them.
The tradition of the Biblical epic in cinema pursued
Alma-Tadema's aims by other means but rarely achieved them with such
magnificent authority. The chariot race in Wyler's Ben-Hur perhaps
comes closest to involving us in a vision of the ancient world that
possesses a comparable enchantment and illusion of truth.
Wyler, and
second-unit director Yakima Canutt, who actually supervised most of the
filming of the chariot race, used the tracking shot in spectacular ways
to draw us into the cinematic universe of the sequence. A camera
moving through real spaces, photographing real people driving real
chariots was a powerful tool, but in a way its very power highlights
the effects Alma-Tadema was able to achieve with just paint and canvas.
He
was fine painter, as well as a fine storyteller -- the study below
gives a good idea of his purely painterly gifts, scarcely inferior to
Degas', for example:
