JOYEUX ANNIVERSAIRE, ANTOINE ! Some arts and one question

[fatimahcrossin.livejournal.com]

Today is the 241th anniversary since Antoine Saint-Just's birth. All the best to my most beloved Citoyen :x !
It's a perfect day to dedicate to him some drawings. I made them with traditional items (pencils, ink, felter-pens) so they are full of mistakes. But I am lazy and I don't have the suppport of an appropriate pc software, so I leave them just as they are. Here the portraits:

Louis Antoine Saint-Just after me + Prudhon

This is my favourite Antoine's portrait ever.
I am sorry because the sentence at the bottom is written badly. But I decided to leave it as it was. Too lazy to change it. 





Louis Antoine Saint-Just after me & Greuze 1

My second favourite Antoine's portrait ever.
Someone say it's not him in the picture (it would be Talleyrand instead) but I don't believe it. The features of this cinically smart, cooly outrageous feline predator are typically Antoine's. More, I love it to be him 


Ps.: I added those golden earrings and stole over the verses on a yellow background from Rimbaud - thank you, Arthur !






Louis Antoine Saint-Just after me & Greuze 2

Other (and beloved) portrait. I have seen it only on a b/w version so the colour (included that kitsch one of his clothes) is mine too.

(If you want to see the portraits in an enlarged and higher definition version then check my DeviantArt: http://www.fatimahcrossin.deviantart.com)



Saint-Just's portraits raise a question - the well-known one of his physical appearence: how did he really look like ?
We know many portraits, prints, engravings etc. all featuring him but each one of them shows a man who looks completely different from the others (I am sure you know all his portraits - if there is anyone who doesn't here it is a good link with a rather complete list of his iconography: http://www.saint-just.net/arts.html).
 Plus, written accounts aren't of much more help. His contemporaries' witnesses vary one from another and they are often in an open contradiction. So again: how did Antoine really look like ?
Despite what it is often commonly said, I believe physical appearence is (at least in a certain way) "the mirror of personality" - an old Sicilian proverb tells - and physiognomy has its reasons to be, I guess.
Antoine was handsome, yes, this appears to be the most common opinion about its physical appearence - how was he handsome ?

Comments

Re: Saint-Just...Virgo?

[fatimahcrossin.livejournal.com]

have read your post, it's weird we have had the same thought at the same time :D !
Once I read (I don't remember the source, but it was reliable enough, I believe) an article about French Freemasonry during the French Revolution (making lots of allusions but not details, like always). It seems that the Duke of Orleans was one of the bosses, and all the people he paid (Camille Desmoulins & Danton included) were masons. But it would be very likely if also Robespierre, Saint-Just and many of the Conventionals were masons or at least in connection with any of its lodges (although in opposition to the Duke of Orleans, maybe, but we don't have elements enough to draw out the inner logic into it). Mazzucchelli, the author of the Italian biography about Saint-Just, makes some remarkable observations about the famous Letter to Daubigny and he claims Saint-Just entered Freemasonry when he studied in Reims...