It is reckoned that Ingmar Bergmann came up with the idea for his film Person one day he was very ill. While he was dealing with the fever of a very serious pneumonia, someone passed him a photo in which his ex-lover, the actress, appeared. Bibi Andersson , together with another interpreter whom he had not yet met, Liv Ulmann . The resemblance between the two was so shocking and inspired him in such a way that he could only get rid of the obsession by directing what is perhaps the greatest of his several masterpieces, which of course starred Ullmann and Andersson.
we don't know exactly why we are fascinated by the subject of the two women so similar that one could be confused with the reflection of the other . But that fascination is a fact. And the cinema has been especially effective in materializing it: there is Hitchcock with Vertigo , a film that uncovers the mechanisms of all falling in love through the process of converting one woman into another (which is herself). They are there Robert Altman, Carlos Saura, David Lynch, Brian de Palma, Darren Aronofsky . And some others.
Ullmann and Andersson in 'Persona' by Ingmar Bergman
As for the painting, he has rarely dealt with the matter with the packaging of this work from 1843. At that time, Theodore Chasseriau he had just split pears with his mentor Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the most successful and also the most Martian of the French Romantic painters, who in the good old days had called him "the Napoleon of painting" . For the church of Saint-Merri in Paris, Chassériau had perpetrated a fresco of Santa María Egipciaca what was it more income than the same income , and after that he must have been somewhat saturated with painting like the teacher who, on the other hand, no longer spoke to him. So in this double portrait he slipped into other fields that, due to their atmosphere and color scheme, brought him closer to Anton van Dyck (there in the distance) and Eugene Delacroix (much closer).
The protagonists of the painting are dressed and combed the same, and their features are so similar that they could be taken for the same person, or at least twins. But the two women, sisters to each other and also to the painter, are separated by a wide age difference. line up , who at twenty-one is the youngest, she grabs the arm of Adele , who is thirty-three and directs the portraitist a lopsided look which reveals that she has learned to distrust even the blood of her blood.
Everything in the image is pure class affirmation. sisters dresses, in gold and red . Their fantastic shawls, from a crimson anticipating the orientalist style that the Chassériau would adopt soon after. The domestic interior in which they pose. The hairstyles, the jewelry, the delicate rose, the sturdy mahogany cabinetry.
Self-portrait of Chassériau, the 'Napoleon of painting'
Everything seems destined to glorify the bourgeoisie of the France of Louis Philippe of Orleans , last king of the French. zombie king , by the way, since the Gallic monarchy was a living dead since Napoleon (the first, the real one) decided that the imperial laurel suited him fabled, and neither the subsequent Bourbon restoration nor the House of Orleans managed to revive the grandeur of the court of the Sun King.
Those were Luis Felipe's years of bourgeois rise. Everyone in France wanted to be a respectable bourgeois . How would be the thing that even the king wanted to be, or at least that was what he tried to convey, and it is already known that from the king below, well that. They were also years of economic prosperity. Until they ceased to be, and the invention collapsed like a house of cards with the Revolution of 1848 . But that other story we will tell at another time.
A lustrum before that, the Chassériau sisters were proud of their aspirations , and time has shown that they were not wrong. Because, from then until now, the bourgeoisie has not left the control room . Nor is it planned to do so at the moment.
The painting 'The Two Sisters' (1843), by Théodore Chassériau, is in the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
Journey to a painting: 'The two sisters', by Théodore Chassériau