Our Greek figures, first appearing along the inside edge of the Parthenon, a position suited to Athenians and foreign visitors, now grace the British Museum. Their French offspring, once gracing in a private chamber at Versailles,
now attracts admirers in the Louvre.

Within a metope, our double, in the suffocating grasp of his opposing centaur, offers an Athenian history lesson, stirring up once again the engagements of natural creatures and civilized humans. Lapiths, we may remember, shared territory with native centaurs, who provided rude hospitality, assisting in sheltering, hunting, navigation. Chiron, the wisest of centaurs, directed the education of Achilles. Appreciative of centaur skills, experience and generosity, Lapiths included them in this wedding celebration. As high spirits advanced, fueled with drink, dancing, stirring recollections, bantering comparisons, manners as well as instinct focus attention on the bride. Finding himself a more worthy suitor than her Lapith intended, a centaur lifts up the bride, turning away. We review consequent struggles.

Within a frame, our double holds out a golden apple to the woman his gaze favors, assisted by winged companion, the powerful messenger who presumably supplied the prize, and the boy-child drawing away concealing fabric. As Hermes oversees his charge, Cupid tends to his mother’s performance. We appreciate Aphrodite, not least through Paris’ eyes. Shepherd’s crook abandoned, shepherd dog drowsing, we reenact his judgment: Aphrodite is fairest of all.

Aphrodites’s companions, however, do not share our pleasures. The distaste of the helmeted girl with spear and shield appears reinforced in the fearful emblem of her shield, as her fellow judge rises up, attended by her peacock, finger raised, pointing away from present circumstances towards those who will better appreciate her presence and gestures. Paris will come to experience the consequences of his choice, as the two slighted girls, Athena and Juno, marshal oppositions. So, too, may we.

Our scenes present stark contrasts, the first muscular with action, the second awash with fashion. Greeks, presumably, took their myths straight, finding themselves as participants in the scene. Pan-Athenaic celebrants, natives and visitors, passed through the Dipylon gate, through the market place, up rock outcroppings to Athena’s temples, to offer Athena a carefully woven richly embroidered robe. Participation incorporates religious and civic duties. A French spectator of Watteau’s tableaux acts to the contrary as a private appreciator of a charming moment, promising new pleasures attending ancient stories. Embodied Greek centaurs struggle equally with Lapiths. French girls, worthy of their beauty pageant, perform roles. The former recalls primary myth. The later seasons current pleasures with suggestive allusion.

Our experiences, perhaps, help us to distinguish a formative period, close to basic desires, from a later period, where civil constraints replace war with love, pantheistic power-struggles with civil graces. For the Greeks, nature dominates. For the French, culture subsumes nature.

Reflection, however, raises questions. Consider Plato among observers of the Parthenon struggles. Phäeton, lacking the power to reign in his charges, appears restored in his Phaedo, where the white horse of reason directs his companion black horse. No more will horse and rider veer low, scorching earth and earthly creatures. Animal energy still fuels human desires, but intellect can steer reasonable courses. Opposing the original Greek postulate of Chaos as originating force, Plato and his followers would discover within myriad experience ordering forms.

Centaur and rival Lapith display provocative, conflicting gestures. Our centaur face twisting with effort, radiates animal passion. Our Lapith’s face, eyes blank to current conflicts, gazes elsewhere. Numerous Greek statues, whether of young men, or of Apollo, offer archaic smiles, removed from earth-bound cares. Perhaps lacking in immediacy to modern observers, to observant Greeks, other-worldly faces could hardly be empty. Like our Lapith, Apollo sees worlds beyond our ken.

Later Hellenistic depictions, of course, bring divinities within human sight: the faces of gods and men, of goddesses and women, share common and recognizable features. Parthenon variations, however, offer shifts of focus, revealing with fresh exposures new orientations. Nature appears now naturally, now other-worldly. A wise Chiron may assume the gaze of Apollo in the presence of an untutored human with the expression of a beast.

Watteau’s charming girls, charming indeed to the youthful French Paris, appear remote from Greek struggles. But those who engage Paris’ women may discover notable passions at work among the fashionable in modern society. Central to our scene is an arresting vision, the compelling revelation of our girl, unencumbered with clothing, superior all despite rank, relationship, or allegiance. Her presence dispels all concerns peripheral characters would enable. He (together with fellow viewers) appreciates her charms all the more by allowing competing circumstances to fall away. Peripheral attentions, qualifying the imagined pleasures her appearances solicit, are to be ignored.

Intensities of scrutiny appear none-the-less to challenge would-be lovers. Helmeted, shielded, spear ready, Athena-like, one disapproving observer will not see through lovers’ eyes. Her disapproving expression reappears magnified in her emblem: the Gorgon Medusa anticipates a future surprise for present voyeurs. Persus, we recall, a man favored by Athena not as lover, but as adventurer who loves to have his way, beheaded Medusa, who now appears to freeze the desires of those who would sacrifice to passion rather than craft. As we begin to suspect strength of opposition in the prettily-costumed girl, we may anticipate the consequences of her disapproval, all the more to be discovered by those most passionately committed to love.

Our second charming figure, gesturing for silence, attracts our complicity. Her disapproval draws allies and subordinates. Hera offers powers of allegiance, places in her courtly coalition, to reward opposition. Among those slighted by the choice of Aphrodite some have the character, position and will to join Hera’s opposition.

Watteau’s Paris, the grandson of Louis XIV, would not become a second Sun King. Five years old at the death of his grandfather, at the age of 11 he was promised by his regent to the infanta Mariana, daughter of King Phillip V of Spain. Freed by the regent’s death to pursue his own inclinations, he marries instead Marie Atoinette, daughter of the deposed King Stanislaw I of Poland. Among many women influential in his affairs, Madame de Pompadour shares with the Queen future celebrity. Disaffected from regents and from ministers, Louis preferred the company of women.

Although he proclaimed that he would henceforth rule without a chief minister, he was too indolent and lacking in self-confidence to coordinate the activities of his secretaries of state and give firm direction to national policy. While his government degenerated into factions of scheming ministers and courtiers, Louis isolated
himself at court and occupied himself with a succession of mistresses, several of whom exercised considerable political influence.