You didn't mess with Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson. Mademoiselle Lange, a notorious actress, learned this the hard way when she and her wealthy husband commissioned a portrait, then asked the painter to remove it from public display at the Paris Salon of 1799 and, worse, tried to stiff him on the payments.

Girodet (1767-1824) promptly removed the canvas from its frame and slashed it to bits, sending these to Mlle. Lange. With surprising speed, he returned to the Salon with a new painting in the same frame: a portrait of the actress as Danae, one of the mythical lovers of Zeus, who spilled himself over her in the form of a cascade of gold.

It wasn't a compliment. It was a savage and unusually vindictive satire, exposing the actress as narcissistic, greedy and adulterous. Crammed with symbols of lust, avarice and cupidity, "Mademoiselle Lange as Danae" features the actress focused on the gold coins rather than the mirror in her hand -- which, in any case, is cracked. Her husband appears as a turkey with the tailfeathers of a peacock. A dove, symbolizing fidelity, is being strangled by a cord attached to a scale used for weighing money. Beneath it is a mask of Mlle. Lange's lover, its eyehole stuffed with a coin -- literally blinded by gold.

"It couldn't have done much for her reputation," drily notes Larry Feinberg, co-curator (with Jay Clarke) of the Art Institute of Chicago's engagement of "Girodet: Romantic Rebel," an exhibition of about 100 paintings and drawings that originated at the Louvre in Paris. "It probably didn't help his reputation as a portrait painter, either, but people continued to commission things from him."

Strange and eccentric: These are apt descriptors for "Romantic Rebel," which opens Saturday and continues through April 30 before moving on to New York's Metropolitan Museum and, later, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Other appropriate adjectives might be "surprising," "excessive," "fabulous," "sensual" and "homoerotic," though this last is the subject of vigorous debate.

One of the leading figures in the Paris art world of the early 19th century, Girodet -- his funeral was as lavish as that of his teacher and rival, Jacques-Louis David, the following year -- soon fell into art-historical oblivion, where he has largely remained until recently.

The revival of interest in Girodet came about, in part, due to his rediscovery in 1980s and '90s by scholars of Gender and Gay Studies, who see in his work a hidden subtext of homosexuality. They point to his often passive, highly feminine male figures in paintings such as the early masterpiece "The Sleep of Endymion" (1791), which depicts the Greek myth of a shepherd so beautiful that the lovestruck goddess Diana -- herself notably absent in the picture -- kept him immortal but always asleep.

Feinberg and Clarke make no claims about Girodet's sexuality, arguing that it's unnecessary to appreciate his work. Feinberg notes that he painted many female nudes, and that feminized male nudes weren't uncommon in 16th century Italian painting, which Girodet studied in Rome, and even in the neoclassical history paintings that were the specialty of David and his students.

Besides, Feinberg says, looking at Girodet through the prism of sexuality is too limiting. "We shouldn't have to look at, say, Leonardo da Vinci's paintings -- and Leonard was almost certainly gay -- just in terms of his sexual leanings, because it really would narrow our understanding of them. Maybe [Girodet's sexuality] is one of the themes in this show that should be considered, but I can see about 10 other themes that I find at least as important -- such as his relationship to David."

Indeed, it's Girodet's rebellion against David's neoclassical tradition -- whose strict, formal approach to painting and sometimes static subject matter the student came to regard as a straitjacket -- that gives the exhibit its title. Unpredictable and unconventional in life, Girodet sought a similar freedom in his art, exploring themes that shrugged off the pedantry of neoclassicism and anticipated the emotional outpourings of Romanticism -- as in his lush portrait of lovers separated by death in "The Burial of Atala," inspired by a novel by his friend Chateaubriand.

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