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Marcus Curtius leaping into the void oil on canvas 44 x 36 in. (111.8 x 91.5 cm.) PROVENANCE John Harris, London. with Hall & Knight, New York, where purchased by the present owner. LITERATURE P. Rosenberg, 'Dessins de Le Sueur … Budapest', Bulletin du Mus‚e Hongrois des Beaux Arts, 1972, p. 71, no. 39. fig. 60, illustrated. A. Pigler, Barockthemen, II, 1974, p. 385. A. M‚rot, Eustache Le Sueur, Paris, 1987, pp. 160-161 and 299, no. 3, fig. 1. A. M‚rot, 'Le Raphael Fran‡ais', L'Object d'Art, III, January 1988, pp. 68 and 69, illustrated. NOTES This splendid early painting by Le Sueur was first identified in 1972 by Pierre Rosenberg, adding significantly to our knowledge of the artist's early development. Le Sueur would paint another (now lost) version of the same subject in 1653 for Monsieur Planson as one of two pendants representing Allegories of Bon Gouvernement (see M‚rot, 1987, no. 163). Le Sueur's dynamic depiction of Marcus Curtius Leaping into the Void depicts with unsurpassed energy the climactic moment of an ancient tale of heroism and civic virtue. The story, taken from Livy (VII, 6), recounts how in 362 B.C. Pluto in his wrath opened a huge abyss in the middle of the Forum. Soothsayers prophesied that the void could never be filled until a true representative of the Roman people was prepared to sacrifice himself by leaping into the fissure. Marcus Curtius, putting his duty to his homeland before his life, mounted his horse and in full armor, charged into the abyss which sealed itself after him. This exemplum virtutis was frequently painted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by, among others, Claude Vignon and Romanelli (who depicted it on one of the ceilings of the apartments which he decorated for Anne of Austria in the Louvre around 1655). Even Bernini's equestrian statue of Louis XIV was adapted to the subject. Le Sueur might have executed his painting to decorate a chimney piece, the actual fireplace below providing the flames that were to engulf the hero. Alain M‚rot ( op.cit. ) dates it to Le Sueur's youth, circa 1636, and compares it to the Marine Gods Paying Homage to Love (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) and the expressive Volumnia and Verturia before Coriolanus (Mus‚e du Louvre, Paris). A masterpiece of perspectival complexity and baroque composition, Marcus Curtius was painted while Le Sueur was still working in the studio of his mentor, Simon Vouet (1590-1649), in whose lodgings he still resided as late as 1642. Indeed, M‚rot also observes that the central figure in Le Sueur's painting is based on a drawing by Vouet, today in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg (see B. Brejon de Lavergn‚e, Inventaire G‚n‚ral des Dessins, Ec“le Fran‡aise: Dessins de Simon Vouet, Mus‚e du Louvre, 1987, XXIII, p. 67, illustrated). That drawing is linked to a design by Vouet for the tapestry The Return of Jephtha, which was engraved by Fran‡ois Tortebat in 1665. The Marcus Curtius displays the compositional drama and brilliant palette that Le Sueur inherited from Vouet and which mark his vigorous early style, soon to be replaced in his maturity with a cooler, more architectonic classicism.