The Battle of the Gods and the Giants

drawing height: 19.4 cm
drawing width: 13.4 cm
mount height: 46.3 cm
mount width: 36.3 cm

This drawing shows the battle of the Olympian gods against the Giants. Gaia, the earth goddess, encouraged her children the Giants to wage war on the gods, but they were defeated. At the top, Zeus holds up his thunderbolts, while Apollo (with the bow) and Athena (in armour) fly beneath him. The jumble of giants at the bottom includes a figure drawn from the Parthenon sculpture of a reclining river god, referred to as Ilissos. This drawing is a finished study for a fresco at 7 Carlton House Terrace, part of a series known as The Elements. This symbolises ‘Air,’ while other frescoes of mythological subjects showed Water, Earth, and Fire.

Watts was a leading figure in the English fresco revival of the 1850s, although many of his frescoes were damaged, destroyed, or disregarded. This red chalk drawing is a refined study for The Elementsseries at 7 Carlton House Terrace, the London home of Watts’ friend Lady Virginia Somers-Cocks, Countess Somers (née Pattle). The fresco is now held in Malvern College, Worcestershire, having been removed from the walls of 7 Carlton House Terrace after 1973 and displayed at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire by relatives of the Somers family from 1976 until 1988 [1].

This sheet presents the Battle of the Gods and the Giants, or the Gigantomachy; Nicholas Tromans has also suggested it might be the battle of Gods and Titans, the Titanomachy [2]. Iconographically these are difficult to distinguish, and for the purposes of Watts’ fresco are essentially interchangeable. The Olympian gods, led by Zeus (here at the top left with thunderbolts in each hand and an eagle just under his knee), represented order and progress, while the defeated Titans or Giants represented the primeval forces as the monstrous or powerful children of the earth goddess Gaia. In this drawing, Zeus is accompanied by Apollo, the god of the sun, music, and poetry, who wields a bow, and Athena, the goddess of craft, arts, and war, in her armour. Their attributes would be easily recognisable to the educated circles who visited 7 Carlton House Terrace.

The jumble of tumbling nude figures of Giants or Titans in the bottom right corner may have its roots in the crowded figures of Michelangelo’s Sistine Last Judgement, which Watts saw in Rome in 1844 and 1847. This is not a direct citation but a sort of evocation of the master of Renaissance fresco, whose Sistine frescoes Watts declared were ‘on the whole, as a complete work by one man…. the greatest things existing’ [3]. Watts has refined the musculature from Michelangelo’s ultra-bulky figures, with more muscles than the human body contains, back to the idealised but still rational bodies of the Greek sculptures he admired even more than Michelangelo, the Parthenon sculptures by Pheidias. Watts owned a cast of the reclining river god from the West pediment of the Parthenon, currently held at the British Museum, and drew from it and the Dionysus repeatedly throughout his life. In remarking on Michelangelo, Watts noted that ‘we know but half of the work of Pheidias, and we can judge of his greatness only by the fragments that remain’ [4].

While this drawing appears highly finished, in the final work Watts made several adjustments to the figure of Athena, who here divides the page horizontally. In the finished work, and in a related pen-and-ink drawing in an album in the Watts Gallery collection, the goddess has been rotated to a more foreshortened position and shifted further to the right of the page. The landscape in which the giants fall is clearer, a rocky peak above a sea of fog, and the figures have been given tormented expressions instead of blank oval heads.

The Giants or Titans appear in Watts’s monumental works Chaos (COMWG.143, 1875-1882), The Titans (COMWG.109, 1848-1875), and Prometheus (COMWG.28, 1904). Where Chaos and the Titans represent Watts’ symbolic concept of the origins of the cosmos, earth, and time, Prometheus, still in his studio when he died in 1904, presents the Titan who modelled human beings out of clay and gave them fire against the orders of the Olympian gods. Again, Watts turned to Michelangelo, drawing from the Renaissance master’s figure of Day from the Medici tombs in Florence [5]. While Prometheus was an oil on canvas painting rather than fresco, we can see how Watts returned to and engaged with the same myth cycle and art historical touchstones across his career.

Footnotes:

[1] Nicholas Tromans, ‘“The Elements”: A Fresco Cycle by George Frederic Watts,’ in Tributes to Jean Michel Massing, ed. Mark Stocker and Phillip Lindley (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016) pp. 313-4. 

[2] Nicholas Tromans, ‘“The Elements”: A Fresco Cycle by George Frederic Watts,’ in Tributes to Jean Michel Massing, ed. Mark Stocker and Phillip Lindley (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016) p. 310. See also, Brinsley Ford & John Christian.  The Sixtieth Volume of the Walpole Society: 'The Ford Collection.' Vol. II, London: The Walpole Society, 1998), cat. 473, p. 252; the cataloguer notes that an old inscription (not in Watts’ hand) calls it ‘Gods & Titans’.

[3] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd, 1912) p. 73.

[4] Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: the Annals of an Artist’s Life, vol. 1 (London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd, 1912) p. 73.

[5] Michelangelo Buonarroti, Day from the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1526-31. Marble, Sagrestia Nuova of the Medici Chapel, Florence.

Text by Dr Melissa Gustin