The Constancy of Coriolanus
Jean François Janinet French
After Jean Guillaume Moitte French
Not on view
Jean-Guillaume Moitte and Jean-François Janinet began collaborating around 1787, and this composition is typical of their work from the end of the eighteenth century. It illustrates a scene from the life of Caius Marcius Coriolanus, a Roman soldier and statesman from the fifth century B.C. whose biography appeared in Plutarch's Lives of the Notable Greeks and Romans (96-98 A.D.) and was the subject of William Shakespeare's last tragedy, Coriolanus (1608). A later version of the print bears an inscription explicating the scene, which shows Coriolanus, having been condemned to exile, bidding farewell to his wife, mother, and children.