Aristomenes Mourning the Death of Socrates from the Bewitchment of Meroë (from Book 1 of Apuleius, "The Golden Ass") (1795): Art, History and Details

Aristomenes Mourning the Death of Socrates from the Bewitchment of Meroë (from Book 1 of Apuleius, "The Golden Ass") (1795) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Antoine-Denis Chaudet (French, 1763–1810).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This scene represents the end of a complex episode from the Roman writer Apuleius's (2nd century ad) story The Golden Ass. Aristomenes narrates a tale to the book's main character, Lucius, about a friend named Socrates, whom he meets during his travels. After a disastrous affair with a witch named Meroë, Socrates dies from a wound she inflicts to his throat, and the scene shown here is the moment just after his death. Chaudet is mainly known as a sculptor, but he also designed a number of book illustrations for the most important publisher of the neoclassic period, the Didot firm. Although we know he did a number of drawings for The Golden Ass, the project was never realized as a book.

Object facts

• Title: Aristomenes Mourning the Death of Socrates from the Bewitchment of Meroë (from Book 1 of Apuleius, "The Golden Ass")
• Date: 1795
• Creator attribution: Antoine-Denis Chaudet (French, 1763–1810)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: brush and black and gray wash, heightened with white gouache, over graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 27.9 x 21.3 cm (11 x 8 3/8 in.); Image: 19.8 x 10.3 cm (7 13/16 x 4 1/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.374

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.