I saw this painting the other day at the Altes Nationalgalerie. It's called "Homecoming of the Smugglers", by Eduard Magnus, a German painter from the Romantic period (this particular painting dates from 1836). It really struck me, as I stood looking at it, that this kind of family dynamic is shown too little in the art of the period. Look at how the children cling on to their father, and how he cuddles them. I really like that. I've been thinking a lot about family dynamics lately, because in my version of Fidelio the main couple has small children that they are reunited with at the end of the novel. And just how, I wondered when I began writing, do they react? Surely relations between a loving father and his children were just as common then are they are now.
I did what I've been doing with every single aspect of this story: I started doing research. Lots and lots of research. I read a lot of books from the period, and letters, and essays, and looked around for paintings of families. And you know what I found? The more normal a family-that is to say, those families who were not royalty or very powerful nobility-often had perfectly normal relationships. And I think that's fabulous.
2 comments:
A fascinating topic, and one hotly debated! A number of scholars have insisted that affective familial relationships only became "normal" in the early modern period (sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century, depending on the scholar.) Fortunately (from my perspective!) there are also medievalists to dispute this. And then the question of how the Industrial Revolution influenced matters is another can of worms. ;) Lovely painting, though.
@Lucy: At the end of the day, it really comes down to how I want my characters to interact, but I've always been interested in family dynamics. I've been trying to re-imagine a few scenes in the narrative from the kids' point of view, which culminated in a scene between Leonore and Graciana that's just so tragic that it may not make the final cut.
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