Coriolanus on the Senate Floor (2018)

My appropriation of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (1785) is largely divorced from Livy’s epic, instead, it is conflated with Ralph Fiennes’ 2011 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Fyodor Bronnikov’s The damned box. Place of execution in ancient Rome. The crucified slaves. (1878).

Utilizing the reaction to Gaius Marcius’ banishment from Rome, Coriolanus on the Senate Floor was created in a period which (some) powerful men were for the first time being held accountable for acts the public rightly found despicable. For the rich and powerful, these actions were normalized as natural aspects of world order, and they expressed a perverse yet genuine sense of victimhood. The figure of Coriolanus in my piece is not intended as a predator, however, but more generally an archetype of masculinity left behind in changing cultural standards.