Fragonard : The Bolt

Review by Giovanni Varazzani

Fragonard's painting "the bolt" (le verrou in French) was made in the eighteenth century in around 1778. It is exposed in le Louvres Museum in Paris. This piece or art is considered as one of the most representative of the times' stream: libertinism. As it is a genre painting, first thing we see is a clear situation: a couple who is just about to consume their love in a messy red bed, or maybe they have just done it..? The painting is full of different expressions and symbols, which can be interpreted in several ways. Agitation and movement are conveyed by the bed, and the couple. We have here an unmade and red coloured bed full of crimps and disorder, a broken glass on the left hand side of the bed and a couple in the middle of an intimate moment and both of them have one of their feet off the ground. These elements show the intensity and the passion of the moment, no matter what we can interpret about the woman or the man's will to carry on or not. It is, from my point of view, the feeling of movement, which generate into the audience the kind of energy and emotions that I like.
Finally, they are both the exact same height, which can symbolise equality between the two. It might just be an erotic scene of a couple making a forbidden act (whence, the bolt).. To conclude, there is a possible explanation that can be raised, linked to the context this painting was made in. In the eighteenth century, there codes existed about how to act in such circumstances, especially for middle class people. Here, it can represent woman's ambivalence who wants herself to be naive, and thus to feign not to understand what men want and in the same time wanting as much as them to answer them...AAaaAA women...