WASHINGTON, DC.- The Corcoran Gallery of Art presents Joan of Arc, an exhibition that celebrates the cultural legacy of the French medieval heroine Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431). Her extraordinary life has inspired generations of writers and artists, and her image has been used for centuries to promote a variety of political, cultural and religious views. Devoted to one of the most fascinating and best known figures of the Middle Ages, the exhibition and accompanying publication explore the life and times of this amazing person and present the history of her image in France and in America over 500 years. The first exhibition on this theme, Joan of Arc features more than 200 works in a wide variety of media. The exhibition will be on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., through January 21, 2007.

Joan of Arc, otherwise known as “Jehanne la Pucelle” or “Joan the Maid,” has been admired for centuries in France and around much of the world. The story of her transformation—from an illiterate provincial peasant girl, to a victorious army commander, to a martyr condemned of heresy and burned at the stake, to Catholic saint—remains singular and compelling to a wide international audience.

Central to the exhibition are two treasures from the Corcoran’s permanent collection created during the height of Joan of Arc’s popularity by the great French artist-illustrator Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850-1913). He created a series of six highly decorative oil and gold-leaf paintings based on the life of Joan of Arc and a brilliantly illustrated deluxe picture book, Jeanne d’Arc (1896). These works inspired the curators of the exhibition, Laura Coyle, art historian and independent curator, formerly at the Corcoran, and Nora M. Heimann, Associate Professor of Art History at The Catholic University, to investigate the complex historical, social and artistic contexts for a range of Joan of Arc representations, including those found in paintings, sculpture, illustrated books and manuscripts, textiles and popular art.

Images of Joan of Arc range from icons of martial ascendancy and nationalist unity to paragons of humble piety and maidenly purity. Her likenesses have been deployed not only as symbols for the power of the people, but also to support the divine right of kings. A model of female fortitude, Joan has contrarily been represented as defiantly androgynous. She has further personified sentiments as varied as independent-minded patriotism and saintly devotion to the Church. Representations of Joan on view in the exhibition vary in scope and purpose from a doodle in the margin of a fifteenth-century manuscript chronicling Joan’s lifting of the English siege of Orleans, to major nineteenth-century paintings for the Paris Salon calculated to appeal to specific, often politically powerful, audiences, to documents such as photographs, postcards, programs and other memorabilia related to the elaborate processions and pageants in France and the United States celebrating Joan’s canonization in 1920.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition begins with some of the earliest known images and descriptions of Joan. These images include illustrated manuscripts and rare books from the collections of the Library of Congress, Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University and Harvard University. Also on view are facsimiles and partial translations of the earliest surviving trial transcripts. These revealing, detailed documents record two trials, the first, the condemnation or inquisition trial that sentenced Joan to death for heresy in 1431, and the second, the rehabilitation trial, held twenty-four years later, which overturned the earlier verdict. The trial transcripts are the main primary source of information about Joan of Arc and the reason we know so much about her life.

Laura Coyle, one of the exhibition’s curators, said, “Joan of Arc was without a doubt one of the most intriguing women who ever lived, and her image is as varied as it is powerful.” Ms. Coyle continued, “Not long after her death, literary and visual representations of her began to circulate widely and set important precedents for how she would be portrayed in the centuries to come. The bold warrior; the pious Catholic; the fashionable courtier; the loyal subject; the doomed prisoner—Joan appears in each of these guises time and again. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new types of portrayals joined more traditional ones. These representations included Joan of Arc as a willing martyr, a robust peasant, a courageous patriot, and a resolute adolescent. Interest in Joan of Arc was and is universal, but the meaning of her image is specific, inflected by its time and place.”

Nora Heimann, the exhibition’s co-curator, said, “In tracing the many representations of Joan of Arc’s image over time, it is evident that her persona has served as a resonant site of symbolic meaning. In assessing the achievement of Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel in describing this remarkable young woman’s life, it seems clear that the artist and illustrator’s greatest achievement was in recognizing the complexity and richness of her enduring symbolic potential, at the same time that he celebrated her very real humanity.”

The exhibition features work in a variety of media. Of particular interest are authentic fifteenth-century arms (Metropolitan Museum of Art); rare illuminated manuscripts and illustrated books (Library of Congress, Bryn Mawr College Library, National Gallery of Art); several illustrated volumes of Voltaire’s provocative and satirical epic poem, La Pucelle (The Maid; Library of Congress and private collection); rare nineteenth-century French toile textiles with Joan of Arc motifs (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution); paintings, including William Hamilton’s Joan of Arc and the Furies (1789; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Art Center, Vassar College), based on Shakespeare’s vitriolic portrayal of Joan, and Alphonse Mucha’s art nouveau masterpiece of the American star of the stage, Maude Adams, as Friedrich Schiller’s Maid of Orleans (1909; Metropolitan Museum of Art); posters by Eugène Grasset of French actress Sarah Bernhardt as Joan of Arc in Barbier’s Paris production (Courtesy the Trustees of the Boston Public Library); a recently restored, gilded reduction of Emmanuel Frémiet’s monument in Paris (Bryn Mawr College); documentation relating to Anna Hyatt Huntington’s famous bronze equestrian monument of Joan of Arc erected in 1915 in New York City (Maier Museum of Art, Library of Congress, The Hispanic Society of America), a site that became a rallying place during World War I in support of the allied troops; war bond posters and anti-German propaganda (Library of Congress); and French and American memorabilia related to Joan’s beatification in 1909 and canonization in 1920 (Columbia University, Boston Public Library, Catholic University).

In addition, an entire section is devoted to the Joan of Arc watercolors (Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester), illustrations, books and paintings by Boutet de Monvel. Included are breathtaking, rarely exhibited watercolor studies for the artist’s Jeanne d’Arc. Although Boutet de Monvel is under-recognized today, he was one of the most talented artists of his generation and was widely admired in the United States, as well as in France. Senator William A. Clark (1839-1925), one of the Corcoran’s great patrons and one of the most important collectors of French art in America during the Gilded Age, commissioned the Joan of Arc paintings (now at the Corcoran) directly from the artist to hang in the smoking and billiards room of his mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City.