'Burn the tendons and cast them into the river' — why a painter depicted the brutal punishment of two failed rebel princes [Lee Won-yul's Huam-dong Gallery — Évariste Vital Luminais]

The Huam-dong Gallery is the original home of an extra-long cultural and arts storytelling series suited to the boundless digital space. Press ■Subscribe to reporter■ to enjoy a new art story every weekend. Articles are written as storytelling based on historical fact, with some imaginative embellishment.

Queen Balthild's face was stone. "Please withdraw your decision. I beg you — kill us here instead." The two princes wept and pleaded, pressing their foreheads to the floor. Still, she did not relent.

Balthild raised her eyes and looked to one side. There stood King Clovis II — lord of the Frankish Kingdom's Merovingian dynasty and her husband, seven years her junior. His expression was anguished as he watched his two sons weep. "My dear. Please… could we not show at least some mercy?" "My king. Remember this well. What they have done is a disgrace to us, to our country, and to both their parents." Balthild was unyielding. Faced with her unwavering resolve, Clovis II could not find words to press further. "Enough. Declare it yourself, my king," Balthild said — still without so much as a glance at her sons. "… Take them away," Clovis II finally said. It was a command to the guards standing on either side. "Make it thorough," he added. "That is to say — as the queen commands, burn every last tendon. Both of them are never to stand on their own feet again." Heavy armor shifted. Chains clashed and rang. "Father, Mother. Please!" All that lingered in the palace now was a cry, growing ever smaller.

According to a legend composed around the 12th century, the two sons of Clovis II plotted a rebellion within their own kingdom around 660.

It happened at a moment when Clovis II had left the country. He had placed his eldest son on the throne to fill the void — and that son had drawn his younger brother into the revolt. But things did not go as planned. Queen Balthild had remained at the palace. She sensed what was afoot and immediately sent word to Clovis II. He halted his carriage at once and turned back. On the road home, he met the army his sons had raised head-on. Experience told. The rebels were routed.

Clovis II had intended to execute his captured sons — but with a swift beheading, a final mercy to spare them prolonged suffering. Balthild, however, objected fiercely. Her position was that such brazen ingratitude — raising a sword against one's own parents and even one's country — deserved the harshest possible punishment. There was logic to it. Above all, her sense of betrayal was erupting like a volcano, and he could not simply dismiss it. So he ultimately deferred to Balthild. Not long after, the sentence was duly carried out: "the tendons of both legs were burned so they could not move," and the two were "set adrift on the Seine, to float away forever." Immobilized for an indefinite stretch of time, they were left to slowly starve or drown — whichever came first.

The two princes lie side by side.

But beneath them is not a bed — it is a raft. And the setting is not a bedchamber but a bluish riverbank. Their expressions are dark: pained, sorrowful, spent. How could they be otherwise? The answer lies in their legs, wrapped in white cloth — for the tendons that once held them together are gone. The velvet cushions are large and plush. The ornate clothing and blankets are unmistakably royal. Yet there are no oars in sight, no tools, no provisions to speak of. At the prow hangs only a gold ornament set with jewels — and inside it, of all things, a small sculpture of a mother cradling a child. An empty sky, a silent plain, an indifferent current — all of it only deepens a sense not of quiet but of uncanny dread. The two must drift on like this. As the price of rebellion, their lives and their bodies are simply to be carried away. This is "The Sons of Clovis II" by 19th-century French painter Évariste Vital Luminais.

This is a brutal story of power.

But there is something important to know. As already noted, this is almost certainly not a true story. Clovis II, for instance, died young at twenty-four in 657. He did have three sons, but all of them went on to ascend the throne in succession — none received a punishment involving burned tendons. Indeed, the tale had so many gaps that even in the distant past it was already regarded as fiction. Luminais knew the story lacked credibility. Yet he painted it with such care — and returned to the same subject multiple times, subtly varying the expressions of the figures, the backgrounds, and the props, or depicting different characters altogether. Was he simply that moved by the tragedy between the royal couple and their sons? That may have been part of it, but the decisive reason is thought to lie elsewhere. It was...

The winter of 1870 — ten years before Luminais completed "The Sons of Clovis II."

His homeland, France, was enduring a cold as brutal as the weather. No one had seen this coming. No one had truly expected Prussia to be so formidable. In truth, it was France that had thrown the first punch — declaring war on Prussia in July of that year with considerable swagger. France was a traditional land power. Prussia, by comparison, seemed little more than a relatively young upstart. The expectation was that the fight would end like a big brother twisting a younger sibling's wrist. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. Prussia was strong. The country had been preparing for the confrontation, long since building a general staff system and moving with disciplined precision under its sophisticated strategy. By the time France came to its senses, it had suffered defeat after defeat. The humiliation culminated in Emperor Napoleon III being taken prisoner. France was stripped of the prized Alsace-Lorraine region and forced to pay 5 billion francs in reparations — two to three times the national budget at the time. The capital, Paris, was stained with blood from siege and internal strife. It was the worst of times. What pressed down on the city was fear, a sense of loss, helplessness and defeatism.

The more people and societies are cornered, the more they yearn for the dramatic narratives of the past.

It may be the quietly stirring impulse toward escapism that drives this.

The French public turned to their country's distant ancient and medieval history. The state encouraged it, investing effort in unearthing and promoting legends and histories that felt close to home — believing it a way to rekindle the patriotism that had dimmed.

The Frankish Kingdom, founded in 481, was a major presence in early medieval Western and Central Europe.

Clovis I — the kingdom's first king and the effective founder of the Merovingian dynasty — was a conquering monarch who ruled from Paris at the head of his armies. He unified the scattered Frankish tribes and expanded his territory significantly by attacking the Visigothic Kingdom and the Kingdom of Burgundy, among others. The dynasty endured for more than 360 years, producing towering figures such as Charles Martel and Charlemagne. It was not without its dark chapters, but it was equally rich in dramatic and turbulent events. The very word "Frank" is widely regarded as the origin of "France." In other words, the stories surrounding the Clovis family of the Frankish Kingdom were material that suited both the state and the public of the time. The state could draw pride from them; the people could restore their sense of self-worth.

The trauma of war was tenacious and deep.

Even when Luminais exhibited "The Sons of Clovis II" at the Salon, the mood in France had not lifted.

In that climate, people stood before the painting and wept. The princes' ornate clothing and blankets called to mind the former glory of their country. The sight of two figures drifting, unable to move, brought the bleak present sharply back into focus. The princes' eyes are vacant — drained of drive and will, with neither the strength nor the desire to reach back toward past brilliance. Sovereignty had been violated; the future was being sucked into turbulent waters. And the very cause of it all was the arrogance of those involved — a fact that made viewers weep all the more. Luminais, in other words, had no interest in historical accuracy. What he sought to convey was not fact but feeling.

The story of "The Sons of Clovis II," however, does not end there.

A monk discovers the two princes near death at Jumièges, in Normandy. After much deliberation, he rescues them — carrying them to his monastery, giving them clothing and food. From that point on, the once-reckless princes begin a new life as devout monks.

Queen Balthild — mother as well as queen — hears the news. Does she order another punishment? She does not. She visits the monastery in secret, summons the monks to one place, and offers her gratitude. Balthild, too, had been burning inside all along. She had shown extreme coldness to uphold the order of the state, but they were her children. Deep down, she was profoundly relieved they had survived. She gave the monastery a substantial endowment and donated surrounding land owned by the crown. The desperate journey ends there.

In Luminais's other version of the work — "The Sons of Clovis II (The Hamstrung Men of Jumièges)" — a candle burns at the end of the raft.

Flowers are blooming. The tendons are still severed, but not everything has ended because of it. This moved viewers beyond mere empathy to something closer to consolation. "The Sons of Clovis II," shown at the 1880 Salon, was counted among the most acclaimed works of that year. It spoke to a longing to look back achingly at a glorious past, to the wounds of the recent war that had not yet healed, and to a desire to be held amid chronic helplessness. Luminais had painted a blockbuster perfectly calibrated to his era — as if answering the questions of the age with a ready solution.

And this opens the door to another intriguing line of reasoning.

Luminais was, by all indications, a remarkably shrewd painter.

Beyond his craft, he appears to have had an instinct above all for painting what would win an immediate popular response.

Luminais was born in 1821 in Nantes, France. His family was a distinguished one that had produced numerous lawyers and legislators. His great-grandfather was a prosecutor. His grandfather was a politician and attorney. His father was a member of the lower house with his own constituency. At their core, all of these were professions that dealt in human beings. Growing up around such figures, Luminais would naturally have learned to read the human heart and to understand how to capture public attention.

Luminais arrived in Paris at eighteen. Showing a talent for art, he studied under Léon Cogniet and Constant Troyon — Cogniet a master of history painting and portraiture, Troyon of landscape and animal painting. This allowed him to absorb a wide range of disciplines without gaps. And as he encountered different genres, he would have been able to gauge for himself: what kinds of paintings did his contemporaries love, and what subjects, in particular, did they respond to with passion?

In 1843, Luminais submitted a civil war scene set in Lower Brittany during the republican period to the Salon and received strong praise — a successful official debut. It was a history painting depicting an internal conflict that had taken place in western France; the original has since been lost. He went on to paint farmers and fishermen from his home region, depicting dogs and horses, and pastoral scenes of people and animals together. He won several prizes at the Salon. Through this process, he gradually began to increase the proportion of history painting in his work. History and mythological painting were already what the academy of the day regarded as the highest form of art — and they offered a more reliable path to both money and reputation.

Then the Franco-Prussian War broke out. In the wake of defeat, a reexamination of distinctly "French" history took hold. Luminais read the mood. He weighed which subjects would earn the greatest public response. The result was works such as "The Sons of Clovis II."

The conclusion of this line of reasoning is as follows.

"The Sons of Clovis II" may be a work born of the combination of Luminais's patriotism and his early, calculated assessment of what the market wanted. Which of the two carried more weight is impossible to say — but the outcome was a success on both counts: principle and profit alike.

And Luminais's apparently shrewd trajectory did not stop there.

The red-haired man in the painting is Childeric III — the last king of the Merovingian dynasty, deposed by Pepin III, the founder of the Carolingian dynasty.

It had long been held that the kings of the Frankish Kingdom in that era did not cut their hair — as God's representatives on earth, their hair too was a divine gift, not to be touched by a blade. Yet the Childeric III on the canvas surrenders his hair without resistance. Monks press down his bound body and cut away with indifferent scissors. Childeric III wears an expression of hollow defeat. He is losing his claim to kingship before our eyes. His crown and red mantle have long since fallen to the floor. This is Luminais's painting "The Last of the Merovingians." It can be inferred that Luminais painted this work, too, through careful calculation and imagination. As with "The Sons of Clovis II," the subject alone was enough to draw everyone's attention. But subject matter was not sufficient. For assured success, he needed to appeal to both of the factions that had grown more starkly divided after the Franco-Prussian War — the royalists and the republicans. He appears to have succeeded. Royalists could look at the painting and feel a mournful grief at the humiliating decline of an old dynasty, followed by catharsis. Republicans could find in the end of absolute royal power a quiet satisfaction — even a sense of triumph.

Luminais may have worked on "The Flight of Gradlon" with a similar intent.

The painting draws on a legend tied to the Bay of Douarnenez in northwestern France and the mythical city of Ys said to have stood there.

According to the legend, Ys — ruled by King Gradlon around the 5th century — was a thriving commercial center overflowing with gold and marble. It had one fatal vulnerability, however: built by holding back the sea, it was in effect a submerged city. A dyke fitted with floodgates encircled the city like a wall, which meant there was little fear of disaster — until there was.

Gradlon's daughter, Dahut — depicted as a witch or a reckless woman — causes the catastrophe. She steals Gradlon's key and throws open all the floodgates at once. The sea surges into the city like an invading army. Gradlon, aided by Saint Gwénolé, scrambles onto his horse. Dahut, suddenly terrified, pretends to know nothing and clings to her father, hoping to escape with him.

"It is your daughter Dahut who has done wrong."

At that moment, Gradlon hears the voice of Saint Gwénolé. Waves close in; the paradise beneath the water vanishes without a trace. Gradlon looks at Dahut — his own blood, the child who is the very image of himself. The daughter he had cared for all his life. Should that be grounds for absolution? Gradlon deliberates. Then he pushes her from the horse. His answer is punishment without mercy. Royalists could look at this painting and see a portrait of a righteous, powerfully charismatic monarch — one who could condemn even his own child when faced with wrongdoing. Republicans, however, could read it differently. Earlier, a royal couple had burned their sons' tendons. Now, a king shoves his own child aside to save himself first. The painting, they might argue, shows that such a cruel image of kingship has no place in the present age. With this work too, Luminais struck a chord with both sides. Another success.

Whether Luminais precisely intended these reactions before he put brush to canvas is impossible to know.

Without his own words and records, it cannot move beyond the realm of inference. What is certain, however, is that Luminais benefited considerably from this dynamic. "The Sons of Clovis II," which had caused a sensation at the Salon, was sold to Australia. "The Flight of Gradlon" was placed on the selection list of the French state's fine arts commission for outstanding works — and the state purchased it for a sum said to equal several years' wages for an ordinary citizen of the time. Luminais was, by any measure, a successful painter.

Of course, Luminais's artistic path drew criticism — some calling him an "opportunist."

There were also complaints that he sacrificed historical accuracy to satisfy the academy's tastes, producing depictions at odds with reality. Yet it was undeniable that artists who combined his level of skill with his commercial instincts were rare at the time. In addition, Luminais occasionally painted works such as "The Widow" — a rural woman in tears, her back to a boat that has returned bearing only her husband's traces, the man himself never coming home from the sea. The sorrow of a poor fisherman's life is felt throughout: in the mournful expression, the crumpled clothing, the muted palette, the desolate landscape. This was not mythological painting, history painting, or genre painting. It was closer to a kind of realism — something that, for its day, verged on the avant-garde. He was capable of making such work. He simply chose a different path.

Luminais married twice during his lifetime. His first wife bore him a daughter. After her death, he remarried one of his own students. He was also one of the few academic painters of his era who taught women.

Even in his later years, Luminais maintained his reputation — contributing to a large mural project inside the dome of the Paris Bourse de Commerce. He received the Legion of Honor and won a gold medal at a world exposition. For more than forty years, he divided his time between a studio in Paris and a country house in Braine, in the center-west of France. Luminais died in Paris in 1896, at the age of seventy-five. He was laid to rest in a small cemetery in Douadic.

Not every painter fought against the age. Some accepted it, and elevated the image the age desired to the heights of their craft. Art needed such painters too. Whatever the case, art remained art even when it stayed in its place. One truth about art is that there are no correct answers anywhere. The vast majority of works are simply reassessed and reassessed again, interpreted and reinterpreted endlessly — much like the paintings of Luminais.

Françoise Daum, Dominique Dussol et al., Evariste Vital Luminais, Peintre des Gaules., Exhibition catalogue, Carcassonne: Musée des beaux-arts; Charleville-Mézières: Musée de l'Ardenne

Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen