Achilles - Bourgeois

A print of Bourgeois' Achilles — a reproductive engraving of the greatest of the Greek heroes at Troy, drawn in the clean line of the European printmaking tradition that carried classical types out of museums and into 19th century households.

Achilles is the central figure of Homer's Iliad, son of the sea-nymph Thetis and the mortal Peleus, king of the Myrmidons. His mother dipped him in the Styx to make him invulnerable — all of him, save the heel by which she held him — and he is the last and most terrible of the heroic generation. The arc of the Iliad turns on his anger: the quarrel with Agamemnon that keeps him from the field, the death of Patroclus that drives him back to it, the killing of Hector and the abuse of the corpse, and finally the visit of old King Priam, alone in the Greek camp at night, to ransom his son.

Reproductive engraving — line-engraved plates after celebrated paintings and antique sculptures — was the 19th century's dominant technology for the distribution of fine art, carrying the canon of Western imagery into thousands of middle-class households that would never travel to Rome or Florence to see the originals.