Some Observations on the Symbolism of the Broken Pot in art and Literature

An inspection of The Broken Pitcher, a painting by the eighteenth century French painter Jean Baptiste Greuze (in the Louvre, Paris) may give rise to sexual interpretations. A rather childish girl is standing near a well, apparently on her way to fetch water. With her two hands she presses a bunch of roses to her abdomen, while from her right arm dangles a pitcher with a jagged hole in it. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, and the more lyrical say that “a kiss melts on her cherry-red swelling lips”.

Though an effort to establish sexual symbolism may have become fashionable in the post-Freudian world, in this case we can refer to authorities from a time antecedent to Freud. Though Greuze had the reputation of the moralistic painter of his time, and of the hypocrite among his colleagues, his veiled sensual side was not overlooked by critics and biographers. “He was the moralistic painter according to Diderot - writes Jaccottet - but his hidden sensuality remains the best element in his art”. Nearly a century ago the Goncourts wrote about the ingenuous Greuze-girl that “at a close view it will seem to you that the painter has placed her in an old era, among the weary appetites of the