Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [58]
DELACROIX: PAINTER OF PASSION. Eugène Delacroix became leader of the Romantic movement after Géricault’s death. A moody, solitary man, he always ran a slight fever. Delacroix believed the artist should feel the agony of creation and, like his friend the composer Frederic Chopin, he was consumed by the flame of genius. “The real man is the savage,” he confided to his journal. As the Romantic poet Baudelaire put it, Delacroix was “passionately in love with passion.”
Delacroix chose his subjects from literature or from stirring topical events. Instead of the Neoclassic style of antique calm, violence charged his exotic images. Delacroix painted an early work, “Massacre at Chios,” as soon as he heard the news of Turks slaughtering Christians on the island of Chios. Although purists called it a “massacre of painting,” spectators wept when they saw the pitiful babe clutching its dead mother’s breast.
OUT OF AFRICA. In 1832, a visit to Morocco changed Delacroix’s life. He infiltrated a harem and made hundreds of sketches. Delacroix was fascinated by the colorful costumes and characters, like throwbacks to a flamboyant past. “The Greeks and Romans are here,” he wrote, “within my reach.” For the next thirty years, he stuck to lush colors, swirling curves, and animals like lions, tigers, and horses knotted in combat.
“The Death of Sardanapalus” shows Delacroix’s attraction to violence. Delacroix based the painting on Byron’s verses of the Assyrian emperor Sardanapalus, who, faced with military defeat, ordered his possessions destroyed before immolating himself on a funeral pyre. Delacroix portrays the shocking instant when servants execute the king’s harem girls and horses. It is an extravaganza of writhing bodies against a flaming red background. The intense hues, vivid light/dark contrasts, and turbulent forms in broad brushstrokes are a virtual manifesto of Romanticism.
Delacroix, “Death of Sardanapalus,” 1827, Louvre, Paris. Fascinated by physical and emotional excess, Delacroix portrays a wild, writhing scene as an emperor’s concubines are murdered.
NEOCLASSICISM VS. ROMANTICISM
For twenty-five years Delacroix and Ingres led rival schools whose squabbling dominated the Paris art scene. Their two paintings of the virtuoso violinist Paganini demonstrate the different outlooks and techniques of the Neoclassic and Romantic movements.
Ingres was a talented violinist himself and knew Paganini personally, yet his version of the maestro is an objective, formal portrait of the public man. With photographic accuracy, his crisp, precise lines duplicate exactly Paganini’s physical appearance. This is a rational man, totally in control.
Delacroix defines the musician’s form through color and energetic, fluid brushwork, as opposed to lines. Unlike Ingres’s ramrod-straight figure, Delacroix’s Paganini is curved like a violin, carried away by the ecstasy of performance. Eyes closed, foot almost tapping, Delacroix’s painting is a figure of passionate abandon. This is the inner man in the throes of emotion.
Ingres,“Paganini,”1819, Louvre, Paris.
Delacroix,“Paganini,” c. 1832, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.
CONTRIBUTIONS. Delacroix liberated painting from the Classical concept of color as a tint applied over forms defined by line drawing. Under his hand, color — especially vibrating adjacent tones — became the indispensable means to model forms, a discovery extended by van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, Seurat, and Cézanne. The admiring van Gogh remarked, in fact, that “only Rembrandt and Delacroix could paint the face of Christ.”
Delacroix did not attempt to reproduce reality precisely but aimed at capturing its essence. He established the right of a painter to defy tradition and paint as he liked. Goya, who had been similarly idiosyncratic, saw Delacroix’s work when the Spaniard was an old man and heartily approved.
Delacroix,