Inventing Assyria: exoticism and reception in nineteenth-century England and France

But Delacroix's scene cannot be taken as a closer transcription of a textual source. To the contrary, this work also maps itself on a field of overlapping and discontinuous textual referents. First, Byron's soulful conception of Sardanapalus is not compatible with that of the classical historians. Byron's play does not even include this scene of brilliant immolation. Beyond the divergence between the classical and Byronic conceptions, a third text further problematizes the precise subject. This text is contemporary with Delacroix, and one to which his work clearly was meant to refer. An unattributed paragraph, in quotation marks, it was published in the Salon catalogue accompanying the work's original exhibition. Its description of Sardanapalus and his setting follows approximately the account of Diodorus Siculus (the major classical authority for the incident), but also mentions two other characters, including a Bactrian woman, Aischeh, who is mentioned nowhere else among the established sources of the legend and does not seem clearly identifiable within Delacroix's image.

Visually, the same sort of referential calculus is at work here as in Martin's image. Delacroix again creates Assyria through citations from a wide and heterogeneous range of sources, always substantiating the most imaginary and sensational by including elements agreed to be authentic and attested. But whereas Martin explicitly claimed to have invented a single period style used more or less consistently in the setting, Delacroix employs a pastiche of visual references from a variety of ancient and contemporary cultures. In Delacroix's attempt to pass off details of architecture, costume, and implements as Assyrian, convincing cases have been made for his painstaking transposition of archaic Greek, Mogul Indian, Etruscan, and Egyptian sources in various aspects of the painting.(23)

Delacroix's work, like Martin's, creates a network of references to authoritative texts and artifacts. But the considerable differences between the two images, renditions of the same subject drawn from common sources of a given historical moment, only serve to further undermine the claim of each to objectivity. Ancient Assyria, then, serves as a mirror that reflects the different preconceptions and desires of the representer as much as it does any objective subject being represented. Western artists and audiences, while partaking of a widely accepted network of established references, also differently construe the imagery of a foreign culture in a way related to their own cultural differences. The subject of the fall of Nineveh thus floats on a sea of references without being precisely tied to any one. It is strikingly open to individual manipulation.

Delacroix's conception of the subject, with its explicit violence, sexuality, and cruelty, contrasts sharply with the mock-heroic and sentimentalized conception of Martin. Martin's placement of the king bestows on him a certain privilege, as he engages in a grand pointing gesture that elevates him above the height of the crowd. Delacroix's king, by contrast, lies in darkness outside the main focus of the composition. Rather than acting, he watches impassively.