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Delacroix's Dante and Virgil as a romantic manifesto: politics and theory in the early 1820s

Art Journal, Summer, 1993 by James H. Rubin

To this very day, artists are bedeviled by a conflict between their frequent desire to address the relevant, and thus inherently political, subjects of modernity, and their need to reach their audience by avoiding overly radical artistic forms. Any study of French Romantic painting, in which this tension first emerges, must consider Eugene Delacroix's Barque of Dante and Virgil Crossing the River Styx.(1) With this picture, a new, young, and ambitious artist launched his public career at the official Salon of 1822.(2) Large and powerful figures of tormented psychology and twisted posture, painted with brilliant colorism and vigorous handling, were intended to stun his audience with a novel and grandiose vision. The picture is like a manifesto, announcing a group of themes and formal concerns that inform the Romanticism of the 1820s. Yet it also embodies the artist's ambivalence in the early part of his career. On the one hand, Delacroix's choices of subject and formal vocabulary constitute the first in a lifelong series of attempts to transcend the artistic conflicts of the nineteenth century--to combine both idealism and modernity. On the other hand, France was still preoccupied with the political legacy of the Revolution and Empire.(3) Delacroix's choices sought not simply a middle road, but a position beyond the conservative and liberal ideologies becoming associated with the competing systems of classicism and Romanticism.

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The complexity of Delacroix's position is suggested by the existence of two more or less contradictory views of his Dante and Virgil. Of course, Delacroix had a penchant for literary subjects. The first way of seeing his painting, then, takes it to be the illustration, more or less convincing (either dramatically or stylistically), of a narrative. Although the quotations that follow were written years after Delacroix made his debut at the Salon of 1822, they evince a dualism that we shall find already latent in more contemporary reactions to his work. A passage written by Theophile Gautier in 1855 exemplifies this attitude. Despite its length it will refresh our memory of the Dante and Virgil and concentrate attention on its particularities of subject matter and imagery:

Dante and Virgil, standing in the boat, are seen against a background darkened by the rust-colored smoke of the eternal fires. Dante leans toward his guide Virgil with that feeling of terror that recurs with virtually every stanza of the Divine Comedy; the Mantuan poet, Virgil, accustomed for a dozen centuries to the horrors of this shadowy empire, is far more calm. He is disturbed neither by the gnashing mouths nor by the convulsive hands that bite and scratch at the sides of the boat. Meanwhile, the Florentine is terrified as he watches the bodies twisted by fruitless effort, and their torsos, pallid like dead flesh. In the dirty foam, the livid light of infernal day seems to extinguish itself on them. One of these damned souls, arched on a wave like a torture victim tied to the wheel, is surely one of the most beautiful passages of painting M. Delacroix has ever done.(4)

The same year, Maxime du Camp, who also viewed the painting at the Exposition Universelle, criticized Delacroix's figure of the oarsman, Phlegias:

In the way this personage is posed, we already recognize Delacroix's tendency to depart too easily from truth so as to obtain an effect of movement which is unmotivated and is thus merely picturesque. The rudder, over which Phlegias leans so vigorously that it makes all his musculature bulge, is not even hinged in a way that would call for such an effort. This detail would be insignificant if it did not prove, in Delacroix's art, a nearly systematic contempt for the precision that true masters have always respected. The picture is important for revealing a preoccupation, if not with beauty, in the very least with form.(5)

Both authors treat the painting as the illustration of a text, the representation of which must have a reasonable degree of naturalism. Though they disagree on the acceptability of effects that do not conform to this criterion, both classify them as formal or picturesque, that is, motivated primarily by aesthetic concerns.

Baudelaire considered the second, formal or "picturesque" reading of Delacroix's painting to be normative. Warning the viewer against excessive reliance on narrative, the poet located Delacroix's essence in expressive associations of color harmonies and pictorial structure, which he often compared, following the master, to music. His modernist vision detaches the signifier from its referent to make Delacroix a precursor of symbolism and abstraction. It is sometimes forgotten that this famous passage refers to the Dante and Virgil:

For Eugene Delacroix, nature is a vast dictionary, whose leaves he turns and consults with a sure and searching eye; and his painting, which issues above all from memory, speaks above all to memory. The effect it produces on the soul of the viewer is analogous to the painter's means. One of Delacroix's paintings, the Dante and Virgil, for example, always leaves a profound impression, whose intensity increases with distance. Forever sacrificing details to the whole and fearing to weaken the vitality of his thought by the drudgery of a neater and more linear execution, he revels in the fullness of an undefinable originality, which is his intimacy with the subject.(6)

Delacroix's Dante and Virgil as a romantic manifesto: politics and theory in the early 1820s

Art Journal, Summer, 1993 by James H. Rubin

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