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

2. Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugene Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 1816-1831, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1: no. 100, 72-78, is the definitive factual treatment of the Dante and Virgil's origins, sources, condition, and history.

3. This peculiarity of the Restoration is amply documented in Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of Historians in the French Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958).

4. Theophile Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, 1855 (Paris: Michel Levy, 1856), 173.

5. Maxime du Camp, Les Beaux-Arts a l'Exposition universelle de 1855 (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1855), 94-95.

6. Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1846," in H. Lemaitre, ed., Curiosites esthetiques: L'Art romantique et autres oeuvres critiques de Baudelaire (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1962), 119.

7. On the boat theme, see Rene Huygue, "Delacroix et le theme de la barque," La Revue du Louvre et des musees de France 2 (1963): 65-72; Lorenz Eitner, "The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat," Art Bulletin 37 (1955): 281-90; and Northrop Frye, "The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism," in Northrop Frye, ed., Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 1-25.

8. For biographical details, the best source is Johnson, The Paintings of Eugene Delacroix, 163ff. In her recent book, Eugene Delacroix: Prints, Politics and Satire (1814-1822) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer treats Delacroix's early political caricatures, establishing both that one of the motives underlying them was commercial and that their orientation was overtly antiregime.

9. On July 30, 1821, Delacroix wrote to his friend Soulier: "I want very much to make a picture for the next Salon, especially if it would in some way help to make me known"; Eugene Delacroix, Correspondance generale, ed. Andre Joubin, 5 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1936-38), 1: 128. On February 9, 1822, he wrote to his sister: "I am overwhelmed by work. If I accomplish what I have set out to do, I will in only two months have made a picture of considerable dimension that may help to make me known" (ibid., 5:106).

10. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820, amply treats the subject of the universities in his two chapters "Youth as the Age of Dissent," 35-70, and "The Professor as Guru," 71-96. (The latter is on Victor Cousin, whose lectures were suspended in 1820.)

11. Catalogue des peintures, sculptures . . . Salon de 1822 (Paris, 1822), no. 309.

12. On the album leaf, Delacroix experimented with the scene of Charon, Hell's boatman, whose appearance in Michelangelo's Last Judgment was famous in the visual arts and who therefore constituted a de rigueur point of departure. Eventually, the artist rejected the image of Charon's boat altogether, and from canto 8 he used less a specific incident than a generalized scene.

13. Most specific documentation postdates the Dante and Virgil. In his Journal of 1823 and 1824, for example, Delacroix declared that in Dante he found "all I have ever dreamed, without being able to define it," and "therein is everything I have felt within myself"; Andre Joubin, ed., Le Journal d'Eugene Delacroix, 3 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1932), 1:29 (May 16, 1823), 96-97 (May 7, 1824). Once, sometime after 1830, he dressed up as Dante for a masked ball; later, at the Library of the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace, he painted a scene of Dante welcomed by Homer to Parnassus. That composition is similar to one in which Delacroix represented the apotheosis of genius, another theme that preoccupied him. In an article published after my original essay was completed, Roy Howard Brown has made some complementary observations about Delacroix's figures as examples of evolution in the development of his hero type; see Roy Howard Brown, "The Formation of Delacroix's Hero between 1822 and 1831," Art Bulletin 66 (1984): 237-54.