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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
Focusing on the painter's technical competence, Delecluze saw the work as experimental--incomplete and tentative. Though hardly full of praise, such statements at least reflect the painter's success in focusing on matters of artistic process. Delacroix approaches the question of modernity--with which the images of Dante, Michelangelo, and Gericault are so involved--in ways that shift attention from potentially controversial contact with politics and the contemporary to the more ostensibly insulated and universal realm of aesthetics and emotions. He draws attention to himself through stylistic rather than political controversy. It may be helpful to see the Dante and Virgil as a kind of self-conscious meditation on the art-historical consequences of the Raft and, by extension, on Romanticism. Delacroix's position regarding modernity appears oblique, at one remove from that of Gericault. Rather than choosing an overtly contemporary event--indeed, Delacroix put off his project on the Greek wars--he dealt with attitudes toward such subjects. Like others of his generation, he repudiated political activism for what Alan Spitzer calls "intellectual adventuring."(46) On the one hand ambiguously evoking both the dangers and delights of 1820s liberalism, Delacroix on the other hand transcended its political context. He sought universal value by displacing the rivalries that dogged the politics of his time into a literary and theoretical frame of reference. With Dante as protagonist, his painting came to be about art.
The literary origins of Delacroix's painterly manner are well known, and with its precedent in the tradition of Rubenism (as opposed to Poussinism), the relationship of the sketchlike technique to imagination is a commonplace of art history. However, the style acquires added dimension, linked to Delacroix's half-conscious and ambivalent social and political postures, when we see how it evolved out of reflections on Michelangelo and modernity within the context of the rivalries of the early 1820s. Delacroix always believed that for his art to speak directly to emotions, his spontaneity would have to be genuine. We know through Delacroix's Journal that this was a period of great experimentation for him and that, in addition to looking at Gericault and Michelangelo, whom we mentioned earlier, he was interested in artists such as Goya and Velazquez.(47) In fact, much of the Dante and Virgil appears rapidly and loosely executed, at least when compared to other contemporary paintings, and in spite of the probability that Delacroix later retouched it. This aspect of the picture is what attracted most comment, other than Delecluze's brief but pointed remarks. For example, C. P. Landon, a former student of Girodet, was shocked by these stylistic features, which he analyzed in more detail than had Delecluze. He wrote:
Seen from far enough away so that the brushstrokes are not visible, this painting, despite its grayish color, produces a remarkable effect thanks to its dramatic composition, which is full of nerve and originality. Seen close up, however, its touch is so choppy and incoherent, though certainly not timid, that one can hardly believe, given the point to which execution skills have been perfected in our school, that an artist would adopt such an unusual technique, which one finds sometimes in paintings in distemper. One is tempted to see two different hands in the picture: it is as if the first arranged the subject on the canvas and drew the figures, and then the second colored them in. One might even venture to think (if such a thing were possible) that the picture is . . . by the brush of a modern |artist~ working after some old drawing of the Florentine school.(48)
