Delacroix'sDante and Virgilas a Romantic Manifesto

Abstract

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 Eugène Delacroix's Barque of Dante and Virgil Crossing the River Styx (fig. I).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 color-ism 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.