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ночь на 3 мая 1808 г.", в котором изобразил трагическую развязку мадридского восстания и
раскрыл могучий дух непокоренного народа.
Искусство Гойи предваряло романтизм - новое художественное направление в
западноевропейском искусстве.
VII. Topics for discussion.
1. Goya's portraits.
2. Goya's engravings.
3. Goya as a forerunner of Romanticism.
UNIT VI DELACROIX (1798-1863)
Eugene Delacroix was one of the leading French and European painters for more than a
generation. He was a real Romantic - solitary, moody, imaginative, profoundly emotional. Although
Delacroix admired Italian art and wanted to go to Italy, he never went there; his journeys were to
England, Belgium, Holland, Spain and North Africa. His life was marked by few external events.
His real life, of great intensity, was lived on the canvas. "What is most real in me," he wrote, "are
the illusions I create with my painting; the rest is shifting sand". In the course of his life he
produced thousands of oil paintings and water-colours and innumerable drawings, and not long
before his death he claimed that "in the matter of compositions I have enough for two human
lifetimes; and as for projects of all kinds, I have enough for four hundred years." Delacroix wanted
to paint scenes of emotional or physical violence. Often he drew his subjects from English poetry,
especially Shakespeare and Byron, and from medieval history. He admired Beethoven, but his idol
in music was "the divine Mozart". His lifelong loyalty to the sixteenth century Venetians and to
Rubens constantly strengthened.
In the Bark of Dante, of 1822, Delacroix illustrates a moment from the Divine Comedy in
which the poet, accompanied by Virgil, is steered across the dark tides of the lake surrounding the
city of Dis, attacked in the sulphurous dimness by damned souls rising from the waves against a
background of towers and flames. In this painting Delacroix has broken up the pyramidal grouping,
and is more concerned with effects of colour and of light and dark than with form. Some of the
drops of water are painted in pure tones of red and green. Delacroix's basic compositional principle
is a series of free curves, arising from the central area and always returning to it. This painting was
highly praised.
Delacroix's next major work the Massacre at Chios, of 1824, was not easily accepted. The
subject was an incident from the Greek wars of liberation against the Turks, which had excited the
sympathies of Romantic spirit everywhere. The foreground is scattered with bodies. The
neobaroque composition is diffused in Delacroix's centrifugal curves, which part to display the
distant slaughter and conflagration. The observer's sympathies are supposed to be with the
sufferings of the Greeks, but their rendering is not convincing. The expressions tend to become
standardised; the head of the young woman at the lower left almost repeats that of the dead mother
at the lower right. This picture was called the "massacre of painting." The colour shows a richness
and vibrancy not visible in French painting since the Rococo. He brought this huge picture to Paris
for the Salon of 1824, and before the exhibition opened he took it down and repainted it in tones
emulating those, he found in Constable. From here on, Delacroix's interest in colour was great. He
investigated colour contrasts on the canvas and in nature and derived a law - "the more contrast the
greater the force."
With the Death of Sardanapalus as a manifesto of Romanticism, the artist drew down upon
himself the disapproval of royal administrators. The legendary subject concerns the last of the
Assyrian monarchs, besieged in his palace for two years by the Medes. On hearing that the enemy
had at last breached his walls, the king had all his concubines, slaves, and horses slaughtered and
his treasures destroyed before his eyes, as he lay upon a couch soon to become his funeral pyre.
Lacking the pretext of humanitarianism that justified the Massacre at Chios and other pictures
inspired by the Greek struggle for independence, the painting becomes a feast of violence, spread
out in glowing colours against the smoke of distant battle. The picture is a phantasmagoria in which