Romantic Art

♪♪ This is another painting by David, The Death of Socrates. Socrates was a famous philosopher in ancient Athens. He was convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens, and his sentence was to die by drinking hemlock. The citizens of Athens fully expected for Socrates to leave the city and stay in exile the rest of his life, but Socrates would not do that because he believed that citizens of a city should follow the rules of the city. And so, true to his own teachings, he drinks the hemlock. These are all his followers around him crying. This is The Death of Marat, painted in 1793. It also is in the neoclassical style. It is one of the most famous images of the French Revolution. This painting depicts the radical journalist Jean Paul Marat lying dead in his bath on July the 13th, 1793, after his murder by Charlotte Corday. Corday, who was from a minor aristocratic family, blamed Marat for the September massacres and feared an all-out civil war. She claimed, I killed one man to save 100,000. Marat often sought the comfort of a cold bath to ease the violent itchings due to a skin disease that he contracted many years earlier when he was forced to hide from his enemies in the Paris sewers. David was a close friend of Marat and a supporter of Robespierre and the Jacobins. David had a great deal of difficulty speaking because he had a large facial tumor, the result of a fencing injury. He was overwhelmed by their natural capacity for convincing crowds with their speeches, and he memorializes his friend in this portrait. There's a paper in Marat's left hand. It's a letter that says in French, I am just too unhappy to deserve your kindness. The name Charlotte Corday can also be seen on the paper held in Marat's left hand. The other details in the painting come from David's visit to Marat's house the day before. The green rug, the papers, and the pen. The death of Marat is meant to commemorate a personable hero. The death of Marat has often been compared to Michelangelo's Pieta. Note the elongated arm hanging down in both the works. David also admired the works of Caravaggio and he mirrors the same use of chiaroscuro, light and dark, in the death of Marat. David painted Marat as a martyr of the revolution in a style reminiscent of a Christian martyr with a face and a body bathed in a glowing soft light. There's an interesting variation of this painting by the expressionist Edvard Munch, the man who painted the screen. We can see in this painting that he depicts Corday as still by the side of Marat. This is one of David's revolutionary paintings of Napoleon. John Antoine Gros was Napoleon's battlefield painter. He traveled with Napoleon on campaigns and captured significant moments in the life of Napoleon. Here is Napoleon visiting the pest house at Joppa. Here he is portrayed as a Christ-like figure, reaching out to touch the people who are ill and dying, almost trying to heal them. This is Napoleon on the battlefield at Ely. Along with Gros, one of the first painters to base images of heroism on contemporary events rather than on classical lore and Christian legend is Goya. He was the court painter to the Spanish King Charles IV. He painted portraits often with unflattering realism. For example, this family of King Charles IV shows the family for what they are, vain and pompous. The royals are spread out like a freeze, heavy, dull-faced, self-satisfied, squashed together with little elegance and no style. The vixenish queen, the stupid king, their stumpish air, yet their clothing is dazzling, silks, glittering, gleaming, blazing out with undiminished glamour. His career spans 60 years, changing and maturing right up to the 1820s. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Goya's work took a different turn. His greatest painting is the Third of May. One of a pair of paintings focusing on the brutal suppression and subsequent mass executions of Spanish civilians who had risen against French troops on May 2, 1808. Painted six years after the event, only when King Ferdinand VII was finally restored to power in 1813 did Goya quickly send him a petition asking to commemorate the most notable and heroic actions or scenes of our glorious insurrection against the tyrant of Europe. Yet it is not the French that Goya condemns, but our communal cruelty. It is humankind that holds the rifles. The victims, too, are every man, the huddled masses of the poor who have no defender. Goya manages to make us feel that we are both the executioners and the executed, describing the dual potential for good and evil that we all possess. Which fate is worse? The intensity of fear, pain, and loss, or the extreme brutality on the other side? Who is dying in this picture? The depersonalized French or the dying Spanish? Another painting of this period was Jericho. This is the raft of the Medusa. This raft carries survivors from a French naval ship, La Medusa, which sank on the way to West Africa in 1816. The captain and the senior officers took the lifeboat and left 150 passengers on a makeshift raft adrift in the Atlantic Ocean for 13 days. All but 15 of them died. Jericho was opposed to the regime that appointed the captain. He painted this as a criticism of the unseemly behavior of the captain who acted out of political favoritism. He interviewed the survivors, made a model of the raft, and viewed the corpses in the Paris morgue. This was the era before photography, and this painting provided a visual, vivid record of a sensational contemporary event. Jericho was denied his controversy when the painting won a prize at the Paris Salon in 1819. Take note of the nudes that are reminiscent of Michelangelo and the light and dark style of Chiara Scuro in the manner of Caravaggio. This is the romantic theme of heroic combatants in the struggle against the forces of nature, humble human beings confronting deadly danger and political injustice. Jericho painted a series of haunting portraits of the insane. Tragic, haunted faces that had personal resonance for him and make us feel that the potential for various imbalances are endemic in all of us. Our own possible futures that we contemplate. Eugene Delacroix, another painter of this era. While Jericho was preoccupied with death and the morbid, Delacroix sought to capture a sense of the romantic fullness of being alive. Like Jericho, Delacroix was classically trained, but he went on to develop a style greatly influenced by Rubens, employing a vivid palette that makes him one of the great colors. Wild, reckless vitality makes him the visual equivalent of Byron. In fact, one of Delacroix's favorite heroes was Lord Byron. And like Byron, Delacroix spent time in exotic places like Tangiers in Morocco, bringing him in tune with this romantic world all his life. He depicted the harrowing women of Islamic Africa. He made memorable illustrations for Goethe's Faust and Dante's Inferno. He declared, I have no love for reasonable painting. This is the death of Sardanapalus, an Assyrian dictator. Painted in 1828. We can see here that the women are treated like chattel, along with the horses and the jewels. This is Arab skirmishing in the mountains. Delacroix painted this a few months before his death. It has been suggested that this depicts battle Delacroix may have witnessed between the Moroccan Sultan's tax collectors and local rebels as he traveled with Moroccan foreign ministers in 1832. However, it is really a romantic celebration of drama, color, and light. And of the exotic. A storyteller's painting reinvented 31 years after Delacroix's Moroccan journey. The fiery red cloak of the fallen horseman introduces a rhythm of color and leads our eye along this body up the path. Described by vegetation and kneeling gunmen. Liberty leading the people, 1830, is probably Delacroix's most famous painting. In 1830, Charles X dissolved the French legislature and repressed voting rights and freedom of the press. Middle class of France is represented by the gentleman in the frock coat and lower class by the scruffy youth carrying pistols. Racial minorities are represented by the black saber bearer on the left. This is a clear call to heroic action. In 1884, France sent a gift to America. A monumental copper sculpture of an idealized female. It was designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartoli. And labeled as the sister of Delacroix's painted heroine. It is the classic image of freedom for the homeless and oppressed peoples everywhere. And now you are the witness of my fervent desire. Conta i palpiti, i palpiti e i sospiri. E da lei che mi innamora, conta i palpiti e i sospiri. E i sospiri, e i sospiri.