Lecture 40: Romanticism in the 19th Century
Note the hip-shot pose and the transported expression on the subject’s face.
This painting was meant to suggest what the artist saw and heard, not just
to record a likeness. Painted rapidly and passionately, the painting parallels
Paganini’s own playing.Before we return to Delacroix, we will look at two other artists and paintings.
The ¿ rst of these is Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (17711835), who painted
Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1799) that we
see here. In 1799, Napoleon conducted a campaign in the Holy Land; Jaffa
is a port city there. The exotic locale and the Near Eastern architecture
obviously appealed to the artist. We see Napoleon as a miracle worker, a
healer. Unafraid, he touches an afÀ icted man. The obvious reference to
biblical stories of Jesus healing the sick may seem odd in the anticlerical
atmosphere of revolutionary France, but it helped guarantee the success of
the painting. This is a prime example of art as propaganda, more complex
than David’s Napoleonic works but nearly as effective. Gros was a great
admirer of Rubens, and he applied vibrant colors and manipulated light more
freely than did David, whose disciple he remained. Some of the other ¿ gures
include a large kneeling man and a wounded soldier.The second artist is Théodore Géricault (1791–1824); we see his Raft of
the Medusa (1818–1819). On July 2, 1816, the Medusa, a French frigate
carrying colonists and soldiers to Senegal, foundered on a reef off the coast
of Africa. The six lifeboats available were commandeered by the incompetent
captain—a political appointee—and his senior of¿ cers. The 150 people left
behind had to carpenter together a raft to carry them from the wreckage. For
13 days, they À oated, suffered, starved, died or went mad, and were driven
to cannibalism. Only 15 survived and 2 of them published an account of the
tragedy that quickly mushroomed into a major political scandal.Géricault’s genius was to transform this contemporary event into a painting of
epic, even mythic, resonance. His preparations for the huge painting included
interviewing survivors, studying the movement of water, constructing a
model of the raft, sketching corpses in morgues and the inmates of insane
asylums, even collecting body parts from morgues, which he arranged as
gruesome still lifes and painted as they decomposed. Géricault edited and
composed these raw data into a dynamic, asymmetrical pyramid. The design