“Dante Et Virgile Aux Enfers, Ou La Barque de Dante” (Dante and Virgil in Hell)

Adonis Ponce Jr.

Art 1001 Sec. 1

2/14/2014

“Dante et Virgile aux enfers, ou La Barque de Dante” (Dante and Virgil in Hell)

By: Eugéne Delacroix

Ferdinand Victor Eugéne Delacroix was born on April 26, 1798 in Charenton-Saint-Maurice, Ile-de-France, France. He was a French Romantic painter during the Romantic period. The inspirations of Delacroix were the art of Peter Paul Rubens and the painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an emphasis on color and movement instead of clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, who he shared a strong identification with the “forces of the sublime”. In his study of the optical effects of color, he not only shaped the work of the Impressionists, but also inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. Delacroix illustrated various works of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Scottish writer Walter Scott, and William Shakespeare. The central themes of his maturity were characterized by romantic and dramatic content. That led him to travel in Africa in search of exotic art, instead of the classical models of Greek and Roman art. His Romanticism was that of an individualist and as Charles Baudelaire said, “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”

The Barque of Dante, or Dante and Virgil in Hell, was the first major painting by Ferdinand Victor Eugéne Delacroix, and one of the works signaling a shift in the character of narrative painting from Neo-Classicism towards the Romantic Movement. The painting itself is oil on canvas, and its dimensions being 189 cm x 241 cm. It was finished just in time for the opening of the Salon of 1822 and currently hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The painting itself is based on the eight chapter of Dante’s Inferno. As you can see in the painting, Dante and Virgil are leaving the blazing City of the Dead and fearfully crossing the River Styx, plowing...