Confronting Death: An Exploration of the Morbid in David and Delacroix

The concept of death is one that has haunted, confused, and intrigued mankind for millennia. Every person has a different reaction to their own ultimate mortality, and art, in particular, provides a perfect medium for exploring one's fears and beliefs. The subject of death has been explored to great lengths in the works of Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Delacroix, two artists who are often discussed as being representative of the artistic movements Neo-classicism and Romanticism. It is through the comparison and contrast of their stylistic approaches to depicting the morbid, and the study of their own philosophical and religious influences, that we can better understand these two artists and their feelings about the after-life. By doing so one finds that Delacroix's representations of death are more bleak and violent, in keeping with his Romantic tendencies and fascination with Catholic art, while David's stoicism was more inspired by classical philosophy and Socratic beliefs in the neutrality of mortality.

Neo-classicism, that wide-reaching artistic and cultural movement of the late eighteenth century, sprang to life after the discovery of the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 1738 and 1748, respectively . Artists began to "[plumb] new depths of inspiration from Roman, Etruscan or Greek antiquity" (Cailleaux ii), and many looked to the "days of the Republic... to serve as a symbol and model for the exaltation of virtue, for the nobility of sentiment, [and] for the sovreignty [sic] of moral rectitude" (Cailleaux ii). Essentially artists were reacting against the decadence and frivolity of the Versailles lifestyle as well as the Baroque and rococo movements, instead trying to emulate and emphasize Republican virtues (Cailleaux vii). For Neo-classicists, painting was "no longer an amusing pastime, it [was] made to elevate the soul and force people to think. Its function [was] moral as well as political" (Cailleaux vii). They had moved from the "youthfulness and gaiety" of the beginning of the century to an austere illustration of virtue at the end of the century (Cailleaux vii).

It was into this new tradition that Jacques-Louis David was born and quickly established himself. As Sophie Monneret puts it, "David's fervent quest as a young man was to overcome the rococo tradition of his predecessors and the academic convention of his training, and establish himself as the grand expositor of classical antiquity" . He managed to do just that, and to become one of the most influential artists of French history; even Delacroix, a symbol of French romanticism, whose relationship to David's work will be examined later in this essay, called David "the father of the whole modern school in painting and sculpture" (qtd. in Monneret 8). His forte was monumental history paintings, like The Oath of the Horatii (Fig. 1), which Jean Cailleaux cites as an indication of the move away from the depiction of antiquity as "voluptuous and divine" (viii) to an illustration of virtue, morality, and the humanization of noble subjects in ancient history (viii). David also followed this set of rules when tackling 'art de morier' or 'Art of Dying' (Cailleux vii), a subject that preoccupied many of his most famous paintings such as The Death of Socrates (Fig. 2) and The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (Fig. 3).

The Death of Socrates was a particularly effective and popular piece of David's work. The artist shows the famed philosopher, who was condemned to death by the government of Athens for attempting to corrupt the minds of the youth and undermine religion (Monneret 73), at the moment just before he takes the poison which will end his life. He is shown surrounded by his followers, many of whom are visibly upset at the tragic events that are unfolding before their eyes. Socrates himself, though, is a vision of serenity and placidity; he sits upright, one hand reaching for the goblet of hemlock, the other pointed skyward, his face absent of any discernible fear or sadness. When contrasted with his followers, the stark differences become quite apparent; David has set up several binaries: straight (Socrates) vs. curvilinear (his followers), stoicism and masculinity (again, Socrates) vs. emotion and femininity (his followers, who David has feminized by depicting them in the same way as the women of The Oath of the Horatii). This portrayal then elevates Socrates from philosopher to classical hero, as his bravery in the face of death is the take-away point of the piece.

This portrayal of death as something that is not meant to be feared is perfectly aligned with Socrates' own philosophy regarding one's mortality. In Plato's dialogues of the trial and death of the great Athenian thinker, Socrates says that, "those who rightly engage in philosophy, study only dying and death... it would be surely strange for a man all through his life to desire only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it" . According to Socrates, man does not possess the knowledge to fully understand death; therefore it would be silly to fear it in the intense way that most do . This laissez-faire attitude towards death explains why the philosopher is so calm and emotionless in David's painting. The subject of a martyr dying for

his own ideals and to subordinate their power to the state would also have spoken to David, as is

evidenced in several of his other 'art de morier' paintings.

In The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic, has ordered the execution of his sons after discovering their involvement in a plot to return the Tarquin monarchy to power (Monneret 92). David shows the moment at which the bodies of Brutus' sons are being returned to his home following their execution. The painting follows many of David's usual conventions, and is also philosophically very similar to The Death of Socrates. The subject of death is approached differently by the two clusters of figures; the women on the right of the work are emotionally distraught, their curvilinearity mirroring that of the followers in Socrates. Brutus, though a brooding figure likely dealing with a variety of complex emotions, is far more internalized and stoic; he is Socrates' doppelganger. According to Monneret, "for the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Brutus was a heroic example of republican liberty, who had placed the interests of the nation above the life of his sons" (92-93) in the same way that Socrates put the interests of the city-state above his own life.

David also painted a post-mortem portrait of fellow revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat after his assassination by royalist Charlotte Corday. The painting, though not Neo-classical in setting or source, does still have a lot in common with David's other works like The Death of Socrates. According to William Vaughan, The Death of Marat (Fig. 4) was an example of an exemplum virtuitis which showed "a hero sacrificing himself for some noble cause" , usually involving a "person making the decision that a moral principle lay above personal interest... The Death of Socrates was a common example of such an exemplum virtuitis". As in David's other depictions of death, the gruesomeness is kept to a bare minimum; there are glimpses of blood in the bath-tub itself, but there is no blood on Marat's body, despite the fact that he was stabbed several times. This is in keeping with the austerity of Neo-classicism, and serves to focus the viewer's attention on the man himself, rather than the action of murder. As Tom Gretton writes, "murders turned into martyrdoms affirm the values embodied by the victim, and they show as worthless and futile the killer's attempts to negate those values" . It is not surprising that David has shown Marat has a martyr, or even a Christ-like figure (Monneret 111), since he knew the man intimately; this would account for this exemplum virtuitis' differences with The Death of Socrates. The work does attempt to "awaken a sense of loss in the spectator" and to perpetuate their shared Republican ideals and values. After all, just like Socrates and Brutus (via his execution of his sons), Marat faced death due to his principles and belief in the importance of the state.

Romanticism, the other major movement of the early 19th-century, lacked Neo-classicism's connection to the French Revolution and Republican ideals and virtues; instead Romantic artists "catered to common taste rather than to higher principles... it was naturalistic and popular" . And though art historians have begun to back away from the concept of Neo-classicism and Romanticism as total stylistic opposites , they still had major fundamental differences in their approach to painting as an art-form, particularly when it came to the importance of color versus contour . Delacroix came to be associated with the school of thought that favored color, while Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, a remnant of the Davidian school, spearheaded the group that wanted to keep lines and contour as supreme. As their contemporaries described it, "Ingres represent[ed] tradition and 'style', Delacroix innovation and rebellion against stylistic formulas" (Chu 91), and, as such, Delacroix came to be seen as the figurehead of the Romantic movement in France (Delacroix 7).

One of his earlier works, The Death of Sardanapalus (Fig. 5), has come to be seen by many art historians as "the most extreme manifestation of Romanticism in his career" (Rubin 33). It's depiction of the morbid is almost antithetical to that of David's in The Death of Socrates or The Death of Marat; the scene, though taken from a classical source, is full of passion and color, writhing bodies and a strange, slanted perspective. This is far from the rigid and more academic portrayal of death in Neo-classicism. The subject, the king of Syria, is a vain and corrupt ruler who forces his slaves to commit suicide alongside him, which clashes with the "French classical tradition of representing kings as great leaders engaged in heroic acts that impart a positive moral lesson" . Saradanapalus' antiheroism and selfishness also directly conflicts with the stoicism and courage of Socrates, and though both are committing suicide the latter is doing so in order to uphold his principles while the former is doing it out of mere cowardice and fear. This clear distinction in subject matter is indicative of the fundamental stylistic rift between Neo-classicism and Romanticism.

Earlier in his career, at the Salon of 1824, Delacroix premiered Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (Fig. 6). The painting represented a radical change from Davidian Neo-classicism, and posed a threat to that long-standing tradition of French painting (Johnson 113). As such, it was panned by most reviewers and art critics of the time. They found that the work "did not yield any isolated dramatic scene where [they] could decipher one oasis of action" , and felt that it was essentially without plot. One critic that did find something worth liking in Chios was Etienne-Jean Delécluze, a former student of David often described as "resistant to innovation and change" and "assiduous in tending the Davidian flame" (MacNamidhe 63). He was drawn to the male figure reclining in the foreground of the painting, referring to his "compelling expression" (MacNamidhe 63) and calling him "the most remarkable figure" (qtd. in MacNamidhe 63) in the work. Margaret MacNamidhe suggests that his otherwise inexplicable approval of a decidedly non-classicist artwork derives from the central male figure's sense of total isolation and singularity, much like Leonidas in David's Leonidas at Thermopylae and Hersilia in his Intervention of the SabineWomen (63). As she puts it, "he glimpsed a precise variation wrought on the Sabines and the Leonidas in the expression of the central male nude" (MacNamidhe 77-78).

Other critics at the Salon wrote extensively on the painting's overall sense of exhaustion, futility, and suffering, again highlighting Delacroix's male nude as evidence (MacNamidhe 66). Critics Marie Aycard and Ferdinand Flocon wrote that "his entire body... is dominated by an exhaustion of his strength which proclaims that this man has fought long and hard and that he has fallen, exhausted of blood and life" (qtd. in MacNamidhe 66). Chauvin decried this morbid and gruesome depiction of death and violence, writing that Delacroix "did not have to resort to the disagreeable means pursued in the Chios" (qtd. in MacNamidhe 74). These critics were responding to the major differences in how Delacroix represented death, and how David and the Neo-classicists portrayed it. David's restraint and use of plot was thrown out the window, replaced by a colorful display of raw human emotion and fluid movement. This is not to say that the painting owes nothing to the Neo-classical tradition that came before it; as has been discussed, the central male nude appealed to the fiercely Neo-classical aesthetic of Delecluze, and it's "stagelike setting" and "monumental dimensions" (Johnson 113) are comparable to Davidian compositional styles. Accordingly, the work can be seen as a bridge of sorts between the two movements rather than a complete reaction against Neo-classicism.

Delacroix's artistic depiction of death in The Death of Sardanapalus and Scenes of the Massacre at Chios point to a philosophical understanding of the after-life less influenced by the great classical thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and more by Victor Cousin (whose writings inspired the transcendentalist movement in America) and Alexis de Tocqueville . He also looked towards the Roman Catholic Church for artistic inspiration, and though he was not formally Catholic he was still "fascinated by the art, architecture , and rituals of the... Church" (Johnson 123). The fact that he was influenced more by the religious tradition of painting than the Davidian school [(Charles Baudelaire referred to him as "the greatest religious painter of the secular nineteenth century")(Johnson 123)], likely contributed to his ability to paint the emotion and gruesome suffering that Chauvin so disliked. After all, Catholic imagery did not shy away from the morbid in art (Fig. 7), and the central male nude in Chios is not unlike the traditional pieta image of the dying Christ (Fig. 8), what with his chest wound, barely-concealed body, and recumbent posture. As for the depiction of death itself, Delacroix did not share the heroic and noble fortitude of Socrates when it came to addressing one's own mortality; in a letter written to George Sand after her recovery from typhus, he says that, "there are many miserable things in the world, but after all, what awaits us? La nuit, l'affreuse nuit (the night, the dreadful night)" (Spitzer 24). Hence why the main characters of his pieces lack the courage of Davidian heroes like Socrates and Marat; Sardanapalus acts with greed and perverse selfishness in his final hour, while the central male nude in Chios is exhausted and defeated in the face of death.

Through this comparison of the methods employed by David and Delacroix to represent mortality in their art, the fundamental differences between Neo-classicism and Romanticism become clear. And even though Delacroix himself said that he was "at heart purely classical" (Delacroix 7), and the two artistic movements are no longer seen as complete antitheses, there are still basic elements that set The Death of Sardanapalus and The Death of Socrates, for example,apart. These stylistic divergences are compounded by the philosophical disagreements between David and Delacroix; David was a more explicit product of the Enlightenment, drawing on the classical traditions of Socrates and Plato, while Delacroix was inspired by Catholicism and contemporary French philosophers like Victor Cousin and Alexis de Tocqueville. Thusly the figures of their paintings can be seen as physicalized representations of each artists' own fears and beliefs about death, and the works themselves products of their individual philosophies and influences.

SOURCES:

¹ Jean Cailleaux, "Aspects of Neo-Classicism in France," The Burlington Magazine. Vol. 115, No. 840 (March 1973) : i-xii.

² Sophie Monneret, David and Neo-Classicism, ed. Jean-Claude Dubost, trans. Chris Miller and Peter Snowdon (Paris: Finest SA/Editions Pierre Terrail, 1999), 8-9, 92.

³ Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates, trans. FJ Church, (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1880), 116

⁴ William Vaughan, "Terror and the Tabula Rosa", David's The Death of Marat, ed. William Vaughan and Helen Weston, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 83

⁵ William Vaughan, "Terror and the Tabula Rosa", David's The Death of Marat, ed. William Vaughan and Helen Weston, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 83

⁶ Tom Gretton, "Marat, l'Ami du Peuple, David: Love and Discipline in the Summer of '93", David's The Death of Marat, ed. William Vaughan and Helen Weston, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 50

⁷ Tony Halliday, "David's Marat as Posthumous Portrait", David's The Death of Marat, ed. William Vaughan and Helen Weston, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62

⁸ James H. Rubin, "Eugene Delacroix and Romanticism", The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. Beth S. Wright, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28

⁹Delacroix and the Romantic Image: Oriental Themes, Wild Beasts, and the Hunt, intro. by Frank Anderson Trapp, (Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum, 1988), 7

¹⁰ Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, "A Science and an Art at Once", The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. Beth S. Wright, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 90

¹¹ Dorothy Johnson, "Delacroix's Dialogue with the French Classical Tradition", The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. Beth S. Wright, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 113-114, 123

¹² Margaret MacNamidhe, "Delecluze's Response to Delacroix's Scenes from the Massacres at Chios", The Art Bulletin, March 2007, Vol. LXXXIX No. 1, (New York: College Art Association, 2007), 63-78

¹³ Alan B. Spitzer, "Delacroix in His Generation", The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. Beth S. Wright, (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24