The Paintings in the Library of the Bourbon Palace
I offer here a thorough analysis of all twenty-two paintings on the ceiling of the Library of the Bourbon Palace. There is no clear order to or path through the murals. Neither the architecture of the room, into which one normally enters at the middle of the west side, nor the arrangement or content of the paintings suggests an order in which to view them. Even Delacroix’s own published description of the paintings meanders. He proceeds through the cupolas from south to north but handles the pendentives in each cupola in varying orders. I proceed through the cupolas in Delacroix’s order and through the pendentive paintings of each cupola in zigzag fashion—from southeast to southwest to northeast to northwest, with respect to each dome—developing, as I go along, the ways in which each treats the subject of civilization and barbarism. Then I finish with the hemicycles.
PENDENTIVES IN THE FIRST BAY (SCIENCE)
FIG. 78 Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Pliny the Elder, 1841. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
The Roman naturalist meets a violent end while dictating his observations on the eruption of Vesuvius. Pliny’s attention is seized suddenly by something behind him and out of view, presumably whatever kills him. The irony is palpable: in creating his monumental account of nature, the Naturalis historia, nature herself, indifferent to his achievement, destroys Pliny. Possibly following the account of Madame de Staël in Corinne,1 Delacroix, in order to create this dramatic moment, departs from standard classical accounts of Pliny’s death, in which he sailed to Herculaneum to rescue a friend and was trapped there.
The narrative points to the passion, even hubris, of the creative personality, which neglects its own well-being in the pursuit of knowledge, but it also addresses one of Delacroix’s favorite themes regarding civilization: the indifference of nature to the work of man. Indeed, he uses the example of a volcano when writing in 1850 about the ways nature may destroy the works of man: “What do the Parthenon, Saint Peter’s in Rome, and other miracles of art matter to the changing seasons, the path of the stars, rivers, or winds? An earthquake, the lava of a volcano are going to do justice; birds make nests on ruins; wild beasts are going to pull bones from the uncovered tombs of the founders” (504).
Aristotle Describes the Animals
FIG. 79 Eugène Delacroix, Aristotle Describes the Animals, 1841. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Aristotle describes and classifies the animals sent to him by Alexander from the various places he has conquered.
It is no accident that two of the four pendentives in the science cupola treat natural history, the scientific field closest to Delacroix’s heart. He considered both subjects from early in his planning. Of all the ways in which Aristotle might have figured into the murals, Delacroix chose to commemorate his classification of the animal kingdom. As noted in chapter 4, Delacroix was fascinated by the natural history of animals, which he spent countless hours observing and drawing.
The great naturalist Georges Cuvier, whom Delacroix knew, emphasized in his history of the natural sciences how important the patronage of Alexander the Great was for Aristotle. Not only did Alexander send Aristotle animals captured during his campaigns, but he lavishly funded Aristotle’s research (to the amount of three million francs by Cuvier’s estimation) and helped him to found a library.2 Thus the painting is about both the achievement of an intellectual and the patronage that permitted it.
This painting also plays with and traverses the divide between nature and culture: as with the Pliny pendentive, the seemingly chaotic variety of nature is here transformed, through human agency, into the ordered, codified world of culture. Aristotle is in the midst of writing, reconfiguring the prodigious and variegated forms of plants and animals into a human order. The painting foregrounds a creative act that builds civilization.
Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes
FIG. 80 Eugène Delacroix, Hippocrates Refusing the Gifts of Artaxerxes, 1841. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Artaxerxes, the king of Persia, attempts to lure the doctor Hippocrates to his country, where plague had erupted, with the offer of fabulous gifts, but Hippocrates refuses them.
This subject usually served as an example of patriotic devotion or civic virtue: Hippocrates chooses duty to his country, which was at war with the Persia, over personal enrichment. Diderot and d’Alembert had praised him in this vein in the Encyclopédie, seeing “as much probity as science in his works and conduct.” They also saw his approach to medicine as a signal achievement of civilization because it was based on reason and empirical observation, as opposed to “fanaticism and superstition.”3 In his own famous treatment of the subject, Anne-Louis Girodet (1792, Louvre, Paris) had emphasized similar ideas.
These themes are certainly active in Delacroix’s version of the story, but in the context of the ceiling, the difference between civilizations, or perhaps between civilization and barbarism, is key. Delacroix plays up the exotic clothing, swarthy complexions, and bizarre objects (note the odd lids of the golden vases in the lower left) of the Persians beseeching Hippocrates. If in the Archimedes barbarism unthinkingly destroys civilization, here one civilization denies its benefits to another in the name of a reasoned patriotism.
Archimedes Killed by a Soldier
FIG. 81 Eugène Delacroix, Archimedes Killed by a Soldier, 1841. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Delacroix’s picture is closest to Livy’s account, in which Archimedes does not see the soldier who kills him: “Archimedes, in all the uproar which the alarm of a captured city could produce in the midst of plundering soldiers dashing about, was intent upon the figures which he had traced in the dust and was slain by a soldier, not knowing who he was” (Livy, History of Rome 25.31). Plutarch and others describe various verbal exchanges between the mathematician and his assailant, but Delacroix apparently wished to emphasize Archimedes’s complete obliviousness and vulnerability.4 All accounts, however, discuss Archimedes’s devotion to pure knowledge and disdain for applied science, even after his success designing armaments for Syracuse. His commitment to learning was so great that he neglected to eat and bathe, a condition alluded to by Delacroix through Archimedes’s disheveled, careless dress, which leaves his hip oddly exposed. Archimedes’ absorption in his creative pursuits, like that of Pliny, blinds him to the dangers surrounding him, but this image also suggests that study can cause the intellectual to neglect his physical condition. Montaigne had observed in his Essays that reading had the drawback of letting the body degrade, and Delacroix had marked the passage when he read it in 1857.5 Most important, the painting shows brutish ignorance killing one of civilization’s great men, exemplifying Delacroix’s often-repeated belief that barbarism may rise up at any moment and triumph over civilization.
Most antique sources describe Archimedes tracing figures in the dust, but Delacroix interestingly substitutes a lectern and scroll (the written word) as the attributes of civilization and lends him the classic pose of thought. The change suggests how important it was to link many of the figures through the motif of writing, which also figures in the Pliny and the Aristotle.
PENDENTIVES IN THE SECOND BAY (HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY)
Herodotus Consults the Magians
FIG. 82 Eugène Delacroix, Herodotus Consults the Magians, 1841. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
In the course of writing his Histories, Herodotus questions a group of Magians about their ancient traditions.
Often referred to as the first historian, Herodotus is a predictable inclusion in the dome of History and Philosophy. Delacroix had settled on him as a subject from early on, but without specifying a narrative. To my knowledge, the exact subject of this pendentive is unprecedented in the history of painting. The Magians, or hereditary Persian priests, figure intermittently in Herodotus’s Histories.6 They are occasionally important political actors, but they are also mentioned in passing as interpreters of dreams and omens and are the subject of a quasi-ethnographic description that emphasizes their role in animal sacrifices (1.132, 140). Herodotus establishes that his account is based on interviews with trustworthy Persian sources (1.95) and personal knowledge (1.140). Presumably this was the material Delacroix used to formulate his subject.
Delacroix’s explanation of the painting is unusually long. A slave (black, of course) brings Herodotus into an “interior landing,” where “mysterious personages examine with curiosity this Greek from so far away, and, at the same time, their cold demeanor seems ill suited to encourage his questions. One of the hierophants, almost blind and stooped over with extreme age, leans on the arm of a mute servant.”7 The picture delivers on the exoticism promised in the description with its bizarre headdresses and staves, bodies buried in overabundant drapery, and furrowed faces with thick beards and severe expressions. In contrast, Herodotus wears a more normative chiton that reveals his comparatively virile body. The bold contrast of light and shadow on the wall recalls the bright light of the Orient.
Herodotus’s empirical methods are here put to the test, as he must make sense of the testimony of foreign mystics. The contrast between Western rationality and Eastern superstition might be considered the main theme, but it is more complicated than this. As Hannoosh has pointed out, Herodotus is “a seeker, rather than a bringer, of knowledge” and occupies a naive, beseeching position normally assigned to the primitive.8 His status as supplicant and other, so emphasized in Delacroix’s description, is established pictorially by the way in which the Magians loom over him. The picture is about the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge, but here it passes from the primitive to the enlightened. The suggestion is that at least some kinds of understanding—history and ethnography, for example—can only be acquired in this manner. This is the inverse of the situation depicted in the Hippocrates. The notion fascinated Delacroix. Much later he noted in his journal, “Hippocrates found right away all that was positive knowledge in medicine. I am mistaken: he visited Egypt, and perhaps a few other sources of primitive knowledge, and brought these principles back from there.” His various plans for the ceiling reveal that he considered other similar subjects: Herodotus Consulting the Egyptian Priests and Pythagoras Consulting the Egyptian Priests.9
FIG. 83 Eugène Delacroix, The Chaldean Shepherds, 1841. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
In the eighth century B.C. Chaldeans recorded new astronomical insights. Numerous antique writers refer to the work of the Chaldean astronomers. The Greeks valued them especially for their empirical observations, which led to greater understanding of phenomena such as eclipse cycles and elliptical orbits. Plutarch claimed that one Chaldean astronomer, Seleucus, had proved the validity of a heliocentric model of planetary motion.10 In his On the Epochs of Nature, Buffon (one of Delacroix’s favorite authors) asserts that the Chaldeans had essentially founded the study of astronomy in the Levant.11
The Chaldean Shepherds is another subject without a well-known precedent in painting. Delacroix imagines them in their most primitive days, as barefooted shepherds beneath a dazzling night sky with a marvelously illuminated horizon. This too shows men acquiring knowledge from direct observation of nature. As in the Aristotle and the Pliny, human intelligence finds order in natural phenomena, transforming nature into culture. Delacroix emphasizes the shepherds’ wonderment and reverence before the beauty of nature by having them kneel or prostrate themselves beneath a magnificent celestial dome. They are very much Vico’s, Diderot’s, or Chateaubriand’s primitives, immersed in a rich sensual experience of nature.
But the pendentive is, like the previous one, also about the passage of knowledge between civilizations, as Greek achievements in astronomy drew on the work of their primitive Eastern forebears. The Chaldeans’ status as exotic others is once again emphasized through dress and skin color, but here their robust bodies and seminude state suggest noble savages living easily in a state of nature.
None of this explains the inclusion of the pendentive in the dome devoted to history and philosophy. Perhaps Delacroix intended to observe that the Chaldeans’ work is preserved in history, or perhaps he wished to connect history with the accurate recording of the real, as opposed to the ideal, but Hopmans is probably correct that this was a “leftover” subject that did not fit in the dome devoted to the sciences.12
FIG. 84 Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Seneca, 1841. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
This pendentive draws on Rubens’s famous painting of the story (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), which is itself based on an antique statue. Delacroix has turned the central group in Rubens’s picture forty-five degrees to the left. Both Rubens and Delacroix follow Tacitus’s version of the death of Seneca (Annals of Imperial Rome 15.60–64), which is part of his general account of the decline of the Roman Empire under Nero.13 After a failed attempt on his life, Nero’s destructive tendencies reached a fever pitch. Among many other murders, he misguidedly ordered the death of his own teacher and advisor. Seneca stoically chose suicide over execution. After slitting his wrists and then his ankles and the back of his knees to no avail, he took poison. This too failed to kill him, so he had himself placed in a warm bath, as in the pendentive, and then in a vapor bath. In the course of his protracted death he dictated his final dissertation. In Delacroix’s painting he is assisted by two centurions and surrounded by grief-stricken servants and friends.
The pendentive reveals Delacroix’s equivocal attitude toward civilization, which here decays from the inside out: power destroys the greatest fruits of its own civilization. This reverses the relationship of power to civilization in the Aristotle, where Alexander aids and underwrites the work of the philosopher. The two scrolls, which Delacroix added to his initial idea for the composition, once again emphasize writing as the medium of civilization, but its function here is ambiguous.14 The scroll in the lower right reminds the viewer that in his last moments Seneca continued to dictate his thoughts: his creative energy was irrepressible. On the other hand, the scroll carried by the centurion contains the fatal order that destroyed the philosopher: writing can be used to both good and bad purposes.
Delacroix considered other subjects thematizing power destroying or impeding intellectual achievement, such as Galileo in chains or Socrates before his judges. Indeed, the appearance of Socrates in the same cupola as The Death of Seneca invites the knowledgeable viewer to consider how many of the individuals depicted as embodiments of cultural achievement might equally well have appeared as examples of cultural destruction.15
FIG. 85 Eugène Delacroix, Socrates and His Daemon, 1841–42. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Socrates spoke of his daemon in various ways. It was sometimes an inner voice that alerted him to error. For example, in the Apology he notes, “It always spoke to me very frequently and opposed me even in very small matters, if I was going to do anything I should not,”16 but it had said nothing when he decided to accept his death sentence. He also spoke of it as a being that communicated between humans and gods. In the Symposium, the priestess Diotima tells Socrates that love is a daemon—that is, “a great spirit” that passes “between a mortal and an immortal.” She elaborates: “for the whole of the spiritual is between divine and mortal.”17
This pendentive introduces some of the most important and sustained themes of the ceiling: the sources of intellectual or artistic inspiration, the spiritual links between the human and divine worlds, and the operation of divine powers on the mind. Plutarch wrote an extended dialogue that explored the nature of Socrates’s daemon and speculated on how it communicated with him (Moralia 7.575–98).18 One argument was that the daemon was little more than everyday divination, or perhaps even Socrates’s own reason, while another line of thought suggested that Socrates was peculiarly attuned to divine influence. In the dialogue, Simmias notes that superior beings do not rely on crude physical forms of communication like the human voice but instead communicate spiritually. The dialogue thus explores the question of why some men are more inspired than others. Montaigne found Plutarch’s logic muddled and averred that such questions eluded human understanding.19
In Delacroix’s painting, Socrates’s daemon hovers above and behind him, with one hand pressed against her forehead to indicate thought. The philosopher does not see her, and both their mouths are closed, suggesting they communicate spiritually. Her wings appear almost to come out of his head. The painting takes up the very ambiguities explored by Plutarch’s treatment of the subject: How does he hear her? Is he peculiarly sensitive to her suggestions, or is she merely a personification of his thoughts, making visible his own inner process as he meditates in nature? The painting conveys both Delacroix’s fascination with and his uncertainty over inspiration. Individual inspiration played, for him, a central role in the production of civilization, but its source was obscure. The fact that Delacroix used Socrates, who for many was the very embodiment of rational thought, to explore questions of the divine and inspiration reveals how much his own understanding of civilization privileged a more mysterious spirituality and creativity.
PENDENTIVES IN THE THIRD BAY (LEGISLATION AND ELOQUENCE)
FIG. 86 Eugène Delacroix, Numa and Egeria, 1843–44. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Numa, the second king of Rome, was able to communicate with gods and demigods, who were a significant source of his wisdom and power. Here he converses with his lover, the nymph Egeria. In Plutarch’s version of the story, Numa distinguished himself as a lawgiver in large part due to the counsel of Egeria, whom he met in deserted places and with whom he was on familiar terms. As Plutarch explains, “it was not . . . from any distress or aberration of spirit that he forsook the ways of men, but he had tasted the joy of more august companionship and had been honoured with a celestial marriage; the goddess Egeria loved him and bestowed herself upon him, and it was his communion with her that gave him a life of blessedness and a wisdom more than human.”20 As with Socrates’s daemon, Plutarch expressed his doubts about the actual existence of Egeria.
As in Socrates and His Daemon, the narrative focuses on creativity’s source, but here divine inspiration is more insistently conflated with nature and love. Numa and Egeria are surrounded by woods, so alone that a doe is surprised when she comes upon them. Egeria seems part of nature. Almost nude, she reclines in a depression in the embankment, lying amid reeds, one foot dipped into a spring, an allusion both to her fate and to her function as a source of inspiration. (In Ovid’s account [Metamorphoses 15.478–552], Egeria turns into a spring after Numa’s death.) It is Numa who speaks. His recumbent pose and free gestures suggest his relaxed attitude, as if words are coming to him easily. Inspiration may be divine, but it finds its source in love and nature as well.
The library ceiling contains many images of great artists and intellectuals with personifications of their inspiration, and this theme had recurred in other, abandoned subjects, such as Michelangelo and His Genius, for which a study survives.21 Delacroix’s notes reveal that he considered still other subjects along these lines for the final ceiling: Brutus and the Specter, Plato and the Muse, Charlemagne and the Christian Angel, Mohammed and His Angel, Moses and God.22 The theme’s prevalence points to Delacroix’s fascination with the individual creator—almost always European and male, to be sure—and his role in producing civilization, but in the final murals Delacroix examined the idea of inspiration. He investigated the origins of inspiration in his Socrates and the links between inspiration, love, and nature in the Numa. The question had been with him for some time. When he painted Justinian Drafting His Laws for the Conseil d’État in 1826, he depicted the legislator with a guiding angel. And it stayed with him, for at the end of his life, in the midst of a rare profession of openly religious sentiment, he was still contemplating it: “It is probably God who puts inspiration into men of genius and warms them at the sight of their own work. There are men of virtue just as there are men of genius; both are inspired and favored by good. The opposite would also thus be true” (1819).
FIG. 87 Eugène Delacroix, Lycurgus Consults the Pythia, 1843. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Lycurgus, an early king of Sparta, gave to the polis the laws that formed its distinctive society. At key moments in his career he went to Delphi for advice concerning the form of Sparta’s government. At the end of his life he asked the oracle if the laws he had established were good, to which Apollo responded in the affirmative (Plutarch, “Lycurgus,” Lives 29.3–4). This is apparently the episode illustrated here. Laurel branch in hand, Lycurgus sacrifices a goat to Apollo and asks, as Delacroix describes it, about “the duration of his laws for Sparta.”23 Delacroix depicts the priestess who gives the oracle in shadow, perched atop a bizarre tripod and assuming the standard pose for thought. Black smoke billows from a brazier up into the dark, cavernous space. Once more divine inspiration is the object, but the exotic, mysterious aspects of the setting here differentiate it from the natural settings of the other pictures.24
Plutarch compared Numa and Lycurgus in the second of his Parallel Lives, where he noted their many similarities, including “their both deriving their laws from a divine source.” But he also dwelt on their differences, stressing that Lycurgus “set his affections more on bravery, the other on righteousness.”25 Plutarch wrote at length about the unusual social practices that resulted from this peculiar emphasis in Lycurgus’s laws. Among other things, they led the Spartans to their extreme austerity, martial fervor, abuse of slaves and other noncitizens, and unusually masculine women.
Delacroix considered a number of subjects depicting Spartan history and customs as potential subjects for his program, some of which would have struck his contemporaries as bizarre, outlandish, or uncivilized. These included the poet Tyrtaeus leading the Spartans in martial songs, parents whipping their children, Spartan girls exercising, and a story about a boy who allowed a fox he had stolen and concealed under his cloak to tear out his bowels, rather than have his theft detected. All but the first are found in Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus. Delacroix drew a number of studies of Spartan girls wrestling that reveal his fascination with their masculinity.26 In light of his interest in the comparison of Lycurgus and Numa, it would appear that Delacroix wanted to point up the peculiar and various forms that a civilization may take depending on the contingencies that form it. As in the Hippocrates and the Herodotus, this was about civilizations in the plural—that is, alternative forms of society with contrasting customs.
The subject of Lycurgus consulting the Pythia emphasized not only divine intervention but also an individual who leads the masses. For Delacroix, this was how history worked. He once wrote,
________
I have looked for the truth in the masses, and I have only found it, when indeed I do find it, in individuals. In order for light to burst forth from the shadows, God must illuminate a sun there; for the truth to come to a people, God must put a legislator there. Truth is only revealed to a genius, and the genius is always alone. What do you see in history? On the one hand, Moses, Socrates, Jesus Christ; on the other, the Hebrews, Greece, and the universe. On the one hand, peoples who persecute and kill one another; on the other, the isolated victim who enlightens them. Always a man and his people; always individual reason working to create universal reason. Peoples, said Bossuet admirably, only endure as long as there are chosen ones to pull from the multitude.27
________
The reference to Jesus Christ, who here has the privilege of guiding the entire universe, as opposed to a mere people or country, might throw the reader off, for in fact Delacroix’s attitude toward Christianity was complex and ambivalent. The main point is the great-man theory of history, in which heroes—Delacroix liked it best when they were also martyrs—lead a people out of the shadows. Moses presenting the law to the people was another of the subjects he considered for the ceiling. The Lycurgus suggests this in the most literal way, for a god illuminates the Greek legislator, and he will in turn bring this light to his people.
Cicero Accuses Verres Before the Roman People and Demosthenes Haranguing the Sea Waves
FIG. 88 Eugène Delacroix, Cicero Accuses Verres Before the Roman People, 1844. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
FIG. 89 Eugène Delacroix, Demosthenes Haranguing the Sea Waves, 1845. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Cicero prosecuted Verres for crimes he committed as praetor of Sicily. Here he produces evidence that Verres extorted from the people. This pendentive begs to be discussed with the next one, Demosthenes Haranguing the Sea Waves, in which the Greek statesman trains his voice to rise above the roar of the sea in order to restore his health and prepare himself for public speaking.
As he did with Lycurgus and Numa, Plutarch compared Demosthenes and Cicero in his Parallel Lives. He emphasized that the first two were lawgivers who each found inspiration by consulting an extraordinary woman (respectively, a priestess of Apollo and a nymph), whereas Demosthenes and Cicero were self-made men who cultivated their talent for oratory through hard work and cunning. Beyond this similarity, Demosthenes and Cicero were very different. Demosthenes’s seriousness bordered on the morose, whereas Cicero was gay and witty. Demosthenes was modest; Cicero vain and boastful. Demosthenes’s oratory was plain, austere, and developed through great planning and study; Cicero relied, in contrast, on spontaneity, humor, and even scurrilous mockery. Delacroix emphasizes these basic differences by picturing Demosthenes alone in nature, momentarily withdrawing from the city in order to better himself, but Cicero engaged in the public sphere, brilliantly exercising his talents in a spur-of-the-moment decision, as Plutarch notes, to rely on witnesses and evidence instead of an extended speech.
Toward the end of his comparison, Plutarch considered charges that Demosthenes and Cicero had compromised themselves for personal gain. Neither man offered an unimpeachable example of moral rectitude. It is difficult to assess the extent to which Delacroix intended his paintings to suggest this ambiguity, for he chose to depict both orators in morally exemplary moments: Demosthenes improving himself, Cicero attacking corruption (and a corruption that he himself had refused when he was praetor of Sicily). On the other hand, the contrast between the two pendentives suggests the degree to which oratory is immersed in the complications of political life. Delacroix has brought Demosthenes as close as possible to a state of nature: he is practically nude and exercises his voice against the elements in a brilliant seaside landscape. Two peasants observe him incredulously, their primitive minds unable to grasp the point of his exercise. Ultimately his talent must be exercised in a world such as the one occupied by Cicero: crowded with people, hemmed in by the arcades of the city, surrounded by the temptations of wealth, before the cult statue of the city. In this way the pendentives reengage with the critique of civilization, for if some aspects of civilization seem god-given (as in the Lycurgus and the Numa), others are clearly developed in the political arena, with all the contingencies and moral ambiguities of the public sphere. The comparison between the pairs of pendentives suggests that orators in well-established societies act in the world of men, unlike the lawgivers at the founding of societies, who rely upon divine inspiration. The Demosthenes also suggests how much nature, like the deities in the Numa and the Socrates, acts as a source of inspiration and well-being.
PENDENTIVES IN THE FOURTH BAY (THEOLOGY)
The Tribute Money
FIG. 90 Eugène Delacroix, The Tribute Money, 1843. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Asked to pay a temple tax, Jesus tells Peter to find it in the mouth of a fish.
This is the only pendentive without an obvious relationship to the theme of civilization. It points to two competing understandings of sovereignty, and therefore perhaps of civilization, in the teaching of Jesus. Jesus tells his disciples that while they should pay tax to “the kings of the earth” (Mathew 17:25), they also belong to a different kingdom, that of God. On the other hand, the manner in which Delacroix depicts the story suggests that it is about how important events are often ignored or misunderstood at the moment of their occurrence. The astonished disciples, fishermen, and other common folk are beautifully depicted with billowing draperies, robust bodies, and dramatic poses, but many ignore the main incident. As in the Demosthenes, the common folk have difficulty comprehending the leading lights of civilization.
Like so many others in the ceiling, the narrative crosses the divide between the divine and the earthly and between nature and culture: Jesus is God made flesh, the divine in the human, and his miracle shows the divine operating in the most earthly of settings. He teaches his lesson (culture) by sending Peter to catch a fish (nature), which in turn produces the coin (culture) demanded by the tax collector. Delacroix experimented with other biblical stories that similarly traverse the boundaries between the animal and the human, the spiritual and the worldly, and nature and culture. He considered devoting pendentives to Tobit and the fish (Tobit 6), where an angel counsels Tobit to ward off the devil with the liver and heart of a fish, and to Saint Paul and the serpent (Acts 28:3–6), in which Saint Paul’s ability to suffer a snakebite with no ill effects is taken as a sign from God.28
FIG. 91 Eugène Delacroix, The Death of John the Baptist, 1843–44? Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
To reward his stepdaughter for dancing for him and his guests, Herod grants her any wish, up to the price of half his kingdom. Her mother, Herodias, tells her to ask for the head of John the Baptist, who had criticized Herodias for remarrying to her first husband’s brother. Here Herodias’s daughter receives the head of John the Baptist from the executioner (Matthew 14:3–11).
Herod’s quasi-incestuous lechery and Herodias’s murderous pride violently end the life of a holy and righteous man. The painting is thus another illustration of Delacroix’s pessimistic belief that barbarism can emerge at any moment from within civilization and triumph over it. The subject allows Delacroix to explore his long-standing interest in the cruelty and bloodlust that he felt could never be eliminated from humanity. As in earlier paintings such as The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1826, Wallace Collection, London), he relies on the dramatic and coloristic aspects of his art to amplify the subject’s dreadful sensuality: the majestic poses of the figures, the richly colored drapery, a stairway that spills down toward the spectator, and, most of all, the severed neck of John the Baptist in the immediate foreground. The horror of his death is emphasized by placing his head on the same vertical axis as his inverted decapitated body, an axis reiterated and framed by the bodies of the executioner and servant.
FIG. 92 Eugène Delacroix, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 1845. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Having sinned by eating from “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17), Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden.
This pendentive depicts the passage from a state of nature to a state of culture, ignorance to knowledge, innocence to sin. The parallels between the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve and Delacroix’s understanding of civilization are numerous. The narrative suggests that humans are compelled to pursue knowledge, but the results of that pursuit are ambiguous and unpredictable. They gain sight/insight and begin the saga of human history on earth, but they lose paradise and enter an unforgiving nature. Knowledge, like Delacroix’s civilization, brings with it the struggle between good and evil, joy and suffering. Just as sin and knowledge are inextricably intertwined, barbarism can never be entirely eliminated from civilization. On the other hand, the Garden of Eden is a paradise, exactly the opposite of the desperate, beastly state of nature imagined by Delacroix in his critique of Rousseau. Only when Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden does the narrative join up with Delacroix’s account of the miserable early condition of humankind (discussed in chapter 1).
Adam covers his face, evidently devastated by the expulsion, but Eve seems to protest or at least question it. She assumes the same imploring pose as Greece in Greece on the Ruins at Missolonghi and gazes upward, as if questioning her fate. Unlike most representations of the subject, she shows no shame over her exposed body, as if she has still not adopted the constraints that civilization will bring. She still incarnates the dream of an innocent woman, comfortable in her nudity, living in a state of nature.
FIG. 93 Eugène Delacroix, The Captivity in Babylon, 1843–45. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
During their exile and enslavement in Babylon, the Jews renounce their musical instruments. Here a dejected family sits idly by a stream, dreaming of their homeland. In the background, people occupy themselves with their menial labors or succumb to sadness.
As in the Adam and Eve, exile is at issue, and as in other pendentives, power oppresses creativity and cultural exchange fails across civilizations. The painting illustrates quite literally Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” (ESV)
In this instance, people belonging to one civilization tyrannically and perversely demand to be entertained by the arts of another, causing the Jews to abjure their own music. Delacroix often spoke of music as the most moving of the arts; here its absence stands for the tragic loss of the Jews’ homeland and culture.
Perhaps Delacroix was also drawn to the psalm’s ending, which wishes a sadistic revenge upon the Babylonians:
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock! (ESV)
The last couplet recalls Delacroix’s cruelest subjects—his Medea (1838, Musée des beaux-arts, Lille), for example. Barbarism begets barbarism. The painting differs from the Lycurgus, the Numa, and other paintings of enlightened leaders: in the absence of such great men, people are condemned to a life of persecution and violence, and the Hebrews in particular suffer without a hero who can guide them out of the shadows.
PENDENTIVES IN THE FIFTH BAY (POETRY)
Alexander and the Poems of Homer
FIG. 94 Eugène Delacroix, Alexander and the Poems of Homer, 1844–45? Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
After the defeat of Darius, Alexander finds a magnificent casket in the spoils and orders the poems of Homer to be preserved in it.
This story demonstrates Alexander’s concern to safeguard the achievements of civilization, even as he prosecutes a war. As with the Aristotle and in contrast to the Seneca and other paintings, the Alexander commemorates an instance where power promotes civilization. Delacroix’s remarkably high opinion of Alexander is evident in the positive role he lends him in relation to civilization. He considered other subjects along these lines (Alexander giving Campaspe to Apelles) as well as one celebrating the conqueror’s equestrian skills (Alexander and Bucephalus). Delacroix may also have known that Alexander played an important role in preserving the work of the Chaldean astronomers by gathering their astronomical records during his conquests and translating them for Aristotle. The artist’s image of the emperor and military leader as an enlightened patron of the arts and sciences evinces his growing Bonapartism.
Yet there is a paradox or irony. The fact that Homer’s poems are found in the spoils of war emphasizes the fragility of civilization and the fortuity that sometimes preserves it.29 Furthermore, Alexander’s service to civilization is predicated on his victory in war. The preservation of cultural treasures results from Alexander’s ability to defeat Darius, but this in turn depends on Alexander’s superior ability to harness violence, to destroy Darius’s armies with a force that is itself barbaric. Civilization and barbarism seem inextricably intertwined.
FIG. 95 Eugène Delacroix, Ovid Among the Scythians, 1844. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Augustus banished Ovid to exile on the Black Sea, at the very eastern edge of the Roman Empire. Separated from his family, his city, and the world that inspired and appreciated his poetry, he lived among the primitive Scythians. In the foreground a Scythian family offers him food. In the background more Scythians wait by a crude shelter.
In contrast to the Alexander but like The Captivity in Babylon, this pendentive depicts the arts suffering at the hands of power, but the main interest lies elsewhere. The narrative focuses on the barbarians’ reception of the exiled poet. Ovid, a figure of maximal refinement and learning, must come to terms with a brutish life among primitive folk. Though Ovid is clothed, he seems to suffer from the elements more than the half-naked savages. He contemplates the food and horse’s milk offered by a vigorous Scythian family, whose bestial aspect is emphasized by the integration of a horse and dog into their group. Is his attitude one of resignation, gratitude, or trepidation? The painting is not entirely clear.
The Scythians’ forward thrust across the composition contrasts with his languid, concave pose and suggests their greater robustness. His feeble posture contrasts especially with the powerful stance of the woman and massive physique of the man. The savages’ attitudes are mixed: even as the woman offers food, she grasps her child protectively, while the dog and man warily inspect the stranger. The painting suggests Delacroix’s ambivalence regarding the primitive. Ovid’s exile is ostensibly the subject, but the imagery emphasizes the generosity and vitality of the barbarians. Ovid’s scroll is behind him, cast aside: his poetry is useless in his present company.
This pendentive also reveals Delacroix’s interest in exploring the attributes of gender in relation to civilization. Ovid is here delicate and tentative, attributes normally seen as feminine. The Scythian man is far more powerful, and even his wife appears more assertive and robust than Ovid. Other intellectuals in the ceiling are notably lacking in the qualities conventionally associated with heroic masculinity: Archimedes has let his body decline; Demosthenes must restore his; even the relatively fit Aristotle appears old and sedentary next to the red-capped assistant (whose back derives from the Belvedere Torso). The primitive Chaldean shepherds are among the most physically robust men in the ceiling, suggesting that the development of civilization is at odds with manliness.
FIG. 96 Eugène Delacroix, The Education of Achilles, 1845. Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Achilles receives his education from Chiron, the only civilized centaur, who raised and mentored him from his infancy.
This is another of the anomalous pendentives because its relation to poetry is not entirely clear. Two of the pendentives in the Poetry cupola depict poets, and a third illustrates an act that preserves poetry. This painting merely illustrates a passage from a poem, presumably the Iliad (though it might illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Plato’s Republic, or any other text that mentions Achilles’s education). However awkwardly it fits into the cupola, the painting takes up many of the broader themes in the ceiling.
Chiron is both human and bestial, as his origins make clear. He was conceived when Kronos raped the sea nymph Philyra. In an attempt to ward off her attacker, Philyra changed into a mare, but this only resulted in giving Chiron his equine form. Rejected by his parents, Chiron was adopted by Apollo, who trained him in his many skills. Chiron came to combine the brute force and instincts of the animal world with the intellectual and artistic abilities of humans. He trained many Greek heroes, transmitting to them both the ability of animals to survive in nature and the ability of humans to manipulate culture. Chiron complicates a simple equation of beast with barbarism and human with culture because he teaches Achilles in part the arts of civilization.
In the only extended antique account of Achilles’s education, Statius stressed that Chiron trained Achilles not only to harness the forces of nature but also to be part of nature: nothing in nature frightened him, his skin hardened so as to endure sun and frost, and he could sleep on bare rock.30 In this respect he was similar to the barbarians in the Ovid pendentive. Delacroix draws out this part of Achilles’s education by having him become almost one with the man-beast: he rides the centaur bareback with ease. The painting celebrates physical, animalistic qualities that are at odds with the refined, intellectual aspects of civilization. As opposed to the Pliny pendentive (nature destroys civilization) or the Aristotle pendentive (civilization makes nature over into culture), nature is here congruent with civilization. Perhaps Delacroix even meant to compare the physical arts that Achilles masters to the arts proper. The postures of Chiron and Achilles roughly resemble one another, but while Achilles is in the midst of stretching his bow, Chiron’s pointing gesture resembles that of a painter drawing his brush across the canvas, and he holds his bow and arrows like a palette.
The Achilles pendentive demonstrates especially well the way in which many of the subjects of the ceiling are nested within others. The story of Achilles is found, among other places, in Homer’s Iliad, which is in turn found within the Alexander narrative, which itself comes to us through Plutarch, among other sources. Many of the pendentives are similarly connected to each other within the heritage of Western civilization. For example, the subjects of some pendentives were discussed by figures depicted in other pendentives: Ovid wrote about Orpheus, Numa, and Achilles; Herodotus discussed Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus; and both Pliny and Cicero left accounts of Archimedes. Many other examples might be cited. Delacroix seems to have chosen his subjects partly with an eye toward emphasizing the dense weave of civilization, or civilization as a rich tapestry of narratives and knowledge that reinforce and hold one another together. The pendentives are about the figures they depict, but also about the sources upon which they draw.
FIG. 97 Eugène Delacroix, Hesiod and the Muse, 1845? Oil on canvas, 221 × 291 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
A Muse carrying laurels inspires Hesiod’s divine poetry as he sleeps beneath a laurel bush.
At the beginning of the Theogony Hesiod tells how he was tending his sheep on Mount Helicon when the Muses gave him a laurel branch “and breathed a divine voice into [him] so that [he] might glorify what will be and what was before” (29–32). This follows the famous lines, spoken by the Muses: “Field-dwelling shepherds, ignoble disgraces, mere bellies: we know how to say many false things similar to genuine ones, but we know, when we wish, how to proclaim true things” (26–28).31 This passage emphasizes the wretched condition of humans at the outset of civilization, and the role of the Muses as mediators between humans and some higher existence. Here a shepherd (that is, a peasant, a rustic, a savage, an innocent) passes through a dream directly into civilization. This is a variation on the now-familiar theme of the advance of civilization through divine inspiration. In an early list of ideas for the ceiling (a list now in the Getty), Delacroix notes, “The Muse kissing the lips of Hesiod or Plato,” suggesting how interconnected these narratives of inspiration were to him. As with the Numa, the Muse is conflated with something else—here a dream—suggesting the possibility that the Muse merely personifies Hesiod’s own inspiration. The Muse is brilliantly handled so that she appears really to float: she hovers above the ledge on which Hesiod rests and in front of the distant meadow in which his flock grazes.
It had been common since antiquity to contrast Hesiod’s pacific poetry, extolling wisdom and the pastoral life, with Homer’s heroic and bellicose verse. Accordingly, Delacroix drew a number of contrasts between the Homer and Hesiod pendentives. Homer’s military epic is appropriately rediscovered and preserved in the midst of a war, whereas Hesiod’s bucolic poetry is born in a shepherd’s slumber in the fields. This implies that Homer and Hesiod are not so much actual poets as embodiments of two poetic modes passed down to the present.32 The pendentives are in this sense about civilization as a cumulative achievement, as a tradition preserved and passed down through the ages.
Once again the process of civilization is gendered: as in Numa and Egeria, Socrates and His Daemon, and Lycurgus Consults the Pythia, a man receives inspiration from a female muse or oracle. Numa’s muse renders him relaxed and recumbent, and Hesiod’s comes to him when he is completely drained of tension (though perhaps his crook suggests an unconscious virility). Civilization is often conceived of as a feminizing force and sometimes as an emasculating one: Archimedes’s single-minded focus on developing his intellectual faculties undercuts his virile masculinity, and Ovid’s cultivation renders him distinctly feeble next to the Scythians. In some instances, however, civilization is achieved through an insistence on masculinity: Seneca pursues his devotion to Stoic ideals by ignoring the emotional women who deplore his death. Achilles gains his athletic prowess through the intervention of the hypermasculine and bestial Chiron, which might also be understood as a check on the softening influences of civilization. Women can also be the agents of barbarism or the downfall of men. This is notably so in the Theology cupola, where Eve tempts Adam, leading to the Fall, and Salomé’s seductive powers lead to the decapitation of the Baptist. Thus, the civilizing process may often be starkly gendered, but not in an entirely consistent way.
FIG. 98 Eugène Delacroix, Orpheus Civilizes the Greeks, 1845–47. Oil and wax on primed surface, 735 × 1,098 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Delacroix offered a substantial explanation of this painting: “Orpheus brings the benefits of the arts and civilization to the Greeks, dispersed and given over to a primitive life. He is surrounded by hunters covered with lion and bear skins. These simple men stop in astonishment. Their wives approach with their children. Oxen joined under the yoke plow furrows in the antique earth, beside lakes and mountainsides still covered with mysterious shadows. Hanging back in crude shelters, some old men, more ferocious or more timid, observe from afar the divine stranger. Centaurs stop at the sight of him and are about to retire to the heart of the forest. The Naiads, the Rivers, are amazed in the midst of their laurels, while the two divinities of Art and Peace, the fecund Ceres, loaded with ears of wheat, and Pallas, holding an olive branch in her hand, cross the azure sky and descend to the earth at the enchanter’s voice.”33
As the description makes abundantly clear, the painting recalls the rude beginnings of Greek society, before the polis. James Barry had divided early Greek history into two paintings in his Society of Arts murals, one of the Greeks living in a state of nature at the moment they are visited by Orpheus, and the other of an established agrarian society. Delacroix, who, as previously noted, was inspired by an account of Barry’s paintings, combined these subjects in one picture. The close connection between humans and beasts is central to Delacroix’s view of the savage state. Creatures that are half man and half beast still live amid the Greeks. Although the Greeks exercise some mastery over beasts, they live like them as well, with little protection from the elements. When Horace described the meeting with Orpheus in his Art of Poetry (a work that Delacroix cited on the walls of the nearby Salon of the King), he emphasized the Greeks’ bestial qualities and noted that Orpheus had tamed tigers and lions.34 The Greeks are in intimate contact with animals: one man even plunges his hands into the entrails of his quarry. The fur garments and abundant carcasses indicate the Greeks’ reliance on the hunt, which must be exceptionally perilous and violent, as their ferocious prey includes lions, tigers, and bears. This is a wholly different relation to animals than that proposed in the Aristotle.
The humans’ brutish, crouching postures and naked bodies suggest the absence of refinement. In contrast, Ceres and Pallas, who represent key attributes of the nascent civilization, are richly draped. Their relatively elegant bearing and even the colors of their clothing are repeated in Orpheus, who communicates their inspiration to the people. Civilization is again distinctly marked as feminine. The painting also suggests that humans lose more than their brutishness with the advent of civilization: before the arrival of Orpheus, they lived among naiads, centaurs, and beasts, in constant contact with the spiritual and the earthly. However enchanting Orpheus’s verse may be, the current enchantment of the world will soon disappear, leaving them to walk the earth alone. Something is lost with this primitive world.
Curiously, Orpheus holds a scroll instead of the usual lyre, presumably to connect the hemicycle to the other paintings with scrolls—those devoted to Pliny, Archimedes, Seneca, and Ovid. In the Pliny and the Archimedes this motif signals the beneficent role of writing in preserving civilization, but also the power of war and nature to destroy civilization. In the Seneca the purpose of writing is ambiguous, as it both preserves Seneca’s final thoughts and transmits the order for his execution, but in either case unjust political power destroys a great figure of civilization. It would seem that Delacroix wished to illustrate the many different ways in which intellectual and artistic achievements pass into and out of the world.
The most interesting comparison is with the Ovid, where poetry apparently has little immediate impact on the savages, who now must come to the aid of the civilized. If at the very beginning of civilization the arts play an almost wholly ameliorative role in elevating human society, at a later stage they render the poet weak. Once removed from the world of refinement, he finds himself far less fit than savages to endure the elements.
Attila and His Barbarian Hordes Trample Italy and the Arts
FIG. 99 Eugène Delacroix, Attila and His Barbarian Hordes Trample Italy and the Arts, 1843–47. Oil and wax on primed surface, 735 × 1,098 cm. Palais Bourbon, Paris.
Delacroix again offered a substantial explanation: “Attila, followed by his barbarian hordes, tramples Italy, upended on some ruins, at the feet of his horse. Weeping Eloquence and the Arts flee before the ferocious steed of the king of the Huns. Fire and murder mark the passage of these savage warriors, who come down from the mountains like a torrent. At their approach the timid inhabitants abandon the countryside and the cities, or pierced in their flight by the arrow or the lance, they water with their blood the ground that nourished them.”35
The contrast with the Orpheus can hardly be overstated. Instead of the poet’s civilizing a company of savages, the savage Attila tramples civilization. As Hannoosh writes, “To the civilization of the Orpheus and the barbarism of the Attila correspond peace and war, rich landscape and scorched earth, luxuriant tree and blasted trunk, calm and furious agitation, light and smoke, dominant blue and dominant red, . . . humanizing the beast and bestializing man, cultivating the land and laying it to waste, drawing sustenance from the earth and watering it with blood; the formation of society in the group uniting around Orpheus and its splintering and scattering as the figures flee from Attila.”36
A putto holds one more scroll, as well as a lyre, and stands amid architectural ruins: in this instance a resurgent barbarism destroys all the arts. The figures of Eloquence and Italy recall Delacroix’s early tendency to figure abject victimization in the bodies of women, as in The Massacre at Chios, and to sexualize it. This is particularly true of Italy, whose exposed breasts, drawn-back arm, and splayed legs make her appear especially vulnerable. The position of the horse’s leg above her sex invites sadistic fantasies. But the decision to embody Italy, Eloquence, and the Arts as women again feminizes civilization and now juxtaposes it with a violent and savage masculinity. The ceiling employs the image of a woman to embody the inspiration of civilization (as with Socrates, Numa, and Hesiod) and the victim of barbarism (Attila), but the actual creation and destruction of civilization remains overwhelmingly the work of men, with the possible exception of Salomé and Eve, who in any event resemble evil muses. Even the women in the Orpheus are too preoccupied with their children to appreciate fully Orpheus’s words and participate in the work of civilization.
As with many of Delacroix’s depictions of barbaric violence, the barely submerged appeal to sexual fantasy belies the image’s ostensible condemnation of barbarism and points to the fascination that violence and destruction hold in their own right. Delacroix’s conception of Attila was a stroke of genius in this regard: he looms over the other figures, wielding a mace and spears, atop a magnificent steed with enormous eyes and an exaggerated windblown mane. The dramatic curve of the horse’s neck plays off of the curve of Attila’s body, further reinforcing their prominence in the composition. Attila’s wolf-skin garment and woolly beard emphasize his bestial aspect. Delacroix’s enthusiasm for the subject matter translated into exceptionally exuberant handling and bold, simplified tonal contrasts, as in the horse. Though the surface of the painting is dark at the bottom and badly damaged, there are places, as on and around the marauders in the lower right, where thick, energetic strokes register his excitement.