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| Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830, oil on canvas, 235 x 260 cm, Louvre, Paris |
Eugène Delacroix painted proposed a revolutionary in 1831 to Salon in Paris. Had been completed the previous year to celebrate the liberation struggle against the king of that time, Charles X. The French Revolution was now far away in time, Napoleon became emperor and was exiled to St. Helena in 1821 where he breathed his last.
The French people, however, been proved by absolute regime, had rebelled against the reactionary policies of the last sovereign, and 27 to 29 July 1830 had put in place then those that history has anointed the Three Glorious Days : the bourgeois class, in particular, succeeded in the fateful intention of bringing the king to abdicate.
The Liberty Leading the People shows all classes united in the struggle, led by the personification of France, Marianne . She recalls the Venus de Milo in the cadence of his garments, discovered a decade earlier and exhibited at the Louvre. It was a shocking performance: the female figure is in contemporary clothes and her breasts exposed, the hair under the arms and the Phrygian cap Headgear, symbol of the struggle for freedom. It will be the first of a long list of works by French artists that will be the protagonists of social and moral scandal.
Marianne, on top of a pyramidal composition, leading the bourgeois , recognizable by the hat and the dress by Quaker, and beside him to accompany him in the fight there is a proletarian , with sword in hand, a boy , the side of Liberty, wielding two guns. But the fight is certain death: a soldier lying lifeless at the base of the pyramid, accompanied by another body, that Delacroix has borrowed from a colleague, Théodore Géricault , from the painting The Raft of the Medusa ; a woman begs on his knees on his clothes and Freedom are reproduced the colors of the French flag, flag Marianne raises up. An indistinct crowd is behind this main group, tramples on the rubble of the barricades to go to attack the seat of power so deleterious. The technique used to play this crowd seems to anticipate what will then be peculiar to the Impressionists, who look to Delacroix as a teacher. Painting in an indistinct way the protagonists of the unrest was also a way to allow anyone to identify with one of characters of the large canvas.
Everything is wrapped in smoky air, a symbol of the riots, the shootings (remember that the rifles and guns once smoked ) and, between the layers of dust, it is possible to recognize the bell towers of Notre- Dame, an architectural element that allows us to understand exactly where we are, where this has happened.
Liberty Leading the People is a framework symbol Romanticism, a movement that exalted nationalism, who has turned his eye to the contemporary, the feeling inside, into the beautiful and the ugly matter. And 'the evidence that an event happened really so revolutionary. It 's a tribute to Géricault, the intent of the author, citing the work of the young friend who died some time ago.
talk about this painting was partly sad and partly full of hope. You can not look at this painting without grasping the essence of politics that pervades it, as it would deprive him of his reason for existence, nor is it possible not to think about this, what happens beyond the Mediterranean, so that the French have influenced colonized, exploited and that still gives priority to contacts with this country, you can not even think about what happens on this side of the Alps, but on this topic the curtain falls.
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