Elena Goikhman
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
One of the notable aspects of Eugène Delacroix as an artistic person is his deep respect for the art of the Classical Antiquity, an active, lively applying to its images and forms that is untypical for the Romanticism. At the same time the attitude of Delacroix towards the classical ancient art contains some innovative tendencies lying in his desire to perceive more deeply the essence of its fundamental difference from European art, to present its more authentic interpretation, to create a new way of synthesis of the ancient and modern styles. To some extent it corresponds with the overall context of the radical revision of traditional views of Classical Antiquity which takes place in the European culture at the turn of the 18th – 19th centuries, becomes apparent in Neoclassicism. For Delacroix Classical Antiquity was not only the source and the model of the perfect, sublime, eternal form and content, as it was for the past centuries, but, quite the reverse, the model of the most objectively realistic, precisely visual representation of nature. Accordingly, the modern European art is not considered by him a direct continuation and development of the Classical antique art improving the field of realistic imitative methods but, on the contrary, he reveals in it manifestations of the revolutionary rupture with the antiquity, the subjective, expressive and picturesque deformations of nature having a view to convey some new, especially personal meanings and impressions. In the works of Delacroix, in the depiction of human figures, the bold, inventive effects of spatial overlaps, dynamic modelling, rich surroundings, borrowed from the works of the old masters, which were for him the main source of inspiration, are exaggerated and transformed into real “errors” and obvious distortions of natural forms which destination is to strike the viewer’s imagination. At the same time, another evident purpose of this phenomenon is seeking for the simple and clear devices to construct a general form of separate plastic elements that is, sure enough, can be considered as an exaggerated rationalist analogue of the classical antique artistic canon, with his such special features as, in accordance with the observations of Delacroix, an intact corporeality of forms and a tectonic distinctness of their conjunctions. As a result, the originality of the combination of the Classical antique and European styles in the works of Delacroix consists in the persistent emphasizing of certain “incomplete”, “unfinished”, “fragmented”, briefly sketched treatment of figures, which corresponds with the artist’ s interest in ruined, damaged monuments, his practice of working with casts, partial equivalents of statues. Thus, contrary to the principle of the “revival” of the Antique, the actualization of the classical ideal that guided the old European masters, Delacroix, on the contrary, seeks to preserve in his figures the features of some “museum” aloofness, inaccessibility, integrity, and maintains the ideal through its grotesque denial that indicates his adoption of the new Neoclassical method and his peculiar realization of the fundamental Romantic principle.