Baudelaire and Delacroix on Tasso in Prison: Romantic Reflections on a Renaissance Martyr

Delacroix, lac de sang hante des mauvais anges,Ombrage par un bois de sapins toujours vert,Ou, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares etrangesPassent, comme un soupir etouffe de Weber; . .("Les Phares")[Delacroix, lake of blood haunted by evil angels,Shadowed by a wood of firs ever green,Where, beneath a saddened sky, strange fanfaresPass, like a stifled Weber sigh; . . .]The problematic relationship between text and image was a lifelong concern of Charles Baudelaire, and one of the forces driving him to return repeatedly over a period of twenty years to the work of Eugene Delacroix. Concepts of the poetry of image and the image of poetry, of the poetic painter and the "painterly" poet, recur not only in Baudelaire's numerous Salon reviews of art criticism but in the dedications of his poems to artists of his time and the frequent thematic references to pictorial art in the body of various poems, especially in Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire placed Delacroix in the historic canon of great masters in "Les Phares," including him with such giants as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rubens and Goya. It is thus through Baudelaire's attraction to Delacroix the person and the Romantic artist, generated by reflections and reverberations of his own creative persona, that the poet achieved access to the historic lineage of the masters.One of the most intriguing and complex dialogues between text and image between Baudelaire and Delacroix's works involves their respective dual depictions of the mad imprisoned and impassioned Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso (1544-95). There are special intertextual echos in Baudelaire's two sonnets on Delacroix's two paintings. In these two works, whose revisions bracket twenty years, Baudelaire transcribes into poetic text Delacroix's visual imagery of the person and work of the Italian poet subject, a poet who also penned two versions twenty years apart of an epic image, Gerusalemme liberata (1559-75) and Gerusalemme conquistata (1593), projecting the journey of his own psychic instability and passion onto the vast political canvas of the crusades.Numerous critics have addressed the relationship between Baudelaire's two sonnets and Delacroix's two paintings over the years, but there has been considerable discord over the significance of the poet's responses, due to misunderstandings and uncertainties regarding the circumstances of Baudelaire's access to images of the paintings. Careful reassessment of certain documented events reveals that Baudelaire was in fact not just revising his original unpublished 1844 sonnet to please a new editor twenty years later, after Delacroix's death, but in fact was rewriting the poem in response to a very different painting and a very different image of Tasso, who himself had evolved radically through a long martyrdom. All three artists' works in fact reveal a similar transformation from initial idealism to despondency and despair. Before we look at the texts of the two sonnets, it is revealing to trace Baudelaire's and Delacroix's discourses of esthetics and ethics, discourses which are both colored and limited by the ideological perceptions of their era.It is logical that Delacroix was drawn to depict a celebrated poet like Tasso and that his paintings in turn inspired poetry, for from the beginning of his career he offered a Romantic iconography that linked painting to the other arts; Baudelaire commented often on the essentially poetic character of Delacroix's painting.1 Baudelaire's fascination with the power and energy of Delacroix's work permeates all his articles about him, especially the elegiacal obituary essay published shortly after Delacroix's death in 1863. Baudelaire was drawn not just to the dynamism of the canvases but found in both their execution and their subject matter a perfect illustration of what he called the "heroism of the moderns." Delacroix's heroism, however, reflected not the immediate and the prosaic that Baudelaire found so poetic and "pathetique" but rather the epic, the historic, the exotic; this modern heroism is in the depiction not the subject. …