page_title: The Barque of Dante
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: The Barque of Dante / Themes
caption_attribution_description: English: charles le brun: la colere
context_page_description: The Barque of Dante, also Dante and Virgil in Hell, is the first major painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, and is a work signalling the shift in the character of narrative painting, from Neo-Classicism towards Romanticism. The painting loosely depicts events narrated in canto eight of Dante's Inferno; a leaden, smoky mist and the blazing City of the Dead form the backdrop against which the poet Dante fearfully endures his crossing of the River Styx. As his barque ploughs through waters heaving with tormented souls, Dante is steadied by Virgil, the learned poet of Classical antiquity.
  Pictorially, the arrangement of a group of central, upright figures, and the rational arrangement of subsidiary figures in studied poses, all in horizontal planes, complies with the tenets of the cool and reflective Neo-Classicism that had dominated French painting for nearly four decades. The Barque of Dante was completed for the opening of the Salon of 1822, and currently hangs in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
context_section_description: The Barque of Dante was an artistically ambitious work, and although the composition is conventional, the painting in some important respects broke unmistakably free of the French Neo-Classical tradition.
  The smoke to the rear and the fierce movement of the garment in which the oarsman Phlegyas is wrapped indicate a strong wind, and most of the individuals in the painting are facing into it. The river is choppy and the boat is lifted to the right, a point at which it is twisted toward the viewer. The party is driven to a destination known to be yet more inhospitable, by an oarsman whose sure-footed poise in the storm suggests his familiarity with these wild conditions. The city behind is a gigantic furnace. There is neither comfort nor a place of refuge in the painting's world of rage, insanity and despair.
  The painting explores the psychological states of the individuals it depicts, and uses compact, dramatic contrasts to highlight their different responses to their respective predicaments. Virgil's detachment from the tumult surrounding him, and his concern for Dante's well-being, is an obvious counterpoint to the latter's fear, anxiety, and physical state of imbalance. The damned are either rapt in a piercing concentration upon some mad and gainless task, or are else apparently in a state of total helplessness and loss. Their lining of the boat takes an up-and-down wave-like form, echoing the choppy water and making the foot of the painting a region of perilous instability. The souls to the far left and right are like grotesque bookends, enclosing the action and adding a claustrophobic touch to the whole.
  Delacroix wrote that his best painting of a head in this picture is that of the soul reaching with his forearm from the far side into the boat. Both Charles Le Brun's, La Colère of 1668, and John Flaxman's line engraving The Fiery Sepulchres, appearing as plate 11 in The Divine Poem of Dante Alighieri, 1807, are likely sources for this head.
  The theatrical display of bold colours in the figures at the centre of the composition is striking. The red of Dante's cowl resonates alarmingly with the fired mass behind him, and vividly contrasts with the billowing blue about Phlegyas. The author Charles Blanc noted the white linen on Virgil's mantle, describing it as a 'great wake up in the middle of the dark, a flash in the tempest'. Adolphe Loève-Veimars commented on the contrast between the colours used in Dante's head, and in the depiction of the damned, concluding that all this 'leaves the soul with I know not what fell impression'. 
caption: Charles Le Brun's, La Colère of 1668.
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