(piano music) Woman: We're in Louvre
and we're looking at Delacroix's the Death of Sardanapalus,
which was exhibited at the Salon of 1827. Man: It's a huge canvas and it turns
every classical rule on its head. Woman: Including the idea of
having a painting with a hero. Here we have Sardanapalus
who is anything but a hero. Man: This is the height
of romantic painting, and in fact its story comes from
a romantic poet, Lord Byron, and it's the story of the
Sysyrian King Sardanapalus who is being vanquished in
battle but rather than surrender, has decided not only to kill
himself, he's going to destroy
everything that he finds pleasure in, the women, his slaves, all
of his ornament, all of his
treasure will be burned. Everything will come to an end. So this is a giant funerary pyar. Woman: So he sits high up on
that bed propping his head up, looking with supreme
indifference at the end of the lives of the women in his life, the end of all his beautiful possessions. Man: So this is a painting
that is about corruption and it is the antithesis of the nobility
of David and of the neoclassical tradition that came before romanticism. Woman: If you think back
to neoclassical paintings with their very rigorous
construction of space, where you can really clearly
see where everything is in relationship to everything else. Here we have a space
that's full of objects. All of the king's really
luxurious possessions, gold and jewels and horses, and the space isn't so much
constructed as filled up. Man: And it feels like everything in it, all of the bodies, the
horses, the objects, they're all flames themselves. Recalling the flame that
are about to be there, licking up in this
serpentine curvilinear forms. So look at the horse for instance, which is practically an S-shape. Look at one the arms of the harp
that's in the bottom middle, or the women themselves, these Arabasks. You can look at the scarf
at the bottom of the bed. All of these things are
snakelike and serpentine as if they themselves are the
flames that are referenced. Woman: So there is all of this
sense of writhing movement but the king at the top who sits very
still and watches with that corrupt gaze, on this bed that is foreshortened, and so we have this idea of everything
spilling down into our space, very much the artist's intention to engage
the viewer and to appeal to our emotions. The woman in the foreground
is being brutally murdered right before our eyes. The horse is being pulled against
its will to a funeral pyar. This is a scene of death and destruction
that is happening as close as possible to the viewer's space. Man: This must have been
such a huge shock to a public that was used to looking at the
clarity and precision of geometry. The rationalism, the
heroism of the neoclassical. All of this violence, all of this luxury, is perfectly suited to Delacroix's
signature use of brilliant color at least in contrast to the kind of
modulation of color that the very subtly colored paintings that were
traditional in the Salon. Woman: If you look at
the flesh of the figures you don't see just that
normal tonal modeling that we've come to expect
in neoclassical paintings but we see figures where the
shadows are greens and blues, and the highlights are oranges and golds. Delacroix is really thinking
about color in a much more
emotional and passionate way. Man: This painting really
is an orgy of violence. It's an orgy of luxury and
it's an orgy of corruption. (piano music)