Word: sardanapalus
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...point about visual influences. When Chereau stages the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he has the entire tradition of French art behind him. The artfully twisted limbs and contorted white bodies come not from "Schindler's List" but from The Raft of the Medusa and The Death of Sardanapalus. Delacroix and Gericault sit on Chereau's shoulders like twin angels of visual excess. (Chereau also includes nods to Rembrandt; Pascal Greggory as Margot's brother Anjou is a dead ringer for Rembrandt's Polish Rider...
...journal, were a permanent resource he could draw from. Delacroix had already made a brilliant name for himself with "Oriental" subjects, including his Byronic denunciation of Turkish barbarity in Greece, The Massacres at Chios (1824), and that enormous Romantic panorama of sex, death and animal vitality, The Death of Sardanapalus...
...wear two hats," Laclotte recalls, "and sometimes it gave me a headache." For the Louvre is by nature a monopoly, with the gravitational pull of a black hole. So many of the canonical masterpieces of the 19th century -- Delacroix's Massacre at Chios and his Death of Sardanapalus, Courbet's The Studio and Funeral at Ornans and so on, ad infinitum -- are in the Louvre that Laclotte was faced with appalling difficulties in getting anything to cross the Seine to Orsay. Moreover, since he was only on loan to Orsay, he wanted to go back to an undepleted Louvre when...
...paint huge allegories of human fate. One sees this interest already in Brittany paintings like Woman in the Hay, an image drenched in anonymous sexuality, whose half-nude peasant woman sprawled on the hay is quoted directly from one of the female slaves in Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. These early modernists were not, after all, deeply concerned with the future, as the avant-garde would be 30 years later. They saw themselves as prophets but obsessed, as prophets often are, with a past they wanted art to recover: a way of visual speech that was archaic, direct...
Brown's Sardanapalus and Myrrha (opposite) sold for virtually the cost of its frame...