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Dante's Bark. At that time the Greeks, that heroic nation, struggling and dying for its religion and independence, had excited everywhere the deepest sympathy and enthusiasm. Delacroix was the very man to be inspired by such a theme. From the agitation caused by the martyrdom of Greece, and from his taste for Byron's poetry, resulted in 1824 the celebrated
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Massacre of Chios, on which he was already employed in 1821, before the completion of his
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Dante's Bark, and in which his power of expression as well as of colour was carried much further than in the earlier picture. In the
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Dante's Bark there were still, both in form and colour, reminiscences of the great Florentine masters; as, for instance, in the female figure in the foreground, which is almost an exact reproduction of Michael Angelo's
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Night. The event depicted was comparatively quiet and tranquil, and the well-balanced composition would have done honour to the most rigorous follower of David. The only novelty lay in the treatment of colour, and in the substitution of the individual and characteristic for the typical and ideal. But undoubtedly it was now possible not only to produce in colour more powerful chords, but also in expression to strike notes more dramatic, for the academic plaster-of-Paris heads of the David school had depicted human emotion only in icy immobility. Delacroix had put all these possibilities into the new picture. The pyramidal configuration has resolved itself into an unconstrained grouping of figures. Here we have for the first time the artistic spirit intoxicated with colour, the
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Orlando Furioso of colourists, the pupil of Rubens, Delacroix. An entire world of deep feeling and of painfully passionate poetry, an entire world of tones, which the master under whose eyes he painted his
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Dante could not have conceived, lies enclosed within the frame of this picture. The figures, sitting, kneeling, partly reclining, with their half-starved bodies and their gloomy, brooding, hopeless faces; the desperate struggle between the conquerors and their victims in the far distance; the contrast between this scene of horror and the luminous splendour of the atmosphere, and the wealth of colour in the whole, made and still make this fine painting one of the most impressive pictures in the Louvre. It is a work which flames in glow of colour more than any that had appeared in France since the days of Rubens. The English had been his teachers.
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It is here only that colour and effect are understood and felt,