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Triumph of Apollo. In the Library of the Luxembourg he had recourse to the _Divina Commedia_, and treated in a masterly manner the theme so familiar and sympathetic to him. In his works there is something of the joyous and sportive energy of Rubens' allegorical pictures, but not the least trace of imitation. He understood decorative painting in the sense of the great old masters, Giulio Romano and Veronese, not as wall didactics and lectures on archæology; he knew that descriptive prose has nothing whatever to do with the walls of a building, but that the sole aim of such paintings is to fill the house with their solemn grandeur, to make the whole building resound as it were with sacred organ music. Between 1853 and 1861 came also the wall paintings in the Church of Saint Sulpice, and one would almost think that Delacroix finished them in feverish excitement, to show for the last time how enormous a store of passion and power still lay in the soul of a sexagenarian. Shortly after their completion, on 13th August 1863, he died, who was, in the words of Silvestre,
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There is nothing pretty or lovable about his art; it is a wild art. He depicted passion wherever he found it, in the shape of wild animals, stormy seas, or battling warriors; and he sought it in every sphere, in nature no less than in poetry and the Bible. Hardly any painter--not even Rubens--has depicted with equal power the passions and movements of animals: lions in which he is own brother to Barye; fighting horses, in which he stands side by side with Géricault. No other artist painted waves more grand, wind-beaten, foaming, dashing, towering on high. Looking at them, one divines all the horrors concealed beneath the roar of the blue surface, horrors which were as yet so insufficiently suggested in Géricault's
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Raft of the Medusa. In his historical pictures there reigns now terror and despair, as in the
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Massacre of Chios ; now gloomy horror, as in the
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Medea ; now feverish movement, as in the
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Death of the Bishop of Liège.