The role of religion in Eugene Delacroix's religious painting: Intention and distortion.
Item
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Title
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The role of religion in Eugene Delacroix's religious painting: Intention and distortion.
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Identifier
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AAI9807985
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identifier
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9807985
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Creator
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Polistena, Joyce Carol.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Patricia Mainardi
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Religion, History of | Theology
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Abstract
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Delacroix's religious oeuvre is analyzed in terms of the theology that invests his religious themes. His religious subjects are scrutinized within a context of the radical, Romantic theologies (Mohler, Lamennais) that superseded traditional religious iconography during the first-half of the nineteenth-century.;The religious reading of Delacroix's paintings revises perceptions of him as a political radical and a hero of modern painting, an unbeliever who in the tradition of the Enlightenment finds religion irrational. Delacroix's status in the modernist canon relied on his avant-garde style and locked him into the model of the artist/hero armed with eighteenth-century Voltairean ideals (supra-rationalism) coupled with the politics of an anti-establishment genius. Consequently, Delacroix's personality was shrouded with an elitist pseudo-skepticism and virulent anti-clericalism. This characterization now seems hardly credible; as a mature artist, Delacroix could be severely critical of the eighteenth-century thinker. Delacroix painted dozens of religious paintings that express orthodox Christian beliefs, some with a sublime sensitivity that reached the highest levels of Christian art, for example, Christ on the Cross, 1846 and the Lamentation, 1848. In his mural program at Saint-Sulpice, Delacroix showed he could give pictorial form to dogmatic eschatological teaching as biblical historiography. The program is not an arbitrary selection of action-oriented angel subjects, but a highly developed angelology unified by textual correlations to the Book of Daniel. Delacroix's religious pictures were without irony. A post-modern ideology that dismisses religious meaning as merely poetic concepts and mythology distorts intention and ultimately skews our understanding of his artistic genius.;Added to the various cultural phenomena that make up Romantic period, rival ecclesiastical forces consisting of Gallican bishops, who were loyal to national ecclesiastical rule and not to the Roman Pontiff, were opposed by ultramontane bishops loyal to Roman authority. Partisan support for various theological systems ultimately politicized religious iconography and it had a direct influence on Delacroix's choice of subjects at Saint-Sulpice.;Twentieth-century pluralistic theology (Rahner) is a metonymical means to explicate Delacroix's religious consciousness in order to define transcendence without religion and to broadened the definition of spirituality, to affirm Delacroix's contemplative nature beyond so-called melancholia.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
