Focus on this artwork and discuss the Reception.
Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus was controversial and polarizing at its exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1828. Delacroix's main figural subject was Sardanapalus, a king willing to destroy all of his possessions, including people and luxurious goods, in a funerary pyre of gore and excess. Sardanapalus was not a classical hero, like the Horatii in Jacques-Louis David’s eponymous painting. Delacroix's Sardanapalus was the antithesis of neoclassical traditions, which favored subdued colors, rigid space, and an overall moral subject matter. He also used foreshortening to tilt the death scene directly into the space of the audience, a far cry from the subdued order of traditional academic paintings. Dorothy Bussy quotes one critic of the work as calling the painting "the fanaticism of ugliness" when it appeared in the Salon in 1828.Linda Nochlin has argued that this painting scandalized the salon because it was understood by contemporaries as a destructive sexual fantasy of Delacroix's own--a collapse of the distinction between the "Other" of Orientalism (i.e., Sardanapalus) and western man.The composer Franz Liszt was inspired by Delacroix's painting (and Byron's play) to compose an Italian opera--Sardanapalo--on the topic, telling Princess Cristina Belgiojoso that, in view of the king's self-immolation, his finale will aim to 'set the entire audience alight'. He completed Act 1 only in 1852 and abandoned the project thereafter. The completed first act received its premiere in 2018.
academic painting Sardanapalo Sardanapalus Paris Salon funerary pyre Franz Liszt foreshortening opera Linda Nochlin Horatii Paris Jacques-Louis David Orientalism