| Mr. Pierre Girieud, architect of a renaissance of the classical spirit, counts among the clear-sighted admirers of the master. He fully agrees with M. René Piot on the nature of the new lesson still offered to painting by one of its greatest masters.
The irony of things makes us go
crack Eugène Delacroix on the occasion of the
Centenary says Romanticism. Those who find it difficult to decipher his thought in his painted work have read. with astonishment in his "Journal" that his art seemed to him very far removed from romantic doctrines. Amaury-Duval confirms this fact by relating a conversation he had with Delacroix; while attending a Berlioz concert, he said to him:
“I have often been compared to him, but
I deserved neither this excess of honor nor this indignity. »
His contemporaries confused the passion
natural of an exceptional temperament with a disordered will. The dome of the Library of the Senate, in my opinion his most complete work, allows us to affirm that he is the equal of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, not only of Tintoretto whose memory he evokes, but of Raphael himself.
The principles of order: hierarchy,
subordination, propriety, are the finest virtues of his compositions (it is useless to speak of the painter on whom, today, everyone is in agreement).
Paradoxical as it may seem, the decorators of the 19th century, from Chassériau to Puvis de Chavannes and up to the present day, to Maurice Denis, have meditated on its lesson. It's him. indeed, who once again knew how to honor the great emotional feeling in wall decoration, which the Le Brun neglected
and his successors who, having misunderstood the Italians and Rubens, thought only of the arrangement of lines and colors.
It singularly surpasses Romanticism;
but, since this opportunity is offered to us, let us celebrate our greatest French painter.
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