Virgin Of The Sacred Heart Analysis

Upon installation in the cathedral in 1827, comments describe “une grande fermeté dans la touche, de la vigeur dans les tons et en même temps néanmoins beaucoup de sagesse de coloris .” How to better define a colourist painter? This description of colour seems to indicate that its alteration had not yet began. One century later, this is very different, Corbellini talking about “une tonalité brune et gris argent .” As revealed by restoration documents found recently, the Ajaccio painting and Dante and Virgil in Hell knew similar chemical reactions, probably because financial problems forced Delacroix to use pigments with poor qualities in both. Thus, as in his first painting presented to the Salon a few months later, his technique was problematic.

The restorer put a new canvas to, but an important work about varnish and colours was completed in 1988 after the Frankfurt exhibition. Then, the painting returned from Monte-Carlo to Ajaccio on January 1989. Thus, except in Rouen for the bicentenary of 1998, its colour can only be seen in Corsica. Above all, there was no reproduction usable for art books: publishers used an old photograph taken before restoration. This is why descriptions continued to be misled, frequently describing a dark harmony with ochre and brown however disappeared since

Yet, painted just before Dante, the Virgin of the Sacred Heart shows commonalities in the harmony with red and blue tones. Present in the Virgil’s drapery, a brown tone was also on the Virgin’s robe: this one was removed in 1988 as a repaint by the restorer. However, as indicate in the modello, the final version had brown tone on the robe. Became completely dark, the view of folds was impeded (Fig.8). Other part was also difficult to see. Thus, talking about “the three men of the painting ”, Spector could not distinguish the female figure in the shadow behind the young man (Fig.9), however, he is the first to have noticed the relation between the Virgin (Fig.11) and the allegorical figure of the Liberty, perceiving in the Ajaccio figure an archetype also present in the Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi and Medea about to Kill her Children. About the characters in the foreground, Spector considered that the “expression of suffering recall a major project recently undertaken – the illustration of an episode from Dante’s