the Death of Sardanapale is a large table of Eugene Delacroix, preserved at the Musée of Louvre to Paris, which entered the collections thanks to the arrears of the Audéoud legacy in 1921. The museum also preserves a small table (100 cm X 81 cm) on the same topic - asset in 1925, thanks to a legacy of the countess of Salvandy - which is a draft of the large table.

Sardanapale is a legendary king of Ninive in Assyrie which would have lived of 661 with 631 av. J. - C. It would be a mythologisation of Assurbanipal, a very cultivated king, not very quarrelsome. The other possibilté is that Sardanapale is the brother of Assurbanipal, that this last had charged with controlling Babylon. Sardanapale had then intrigued against Assurbanipal, which had pushed this one to make the head office of Babylon to punish it (650-648). When Sardanapale felt the defeat to approach, it decided to die with all his women and its horses and to set fire to its palate.

The scene represented by Delacroix tells the dramatic episode of dead of the sovereign, whose capital is besieged without any hope of delivery and who decides to commit suicide in company of his Esclave S and his favorite, after having burned his city to prevent the enemy from benefitting from sound well. Delacroix tested the need to provide some explanations when the fabric was exposed the first time, and it did it in these terms:

Revolted besieged it in its palate… Slept on a superb bed, to the top of immense to rough-hew, Sardanapale gives the order to its eunuques and to the officers of the palate to cut the throat of his wives, its pages, to its favorite horses and its dogs; none the objects which had been used for its pleasures owed him survivre.

The English poet Lord Byron, one of the writers headlight of the romanticism, had published in 1821 in England a drama - Sardanapalus - translated into France as of 1822. Certain historians think that Delacroix would have drawn its inspiration there. The poem tells the fine tragedy of this legendary king of Assyrie, which, seeing the capacity to escape to him following a conspiracy, chooses, when it realized that its defeat was inescapable, to be thrown in company of its favorite, Myrrha, a Ionian Esclave, in the flames of gigantic to rough-hew. If Delacroix seems well to have begun again the general screen of the drama of Byron - one recognizes Myrrha in the woman with half lengthened on the bed with the feet of the monarch - it seems on the other hand to have borrowed the holocaust of the women, the horses and the treasure to another author, antique this time, Diodore of Sicily, which, in its historical Bibliothèque , tells a similar scene: “Not to find itself captive of the enemy, it made install in its palate gigantic to rough-hew on which it placed his gold, its money and all its clothes of monarch; being locked up with his wives and its eunuques in a space arranged in the middle of roughing-hew it, it was thus let burn with its people and his palate. ”

It is noticed that it is not a licked table. The painter juxtaposes spots of color which present a form only when one moves back. The color dominates, the luminosity is bright.

Beyond the history represented, this table seems a proclamation in the quarrel between romantic painting - represented by Delacroix - and the Classicisme or the Néoclassicisme - represented by Ingres - since Delacroix proposes in its work this relaxation of formal conventions, that rejects the traditional ones: they are not any more the forms and the subjects which the artist emphasizes, but more intensity of the colors, contrasts and the light (cf the '' quarrel of the drawing and the color '' between Ingres and Delacroix).

Work was exposed to the Living room of 1827, living room where Ingres exposed the Apotheosis of Homère . It much more badly was accommodated than Scènes of the massacres of Scio (1824) exposed two years earlier, which had already made scandal and promoted Delacroix with the rank of leader of the romantic school in painting. Vis-a-vis the work of Ingres, the Death of Sardanapale caused a new scandal and was rejected by the majority of criticisms. Victor Hugo, once again clear-sighted, was one of only not to condemn the disproportion expressed by Delacroix, its rejection of the Beautiful, and the cruelty of the scene contemplated by a tyrant esthète with thousand miles of the neo-classic examples of virtue.

the Death of Sardanapale is certainly the most romantic fabric of Delacroix. On the same topic, Hector Berlioz wrote a Cantate which was worth its first official success to him.

See too

• Eugene Delacroix