David to Delacroix [antikvár]

PREFACE T Xhe German edition of this book was published in 1930 as a volume in a series of philological handbooks destined for use in colleges and universities. The special feature of the book is its emphasis on the historical structure of French painting from the time of David to that of Ingres and Delacroix. This most interesting and important period of French painting has been treated mostly by art critics who have specialized in the art and culture of the nineteenth century and who reduced the art of the period to two main tendencies, classicism and romanticism. Such terms, however, are unsuitable to contrasts of style or technique, whether in painting or in literature, because they refer to different levels of aesthetic experience; the one implies an ideal of form directly or indirectly dependent upon the antique, while the other describes the mood or sentiment which a creative artist expresses through the medium of his work. One can very well speak of a romantic classicism, for example in certain works of Ingres or Girodet, or of a classicistic romanticism in such a painting as Delacroix's "Medea." Such terms tend to confuse rather than to clarify the artistic situation of the period. To my mind, a clearer idea of this situation can be gained by studying, more than has been done in the past, the historical sources of the various stylistic and intellectual currents of the time. Naturally these sources are to be found, to a large extent, in the art of the preceding period, the eighteenth century. I have therefore begun by outlining in an introduction (which because of lack of space is somewhat schematic) the main trends that lead up to David. Of equal importance, however, is the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and significant parallels can be drawn between these periods and the early nineteenth century — parallels which are made particularly meaningful by the strongly and consciously retrospective element in the artistic intellect of the time from David to Delacroix. The art of David