Ut pictura poesis: The Role of Delacroix’s Landscapes in the Palais-Bourbon

Even before Delacroix emerged as the rising star of the Romantic school, artists had claimed social equality with poets, and had severed any vestigial connections to artisans. Immersed in the culture of the Romantic salons, and inspired by the writings of Madame de Staël, the Barbuspoet Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and others, Delacroix imagined himself in an Orpheus-like role, as a leader and creator of civilization. He believed that the artist, like the poet, possessed spiritual knowledge that enabled him to solve the mysteries of nature; it was the artist’s task to restore harmony between the physical world and the world of the mind. Delacroix’s landscapes in the Orpheushemicycle and pendentives of the Palais-Bourbon are not merely backgrounds for the figures, but serve to illuminate the artist-poet’s role as interpreter of nature.