Collection of Sand

by Italo Calvino

  ‘Bloodstained hotels’, where the owners murdered their clients in their sleep and burned them in the stove, form another topos which crime journalism from nineteenth-century rural France would pass on to literature and theatre (the most recent example being Camus’s Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding)). The most notorious such hotel was that of Peyrebeille, where M. and Mme. Martin, along with their servant Rochette, also known as ‘The Mulatto’, eliminated a number of people whose total was never established exactly. They were then guillotined in 1833 on the very site of their crimes. That was all that was needed for their hotel to turn into a tourist attraction, with postcards and souvenirs.

  These violent stories provided the mythical raw material that was then taken up by popular literature (which closely followed such crime reporting, with instalments selling at 10 centimes each on famous crimes that had passed into literature). It was also taken up by the theatre, which specialized in these crimes and got its macabre inspiration from the name of the Boulevard on which it was situated, Boulevard du Crime (immortalized in Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis). Other areas that derived inspiration from these stories were the wax dummies of the Musée Grevin, and later the cinema: this was a whole new world of the imagination that France contributed to the collective mythology of the modern world.

  (Italy too had this kind of raw material: just think of the book by Ernesto Ferrero, La mala Italia, which Rizzoli published a few years ago. But we did not have the literary culture—or even just a particular turn of imagination—that was capable of transforming all this.)

  However, the ‘human interest stories’ analysed in the Paris exhibition do not just cover crime stories. Acts of heroism, abnegation, courage, particularly rescues, are also part of the picture. A collection of short works in 1787, on the eve of the Revolution, was dedicated to the ‘Virtues of the People’: these were human interest stories in which humble people took centre stage, confirming Rousseau’s ideas on the natural goodness of human beings.

  Not only the extremes of the human mind in terms of good or evil, but every act that departs from the norm helps to make news, to create a human interest story: the arrival of the first giraffe in Paris in 1827 was an event that for years continued to be illustrated in woodcuts, lithographs, almanacs, on majolica plates, on copper pans.

  There are also living phenomena, which from ancient times onwards have carried with them the aura of prodigies, of signs from the gods. The exhibition is not very rich on monsters, mermaids, dwarves, giants or Siamese twins, but there is one exhibit that you certainly don’t see every day: a ‘naturalized bust’ of a bearded woman (of about a century ago), in other words not a representation but the real head of the woman, embalmed after her death for the purposes of scientific documentation. The embalmer, out of both ‘artistic’ and gentlemanly scruples, has placed round her neck a little collar of embroidered lace.

  Also newsworthy are of course incidents and accidents of all types: the rarer and more novel they are, the more they are prized. So we see the first car accidents: a car crashing down on an express train (in America: the backdrop shows rocky mountains, and the vegetation is exotic).

  Many of the covers of Le Petit Journal show human figures as they fall, suspended in mid-air, or in free fall: a spectator at the theatre plummets from his box down into the stalls, a pilot falls from his balloon, a woman with long skirts flies through a window (‘act of madness’), from another window a ‘new Icarus’ flies, covered in feathers.

  And the scenes of violence and crime are always portrayed with raised arms brandishing daggers or knives. The event that shakes the natural order of things is situated in a moment which is as it were outside of time, a fleeting moment that remains fixed for ever.

  [1983]

  A Novel Inside a Painting

  Periodically the Louvre puts on Dossier exhibitions, taking a famous painting—or group of paintings—and putting alongside it all the essential documents (drawings, sketches, other works of art) needed to shed light on its genesis. They are always interesting shows, and there is always a lot to learn from them. This winter the Dossier exhibition allows us to study one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century, figure by figure: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. A painting with so many people in it is a little bit like a novel where several plots intertwine; that is the reason I feel I am entitled to talk about it, without wanting to invade the field of art historians and critics, but simply recounting what is explained in the exhibition, and trying to read the painting as one reads a book. In July 1830, three days of popular revolt in Paris (the ‘Three Glorious Days’) had put an end to the rule of Charles X and to the Bourbon restoration; a few days later Louis Philippe d’Orléans’s constitutional monarchy was installed; in the final months of the same year Delacroix painted his great canvas in celebration of the July Revolution. Even today, when one needs an image to commemorate the liberating power of a popular revolt, with all the emphasis the theme deserves, people all over the world turn to this painting. The show exemplifies this later reception as well in a room which displays how the painting continues to be referenced, reproduced, caricatured, dressed up in all sorts of different guises: a reception that is certainly due to its theme, but above all to its painterly qualities, which have never been equalled in representations of this type. This work was revolutionary first of all in the history of painting, because, even though nowadays it seems to us an allegorical work, at the time it was seen as the first expression of a ‘realism’ that was unheard of and scandalous.

  Now it has to be said that the painting does not stem from political militancy on Delacroix’s part: under Charles X the painter was already at the height of his fame, with supporters at Court and commissions from the State. The scandal caused by his 1827 painting of The Death of Sardanapalus, a painting that was judged to be immoral, had ended up by consolidating his reputation. At the same time he also enjoyed the support of the Duke of Orléans, the future Louis Philippe, who was then leader of the liberal opposition and an enthusiast of the new style of painting, and someone who bought paintings from Delacroix.

  When the revolt broke out in July 1830, Delacroix did not mount the barricades, but enlisted—like many other artists—for guard duty at the Louvre in order to protect the museum’s collections from any danger of being ransacked by the furious mob. We still have some evidence regarding these stints on daytime and night-time guard duty, where furious rows erupted amongst the artists doing their rounds, sometimes ending in fisticuffs, not about politics but about artistic tendencies or how to evaluate Raphael. The image that this scant collection of anecdotes evokes helps us relive that atmosphere of revolutionary tension through an extraordinarily authentic image: the rooms of the Louvre, by night, in the heart of a city in revolt, and these civilians who are armed and cloaked, moving amongst the Egyptian sarcophagi, discussing the ideals of their art with unparalleled fervour, while distant echoes of shots and roars float over from the Hôtel de Ville on the other side of the Seine . . .

  Delacroix had interrupted his diary for those years, and to understand his attitude towards the revolution we have some letters where what we see are only the worries of a tranquil man in a time of upheaval. A piece of evidence from Alexandre Dumas (who, however, always distorted his memories) shows us a Delacroix at first visibly shaken at seeing the populace in arms, but then enthusiastic at the sight of the tricolour flying once more as in Napoleon’s day, and from that point on he was won over to the people’s cause.

  In the days following the revolution, the National Guard, which Charles X had dissolved, was re-established, and Delacroix immediately enlisted as a volunteer, though grumbling in
his letters about how tough the turns of duty were. His entire conduct was extremely consistent: his reactions were absolutely normal for someone who sympathized with the way the people’s anti-absolutist movement led to the formation of a liberal monarchy, and the logical outcome was for him to end up as part of the new Orléanist establishment.

  But 1830 had marked not only the shift from one dynasty to another, and from an aristocracy with bourgeois leanings to a bourgeoisie with aristocratic leanings: for the first time the proletarian masses had taken to the streets in person (while even in the 1789 Revolution the initiative had been taken by the ideological leaders), and they had been the decisive element in the change of regime. This novelty, which dominated all talk at the time, would be the specific theme of the painting that Delacroix would work on in the months immediately after these events (when already disillusionment and recrimination were seeping through the ranks of the most radical republicans and democrats). ‘I’ve taken up a modern subject, the barricades,’ he wrote to his brother in October, ‘and if I did not fight for our country, at least I will paint for it. This has put me back in a very good mood.’

  A painting that puts before the eyes of the observer the energy, movement and enthusiasm of the event would be thought to have been painted on the spur of the moment. Instead, the history of the work is one of a laborious composition, full of hesitations and about-turns, worked out detail by detail, the artist placing side by side elements that were heterogeneous, some of them motifs from existing paintings. As an allegorical work, one would say that it was inspired solely by an ideal that the painter felt passionately about. Instead, the choice of every detail of clothing, of every weapon brandished, has a meaning and a story behind it. As a realistic work, one would think it was inspired by real life, by emotions aroused by the field of struggle; instead it is a repertoire of quotations from other works in museums, a kind of compendium of figurative culture.

  For a start, the exhibition shows, in a way I find convincing, that the female figure at the centre of the painting, the most famous image of Liberty in the history of painting, did not come into Delacroix’s imagination only then: she had been present already in a large number of his drawings in the previous ten years or so. She was ‘Greece Rebelling against the Turks’, a subject to which Delacroix wanted to dedicate a painting from the time of the first stirrings of Greek independence in 1820. The solidarity with Greece was a very powerful theme in European Romanticism, and in 1821 Delacroix began a series of drawings for an allegorical painting. The following year, hearing of the bloody suppression of the revolt on the island of Chios, he developed another idea which would eventually lead to the famous 1824 painting The Massacre at Chios. A few years later he would resume these studies for the female figure who would become Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1827, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux). But more than in these paintings it is in the drawings (which on the basis of other details are recognizable as preparatory studies for Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi) that we recognize the movement of her arms and torso that will be taken up again in Liberty Leading the People. Similarly, we see that in these same drawings the figure wears on her head initially a turreted crown, then later a Phrygian cap.

  But that is not all. Infra-red photography has been used to determine whether Delacroix by any chance used an already painted canvas for Liberty, correcting a draft made years before for Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi. The results of this research are, as often happens, very uncertain, and have led to further questions rather than answers. One thing that is sure is that Liberty’s skirt had initially been much fuller, and less suitable for leaping on to the barricade. Her face was initially seen full-on, as in the drawings: the decision to paint her in profile, which gives her that unforgettable incisiveness, seems to have come to the painter as he worked on this canvas, and it is certainly an idea linked to the theme of 1830 and not to the earlier one: Liberty turns her face to the people to exhort them to fight. And then there is a strange cuff on the worker on the left, one of the few points where the painting seems rather botched: this might be a correction to cover a Greek or Turkish outfit. There are also the rickety tables of the barricade, which in the overall composition of the work are used to relegate the landscape of Paris to the background and to raise up as though on a stage the glorified figures in the foreground, but they might also have been used to hide a different landscape that had been painted previously, the beach at Missolonghi, the sea . . .

  None of these findings are certain; they remain hypotheses. The only conclusion is that Liberty Leading the People is an autonomous painting, devised and painted in 1830; to have used previous studies does not prove any contradiction of, or indifference to, the painting’s theme, which is that of the freedom of peoples, but rather enriches it in this move from an ideal allegory to a lived experience which becomes a visual and corporeal fact. The formal composition of the work was determined by the painter in 1830: it is the flag that acts as the apex of the composition, providing it with its triangular structures and the three colours that find a counterpoint in the rest of the painting.

  The curators of the exhibition cite as an analogous case that of Picasso, who, on hearing the news of the bombing of Guernica, took up his studies for bull-fights from previous years (which already contained presages of the tragedy that was looming over Spain) in order to compose his famous painting.

  Consistently with the theme he had chosen, Delacroix places to the left of Liberty the figures of three workers: what he meant by ‘people’ were manual workers. (There is not a single recognizable bourgeois person in the painting, except for a figure wearing a cocked hat in the background, who could be one of the students from the Ecole Polytechnique who took part in the uprising.) Driven by a clearly sociological intent, Delacroix portrays three different types of manual workers: the man with the top hat could be an artisan, a compagnon from a guild (yes, at that time the top hat was a universal item of headwear, with no social connotations; but the wide trousers and the red flannel belt were typical of the workers); the man with the sword is a worker from the manufacturing sector, with his worker’s apron; the man who is wounded, on his hands and knees, with the handkerchief on his head and his blue shirt tucked into his belt, is a manual worker from a building site, one of the seasonal workers who had emigrated from the country to the city.

  To the right of Liberty there is the famous urchin with the black beret brandishing two pistols, whom today we all call Gavroche (but in 1830 Les Misérables had not yet been written: Hugo’s novel would not be published until 1862). In this exhibition he is compared with a statue of Mercury by Giambologna, the élan of which had already inspired other painters of the time, but was always portrayed in profile, whereas here the figure is full-on.

  There is another boy armed with a bayonet to the left of the painting, crouching amongst the piled-up paving stones, wearing the beret of the National Guard. All the details of the uniforms are identifiable, so precisely are they represented, and so too are the weapons, from the Royal Guards’ bandolier that the urchin has got hold of (though the two pistols were from the cavalry) to the sabre from a crack infantry unit, held by the worker with the apron, along with its own bandolier. You can trace the story of all the weapons in the picture, just like the stories attached to the weapons of the paladins in the chivalric romances; except that here, as always in real revolutions, the weaponry is haphazard and heterogeneous, since it comes from chance seizures and from booty snatched from enemies. The only non-military weapon is the one brandished by the worker in the top hat, which is a hunting rifle.

  This detailed iconological analysis has unearthed some ideological surprises regarding
this very figure, the most working-class figure here, the man with the apron: on his beret he has a white cockade with a red bow. The white cockade means he is a monarchist, and what is more his pistol tucked into his belt is held by a scarf that has Vendean colours; but he has converted to liberalism (the red bow): so what we have here is a man of the people who is loyal to the throne but is rebelling against the oppression of absolutism . . . However, it is pointless immersing ourselves further in these hypotheses where the specialists can tell us whatever they like without fear of us gainsaying them.

  More pertinent to our reading of the painting are the three corpses in the foreground. One belongs to allegory and myth, in his idealized, classical pose: in fact he is naked, or at least has lost his trousers, but no critic ever dreamed of being scandalized by this (whereas Liberty’s naked breasts, despite being a traditional attribute of Winged Victories, were met with protests) because he follows a widely known academic model from the classical repertoire. That was the pose in which Hector was portrayed when he was tied by his legs to Achilles’ chariot. The other two corpses are soldiers of the defeated king, who have been placed along with the fallen of the revolution in a mood of universal pietas. One of them wears the uniform of the Swiss Regiment of the Royal Guard (which Louis Philippe would later suppress), and his helmet (the shako) has rolled alongside him; the other is a French soldier, a cuirassier. These figures of fallen men (including the wounded worker) have precedents in the celebratory paintings of David and Gros: Delacroix’s painting is where old and new motifs in the history of painting meet, just as the July Revolution had been a meeting-point in the history of France.