The Image of Death in the Environment of the French Revolution

Abstract

The traditional expressions of art, painting and sculpture postulate, since the French Revolution, a renewed symbolism of death. The human body, alive or dead, serves as a model in the replica. This ambiguity between fiction, presence and space generates aesthetic pleasure. The power of Platonic reminiscence or the mental image in funeral representations (which require visibility and official presence in the social public space) is re-signified. Art, once again, drifts in collective conscience for expressing political interests and ideologies. The ideals of the Revolution gave however a different orientation to symbolic perception: the portrait as a medium of the lifeless body, the shadow with or without form, the body support, the mystery, the absence-presence, and the suggestion, as in The Angelus by Jean-François Millet. The approaches vary. Heroic death: the corpse of Marat, a citizen hero, invulnerable due to his ritual metamorphosis, becomes glory (Jacques-Louis David); the gratuitous death of the antiheroes, as in the executions depicted in the canvas The 3^rd of May 1808 in Madrid by Francisco de Goya; the natural forces that threaten death: The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault; natural and inevitable death: Camille Monet on her deathbed by Claude Monet, and so on.