Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People
In Our Time
BBC
4.6 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2011
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People. In 1830 revolution once more overtook France, when a popular uprising toppled the French king Charles X. A few months later, the artist Eugene Delacroix immortalised the events of the July Revolution in a painting which remains one of the icons of the age. His allegorical depiction of a Paris barricade, with the figure of Liberty clutching a tricolore while standing on a pile of corpses, is a powerful image which has provoked much debate in the years since it was first unveiled to an enthusiastic public.Producer: Natalia Fernandez.
Transcript
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| 0:46.5 | the program. Hello in 1831 the German poet Heinrich Heiner visited the salon in Paris |
| 0:52.4 | the largest and most important annual art exhibition in Europe. |
| 0:56.0 | He noticed that one painting was surrounded by a large crowd of people and in his review of the show he devoted particular attention to it. The sacredness of the subject he |
| 1:05.0 | wrote makes it dangerous to venture any criticism of its use of colour, apart from a few |
| 1:10.8 | purely technical faults, a great thought range in this work which strongly |
| 1:15.2 | attracts us. The painting hymno was so taken with is called The 28th of July, |
| 1:20.3 | Liberty, leading the people. It was the work of a 32-year-old Parisian, Eugene Delacroix. Its |
| 1:26.0 | subject is a revolution which had taken place in France the previous year. The setting is a Paris |
| 1:31.3 | barricade over which a bare-breasted woman, the personification of liberty leads a group of armed men, a pile of corpses lies at her feet. |
| 1:40.0 | This striking image caused a Ferrari when it was first shown and for years was deemed too subversive to be shown in public. |
| 1:45.8 | Since then, it's become a symbol of human liberty and one of the most influential artworks of the 19th century. |
| 1:51.8 | Joining me to discuss Delacroix's Liberty leading the people are Tim Blanning, |
| 1:56.0 | Emeritus Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge, Tamagard, |
| 2:01.1 | Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at the University at University College London, |
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