The Barque of Dante

Delacroix made his name with this dark, turbulent vision of Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx in Charon’s boat, shown at the Salon of 1822 when the artist was twenty-four. The crowded bark, the straining figures and the burning city of Dis behind them announced the young painter’s debts — to Michelangelo, Rubens and above all Gros and Géricault — and his determination to break with the cool classicism of the day. The picture was bought by the state and entered the Luxembourg, an extraordinary honor for a first Salon showing, and remains one of the founding documents of French Romanticism.