Iconic reading in« DELACROIX’s paiting »

Sultan Moulay Slimane University Cycle master
Faculty of letters and human Master L.I.T
sciences – Beni Mellal S. 3









Iconic reading in
« DELACROIX’s paiting »













Realized by: Supervised by: Elmostafa FTOUH Dr. Nourdine BOURIMA


2009/2010

CONTENT


INTRODUCTION 3
Should we translate or read a painting? 4
Should we describe or interpret an image? 5
Reading 5
The iconic sign 6
Semiologic approach 6
A semiological Reading 6
a- Denotation «first meaning » 6
b-Connotation 7
The logical and the analogical thinking. 7
The image and the text 8
Delacroix 8
PRACTICAL PART; 10
Liberty Leading the People 10
Death of Sardanapalus (1827), 13
Le harem (The Women of Algiers •) 16
References 18








INTRODUCTION
A traditional theory of translation interprets it as a process of two processes, there is always two processes in translation. One text in a language “A” and its equivalent in language “B”. But translation manifests its self in different aspects; there is legal translation, literary translation, audio-visual translation, etc. in this exposé, we are interested by visual translation. Image is not always naïve, when we receive an image; we should know how to read it, how to give off its connotations and the different messages coming from it.
Images may be two-dimensional, such as a photograph, screen display, and as well as a three-dimensional, such as a statue. They may be captured by optical devices—such as cameras, mirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes, etc. and natural objects and phenomena, such as the human eye or water surfaces.
The word image is also used in the broader sense of any two-dimensional figure such as a map, a graph, a pie chart, or an abstract painting. In this wider sense, images can also be rendered manually, such as by drawing, painting, carving, rendered automatically by printing or computer graphics technology, or developed by a combination of methods, especially in a pseudo-photograph.
A volatile image is one that exists only for a short period of time. This may be a reflection of an object by a mirror, a projection of a camera obscured, or a scene displayed on a cathode ray tube. A fixed image, also called a hard copy, is one that has been recorded on a material object, such as paper or textile by photography or digital processes.
A mental image exists in an individual's mind: something one remembers or imagines. The subject of an image need not be real; it may be an abstract concept, such as a graph, function, or "imaginary" entity. For example, Sigmund Freud claimed to have dreamt purely in aural-images of dialogues. The development of synthetic acoustic technologies and the creation of sound art have led to a consideration of the possibilities of a sound-image made up of irreducible phonic substance beyond linguistic or musicological analysis.
Image is a technical object because it permits us to move from a world in three dimensions to a two dimensions world presented in a surface; a painting, a wall, a screen, etc.
It is a visual sign, because it mends us to the reality or the fiction by representing things.
It results from a physiological phenomenon which is ‘perception’.

Should we translate or read a painting?
How to read the language specific to the image? What are the expressions that help to detect this iconic language? The approach that we wish to consider here attempts to translate what the image can express and discover its multiple connotations.
When we want to translate a text, we have to read it, to have its meaning and to what its components and expressions refer to. After that come the translation phase. So, to translate an image, we have to read it, to understand its components and its iconic signs meaning.

Should we describe or interpret an image?
At first, we have to say that description is objective and scientific. To describe an image, you have to be a specialist from the domain, to have a large knowledge in the domain of the iconic reading.
Interpretation is subjective and personnel. When we give the same image to different people from different categories, we will have different interpretations following the background and the proper vision to thing of every one of them. So that why the interpretation is consider as personnel.

Reading
The act of reading is; representing by signs, making hypotheses, detection of the sense of the message, be it linguistic, iconic or resounding. The image is a system of rational signs. Working on the image may allow: A perceptive and intellectual enrichment and an affective enrichment; we can communicate its imagination in the iconic universe.



The iconic sign
The interpretation of the image is based on decomposed signs; signifying and signified;
 The signifying : is the element apparent in the image
 The signified constitutes the non perceptible side of the image; the ideas and the concepts convoyed by the signifying.

Semiologic approach
This approach is interested in the image as a mean of communication. A visual message comes to existence only when it is correctly decoded by the receptor that becomes capable of giving a meaning to it. More information will be obtained if the addressee is closer to the code used by the addressor. The more the receptor is near to the code used by the image, the more we get information.
A semiological Reading
The first level of reading: Denotation
 What do I see in the image?
The second level of reading: Connotation
 What does the image make me think about?
a- Denotation «first meaning »
The signifying
(colors, people, dots, lines…) The signified
(the object representation) (analogical content : the real object as we perceive it)
b-Connotation

The signifying The signified
(Interpretations) (Iconic and extra-iconic)

The logical and the analogical thinking.
To express the content of an image is a verbal requirement that provokes a tension between two modes of thought: the logical and the analogical thought. The distinction between two modes of thought comes from the functional specialization of the two cerebral hemispheres and their necessary complementarities. So the image and the modes of thought can be represented like that;

 The right brain The logical thought
 The left brain The analogical thought

The act of reading a fixed image,-reasoned analysis- will activate the left hemisphere, which means moving from the non-verbal to the verbal, from the synthetic to the analytic and from the concrete to the abstract.
Having a look on this painting, we can see only the flowers, -the left hemisphere-. To see the whole character/ person, we need the right hemisphere so as to see the things as a whole. The two hemispheres allow us to appreciate the work of the painter.

The image and the text
We can wonder about the relation between the text and the image, which plays either the function of anchoring when it imposes, among the different meanings possible, a unique and distinct sense of reading. Sometimes, a function of a mediator when it suggests what the image doesn’t say. And sometimes, the text is moved from the image; at this moment, it acquires a poetic value and incites the reader to make an effort in imagining the situation.

Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on color and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.
However, Delacroix was given neither to sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.






























PRACTICAL PART;


Liberty Leading the People








Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple) is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which reject Charles X. A woman personifying Liberty leads the people forward over the bodies of the fallen, holding the tricolor flag of the French Revolution in one hand and brandishing a bayoneted musket with the other. This is perhaps Delacroix's best-known painting, having carved its own niche in popular culture.
This is Delacroix's most influential work which for choice of subject and technique highlights the differences between the romantic approach and the neoclassical style. Less obviously, it also differs from the Romanticism of Géricault and the Raft of the Medusa; "Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions…"
It is probably Delacroix's best known painting. It is an unforgettable image of Parisians, having taken up arms, marching forward under the banner of the tricolor representing liberty, equality, and fraternity; Delacroix was inspired by contemporary events to invoke the romantic image of the spirit of liberty. The soldiers lying dead in the foreground offer poignant counterpoint to the symbolic female figure, which is illuminated triumphantly, as if in a spotlight.
The French government bought the painting but officials deemed its glorification of liberty too inflammatory and removed it from public view. Nonetheless, Delacroix still received many government commissions for murals and ceiling paintings. He seems to have been trying to represent the spirit and the character of the people, rather than glorify the actual event, a revolution against King Charles X which did little other than bring in a different king, Louis-Philippe, to power.
Following the Revolution of 1848 that saw the end of the reign of King Louis Philippe, Delacroix' painting, Liberty Leading the People, was finally put on display by the newly elected President, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III.) Today, it is visible in the Louvre museum.









Death of Sardanapalus (1827),




Death of Sardanapalus (La Mort de Sardanapale) is an oil painting on canvas, dated 1827 by Eugène Delacroix. Its dimensions are 392 x 496 cm or 12′ 1" x 16′ 3". It currently hangs in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Its dominant feature is a large bed on which a nude prostrates herself and beseeches the apathetic Sardanapalus for mercy. Sardanapalus had ordered his possessions destroyed and concubines murdered before immolating himself, once he learnt that he was faced with military defeat.
Death of Sardanapalus is based on a play, Sardanapalus, written by Lord Byron, and is a work of the era of Romanticism. This painting uses rich, vivid and warm colors, and broad brushstrokes. It inspired a cantata by Hector Berlioz, La mort de Sardanapale (1830), and also Franz Liszt's opera.
The Death of Sardanapalus, (1827- is one from Delacroix’s prestigious painting. It shows an emotionally stirring scene alive with beautiful colors, exotic costumes and tragic events. The Death of Sardanapalus depicts the besieged king watching impassively as guards carry out his orders to kill his servants, concubines and animals.
Sardanapalus attitude of calm detachment is a familiar pose in Romantic imagery in this period in Europe. The painting, which was not exhibited again for many years afterward, has been regarded by some critics as a gruesome fantasy involving death and lust. Especially shocking is the struggle of a nude woman whose throat is about to be cut, a scene placed prominently in the foreground for maximum impact. However, the sensuous beauty and exotic colours of the composition make the picture appear pleasing and shocking at the same time.
A variety of Romantic interests were again synthesized in The Murder of the Bishop of Liège, (1829). It also borrowed from a literary source, this time Scott depicts a scene from the Middle Ages, that of the murder of Louis de Bourbon, Bishop of Liège amidst an orgy sponsored by his captor, William de la Marck. Set in an immense vaulted interior which Delacroix based on sketches of the “Palais de Justice” in Rouen and Westminster Hall, the drama plays out in chiaroscuro, organized around a brilliantly lit stretch of tablecloth. In 1855 a critic described the painting's vibrant handling as "Less finished than a painting, more finished than a sketch, The Murder of the Bishop of Liège was left by the painter at that supreme moment when one more stroke of the brush would have ruined everything".












Le harem (The Women of Algiers •)






The Women of Algiers (In Their Apartment) is an 1834 oil on canvas painting by Eugène Delacroix. It is located in the Louvre, Paris, France.
The painting is notable for its sexual connotations; it depicts Algerian concubines of a harem. It also depicts opium, which often accompanied paintings of prostitutes. In the 19th century, it was known for its sexual content. The painting served as a source of inspiration to the later impressionists, and a series of 15 paintings and numerous drawings by Pablo Picasso in 1954.
In the 1950s, he painted three major series of variations on past masterpieces: Women of Algiers after Delacroix in 1954, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) after Velázquez in 1957, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe after Manet in 1960-61, as well as reinterpreting, more sporadically, themes used by Poussin, David, Le Nain, Courbet, etc. Thirteen years of his life were dedicated to these variations, which include over 250 paintings and countless drawings and engravings. This reworking of past masterpieces for his personal reasons was not devoid of humor or irony. This sacrilegious determination to go beyond convention was the Picassian Empire’s final annexation. For him, it was a means of comparing his own pictorial language with some of painting’s greatest masterpieces, of renewing the “borrowing” genre and measuring his own artistic potential.





References

 Bibliography:
- Aumont Jacques, 1990, L’image, Paris, Nathan Université
- Sylvin Simard, 1991, la révolution française au Canada.

 Iconography:
DELACROIX’s paintings ;

-Liberty Leading the People
-Death of Sardanapalus
-Le harem (The Women of Algiers •)

 Webography:

http://www.Delacroix+wikipédia.org

















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