A Danse Macabre on the Barricades: Art in Revolution from a European Perspective

If the nineteenth century is correctly seen as an age when a new and acute historical awareness reshaped the cultural sensibility, then it is no small irony that in the age of history, history painting was in a crisis. This paper maps out three models in modern history painting, which responded to the challenges of this crisis. The first model, Emulation, tries to bring secular history back into the fold of sacred history. Grounded in a missionary return to the Christian roots of art and society, it pursues painting as an act of devotion and history as a carrier of the Christian message. In this context, history stands not only for a specific set of events but more importantly embodies a particular cultural expression, a certain style that, in turn, is defined as moral agent and a materialized remnant of divine revelation. This approach stands out for its radical emphasis on the unbridgeable distance between past and present. Instead of drawing the viewer via pictorial rhetoric, this model seeks to create emotional participation and personal identification as an intellectualized, art-historically charged act of meditation and mediation that does not hold out the apple of pictorial temptation but poses History and history painting as stark reminders that faith requires a conscious leap. In the second model, Empathy, opts for a psychological rendition of the past, the cathartic moment of an event yields to depictions of the characters’ interiority and state of mind. History begins to unfold in back rooms and private moments of contemplation, and its protagonists are no longer heroes who shape (of even can shape) history, but confront us as History’s victims, whose fate manifests itself as emotional occurrences of allegedly anthropological universality. The third model, Spectacle, reflects a burning desire to recreate history as congruent with the viewer’s reality, thus working with the allure and illusion of real participation. As history turns into spectacle, historical representation becomes eyewitness report and, as such, commits itself to the laws of realism. This yearning for personal participation contributed greatly to the popularity of the fourth model, Domestication, which responded to the call for new modes of representation via a lesser but more popular format: genre painting. The ensuing domestication of history spoke, beyond an identification with the everyman, to a yearning for intimate forms of story-telling. But for all its popularity, Model 4 tended to fall short of providing an uplifting vision that could be understood as being both universal and timeless. The fifth model, Real Allegory, thus catered to the persistent need of making sense of history’s chaos and bestow long-lasting meaning of the contingent events of the present by marrying symbolism with a daunting realism. In a Final Crossing, we then encounter this overarching striving by thinking through the circulation of styles and people, thus turning to the notion of subthemes that bestow upon a historical event an unexpected second meaning