The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) · 1840
On the twelfth of April twelve hundred and four the knights of the Fourth Crusade, who had set out for the Holy Land, took Constantinople instead. Delacroix shows the moment after the assault. Baldwin of Flanders and his companions ride through the city on their horses, banners flying, but nobody is celebrating. In the foreground the defeated beg for mercy: an old man supports a swooning woman, a girl bends over a dead body, a bearded elder kneels before the riders. Behind them the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus open out under a stormy sky, with the roofs and towers of the Byzantine capital catching the light.
Delacroix was commissioned to paint the picture on the thirtieth of April eighteen thirty eight for the Crusades rooms that King Louis-Philippe was creating at Versailles, and he was paid ten thousand francs. He painted it in Paris from March eighteen forty, with the help of the painter Louis Boulangé for the perspective and the architecture. Stand back and follow the light. The sky and the sea are the brightest areas, and the crusaders are painted in relatively sober tones, so that the eye is drawn away from the conquerors towards the victims and the landscape. The picture is signed at the lower right and dated eighteen forty.
Shown at the Salon of eighteen forty one, it was sent to Versailles that June and only returned to the Louvre in eighteen eighty five. Critics of the time found it disordered and gloomy; later generations saw in it Delacroix's deepest reflection on war and the melancholy of history. The horses, the banners and the crowd are built into a great diagonal that sweeps from the upper left down to the mourning figures at the right, so that even the composition seems to slide towards grief.
Did You Know? The painting was made for the Crusades galleries at Versailles, but Delacroix quietly turned a scene of triumph into one of the saddest pictures of victory ever painted.
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