The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). 1822. Oil on canvas. 189 x 241.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, INV 3820, L 3837 (face, recto, avers, avant ; vue d'ensemble ; vue sans cadre © 2017 GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux). This harrowing composition, painted when Delacroix was still in his early twenties, was his debut work at the Salon in 1822. It depicts Dante being rowed across the River Styx by Phlegyas towards the City of the Dead, in Canto VIII of the Inferno. As souls in torment jostle against the boat, hoping to board it and escape, Virgil supports the horrified Dante, who has just been addressed by one of them, the once wealthy and ill-tempered Florentine, Filippo Argenti. Dante puts up an arm as if to ward off the horror; to satisfy him, the man is consigned to a gruesome death on the spot (the episode is recounted in ll.31-61, p. 78). Despite its often-noted debt to Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, this highly emotive and disturbing painting is sometimes seen to mark a new era in French art — "year I of the Romantic revolution" (Allard and Fabre 12). — Jacqueline Banerjee
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Bibliography
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Oxford World's Classics edition, trans. C.H. Sisson, with an introduction and notes by David H. Higgins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Allard, Sébastien, and Côme Fabre. "The Sphinx of Modern Painting." Delacroix, by Sébastien Allard, Côme Fabre and others. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. 1-222.
"Eugène Delacroix, The Barque of Dante."
Last modified 6 August 2025