Burial Of Atala Stylistic Analysis

In the late 18th and early 19th century, the practice, understanding and meaning-making of art completely shifted. It no longer only served churches, aristocrats and history— instead, it now included secular emotions and individual thought. This was partly what gave way to the advent of such styles as neoclassicism and romanticism, which each got rid of at least some aspect of ‘traditional’ painting and embraced new ideas and perceptions regarding art. Neoclassicism arose, borrowing from Roman and Greek figures of antiquity, and remolding those values to become deeply engaged with the ethical, the central, the simple, the clear—which if situated against or compared to its predecessor, the Rococo style, one is able to clearly distinguish the

This work begins to leap from the style of neoclassicist art and trod into the sensual, emotional sphere of romanticism. Also called Entombment of Atala, it is a clear and uncontested reference to the traditional pictorial composition of Christian iconography. The portrayed scene takes place inside a cave—and knowingly enough, the location has been used as a scene for many paintings depicting the burial of Christ, such as the Entombment of Christ by Caravaggio (1603), an altarpiece currently placed in the Vatican Pinacoteca. We find that the artist, Girodet, employs the use of traditional techniques to paint non-traditional subjects, filling the landscape with emotion, nature and sacredness. This is evident as the artist also employs the same title, but instead resorts to portraying a Christian figure rather than the Christ, shifting the focus to flawed yet purely represented subjects and taking inspiration from a literary piece (Chateaubriand’s Atala), instead of the bible per se. This epic portrayal of the three figures truly resembles paintings of the Christ, and even the title lettering, in the way that it specifies a certain event and name, tending towards a “religious revival”. It bears some resemblance to the

David painted many of his works in the “traditional” manner, however blowing a new life into the mentioned scenes and traditions of antiquity. As this work is categorized as ‘history painting’, I do not believe the painting completely endorses the term, as it is as concerned with the artistic style as it is with the subject matter at hand, whereas historic painting generally does not concern itself with artistic