Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/771

 DELAROCHE

091

DELATORES

N'. !!• York Calaloanr of Cl.brnkrI riiOili?igs: L'CEuvre CompM • ll'.uQtrtf Dilacroir. cd. Robert (1SS5); Tourneux, Dela- , ■■•:r dcvnnt xcs rontrtnimrains (Paris, 18S6); Vac-hon, Elmle si;r li'lnrrour (Paris. ISS.')); Veron, E. Delacroix in Lrs Artistes eri.brcs (Paris).

Henky Anher.

Delaroche, Hippoltte (known also as Paul), painter, b. at Paris. 17 July, 1797; d. 4 November, 1856. A pupil of Watelet, a landscape painter of mediocre ability, and afterwards of Gros, a great painter but a very poor teacher and incapable of har- monizing his doctrines with his genius, Delaroche was consequently badly trained. Without any deep con- ception of mankind or of life, without style, and lacking even a novel idea along the lines of art or beauty, Delaroche was nevertheless gifted with a certain com- monplace skill and aptitude which satisfied the public, and, whilst fully realizing his nar- row limitations, he was astute enough t o supply the want nf artistic ability by an ingenious choice of subjects. Herein lay his genius, if indeed it may so be called. I n this he appealed to the taste of the l)ourgeoisie which, devoid of artistic culture, had in the role of Maecenas succeeded the aris- tocracy of the old regime and defin- itively come into power during the Restoration and the July Mon- archy. The artist's debut in the sa/o« of 1819 with "Xaphtali in the Desert" passed by unnoticed. An- iilliiT Biblical subject appeared in the salmi of 1822, and in 1824 he won the gold medal. Delaroche dis- iM)\ereil his vein and thenceforth, except for the occa- sional treatment of some current event (The Capture of the Trocadero, 1827), heworked upon that series of his- liirical incidents, that vast repertory of anecdotes gen- iTiilly taken from the civil wars of France and England and which, when multiplied by the engravings of (loupil, the publisher, who thereby made a fortune, liccame equally valuable to the author in Paris and bdiidon. We must admit that Delaroche was admir- alily served by his engravers, of whom Ilenriqiiel Du- I'Diit was the best known. His inartistic painting trained much by being translated into engraving as, in this way, only the subject had to be reproduced. It luiist be admitted that, in all these works, Delaroche >liinvs himself an incomparable scene-setter. In his ina.sterpiece, " The Assassination of the Duke of fiiiise" (18S.i,Conde Museum), he is most realistic and furnishes, .as it were, the retrospective photograph of a sixteenth-century drama. Therein accuracy nf detail, naturalness of composition, and the extremely careful treatment of the decoration copied from the Chateau of Blois repl.aced, if indeed they do not equal, tlie im- pre.s.sion made by real art. And yet the unique suc- cess of this small picture does not attend the larger ones, which do not so fully reflect the painter's fancy. In 183:i there Wiis question of entrusting him with '111' decoration of the church of the Madeleine, but the iiLje order w.as divided and the artist refused to ac- iiilrety. By way of compensation he was commi.s- ^loned to decorate the hemicycle of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. This work, completed in 1841 and which
 * il li.ilf of the task that was to have been his in its

was for some time regarded as a masterpiece of dec- orative painting, is an itleal assemlilage. or (jecumeni- cal council, of all the great artists from Ictinus to Bra- mante, from Cimabue to Velazquez, and from Phidias to Erwin von Steinbach, a composition in which the disconnectedness of the whole rivals the absence of character in each personage taken individually. Few great "machines" convey a more cruel impression of the utter lack of ideas and the incurable debility of the poetic or plastic conception. This frieze, officially praised, marked the decline of the artist in the eyes of competent judges and gave unmistakable evidence of his indigence. Delaroche endeavoured to reinstate himself by working up different familiar and pious subjects. He also followed the vogue of the imperial cult and produced several scenes from the life of Napo- leon. But even this ingenious idea did not restore the artist to his pristine glory. Then, as a last resource, he returned to his first subjects: "The Last Prayer of the Children of Edward IV " (1852) ; " The Last Com- munion of Mary Stuart" (1854), etc. His declining years were very sad. In 1835 he married the only daughter of Horace Vernet, but she died in 1848. At this time, although retaining popular favour, he was keenly sensible of the contempt of his fellow art- ists and realized not only that they would never regard him as one of their number l^ut that, despite his glory, his fortunes, and his titles, he must ever remain in their eyes a Philistine painter. He exhil^ited nothing in the salon subsequently to 1837 and had not the courage to participate in the great manifestation of 1855, which was the dazzling triumph of the French School. His "Christian Martyr" (Louvre, 1855), so feebly deline- ated and poorly painted, nevertheless exhales exquis- ite sentiment and is, as it were, the last sigh of a Chris- tian Ophelia. But the shortcomings of the artist should not blind us to the purity of his character and the uprightness of his life. Besides, faulty as his style may be, he nevertheless has the merit of being an inventor. He created anecdotal painting and the spe- cial order of illustrations to which we owe, among so many inferior works, the most creditable protluctions of J. P. Laurens. Delaroche had an " idea", whatever its value, and this fact alone is unusual enough to be taken into account.

Blanc. Hisloire des peintres ,• de LoMi;NlE, P. Delaroche par un homme de rien (1844"); Delaborde, Etudes sur les Beanx-Arts, 11; de Lalaixg, Les Vernet, GericauU et Delaroche: Gautier, Portraits contemporains; (Euvre de P. Delaroche re- prodnit et photographic par Bingham et accompagn^ d'ujie notice par H . Delaborde et d^un catalogue raisonnfi par J. Godde (Paris, 185S); Rosenthal, La Peinture romantique (Paris, 1903).

Louis Gillet.

Delatores (Lat. for Denouncers), a term used by the S>^lod of Ehara (c. .306) to stigmatize those Chris- tians who appeared as accusers of their brethren. This synod decided (can. Ixxiii, Hefele, Concilien- geschichte, 2d ed., I, 188) that if any Christian was proscribed or put to death through the denunciation (delatio) of another Christian, such a tlelator was to suf- fer [)erpetual excommunication. No distinction is made between true and false accusation, but the .synod probably meant only the accusation of Christianity before the heathen judge, or at most a false accusa- tion. Any fal.se accusation against a bishop, priest, or deacon was visited with a similar punishment by the •same synod (can. Ixxv, op. cit., 189). The punishment for false witness in general wjis proportioned by (an. Ixxiv to the gravity of the accusation. The Council of Aries of 314 issued a similar decree (can. xiv, op. cit., p. 213), when it decided that Christians who accused falsely their brethren were to be forever excluded from communion with the faithful. During the persecu- tions of the early Christians it sometimes happened that apostates denounced their fellow-Christians. The younger Pliny relates in a letter to Trajan (Apostolic Fathers ed. Lightfoot, 2d ed., I i, 50 sqq.),