Liberty Leading the People, the Background of the Story

The work on which I linger is a video by Cristina Lucas entitled La liberté raisonnée from 2009.

It is located in a large room of the museum, next to works by Emilio Vedova, Renato Guttuso, Liliana Moro among others.

However, it is a work not only established within a set of areas that speaks about conflict, war, systems of power, but also constitutes a perspective from which to look at the other works and the theme itself.

As can be immediately understood, Lucas's work returns to one of the most famous images in the history of nineteenth-century French art: La libertà che guida il popolo (Liberty Leading the People) by Eugene Delacroix, 1830.

By setting Delacroix's image in motion in a certain sense, Lucas envisions the before and after, develops the narrative and expands it on facts we could not have known.

Lucas brings us into the background of the story.

The woman who leads, in Delacroix, is a symbolic image and as such takes on universal meanings: France, the revolution, freedom, the same days on which the people overthrew Charles X at the end of July 1830.

In Lucas, however, the woman descends to the ground, de-monumentalises herself and, once low, is struck. Her body is no longer an allegory but the body of a real, wounded woman.

The condemnation is overturned, the forms of power are not what she leads the people against.

The symbolic plane, unaltered, yields to the physical plane of reality.

The same pyramidal structure that rises in the first part of the video is deconstructed in the second and the woman's body, having lost its allegorical features, becomes the focus of gazes, fury, violence.

The music, by Henry Purcell, comments and sets the pace for a slowed down view of history, so that it can be grasped and reasoned, understood, right down to the details.