Gerard de Nerval's little gourmet geography in his Journey to the Orient

A literary and semiological approach of Delacroix'" Journal de jeunesse" reveals a path that leads the artist who faces his inner abyss to a rebirth resulting in the completion of the Scenes des Massacres de Scio. Delacroix, heir to the Enlightenment, starts his journal as a way to happiness, but soon, his writing, undermined by melancholy, turns into an instrument of the loss of self and masks the vacuum of inaccessible depths. How then to bring what lies within the self to light ? Pictorial language can fulfill this goal. In the Journal, periodic falls into despair generate visual metaphors unveiling the intimate nature of the massacre which stands "en abyme" at the center of the painting. By this experience of the depths that images and singing alone can reach, Delacroix, possibly influenced by Rousseau's Essai sur l'Origine des Langues, breaks free from the linearity and articulation of language and ties the pictorial sign to primal roots.