A Burial at Ornans

The frieze is necessary as a mass: what the picture says depends on a whole town standing at one level, and the number of figures is the argument, not padding. The grave cannot go, nor the crucifix, the one vertical against the sky, nor the gravedigger, the only figure attending to the dead rather than to the occasion, nor the dog, which looks away as the town looks everywhere but into the grave. Below that the subtractive test gives. Within the mass of women at the right two or three heads could be lost without loss; the men in black between mayor and women are as fungible; the double row behind the clergy thickens more than it articulates. The fungibility is partly the point, a crowd in which each is individual and none singular, but a method of accumulation cannot claim the necessity of a picture from which nothing can be removed.

Score: 8.3 / 10

What the picture brings into the open can be stated, and holds: death in a provincial town is a social occasion before it is a religious one, and the people at a burial attend to one another. Almost nobody looks at the grave; the clergy are perfunctory; the mourners weep in the manner of mourners. The rural bourgeoisie, a class the Salon had never painted at this size, is shown as a subject equal to kings and martyrs, and its rituals as habit, rank and real grief mixed without hierarchy. The image itself discloses it: no heaven, the grave cut by the frame into the viewer’s space, the crucifix one object among hats. The disclosure is specific and holds outside 1850. Held below the top because much of its truth is a negation, no transcendence and no hero, stated with force but not developed into a fuller condition.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The axis scores height and frequency, and here elevation is of one register, gravity, and is refused at the points where the tradition placed it. Where it arises: the black mass of mourners under the pale cliffs, a dark band of people under a lighter band of rock, which at this size has the weight of geology; the crucifix against the grey sky; the gravedigger’s bent back over the open earth; the white headdresses against the black. Before a canvas nearly seven metres wide the whole town arriving at the viewer’s own level is a real grandeur, the grandeur of number. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that it does not rise again and again, and that the picture closes the places where transport would come: no light breaks, no gesture lifts, the sky is overcast. The refusal is the achievement, and the axis counts what is reached.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Myth built, and built by subtraction. The burial is one of the oldest schemes painting has, and the canvas is laid out on it, the procession, the cross, the grave, the gravedigger, the skull, the dog as the old companion of the dead, with the heavenly register cut away. The cut is load-bearing: the expected resolution is withheld, and the particular town takes the place of the celestial court. The particular holds absolutely; the cliffs are the cliffs above the town, and the mourners are its people. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth works mostly as a frame being refused, and the picture’s own construction, a grave at the centre of a community that will not look into it, is strong but single.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is history painting: a format of six or seven metres kept for the state, the church, the battle and the antique. The departure is to fill it with a provincial burial of no public rank, with life-size portraits of the painter’s neighbours, unidealised, ranked by nothing, under an empty sky, in a sombre, broad, unfinished-looking manner the critics took for ugliness. It is the founding wager of Realism in painting, and the stake was real: a young provincial painter with one Salon medal behind him staked his standing on a canvas called ugly and vulgar and read as a political provocation in the years after 1848; the jury of 1855 refused it, and he answered by building his own pavilion. Held below the top because the turn was prepared, in Dutch group portraiture, the provincial genre scene, Géricault’s scale for a contemporary event, and his own After Dinner at Ornans of 1849.

Score: 9.2 / 10

What the picture knows, it knows at this size and in this frieze. A small genre picture of a village funeral says nothing the Salon had not seen; the knowledge is that ordinary people at life size occupy the place of history, and only the format can say it. The frieze is the instrument: one ground line, no figure raised above another, no lit protagonist, so that the composition is itself an equality and a dispersal. The grave is set at the bottom edge, and the viewer stands at the graveside. The horizon of cliffs repeats the line of heads, so that the town and its land are one band. Substitute a pyramid, a heaven or a hero and the argument goes. Held below the top because the form is in places a crowding rather than a construction: the right side reads as a wall, and the depth of the space is compressed in a way partly decided and partly not.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over promise: about 176 years, and the questions are open. Who is buried, and why does the picture not say? Is it a democratic image, as its first critics feared and the left later claimed, a satire of provincial piety, as others read it, or a mourning without irony for the painter’s own town? Is its flatness naïveté, popular imagery taken up on purpose, or a modern refusal of illusion? T. J. Clark’s Image of the People (1973) made it a political event of the Second Republic; Michael Fried’s Courbet’s Realism (1990) read it through the painter’s bodily absorption in his own picture; Linda Nochlin’s work on Realism set it at the origin of the movement. Each reading holds and none closes it. Held below the top because the yield is more historical and political than formal, and the surface rewards close return less than the finest pictures do.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in French painting of 1850. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what painting at full scale could take as its subject: after it, the people of the present, unidealised and in their numbers, could occupy the place of history, and the hierarchy of genres was broken at its top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with The Stonebreakers it became the founding picture of Realism; the pavilion of 1855 and its manifesto turned the scandal into a movement; Manet’s large pictures of contemporary life, the group portraits of Fantin-Latour, Degas and the painters of the 1860s, and Realism across Europe from Leibl in Germany to the Russian painters of the 1870s and 1880s descend from the opening it made. Held below the highest figure because the reach belongs to the painter’s work of 1849 to 1855 as a group, not to this canvas alone.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 176 years. Form: the composition stands legible, and nothing in it is known to be lost. Presence: considerable but intermittent in its first decades, continuous since in the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay; famous among painters and historians, though not of the widest public presence. Fabric: whether the dark grounds and blacks have sunk, so that the mourners read more as one dark band than they did, cannot be stated here, and is charged lightly if at all. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume and in the politics that made it a scandal, and none of that now stands between the viewer and the picture: the scandal is gone, and the town at the grave remains. The figure is the usual one for its span, short of what the widest presence would give.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of oil at nearly seven metres. Load-bearing where achieved: the blacks, which are the picture’s main colour, modulated across the whole crowd so that cloth, felt, wool and shadow are told apart; the heads, each a portrait, observed without flattery and with great variety; the whites of the headdresses, the surplices and the pall, laid in broad loaded strokes; the knife and heavy brush that give the surface its weight; the grave and the earth. The costs are real and are charged here: the space is compressed and the depth between ranks unclear; the procession at the left and the women at the right do not sit in one convincing ground plane; the drawing of some bodies under the clothing is summary. Some of this is the method, a chosen flatness; some is not, and the axis cannot credit as decided what it cannot tell was decided.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the crucifix against the sky at the top left and the dog at the bottom right. They obey one law. Everything is under one grey daylight, without a source and without a miracle; every figure is painted to the same pitch of portrait truth, the priest as the gravedigger, the mayor as the women; the cliffs are painted as the people are, as matter. The sacred objects, the crucifix, the pall with its tears, the holy-water sprinkler, are painted as objects among hats and handkerchiefs, which is the law of the picture applied to the hardest case. The range runs from the cross to the animal, from the old men in the dress of the 1790s to the choirboys, from grief to boredom, and holds. Held below the top because the range is one occasion at one temperature, and the spatial break between the two halves is a small breach of the physics.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The orders held: the church, in its clergy and its objects; the state, in the mayor and the men of the town; history, in the two old men in the dress of the 1790s beside the open grave; the family, in the mourning women; labour, in the gravedigger and the bearers; the natural order, in the cliffs and the turned earth; death; the animal; and the town as a society, all ranks of it at once. They are integrated by the frieze and by the grave they surround. What is thin: consciousness, since faces register but no one is followed into thought, and any order beyond the town. It holds more than a pastoral and less than a court seen as a structure of attention; set beside Las Meninas, at 8.2 on this axis, it holds a wider society and a narrower interior. The figure describes a single scene of very wide social reach.

Score: 8.1 / 10