Andy
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Liberty Leading the People is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled King Charles X of France. A woman of the people with a Phrygian cap personifying the concept of Liberty leads a varied group of people forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen, holding the flag of the French Revolution the tricolour, which again became France's national flag after these events in one hand and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne.Delacroix depicted Liberty as both an allegorical goddess-figure and a robust woman of the people. The mound of corpses and wreckage acts as a kind of pedestal from which Liberty strides, barefoot and bare-breasted, out of the canvas and into the space of the viewer. According to Marcus Rediker she might have been inspired by a Dutch portrait of a fighting Anne Bonny. The Phrygian cap she wears had come to symbolize liberty during the first French Revolution, of 1789. The painting has been seen as a marker to the end of the Age of Enlightenment, as many scholars see the end of the French Revolution as the start of the romantic era.
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