Charles Louis Lucien Muller's The Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror has been strongly influenced by classical design. Following in the style of Leonardo DaVinci's The Last Supper, Muller paints his scene with a tremendous sense of balance and unity. His work also depicts a wide spectrum of emotion: a technique that is celebrated in the classical arts. Like all poets, Muller does not simply retell the historical events of the Reign of Terror, but instead he paints a modified history in universal terms. These aspects of The Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror certify that Muller's work has been strongly influenced by classical art.

Muller allows a viewer of The Roll Call to absorb the plethora of emotion, action, and color by creating unity and balance in his work. His placement of objects, light, and movement provide the painting with geometric unity, following the techniques that DaVinci applied to The Last Supper.

Spatially balancing this painting, Muller divides the number of people in the jail cell evenly on both sides of the room. In addition, a triangle is formed by the placement of the elevated archway in the center of the painting. As the strongest geometric shape, the triangle functions to bind the aspects of the painting together.

Muller carefully balances individual people and objects in The Roll Call. The main characters in this painting are represented as evenly balanced focal points. For example, the man reading the victim list on the left offsets the woman rising out of her chair on the viewer's right. Likewise symbolic representations are balanced in this painting; the elderly woman grasping her rosary is positioned symmetrically with respect to the clergyman wearing a cross around his neck. Balancing objects also provides structural unity in this work. Muller mirrors a knocked-down chair on the left with a brick pattern in the floor on the right. While the chair and brick pattern have little in common, the two objects function to spatially organize the painting.

Muller's use of light and shadow also add tremendously to the unity of this work in several ways. First, the right and left edges of the paintings are both dark, focusing more attention on the center of the painting. Secondly, Muller offsets light entering from the window in the upper right corner with an orange light in the upper left corner of the jail cell. Next, the triangular frame, which outlines the main action of Muller's scene, contains more vibrant colors than the outside of this region. In this way, the lighting draws further attention toward the man seated in the central chair and the action taking place around him.

The rich selection of facial expressions in this painting comes from classical influences. Anger, fear, and shock come in different forms in the faces of each of the prisoners. On the other hand, the man reading the list, who represents the antagonist in the scene, stands with an erect posture and expresses no pity in his face. His well-defined jaw and piercing eyes create a stern appearance, which contrasts with the nervous anticipation of the central seated man, Andre Chenier, the work's protagonist. Like King Priam's pleas to Achilles for the body of Hector in The Iliad, Chenier's melancholy visage stirs up feelings of pity in Muller's work. It is the evocative nature of the painting that indicates that Muller is not simply chronicling an event in history.

Aristotle considered poetry superior to history, because poetry relates more to the universal than the particular. Standing in opposition to the Reign of Terror, Muller, like most classical artists, brings universal themes to a specific event in history. Emphasizing certain facial expressions, Muller allows the audience to feel sorrow for the victims and anger toward the leaders of the Terror. Furthermore, Andre Chenier stands out as the central victim, and the reader of the list appears as the central antagonist. Chenier, who was a French poet in the late eighteenth century, became the subject of various artworks after he was executed in the Reign of Terror (Matthias). By using Chenier in his work, Muller stirs up certain pathos that the viewer might feel for this historical figure.

Other aspects of The Roll Call suggest how Muller interpreted this event in history. On first glance, a viewer might overlook the tattered revolutionary flag in the painting. The flag hangs in darkness, and its colors appear faded. Using light and shadow as descriptive devices, Muller expresses his negative feelings toward the revolutionary cause. In the same way, a cane, a symbol of aristocracy, and a Bible, a symbol of the clergy, have fallen on the floor as visible representations of the historical context of the scene. Like many classical paintings and works of poetry, The Roll Call contains symbolism that makes his work more universal.

Muller's organization of balance, expression of emotions, and reflection on historical events follow the classical style of art. From Aristotle's Poetics to DaVinci's The Last Supper, classical influences are visibly present in Muller's grippingly dramatic The Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror.

Works Cited

Matthias, Diana. Snite Museum, University of Notre Dame. Retrieved 16 October 2003
	http://www.nd.edu/~sniteart/edu/academic/curric_cnctns.html..