Comparing Burial Of Phocion And The Slave Ship

The history of mankind has always been that of the constant struggle between man and nature; mankind seeks control and order while nature is constantly creating disorder. Our perception of our relationship with nature, however, is something that has shifted over the years—especially from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. This can clearly be seen in a comparison between Poussin’s Burial of Phocion and Turner’s The Slave Ship. Despite both having the same subject of death and injustice, differences in formal qualities reveal a shift from thinking man dominates nature to nature dominates man, which makes sense given the contexts surrounding each work. Practically the only commonality between these two works (besides simply saying both are historical
Similarly, in The Slave Ship, Turner is depicting a story that was about one hundred years old at his time in which a ship returning from a colony threw its diseased and dead slaves overboard in order to claim cargo insurance money on them. In both instances, these subjects stay true to their respective stylistic periods—with Poussin’s French Baroque work being a classical, western subject and Turner’s Romantic work being from a different time and place, speaking to an interest in abolitionism and conjuring the sublime—and both are clearly presenting the topic of injustice and death; however, the way in which these narratives were depicted creates a large difference in their underlying messages. Ultimately, Poussin is suggesting that man has control of and dominates nature, while Turner is suggesting that nature is dominant over man, and mankind is truly nothing in the face of nature. One of the first indicators of these differing messages of man’s relationship with nature is the approach to composition within each work. Looking at Burial of Phocion, the composition consists almost primarily of horizontals and verticals, and especially noteworthy are the vertical elements on both sides