南锡战役(1477)

This was the first official commission Delacroix ever won, handed to him in 1828, and the subject took months of argument with the king's ministers and the city of Nancy before anyone agreed on it. What they settled on was a defeat four centuries old. On a freezing January day in 1477, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, threw his army against the walls of Nancy and lost everything, his own life included. Delacroix paints the instant the duke's horse goes down in the snow. Charles was not found for two days, stripped by looters and frozen into a pond, and with him died the independent Burgundy he had spent his reign trying to build. The picture hangs today in Nancy itself, outside whose walls he was killed.