On Charles Baudelaire’s Conception of “Les Correspondances” and Musicality of Eugène Delacroix’ Oeuvre

The author attempts to interpret Baudelaire’s famous concept of “correspondences” in terms of the problem of the synthesis of the arts, which was of vital importance to the Romantics. According to Baudelaire, “correspondences” arise between the attributes abstracted from objects in the surrounding world, to which the poet assigned the status of signs. The author models an algorithm which transforms these signs into symbols in an artist’s mind, shows possible outcomes, the most important of which is the “convertibility” of spatial and temporal characteristics, inherent in the nature of the different properties of reality. One example in Baudelaire’s writings is the perception of color in painting through the duration, on the basis of which ontological correspondences between music and painting are established. The poet considered Delacroix’s art to be the ideal of painting admitting such correspondences; Baudelaire characterized Delacroix’s innovations in the field of expressive means by the concept of “musicality”, comparing, particularly, properly musical categories (melody, harmony, chord) to specific aspects of the master’s art system.