Early Morning Discussions: June 2021

This is Chapter Eight of NORMAN BRYSON's : Word and Image, French Painting of the Ancien Regime. (1983). Text in Orange are quotes from the author.

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1785

David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784

The "Oath of the Horatii entered the Salon of the Royal Academy in 1785, marking the triumphant arrival of Neoclassicism , a watershed in the history of French painting and civic life.

Or maybe not.

We'll wait to see what Bryson has to say about it - remembering that he has his own ideas about the styles of French painting. He included Chardin in his chapter about rococo.

This piece is especially thrilling for me after weeks of wading through the Salon of 1765. That broadcast of martial energy from the three young Horatii is like a rocket reaching escape velocity from the cluttered, dumpy world of academy illustration. But that bold Roman salute is also the first visual expression of the testosterone fueled, militant secular nationalism that would eventually be called fascism. So I'm more than a little ambivalent about it. Perhaps, just like the best examples of Nazi sculpture, it should be stored in a locked warehouse accessible only to pacifist art lovers.

Charles LeBrun, Horatius Cocles Defending the Bridge, 1642

Here's LeBrun's version of another hero of the Horatii family. Weird and wacky, wouldn't you say? A pastiche of model studies that feels like a fever dream.

Poussin, Death of Germanicus, 1627

Not as rhetorical as the Oath, but still a powerful painting of martial virtue.

Francesco Casanova, Cavalry Battle, 1763

At their best, Academy depictions of martial glory are mere spectacle

David, Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1781

This earlier piece by David appeared in the salon of 1781.

It's more like stagecraft than painting. It's hard to believe that the same artist could make something as powerful as the Oath only three years later - but David appears to be the kind of artist who rises to the occasion - if there is one.

David, Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae, 1812

But this one one I would call a big, silly, exhausted, flop.

It looks more like Tannhauser visiting Venusberg

than the martial king of a martial city.

David, Death of Marat, 1793

While this is the great painting of the French Revolution

and one of the great paintings of the 18th Century.

David's serious martial and political themes might be seen as a rejection of the erotic fantasies of the rococo - just as the well groomed parks of Watteau and the rumpled bedsheets of Boucher rejected the spectacular pieties and battlefields of the Baroque. Being an old hippie and draft dodger, I also prefer making love to war. But David's militancy, as self serving as it may have been, does feel like a fresh breeze blowing through the stuffy old Salon.

You can say all you want about the gestures, muted colors, and geometry of the "Oath of the Horatii", but it's the fierce, testosterone driven spirit that fills its sails.

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Bryson's discussion of this piece is his response to a straw man who begins as follows:

"The period from 1785to 1795 is generally understood, he maintained, as having a uniquely appropriate style- neo-classicism; and one artist within that style whose work is from every point of view outstanding- David."

David, Death of Socrates, 1787

David, The Lictors bring to Brutus the bodies of his sons, 1789

The neo-classical style triumphed with David's Oath of 1785 because at least three streams of influence converged upon that work. First, the influence of Rome, where the circle around Winckelmann and Mengs, reacting with enthusiasm to the discovery of antique painting at Herculaneum and Pompeii, had launched unprecedently thorough scholarly enquiry into the art of antiquity, and had promoted antiquity as the inspiration for a stylistic reform of painting whose firiust expression is Mengs's ceiling decoration for the Villa Albani, and whose greatest expression will be the Oath itself.

Pompeii, Villa of Mysteries, First Century A.D.

Regretfully, the frescos in the Villa of Mysteries were not discovered until 1909. Mengs must have been inspired by much worse examples that, like his own work, were cut-and-paste conventional figures with no life between them.

Mengs, Parnassus, Villa Albani, 1761

Second, the influence of the philosophes and enlightened amateurs in France who, rejecting as frivolous and base the excesses of rococo, advocated a new, grand style, full of moral purposiveness, and a whole didactic programme in the arts ....it was tragic that Diderot, the first to criticize the degeneracy of rococo and to advocate a return to the grand tableau, died before he could see David's masterpiece.

Diderot hated the work of Boucher that hung in the Salon of 1765 (though he did acquire a Boucher drawing). But did he ever criticize the rococo ? I have yet to see him use that word- or to define and discuss any style at all.

Greuze, Comte d'Angiviller

Sorry for the digression,

but what a great portrait of the director of royal buildings.

I can hear him breathing.

and what luscious detail

Joseph Duplessis, portrait of Comte D'Angilviller

Here's a less successful version of the same subject.

The head doesn't quite work with the body.

Third, the activity of the administrators of the arts in France, who translated the ideas of the philosophes into practice: first Marigny and then d'Angiviller, the bureaucratic executors of a

government policy which stretches back as far as the 1740's and which comes to fruition in I 785.

The austere, virile style of the Oath was the perfect accompaniment to the moral purpose of the painting, which urged personal self-sacrifice for the good of the state; and the perfect accompaniment also to the political self-expression of the class rousing itself to action in the years immediately before the Revolution. The Oath , the Death of Socrates , and the Brutus reinforced this message of individual self-renunciation and severe political morality: Brutus would become the guardian spirit of the Revolutionaries.

Greuze, The Drunken Cobbler, 1776-79

In response to this conventional thinking, Bryant tells us that David looks back to Greuze rather than forward to something new - as his Belisarius repeats the gestures in The Drunken Cobbler. Likewise, it appears to me, that David's shallow stage, muted colors, horizontal line of figures, and emphatic hand gestures all echo Greuze way more than any other Academy painter - especially David's teacher, Joseph Marie Vien.

Joseph Marie Vien, Women Bathing, 1763

Bryson tells us, in an offhand way, that Vien was "the originator of the first neo-antique manner in French painting" - but I'm not sure how seriously he would defend such a statement about a tradition that appears to have been neo-antique for the previous two hundred years. Most notably, he has forgotten about "Parisian Atticism" as exemplified below:

La Sueur, Caligula depositing the ashes of his mother and brother in the tomb of his ancestors, 1647

Bryson does not share the following quote - but it seems appropriate here to mention Winkelmann's prescription for "noble simplicity and calm grandeur" as a quality of the neo-antique. It is shared by Vien, David, and Chardin but not Boucher, Fragonard, or Greuze.

Bryson continues to challenge the conventional explanation for the emergence of David's neo-classicism by asking why it took so long. Greuze painted his 'Severus and Caracalla" in 1769, but David's Belisarius did not appear until 1781. And he notes that in the English world, it arrived even earlier with Benjamin West in the wilds of Pennsylvania with the "urge to wed a moral subject with antiquity":

Benjamin West, Death of Socrates, 1756

"West does not yet command the technical means to realize the urge, but by the time of "Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus" he has succeeded"

Benjamin West, Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus, 1768

The year is 1768, and a great deal of 1785 is already present: the use of bas-relief to inform the grouping of figures; a purge of the diagonal and a banishment of melodrama in favor of' noble calm and an exhortative narrative address to the spectator. In particular, didactic intent combined with austerity of form seem to 'anticipate' David, as historians of the Anglo-Saxon painters working in Rome always point out.

Cornelis Troost, "Death of Socrates" 1736

I suspect that West's source material (a print in Rollin's popular book of history) also combined "didactic intent with austerity of form" - as did many Dutch history painters from the previous century and the piece shown above. (I just discovered Cornelis Troost -- an actor as well as painter).

Cornelis Troost, Jeronimus Tonneman and his son, 1736

(Sorry for the digression - but Troost was so much better at genre portraits)

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Also, I do not feel that West abandoned melodrama as he developed new technical skills - indeed , melodrama seems to be the whole point of his rendering of the pathetic Agrippina.

Gavin Hamilton, "Oath of Brutus", 1760's

A crucial figure here is, of course, Gavin Hamilton, whose Oath of Brutus is sometimes cited among the sources for David's Oath of the Horatii. Already in 1764 Hamilton is planning and executing his series of Homeric subjects which, through the medium of Cunego's engravings,

Gavin Hamilton, a Scot living in Rome as a dealer of antiquities, excavated classical figures as well as painting them. Like so much British painting of that time, the above seems more theatrical than painterly . Energy is broadcast from a stage to a theater rather than from a rectangular surface to a single viewer.

How did it come about that barbarians from ultima Thule succeeded where their more sophisticated colleagues from Paris seem to have failed? In fact the question is a false one, presupposing a historical drive 'towards' the manner of 1785, a drive that is then 'countered' by various resistances. That is the problem with the Oath: it is so enormously superior to the work surrounding it that it encourages one to think in supraindividual terms; its colossal force must come from History.

.......The answer has already been found, I believe, by Jean Locquin (1879-1949). Government intervention in the arts, and the idea of didactic history painting, is of an importance in French painting that can never be overestimated: it is that programme which makes French painting in the latter half of the eighteenth century so different from the work of the other European schools. But the requirement that painting teach is quite separate from the requirement that painting assume a particular visual style. Didacticism has everything to do with the kind of sign painting should become - what the relation should be between word and image: didactic painting must be discursive paint ing, and all of its interest centres on the signified. But didactic ism does not necessarily prescribe or proscribe its styles. On 1 the contrary, it may use any style, so long as its ·characteristic sign-format is preserved. This emerges clearly when we consider the successive cycles of state-supported commissions in the 1770s and 1780s.

Francois Andre Vincent, Mole confronting the Rebels, 1779

The moment of change is 1773, when Marigny, Pompadour's brother, retired as Directeur general, to be replaced by the Comte d'Angiviller. The new Directeur was quick to issue the pronouncement that 'the King will view with particular interest the painters of his Academy as they depict the deeds and the events which honour the nation: what more worthy use can there be for the arts, than to become associated with the legislation of morality?' In 1775 d'Angiviller commissions from his painters four scenes destined to become tapestries at the Gobelins: the City ofRandan honouring the valour of the Constable du Guesclin; the Chevalier Bayard returning a prisoner to her mother after giving her a dowry; President Mole seized by rebels in the capital; the would-be assassins of Coligny falling to their knees in respect. The point is that not one of these is a classical subject, and given d' Angiviller's chauvinism, his belief that the arts should be an 'emanation from the Throne' and should celebrate the national gloire, subjects taken from antiquity would inevitably have seemed less engaging than those taken from the nation's past.

I certainly agree that neither the ancient subject matter nor the dynamic design of "Oath of the Horatii" has much to do with these illustrations of French history.

Vincent's President Mole typifies the kind of painting d'Angiviller is eager to encourage; nationalistic, emotionally simple scenes glorifying on the one hand the heritage of France and on the other the virtues of civic altruism and discipline. It is the first of these that infuses what is d' Angiviller's greatest single achievement, the statuary cycle of illustrious Frenchmen commissioned for permanent installation in the Louvre. d' Angiviller was concerned that the National Museum become a vehicle for public instruction)\. These survive and in most cases survive in mint condition.

Julien's La Fontaine and Clodion's Montesquieu are the real and exquisite culmination of the programme our historian believes to occur in the Oath. Julien and Clodion are in harmony with the rest of the series in their minute attention to the particularity of period detail: for the sense of Heritage to emerge historicism must be manifest. But the corollary of this is that neo-classicising tendencies are to be suppressed: d' Angiviller is intent upon precise historical placing and so far from generalising the forms or subduing sculpture to the style of antiquity, these works are to be accurate reconstructions with minimal classical flavour. The cycle is d' Angiviller's most personal contribution to the didactic programme, and it shows the idea of the arts as propaganda in all its disconnection from neo-classicism, and almost from any style. All the styles are equivalent, because pedagogic concerns take precedence over stylistic ones: if any style is to be excluded, it would be because it interfered with instruction and neo-classicism, by denying the desired historical specificity, is just such a style. Hence the spectacle, disconcerting to the historian who believes neo-classicism to be the style of the pre-Revolutionary period, of the Louvre filling up from 1781 with propagandistic work that actively opposes neo-classical principles.

One answer to the query about the delayed assimilation of didactic neo-classicism into France is this disconnection of style from instruction.

Such a disconnection is quite possible for Bryson and probably many other professional art historians. But I'm really doubting that d'Angiviller did not demand the fluidity and elegance that he got from Clodion and Julien.

Pierre Julien, La Fontaine, 1783-5

Clodion, Montesquieu, 1783

These do not appear to be great sculptures - especially when compared to Houdon's contemporary seated portrait of Voltaire - but they have too much elegance and flair to be called as style-free as, say, the displays in a wax museum.

Houdon, Voltaire, 1781

Here's a 52" plaster cast of this portrait - presumably taken from the clay modeled or at least finished by the artist himself. The simple classical robe is more amenable to sculpture than the more complicated costumes of the portraits shown above it - and the artist had the benefit of having his subject sit for the sculptor.

I couldn't say that it has more style - but it does have more life and charm and gravitas.

Vien, Seller of Cupids, 1763

Pompeii, Villa di Arianna, Cupid Seller, 1st Century AD

But there is a second reason for 'the delay'. The neo-classical style did not look, to the French in the 1760s and 1770s, moralistic at all; in fact it looked decadent. When Mme du Barry rejected Fragonard's Four Seasons as appropriate decoration for her new and severely neo-classical Pavilion, and chose instead to decorate it with designs by Vien, we can see the guise in which neo-classicism first appeared in France: as a slightly purer, and much more fashionable, rococo. Vien has, of course, looked at antiquity, and his figures are far more sculptural than before; but they are hardly severe, and their appropriate destination is clearly the private apartment. His Sale of Cupids closely follows the design of a freshly excavated find at Naples; it was even hailed as a rigorous imitation of the antique'. But the heads are small and doll-like, the proportions sleek and tapered, and the subject matter seems perfectly Louis seize.

Yes - there is quite difference here between the first Century and the 18th Century versions. There's nothing cute about the ancient version. It's livelier and more confrontational - and far less "neo-classical" than the piece done 1700 years later. Go figure.

If David's early career teaches us anything, it is the irrelevance of antiquity to a painter working at the frontier of French taste in the 1770s - a decade during which, let us remember, at least three forces, according to our historian friend, are at work to bring about the triumph of didactic neo-classicism. David begins by following Boucher, as we see in his early Jupiter and Antiope. This is just what our historian would want- surely it is fitting that the future creator of the Oath should begin with a fully rococo manner, all the better to overthrow. David intended to become Boucher's pupil, but Boucher deciding that he was too old to teach, he was passed on to Vien instead. One might have expected David to be discontented with Vien's insipid neo-classicism, to react against its frivolity, and to embark on the serious neoclassicism which will culminate in the Oath. Nothing of the kind happens.

David, Jupiter and Antiope

Instead, he becomes increasingly involved with the baroque. In the Death of Seneca (1773) we can see a new influence, from anatomy: the figure of Seneca shows considerable effort to master musculature and flesh-texture, and this probably comes from Vien, who insisted - this is his real claim to innovative status - on working from the model; but the swirling, agitated composition, based on pyramid and ellipse, shows the same seicento revivalism as Antiochus.

David, Death of Seneca, 1773

The Antiochus and Straton ice (1774) is a straight reworking of the same subject by Pietro da Cortona, down to the quite minor detail of the type of diadem Stratonice wears; David may have banished Boucher, but not by a return to the antique, or even to Poussin.

David, Antiochus and Stratoice, 1774

The tendency becomes quite marked during David 's stay in Rome, from 1775 to 1780. During this period David was filling sketchbooks with pages which show a developing interest in classical sculpture: he is reputed to have been converted to the neo-classical cause during a visit to Naples with Quatremere de Quincy (' I have been cured of a cataract'.) But the large-scale sketches of this period, where David is thinking pictorially and not simply jotting down notes, show increasing non-classical tendencies. Alexander at the Tent of the Queen. of Persia is clearly inspired by LeBrun; in the weeping females, he seems to be thinking of Greuze, and if there is a single aim in the sketch, it is to link the grandeur of French baroque with the emotionalism of sensibilite. One tends to underestimate the originality of this direction in David's art: back-projecting from the Oath, such an aim seems off- centre. But one of the forces our historian claims as responsible for the Oath - a government-sponsored programme for the creation of an exalted and edifying history painting-is entirely satisfied by this side of his work, which if it had been successfnlly executed would have joined the emotional and didactic style of Greuze with the grand manner of the tableau d'histoire -just what was wanted (and just what Greuze in 1769 had failed to achieve).

David, Alexander at the tent of the Queen of Persia

The Funeral of Patroclus carries still further this approach. It is a work of great compositional daring, and risks innovations to my mind as extreme as those of the Oath: instead of one centre of interest, three - the pyre, the altar on the left, the advancing figures on the right; in addition to these, and complicating still further the already sub-divided image, the ship on the horizon, and a profusion of crowded, turbulent extras, forgotten in French painting since the 'Batailles of LeBrun.

David, Funeral of Patroclus, 1778

It is unlikely that David could have successfully transformed the sketch into a finished work: it is really over-ambitious, and David seems to be displaying here the same taste for subjects too vast or too remote from his skills to be fully realisable, which he will display in the project for The Oath of the Tennis Court , and in his remarkable decision to undertake for the Convention a painting of a Revolutionary sea battle. One thing is clear: antiquity, severity, virility, sculpturality, all the qualities we would expect from the future painter of The Oath of the Horatii are absent. Yet the historical forces supposedly behind The Oath of the Horatii are all present.

Let us imagine our historian friend defend his case. "It is true that David's conversion to neo-classicism is belated. You have not mentioned the Saint-Roch of I781 which owes far more to the seicento, and to Bologna, than it does to antiquity, and to Rome; nor the portrait of Count Potocki (I782), which recalls Rubens and Boucher, and not in the least the classical world. But all these are wayward divagations. You cannot deny that the Oath is the climax of neo-classical painting; what you say about other works does not affect my claim for this one. "

If "Oath of the Horatii" were the first of many austere and powerful historical paintings by David, this argument of how he got there might make sense.

But it appears to me to be an aberration - which would make this entire discussion pointless.

David, St. Roch, 1780

David, Count Potocki, 1781

Our historian obviously has a strong case. David before Belisarius (1781) may have been pursuing non-classical goals of his own, but his contemporaries were becoming increasingly interested in a neo-classical style that comes within inches of The Oath of the Horatii itself.

Peyron, Curius Dentatus, 1787

Curius Dentatus Refusing the Gifts of the Samnites by Peyron (1744-1814) may look back to Poussin, but the anatomy has a new vividness and accuracy, and the lighting a new starkness and dramatic force; the architecture is 'as austere as the subject', and it creates an enclosed, Oath-like space, rectilinear and walled, that avoids the diagonals and spatial openness present in a more orthodox image of two years later, Brenet's Continence of Scipio

Brenet, Continence of Scipio 1788

This does feel more serious than the pre-David Royal Academy paintings. The gestures of asking and giving are emphatic. But what's with the right third of the painting? The two standing men seem to serve no other purpose than to pull the viewer further back in the crowd. The dog climbing the steps is a nice touch.

Pompeio Batoni, Continence of Scipio, 1771

feels a bit silly compared to the Brenet

Poussin, Continence of Scipio, 1640

Scipio feels more like a French monarch than a precocious Roman general. And again, the right third of the painting seems superfluous, especially as the large standing warrior deflates the power and importance of the main character

Tiepolo, Continence of Scipio, 1743

judging from the perspective of the steps,

viewers are are on their knees before the magnificence of this spectacle.

As we should be.

plenty of character and expression in these faces

behold the boy wonder

Peyron, Funeral of Miltiades ,1782

Drouais, Prodigal Son

Peyron' s Cymon and Militiades of 1782 has even starker architecture and lighting, and the anatomy is now so striking, particularly in the musculature of the arms, that the distance from here to the Oath and even to the Death of Marat is slight. Drouais's Prodigal Son (1782) shows the same tendencies , and adds to the repertoire a centrally-focussed perspective regression on a chequered floor, and the device of figures seem in emphatic and unnatural profile, which lead directly into 1785. The evidence of these works suggests that David's stubborn non-classicism runs counter to the practice of his rival contemporaries at the Academie; even the Belisarius is archaic, far more Poussinist than these works, and much closer to Greuze. In the Oath of the Horatii David returns to the course his peers are following, and at once he outstrips them. He produces, at a stroke, the definitive neo-classical painting

But how neo-classical is it? If we mean by 'neo-classical', painting that looks like The Oath of the Horatii, the question is circular and absurd; but that is often just what we do mean by the term, and when we look at those works by Peyron and Drouais, it is the Oath we have in mind. These paintings indeed form a group, and we may feel the need to find a label for them; but is neo-classical the right label to use? I raise this question because some of the strongest features of the Oath, as of this group, have little connection with the revival of antiquity.

Good point! Perhaps like most, if not all, names given to movements or tendencies or styles of art, "Neo Classical" is more like an habitual notation rather than an accurate descriptor. Below, Bryson suggests that a certain kind of lighting distinguishes the Oath from what came before -- though that doesn't really distinguish it for me.

Peyron, Sainte Madeleine in Meditation

If I may insert a word about Peyron,

his reputation was eclipsed by David in his own lifetime

and he has been marginalized ever since.

But I would call him a great French painter

First of all, the lighting, with its extreme contrasts of light and dark, its insistence upon the tenebral, and its rejection of soft transitions in the modelling of flesh. How are we to relate such an innovation to antiquity? Antique painting largely ignores the question of lighting; the sculpture of antiquity or of any other period necessarily excludes lighting as a parameter. Yet clearly for Peyron, for Drouais and for David, lighting is of the essence - a new discovery. With David, at least, it is possible to retrace the route to the discovery.

When I arrived in Italy with M. Vien I was at once struck, in the Italian paintings I saw there, by the vigour of their tones and shadows. This was a quality absolutely opposed to the weakness of French painting in this area, and this new relationship of light to dark, this imposing vivacity of which I had until then no idea, so struck me that during the first period of my stay in Italy, I believed that the whole secret of the art of painting lay in reproducing, as the Italian colorists of the late sixteenth century had done, the undisguised and decisive modelling which nature almost always presents. I felt ... my eyes were so unrefined, that so far from being able to exercise them profitably by exposure to delicate work, like Andrea del Sarto, Titian, or the subtle colourists, they could only really take in and understand work brutally executed, but nonetheless of merit: Caravaggio, Ribera, and le Valentin their pupil.

Valentin de Boulogne, David and Goliath, 1620-22

Andrea Del Sarto, Charity (detail) before 1530

David, Patroclus, 1780

This statement is backed by the academies David sent from Rome to Paris during his first Italian sojourn (1775 to 1780). Brutal? In certain respects, not at all: the Academy ('Patroclus') is a study work, part of David's self-education in the handling of lighting of the nude, areas of painting that his earlier affections for Boucher, Pietro da Cortona (Antiochus and Stratonice) and for Poussin and Greuze (Hector and Andromache) had left neglected. "But there is something if not brutal, certainly dramatic and even melodramatic, about the extreme polarisation of light and dark in David's Roman academies: he has deliberately exceeded the 'academic' requirements of study, and the image of 'Patroclus' hovers uncertainly between self-effacement and self-assertion, between the impersonality of training in desired skills, and the personal extremism of the lighting, which goes so far beyond the official mandate and purpose of the image as to contradict and subvert that purpose- which contradiction only adds to the brutality, or violence, of the image as a whole.

The second innovation of the Oath, already apparent in the academies, and perhaps a consequence of the new interest in lighting, is an increased importance attached to transcriptive painting from the model (the Romantics will accuse David of being unable to paint from imagination, of having no imagination). Vien had claimed that he was the first to reintroduce the model into studio practice, after its long rococo absence, and it is probably Vien's encouragement that lies behind the anatomical accuracy of David's figure of Seneca. But clearly Vien betrayed that studio practice in his own work, and his pupils took it upon themselves to investigate independently the properties of the model. The sculptor Giraud, a contemporary and friend of David at Rome, undertook to study anatomy at the Hospital of the Holy Spirit precisely to unlearn (desapprendre)'academic routines', and this reliance on the model came to mean a great deal to David, as it did to Peyron and Drouais. Tischbein, who visited David's atelier during the painting of the Oath, relates that to paint his scene David relied heavily on studio simulation and properties; Delecluze describes David's studio during the Directoire as full of furniture by the great ebeniste Jacob, furniture designed specifically to aid painting practice. When one reads the considerable literature on the sources of the Oath , one should bear in mind that the final image owes far more-to direct transcription of visual experience (or, to be precise, to the rhetoric of transcriptive realism) than would have been the case with David a decade earlier, when the influence of sources lacked this competition from the real world. But the use of the model is not an intrinsic part of neo-classicism. Benjamin West's Agrippina is an example of a fully neo-classical work which shows no interest at all in the qualities of real flesh; it lacks animation precisely because the poses of the bas-relief have not been filled in by the techniques and devices of ' transcription from the real'. Part of the shock of the Oath is that while its male figures seem so close to bas-relief in pose, the quality of their flesh seems derivable only from direct observation from nature; which is to say that the impact derives from departure from the forms of antiquity, and not their repetition.

Benjamin West, Agrippina (detail)

West's single academic figure in his Agrippina is not especially relevant to the story, but it is the largest figure in the painting - and one could hardly say that it "shows no interest at all in the qualities of real flesh". There is no other reason for it to be here.

Arch of Constantine (detail)

Niobid Sarchophagus (detail) , 160 AD

Trajan's Column (detail), AD 113

The world of Greco-Roman bas-relief spans many countries over at least a millennium. Whatever techniques may have been absent, anatomical study or "transcription from the real" is not one of them.

The third innovation of the Oath, an innovation which becomes David 's normal practice in the major work of the 1780s, is broken composition. Belisarius probably shows the beginnings of this tendency, in the lack of relation between the gesticulating soldier on the left, and the figures of Belisarius, the donor, and the child; but David seems to show a general uncertainty about this image - the decision to repaint the donor's robe in white was both radical and belated- and the lack of co-ordination between the soldier's 'frozen' gesture and the other figures' stable and statuesque "gestures (a difference between a 'high-speed' and a 'low- speed' register) may well be uncalculated. But with the Socrates there can be no doubt; the disparity between near and far is part of the painting's intention, and the separation of the three zones of the Brutus is by now fully self-conscious - the zone of the lictors, the zone of the women, and the zone of Brutus and the statue of Roma.

Looking back to the paintings in the Salon of 1765 - it does appear that "broken composition" might be considered an innovation - one that would soon be echoed by Brenet's "Continence of Scipio". If a Salon painting had multiple figures, you could expect them to be interacting - while David puts some characters into different "zones" as Bryson puts it.

It's an enjoyable effect - though, as you can see below, it's not especially new to European art history:

Piero Della Francesca, Flagellation, 1460

Viewers' reactions to these split compositions have always been uneasy. It is likely that Grimm's incomprehension was widely shared: 'all the figures which form the grouping of the scene are isolated, and fail to participate in the central action.' The assault on unity attacked a belief in the intrinsic worth of unity in the image that was so unquestioned as to be almost invisible - there was no need for critics to stand up and promote or defend it; David's subversion is deep. Our own continued disquiet about David's disunifications is evinced by the variety and mutual contradiction amongst our own explanations: the disunification is the product of David's psychic polarisation of 'male and female principles', or it is the result of a precocious appreciation of trecento painting, with its ability to place within the same frame quite distinct narrative episodes, or it derives from David's appreciation of Herculanean painting, with its large voids between figures. My own argument will be that it has a narrative, rather than a visual, rationale . . But an assault on compositional unity is a strong characteristic of the Peyron-Drouais-Oath cluster. Drouais's scene of the Prodigal Son is accompanied at its margins by distractions emphatically distinct from the central scene of forgiveness- the ghostly female servant on the left, behind the female seen in profile and contradicting her unnaturally exact profile with an equally exaggerated full frontal position; and the powerful and beautiful image at the right, of the son who has been passed over and who seems to plan his revenge.

El Greco, Assumption of the Virgin, 1577

Actually - having separate zones of figuration is not all that rare.

El Greco did it quite frequently.

Drouais' Prodigal Son is a multiplicity of zones that is also

an awkward jumble. (and I would not say that the figure at the far right is "a powerful and beautiful image")

Drouais, Marius at Minturnae

When limited to two figures,

Drouais could be much more successful.

Peyron, Curius Dentatus

Brenet, Continence of Scipio

Peyron, Cymon and Militiades

Peyron's Curius Dentatus disturbs pictorial unity by extreme simplification: the painting is united, but by means so rudimentary that it is clear that pictorial unification is no longer a donnee of painting, but an area up for re-investigation. Compare it with Brenet's more orthodox Continence of Scipio : there, the oblique angle of the architectural setting, and the ease with which the necessary spatial adjustments are calculated, shows a lack of concern with the whole issue - it is simply taken for granted. Curius Dentatus, on the other hand, tilts the setting round into full frontality, and insists on spatial unity of a reduced or elementary kind - frontality is a much more basic solution to the problem of spatial articulation than Brenet 's complicated accommodations, and though simple it is much more striking: we cannot ignore it, as we probably do with Brenet's work. Again, Brenet interlocks his extensive crew of figures by a network, or rather a random entanglement, of glances; the Curius Dentatus divides into two halves, with three of the figures looking in one direction and three in the other; by this again- almost rudimentary solution the fact of the central axis is emphasised (and given support by perspective). But the point is that unity is now an area of questioning and change: Peyron is reducing it to its bare essentials and investigating its deeper assumptions; it has entered the arena of innovation, where Brenet has taken it for granted. And having turned his attention towards the nature of unity and having offered the deliberately simplified solution of the Curius Dentatus, Peyron goes on to subvert his simplification. Cymon and Militiades centres on a void flanked by two distinct and non-communicating scenes: the stretcher-bearers on the left, the figures on the right. So stressed is the separation that it even goes so far as to threaten narrative intelligibility (David will stop short of this extreme) : the problem for the viewer is that there seems to be no way to relate the two side-scenes across the dark void that holds them apart, except by way of the echoed motif of the arm - a potential re-unification that has no narrative significance, and seems too arbitrary, too exclusively visual, and too bizarre to fulfil the promise of return to unity.

I disagree with almost every assertion made above, but how can unity be argued ? You feel it in a piece -- or not. A sum of parts cannot comprise the whole - except in things like a sack of flour. Might I offer an analogy to the QR code? Every mark on its square surface must be in the proper place to send you to the intended webpage. No mark is less important than any other. And yet --- when there seems to be something terribly wrong about a painting - unity may unavoidably rise as an issue that demands a discussion of detail.

For me, Peyron's "Curious Dentatus" is a dull painting; unity is not the issue. In Brenet's "Continence of Scipio", however, the right third of the painting seems disconnected from the left and woefully detracts from it. In Peyron's "Cymon and Militiades" I feel no visual disjunction between the left and right sides --but I am totally puzzled as to how they might related to each other as a single narrative. What does Miltiades' corpse on the bier have to do with some unknown woman being dramatically unchained?

Still life from Herculaneum, House of the Stags, 62-69 C.E.

The emergent taste of these advanced works of the 1780's is towards fragmentation of the unity of composition. David had already, in the multi-centred Funeral of Patroclus explored this vein, but the idiom there was a kind of neo-baroque agitation. This new disunification occurs in a processional, relief-like space, and because we are used to the idea that reliefs are guaranteed unity through the fact of their single plane, the effect of fragmentation is all the more striking. But is it classical? Herculanean painting is centerless, but it is neither united nor disunited: its space is not coherent enough for such considerations to arise. It is only when lighting and anatomical accuracy insist on a coherent, three-dimensional space that the effect of deliberate incoherence becomes evident. And although Poussin is sometimes seen as an influence behind these works, to look for Poussinism is really to miss what these paintings concern themselves with. Poussin is preeminently unified, not only by undisrupted planarity, by continual awareness of the picture plane, but by an elaborate system of checks and balances which works at every point to create and preserve unity. "The young Turks of the 1780s want none of this: they are trying something which is, I believe, unprecedented, shocking, and nothing to do with either antiquity or 'neo-classicism'.

Bryson does not specify which of the paintings from Herculaneum were "not coherent enough" for a determination of whether they were "united or dis-united".

The above might exemplify the absence of one-point perspective - as would the still-lifes of Cezanne - but pictorial unity does not seem to be an issue - as it would be - for example - if that glass jar had been drawn in perspective.

Bryson tells us that "It is only when lighting and anatomical accuracy insist on a coherent, three-dimensional space that the effect of deliberate incoherence becomes evident." - but David's "Oath of the Horatii" does not present an incoherent three dimensional space. It's rupture into two separate zones is achieved by composition, not technical perspective. The slumping group of despairing women would fit well into the gaping empty space between the belligerent father and his doomed sons

Peyron, Curius Dentatus

The fourth aspect of the Oath which I want to stress is the vigorous use, or rather manipulation, of perspective. The textbooks often maintain that a characteristic feature of works called neo-classical is the use of relief space: the figures are placed in a plane parallel to the plane of signifiers. What Peyron and Drouais seem to have discovered before David is the combination of this relief space, which negates depth, . with regression towards a vanishing point, which insists on depth. The resultant space is one full of conflict: we are drawn into the painting and kept out at the same time. Peyron seems to have been the first to have discovered this device, in the Curius Dentatus. The two halves, with three figures facing in from the left and three from the right, insists on the fact of the centre, and a strange trough-like opening at the bottom of the painting draws our attention to flagstones, weathered by age, whose lines plunge in towards a centralised vanishing point. The motif of fugitive lines is taken up by the plunging wall on the right, and the sense of inward plunging is reinforced by the idea of an invisible courtyard we cannot see into, beyond the present scene. At the same time, the figures dispose themselves in a relief space, with the right arm and chest of Dentatus, and the arm of the servant crouched at the extreme left, as well as a whole series of other bodily surfaces, all flat to the picture plane; while the frontal architecture also insists on its perpendicularity to the viewing eye. Peyron's spatial thinking reaches genuine brilliance with the earthenware flagon on the right. Semantically, it means frugality - that is its narrative justification - in contrast to the useless golden gifts; but spatially it resolves the conflict between lateral and regressional spaces by relating the cross-sectional profile the eye sees, to the satisfying in-depth volume of the flagon that the hand knows. The contradiction between the processional, relief-like space and the plunging perspective space would be pitched too high if the painting did not include this object: just as a sphere participates equally in cross-sectional and depth spaces, so the flagon harmonizes the relief and regressional spaces.

Bryson focuses on the "conflict" between lateral and recessive space - while making no mention of the compositional triangles - the most dominant of which has that flagon at its apex. He’s impressed by a "spatial thinking that reaches genuine brilliance" - though earlier he told us that this piece "disturbs unity by extreme simplification". If overall a painting has failed to win distinction, how can any of its specifics be considered a success? This is one way in which an artwork is different from a baseball game.

It’s not as if Peyron deserves credit for innovation. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Watteau also featured spatial recession strongly indicated by tiles on the floor of a narrow stage.

Peyron's subtle work here anticipates David's similar resolutions of spatial conflict, for example the circular table and the three variously curving chairs of the Brutus, which interrupt the harsh gridwork of rectilinear space with welcome roundness, and resolve the conflict between recession and relief in the harmony of the circle. The Cymon and Militiades lacks that kind of subtlety, as does Peyron's Death of Socrates: it simply opposes, without any attempt at objects or sites of transition, the fugitive lines of the flagstones, plunging in towards the vanishing point, with stark, frontal, planimetric walls. Drouais's Prodigal Son similarly overstates the conflict. The kneeling woman is in absolute profile, like the servant bearing the cup, and the father's right hand- a relief so frontal that it verges on becoming cameo-space-;-and contrasting with that flatness, a dramatic perspective plunge, clear in the flooring, which David will take over for the Oath.

Andrea Del Castagno, Last Supper, 1450

Is Bryson's "spatial conflict" any different from the tension that all illusionary space has with the surface on which it has been painted? As Bryson soon tells us "This marks a return to the fundamentals of quattrocento space, and to the origins of perspective as a visual system; the courtyard looks, despite its primitive columns, very Florentine."

Above is a delightful example from 300 years earlier. It measures backward into space on all four sides - and then shocks that depth with a big, floating, white horizontal band. (the table cloth)

Given the enormous tension of the scene, these fugitive lines take on an emotional quality: the unity of the vanishing point is like the human unification of wills, towards which everything accelerates. Contradicting perspective, a frieze of male limbs compresses the three warriors into an improbably constricted and flattened space. David was no master of perspective; in fact, he was always being criticised by the Academie for his weakness in this respect, and a highly simplified or crudified perspectival system was probably congenial at a technical level. I have never been sure whether there are concealed errors in the disposition of the bodies of the tree brothers: shadow hides the difficult areas. But I am sure that the handling of space is rudimentary, in that there is hardly any attempt to link the frieze and perspective spaces; and sure, equally, that the absence of articulation is spectacular. But is such an innovation neo-classical? After 1795, French artists turn increasingly towards planar or cameo-space, and perspective is effectively banished; internationally, the trend is towards what Rosenblum calls 'linear abstraction'. This brief reign of recession-lines and vanishing points seems confined to the cluster of paintings around the Oath, and to David's work through to the final statement in The Tennis Court Oath. The manipulation of frieze against perspective is vital to the Oath, and to the other works cognate with the Oath, but largely as an aberration from the overall neo-classical tendency towards contour and flatness - a tendency evident in the work of artists as different one from another as Blake, Flaxman, and

What's wrong with the perspective is that the red flagstone in the foreground has been stretched a foot or two to the right of where we would expect to see it if its row of receding flagstones fit neatly between the two vertical columns in the rear - as it does on the left. That accommodates to the center of the canvas being somewhat to the right of the center of the narrative - and emphasizes the dynamic between the brave sons to the left and the weeping women to the right. Bravo David!

I would like to read whatever criticism his fellow members of the academy made regarding David's perspective. Hopefully they would later bow to Madame Guillotine! Regretfully, I can find nothing online about Robert Rosenblum's notion of "Linear abstraction"

Lighting, reliance on the model, broken composition, spatial conflict: these are the arresting features of David's Oath. But they exist in independence from the main directions of neo-classicism: they have little to do with antiquity or its rediscovery, or with Poussin, still less with Winckelmann. Of course, it would take much more work than is offered here to begin to dislodge the label, and in a sense it is not the label I object to, or even the misunderstanding of the innovations in the Oath which the label gives rise to. The painting is still an incredible achievement if we ignore everything that is new about it. My real objection is to the idea that the Oath is the climax of propaganda painting, and it is a more serious objection, because the propaganda claim seems to completely distort the significance and subtlety of David's work in the 1780s. Let us return to our historian, who asks us to accept that The Oath of the Horatii is a didactic work, meant to instruct us in the path of virtue. What can such an image really teach us?

Bryson answers this question by referring to Corneille's popular drama, Horace, which had presented these events to the French public. Bryson notes that the play is "problematic, not propagandistic", It was mentioned as a source by David who had recently seen a production - so Bryson considers the painting, as well as the play, as "subversive" of "official doctrines both of gloire and of monarchical clemency" Yet Bryson also notes that "David is visually uninterested in Corneille's play and the brothers do not in fact swear an oath at any point during its action."

David, Aged Horatius Defending his Son, 1782

When David first tackled the subject, he chose to depict a scene where the father defends his accused son before the Roman people. Again, this departs from Corneille and indeed from history: this was a Rome of kings, not of democracy, and Horace is full of disdain for the rabble. David's image defines a problem, and even a binary choice, but it does not point towards a solution of the problem or try to influence our decision. Should the young warrior be granted clemency?

It does appear that the trio of father-son-daughter was in David's mind from the very beginning. It's not far removed from an honor killing.

David, Horatius Returning to Rome with the Spoils of the Curatii

after the Murder of Camilla, 1781

Here's an even earlier drawing that spotlights the same trio

Above are some more preparatory sketches,

not shared by Bryson.

The interaction of father, son, and daughter is central to each. The above sketch is rather close to the final version, with some important, if subtle, differences. The P.O.V. was at the left edge of the central arch before being moved to over to the hand holding the swords; the flagstones did not need to be pulled out of perspective, and a standing woman at the center of the woman's grouping made it an equilateral triangle - whose strength is enhanced by the stairwell opening up behind it. In the final painting, both the woman and the stairwell have been removed. The two groups of figures have become less balanced - but the painting has become more dramatic and expressive.

David had transformed his design from just another academic historical set piece to an intense, gender-based psychological conflict.

Bryson's point is that the Oath, as well as David's other paintings from that time, 'Belisarius", "Brutus, and "The Death of Socrates" were not didactic - which he succinctly defines as follows:

In didactic painting,

broadly speaking, the viewer is passive and the image active.

Here, the roles are exactly the other way round - the image

elicits a response from the viewer, but it is passive before his

decision, or before his effort to decide.

Let us remind ourselves of what an unarguably didactic work looks like: Brenet's Continence of Scipio. Clearly qualities of restraint and kindness, and the merciful exercise of power, are preferable in a ruler to tyranny, but Brenet does not allow Scipio much choice. He cannot. If he were to show Scipio as wrestling with a dark, selfish side of his nature, Scipio would lose his exemplary status. And the path of virtue must seem obvious: it would be of no use if the painting suggested that there might be something surprising about Scipio's continence. The net result is to destroy the representation of choice. This is only to be expected. Didacticism in the arts supposes that the mere exposure of people to virtuous scenes is enough to persuade them to act in accordance with virtue. It assumes that if people act wickedly, it is not from choice; it is just that they have not seen enough of goodness. If their museums were full of noble scenes, they would change their ways.

Brenet's image puts me to sleep - and for anyone with even an ounce of cynicism, this soporific, sugar-coated representation would be sufficient evidence to suspect a dark and sinister side to Scipio that needed to be concealed. (Cato the Elder would have agreed)

Dawoud Bey

The left-wing didactic art of our time,

in the tradition of the solemn purity and innocence of poor people,

is much the same way

- only more demanding -

since to reject the art is to reject social justice.

Domenichino, Flagellation of St. Andrew

Bryson doesn't mention it,

but we're told elsewhere that David was a fan of Domenichino.

This piece certainly has more drama, vigor, spaciousness, and good life drawing

than what usually appeared in the Salon.

Bryson's discussion of David's Brutus as a moral dilemma

is quite convincing:

After 1789, the meaning of Brutus seemed clear to everyone: like Challier, like Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau, Marat, Barra and Viala, Brutus had placed the good of the state above all personal considerations. Between 1790 and 1794 it would have been virtually impossible to look at the painting in any other way: France was flooded with Brutus imagery. But, significantly, the propaganda made no use of David's painting, even though David was recognised as the great painter of the Revolution, and indeed was personally in charge of its propaganda machine; for the most part Revolutionary iconography bypassed David's painting and went directly to the Roman sculpture used as a source for the central f1gure, known as the Capitoline Brutus. David's painting was;- in fact, too complicated - too subversive - to be serviceable. The Revolutionaries may have convinced themselves that the painting celebrated Brutus's self-sacrifice, but were they right? The male world of heroism and political action is not shown as superior to the world of the females and their emotionalism: it is true that while the men do great deeds, the women are at home sewing, that on seeing the body they react but do not and cannot act, that they are cordoned off or coralled inside the house and seem without access to the outside world; all this is obvious, and equally obvious is the sinister quality of Brutus. He seems to be in communion with the primitive statue of Roma, which should face into the room, but instead faces Brutus alone; beneath the statue we see a frieze of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, indicating the origin of Rome in the abrogation of the natural family - a motif which will be taken up on the shield of the warrior in the Intervention of the Sabine Women, where it will have the very clear semantic function of placing negatively the dedication of the Roman male to State over Nature.

Brutus - detail

Sabines - detail

(I far prefer the details to the whole in this piece)

Michelangelo, Isaiah

While the extreme shadow surrounding Brutus conveys the inward withdrawal of stoicism, it also suggests a quality of terribilite, supra-human or nonhuman grandeur; this is confirmed, at the level of source, by the dependence on the Sistine Isaiah, which besides the Capitoline Brutus is perhaps the single most important inspiration behind the figure. 'Either the greatness of his virtue raised him above the impressions of sorrow, or the extravagance of his misery took away all sense of it; but neither seemed common, or the result of humanity, but either divine or brutish. ' That is Plutarch, and surely Plutarch's comment on Brutus is exactly the comment David would have wished to apply to his figure. Either brutish or divine - the same binary and unresolved interrogative stance as the Socrates and the Horatian sketch; first one side (law, state, reason), then the other (blood, family, emotion); and since neither side is able to win our approval, we are forced to abandon the whole judgmental process the painting at first sets in motion; forcing judgment into an impasse, the image goes beyond the mutual exclusions of binarism into a real moral dilemma where a figure can be both brutish and divine at the same time, both heroic and monstrous, noble and unnatural; in a word, where Brutus exits from our normal categories and enters the Sublime. But the Sublime and the didactic, Burke tells us, cannot co-exist.

Please excuse the digression, but don't the sublime and the didactic

coexist in Michelangelo's Isaiah as shown above ?

Perhaps we could amend the above to say that

the sublime and the didactic cannot coexist in secular art.

The argument is identical to the argument in favour of censorship: that since people (but not the censors themselves) mechanically repeat whatever human actions they are exposed to, only socially useful acts must be depicted. The thinking behind such didacticism is thoroughly behaviouristic: people act in the ways they do because they are always repeating and never initiating action; and although didacticism is extremely concerned with those moments when an individual comes to morally forking paths, and is anxious that he follow the one that is right, nevertheless it also believes that when he comes to the fork, the individual's choice will be pre-determined by inertia - he will generally follow whichever path looks familiar. It does not really trust in the individual 's intelligence or capacity to decide for himself The Scipio we see is not making a decision: where is his alternative course? Such instructional programmes as the one supposed to culminate in 1785 must always crudify the representation of human choice, the genuine complexity and difficulty of the issues which being human involves us in. Basically, the programme does not trust the act of decision; and to make its lessons palatable the force which is overcome in the virtuous act cannot be represented (even though, paradoxically, its existence is insisted on: there must be vice for virtue to exist).

Might we say that didacticism is more appropriate for some than others? And then might we note that only a few people (like you and me, dear reader ) prefer to be presented with unsolvable dilemmas ?

The significance of the Oath is that it breaks with this simplistic and single-minded tradition. In place of its certainties and reductions, David offers us genuine moral difficulty, in images that respect the individual's capacity to make moral decisions by refusing to tilt the balance in one direction or the other in advance; instead of exempla, he gives us problems for us to explore, problems which tempt us towards judgment, but by striking so fine a balance prevent us from drawing from the image the firm conclusions which the didactic tradition demands. The heroism of the Horatian brothers is not at all like the heroism of Scipio; it is undeniable, but it is not a moral quality at all.. In the ancient literary conception of the hero, the performance of great acts of virtue or courage is only one element in the hero's constitution, and though essential, it is not definitive. The hero is a man so raised above average humanity that his status is wholly manifest in word and deed, physique and comportment. The hero of Greek drama can perform deeds that are monstrous, like those of Ajax, or unworthy, like those of Achilles; this in no way detracts from heroic stature. We are not asked, in classical drama, to emulate the hero; on the contrary, he is exalted and inimitable. The heroism of the Horatii has something of this morally neutral quality: we cannot forget that of these three who make themselves into one, only one will return, and he will kill his sister. Like the sacrifice of Brutus, the sacrifice of the Horatii is not something 'common, or the result of humanity'; it is 'either divine or brutish'. We cannot translate the image into imitable action without ourselves leaving the realm of normal ethical categories.

Rembrandt, Sacrifice of Isaac

Might we ask what earlier artworks likewise confronted the viewer with moral difficulty? Rembrandt's "Sacrifice of Isaac" comes first to mind. The founding father of three great world religions is about to seriously abuse his frightened, vulnerable, and helpless son who does not yet share his father's blind faith in a jealous God.

If sexual shame were an equivalent moral difficulty, David's predecessors at the Academy had plenty to show. "Roman Charity" was a popular theme. And then there was Greuze who specialized in the conflict between family obligation and self realization. But who else until Manet ? I'm not sure that moral ambivalence has ever had a large audience waiting eagerly to be puzzled.

Far more than it is instructive, the image is tragic, not only because of our foreknowledge that two of the warriors and one of the women will die, but because of its unmitigated sense of pain. The world-order is revealed as perverted: men and women lead lives so specialised and separate that humanity seems broken in two; and though I do not myself find anything too interesting in the idea of a male/female psychic split within David's personality, I do think that the theme of gender- alienation is very close to the centre of his work, right until the end. In David's conception of gender-specialisation, the males are incomplete because they lack awareness of the loss of individual outline that is the price they must pay for their united strength; and the females are incomplete because although they retain personal outline they are denied the power to influence the action (Corneille's Camilla was a fury by comparison with these drained, exhausted women).

Several scholars found gender alienation in Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergere" as compiled in Twelve Views of Manet's Bar - though none of them mentioned David's Oath as a precedent.

David's vision is a tragic one because it shows humanity turned against itself in perpetual incompletion (he has none of Greuze's faith in a Humanity). And tragic because even the most noble of actions is presented as linked with, or even inseparable from, the opposite of man's noble nature: the destructiveness of his group-mentality, the violence of his political institutions, the monstrosity of his idealism. Didacticism in painting seems the extreme case of subjection of the image to discursive control. But it is more accurate to say that the rigour of didacticism extends also to the kind of control to which the image is subjected: the text yielded by the didactic image must be of a certain kind, univocal, unambiguousa nd exhortative. In breaking with an unwieldy didacticism, David was by no means intent on a general banishment of discourse from painting. On the contrary, he was reforming the use of discourse in the image as much as he was reforming style, and creating a new discursive format built on a genuinely intricate and engaging kind of text. While I find it unacceptable to associate the David of 1785, I787 and I789 with a propagandist programme, I concur with Locquin that 1785 marks a climax of textual history painting. After the progressive decline of the text in painting from 1700 through to the 1750's, the text begins a resurgence ,through Greuze and through one side of Diderot, to emerge in triumph in 1785. That is by no means the whole significance of 1785, which is of course a stylistic revolution as well as a textual one. But David is as much a master of text as he is of paint, and his work manipulates the textuality of the image with much greater subtlety than, for example, LeBrun or Greuze. The work of discourse there operates, if I may use an awkward expression, by massive exploitation of the 'equals sign': this expression equals pity, that expression equals admiration, the broken pitcher equals loss of virginity, the dead bird equals childhood's end. When we 'read ' LeBrun's Darius or Greuze's L'Accordee in the manner of Felibien or Diderot, we check off the signifieds against the signifiers in much the same way as we read words in a foreign language by means of a lexicon.

Perhaps David's manipulation of text was too subtle. Much as I agree with Bryson's interpretation of the Oath, it would be problematic to say that "David was a master of text" when his text has been interpreted differently so consistently. As the University of Massachusetts website puts it : "The moral of the story is that one should be guided by patriotic feelings, not personal feelings about family." -- or as the University of Cork puts it: "While the picture does indeed promote the values of patriotism and masculine self-sacrifice for one's country, it indicates that this loyalty should take priority over everything - even the family. This highly political painting which proclaimed the overriding importance of the Republic, brought David international renown". And all of the other art history websites found so far have followed suit.

So I would say that David was successful in evoking strong emotion rather than in sharing any particular idea. Bryson tells us that "David asks for a different kind of reading, that is less like translation and much closer to interpretation: there is a greater distance between the image and our reading, and there are no easy one-to-one equivalences" But could not the same be said for those rococo artists whom Bryson calls "figurative" rather than "discursive" ?

Bryson asserts that "whereas rococo, with its stress on the autonomy of the painterly-trace, had run little risk of appropriation by didactic programme, the new style, which renders the plane of signifiers invisible or transparent and renounces the autonomy of the trace, is highly vulnerable to discursive control, all the more so at a time when the policy of d' Angiviller was towards an expansion of that control

Couldn't we say that rococo enjoyed royal approval because its messages, either stoic (Chardin) or hedonistic (Boucher) promoted apathy towards the failures of autocracy ?

And must "painterly trace" always require loose brush strokes? What about hard-edge abstract painting? Isn't the precise arrangement of discrete, sharply defined areas of tone and color also a "painterly trace" ? What else would you call it? David was a hard edge figurative painter.

In the work of the Davidiens, the style degenerates into a theatrical exaggeration of expression waxwork classicism'. David protects himself from this danger by a systematic, 'paralysed' ambiguity which no didactic programme can put to easy or certain use, and by blocking discursive confiscation of the image, he keeps the figural alive in the new order he has helped to bring into being.

************

The style of The Oath degenerated under David as well.

But let's have a look at all the Davidiens.

Wikipedia has a long list of David's pupils.

I assume that the criteria to be listed as such is quite loose.

Jean Germain Drouais, Marius, 1786

Here's a Davidien whom we have already seen. If this painting were intended to be didactic, I suppose the message might be that the will is more powerful than the body - which is not especially a moral dilemma. It is a poignant moment, however: the modest athletic slave not daring to slay the old but defiant First-Man-in-Rome. (I read the novel - it's great fun). Much attention has been paid to the dramatics of negative space - a possible lesson from the master.

Jean-Eugène-Charles Alberti, Warrior with drawn sword, 1808

A fine painting! And an arousing presentation of young male sexuality. This appears less like the portrait of a warrior and more like a selfie sent to the boyfriend. I certainly would not want this lad to face off against any of those fierce Horatii brothers.

Jean-Eugène-Charles Alberti,

Proculeius preventing Cleopatra from stabbing herself, 1810

Yet this Albrerti painting is too awkward and silly to even be called "waxworks classicism"

JOSÉ APARICIO INGLADA - The Famine in Madrid, 1818

Here's one of Goya's presentations of the same disaster,

offering a nice contrast between the real life drama of the street and the melodrama of the stage.

Jacques-Luc Barbier-Walbonne, 1808

This really does qualify as wax-works classicism.

A charming collection of expertly rendered details with absolutely zero inner life - either between the forms or within the people represented. The ideal bourgeois family - probably living a mile north of me in River Forest.

Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Innocence Between Virtue and Vice, 1790

Much better than most of the figurative pieces in the 1765 Salon.

Quite obviously didactic - but who would not find Vice to be so much more appealing?

Vice offers you passion and experience.

Virtue wants you join her in knitting ski caps in the library.

William Blake, Good and Evil Angels, 1795-1805

For contrast, here is a vision that is much less enjoyable,

but clearly makes virtue far more attractive.

René Théodore Berthon, portrait of Lady Morgan, 1818

Berton's historical painting was too awful to show on the internet, but he did do this dreamy portrait of Lady Morgan, the Irish novelist and social activist. Apparently, like David, he could rise to the occasion of a great subject.

Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet, Death of Cato the Younger, 1797

Jean-Paul Laurens, Death of Cato the Younger, 1863

The gestures in Bouchet's version echo David and Greuze. but the sheer horror of self-disembowelment is better expressed by Laurens (1838-1921) -- one of last painters in the Academic tradition, and one of the best.

Antoni Brodowsky, Saul's Anger at David, 1810's

Another "wax-works neoclassical" piece. It's like putting well-made, interacting dolls upon a stage - sort of like a puppet show. Zero feeling for pictorial relationships.

Henri Buguet, Lord-Gueil and Lady-Scorde, 1818

And here we actually have a puppet show - something like Punch and Judy.

But having abandoned the conventions of academic painting in order to make an amusing satirical cartoon, it actually has some graphic power.

Armand-Charles Caraffi, Oath of the Horatii, 1791

Here it looks like the Horatii brothers and their father were thwarted by their womenfolk. A better outcome for the story- but a much worse painting than David's.

David, Sappho and Phaon , 1808

This was commissioned by the same Russian prince who commissioned the Oath by Caraffi.

The term "wax-works neoclassicism" might sometimes apply to the master as well as the students.

Marie Denise Villers, 1801

This is a wonderful painting. Strange enough to be called Surrealism, of the gentle, dreamy Magritte variety. The space feels so private - and a bit neglected (note the sparse furnishings and the broken window pane). And the figure connects so directly with the viewer.

It used to be attributed to David himself - but, no, this could not have come from his testosterone fueled soul. Currently it's attributed to Marie Villers - possibly because of the following piece:

Marie Denise Villers

Both pieces seem to present femininity from within

rather than through the eyes of a man.

As a woman artist in the reactionary France of her day,

she must have been swimming against the current.

It's sad that more of her work cannot be found.

Guillaume-François Colson (1785-1860)

Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Augustus Rebuking Cinna, 1814

Bouchet, Augustus Rebuking Cinna, 1818

Here's two of David's pupils representing the same scene.

Deletuze's version was criticized as being too theatrical.

(as if any academic painting were not!)

He took the criticism to heart, stopping painting, and became an art critic himself.

His piece feels livelier to me - though it does appear to represent a high school teacher

reprimanding a student for cheating.

Bouchet's painting was better received and ended up in Versaille,

presumably for its succinct presentation of craven guilt, high authority, and benign, mercy.

Deletuze would go on to write "Jacques Louis David, his school and his time", an important primary source for those interested in the period.

Anatole Devosge, Peace of Amiens, 1802

That brutal fellow on the right seems undeterred by the blissfully peaceful folk on the left - and prophetically the peace between Napoleon and the rest of Europe dissolved a year later.

This is the first piece by one of David's former students, so far, that presents moral ambivalence.

James Gillray, The Peace of Amiens, 1803

or the Meeting of Britannia and Citizen Francois

Here's another way to show that the treaty was joke. The Napoleonic Wars would not be over until Napoleon was over.

Michel Martin Drolling, Orpheus and Euridice, 1820

More of an opera than a painting.

Much better on the left than right.

Claude-Marie Dubufe:Apollo and Cyparisse, 1821

This is an early piece. Regrettfully, Dubufe did not continue to produce

dreamlike,surreal gay visions - or if he did, they're not on the internet.

Louis Ducis, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1825

Rather insipid

Paul Duqueylar, Orpheus

Bryson does not discuss it,

but David's style was continually evolving

and not necessarily for the better.

David, Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1798

The stark simplicity of the Oath and the moral ambiguity of Brutus

has here been replaced by an overstuffed melodrama

suitable for a swords and sandals B-Movie.

Some of his followers rejected it.

They were called the Primatifs or the Barbus (Bearded Ones),

and Paul Duqueylar was possibly among them.

Paul Duqueylar, Ossian, 1800

But then we have this cluttered piece

that's not even worthy of a B-Movie.

The Barbus were the first of three 19th C. movements that wanted to restore painting to a earlier, simpler, less corrupted time. They were followed by the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites. It appears to me that they only made things worse.