Spencer Alley: Anita Brookner on Jacques-Louis David

Jacques-Louis David
The Oath of the Horatii
1784
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
The Oath of the Horatii (detail)
1784
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"In a stony atrium, completely devoid of any hint of domestic warmth or comfort, an extraordinary and essentially domestic drama is taking place, has in fact already risen to its irreversible climax. Three Roman youths, whose close physical links proclaim them to be brothers, are making some kind of pledge to their father. He holds in his left hand three swords; his brilliantly lit right hand makes a gesture of promise, of sacrifice, or of incantation. All four men are dressed in capacious garments of fairly rudimentary design. The undomestic light glints on their iron profiles, their leather legs: the structure of this particular group seems braced with calipers of steel, for the father's tensile back is calculated as a stress that neutralizes the forward thrust of the group and responds to the lance so uncomfortably held by the most prominent son, while the spectator's eye returns to the bundle of swords which have a sullen heaviness shockingly at variance with the bodkin-like convention of pictorial weaponry."

"Behind the father's back huddle the women of the family, two in a stupor of grief which seems to us convincing – although an earlier critic complained that they looked as if they had fallen asleep – and an older woman who tries to shield two children from the sight, unsuccessfully, for the bigger boy has pulled her fingers from his eyes and is gazing at the swords. There is no source of light in the picture and something about the crudeness of the illumination sends one looking upwards for a naked opening on to a hostile sky. The colours are clear, vivid, but utterly undescriptive. One cannot single out a passage that is beautifully painted or isolate one brush-stroke from the next. Technically the picture is more or less neutral. What holds the eye and dominates the consciousness is the incredible tension that unites the protagonists in their ritual gesture. Small wonder, then, that this mysterious scene, the elements of which have been reorganized into an emblem of iconic simplicity, should have held the imagination of spectators since it was first put on exhibition in Rome in 1785. Small wonder, too, that in their attempts to isolate its true meaning (which is only superficially clear) interpreters have found themselves involved with this picture to such an extent that they have almost challenged the autonomy of the painter in their attempt to lay bare the chemistry which exists between the artist and the spectator."

"In the reign of Tullus Hostilius (672-640 B.C.) the neighbouring kingdoms of Rome and Alba were declining into a state of war because of a series of cattle raids along the border. The people, very sensibly, refused to be mobilized and possibly killed for so trivial a reason, so each side chose three heroes to do battle for it. The Horatii would represent Rome and the Curiatii Alba. However, one of the Horatii was married to Sabina, sister to the Curiatii (the woman in the blue dress and yellow cloak in David's picture) and one of the Curiatii was betrothed to Camilla, sister to the Horatii (David's woman in white). In other words, whichever side won would inflict a cruel bereavement within the family. The drama is one of conflict between love and duty and this is what brings it into the French classical net. The battle was won by the Horatii; when the senior brother announced the victory his sister Camilla cursed him for the loss of her lover, whereupon he drew his sword and killed her. . . . Tullus Hostilius, the ruler of Rome, refused to judge Horatius for his crime but the father of the family appealed to the people who, with certain misgivings, acquitted him of the charge of murder."

Jacques-Louis David
Brutus receiving the Bodies of his Sons
1789
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Brutus receiving the Bodies of his Sons (detail)
1789
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Brutus receiving the Bodies
of his Sons (detail)
1789
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"The enormous literature which has grown up around the Brutus picture concerns itself largely with the problem of whether or not this was a committed republican work and therefore a calculated political act. As an antidote, one must recite the full title: 'J. Brutus, first consul, has returned to his home after having condemned his two sons who had joined the Tarquins and conspired against Roman liberty; lictors bring back the bodies so that they may be given burial.' David, with his curious appreciation of some of the more loathsome aspects of Roman history, has returned to that unregenerate family which shaped the final appearance of the Horatii. Brutus has successfully carried off the assassination of Tarquin the Proud, whose son had raped Lucretia; together with Collatinus, Lucretia's husband, and another senator, he has made himself consul of Rome (which by definition has become a republic). Republican virtues, however, are not strongly in evidence, for Brutus's sons favoured a royalist restoration, and entered into a conspiracy to this effect with some members of their mother's family. Brutus then ordered their execution, which he witnessed, and both Livy and Plutarch report that he sat impassively while the death sentences were carried out."

"As on the classical stage, there is but a single setting; violent deeds have taken place, but not before our eyes, and only their aftermath is shown. But this aftermath is so angry that disagreeable tremors of tension are present, most notably in the disruption of the space, for the control which previously held this formal element together has given way. Thus Brutus sits in shadow, his wife clamours in full light, the nurse weeps, the daughters collapse, and through that terrible door the stony-eyed lictors progress with their inert burden. It is this and the strident concatenation of emotional reactions – as if the picture were working too hard at too many disparate feelings – that shocks. It is a picture over which the eye travels restlessly, from cause (the bodies) to effect (the mother and daughters) to reflection (Brutus himself). It remains a work of extreme and horrifying power, reverberant to the outer limits of the weeping servant or nurse on the right and the sun entering the doorway on the left to outline the primitive statue of the goddess Roma."

Jacques-Louis David
Intervention of the Sabine Women
1799
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Intervention of the Sabine Women (detail)
1799
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Intervention of the
Sabine Women (detail)
1799
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Intervention of the Sabine Women (detail)
1799
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"The Intervention of the Sabine Women was intended to prove to the nation that factional strife was no longer desirable and that appeasement should be welcomed. It is yet another political picture, both at objective and subjective levels, for in admitting the peace-making matron Hersilia to the central position on the canvas David sacrifices his own tense wariness of the mollifying power of female intervention into masculine quarrels. . . . As he did in the Oath of the Horatii, David has ennobled the intentions of his characters. We are back with the pig-headed citizenry of Ancient Rome. After the rape of their women by the Romans, it took the Sabines three years to mount a counter-offensive, during which time their former sisters, daughters and fiancées had become Roman wives and mothers, a fact which Hersilia tries to demonstrate to the warring Romulus and Tatius. By carrying their babies into the conflict the women effectively put an end to it, for the Roman cavalry leader is sheathing his sword and the foot soldiers raise their helmets to show that they refuse to fight. Psychologically, this is a reprise of the Oath of the Horatii, harking back to tribal conflict and footling pretexts for war. It is also a new method of resolving the conflict, as characteristic of David in his chastened post-prison mood as had been the hysterical heroism of the 1780s. The appearance of the Horatii is as naked, as cruel, and as exciting as its subject. The Intervention of the Sabine Women is a huge picture, crowded with incident, with superb isolated studies and a picturesque background; at the same time it is easy to read because it has an overall tonal unity which is new in David' work. It is the colour of champagne, with only three strong accents massed vertically along the central axis. Did David, in a considerable imaginative leap, draw some parallel between this colouring and the light of Antiquity, or did he merely feel a longing for Rome, yellow in the sun as opposed to the rational daylight of Paris? Whatever the cause, the effect is amazingly successful and consistent."

Jacques-Louis David
Leonidas at Thermopylae
1814
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jacques-Louis David
Leonidas at Thermopylae (detail)
1814
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"[Leonidas at Thermopylae] was begun in 1800, was worked on 'vers 1802', according to Delécluze, was roundly condemned by Napoleon who told David that he could not see where the attack was to come from, was laid aside in favour of the Coronation pictures, was presumably resumed after the portrait of Napoleon of 1812, and is signed and dated 1814. . . . What is singular about the Leonidas is that none of David's contemporaries liked it; indeed, they experienced distaste or irritation on seeing it or even hearing about it. Napoleon's strictures can be understood in the light of his inherent superstition, for this story of the general and his immediate followers (the equivalent of the Imperial Guard) refusing to sell the pass to the Persian invaders and being slaughtered to a man did not fit in with his own unshaken belief in his military luck. . . . But when speaking of the finished picture Delécluze breaks into a petulant invective against David's lack of a dominant philosophy, a coherent system of ideas or beliefs that would have given his work a much wanted unity."

"Even David was obliged to defend his choice of subject, although he seems to have misunderstood the general run of objections. He thought that he had upset people by choosing not a poetic subject from Homer but rather a historical one from Herodotus. 'As for me, I thought I was more prudent than they in choosing a historical fact which I could master and to which I could add a poetry of my own, rather than paint a purely poetic subject, from Homer or Sophocles . . . in comparison with which I should appear inferior and prosaic in spite of all my efforts.' . . . As if to confirm this he used as models those of his pupils who were given to swimming nude in the Seine. Delécluze adds angrily that although Leonidas is a lyric subject, David has treated it dramatically, and that what was begun as poetry has ended up as prose."

"In contradistinction to the Sabine Women, for which Delécluze seems to be hankering, Leonidas is both profound and dynamic. Its appearance alone turns the schema of the Sabine Women inside out, for instead of the two main figures facing each other and thus neutralizing their forces, as in the Sabine Women, movement pours out of the opposite sides of the frame of the Leonidas. And whereas Hersilia's gesture embodies the disparate energies of Romulus and Tatius, Leonidas is literally without motion, distanced both physically and spiritually from the activities of those who surround him. . . . For although the figures, with their razor-sharp profiles and portly buttocks, have moved a long way from the sinewy sparseness of the Horatii, have in fact become overlaid with the stocky military bearing of the generals poised in mid-rush to collect their eagle standards, this is not only a composition of astonishing novelty but may well be the only picture which David considered worthy of prolonged contemplation, as his own words would seem to imply. Much is taking place on the canvas yet the total impression is resolutely unified. A youth ties his sandals; an aging soldier embraces his son; a blind and helmeted veteran is positioned for battle by his servant; three brothers swear a votive oath on the altar of Aphrodite; the faint-hearted leave with the baggage train; the sentry signals to the trumpeters; a lyre is hung on a wintry tree; and with his sword a soldier carves on the rock the epigram, which David transliterates as, 'Passer-by, tell Sparta that her sons died for her'. Observed by only one man, like the donor in a devotional picture, Leonidas, who is indeed copied from the Ajax cameo illustrated by Winckelmann, contemplates a destiny other than the one which so obviously awaits him. His frontality and his repose are the hypnotic focus in this crowded scene which we view head on, as if we were seated in the front row of the stalls for the final tableau of some gigantic historical panorama."

– quoted text by Anita Brookner, from Jacques-Louis David (New York: Harper & Row, 1980)

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Anita Brookner on Jacques-Louis David