The man who made the creed a body
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was the painter Neoclassicism had been waiting for: French, fiercely ambitious, and possessed of a hardness of hand that suited the new severity exactly. He had trained in the usual way, won the Prix de Rome (the state prize that paid for years of study in Italy) that sent young French painters to Rome, and there, among the ruins and the antique sculpture Winckelmann worshipped, he burned the Rococo out of himself. What he came back with was a way of painting that looked like nothing the Salon was used to. To see the size of the change, it helps to set his breakthrough beside the Fragonard.
Where Fragonard’s color is pastel, David’s is severe and local: stone gray, steel, the dull red of dried blood, each thing its own plain color with no sugary haze over it. Where Fragonard’s brushwork is feathery and shows, David’s is smooth to the point of invisibility, so that his figures read like carved and painted marble rather than strokes of paint. Where Fragonard composes on swinging soft curves, David lines his figures up across a shallow stage like a carved relief on a Roman tomb, the action pressed right to the front and lit hard from the side. And where Fragonard’s subject is a flirtation, David’s is a vow to die. The single deepest swap is the one the whole movement turns on: clear line replaces soft color as the thing that carries the picture. You could trace every figure in a David with a pencil and lose almost nothing. That is line over color, the conviction that drawing (the firm edge, the contour) is the true bones of painting and color only its skin.
Three swords and a vow
The picture that announced all of this was the Oath of the Horatii, painted in Rome in 1784 and shown at the Salon (the official annual exhibition in Paris, the one show that made or broke a French career) the next year. The story is from early Roman legend: three brothers of the Horatii family step forward to fight three champions of a rival city, settling a war by single combat to spare both armies. David paints the moment of their oath. Look at the structure of it. On the left, the three brothers throw out their arms in a single rigid salute toward their father, every line of their bodies taut and parallel, soldiers turned to clenched springs. In the center the old father lifts up three swords in his fists, the bright steel the hard focus of the whole canvas. And on the right, in a heap of soft curves that pointedly break the men’s straight lines, the women of the family collapse, weeping, already grieving the deaths the men have not yet died. Three round arches behind divide the scene into the men, the swords, and the women: duty, the weapon, and the cost.
A word of care about what this picture is, because it is almost always told wrong. It is endlessly described as a deliberate call to revolution, a prophecy of 1789 painted to summon France to overthrow its king. It was nothing of the kind. The Oath of the Horatii was a royal commission, ordered for the Crown through the comte d’Angiviller, the official who ran the king’s buildings and art, and it was painted in 1784, five full years before the Revolution began. Its subject, men sacrificing everything private for the good of the state, became a revolutionary banner only later, read back into the picture once France had a revolution to read it through. David did not paint a prophecy. He painted the king’s commission about Roman duty, in a style hard enough that history could pick it up afterward and carry it.
Reason takes the poison
Three years on, David painted the calmest and perhaps the most perfect statement of the whole creed: The Death of Socrates (1787). The Greek philosopher Socrates, condemned to death by an Athenian court for his teaching and offered the choice of execution, has chosen to drink a cup of hemlock (a deadly poison) rather than flee or recant. David paints the instant before he drinks. Socrates sits upright on his prison cot, his body that of a much younger and stronger man than he was, one hand reaching almost absent-mindedly for the cup a turned-away jailer holds out, the other hand raised with a finger pointed up, because he is still in the middle of making a point. He is arguing as he dies. Around him his students fall apart, clutching their heads, looking away, unable to watch; the man holding out the poison cannot meet his eye. Only Socrates is steady. It is the movement’s ideal in a single body: reason facing death without the smallest tremor, still teaching as the dark comes up. Everything the style stood for (clarity, restraint, moral seriousness, a calm gravity drawn with a hard edge) is concentrated in that raised, pointing hand.
