The case for order
The reason wing built its whole case on a single conviction: that the way out of a frivolous, decadent present was to go back to the antique and copy its severity. Its bible was Winckelmann’s 1755 essay calling for “a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” and its method was drawing. A young painter trained for years on line before he was trusted with serious color, because in this faith the contour is the truth of a thing and color is mere decoration laid on top. The ideal surface was fini (a finish blended so smooth you could not find a brushstroke if you searched), so the figures would read like polished marble rather than like paint. Beauty, in this view, has rules, the ancients knew them, and the job is to learn them.
The subjects matched the method. This was history painting (grand scenes from myth, scripture, and ancient history, the most prestigious kind a painter could attempt), and the scenes were chosen for their moral charge: a Roman swearing to die for the city, a philosopher drinking poison rather than recant. The point was never just to show a beautiful body. The point was to hold up a stoic ancient virtue as a mirror for a soft modern age. Art as a public lesson, not a private delight.
Stillness you could set a clock by
Stand in front of one of these pictures and the first thing it does is stop time. Everything is held at the one frozen instant that carries the most meaning, the way a stage freezes the second the curtain lifts. The figures stand in a shallow band close to the front, as if on a narrow stone ledge with a wall just behind them, so nothing recedes into deep space to pull the eye away. Their edges are hard and exact and the brushwork is sanded off until skin and cloth read like polished marble; the color is local and severe, stone gray and steel and the dull red of dried blood, never a pretty pastel. And the whole moral of the picture is loaded into a single gesture you cannot miss. This is a style built to be understood at a glance and obeyed.
David’s Oath of the Horatii is the copybook of it. Three brothers throw their arms out in one rigid line toward the swords their father lifts, every limb straightened to the same taut angle, a block of male resolve machined to a single edge; the women at the right have melted into a soft curve of grief, and the two halves do not touch. Three round arches behind sort the canvas into its parts: the men, the weapons, the cost. Nothing blurs, nothing moves, nothing is in doubt. The Death of Marat strips the same method almost to nothing and shows how much it can still carry: a murdered man slumped in his bath, one bare arm hanging straight to the floor with the pen still in the fingers, the wound and the dropped knife rendered exactly, and above all of it a great empty brown void doing the work an altarpiece’s gold once did. The reason style can hold a whole martyrdom in an arm and a blank wall.
That economy is also the style’s open secret. An art built to embody virtue turned out to be exquisitely built to serve power: the same severe line that swore the Horatii’s oath went on to serve a Revolution and then an Emperor without changing its look, which is the lesson the feeling wing would seize on.
Line made voluptuous
David’s pupil Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) carried the primacy of line into the next generation and made it strange. His La Grande Odalisque (1814) is a reclining harem nude (an odalisque is a woman of a sultan’s household) whose cool back is drawn impossibly, sinuously long; critics joked she had two or three vertebrae too many. Ingres had bent anatomy itself in the service of pure, flowing contour, proof that the worship of line could become as sensuous and as willful as anything the colorists did. He would spend forty years as the defender of drawing for the academy (the official art establishment, in France the Académie with its school and its Salon, that trained painters and controlled which pictures the public got to see) against the rising tide of color, the standing rebuttal to everything the second wing of the era believed.
