Word: horatii
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...thought changed more radically in those 56 years than it ever had before, or would again. So did its cultural surface, especially in painting, which moved, as it were, from the pink thighs of Boucher's Miss O'Murphy to the martial sinews of David's Horatii and thence to the tumescent flesh of Delacroix's slave girls almost within the lifetime of one man. Yet these tremendous years of the Revolution, the Directorate and the Empire have long been the art historian's Bermuda Triangle. They are crudely charted with the routine marks "classical...
What became the Revolution's house style, neoclassicism, had been steadily developing since the reign of Louis XV. The grand exhortations to "order and severity" produced by the Revolution's painter laureate, Jacques-Louis David-The Oath of the Horatii, Socrates Drinking the Hemlock-were about as hierarchical and elitist as art can be. They were about heroes, not average men; and the world of stoic virtue and exemplary action that unfolds in them is far removed from the reality of the Revolution. The fate of David's portrait of Lavoisier and His Wife was instructive...
Since he has provided translations of everything, his book is accessible to any reader, and, although his own style sometimes lacks the "Horatii curiosa felicitas," Commager should be read by everyone interested in poetry or its criticism...
...painter, trained in the sentimental and erotic elegance that the court demanded. But young David was a difficult student; he simply could not learn to paint charmingly. At 27 he took off for Rome, looked at the statues and pictures, and came back a fighting antiquary. Brutus and the Horatii were his idols; he painted them to resemble the antique sculpture he admired, posturing naked and grand in a cool world. To complaints about la nudité de mes héros, David replied simply and smugly that they had always been represented that way in the Golden...
...ignorantly identified with the flippancies of a decadent court, preceded and precipitated the French Revolution. Large somber canvases, they exclude flippancy and tell, with a dignified and almost Alexandrine rhythm, the most ennobling dramas of classical history-The Rape of the Sabines, Leonidas at Thermopylae, The Oath of the Horatii, Brutus, The Grief of Andromache and, most somber and perhaps imposing of all, the Death of Socrates-called, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, ''the greatest effort of art since the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze of Raphael...
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