Word: horatii
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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