DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS. – Painter, born in Paris on 30 August 1748, died in Brussels on 29 December 1825. He is the foremost painter of the Neoclassical period in France. A pupil of Boucher and Vien, he stayed in Rome from 1775 to 1780, at that time in the midst of a fervent Neoclassical renewal, and that sojourn decisively determined the direction of his taste.
There, in fact, while on the one hand he was attracted by the ideas that impelled men of thought toward the ideals of an antiquity, albeit a stylized one, and renewed enthusiasm for the heroic civic virtues exalted by Plutarch in his Vite, on the other he took a particular interest in the paintings of Caravaggio, Valentin, and Guercino, especially because of the violence of their shadows and lights, which brought out the contrasts between masses.
Led by his excessive, declamatory, tribune-like temperament toward a programmatic kind of painting, he initially used it to exalt the republican virtues of the French revolutionaries and then to publicize the glories of the Napoleonic dictatorship. His Belisario in the Lille museum, dating from 1785, the Giuramento degli Orazi (Louvre), dating from 1784, La morte di Socrate (1787), and Marat assassinato (Brussels, 1798) clearly represent his initial aims, while the large canvas
with the Consacrazione di Napoleone (Louvre) is a clear expression of his fundamental inability to compose his paintings with an intimate sense of rhythm. His portraits are almost always better, among them that of Pius VII, painted during that pontiff’s stay in France.