DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS. — Painter, b. in Paris on 30 Aug. 1748, d. in Brussels on 29 Dec. 1825. He is the leading painter of the Neoclassical period in France. A pupil of Boucher and Vien, from 1775 to 1780 he resided in Rome, then in the full ferment of Neoclassical renewal, and this stay was decisive for the orientation of his taste.
Here, in fact, while on the one hand he was drawn to the ideas that impelled men of thought toward the ideals of antiquity—albeit in a mannered way—and renewed their enthusiasm for the heroic civic virtues extolled by Plutarch in his *Lives*, on the other he took a particular interest in the paintings of Caravaggio, Valentin, and Guercino, above all for the violence of their shadows and lights, which highlighted the contrasts of masses.
Guided by his excessive, declamatory, tribunal temperament toward a programmatic painting, this served him first to exalt the republican virtues of the French revolutionaries and then to disseminate the glories of Napoleonic dictatorship. His *Belisarius* in the Lille Museum, dating to 1785, *The Oath of the Horatii* (Louvre), from 1784, *The Death of Socrates* (1787), and *The Assassination of Marat* (Brussels, 1798) display in bold strokes his initial aims, while the large canvas of *The Coronation of Napoleon* (Louvre) clearly expresses his fundamental inability to compose his paintings with an inner rhythmic feeling. Almost always better are his portraits, among which that of Pius VII, painted during the pope’s stay in France.