DAVID, JACQUES-LOUIS. - Painter, b. in Paris on 30 Aug. 1748, d. in Brussels on 29 Dec. 1825. He is the greatest painter of the Neoclassical period in France. A pupil of Boucher and of Vien, from 1775 to 1780 he stayed in Rome, then in full fervor of Neoclassical renewal, and that stay was decisive for the orientation 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 antiquity, albeit in a mannered form, and renewed enthusiasms for the heroic civil virtues exalted 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 brought out the contrasts of the masses.
Led by his excessive, declamatory, tribunician temperament to a programmatic painting, this served him first to exalt the republican virtues of the French revolutionaries and then to spread the glories of the Napoleonic dictatorship. His Belisarius in the museum of Lille, which is from 1785, the Oath of the Horatii (Louvre), which is from 1784, The Death of Socrates (1787), the Assassinated Marat (Brussels 1798) clearly represent his initial proposals, while the great canvas with the Consecration of Napoleon (Louvre) is the clear expression of his substantial inability to compose his pictures with intimate rhythmic feeling. Almost always better are the portraits, among them that of Pius VII, painted during that pontiff's stay in France.
Bibliography3 works
Emilio Lavagnino