Jacques-Louis David Research Paper

918 Words4 Pages
Jacques-Louis David was a French painter who lived in times of the French Revolution. David was on the side of the Revolution, as a friend of Robespierre he fought to destroy the power of the King Louis XVI. The social activism and the revolution of this period of time are important because they affected the work of Jacques-Louis David. In an effort to despise Rococo and going back to the classics, David showed a real interest into painting in a more classical way. He based the forms and the gestures from the Roman sculptures; having a Neoclassical Art Style, where the poses were stiffer and full of drama (Jacques-Louis David.). When analyzing the paintings, “The Intervention of The Sabine Women” and “Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe”, it can be appreciated that both have a female figure in the center, this was something rather new in Jacques-Louis’s art. Actually, the first woman who was in the center of his artwork was the Sabine woman, Hersilia (Fichner-Rathus, 556). These two paintings are very similar in the sense that both have a dramatic scene where the woman in the middle is begging for the violence to stop while in the floor of both paintings there are bodies of dead people. The idealization of the human body, the dramatic classical scenes and the oil as a…show more content…
The most powerful part of the story is that the woman in the middle, who is trying to stop the attacks, is the actual wife of Romulus- Roman Emperor- and is the daughter of the Sabine Tatius, who are fighting against each other. Therefore, Hersilia has to be put in the middle to symbolize the terror and misery of being in that

    More about Jacques-Louis David Research Paper

      Open Document