Tea at Trianon: David's Brutus

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 17, 2022

David's Brutus

From The Conversation:

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) was a leader among the painters of a generation enthused by the revival of interest in ancient histories, cultures and art we now call neo-classicism. After a rocky start, and a life-changing stay in Rome, David made his reputation with spectacular paintings derived from ancient history, shown at the Salon – the enormously popular public exhibitions of contemporary art held every two years in the Louvre palace. These works included the Oath of the Horatii, which caused a sensation in 1785 and the equally remarkable Death of Socrates. He painted The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Dead Sons over the course of two years, before it premiered at the Salon in 1789. It was first seen six weeks after the storming of the Bastille. The exhibition closed on October 6, the same day a revolutionary crowd spearheaded by Parisian women extracted Louis XVI and his family from the Versailles and placed them under house arrest in the Tuileries palace.

The Brutus depicts a terrible moment in the life of the (perhaps legendary) founder of the Roman republic Lucius Junius Brutus who, after the brutalisation of his own family and the rape of Lucretia, led the successful revolt that ended the reign of Tarquinius Superbus and founded the Roman republic. After this coup, the exiled Tarquins attempted a counter-revolution. Brutus’s sons and his wife’s brothers were involved in this plot. Uncovering their treason, Brutus was forced to follow his own anti-treason decree and presided over the judgement and execution of his sons. David chose not to show the execution itself, described in Livy and Plutarch. Instead he imagined the moment when the lictors – the physical executioners and the bodyguards of the Republic – return the bodies to Brutus’ household for burial. At the left of the 14-square-metre canvas, we see the tense, numb Brutus seated, uncomfortably, in the shadow of the Goddess Roma. His facial expression is inscrutable, but his clenched feet, toes and right hand, clutching his anti-treason decree, betray his tension and pain. The corpses and the weight of history, office and the law seem to impose on him a heavy bodily and psychic burden. (Read more.)