I know of no major artist who was more directly involved in politics than Jacques-Louis David, the greatest French artist of his generation and the leading artist of the French Revolution.
David received commissions for paintings that celebrated heroes and events of the Revolution. He was elected to one of the Revolution’s governing bodies, the Convention, of which he was president for one term; he was president for one term of the leading political club of the Revolution, the Jacobins; he sat on the Revolutionary tribunal; he signed the death warrant for the king and queen; he orchestrated patriotic festivals; and he was the Revolution’s leading propagandist.
When the Revolution imploded in 1794 David was sent to prison. He was lucky to escape with his life. In prison, he decided to avoid political subjects in his art, but he was not true to his word. David met Napoleon at a banquet in 1797, after his astonishing campaign in Italy in 1796-97. He told his students after Napoleon came to his studio to sit for a portrait that he had a new hero, and said that if Napoleon had lived in antiquity they would have built altars in his honor. David painted Napoleon crossing the Alps in an 1800 campaign and he painted Napoleon’s 1804 coronation.
When Beethoven was told of Napoleon’s coronation, he scratched out his name from the title page of his Third Symphony, which he had dedicated to Napoleon. He wrote that the symphony was dedicated to the memory of a hero. We know it as the Eroica.
Beethoven had seen Napoleon as a leader who would bring liberty and freedom to all peoples, and felt that he betrayed those ideals when he became emperor. Beethoven was right about Napoleon, who was utterly cynical. Napoleon said that he was for the whites because he was a white; if he were black he would be for the blacks. He said he could win over virtuous republicans by hanging gold braid on them; David had been one of the virtuous republicans that Napoleon scorned.
David distanced himself from Napoleon in the last several years of his reign when ambition drove him into military campaigns that resulted in his defeat. Napoleon abdicated and was sent to the island of Elba in 1814, but he escaped and returned to France in 1815. The army that was sent to arrest him sided with Napoleon and marched with him triumphantly to Paris. David sided with Napoleon at this point; he couldn’t stomach the restored Bourbon dynasty. Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and sent to permanent exile at Saint Helena. David was not imprisoned, but went into exile in Brussels, where he spent the last ten years of his life.
David’s creative work, his paintings, say much about his experience in the tumultuous age in which he lived. He created an heroic style in three large canvases painted between 1784 and 1789. These works expressed ideas and ideals that were at the core of the French Revolution. That David became the dominant artist of the French Revolution was no accident; he was at one with its ideology. But the Revolution lasted a mere five years and David paid the price for his involvement in the Reign of Terror, in which he was an active participant.
When he was released from prison David struck off in a new artistic direction. He began work on a painting that was about reconciliation, The Sabine Women. The style is a striking departure from his earlier heroic style. Women are at the center of the painting. They intervene to prevent men from going to war.
While David was a court painter for Napoleon he painted portraits, including a massive group portrait, the Coronation of Napoleon. The colossal painting is superb technically, but it is far removed expressively from David’s work done in his earlier heroic style. The painting is devoid of ideas—almost. David insinuated some of his own feelings about the event he depicted in the painting. Altar boys at the far end look at an ornamental sword, held by Napoleon’s stepson. Swords had been emblems of patriotic virtue; now they express its collapse.
David’s work in Brussels, done in the last ten years of his life, is a remarkable record of how he changed as an artist. His technical skill was unabated. His portraits from this period are superb. It was during this time when he did history paintings, a genre that carried him to greatness 30 years earlier, that an astonishing loss of vitality can be seen.
His last work, Venus disarming Mars, done in in the last three years of his life, shows the goddess of love taking the sword and shield from the god of war. Mars can barely hold onto a lance with his right arm. He is heavy-lidded and fatigued. One wonders if he can work up an arousal for Venus, who is clearing the way for what she has in mind. To compare this work with David’s Oath of the Horatii, the patriotic work that catapulted him to greatness in 1785, is to see one of the most astonishing changes of style of any major French artist, ever. It is not only that the energy plug has been pulled, the heroic idealism that informed the work of this artist before he was swept into the upheaval of the Revolutionary Age is no longer present.
While David was working on his last painting, a parody of his earlier work, Beethoven was writing music of unmatched spiritual depth, the 9th Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, and the late quartets. Beethoven responded creatively to his suffering. His inner life deepened; his musical compositions are a record of his spiritual journey. David took a different journey in Brussels. How different the last ten years of these two creative figures are. The spiritual growth of one was as profound as its absence was in the other.