Art & Art History
Department

Jacques-Louis David; Neoclassicism, Art and Politics

By the late 1700s, the Neoclassical art movement had gained a strong following in France due to the writings by such art historians and critiques as Johan Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 1768), as well as to the growing political and social unrest amongst the rising middle class. Winckelmann’s call to artists to immerse themselves in models of classical antiquity was answered by the rising middle class of artists and philosophers in France as a response to the growing extravagance of the monarchy at the expense of the people. Jacques-Louis David (1748 – 1825) was among the artists that advocated these new ideas, this Neoclassicism. David became a revolutionary and a neoclassical artist simultaneously. Neoclassicism became the artistic movement of the French Revolution (1789 – 1799) and no artist exemplified the strong relationship between politics and art at this time better than David. In my study of Jacques-Louis David and his unique contributions to Neoclassicism and the French Revolution, an examination of Winckelmann’s works is a necessary beginning step. In his two greatest works, Winckelmann gave young, struggling artists (like David and his contemporaries) a blueprint for creating masterpieces that would make them famous for their artistic achievements and infamous for their political values and actions. No other artists explored the neoclassical style and broke its boundaries to merge art and politics quite like David. Winckelmann wrote that “the ancient Greeks in all aspects of their life and thought were more perfect than the modern European: more perfect in art and literature and religion, and more perfect as specimens of men.” [from introduction]