Jacques-Louis David

Painted just before the French Revolution, David's "Oath of the Horatii" radically challenged the dominant rococo style by emphasizing the representation of psychological states through the entire body rather than through the face alone. In these essays on David's modernity, Dorothy Johnson examines the aesthetic innovations that shaped a career attuned to intellectual as well as political change. Focusing on the painter's writings and on topics such as his life-long experimentation with corporality, his inquiry into the nature of representation, his reinterpretations of mythology, and his application of the theory and language of sculpture to his art, Johnson rejects oversimplified categorizations of David as a neoclassicist and positions him as an important link in the development of romanticism.