ABSTRACT
The genre of history painting meshes history with art. This category of subject matter in art is explicitly intertextual and relies on transformations that exist in time as well as over time. Examination of the processes involved in the making, production and reception of a major pre-Revolutionary work, Socrate au moment de prendre la ciguë (Fig. 14.1) reveals how relevant social and historical contexts activate the potential for meaning in a history painting. When this work was first exhibited, it was celebrated both as a depiction of a great man of high moral virtue, and as an example of how a great artist and history painter could successfully express and find physical embodiment for higher, more cerebral and ennobling ideas. Such meanings cannot, though, be definitively fixed in time. Changed associations and connotation continually accrue to visual imagery, particularly at times of revolutionary upheaval. By considering the subsequent reproduction in print form of the history painting, Socrate au moment de prendre la ciguë, this chapter will show how this particular representation of the antique philosopher came to acquire, during the Revolution, the more specifically political connotations of the persecuted victim of an unjust ruling faction. The painting of 1787 by Jacques-Louis David is a visual tribute to the endurance of ideas. By prominently including inkpot, pen and paper scrolls on the ground by the block on which Plato sits, sunk deep within his own thoughts, the artist, David, has also implicitly cast himself and the creation of his own paint and brush-work in the line of Plato. As another, later disciple of the long-dead pagan philosopher Socrates, David, like Plato
before him, could be celebrated for having transmitted the image of the greatness of Socrates down to posterity. In so doing, David could, furthermore, lay claim to the status of a great peintre-philosophe in the manner of another famously acknowledged predecessor, the first Premier Peintre of France, Nicolas Poussin. Many history painters and trainee history painters, such as François Boucher, Joseph-Marie Vien, David’s studio master, and Michel-François Dandré Bardon, David’s teacher of history at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, supplemented their incomes with work for the print market at the outset of their careers.2 There is, though, no evidence that David was involved in the manufacture of what was held to be the lower, more mechanical art from of printmaking before 1787. Rather, during his training as a history painter and artist of the highest order or genre within the structured hierarchies of the Académie Royale, prints had given David access to the inventions of what were held up as the greatest masters of the past. During the Revolution, the painter turned artist/politician designed and actively produced prints of a polemical nature for quite widespread distribution. After the Revolution, the artist/politician turned painter again came to exploit the market for print reproductions after his own major history paintings so as to secure for himself a more open-ended gloire, or fame in posterity, without entirely rejecting his recent political engagement and associations. Socrates and the moment of taking the hemlock
An etched view of the 1787 Salon exhibition (Fig. 14.2) conveys the elegance of the assembled crowds and the prominent position given to David’s painting in the Salon hang that year. His history painting of Socrates is to be seen hanging just beneath an important full length portrait by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard of the King’s aunt, Madame Adéläide de France, (Versailles, Musée Nationale du Château). A nearby adjacent space left blank on the wall beneath Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun’s portrait of La reine Marie-Antoinette et ses enfants, (Versailles, Musée Nationale du Château) was probably reserved for a sketch by one of David’s rival history painters, Pierre Peyron. This sketch was sent to the Salon late once many of the critical reviews of the exhibition had appeared. Entitled Mort de Socrate (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst), it was a preparatory version of a larger royal commission that was only first exhibited at the Salon of 1789. Contemporary critics and subsequent scholars have seen in the correspondences between the concurrent works of Peyron and David on the
theme of Socrates, a challenge spurred onwards by David so as to prompt his own triumphant emergence as the undisputed leader of the French School of history painting.3 The title of David’s painting was not, though, listed as La Mort de Socrate in the Salon Catalogue of 1787, but as Socrate au moment de prendre la cigüe (Fig. 14.1) and as belonging to M de Trudaine.4 The painting by David had been a commission from the younger of two noble brothers, recently returned to Paris from a Grand Tour to Italy.5 These young men belonged to a social élite, educated in the classics and sharing a valued culture of high art. The magnificent town house of the Trudaine family in the Place Royale had one of the finest libraries in Paris. In this hôtel, members of the liberal aristocracy and of the talented bourgeoisie, including the poet André Chénier and the history painter David, regularly met, just before the Revolution, to participate in enlightened exchanges of progressive opinion. Sticking to their moderate, liberal principles of the start of the Revolution and together with André Chénier, the two brothers were to go to the guillotine in 1794, just before the coup d’état of Thermidor and the downfall of the most radical Jacobin leader, Robespierre. Many other artists had treated the subject of Socrates in paint during the second half of the eighteenth century.6 Prison scenes were particularly popular at this time for they offered opportunities to experience, in relatively harmless ways, the sensations of enslavement, pathos and the sublime and they featured in the literature, plays and opera, as well as the paintings of the period. David’s teacher of history, Dandré Bardon, had, for instance, exhibited a now lost sketch on the subject of the death of Socrates at the Paris Salon of 1753.7 The same subject was set for the Royal Academy’s Grand Prix de Rome competition of 1762.8 This choice was a break with existing tradition in which the subjects had been selected from the Bible. In that year too, Jean-François Sané painted a now lost Mort de Socrate. In 1786, at the time when David was working on his version of the Socrates theme, Jacques-Claude Danzel produced a fine art reproductive engraving (Fig. 14.3) of the painting by Sané. Here the philosopher’s disciples are shown grouped around his deathbed in a range of grief-stricken poses and emotions
that belong to the conventions of the Baroque Pietà and to earlier scenes of lamentations over the body of the dead Christ.9 The subject of the death of Socrates was not, though, the subject of David’s painting which, in the Salon catalogue of 1787, was given the specific title of Socrates au moment de prendre la ciguë. What has been set before the viewer of David’s painting is not the death of the philosopher, nor even the process of his dying. Rather the focus here is on the manner in which a great man when about to face death conducts himself in life with dignity, nobility and virtue. A precedent for the moment of David’s painting seems to have been a lost work by Charles Michel-Ange Challe. The Salon catalogue of 1761 had given the title of Challe’s work as ‘Socrate condamné par les Athéniens à boire la ciguë la reçoit avec indifférence, tandis que ses Amis et ses Disciples cèdent à la plus vive douleur’.10 In praising Challe’s work for its simplicity, tranquillity and adherence to antique forms, Diderot would also have recalled his own envisioning, in his treatise on dramatic poetry of 1758, of the last moments of Socrates’ life as a series of movingly emotional dramatic tableaux.11 This is the most cerebral and philosophical of David’s history paintings. The philosophies of Socrates and of Plato are implied in the way in which the figures of these great men of Antiquity have been incorporated into the visual image. There is, though, little direct evidence to suggest that the Salon viewers of 1787 were being invited to make explicit analogies between the predicament of Socrates and his disciples shown here and the persecution of latter-day, free-thinking eighteenth-century philosophes as martyrs of unjust systems of government. According to the evidence of a draft letter, David had received advice from the Oratorian Brother Adry about the advisability of including Plato in the painting.12 Even though Plato had not been present when Socrates took the hemlock, Adry had recommended the inclusion of Plato in the history painting because it was Plato who had gathered together and transmitted the last words of Socrates to posterity. In 1798, Adry annotated his draft letter with the criticism that the representation of Plato with the head of an old man in David’s painting was anachronistic as he, Adry, had recommended that the maximum age for Plato at this time should have been 25. In deliberately flouting the suggestions of the Oratorian Father, David has, though, established crucial visual links between Socrates and Plato. Both the philosophers are not just elderly, but are draped in shades of white and have
similarly large, balding foreheads, which are also strongly illuminated in the evening light from the left and from above. One of the central gestures of David’s painting is that of Socrates’ upwardly pointing index finger. Like the figure of Plato in Raphael’s School of Athens fresco (Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura), this gesture implies that Socrates is discoursing to his disciples on the subject of the immortality of the soul. In choosing to depict Socrates just about to take the cup of hemlock – his hand just does not touch the fatal cup yet – David clearly drew upon the image of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, Apology and Crito. In these texts, Socrates is celebrated as a philosopher who preferred to die by the truth than live by corruption. In professing to be the speech made by Socrates at his trial, the Apology is an open address and answer to his indictment. By posing Socrates frontally facing the viewer, David similarly shows the viewer of his painting as being addressed by Socrates in a statement, or dialogue, of the philosopher’s beliefs in defence of his life’s work. The Crito is a dialogue that deals with Socrates as a citizen. Crito offered the condemned man the chance to escape before the sentence was carried out but the philosopher refused this opportunity in order to show the necessity of obeying the laws of the State. In David’s painting, Crito is given a prominent foreground seated position and he has one hand resting on the knee of Socrates, appearing to listen most attentively to what the philosopher has to say. The Phaedo, a dialogue on the immortality of the soul, culminates in a vivid description of the last moments of Socrates’ life and includes details such as the tears of a gaoler whose task it was to administer the hemlock to the condemned man. Following on from this description in Plato’s Phaedo, the tortured, twisted rear contrapposto stance of the gaoler in David’s painting, who is in the action of having to proffer the cup of fatal poison, is thus to be seen as a contrasting example of how not to behave in life. Thus, what has been set before the viewer of the painting is not the death of the philosopher, or even the process of his dying. Rather the focus here is on the manner in which a great man, when about to face death, conducts himself in life with dignity, nobility and virtue. Jennifer Roberts has used Plato’s Phaedo, Apology and Crito to bring to the fore an anti-democratic tradition in Western thought in which the democratic party of Athens at the time of Socrates’ death was held up as a negative model of mob rule and abusive popular government.13 Voltaire’s satire, Socrate, is more within this tradition than within the egalitarian subversions of modern-day political theatre.14 Similarly David’s 1787 envisioning of Socrates in the action of
deciding, for himself, the moment when he will take hold of the cup of hemlock demonstrates the philosopher virtuously upholding the laws and authority of the State, in spite of the injustices of his sentencing. Thus, this Socrates shows obedience to the law and belief in higher spiritual authority. Nothing of the martyr victimized for his beliefs belonged, as yet, to the initial putting together of and reception of this particular image. In David’s painting, an abandoned lyre and released shackles lie on the bed by the outstretched leg of Socrates. These items are detailed in the opening scene of the Phaedo in which friends of the philosopher entered his cell once his chains had been removed in preparation for the sentence of death to be carried out later that day. In answer to an enquiry as to why he had been composing verses and a hymn in honour of Apollo, Socrates replied that he was not doing this to rival the poet Evenus, but out of obedience to his own dreams that had advised the cultivation and making of music. The inkpot, pen and writing scroll that lie by the block on which Plato sits may also imply the tools used to record the scene for posterity and they provide a further link forward to David’s own work. The artist signed the painting bottom left, but the artist’s initials LD also appear on the block on which Plato sits. The physical arrangement of this lettering is an important constituent of the meaning of the image as a whole. There is an upward linking chain, from the writing implements to the disciple sunk in thought, via the mediation of the history painter’s own act of inventing, envisioning and inscribing for posterity. And just as Socrates, then Plato, founded schools and fostered disciples, so David, at this stage in his career, had many students who would go on to become leading painters in the school of David.15 As a visual tribute to the continuing endurance and importance of abstract idea, this work conforms to the conceptual and ennobling aims of history painting, the highest genre of painting as defined in Early Modern academic treatises on art.16 Within this academic tradition, the works of the seventeenth-century masters, Nicolas Poussin and Charles Le Brun were particularly valued for the ways in which appropriate outward gesture and expression were depicted so as to communicate inner idea and emotion. Yet since Antiquity, there had also been much comment on the inverse predicament of the figure of Socrates in this respect. Honoré Lacombe de Prezel’s dictionary of famous men of 1773 raised the issue succinctly. It noted that medals of Socrates showed him with a bald head, pronounced forehead, thick eyebrows, deep-sunk eyes in a crude, even disagreeable physiognomy, in spite of the fact that the beauty of his soul was beyond
compare.17 In stating that painters, sculptors and illustrators had not yet done justice to Socrates’s virtue and the elevating grandeur and nobility of his soul, the French translation of Lavater’s book on physiognomy of 1783 even included a series of illustrations showing the head of Socrates in different profiles.18 The physiognomic challenge posed by the face of Socrates may have underscored some of the many other visual representations of the philosopher as, for instance, in the painting of Alcibiade recevant les leçons de Socrate (Fig. 14.4) by François-André Vincent which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1777. In this work, a graceful, smooth-limbed Alcibiades with shadowed facial profile modelled on the Apollo Belvedere, is being confronted and admonished by a snub-nosed, ruddy cheeked, plump, squat Socrates, but with brightly illuminated forehead.19 Following on from passages in Cicero discussing Socrates’ encounter with the physiognomist Zopyrus, the painting by Vincent may well present us with a vision of Socrates as mentor and guide who, through the use of reason and under the guidance of a daemon advocated self-improvement in spite of nature’s imperfections. That David tackled some kind of physiognomic challenge head on in his commissioned painting of Socrates was borne out by the critical reaction to the work at the 1787 Salon. Count Stanislas Potocki, whom David had so ennobled in the equestrian portrait of 1781 (Warsaw, National Museum) when both the artist and sitter were in Rome, gave one of the most effusive descriptions of the work:
The frames of reference in this extract make clear connections between the beauty of Socrates’ soul and the supposed ugliness of his physical appearance and between the greatness of the philosopher and the greatness of the artist, David. That Socrates was celebrated for the beauty of his soul in spite of a superficially ugly outward appearance may have had particular resonance for David who rejoiced in the nickname of la grosse joue because of a benign jaw tumour that also, increasingly, impeded the artist’s speech.21 In Socrate au moment de prendre la ciguë, the artist and peintre-philosophe David
had risen above Socrates’ supposed ugliness through his own abilities as an artist in purifying out nature’s imperfections. The beauty and elevation of his own physically fine embodiments even included, somewhat improbably, the placing of an ennobled, venerable aged head on the torso of a much younger man. In so doing, David’s own claims to the status of a grand homme and to greatness in posterity were also clearly being articulated.22 Some reviews even went so far as to criticise the work for its excess of expression that bordered on a too sophisticated affectation and a strained manner in all the poses.23 This particular aspect of the painting drew comment even in England. A review in The World of 2nd October 1787, attributed to the enterprising print publisher John Boydell, noted:
David, printmaking and the revolution
After David’s death, inventories of his possessions reveal that he had owned a large collection of prints. These had given him access to the inventions of what were held to have been the greatest masters of the past. Besides prints after the works of his most promising students such as Drouais, Gérard, Girodet and Isabey, his collection was richest in prints after the works of Raphael and of Poussin, the first Premier Peintre, or First Painter of France. The collection included a print (Fig. 14.5) after Poussin’s painting of Le Testament d’Eudamidas (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst).25 Its subject too is the emotional and moral legacy of a virtuous man when facing death, and a reversed version of the figure of the mother of Eudamidas has been adapted for the seated immobility of Plato in David’s painting. From the outset of his career and in line with the practices of his academic training, David had imitated and adapted the inventions of other revered history painters, but he was slow to exploit the commercial potential of the print market on his own account. Contact with John Boydell, who had launched plans in December 1786 for a Shakespeare Gallery in the hope that the history paintings commissioned for this gallery would be turned into highly profitable prints, may well, though, have prompted David’s first entrepreneurial venture into the print market. The reproductive nature of
the fine art engraving would also have appealed to the artist, for it would have enabled his inventions, his achievements and his fame to be spread to a wider, although not necessarily populist, audience. The studied focus on gesture and expression in the painting of Socrate au moment de prendre la ciguë (Fig. 14.1) lends itself to the hard-edged, linear reproductive qualities of a black and white print. A contract for an engraving after a drawing of the painting of Socrates with the engraver Jean Massard père is dated 20 September 1787, less than a month after the official opening of the Salon exhibition.26 Jean Massard had been one of the engravers favoured by the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze and the details of his contract with David follow the rather unusual format, established by Greuze.27 Like Greuze, the history painter was careful to maintain control over the appearance of the print image. Article I of the contract stipulated that David had the right to correct the proofs to be supplied by Massard as many times as he, David, believed necessary. This was a joint operation and it was also one in which the patron of the history painting had no say. Instead, the history painter, David, had negotiated with associates, and certainly not as an employee, so as to exploit the product of his own inventions. The terms of this contract were, though, never fulfilled. The events of the Revolution intervened and when an engraving after the painting did eventually appear in 1798, it emerged from within quite different circumstances. Boydell’s exploitation of the market for print reproductions of history painting can also be seen to have set a precedent for the Serment du Jeu de Paume project. The subscription scheme towards a print reproduction of David’s drawing of the Tennis Court Oath (Versailles, Musée Nationale du Château) which was intended to fund a large painted canvas, was, though, a failure.28 Not enough funds were raised and the canvas was never completed. During the Revolution, events moved swiftly and some of the leading personalities, who had figured prominently in the founding event of the short-lived National Assembly, were soon discredited and/or went to the guillotine. The National Assembly was replaced by the Constituent Assembly and then the Legislative Assembly, before the government became, in turn, that of the National Convention, the Directory and the Consulate. As Philippe Bordes has convincingly demonstrated, the initiative to produce a vast canvas on a subject of important, contemporary and
political action, which was to be funded by public subscription to a printed version of the composition, served primarily to radicalise the artist.29 David’s drawing for the Jeu de Paume print, which was only first published in Brussels in 1823, was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1791, the first open Salon in that the exhibits were not restricted to those produced by members of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.30 Alongside the Jeu de Paume drawing at this Salon David re-exhibited his major history paintings of the 1780s, Le Serment des Horaces (Paris, Louvre), Les Licteurs rapportent à Brutus le corps des ses fils (Paris, Louvre), and Socrate au moment de boire la ciguë (Fig. 14.1). Critical response was now of a much more overtly political nature. One Pithou seems to have got rather carried away – in an entirely different manner to the way in which, in 1787, Count Potocki had been so effusively celebratory:
These comments and the language in which they are expressed provide evidence of the new political culture of the Revolution. They are, furthermore, far removed from the concerns and critical responses of 1787. David did not work as a history painter during the period when the Revolution was at its most intense. At this time, the artist sat with the radical Jacobins as a deputy in the National Convention and produced imagery that dealt with issues of great immediacy and political commitment. The prints that David was involved with producing in this period were etchings, which can be produced much more quickly, more cheaply and in much greater numbers than engravings. On 12 September 1793 the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety resolved, for instance, to invite David to use the talents and means at his disposal so as to increase the production of prints and caricatures of a specifically political and polemical nature. In awakening public spirit, these prints were to convince as to the atrociousness and ridiculousness of the enemies of the liberty of the Republic.32 Caricature was, thus, to be used in the service of the new French Republic and for the public good on a much wider scale than had hitherto been the case. To this end David produced two caricatures attacking the English Government,
L'Armée des Cruches (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale) and Le Governement anglois (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale), and he was paid 6,000 livres for 1,000 impressions of each design, 500 in colour and 500 in black and white.33 In imitation of the English art of caricature, these prints use scatology, verbal and visual puns, ridicule, distortion and exaggeration to attack England, the enemy of France, openly and directly. The etchings are unsigned and were not included in the major 1989 retrospective exhibition of David’s works. In being quite the reverse of a fine art engraved reproduction of a major history painting, they too belong to the new political culture of the Revolution. David, the Revolution and Socrates
In place of the imagery of a long dead philosopher of Antiquity, David the painter turned politician, produced, during the Revolution, notable single figure portraits of recently deceased martyrs in the republican cause. Presenting proposals for Marat’s funeral to the National Convention, David used rhetoric that was simple, direct and forceful:
The figure of Socrates was here being associated with other victims of high moral principle and fortitude, unjustly persecuted for their activities in the public sphere. It was, though, the immediacy of Marat’s life and death which was to serve for David’s own painting of political martyrdom at this time. Yet the subject of Socrates was far from forgotten for it came to acquire more generally radical and alternative associations and connotations during the Revolution. As early as 1790, a pamphlet unfavourably compared the decadent, corrupt lifestyle of Philippe Duc d’Orléans with the moral virtue, simple piety and frugal austerity of the true friend of the people, Socrates.35 The future radical Jacobin leader, Collot d’Herbois, in the introduction to his play Le Procès de Socrate ou le Régime des Anciens Temps, acknowledged that his play followed that of Voltaire. He added, somewhat anachronistically however, that he had wanted to stage, in the character of Socrates, all the Defenders of the cause of the People, all those who had suffered and been persecuted for this cause.36 The dramatist further considered that it was the aristocrats who had ruled Athens by tracing the derivation of this word back to arès meaning ‘iron’ and cratos meaning ‘constraint’; the aristocracy of
Athens thus meant the constraint exercised by men of iron.37 In the allegorical drawing entitled La Philosophie méditant sur l’immortalité de l’âme est tentée par la Fortune (Fig. 14.6) by Jacques Réattu, a bust of Socrates, stern of countenance, presides over a scene of temptation. Socrates represents here, after Plato’s Phaedo, the productive immortality of the soul, according to the scroll held in one hand by the figure of philosophy. This is in opposition to the sterile mortality of the skull that philosophy holds in her other hand. Socrates also functions within this scene as a historical figure commemorated in classical bust form for his enduring virtue as a great philosopher and role model from Antiquity. The severe, static masculinity, the heavy facial hair, the large, balding forehead, the near naked torso, placed above papers and the globe as the creative results of learning, suggest the work of the intellect. These stern, worthy features are to be further contrasted to the female personification of winged fortune who, flying on in flowing robes and showering philosophy with the mere material wealth of coins, exudes extravagance, luxury and, by implication, vice. Dorinda Outram has considered the phenomenon of the willed ‘heroic’ suicide to be a marker of the new revolutionary political culture.38 For a brief period between 1793 and 1795 and like the heroic suicides of Antiquity, members of the National Convention and of the political élite took their lives when in prison and just after having been sentenced for a political offence. Following on from the work of H.T. Parker, Outram also noted that for most of this political élite knowledge of the classical models was confined to a few, mainly Latin texts, such as Seneca and Cicero.39 Suicide was central to the thought of Seneca who used the exemplary figure of Cato of Utica to make of suicide an exalted moment of stasis and freedom, whilst in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations the heroic suicide of Cato was praised as the culmination of a lifelong search for incredible dignity.40 Following on from such examples, the men of the Revolution associated suicide with liberty, the defence of republicanism and a seriousness of demeanour appropriate for the exercise of moral authority and political leadership. Considered to be an affront to one’s public role and undertaken in a suitably virtuous, grave and controlled demeanour, such ‘heroic’ suicides, even when in prison and powerless, became controlled, self-conscious public acts of freedom and gave an impression of solidarity amongst those of disparate views.41 The leading Jacobin, Maximilien Robespierre, increasingly saw himself as something of a martyr figure, working for the good of humanity but beset on
all sides by treachery, enemies and plots. Alongside other famous historical individuals, he used the figure of Socrates as a model for posterity of someone who was politically committed, virtuous and unjustly victimised. In his published address to Jérôme Pétion of October 1792, Robespierre contrasted the shallow happiness of Pétion’s recent success, due in part to intrigue, with the more lasting heroism to be found in the histories of such as Agis, Cato, the second Brutus, the son of Mary, Socrates and Sydney. It took time for these men of state to be acknowledged as benefactors of humanity and martyrs and they had not been befriended by the sorts of treacherous people, the Brissotins, who were now heaping praises and deifying a former Jacobin ally.42 Robespierre’s important address to the National Convention of 18 floréal an II/ 7 May 1794, used the figure of Socrates to promote belief in the Supreme Being.43 The rhetoric here tied the idea of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the Soul to nature, truth, justice, republicanism and society. The legislator cited the historical examples of Cicero, Socrates and Leonidas together to demonstrate that a true hero valued himself too much to be complicit in the idea of his own annihilation. Such virtuous models were then contrasted to the scoundrel who felt that nature could give him no better present than nothingness. Robespierre made another long speech in the National Convention, the day before he was arrested there on 9 thermidor. This speech warned that failure to deal with the enemies of the National Convention, and thus by implication those of Robespierre, would endanger the Revolution. To David’s suggestion that the distribution of this speech to the Communes might, in itself, be dangerous, Robespierre had apparently responded: ‘All that is left for me is to drink the hemlock’. In response to this David had blurted out: ‘If you drink the hemlock, I will drink it with you’.44 Robespierre did not drink the hemlock but after having been shot in the jaw, almost certainly in an attempt to commit suicide, he went to the guillotine on 10 thermidor. David too did not drink the hemlock, but he was later to justify his absence from the Convention on 9 thermidor by providing proof that he had been unwell on that day and the proof that he provided was that of an apothecary’s bill for an emetic!45 Unlike John Major’s timely visit to the dentist to have a wisdom tooth removed and his concomitant absence from Parliament during the crucial moments of his own leader’s downfall, David’s astutely opportune absence from the National Convention was not for the purposes of furthering his political career. It probably saved his life. It
should, furthermore, be noted that the account of the exchange of 8 thermidor between Robespierre and David occurred a week later when the artist was having to refute accusations that he had been too close a supporter of Robespierre. Viewed in the light of this context, David’s abrupt response is somewhat ambiguous and can possibly be understood to mean ‘not likely’ or even ‘over my dead body’. After Thermidor, David was arrested and put in prison; temporarily released from prison on 29 December 1794 he was re-arrested the following May at Saint-Ouen in the countryside where he had taken refuge with his brother-in-law and brought back to Paris under armed guard. Placed under house arrest the following August, he was eventually officially released only under the General Amnesty of 26 October 1795.46 The fluctuating political fortunes of the Revolution had struck David close to and for a period of many months, his own life was in real danger. It was just at this time, too, that the history painter turned artist/politician ostensibly attempted to distance himself from his period of active political engagement by once again promoting himself as a history painter of the highest order. In prison he produced drawings for a composition on the subject of the blind, excluded, yet still independent, Homer (Paris, Louvre) and he began work on his celebrated history painting of Les Sabines (Paris, Louvre). His treatment of subjects culled from the histories of Antiquity could not, though, be entirely divorced from the recently turbulent political arena, for which he had used his abilities as an artist to produce visual images of politically potent, powerful and meaningful effect. His painting of Les Sabines was, for instance, ostensibly about the cessation of the battle between the Romans and the Sabines through the intervention of the Sabine women. Yet when first exhibited in public in 1799, the work was also interpreted as a plea for reconciliation between warring Frenchmen.47 After Thermidor, the reproductive engraving of the history painting of Socrates was also taken up again. On 6 February 1795, Massard requested from the Committee of Public Instruction access to the original painting so as to complete the engraving.48 The painting now belonged to the nation as its patron, Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière had gone to the guillotine in 1794. Six days later the Committee authorised the Temporary Commission of Arts to procure all the necessary facilities so as to enable Massard to complete the engraving. An undated draft contract between David and Massard on notepaper with the seal of the French Republic indicates that the details of this venture were, though, to be different from
the one of before the Revolution. The title of the painting in the draft contract was now just given as Socrate.49 The engraving was first exhibited at the Salon of 1798 and a later lettered impression of it (Fig. 14.7) has a different title to that of the painting.50 Socrate au moment de prendre la ciguë has been transformed into La Mort de Socrate. Beneath this title there is a carefully annotated and abbreviated citation from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations: ‘Socrates, supremo vitae die, cum penè in manu jam mortiferum teneret poculum, locutus ita est, ut non ad mortem trudi, verum in caelum videretur ascendere’.51 The lettering contains no dedication to the original patron. Neither are there any overt references to the dead Jacobin leader, Robespierre, or to the past political activities of the artist David, but the image as a whole could now be seen to be linked to the plight of the ennobled but imprisoned victim and/or victims of political injustice.52 The Latin lettering gives to the print the credentials of high art; it also provides cover to prevent too obviously close contemporary, personal and political associations, although some such reference may now well have been potentially available. There has been a subtle change of emphasis. In this much more starkly black and white representation of the scene, there is a much more clearly identifiable focus on the manner of the philosopher’s death. Cicero, and by association Cato, have also been added to the overt causes of Socrates, and his disciples, Plato and David. The pairing of these two subjects had provided models for the Stoic philosophers with writers such as Tacitus treating the pair as martyrs on the altars of libertas.53 The first subject set when the Grand Prix de Rome was re-established in 1797 was of La Mort de Caton d’Utique.54 Postscripts
Etienne-Jean Delécluze entered David’s studio as a pupil in 1796 and his book, Louis David, Son Ecole et Son Temps of 1854, narrated the story of the author’s earlier participation in David’s studio by using the third person semi-fictional guise of the student Etienne. Delécluze went out of his way to detail his master’s reaction to the coup d’état of Brumaire of November 1799 when General Bonaparte had seized power as First Consul. David had
apparently said that he had always thought that: ‘we were not virtuous enough to be good republicans’.55 The artist had then gone on to cite Lucan: ‘The cause of the victor pleased the gods, but that of the vanquished Cato’.56 In Lucan’s Pharsalus, Caesar’s winning cause as fortune’s favourite was placed in opposition to the morally superior human virtue of Cato. And in David’s own histories, the politically contingent had, in fact, and to the painter’s regret, also come to win out over the morally virtuous. In dealing with David’s painting of Socrates, Delécluze attributed to André Chénier the suggestion that Socrates should not hold the cup of hemlock but should reach towards it so as to imply that the poison will be taken once the philosopher has finished speaking. Delécluze considered that Chénier’s suggestion had been a good one and that later, in knowing how to die as a victim of the injustice of men, the poet must also have had the feeling of resignation with which the sage receives death.57 This observation is to be considered in the light of Charles Muller’s major Salon exhibit of 1850, L’Appel des dernières victimes de la Terreur (Fig. 14.8). In this prison scene, the figure of André Chénier is seated, isolated centre stage as he hears, amongst the tumult and anguish of his fellow prisoners, his own name being read out as one of the last victims of the guillotine. Anti-republican and Catholic in focus, Muller’s work has the tragic scope, dramatic breadth and sentimental pathos of a novel by Dickens but the painter has also used the figurative examples of David’s Brutus and Socrates to further the inventions of his own history painting. The subject of this history painting was, though, now not taken from the far distance of Antiquity but from a much more recent founding moment in the modern history of the French nation. Four years after David died, his family lost a lawsuit against Potrelle, a printmaker-publisher. In 1822, Potrelle had purchased the plate and what he believed to be all the remaining unsold impressions of the engraving of La Mort de Socrate (Fig. 14. 6) from David’s son, Eugène, who had been authorised to act on his father’s behalf in this matter.58 Potrelle then claimed 50 impressions of the print that had been withheld by Massard’s beneficiaries. In 1828/29, David’s beneficiaries, principally Eugène, lost the lawsuit for the ownership of half of these prints and even had to pay costs.59 Just as the philosopher figure of Socrates had become of far less worth to the modern French nation, so too is such litigation indicative of a hard-edged
capitalism that is far distant from the academic principles of the old order in which David had been raised. References
Fig. 14.1 J-L. David, Socrate au moment de prendre la ciguë, 1787. Oil on canvas, 129.5cm x 196.2cm; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1931. (31.45). Photographic Services, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y. 10028.
