词条 | David, Jacques-Louis |
释义 | David, Jacques-Louis French painter Introduction born Aug. 30, 1748, Paris died Dec. 29, 1825, Brussels ![]() ![]() Formative years David was born in the year when new excavations at the ash-buried ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum were beginning to encourage a stylistic return to antiquity (without being, as was long supposed, a principal cause of that return). His father, a small but prosperous dealer in textiles, was killed in a duel in 1757, and the boy was subsequently raised, reportedly not very tenderly, by two uncles. After classical literary studies and a course in drawing, he was placed in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien, a history painter who catered to the growing Greco-Roman taste without quite abandoning the light sentiment and the eroticism that had been fashionable earlier in the century. At age 18, the obviously gifted budding artist was enrolled in the school of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. After four failures in the official competitions and years of discouragement that included an attempt at suicide (by the stoic method of avoiding food), he finally obtained, in 1774, the Prix de Rome, a government scholarship that not only provided a stay in Italy but practically guaranteed lucrative commissions in France. His prize-winning work, Antiochus and Stratonice, reveals that at this point he could still be influenced slightly by the Rococo charm of the painter François Boucher (Boucher, François), who had been a family friend. In Italy there were many influences, including those of the dark-toned 17th-century Bolognese school, the serenely classical Nicolas Poussin (Poussin, Nicolas), and the dramatically realistic Caravaggio. David absorbed all three, with an evident preference for the strong light and shade of the followers of Caravaggio. For a while he seemed determined to fulfill a prediction he had made on leaving France: “The art of antiquity will not seduce me, for it lacks liveliness . . . .” But he became interested in the Neoclassical doctrines that had been developed in Rome by, among others, the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs (Mengs, Anton Raphael) and the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Winckelmann, Johann). In the company of Quatremère de Quincy, a young French sculptor who was a strong partisan of the return to antiquity, he visited the ruins of Herculaneum, the Doric temples at Paestum, and the Pompeian collections at Naples. In front of the ancient vases and columns, he felt, he said later, that he had just been “operated on for cataract of the eye.” Rise to fame: 1780–94 Back in Paris in 1780, he completed and successfully exhibited Belisarius Asking Alms, in which he combined a nobly sentimental approach to antiquity with a pictorial technique reminiscent of Poussin. In 1782 he married the spirited Marguerite Pécoul, whose father was a wealthy building contractor and the superintendent of construction at the Louvre—a position that carried considerable influence. From this date David prospered rapidly. ![]() David became a culture hero; he was even referred to in some quarters as a messiah. He added to his fame by producing in 1787 the morally uplifting Death of Socrates, in 1788 the less uplifting but archaeologically interesting Paris and Helen, and in 1789 another lesson in self-sacrifice, The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons. By the time the Brutus was on view, the French Revolution had begun, and this picture of the patriotic Roman consul who condemned his traitorous sons to death had an unanticipated political significance. It also had, through its presumably accurate reconstitution of the details of everyday Roman life, an effect that was perhaps equally unexpected, for with it David began the long and extensive influence he was to have on French fashions. Up-to-date homes began to display imitations of his Roman furniture; men cut their hair short in the Roman style; and women adopted the dresses and the coiffures of Brutus' daughters. Later on, even the flimsy Sabine dress, which left the breasts exposed, was adopted by the ultramodern. In the early years of the Revolution, David was a member of the extremist Jacobin group led by Robespierre (Robespierre, Maximilien de), and he became an energetic example of the politically committed artist. He was elected to the National Convention in 1792, in time to vote for the execution of Louis XVI. By 1793, as a member of the art commission, he was virtually the art dictator of France and was nicknamed “the Robespierre of the brush.” He preached moral and aesthetic sermons to the Convention: The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques 【Rousseau】 the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason. Guided supposedly by the torch of reason and perhaps also by bitter memories of his many unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome, he succeeded in abolishing the Académie Royale and with it much of the old regime's system for training artists and providing them with patronage. The Académie was replaced briefly by a body called the Commune des Arts, then by a group called the Popular and Republican Society of the Arts, and then, finally, in 1795, after David was out of power, by the beginning of the system—a combination of the Institut de France and the École des Beaux-Arts—that dominated French artistic life during most of the 19th century. ![]() Later years: 1794–1825 In 1794, after his friend Robespierre had been sent to the guillotine, David was arrested. At his trial he is said to have defended himself badly, mumbling that in the future he intended to attach himself “to principles and not to men.” He was imprisoned twice, for four months in 1794 and for two more the next year, apparently most of the time in the not uncomfortable Palais du Luxembourg in Paris. He was consoled by being allowed to paint and also by the fact that his wife, who had divorced him two years earlier for having voted for the death of the King, now loyally returned in his hour of trouble and remarried him, on this occasion for good. During his first period in prison, he painted from his window his only landscape, the View of the Luxembourg Gardens. While he was held temporarily in another Paris building, he did an unfinished self-portrait. At 46 he appears as a boyish young man with romantically disheveled hair, brown eyes, and a generally aggressive, if worried, look; a cheek tumour from which he suffered all of his adult life and which is said to have impeded his speech gives his face a slight twist. Even during his imprisonment, he had retained three studios in the Louvre, and, after the amnesty of 1795, he devoted to teaching the same energy he had been devoting to revolutionary politics. Eventually, in the interval between his painting of Oath of the Horatii and Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, he was responsible for the training and indoctrination of hundreds of young painters from all over Europe, among them such future masters as François Gérard (Gérard, François, Baron), Antoine-Jean Gros (Gros, Antoine-Jean, Baron), and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Ingres, J.-A.-D). The indoctrination began with the premise that the basis of art was the contour, and so it can be held partly responsible for the excessive emphasis on drawing that characterized European academic painting in the 19th century. But David himself, as his works show, was not always hostile to rich chromatic effects; as late as 1860 he could be called, by no less a colourist than Eugène Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène), “the father of the whole modern school.” ![]() But David was not a man for the life of a mere teacher and portraitist. In 1799 he made a spectacular reentry into public notice with a new giant canvas, The Intervention of the Sabine Women. The picture, often mistakenly referred to as The Rape of the Sabines, represents the moment, a few years after the legendary abduction, when the women, now contented wives and mothers, halt a battle between their Roman husbands and the Sabine men who have come on an unwanted rescue mission; in the middle of the melee stands the lovely Sabine woman Hersilia, appealing with one arm toward the Roman Romulus and the other toward the bearded Sabine Tatius. The artist had said that his aim was to move away from the allegedly crude Roman manner of the Oath of the Horatii into a more graceful Greek manner, and he did win enthusiastic applause for the elegance of his figures. He also won some approval for his supposed intention to preach conciliation after 10 years of bloodletting in France. But he attracted perhaps the most attention with the nakedness of his ancient warriors; having ceased to be the Robespierre of the brush, he now became, in a popular jingle, “the Raphael of the sansculottes (sansculotte)” (i.e., the Raphael of the radical Republicans). ![]() ![]() After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, David was exiled to Brussels. Cut off from the excitement and stimulus of the great events he had lived through, he lost much of his old energy. Toward the end of his life, he executed, probably with considerable help from a Belgian pupil, François-Joseph Navez, one more remarkably convincing portrait: The Three Women of Ghent. Additional Reading E.J. Delécluze, Louis David, son école et son temps (1855, reprinted 1983), is a primary source of information by one of the artist's pupils. Biographies include David Lloyd Dowd, Pageant-Master of the Republic: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution (1948, reissued 1969); Simon Lee, David (1999); and Antonio Pinelli, David (2004). General histories of style containing perceptive analyses of David's work are Walter Friedlaender, David to Delacroix (1952, reissued 1980; originally published in German, 1930); Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (1967); Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicism (1968, reissued 1991); and Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (1980). Philippe Bordes, Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile (2005), is an exhibition catalogue. |
随便看 |
|
百科全书收录100133条中英文百科知识,基本涵盖了大多数领域的百科知识,是一部内容开放、自由的电子版百科全书。