Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre

The play is about Lucius Junius Brutus, the � rst consul of republican
Rome, who discovers that his two sons are plotting against the
republic, favoring the return of an aristocratic family, the Tarquins.
When he hears of their deaths, Brutus takes the news stoically,
knowing that, for him, the future of his people and their freedom
from tyranny is more important than the lives of his corrupt sons.
In a visual tour of the painting, we see the feet of the two sons on
the left behind the seated � gure of Brutus, along with a section of
his house dominated by an allegorical sculpture of Rome. To the
right, separated from the father, are the entwined bodies of Brutus’s
wife and their daughters, who scream, gesture, and cry in an anguish
that Brutus himself stoically avoids. David uses color, composition,
contour, and space to make visually manifest these two responses to
the tragedy. The painting clearly affected public discourse—novels,
pamphlets, the theater, and criticism—creating a climate in which
the very existence of the monarchy was questioned by an artist who
had been trained by the government and who displayed his work in
an exhibition it sponsored.
The Pupils of David
Baron Antoine-Jean Gros was, among David’s many pupils, the one who
achieved the most of� cial success with Napoleon’s government. He became
the greatest painter of Napoleon’s numerous military victories throughout
the world, and even today, every French schoolchild learns of the military
campaigns of the greatest French general from the paintings of Gros. In
1799, Napoleon defeated the Middle Eastern city of Jaffa, where he is shown
by Gros visiting a hospital for victims of the plague in Napoleon Visiting
the Pest House at Jaffa. Unafraid of the disease, utterly human, and in an
odd way, heroic, Napoleon dominates the painting as a healer as much
as a general.
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