Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
The paintings themselves reveal the gendered aspect of the aesthetic categories.
Both the Horatii and the Brutus picture the conflict between the claims of
the national polity and those of familial love, and are structured in terms of male
and female embodiments of these claims. The former places the Roman father
in the center; his sons face him on the left, their taut bodies testifying to the
strength of their resolve to use the power of death he holds out to them in the
shape of the three swords. At the right sit three women—one of them a sister of
the men the Horatii are setting out to kill, another a sister of the Roman triplets,
pledged in marriage to one of their opponents—with their children. Though the
picture is strongly divided by the three open spaces that frame the figures, the
twofold division of its subject between masculine and feminine is equally pronounced.
The central action is indeed the transmission of power from father to
sons, who at the same moment abandon their marriage-formed family alliances.
To this moment the group of women is linked only by implication: their grief
reflects the fact that they are faced with loss whoever wins the coming fight.
Everything is stronger on the men’s side than in the women’s: the color of their
clothing, the shadows behind them, and their tense, muscled bodies in contrast
with the soft, smooth skin of the women, who seem not agitated by despair but
sunk in a deep, sleeplike passivity. 56
The Brutus reverses the distribution of action between the sexes. Here the
father sits brooding as the bodies of his sons, executed at his orders for treason,
are carried in, while the women of the house rise in anguish, gesturing toward
the bier. The women are experiencing horror and fear (one has fainted and one
hides her face), but they themselves are beautiful, objects of pity. They are
brightly illuminated, made for the sense of sight, while Brutus sits in obscurity,
awesome, strong, interiorizing his grief rather than acting it out in womanly
rhetoric. The women here are not the female citizens of Sparta whom
Rousseau held up as models, happy to lose their sons for the military good of
this work “history belongs in the same manner to painter and to poet” and that David’s “production
is more of a great poet than of a painter.” Joshua Reynolds similarly contrasted the
“grandeur and severity of Michael Angelo” with the “effeminacy” of modern painting. Comparing
him to Raphael, he asserts that the latter “had more Taste and Fancy, Michael Angelo more
Genius and Imagination. The one excelled in beauty, the other in energy. Michael Angelo has
more of the Poetical Inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime” (p. 83).
56 Tischbein’s contemporary description shows that this is not simply a present-day commentator’s
projection of the categories of beautiful and sublime onto David’s picture: “Determination,
courage, strength, reverence for the gods, love of freedom and of the fatherland show themselves
in the men; in the women inconsolable dejection, weak and numb collapse, tenderness for
the spouse, the bridegroom, the children, the brothers; in the children playful innocence and
naiveté”; see J. H. W. Tischbein, “Letters from Rome,” Derteutsche Merkur (February1786), tr. in
Elizabeth G. Holt (ed.), The Triumph of Art for the Public, 1781–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), p. 19. Other contemporary accounts make the same point.
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