Painting's Constitution

Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii. The Louvre, Paris

Legend has it that long, long ago, Rome quarreled with Alba Longa. Rather than conduct an all-out war, the two cities agreed that each would send three men into battle, and the dispute would be settled in favor of the city whose warriors were victorious. Rome’s representatives were brothers from the Horatius family. In 1785, Jacques-Louis David completed Oath of the Horatii, a large painting that shows the Roman brothers reaching in unison for the swords their father holds out for them. This is an image of patriotic devotion and, if we attend only to its message, it is not at all radical. In the time of the Horatii, Rome was a monarchy, as was France in 1785. Yet, as I wrote in an essay from 1990, the painting does something unprecedented. It provides the medium of painting with a constitution. Because our federal constitution has been so much in the news these days, I decided to publish an excerpt from that essay, not only to recall an era in the history of art but to suggest, in a roundabout way, something about the way constitutions do and do not find legitimate ways to evolve.  The excerpt begins at the Salon of 1785, where Oath of the Horatii was a major hit.

Conservative commentators were appalled by the picture’s popularity with the public and with those critics who clamored for novelty. Yet all but the stuffiest felt obliged to admit that the picture has obvious virtues: firm drawing, clear composition, dramatic impact. Offered begrudgingly, this praise sometimes led to sniping at the Oath’s stiff gestures and repetitive forms. Defenders of tradition found the tableau’s clarities overbearing, its dramatic moment all too sharply focused, and its way with precedent unacceptable. David had drastically, even brutally, systematized the heritage of academic painting in seventeenth-century French, especially the grandly refined example provided by Poussin. To eyes seeking in art the reassurances of propriety and continuity, Oath of the Horatii seemed to have recast pictorial tradition too suddenly, too violently. The audacity that drew admirers like a magnet sent shudders through conservative sensibilities, who saw in the painting a baffling lapse of taste.

Politically liberal and an admirer of the Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix, Adolph Thiers wrote in 1822 that “no matter how handsome David’s Greeks and Romans are, I see in them ... abstract drawings depicting moral abstractions, and even though overcome by admiration, I am not convinced.” This talk of abstraction brings us close to the power that unsettled even those who adored the Oath and inspired in David's followers a dogged, proselytizing loyalty.

The picture’s composition takes from its male figures a muscularity clenched to the point of awkwardness. It displays no classical grace, no Baroque amplitude. David’s invocations of the antique clash with signs of sharp observation—an empiricist's scrupulosity driven in part, I believe, by respect for the efforts of hard-working models. With compressed perspective and rigid gesture, the Oath starkly schematizes the look of ancient art, the academic proprieties of Poussin’s time, and data gathered in the studio. Flaunting its precedents, the painting declines to treat them as superior—or even equal—to itself. With a confidence close to impudence, it gives those precedents a modern rationale. With Oath of the Horatii, David said: here is a foundation on which to build the future. Here is painting’s constitution.

Literally, of course, painting has no constitution. I am using the notion metaphorically. Further, I believe that when writers invoked “the rules” of painting, as they did often from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, they employed another metaphor: pictorial convention as law. Theorists who invoked painting’s rules often admitted—or complained—that they resist codification. In his sixth “Discourse,” 1774, Joshua Reynolds suggested that the rules remain unstated, therefore uncodified, because artists “are not very frequently skilled … in communicating ideas with words.” However, most rules of painting needed no verbal formulation. They were established by example, in the studio, and enforced by the taste of those patrons whose judgments had weight.         

So when I speak, metaphorically, of painting's laws, I mean not only the rules laid down explicitly in treatises by Alberti, Leonardo, Reynolds, and others, but also the conventional usages that were never articulated and yet had the force of law. Inevitably, these laws evolved, which is to say that styles changed. The Baroque gave way to the Rococo, for example. The law received different interpretations in various regions and cities; thus there were various schools of painting—Venetian, Florentine, and so on. In David's time, however, painting's law was like common law in England. It had no formal constitution.

I am arguing that his Oath established one, and that the Davidian constitution is a metaphorical equivalent to the American constitution of 1789 and the several constitutions that the French inaugurated during the 1790s. Constitutions are among modernity’s earliest exercises in the abstraction that results when we reduce specifics to generalities—the process that gave David's Oath its power both to please and to disconcert his audience. Poussin had composed in planes. David did likewise in the Oath, flattening planarity until it put itself on didactic display. Thus did an academic tradition—a law—of painting become a constitutional principle. David wrought the same transformation in the law that required formal variety. The Oath puts angular, masculine form in such sharp contrast to curving, feminine form that commentators in our time sometimes say that the painting doesn’t hold together.  In a way, it doesn’t. However, this is not merely a picture. It is a demonstration of what, in David’s opinion, a picture ought to be. It claims exemplary force, and if we acknowledge that force, then the very starkness of the Oath’s formal contrast establishes unity, not visual, perhaps, but in the realm of concept, where unity is a consequence of coherent principle.

In 1860, Delacroix wrote in his journal that Daivd “still reigns in some respects and … it is manifest that everything still derives from him and his principles.”  Delacroix himself had amended the Davidian constitution to give color a new force. Principles of composition received amendment from Gustave Courbet and then from Claude Monet and the other Impressionists, who loosened the hierarchical ordering of form. In their paintings, it is not always clear which forms are major and which are minor. This compositional relaxation had a leveling effect, to use a phrase current in nineteenth century talk of politics, and certain defenders of “aristocratic” taste sneered at Courbet and Monet for their “democratic” paintings.

The Impressionists subjected Davidian order to a major revision by giving color a precedence over line and tone that neither the traditional laws nor the modern constitution of Western painting had ever permitted. Yet that order persisted well into the twentieth century, having received firm reinforcement from the pictorial architecture of Paul Cézanne and early Cubism. The allover paintings of a few postwar Americans—Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still—were the first to dispense entirely with the pictorial constitution promulgated by David in 1785.