December 6, 2014 |
Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas at Thermopylae of 1814 centres on the Spartan king’s doomed last stand with just 300 warriors against the invading Persian army. However, this is not the famed two-day showdown where the civilised classical world was defended to the last against Xerxes I. Instead we get the build-up to the big fight, a scene fraught with thoughts of death and a higher purpose.
At the centre, Leonidas is a vision of heroic self-possession. He stares directly at us, preparing for a noble end on the battlefield. To left and right two comely youths who have refused an order to return home are at the older soldier’s feet. In the left-hand corner, another whom Leonidas has attempted to save from the violence, the blind and aged Eurytas returns, determined to take part.
David created many such works mining the classics. They helped set the intellectual and emotional tone for the French revolution and established him as the leading artist of his day. For the painter and his fellow neoclassicists, the Spartans’ self-sacrifice for principles, was a staple exemplum virtutis.
What inevitably strikes the 21st-century viewer in David’s painting, however, is that these perfectly honed, miraculously unblemished fighting men are all exquisitely, tantalisingly naked. Those artfully positioned thrusting swords and sheaths lend an unmistakably libidinal charge of sex and death, the billowing scarlet cloaks, an extra note of virile energy. The digitally enhanced six-packs in the movie of Frank Miller’s version of the Spartan story, 300, have nothing on this unabashed worship of the body beautiful.
What did the painting’s first audience think when they gazed at all the bare male flesh? It’s hard to believe that the homoerotic overtones were not central to the painting’s pleasure. But this was also an age when a man’s nude body meant more than met the eye, clothed as it were, in gauzy layers of symbolic meaning.
Late-18th-century artists took their lead from the ancient Greeks depicting warriors and athletes as improbably nude and gorgeous. The angular male physique was the total opposite of the previous rococo era’s portraits of courtly life, peopled by powdered effeminate royals and petticoated courtesans, which had reigned supreme on aristocratic patrons’ lofty walls.
In France this preference for the classics was no simple stylistic backlash. As the thinkers of the age saw it, the artists of Greece were free born men who created great artworks because of their liberated minds: their statues’ naked beauty spoke of a better society. The rococo’s ornate frills and fronds meanwhile was a decadent art for a debauched, corrupt elite.
In the years running up to the chaos of the Revolution in 1789, these ideas heated discussions in the Parisian intelligentsia’s salons, as well as the schooling in David’s aspirational studio. (Signalling painting’s shift from dusty artisanal to glittery intellectual pursuit, his students all had to know Latin.) It seems strange now that an age where social reformers pursued liberty, community and egalitarianism would exalt physical perfection. After all, a very different thought process took the Nazis to exactly the same ideal. Yet there’s a democratic dimension to the stripped-down body, the total opposite of the titled nobles decked in costly gowns and suits that announce their social status. We are all flesh underneath, after all, with the chance to achieve nobility in its other sense.
As Thomas Crow proposes in Emulation, his now-classic study of the central figures in David’s studio, this bridling against the establishment wasn’t limited to the court of Louis XVI. A fresh generation of painters, coming of age as apprentices in the studio, found plenty to question in the controlling force of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which dictated the hierarchy that determined an artist’s career.
For precocious talents like David’s protege Jean-Germain Drouais it was a battle that played out in the male nude. So fundamental was the genre in the French art world that it was simply referred to as “un academie”. Yet Drouais, compelled to produce this student fare when he wanted more demanding subjects, found a way to buck the system. His Wounded Warrior or Dying Athlete of 1785 is a sinewy, alabaster-skinned man in the life model’s standard reclining pose. Yet instead of a passive object, he turns this run-of-the-mill set-up into a body taut with self-composure while wracked by pain from a bleeding wound to his thigh.
As David does in his Leonidas, Drouais makes his figure stand for two apparently contrasting kinds of heroic male beauty: the awe the superhero physique inspires in action on the battlefield and its natural appeal in repose. There’s a further implication in their soldiers, though – that enduring pain is noble, a notion that looms large in the Romantic myth of the tragic creative genius who suffers for his art. In fact, the glamorous Drouais was one of the concept’s early poster boys: a young overachiever who came from money, pushed himself to extremes of physical deprivation to complete work and ended up dying from smallpox at the age of 24.
It fell to another student of David’s to transform the male nude from academic calling card once again. Anne-Louis Girodet was up against foes more insidious than the academy’s strictures when he embarked on The Sleep of Endymion in 1791. He had the memory of Drouais and the influence of David himself to shuck off. Eschewing the moralising subject matter favoured by his teacher, he went for lighter, more malleable and flagrantly erotic material: the myth of a moon goddess enchanted by a sleeping shepherd.
In his imagining of the scene, however, the goddess Diana is no more than a moonbeam; the female voyeur supplanted by an impish boy-Eros. Endymion himself is a long-locked, smooth-faced youth, with his arms thrown back in abandon. His body, by turns vague and shadowy and vividly illuminated by moonlight, manages to be both muscular and succulently plump. The only death here is the petite mort of orgasm. For all the sweet-toothed eroticism, though, Girodet’s pleasure-heavy androgyne represents a radical departure from David, offering mystery and double-meaning in place of clear-cut civic values.
Like Wounded Warrior, David’s Spartans are a perfect echo of pre-revolutionary ideals: an army of equal citizens who prize freedom over anything and conjure both the egalitarianism he hoped to foster in the world and within the brotherhood of his studio. This was the most demanding and complex canvas he produced; it was also, however, about 25 years too late.
Leonidas at Thermopylae was the great neoclassical artist’s last history painting. He began it in 1799, 10 years after the original revolution of 1789. The previous decade had stretched his political leanings to disturbing extremes. A fervent Jacobin, he turned his talents to capturing present-day events in the New Republic, creating a masterpiece of political art, The Death of Marat, where the assassinated politician is depicted as a martyr to the cause. Appointed minister for propaganda, David was as likely to be found orchestrating elaborately costumed, spectacular processions in the streets of Paris, as he was painting. He was the great ally of the mad, murderous Robespierre, the instigator of the Reign of Terror that would see guillotine fever seize France. When Robespierre was eventually overthrown and himself guillotined, David was lucky to escape execution at his side.
David conceived of Leonidas as a companion piece to his plea for an end to violence in France – 1799’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women, a work inspired by his wife visiting him during his time in prison. Both paintings saw him return to the classics, preferring to speak to his country through inspiring metaphors than direct action. He would however spend the following 15 years struggling to complete it. Napoleon kept him busy.
A committed admirer of the artist, the revolutionary general-turned-emperor commissioned some of David’s best-known works, including the famed portrait of him crossing the Alps, his horse rearing, his cloak blowing in the wind of change. In 1804 when Napoleon declared himself emperor, David became official court painter. After completing epic assignments including painting the coronation, he returned to Leonidas in 1813, creating hundreds of sketches planning out its complicated composition.
When it was finally exhibited in David’s studio in 1814, it must have seemed hopelessly out of touch. It was the year of Napoleon’s abdication. He had been no fan of the painting anyway. Instead of the Spartans’ message of fraternity and freedom he saw a battle lost.
What’s more, since David began the painting a new vision of the male nude had emerged. In 1806 Girodet, otherwise known for works of chocolate-box beauty, had produced the truly disturbing Scene from a Deluge, where a horrified young man strains to save his wife from a flood, while his wiry, emaciated elderly father clings to his back, a bag of gold clutched in one hand. For David Girodet’s figures were “monstrosities”. “Farewell to this beau ideal,” he wrote in his autobiography. Yet it was Girodet’s contorted, struggling bodies that then summed up the spirit of the age.
By Skye Sherwin
