La composition comme symbole politique : David, Winckelmann et Carlo Fea

Abstract

Composition as a political symbol : David, Winckelmann and Carlo Fea. During the years 1770 to 1780, the painter David moved from a diagonal organisation of his works to a composition based on horizontal lines, and from a principle of the reciprocal subordination of Figures to their juxtaposition. The present article examines this evolution, from the earliest works of the artist (the paintings done for the Prix de Rome competitions of 1770 and 1772) up to the Serment des Horaces and including the crucial work of 1774, Antiochus. The article then goes on to offer an explanation for this evolution. This change is characteristic of a « return to Antiquity » and shows certain affinities with the ideas of Winckelmann who, as early as 1767, had praised isocephaly and the horizontal composition used in the art of Antiquity. For this author, these features were characteristic of the liberty of an artist working in a democratic society. For David too, this aesthetic principle may perhaps have corresponded with an ideal of modernity, parallel to the ideal of equality of rights in the new social order. After 1800, when David became the official painter of the imperial regime, the principles of a hierarchical, diagonal composition reappeared, used to exalt the personality of the Emperor. This does not mean to say, however, that he turned his back on the lessons of the art of Antiquity : from 1783 Carlo Fea, the Italian translator of Winckelmann, maintained that, contrary to what the German author had supposed, this type of hierarchical composition had indeed existed in Greek and Roman art.