The Trouble with Tatius

Abstract

David's Intervention of the Sabine Women, 1799 (Fig. 1), is rightly seen as a turning point in French history painting. Under the Ancien Régime, major history paintings were usually undertaken in response to specific demand, often as the result of a public commission on behalf of Church or State. Uncommissioned and without destination, the Sabines was painted to be exhibited for money, a purpose that it fulfilled so successfully that David was able to buy a modest estate with the proceeds.1 The success of the Sabines exhibition served both as a lesson and as a warning to later history painters. It fuelled fantasies about the potency of art and the independence of the artist, but it warned of their increasing social marginalisation at the same time. The Sabines was calculated to attract critical reactions and commentary. It received considerable press coverage both at its first exhibition, which lasted from 1799 until 1805, and later. It was shown again in 1808 and in 1810, in which year it was shortlisted for Napoleon's Decennial Prizes. Following the Restoration the Sabines was purchased for the Crown. It went on public display at the Luxembourg in 1820 and at the Louvre from 1826. There it came to be seen as epitomising the achievements and failures, the strengths and the shortcomings of the sort of classical history painting associated with the school of David. The painter had helped to ensure that this would be the case by publishing a pamphlet to accompany the initial exhibition in which he claimed to have realised afresh the peculiar qualities of ancient art. Such emphasis on the aesthetic rather than the moral aspects of history painting was a novelty on the part of David, consonant with the circumstances of the Sabines exhibition.2 At the same time, the political implications of the painting's subject, the reconciliation of hostile political factions by the intervention of a group of women, were intended to attract comment and reflection.3 They have continued to do so. Recent accounts of the painting have concentrated on the role of the women – particularly that of the central figure, Hersilia, who stands at the crux of the composition.4 However, early spectators were at least as concerned with the artist's characterisation of the principal male figures to either side of her as with that of Hersilia. Where later commentators have seen a polarity based on gender roles, David's contemporaries were struck by a hierarchical distinction of social and physical types among both the women and the men, but chiefly between the two male protagonists. What this difference signified and why it mattered is the subject of this article. In particular, the Sabines and its early critiques will be looked at in the light of contemporary speeches and writings by one of David's contemporaries, Cabanis, who was at the height of his influence in 1799, both as a medical and a political theorist.