Reason , religion and revolution: lights and shadows on the Jacques-Louis David paintings

Abstract

The article analyzes the pictorial production of Jacques-Louis David between the late 1770s and 1793, highlighting the links between art, religion and politics in the works of the French artist. In their struggle against the Old Regime “philosophers artists,” as Jacques-Louis David, they took possession of the weapons that were manipulated for centuries by one of its main enemies: the Church. The transmission of Enlightenment ideas could not be restricted to “aridity” of academic papers and should seek in religion and the arts the “enchantment” indispensable to the conquest of eyes, ears, brains and hearts. After resorting to the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome, Jacques-Louis David leaned across the men of his time: the deputies of Tennis Court Oath and the martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the sake of revolution. Interweaving classical art with Christian art, reason, revolution and religion, Jacques-Louis David forged strategies that would be mobilized in the spread of political leaders and ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.