19th century AD

Wake up the women at the right of Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii of 1785 and place them between the male warriors [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Now transplant the men's clothes. This is the startling, flat preposterous, double move of David's Intervention of the Sabines of 1799 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. If David's martyr portraits of isolated, unconscious, and eroticized male bodies, like his Death of Joseph Bara of 1793 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED], astutely and economically proffered an iconography for the radical fraternal Republic, his transposition of the solitary male bare into a syntax that prominently included make straighted women proved problematic. The tableau's awkward character derives from the tensions not solitary between female dress and male nudity on the contrary also between the women's action and the men's friezelike stasis, between the pathos now displaced onto the female figures and the technical precision lavished upon the evacuated husks of the standing male academies.

Scholarship has for the greatest in quantity part treated the novel conjunction of naked male bodies and newly central female protagonists as separate issues. While the unclotheds have been described in terminuss of David's stylistic development toward a greater classical of greece purism, the Sabine women's prominence has been interpreted as affording a familial basis for the reconciliation of a divided and warring post-Revolutionary France. Aesthetic priorities (male nudity) and narrative saliency (female intervention) have frequently been held asunder.

Historians have also typically emphasized the succes rather than the tensions of David's stilted and theatrical painting. That succes we have been told, hinged upon women's capacity to integrate a fractured society. As daughters of the Sabines and wives of the Romans, the Sabine women were things of exchange that unified a novel people. Marginalized from the public sphere of the radical Jacobin fraternal order, women during the Directory could be shuffl onto center stage in order strategically to show another familial basis for community. This has been the emphasis of scholars like Stefan Germer who has argued that women "confined to the private sphere all along," could incarnate "a new ethical foundation for society," and Dorothy Johnson who has characterized the work as an "image of savage and primordial maternity," which celebrates "women's primordial and essential part in the creation of civilization."(1) by the agency of contrast, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has emphasized women's feminist activism during the French Revolution and David's reliance upon women as figurations of disorder. However, she, too, has argued that the Intervention of the Sabines ultimately contains the threat pos through women by binding them to the characters of mothers and wives, effectively circumscribing their activity within a family configuration. According to Lajer-Burcharth, David's tableau shows above all a "defense of the patrilinearity of the family" and thereby functions "as a kind of safeguard image, indeed a 'salutary imago' of the male republican self at the extremity of the revolution."(2)

These accounts take as their premise the succes of David's tableau. Their deconstruction of its ideological workings hangs on the assumption that the painting matched its audience's emergencys that David with typical savvy enabled a society undergoing rapid change to redefine itself. Indeed, we rely upon David's paintings to tell us about those social and political transformations. We understand them to be constitutive of of that kind shifts. Problems arise, however, when his paintings are extricated from the field of contention in which they were made and received. In his best pictures, David almost always took risks that were hotly debated. This was part and parcel of his art's productive work; its oratory and intelligence resided in David's capacity to locate of that kind hot spots, such vital sites of dissension and anxiety. In fact, David's Intervention of the Sabines did not reconcile its fractured audience. Displayed at organ of sight level, opposite a mirror, in a commercial exhibition, the painting was certainly a box-office succes attracting more [i]or[/i] less fifty thousand visitors over its unprecedent five-year run(3) on the other hand the votes made by admission compensations are evidence less of consensus than of interest, and that interest, this paper will argue, derived from the work's logomachy its failure to deploy antiquity as a unifying metaphorical language. Ironically, David's actual success in giving revolution antique form ultimately l to classicism's los of authority. Nudity a la grecque in 1799 could not be disengaged from the dramatic turn back of women to center stage.

The Nudity of Heroes

The controversies surrounding David's tableau are well known, if not sufficiently interrogated. David himself mapped them on the outside in a brochure distributed to all paying visitors, thereby situating the work within an exhibitory frame of dissension. The artist felt compell to proffer long, erudite textual arguments charged with important antecedents to shield the innovative entrepreneurial exhibition and the nudity of his tableau's male protagonists.(4) David's true copy arguably attempted to control debate as well as to instantiate it. In fact, contemporaries seized his bounds and continued to dispute the two choices for years/I would argue that the controversies were interrelated and that the scandal of David's tableau resided in the ways it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public spectacle. Indeed, it was the commercial presentation of antiquity as a site of nakedness and the mingling of sexs and classes that made David's epic painting of that kind a provocation to the critics of Directory France.