![]() ![]() He made innumerable studies that attest to his passionate interest in antiquity and in the style espoused in the seventeenth century by Nicolas Poussin, the great French artist who had resided in Rome (David was later regarded as Poussin’s successor). In the Italian capital, David followed the traditional course of study, drawing from the antique, from models, from nature, and from contemporary and earlier paintings. Having won the 1774 Prix de Rome, David traveled to Italy with Vien, an early exponent of Neoclassicism and the newly appointed director of the French Academy there. The Artist: The great history painter and portraitist Jacques Louis David studied with Joseph Marie Vien and then, in 1766, entered the school of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. To experts illuminate this artwork's story David consulted antiquarian scholars in his pursuit of an archeologically exacting image, including details of furniture and clothing his inclusion of Plato at the foot of the bed, however, deliberately references not someone present at Socrates’s death but, rather, the author whose text, Phaedo, had preserved this ancient story into modern times. He is about to grasp the cup of hemlock, offered by a disciple who cannot bear to witness the act. Through a network of carefully articulated gestures and expressions, David’s figures act out the last moments of Socrates’s life. The Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399 BCE) was convicted of impiety by the Athenian courts rather than renounce his beliefs, he died willingly, expounding on the immortality of the soul before drinking poisonous hemlock. In this landmark of Neoclassical painting from the years immediately preceding the French Revolution, David took up a classical story of resisting unjust authority in a sparse, friezelike composition. ![]()
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