IV.

Painting

Neo-Classical painting was centred in Rome, where many expatriate painters gathered around the German art historian Johann Winckelmann. Winckelmann's circle included the expatriate German Anton Raphael Mengs, the Scot Gavin Hamilton, and the American Benjamin West. Mengs's Parnassus (1761), a ceiling fresco for the Villa Albani in Rome, was designed expressly with Winckelmann's advice. Unlike the composition of typical Baroque or Rococo painted ceilings, its composition is simple: only a few figures, in calm, static poses mainly derived from antique statues. Between 1760 and 1765, Hamilton, who was also an archaeologist and art dealer, completed five pictures inspired by Homer's Iliad and incorporating figures derived from ancient sculpture. West worked in Rome from 1760 to 1763. Paintings such as Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus (1768, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut) were inspired by his Roman experience. Solemn and austere in theme and treatment, they are also archaeologically correct in detailing.

The same tendencies are evident in the earlier work of the French painter Jacques-Louis David, one of the most prominent exponents of Neo-Classical painting. His Oath of the Horatii (1784-1785, Louvre, Paris) celebrates the theme of stoic patriotism. The picture's boxlike architectural space and frieze-like arrangement of figures reflect Neo-Classical concern for compositional logic and clarity. The firm contours and harsh light lend these figures a statuesque quality. Later works by David, commissioned by Napoleon—such as Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine (1805-1807, Louvre)—are very different, however, in their celebration of worldly splendour and power. The emperor's approval of such ostentatious displays was even extended to an American painter, John Vanderlyn, to whom he awarded a medal in 1808 for his Marius Among the Ruins of Carthage (1807, M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco).

By the early 1790s painters began to emulate the flat, silhouetted figures of Greek vase painting. The foremost exponent of this style was the English painter John Flaxman, whose simple line engravings for editions (1793) of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey completely replaced traditional perspective, lighting, and modelling with flat linear design. The style was immensely successful and widely imitated. One of David's most successful pupils, and the inheritor of his role as leading interpreter of the classical tradition, was Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. He adopted Flaxman's two-dimensional approach, as seen in his popular early work The Envoys of Agamemnon (1801, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris).