More than any other artist, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) is identified with the dramatic upheaval of the French Revolution. As a liberal politician, he welcomed the promise of social change; as an artist he used his brush to glorify the Revolution's heroes and martyrs. When the political tide changed, David became Napoleon's chief painter, capturing the imperial pomp and contributing to the cult of military heroism.

In this engrossing account Simon Lee argues that David was the single most important European painter of the age, perfecting a style of dramatic and noble painting that matched exactly the contemporary desire for morally elevating images. A leading exponent of what was to be termed Neoclassicism, he was, however, capable of departing considerably from its ideals of understatement and restraint. Lee's account is the first to trace all aspects of David's career, from his intellectual interests to his entrepreneurial skills and his relationships with patrons. Drawing on the most recent research, he analyses David's stylistic innovations, his political engagement, his search for new audiences, and his changing attitudes to the depiction of virtue and patriotism.

With essays by Valerie Bajou, Philippe Bordes, Thomas Crow, Michael Fried, Tom Gretton, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Stephane Guegan, Daniel Harkett, Godehard Janzing, Dorothy Johnson, Mehdi Korchane, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Issa Lampe, Mark Ledbury, Simon Lee, Heather McPherson, David O'Brien, Satish Padiyar, Todd Porterfield, Susan L. Siegfried, and Helen Weston Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the most celebrated painter of his era, was appointed court painter to Napoleon in 1804 and exiled to Brussels in 1816. This important book--based on the proceedings of an international symposium--explores David's grand projects of the Empire period and the often mysterious works produced in his last years as a political exile. David after David features twenty-one essays by leading art historians that discuss these later works--which include innovative portraits as well as paintings and drawings that address the opposing themes of the antique and modern--in the aesthetic, political, and social contexts of their production and reception. The book also draws upon recently discovered letters the artist wrote in exile and provides fascinating new perspectives into his life and art. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

By the Roman age the traditional stories of Greek myth had long since ceased to reflect popular culture. Mythology had become instead a central element in elite culture. If one did not know the stories one would not understand most of the allusions in the poets and orators, classics and contemporaries alike; nor would one be able to identify the scenes represented on the mosaic floors and wall paintings in your cultivated friends' houses, or on the silverware on their tables at dinner.
Mythology was no longer imbibed in the nursery; nor could it be simply picked up from the often oblique allusions in the classics. It had to be learned in school, as illustrated by the extraordinary amount of elementary mythological information in the many surviving ancient commentaries on the classics, notably Servius, who offers a mythical story for almost every person, place, and even plant Vergil mentions. Commentators used the classics as pegs on which to hang stories they thought their students should know.
A surprisingly large number of mythographic treatises survive from the early empire, and many papyrus fragments from lost works prove that they were in common use. In addition, author Alan Cameron identifies a hitherto unrecognized type of aid to the reading of Greek and Latin classical and classicizing texts--what might be called mythographic companions to learned poets such as Aratus, Callimachus, Vergil, and Ovid, complete with source references. Much of this book is devoted to an analysis of the importance evidently attached to citing classical sources for mythical stories, the clearest proof that they were now a part of learned culture. So central were these source references that the more unscrupulous faked them, sometimes on the grand scale.

Why does tragedy give pleasure? Why do people who are neither wicked nor depraved enjoy watching plays about suffering and death? Is it because we see horrific matter controlled by majestic art? Or because tragedy actually reaches out to the dark side of human nature? A. D. Nuttall's wide-ranging, lively, and engaging book offers a new answer to this perennial question. Writers discussed include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Goethes Kunstberater Johann Heinrich Meyer (1760-1832) war einer der Hauptakteure der klassizistischen Bewegung um 1800. Die Studie untersucht sein kunstlerisches und schriftstellerisches OEuvre im Wechselverhaltnis. Praktiken der Aufzeichnung vor Ort, des Kopierens und Nachzeichnens werden als zentrale operative Elemente der klassizistischen Theoriebildung und Historisierung der Kunst gesehen. Umfanglich ausgewertet werden auch die italienischen Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1795-1797, die sich als wertvolle Quelle zur Sammlungsgeschichte und Provenienzforschung erweisen. Die Untersuchung von Meyers kunstlerischem und schriftstellerischem Nachlass verfolgt die Rekonstruktion einer kunstlerischen Gelehrtenpraxis, die sich nicht zuletzt in Goethes Farbenlehre produktiv niedergeschlagen hat.