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Oath of the Horatii

Oath of the Horatii (French: Le Serment des Horaces), is a large painting by the French artist
Jacques-Louis David painted in 1784 and now on display in the Louvre in Paris.[1] The painting
immediately became a huge success with critics and the public, and remains one of the best
known paintings in the Neoclassical style.

Oath of the Horatii

Artist Jacques-Louis David

Year 1784

Medium Oil on canvas

Dimensions 329.8 cm × 424.8 cm (129.8 in × 167.2 in)

Location Louvre, Paris

It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a seventh-century BC dispute between two
warring cities, Rome and Alba Longa,[2] and stresses the importance of patriotism and masculine
self-sacrifice for one's country. Instead of the two cities sending their armies to war, they agree
to choose three men from each city; the victor in that fight will be the victorious city. From Rome,
three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, agree to end the war by fighting three brothers
from a family of Alba Longa, the Curiatii. The three brothers, all of whom appear willing to
sacrifice their lives for the good of Rome,[1] are shown saluting their father who holds their
swords out for them.[3] Of the three Horatii brothers, only one will survive the confrontation.
However, it is the surviving brother who is able to kill the other three fighters from Alba Longa:
he allows the three fighters to chase him, causing them to separate from each other, and then, in
turn, kills each Curiatii brother. Aside from the three brothers depicted, David also represents, in
the bottom right corner, a woman crying while sitting down. She is Camilla, a sister of the Horatii

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brothers, who is also betrothed to one of the Curiatii fighters, and thus she weeps in the
realisation that, whatever happens, she will lose someone she loves. Seeing her weep, the
surviving brother, Pu

The principal sources for the story behind David's Oath are the first book of Livy (sections 24–26)
which was elaborated by Dionysius in book 3 of his Roman Antiquities.[4] However, the moment
depicted in David's painting is his own invention.[5][6] The painting led to the popularization of
the Roman salute.[5]

Commissioning the work

David's The Lictors Bring to Brutus the

Bodies of His Sons, 1789

In 1774, David won the Prix de Rome with his work Érasistrate découvrant la cause de la Maladie
d’Antiochius. This allowed him to stay five years (1775–1780) in Rome as a student from the
French government. Upon his return to Paris, he exhibited his work, which Diderot greatly
admired; the success was so resounding that King Louis XVI of France allowed him to stay in the
Louvre, a privilege greatly desired by artists. There he met Pecoul, the contractor for the actual
buildings, and Pecoul's daughter, whom he married. The king's assistant, Charles-Claude Flahaut
de la Billaderie, commissioned Oath of the Horatii with the intention that it be an allegory about
loyalty to the state and therefore to the king. Nevertheless, David departed from the agreed-
upon scene, painting this scene instead. The painting was not completed in Paris, but rather in
Rome, where David was visited by his pupil Jean-Germaine Drouais who had himself recently
won the Prix de Rome. Ultimately, David's picture manifests a progressive outlook, deeply
influenced by Enlightenment ideas, that eventually contributed to the overthrow of the
monarchy. As the French Revolution approached, paintings increasingly referred to the loyalty to
the state rather than the family or the church. Painted five years before the Revolution, the Oath
of the Horatii reflects the political tensions of the period.

In 1789, David painted The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, a picture that was also a
royal commission. Shortly afterward, the king went up to the scaffold also accused of treason, as
the sons of Brutus, and with the vote of the artist in the National Assembly, which supported the
execution of Louis XVI.

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Symbolic theme

Oath of the Horatii, a second smaller version painted

in 1786 by David and his pupil Girodet, now in
Toledo, Ohio

The painting depicts the Roman Horatius family, who, according to Titus Livius' Ab Urbe Condita
(From the Founding of the City) had been chosen for a ritual duel against three members of the
Curiatii, a family from Alba Longa, in order to settle disputes between the Romans and the latter
city.

As revolution in France loomed, paintings urging loyalty to the state rather than to clan or clergy
abounded. Although it was painted nearly four years before the revolution in France, The Oath of
the Horatii became one of the defining images of the time. In the painting, the three brothers
express their loyalty and solidarity with Rome before battle, wholly supported by their father.
These are men willing to lay down their lives out of patriotic duty. With their resolute gaze and
taut, outstretched limbs, they are citadels of patriotism. They are symbols of the highest virtues
of Rome. Their clarity of purpose, mirrored by David's simple yet powerful use of tonal contrasts,
lends the painting, and its message about the nobility of patriotic sacrifice, an electric intensity.
This is all in contrast to the tender-hearted women who lie weeping and mourning, awaiting the
results of the fighting.[7]

The mother and sisters are shown clothed in silken garments seemingly melting into tender
expressions of sorrow. Their despair is partly due to the fact that one sister was engaged to one
of the Curiatii and another is a sister of the Curiatii, married to one of the Horatii. Upon defeat of
the Curiatii, the remaining Horatius journeyed home to find his sister cursing Rome over the
death of her fiancé. He killed her, horrified that Rome was being cursed. Originally David had
intended to depict this episode, and a drawing survives showing the surviving Horatius raising
his sword, with his sister lying dead. David later decided that this subject was too gruesome a
way of sending the message of public duty overcoming private feeling, but his next major
painting, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons depicted a similar scene - Lucius Junius
Brutus brooding as the bodies of his sons, whose executions for treason he had ordered, are
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returned home. This was a subject the tragedy Brutus by Voltaire had made familiar to the
French.

Study for Camilla, black chalk

and white highlights

The painting shows the three brothers on the left, the Horatii father in the center, and the three
women along with two children on the right. The Horatii brothers are depicted swearing upon
(saluting) their swords as they take their oath. The men show no sense of emotion. Even the
father, who holds up three swords, shows no emotion. On the right, three women are weeping—
one in the back and two up closer. The woman dressed in the white is a Horatius weeping for
both her Curiatii fiancé and her brother; the one dressed in brown is a Curiatius who weeps for
her Horatii husband and her brother. The background woman in black holds two children—one
of whom is the child of a Horatius male and his Curiatii wife. The younger daughter hides her
face in her nanny's dress as the son refuses to have his eyes shielded. According to Thomas Le
Claire:

This painting occupies an extremely important place in the body of David’s

work and in the history of French painting. The story was taken from Livy.
We are in the period of the wars between Rome and Alba, in 669 B.C. It has
been decided that the dispute between the two cities must be settled by an
unusual form of combat to be fought by two groups of three champions each.
The two groups are the three Horatii brothers and the three Curiatii brothers.
The drama lay in the fact that one of the sisters of the Curiatii, Sabina, is
married to one of the Horatii, while one of the sisters of the Horatii, Camilla,
is betrothed to one of the Curiatii. Despite the ties between the two families,
the Horatii's father exhorts his sons to fight the Curiatii and they obey,
despite the lamentations of the women.[8]

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Compositional technique

Schematic showing the convergence of many

elements in the composition at the central point

This painting shows the neoclassical art style,[9] and employs various techniques that were typical
of it:

The background is de-emphasized, while the figures in the foreground are emphasized.

Overlapping ranks of profile figures are a common motif in classical art, and that of other
ancient Near Eastern cultures.

The central point of the hand clasping the swords is placed in front of the vanishing point of
the perspective scheme, which is emphasized by the straight lines of the edges of the wall
blocks and floor slabs of the architectural setting leading to it (see schematic).

The use of dull colors is to show the importance of the story behind the painting over the
painting itself.

The picture is organized, depicting the symbolism of the number three and of the moment
itself.

The focus on clear, hard details and the lack of use of the more wispy brushstrokes preferred
by Rococo art.

The brushstrokes are invisible, and the painter's technique is not displayed as a distraction
from the subject

The men are all depicted with straight lines mirroring the columns in the background
signifying their rigidity and strength while the women are all curved like the arches which are
held up by the columns.

The use of straight lines to depict strength is also demonstrated in the swords, two of which
are curved while one is straight, perhaps foreshadowing that only one brother would survive
the encounter.

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The frozen quality of the painting is also intended to emphasize rationality, unlike the Rococo
style.

That it depicts a morally uplifting story, promoting civic duty over the personal, reflects the
values of the Age of Enlightenment and neoclassical idealism.

Comparisons

Study by David, drawing

Assyrian archers, from a relief of about 728 BC, British Museum

Overlapping riders in profile, from the Parthenon Frieze

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Gavin Hamilton, The oath of Brutus, 1763–64

Johann Heinrich Füssli, the Rütlischwur, an oath from medieval Swiss history, 1780

Johann Heinrich Füssli, Macbeth and Banquo with the witches, 1793–64

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El Tres de Mayo, by Francisco de Goya, making a very different use of a file of men in profile, 1814.

Mantel clock version, Carnavalet Museum, Paris

Reception

David first exhibited the painting in Rome, where even the Pope requested a viewing.[6]

The painting was exhibited in France at the Salon of 1785, but it was delivered late.[6] David's
enemies at the Academy took advantage of the delay to exhibit the painting in a poor locale in
the gallery. The public's dissatisfaction with the painting's poor viewing conditions obliged the
gallery to move it to a more prominent location. David kept The Oath of the Horatii on exhibit for
longer than expected to permit reporters to write about all of the paintings exhibited, not just
his.

References

1. Ophélie Lerouge. "The Oath of the Horatii" (https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/oath-horatii) .

Louvre. Retrieved 7 April 2019.

2. "Horatii and Curiatii" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Horatii-and-Curiatii) . Encyclopaedia

Britannica.

3. Roth, Michael (1994). "Facing the Patriarch in Early Davidian Painting". Rediscovering history: culture,
politics, and the psyche. Stanford University Press. p. 308. ISBN 9780804723138.

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4. Marvin, Roberta Montemorra; Downing A. Thomas (2006). "Roman Republicanism and Operatic
Heroines". Operatic migrations: transforming works and crossing boundaries (illustrated ed.). Ashgate
Publishing, Ltd. pp. 102–103. ISBN 9780754650980.

5. Winkler, Martin M. (2009). The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press. pp. 42–56. ISBN 9780814208649.

6. Crow, Thomas (1985). Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University
Press. pp. 213–214.

7. Jacques-Louis David and Peter Russell (2017). Delphi Complete Works of Jacques-Louis David
(Illustrated) (https://books.google.com/books?id=bVg-DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT36) . p. 36.
ISBN 9781786565143.

8. Master Drawings - Recent Acquisitions (http://www.leclaire-kunst.de/katalog-17.pdf) Archived (https://

web.archive.org/web/20071009204905/http://www.leclaire-kunst.de/katalog-17.pdf) 2007-10-09 at
the Wayback Machine - Le Claire, Thomas - Kunsthandel XVII

9. Jacques-Louis David: The Oath of the Horatii (http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/neocl

_dav_oath.html) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20160501014955/http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/
avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/neocl_dav_oath.html) 2016-05-01 at the Wayback Machine (from the Boston
College website. Retrieved 2008-01-10.)

External links

External video

David's Oath of the Horatii (https://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/david-oath-of-the-horatii.html) ,

Smarthistory at Khan Academy

Media related to Le Serment des Horaces by Jacques-Louis David at Wikimedia Commons

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