The Louvre is the only museum in the world that could host a Jacques Louis David retrospective and even they struggle. The sheer scale, not to mention fragility, of his canvases means that you need to detour into the main collection to see Brutus, Leonidas and the Coronation of Napoleon. And the scale of the works presents near insurmountable difficulties within the show itself. The Oath of the Horatii, a whole wallful, of machismo minimalism is detached from a lovely line of its preparatory drawings. The huge discrepancy in scale between the two versions of Belisarius Begging for Alms means that they too are placed annoyingly far apart and one is forced to peer through the crowds to compare the ways David responded to criticism of the first version.
The show starts strongly with a wall text reclaiming David as an artist of passion. Personally, I think this is a less radical line than the curators suggest - no one can look at Napoleon Crossing the Alps and not feel the artist's patriotic commitment - and even in the earlier austere works, the passion is there pent-up with almost volcanic intensity. In any case the labelling never follows the argument through, veering instead towards connoisseur-y blandness. To push the passion point, they stress David's enthusiasm for Caravaggio. Yet, apart from the obvious borrowing in Cupid and Psyche, David's early work seems more influenced by a more generalised infusion of Italian Baroque, exemplified by his St Jerome, one of the few less familiar works on show.
There is also friction between a desire to stress his individual genius, and an acknowledgement of David's deliberate campaign to court success. His early career is a masterclass in experimenting with what worked and his ruthless pursuit of Academic success, represented by the annual Prix de Rome competition. The formula he fixed on - a combination of Poussin restraint, Greuze emotion and Baroque drama, with a nice sideline in a more Rococo femininity should the subject demand it - is perfectly illustrated by Andromache Mourning the Body of Hector. Andromache's ostentatious grief is counterbalanced by the shallow depth and empty background, both of which look forward to the Death of Marat. The decaying beauty of the corpse lends a hard-edged melodrama, to a scene which might become too saccharine.
These grand machines are balanced through the show by David's portraits, of himself, his family and of patrons. There is a deceptive mastery here as apparent in the early intimate informality of Dr Alphonse Leroy sitting at his cluttered desk, disturbed from his studies, quill in hand, as in the late poignant pomposity of fellow-exile, Comte de Turenne, proudly showing his family crest on the inside of his hat, sporting his disgraced Napoleonic medals. Most striking if all are the small pencil sketches of fellow prisoners during the period when they, and David himself, had no ideal whether they would live or die. Grim defence and resignation are etched into each profile. The extraordinary Tennis Court Oath fragment, as impossibly huge an undertaking, and as destined to failure, as the political ambitions it represented, pits precisely rendered portraits incongruously against preparatory idealised nude torsos. The exhibition choses not to investigate David's artistic method beyond this and a few sketches - it seems an omission.
Was David the great survivor or a man increasingly clutching at straws? The exhibition hedges its bets, obliquely referencing his difficult relationship with Napoleon and treating the years of exile in Brussels almost as a postscript. The extraordinary Mars disarmed by Venus simply compounds the conundrum. Here juxtaposed with Ingres’ huge and extraordinary Jupiter and Thetis, the curators suggest David is satirising his pupil's louche eroticism. Yet one can trace that lingering rococo softness throughout Davids art through works like The Love of Paris and Helen. Here he combines that with the bolder, hard edged colouration and fussier complexity which can be seen developing in his work from 1800 onwards.
The Louvre presents an unmissable exhibition by a standout artist. The shows tells the narrative, gives the political background and generates at least a sense of David the man. Ultimately, it plays safe, focusing on his unique genius at the expense of saying anything really new or inciteful. He is a painter inexorably connected to politics, and perhaps a more adventurous show might have tried to focus more on his art, his methods, his role as a teacher and inspirer, rather than trot out the revolutionary line. But standing in front of the Death of Marat, none of that matters. The mottled background creating just that hint of emotional swirl, the impeccable simplicity of the packing chest memorial and the stark, emptiness of it all which takes you right back to immediate, stunned silence of 1793. There is no other artist who can say so much, so quietly.
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