Winckelmann's doctrine was amplified and codified for the benefit of the French by a writer whose pen was no less authori tative than David's brush, Quatremere de Quincy. Between them they laid down the principles of the new Aesthetic. It was ad mitted that true beauty, as realized by the Greeks in their master pieces, is a creation of reason capable of satisfying the needs of all men in all ages. Greek painting having disappeared (at least that of the great painters of the classical period), they were driven to ordain that painters should draw their inspiration from antique statuary; by way of consequence the superiority of design over colour was proclaimed and it was decided that the only noble arrangement was grouping in bas-relief. The Serment des Horaces (1785), illustrating these principles with a vigour and austerity hitherto unknown, forthwith exalted David's reputation to the skies. His contemporaries saw in it the promise of a re-birth of art through a heroic ideal suited to a humanity uplifted by what man at that time called, without having put them to the test, the "republican virtues." David was therefore the author of the most fundamental breach which has ever occurred in French tradition. The consequences of that breach were nevertheless not so disas trous as they had been in Germany, although circumstances lent to the artistic revolution the support of a terrible political one in which, as it happened, the leader of the new School played an im portant part. But, happily for the destinies of French art, David was a true artist and a man of strong passions. In spite of his doc trinaire pretensions he had the temperament of a dictator, not that of a pure theorist. The French, moreover, love to play with ideas, a game in which they have more than once excelled, but they do not allow themselves to be dominated for long by abstractions; they are too much in love with life and human truth. Their desire is to reconcile the intellectual and the emotional and the greatest among them have generally succeeded. David himself possessed the means of combating to some extent the dangers of the uncom promising doctrine despotically preached to his pupils, so that he did more harm to others than to himself. When we look at the sketches by Guerin or Girodet who. whether or not they had passed through his studio had subjected themselves to his rules, we recognize the light and pleasant touches that denote the real artist of which, however, they were obliged to divest themselves when painting their huge canvases, in order to conform to the rigid aesthetic of their master. David was saved by that love of truth, and even of a somewhat rugged truth, which was natural to him and from pre-Revolution days onwards made him an ex cellent portraitist. The false antique ideal was, mercifully, en tirely absent from the numerous and admirable portraits which he painted at all periods of his life, from the dear old people dressed up in their Sunday best of the Louis XV. style, M. et Mme. Pecoul down to that canvas dating from his last years, his exile at Brussels, Mme. Morel de Tangry et ses filles. There is perhaps nothing more realistic in the history of portrait painting than this canvas generally known as Les Trois Dames de Gand, a realism which seems to border narrowly on caricature ; but everything finally turns to strength, life and true beauty.
It was this gift of portraiture which enabled David to paint Le Sacre de Napoleon I., the finest official picture in the world, and to breathe life into a huge ceremonial composition. It is no small achievement to have arranged and animated this immense composition, the only canvas which can, in a certain measure, be compared to Veronese's Marriage of Cana. David had not, more over, awaited the commissions which made him the historiographer of the Empire, before deserting, at least intermittently, the Greeks and Romans in order to paint the doings of his con temporaries. At the beginning of the Revolution he outlined in a
large canvas the Serment du Jeu de Paume, then painted Marat dead in his bath, and another murdered man, Lepelletier de Saint Fargeau. Without sharing the revolutionary passion which was his inspiration, we cannot help admiring unreservedly in his works, then so novel, the striking atmosphere of truth and the style, truly heroic in its grandeur and simplicity. Thus this doc trinaire had a deep-seated love of nature; and, although his suc cessors were obliged, in order to restore to French painting its essential liberties, to react against the doctrines of David's school, we may yet find in him the source of the chief currents which stirred i9th century art : romanticism, first of all, for Gericault is related to David by all the intense and virile side of his talent; and Gros, David's favourite pupil, with his Pestiferes de Jaffa and Napoleon a Eylau, already heralds Delacroix in colour and dra matic feeling; then that taste for archaism which, in diverse forms and under various names, from the German "Nazarenes" to the English "Pre-Raphaelites" and French "Symbolistes," per vaded several successive generations; and realism, i.e., the in troduction of modern life into art, coupled with the determina tion to express unconventional truth in a style novel but not in ferior in dignity to the great styles of former times. It is in this sense that Courbet and Manet may be said to derive from David through Gericault.
David as a regicide of ter the return of the Bourbons spent the last eight years of his life in Brussels. He then created a new School in a country in which art appeared to be on the verge of extinction. If the ascription, "Flemish," is reserved for the art of Van Eyck, Van der Weyden, Breughel, Rubens and Van Dyck, we may say that Flemish art was dead. But just when Belgium was winning independence, a Belgian school was about to be born. David was its father, or at least its godfather.
When David arrived in Brussels in 1815, the young painters gathered round the famous exile. The most gifted among them, an excellent portraitist, Francois Navez (1787-1869), had for a long time admired David, whom he had known in Paris. The highest possible praise of his talent is to say that, as a disciple of David, he did not give up his own freedom. Outside France, it was in Belgium that the soundest element of David's art was best understood, while elsewhere—notably in Switzerland with Leopold Robert (1794-1835)—the Davidian influence with the assistance of a mild Romanticism led to an anecdotic genre which stiffened in a pretension little approximating to the style.
Once embarked on this course, development of the Belgian school synchronized almost exactly with the stages of French painting. Unfortunately Belgium produced no Delacroix. There the development of Romanticism was confined to the externals, to archaeological or historical imagery. Instead of the poet who, without overmuch heed to material exactitude, interprets in plas tic creations the emotion experienced in meditation on the great events of life, on the heroes of history, on legends or fiction, there were annalists, who, by all sorts of detail in costume and decora tion, claimed to reconstitute the past by giving us the illusion only of authentic evidence; an error which spread almost throughout Europe and which, moreover, beguiled the masses, and produced immense success for painters who to-day are relegated to obscu rity. The movement started in France with Horace Vernet (1789 1863) and Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). In Germany it gave rise to the Diisseldorf School, of which Rethel (1816-59) is the most sincere representative. Next came Piloty (1828-95) with the Munich School, the influence of which extends to the Slav countries and was continued to the end of the century by the Viennese, Markart (184o-84), the Pole, Matejko (1836-93) and the Hungarian, Munkacsy (1844-190o).