19th century AD

Wake up the women at the right of Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii of 1785 and place them between the male warriors [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Now remove the men's clothes. This is the startling, even preposterous, double move of David's Intervention of the Sabines of 1799 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. If David's martyr portraits of isolated, unconscious, and eroticized male bodies, like his Death of Joseph Bara of 1793 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED], astutely and economically offered an iconography for the radical fraternal Republic, his transposition of the solitary male nude into a syntax that prominently included dressed women proved problematic. The tableau's awkward character derives from the tensions not only between female dress and male nudity but also between the women's action and the men's friezelike stasis, between the pathos now displaced onto the female figures and the technical precision lavished on the evacuated husks of the standing male academies.

Scholarship has for the most part treated the novel conjunction of naked male bodies and newly central female protagonists as separate issues. While the nudes have been described in terms of David's stylistic development toward a greater classical Greek purism, the Sabine women's prominence has been interpreted as affording a familial basis for the reconciliation of a divided and warring post-Revolutionary France. Aesthetic priorities (male nudity) and narrative saliency (female intervention) have often been held asunder.

Historians have also typically emphasized the success rather than the tensions of David's stilted and theatrical painting. That success, we have been told, hinged on women's capacity to integrate a fractured society. As daughters of the Sabines and wives of the Romans, the Sabine women were objects of exchange that unified a new people. Marginalized from the public sphere of the radical Jacobin fraternal order, women during the Directory could be shuffled onto center stage in order strategically to represent another familial basis for community. This has been the emphasis of scholars like Stefan Germer, who has argued that women, "confined to the private sphere all along," could embody "a new ethical foundation for society," and Dorothy Johnson, who has characterized the work as an "image of savage and primordial maternity," which celebrates "women's primordial and essential role in the creation of civilization."(1) By contrast, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has emphasized women's feminist activism during the French Revolution and David's reliance on women as figurations of disorder. However, she, too, has argued that the Intervention of the Sabines ultimately contains the threat posed by women by binding them to the roles of mothers and wives, effectively circumscribing their activity within a family configuration. According to Lajer-Burcharth, David's tableau represents above all a "defense of the patrilinearity of the family" and thereby functions "as a kind of safeguard image, indeed a 'salutary imago' of the male republican self at the end of the revolution."(2)

These accounts take as their premise the success of David's tableau. Their deconstruction of its ideological workings depends on the assumption that the painting matched its audience's needs, that David with typical savvy enabled a society undergoing rapid change to redefine itself. Indeed, we rely on David's paintings to tell us about those social and political transformations. We understand them to be constitutive of such shifts. Problems arise, however, when his paintings are extricated from the field of contention in which they were made and received. In his best pictures, David almost always took risks that were hotly debated. This was part and parcel of his art's productive work; its eloquence and intelligence resided in David's capacity to locate such hot spots, such vital sites of dissension and anxiety. In fact, David's Intervention of the Sabines did not reconcile its fractured audience. Displayed at eye level, opposite a mirror, in a commercial exhibition, the painting was certainly a box-office success, attracting some fifty thousand visitors over its unprecedented five-year run.(3) But the votes made by admission fees are evidence less of consensus than of interest, and that interest, this paper will argue, derived from the work's controversy, its failure to deploy antiquity as a unifying metaphorical language. Ironically, David's very success in giving revolution antique form ultimately led to classicism's loss of authority. Nudity a la grecque in 1799 could not be disengaged from the dramatic return of women to center stage.

The Nudity of Heroes

The controversies surrounding David's tableau are well known, if not sufficiently interrogated. David himself mapped them out in a brochure distributed to all paying visitors, thereby situating the work within an exhibitory frame of dissension. The artist felt compelled to offer long, erudite textual arguments replete with important antecedents to defend the innovative entrepreneurial exhibition and the nudity of his tableau's male protagonists.(4) David's text arguably attempted to control debate as well as to instantiate it. In fact, contemporaries seized his terms and continued to dispute both choices for years/I would argue that the controversies were interrelated and that the scandal of David's tableau resided in the ways it made nudity a la grecque the centerpiece of a public spectacle. Indeed, it was the commercial presentation of antiquity as a site of nakedness and the mingling of genders and classes that made David's epic painting such a provocation to the critics of Directory France.