David Brutus
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Jacques-Louis David's The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons stands as one of the most politically charged masterworks of the French Neoclassical movement, and Robert L. Herbert's penetrating study, David Brutus, places this monumental painting under the full lens of historical and aesthetic scrutiny. Published as part of the acclaimed Art in Context series, the volume situates the 1789 painting within the volatile political climate of pre-Revolutionary France, arguing that David's depiction of the Roman consul Brutus — who condemned his own sons to death for treason — served as a thunderous moral statement on civic duty, sacrifice, and republican virtue. Herbert, a distinguished art historian renowned for his scholarship on 19th-century French art, presents a rigorous yet accessible analysis that weaves together biography, iconography, and social history. His authoritative prose illuminates how David transformed classical Roman narrative into a weapon of political allegory, crafting a composition of extraordinary psychological tension where grief and stoic resolve occupy the same shadowed space. This compact but richly detailed study challenges the reader to reconsider the relationship between art and revolution — and to ask whether a painting can, in itself, be an act of defiance.
Author: Robert L. Herbert
Format: Hardback
Genre: History of arts
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Jacques-Louis David's The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons stands as one of the most politically charged masterworks of the French Neoclassical movement, and Robert L. Herbert's penetrating study, David Brutus, places this monumental painting under the full lens of historical and aesthetic scrutiny. Published as part of the acclaimed Art in Context series, the volume situates the 1789 painting within the volatile political climate of pre-Revolutionary France, arguing that David's depiction of the Roman consul Brutus — who condemned his own sons to death for treason — served as a thunderous moral statement on civic duty, sacrifice, and republican virtue. Herbert, a distinguished art historian renowned for his scholarship on 19th-century French art, presents a rigorous yet accessible analysis that weaves together biography, iconography, and social history. His authoritative prose illuminates how David transformed classical Roman narrative into a weapon of political allegory, crafting a composition of extraordinary psychological tension where grief and stoic resolve occupy the same shadowed space. This compact but richly detailed study challenges the reader to reconsider the relationship between art and revolution — and to ask whether a painting can, in itself, be an act of defiance.