Drawing the Corporeal: Balance and Mirror Reversal in Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of Horatii

In 1784, Jacques-Louis David painted the Oath of Horatii, a work that marked him as the leading artist of his generation and became one of his most well-known masterpieces (fig. 1). The painting tells the story of the three Horatii brothers who vow to sacrifice their lives for Rome in a duel with the Curiatii brothers from Alba Longa and end an ongoing war between the two cities. On the left side of the composition, the three sons take an oath, and, on the right side, the women are already mourning the impending death of their loved ones. While several interpretations of this painting have focused on the opposition between these two spheres—the masculine and the feminine—this essay offers ways of reading the composition more continuously by considering the figures’ variant modes of stance and stability. By analyzing the many drawings and sketches that David made for this painting, I set to convey new relationships between his preparatory and final work.

Specifically, this essay focuses on several modes of mirror reversal that appear in David’s sketchbook, currently held at the Louvre, which contains many preparatory studies for the Horatii.¹ The surprisingly rich modes of reversal that appear in this sketchbook, together with drawing practices found in some of David’s later books, reveal a deep engagement in David’s work with questions of balance and stability. The existence of many drawings of legs and feet in this sketchbook reaffirms that problems of gravity and of establishing figures’ relationship to the ground below them were dominant in this process. The focus on the solid stance of the male figures, together with an interest in narrative continuity through gestural movement, helps to generate a new reading of the Horatii’s composition. Inspired by Ralph Ubl’s groundbreaking work on Delacroix’s drawings and by his idea that Delacroix’s treatment of the drawn surface helps to reformulate notions of gravity in his pictorial works, this essay seeks to demonstrate similar correlations between drawing and painting in David’s work.²

Figure 1.

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, ca. 1784. Oil on canvas, 330 x 425 cm. Inv.: 3692. Photo: Gérard Blot/Christian Jean. Louvre, Paris, France. Photo Credit: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

It has been claimed that the Horatii broke with conventions of pictorial composition by presenting two distinct and unrelated groups, rendering the painting static, rigid, and spatially unharmonious.³ While this is true, important continuities can be recovered amidst the discord and contrast. Focusing on the father as the key figure that embodies the tension between the two groups, I interpret the Horatii’s composition as a chain of decreasing power: from the forceful stability of the sons on the left, through the slight imbalance of their father at center, to the utter collapse of the women on the right. I illustrate this reading by closely comparing David’s preparatory compositional drawing and the finished composition. The frieze is the structure within which this compositional dynamics takes place. The dominance of the frieze in the Horatii has been established, but it has never been linked with David’s preparatory drawings and practices.⁴ I argue that acts of 180° reversals in his drawing encapsulate the complex functions of David’s frieze-like structure, which, in the Oath of the Horatii, is used as a means of achieving two somewhat contradictory ends: both to secure the figure’s stable stance and to provide the axis within which the beholder may read the composition as a continuous chain of gestural movements.

By providing a close analysis of David’s preparatory procedures for this painting, specifically the drawings of legs and feet that appear in this sketchbooks, I show that issues of stable and solid stance are central to David’s Horatii. Key to this analysis is the contrast between the standing men and the seated women, and the fact that absolutely all of the drawings in question (twelve altogether...