Ah, it is simply unbearable. Why must beauty be so cruel to us? I wonder if you are familiar with the man known as Jacques-Louis David. To hear the name, one might imagine a dignified steward of some aristocratic household, but the reality is quite different. He was a frigid dictator seated before a canvas—a beautiful specter imprisoned within a cage of pigment.
During that terrifying era called the French Revolution, when the world turned upside down and yesterday’s feast became today’s mud, this man stood his ground with nothing but a brush. No, rather than merely standing his ground, he seemed to leap onto the very crest of the crashing wave, shouting, “Look at me! Behold the justice I paint!” The paintings he produced are enough to make one sigh with their perfection—and, perhaps, feel a slight prickle of irritation at their arrogance.
Take, for instance, that famous “Coronation of Napoleon.” That is not a painting. It is a vast, frozen stage play. The Emperor Napoleon holds up the crown with a face that suggests he alone bears the weight of the world. Behind him, David pinned down a moment of history as if he himself were God. He did not record the truth; he fabricated the “most beautiful truth” he desired. I do not mean to call it a lie. It is just that the lie is so dazzling, so utterly “correct,” that we have no choice but to fall silent.
He carried the stiff, formal banner of “Neoclassicism.” Ancient Greece, ancient Rome—he tried to force that world of exposed muscle and rigid logic onto flesh-and-blood human beings. Yet, that is what makes him fascinating. While David feigned the persona of a cold rationalist, beneath that smooth painted surface, he hid an ambition and passion so scorching they might cause a burn.
What strikes me with true trepidation is his depiction of the death of Marat. A revolutionary, assassinated, breathing his last in a bathtub. Ordinarily, such a scene would be too gruesome to look at, yet under David’s magic, it is enveloped in a divine silence, like the martyrdom of a saint. He sought to find perfect proportions even within a corpse. What greed! What an obsession with beauty!
When a person spouts nothing but righteous arguments, they usually end up strangled by the weight of their own words. But David was different. When Napoleon fell, he too was exiled. Even so, until the day he died in Belgium, he never abandoned his chilling perfectionism. In his final years, having lost his former political fervor, he spent his days painting the inhabitants of myth—figures with skin as smooth as porcelain. Was that a defeat? No, to me, it seems he finally escaped the mundane mire of politics and sought asylum in his own kingdom of beauty, where no one could touch him.
We often prattle on about being “true to ourselves.” But before a painting by David, such sugary words vanish. Is “being as you are” not merely a form of negligence? To strive for beauty, to discipline oneself, to pour one’s soul into the mold of a noble ideal—perhaps that very effort, bordering on madness, is the true form of art.
David teaches us this: Life is shapeless, covered in mud, and impossible to tidy up. That is precisely why we must, at the very least, hang a single, cold, and supremely beautiful painting within our hearts. Even if the waves of time wash it away until it remains only as a lonely fantasy for ourselves alone, that stubborn insistence on “beauty” is the final line that separates a human being from an animal.
Oh, but look at the texture of the fabrics he paints! The cold shimmer of satin, the heavy shadows of velvet. When shown such things, the unreliable strings of words I write seem as faded as old newspapers soaked in the rain. It is frustrating, but I must take off my hat to him. Jacques-Louis David did not paint history. He repainted history itself in the colors of his choosing. Perhaps he is the only one, before or since, who was ever permitted such a magnificent, stubborn prank.