The Intervention of the Sabine Women
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) · 1799
Three years after Romulus and his men carried off the Sabine women, the Sabine army has come to take them back. Hersilia, daughter of the Sabine king Tatius and now wife of Romulus, throws herself between the two warriors with her arms flung wide, and other women push infants into the gap between the spears. Babies crawl in the dust at the very centre of the battlefield. The argument of the picture is that the women, having become mothers on both sides, are the only ones who can stop the killing.
Romulus on the right draws back his javelin; Tatius on the left raises his shield. Both are nude in the antique manner, and David worked hard on a cooler, more linear style than in the Horatii, closer to Greek vase painting than to Roman relief. Look at the helmets, the circular shields and the spears raised in the background, which turn the upper half of the canvas into an abstract pattern of verticals. Look also at the rock of the Capitol behind, and at the hand of the soldier sheathing his sword at the far right, the first sign that the appeal has worked.
David began the work in prison after the fall of Robespierre, and it is usually read as a plea for reconciliation among the French after the Terror. He exhibited it not at the Salon but in his own studio at the Louvre from 1799, charging admission, a commercial move that scandalised critics and earned him a small fortune over five years. The state bought the canvas in 1819. His pupils nicknamed the elegant, bloodless manner of these years the style grec.
Did You Know? David charged the public an entrance fee to see the picture in his own studio, and the takings reportedly funded much of his later career.
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