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Abstract Jacques-Louis David’s (1748–1825) iconic portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) and Marie-Anne Lavoisier (Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, 1758–1836) has come to epitomize a modern couple born of the Enlightenment. An analytical approach that combined macro-X-ray fluorescence with the examination and microanalysis of samples by Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry to investigate imprecise indications of changes to the composition observed by microscopy and infrared refectography allowed the visualization of a hidden composition with a high level of detail. The results revealed that the first version depicted not the progressive, scientific-minded couple that we see today, but their other identity, that of wealthy tax collectors and fashionable luxury consumers. The first version and the changes to the composition are placed in the context of David’s mastery of the oil painting technique by examining how he concealed colorful features in the first composition by using paint mixtures that allowed for maximum coverage with thin paint layers. The limitations of the analytical techniques used are also discussed. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth technical study of a painting by J.-L. David.

Jacques-Louis David's (1748–1825) iconic portrait of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) and Marie-Anne Lavoisier (Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, 1758–1836) has come to epitomize a modern couple born of the Enlightenment. An analytical approach that combined macro-X-ray fluorescence with the examination and microanalysis of samples by Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry to investigate imprecise indications of changes to the composition observed by microscopy and infrared refectography allowed the visualization of a hidden composition with a high level of detail. The results revealed that the first version depicted not the progressive, scientific-minded couple that we see today, but their other identity, that of wealthy tax collectors and fashionable luxury consumers. The first version and the changes to the composition are placed in the context of David's mastery of the oil painting technique by examining how he concealed colorful features in the first composition by using paint mixtures that allowed for maximum coverage with thin paint layers. The limitations of the analytical techniques used are also discussed. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth technical study of a painting by J.-L. David. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entre 1793 y 1794, durante el llamado «Gran Terror», los retratos de los «mártires revolucionarios» de Jacques-Louis David han desarticulado las bases de la pintura de historia al eliminar la narración y el espacio de la perspectiva tal y como habían sido concebidos desde el Renacimiento. Este artículo indaga en este proceso a través del entramado político, social y religioso que se puso en marcha durante la República jacobina.

In 1816, the restored Bourbon regime banished a group of French Revolutionary politicians from French soil. Although Louis XVIII created an exception for France’s premier painter Jacques-Louis David, David contested this exercise of sovereignty by refusing to be the beneficiary of a monarchic decision on the exception. In rewriting exile as exit, David alters the Revolutionary conception of national sovereignty he subscribed to decades earlier and enacts self-sovereignty instead. David’s painting Les Adieux de Télémaque et d’Eucharis (1818) confirms the artist’s self-sovereign affirmation of responsibility, potential undecidability, and autonomous error in defiance of Bourbon unaccountability, decisionism, and infallibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the eighteenth-century Philadelphia Museum of artist Charles Willson Peale, and particularly the numerous portraits, including those of French military commanders, painted for it. Inspired by eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals celebrating humankind’s capacity to learn and use new information, Peale conceived his Philadelphia Museum. In it Peale intended the works of man and nature to co-exist for the edification of all. The Philadelphia Museum, Peale said, served “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds of Virtue” in the new, American republic. During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Peale and his family filled the museum with hundreds of painted portraits, thousands of natural history specimens, minerals, models, Asian and American Indian artefacts, archaeological objects, life-sized wax figures, fossils and curiosities, all exhibited to an international public.

For both French and American artists, there was an initial interest in depicting the events of the American Revolution in the 1780s, followed by a later wave of art in the 1820s and ’30s. This paper examines the timeline, politics and artistic parameters shaping this art, which was both documentary and symbolic in nature, with artists building on one another’s work. For John Trumbull it was only with time and the buffer of a second war with Britain, the War of 1812, that he was able to obtain a government commission, but his later paintings of the American Revolution were essentially enlarged versions of his compositions from the 1780s. Trumbull studied in the London studio of Benjamin West and was heavily influenced by contemporary British painting. Yet French art and culture were also influential, and this relationship has not been sufficiently studied. Trumbull travelled to France a number of times, beginning in 1786, when he met Jacques-Louis David, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, Jean-Antoine Houdon and other important French artists, incorporating aspects of David’s compositions into his own work. It was also in Paris that Trumbull began to compose the Declaration of Independence under the guidance of Thomas Jefferson. Like most Americans, Trumbull initially supported the French Revolution and saw parallels between it and the American Revolution. He intended to paint early scenes from the French Revolution, including the fall of the Bastille. But although he sympathized with Jefferson and the French republican philosophers, shifting politics and the violence of the French Revolution turned his opinion by 1793.

Since the 1960s Carlos Alonso (b 1930, Tucunan, Argentina) has been committed to the practice of a figurative art charged with sociopolitical content. Beginning in 1969 and ending in 1995, he produced six works that depict the death of revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (1928-1967). Unlike other images of the dead Guevara, which depict his corpse in a Christ-like fashion and emphasise a religious aura, Alonso frames the execution within the convention of an anatomy lesson, thereby returning his subject to a secular space. In the six works Guevara's body becomes the contested space of failed and betrayed revolutions in Latin America, as well as an arena where Alonso stubbornly defends painting as a place of memory that saves 'the wounds of reality'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RESUMO O artigo analisa a produção pictórica de Jacques-Louis David entre o final da década de 1770 e 1793, destacando o entrelaçamento entre arte, religião e política nas obras do artista francês. Em sua luta contra o Antigo Regime, “filósofos artistas”, como Jacques-Louis David, apossaram-se das armas que eram manipuladas, há séculos, por um de seus principais inimigos: a Igreja. A transmissão do ideário iluminista não poderia ficar restrita à “aridez” dos textos acadêmicos, devendo buscar na religião e nas artes o “encantamento” indispensável à conquista de olhos, ouvidos, cérebros e corações. Depois de recorrer aos heróis das antigas Grécia e Roma, Jacques-Louis David debruçou-se sobre os homens do seu tempo: os deputados de O juramento do jogo de pela e os mártires que sacrificaram suas vidas em prol da revolução. Entrelaçando a arte clássica com a cristã, razão, revolução e religião, Jacques-Louis David forjou estratégias que seriam mobilizadas na propagação de líderes e ideários políticos nos séculos XIX e XX.