The Political Implications of Jacques-Louis David’s Paintings Oath of the Horatii and The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons

This thesis is concerned with the political implications of two of Jacques-Louis David's paintings: Oath of the Horatii (1784) and The Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789). In this thesis, I argue that David’s pre-Revolutionary work contained political anticipations of Revolutionary France articulated in his Neoclassical forms, the classical stories he chose to paint, his own narrative innovations using light, color, gender, unusual scenes and the thematic conflict of the state vs the individual and family.