Leonidas at Thermopylae
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) · 1814
At the centre of a crowded rocky pass, a naked warrior sits on a rock with his shield beside him and his sword across his knee, looking straight out at you. He is Leonidas, king of Sparta, on the morning of the last day at Thermopylae in four hundred and eighty before Christ, when he and his three hundred men chose to die rather than retreat before the army of Xerxes. Around him Spartans arm themselves, embrace, raise garlands over an altar and sound trumpets. On the cliff at the upper left a soldier carves an inscription with his sword, the famous epitaph that tells the stranger to go and tell the Lacedaemonians that here we lie, obedient to their laws.
David worked on this picture longer than on any other. He conceived it from 1798 as a pendant to the Sabine Women, painted at it from 1802 to 1804, abandoned it, then took it up again in June 1813 and finished it in October 1814, just after the fall of Napoleon. The canvas is a catalogue of the ideal male nude in every pose: look at the blind soldier at the left being led into battle, the young men tying on sandals, and the old man holding up wreaths. Greek inscriptions appear on the stone altar to Herakles and on the letter lying on the ground in the middle of the foreground, addressed by Leonidas to the elders of Sparta.
Napoleon is said to have told David he was wasting his time painting the defeated; David answered that this was the moment when a commander's virtue was greatest. The painter showed the canvas in his studio in the former Cluny college from October to December 1814, where it stayed until 1819. That year, before leaving for exile in Brussels, he sold it together with the Sabine Women, through his agent Jean-Louis Delahaye, to the household of Louis the Eighteenth for one hundred thousand francs. Both pictures entered the royal collection and then the Louvre, and they still hang near each other today.
Did You Know? David worked on this canvas on and off for fifteen years and finished it just after Napoleon's first abdication.
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