The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) · 1789
In the shadow at the left, Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, sits beneath a statue of Roma with his face turned away from the light. Behind him, lictors carry the bodies of his two sons on a stretcher into the house. He has condemned them himself, because they plotted to restore the king he had overthrown. On the right, in full light, his wife stretches out her arm and his daughters collapse against her, while a nurse at the far edge hides her face in her blue cloak. Between the two groups stand an empty chair and a table draped in red, with a sewing basket, scissors and unfinished cloth that quietly say this household will never be the same.
David composed the picture so that your eye must choose between duty and feeling. Brutus is in half shadow, clutching the paper of the sentence, his feet crossed and his toes tense against the floor; the women are painted in clear, statue-like light. The Doric columns, the folding chair, the wool basket and the table were studied from Roman antiquities, and the canvas is enormous, more than four metres wide. The signature at the lower left says in Latin that David made it in Paris in the year 1789, and on the back of the canvas he added that it was painted in the time of the Revolution.
The picture had been commissioned by the king in 1786 for six thousand livres, with a subject imposed of Coriolanus stopped by his mother; David changed it to Brutus during 1787. It was shown at the Salon that opened on the twenty-fifth of August 1789, a few weeks after the fall of the Bastille, and again at the Salon of 1791. The story of a father who put the Republic before his own blood was read as a manifesto for the new order, Brutus became a revolutionary hero, and the furniture in the picture even inspired fashionable chairs. The canvas came to the museum from the collection of Louis the Sixteenth.
Did You Know? On the back of the canvas David wrote that the picture was made in the time of the Revolution, in the year 1789.
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