The Greatest History Paintings

RAFFAELLO Sanzio
The School of Athens
1509
Fresco, width at the base 770
cm
Stanza della Segnatura,
Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican

RAFFAELLO Sanzio
The School of Athens (detail)
1509
Fresco

RAFFAELLO Sanzio
1509
Fresco
Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi
Pontifici, Vatican
Below the tondo on the vault
representing Philosophy, ancient
philosophers have assembled in the
School of Athens. In the centre Plato
and Aristotle carry books they have
written: Timaeus and Ethics,
respectively. Their gestures are rich in
meanings: Plato points upward, into
the sphere of higher thoughts. With his
outstretched hand Aristotle is
presumably alluding to his mastery of
natural phenomena. On the steps in
front of Aristotle rests the Cynic
philosopher Diogenes, with the cup
that he tossed away.

RAFFAELLO Sanzio
1509
Fresco
Pythagoras, representing
Arithmetic, is sitting in the
foreground. The two men who
are jostling to look over his
shoulder recall figures in
Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished
Adoration of the Magi in the
Uffizi. Raphael had occasion to
study Leonardo's picture
during his stay in Florence.

RAFFAELLO Sanzio
1509
Fresco
Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi
Pontifici, Vatican
Plato and Aristotle are standing in the
centre of the picture at the head of the
steps. Diogenes is lying carefree on
the steps to show his philosophical
attitude: he despised all material
wealth and the lifestyle associated
with it. Below on the right is a great
block of stone whose significance is
probably connected with the first
epistle of St Peter. It symbolizes
Christ, the "cornerstone" which the
builders have rejected, which
becomes a stumbling block and a
"rock of offence" to the unbeliever.

DAVID, Jacques-Louis
The Oath of the Horatii
1784
Oil on canvas, 330 x 425 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Oath of the Horatii (detail)
1784

The Oath of the Horatii (detail)
1784
The Oath of the Horatii proved to
be a triumph for David. The
public was overwhelmed by his
break with the Baroque stylistic
tradition. For the first time, the
unity of time and action had been
brought into a deliberately severe
composition. The story of the
passionate readiness of these
heroes for self-sacrifice was
known, and it was also
recognized that the weeping
women in the composition are an
expression of foreboding,
symbols of the tragedy to come.

The Death of Marat
1793
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

The Death of Marat (detail)
1793
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

BRYULLOV, Karl Pavlovich
Last Day of Pompei
1833
State Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg

Last Day of Pompei (detail)
1833
State Russian Museum, St.
Petersburg

DELACROIX, Eugène
Liberty Leading the People
1830
Oil on canvas

DELACROIX, Eugène
Liberty Leading the People (detail)
1830
Oil on canvas

The Death of Socrates
1787
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Death of Socrates (detail)
1787
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

DELAROCHE, Paul
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey
1833
National Gallery, London

DELAROCHE, Paul
(detail)
1833
National Gallery, London

DEBAT-PONSAN, Edouard Bernard
Catherine de Medici gazing at
Protestants massacred in the
aftermath of the massacre of St.
Bartholomew
1880
Oil on canvas
Musée Roger-Quilliot, France -
Clermont-Ferrand

Catherine de Medici gazing at
Protestants massacred in the
aftermath of the massacre of St.
Bartholomew (detail)
1880
Oil on canvas
Musée Roger-Quilliot, France -
Clermont-Ferrand

DELACROIX, Eugène
The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople
1840

DELACROIX, Eugène
(detail)
1840

GOYA Y LUCIENTES, Francisco de
The Third of May, 1808: The Execution
of the Defenders of Madrid
1814
Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Third of May, 1808: The Execution
of the Defenders of Madrid (detail)
1814
Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Greatest History Paintings
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The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid
This painting was commissioned by the provisional government of Spain, upon Goya’s suggestion, to commemorate the invasion of Spain by Napoleon’s troops in 1808. At the
time it was painted, the painting was considered groundbreaking and revolutionary, as it presents the horrors of war that had heretofore not been openly illustrated. The painting
focuses on one man, illuminated in white light in the middle of the painting, arms held out to the sides, facing a French firing squad. His slain companions litter the ground. It is
thus considered one of the first pieces of modern art. This painting has influence a number of other artists, who have directly referenced the style and setting of the painting,
including Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso.

RAFFAELLO Sanzio
The School of Athens
The School of Athens is a depiction of philosophy. The scene takes place in classical times, as both the architecture and the garments indicate. Figures representing each subject
that must be mastered in order to hold a true philosophic debate - astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and solid geometry - are depicted in concrete form. The arbiters of this rule, the
main figures, Plato and Aristotle, are shown in the centre, engaged in such a dialogue.
The School of Athens represents the truth acquired through reason. Raphael does not entrust his illustration to allegorical figures, as was customary in the 14th and 15th
centuries. Rather, he groups the solemn figures of thinkers and philosophers together in a large, grandiose architectural framework. This framework is characterized by a high
dome, a vault with lacunar ceiling and pilasters. It is probably inspired by late Roman architecture or - as most critics believe - by Bramante's project for the new St Peter's which is
itself a symbol of the synthesis of pagan and Christian philosophies.
The figures who dominate the composition do not crowd the environment, nor are they suffocated by it. Rather, they underline the breadth and depth of the architectural
structures. The protagonists - Plato, represented with a white beard (some people identify this solemn old man with Leonardo da Vinci) and Aristotle - are both characterized by a
precise and meaningful pose. Raphael's descriptive capacity, in contrast to that visible in the allegories of earlier painters, is such that the figures do not pay homage to, or group
around the symbols of knowledge; they do not form a parade. They move, act, teach, discuss and become excited.
The fresco achieved immediate success. Its beauty and its thematic unity were universally accepted.

The Oath of the Horatii
David owed his rise to fame - after many reversals - to a painting for the execution of which he took his family to Rome, in order to absorb himself totally in the world of
antique forms. It was The Oath of the Horatii.
The story is from the 7th century B.C., and it tells of the triplet sons of Publius Horatius, who decided the struggle between Rome and Albalonga. One survived, but he
killed his own sister because she wept for one of the fallen foes, to whom she was betrothed. Condemned to death for the murder of a sibling, Horatius' son is pardoned by
the will of the people.
Because of its austerity and depiction of dutiful patriotism, The Oath of the Horatii is often considered to be the clearest expression of Neoclassicism in painting. Each of
the three elements of the picture - the sons, the father and the women - is framed by a section of a Doric arcade, and the figures are located in a narrow stage-like space. David
split the picture between the masculine resolve of the father and brothers and the slumped resignation of the women..
The focal point of the work is occupied by the swords that old Horatius is about to distribute to his sons. While the rear two brothers take the oath with their left hands, the
foremost one swears with his right. Perhaps David did this simply as a way of grouping the figures together, but people at the time noticed this detail, and some supposed
that this meant that the brother in the front would be the one to survive the combat.

The Death of Marat
This painting can be regarded as David's finest work, in which he has perfectly succeeded in immortalizing a contemporary political event as an image of social ideals. David's
painting of Marat represents the peak of his involvement in the Revolution where invention, style, fervent belief and devotion combine to produce one of the most perfect examples
of political painting. David presented the painting to the Convention on 14 November 1793.
Jean-Paul Marat saw himself as a friend of the people, he was a doctor of medicine and a physicist, and above all he was editor of the news-sheet Ami du peuple. He suffered
from a skin disease and had to perform his business for the revolution in a soothing bath. This is where David shows him, in the moment after the pernicious murder by Charlotte
Corday, a supporter of the aristocracy. David had seen his fellow party member and friend the day before. Under the impact of their personal friendship David created his painting
"as if in a trance," as one of his pupils later reported.
David takes the viewer into Marat's private room, making him the witness of the moments immediately after the murder. Marat's head and arm have sunk down, but the dead
hand still holds pen and paper. This snapshot of exactly the minute between the last breath and death in the bathroom had an immense impact at the time, and it still has the same
effect today.
David has used a dark, immeasurable background to intensify the significance. The boldness of the high half of the room above the figure concentrates attention on the lowered
head, and makes us all the more aware of the vacuum that has been created. The distribution of light here has been reversed from the usual practice, with dark above light. This is
not only one of the most moving paintings of the time, but David has also created a secularised image of martyrdom. The painting has often, and rightly, been compared with
Michelangelo's Pietà in Rome; in both the most striking element is the arm hanging down lifeless. Thus David has unobtrusively taken over the central image of martyrdom in
Christianity to his image of Marat. Revolutionary and anti-religious as the painting of this period claimed to be, it is evident here that it very often had recourse to the iconography
and pictorial vocabulary of the religious art of the past.

Last Day of Pompei
The Last Day of Pompeii is a large canvas painting by Russian artist Karl Briullov in 1830-33.
Briullov visited the site of Pompeii in 1828, making numerous sketches depicting the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption. The completed canvas was exhibited in Rome to rapturous reviews of
critics and thereafter transported to Paris to be displayed in the Louvre. The first Russian artwork to cause such an interest abroad, it gave birth to an anthologic poem by Alexander
Pushkin, and inspired the hugely successful novel The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who saw it in Rome. Another British author, Sir Walter Scott declared that it
was not an ordinary painting but an epic in colours.
The topic is classical, but Briullov's dramatic treatment and generous use of chiaroscuro render it farther advanced from the neoclassical style. In fact, The Last Day of
Pompeii exemplifies many of the characteristics of Romanticism as it manifests itself in Russian art, including drama, realism tempered with idealism, increased interest in nature,
and a zealous fondness for historical subjects.
The commissioner, Prince Anatole Demidov, donated the painting to Nicholas I of Russia who displayed it at the Imperial Academy of Arts for the instruction of young painters. To
present the painting to a wider audience the canvas was transferred to the Russian Museum for the museum's opening in 1895.
Briullov included a self-portrait in the upper left corner of the painting, under the steeple, one of the several foci in the picture, but not easy to identify.

DELACROIX, Eugène
Liberty Leading the People
The Liberty Leading the People is a sort of epic narrative of the woman who quits her hearth to espouse a great cause. There is a carpet of bodies beneath her feet as she leads
the ravening crowd. Her naked breasts have come to embody the social virtues of Republicanism, a point officially acknowledged by the generous diffusion of the image in the form
of French stamps. It is also the first modern political composition. It marks the moment at which Romanticism abandoned its classical sources of inspiration to take up an emphatic
role in contemporary life. Delacroix enrolled as a garde national, and in this role he portrayed himself, wearing a top hat, to the left of Liberty. The young drummer brandishing his
pistols to the right of Liberty was, perhaps, the inspiration for the character Gavroche, in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, written thirty years later. Delacroix's influences - Goya,
Gros, and, above all, Géricault - are clearly apparent.

The Death of Socrates
At the approach of the French Revolution, when Greek and Roman civic virtues were extolled as salutary antidotes to the degeneracy of the Old Regime, David triumphed at
the Salon with a succession of works, including this one, that gave clear expression to the moral and philosophical principles of his time.
Socrates was accused by the Athenian government of impiety and corrupting the young through his teachings; he was offered the choice of renouncing his beliefs or being
sentenced to death for treason. Faithful to his convictions and obedient to the law, Socrates chose to accept his sentence.
Here Socrates reaches for the cup of poisonous hemlock while he discourses on the immortality of the soul. The Death of Socrates became a symbol of republican virtue and
was a manifesto of the Neoclassical style.

DELAROCHE, Paul
The painting depicts the last moments on 12 February 1554 in the life of the seventeen-year old Jane Grey, a great granddaughter of Henry VII who was proclaimed Queen of
England upon the death of young King Edward VI, a Protestant like herself. She reigned for nine days in 1553, but, through the machinations of the partisans of Henry VIII's Catholic
daughter, Mary Tudor, she was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death in the Tower of London.
Delaroche, who based the painting on a sixteenth-century Protestant martyrology, has falsified the historical account the better to appeal to his contemporaries. Lady Jane Grey,
a humanist-educated young married woman, was in fact executed out of doors. Attended by two gentlewomen, probably no less stoical than she, she resolutely made her own way
to the block. She could not have worn a white satin dress of nineteenth-century cut with a whalebone corset, and her hair would have been tucked up, not streaming down over her
shoulders. But a painting cannot be judged by the criteria of historical accuracy. Much more applicable to this particular picture are the standards of popular melodrama and
tableau vivant.
As on a stage, the heroine gropes her way towards the audience, gently guided by the elderly Constable of the Tower whose massive, dark, male presence acts as a foil to her
own. A spotlight trained on her from above complements the dim stage lighting, reflecting from her immaculate dress and the straw which spills over into the front row of the stalls.
The emotions of each actor are carefully delineated and distinguished, and we are left in no doubt as to the character of each even of the lady in the background who turns her back
on the terrible sight.

Catherine de Medici gazing at Protestants massacred in the aftermath of the massacre of St. Bartholomew
One morning at the gates of the Louvre, Catherine de' Medici (in black) calmly viewing the bodies of victims of the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Debat-Ponsan might have
actually intended to refer to more recent events in French history, such as the bloody suppression of the Commune of Paris, nine years before this painting was made.
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy in French) was a wave of Catholic mob violence against the Huguenots (French Protestants). Starting on
August 24, 1572, with the assassination of a prominent Huguenot, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the massacres spread throughout Paris and later to other cities and the countryside,
lasting for several months, during 5,000 to 20,000 may have been killed.

DELACROIX, Eugène
For Louis-Philippe's new historical galleries at Versailles Delacroix painted a characteristically independent, if not actually subversive account of The Entry of the Crusaders into
Constantinople. Depicting the climax of the Fourth Crusade, largely a French initiative, this might have been thought a glorious theme, as well as a nod towards that latter-day
crusader Napoleon. But the campaign had been fatally tarnished by the pillage it visited upon Constantinople, and Delacroix allows his victors no pleasure in their conquest. Their
leader, Baldwin of Flanders, turns away from the vanquished infidel, remorseful or uncertain what to do next, and even his horse stoops as if in sorrow.
In The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, like in The Massacre of Chios, there is a meditation on the misfortunes of war, in both the conquerors on their trembling steeds
tower over prostrate women.

History Painting (Istoria)
Derived from the Italian word "istoria" (narrative), the term 'history painting' refers to any picture with a high-minded or heroic narrative (message) as illustrated by the exemplary
deeds of its figures. Originally dominated by religious paintings, the category expanded during the Italian Renaissance to include works depicting themes from mythology, literature,
or history, typically executed in a large-scale format. For the world's greatest exponents of this type of art, see: Best History Painters.
There are five main categories of "History Painting": religious, mythological, allegorical, literary and historical. But please note that, whichever category the painting belongs to, its
message must be edifying and worthy of depiction.
(1) Religious history paintings. This speaks for itself. It involves any type of picture with a religious narrative - including Christian (Catholic, Protestant), Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist,
Jewish or tribal religion. Good examples include: Descent From the Cross (Deposition) (c.1435-40, Prado, Madrid) by Roger van der Weyden, and The Avignon Pieta (1454-6, Louvre,
Paris) by Enguerrand Quarton. For general themes from Christianity, see: Christian art (150-2000). For later works, see: Protestant Reformation Art (c.1520-1700), as well as Catholic
Counter-Reformation Art (1560-1700).
(2) Mythological history paintings. Myths are stories developed to explain unaccountable phenomena in the world. Mythological painting includes any picture illustrating a mythical
story, fable or legend. Popular themes included legends surrounding Greek gods (e.g. Ares, Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Hestia,
Poseidon, and Zeus), or mythical stories of Roman deities like: Apollo, Diana, Juno, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Neptune and Venus). Examples include: Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-23)
and Bacchanal of the Andrians (1523-5) by Titian; Jupiter and Io (1533, Vienna) by Correggio; Allegory with Venus and Cupid (1540-50) by Bronzino; Rape of the Daughters of
Leucippus (1618, Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and Judgement of Paris (1635, National Gallery, London) by Rubens; Abduction of the Sabine Women (1634-5, Metropolitan Museum) and Et
in Arcadia Ego (1637, Louvre) by Nicolas Poussin; The Rokeby Venus (1647-51, National Gallery, London) by Velazquez. Suicide of Lucretia (c.1666, Minneapolis Institute of Arts) by
Rembrandt van Rijn; The Colossus (1810, Prado, Madrid) by Goya; Saturn Devouring his Son (1819-23, Prado, Madrid) by Goya; Pasiphae (1943, Metropolitan Museum of Art) by
Jackson Pollock; and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate Collection) by Francis Bacon.
(3) Allegorical history paintings. An allegory is a story containing a hidden meaning. Allegorical pictures typically use people or objects that symbolize (or represent) other people or
things. Examples include: Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338-9, Siena) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti; Garden of Earthly Delights (1500-5, Prado Museum, Madrid) by Hieronymus
Bosch; and The Tempest (1508, Venice Academy Gallery) by Giorgione. For a modern example, see: The Artist's Studio - A Real Allegory (1855, Musee d'Orsay) by Courbet.
(4) Literary history paintings. A narrower category (sometimes included within Mythological category, above) consisting of narrative paintings based on themes taken from literature
(not involving mythological stories). Popular literary works include the plays of William Shakespeare, the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) and
classics like Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Paintings include: Eve tempted by the Serpent (1800, Victoria and Albert Museum) by William Blake; Ophelia (1852, Tate Collection)
by John Everett Millais; The Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets (1854, Yale Center for British Art) by Frederic Leighton; Dante's Dream (1871, Walker Art Gallery) by Dante
Gabriel Rossetti; and Lady of Shalott (1888, Tate Collection) by John Waterhouse.
(5) Historical history painting. The most straightforward category, it embraces all pictures depicting an event or a moment in history, or a historical figure who embodies a clear
message. Examples include Battle of San Romano (1438-55; National Gallery London; Uffizi Florence; Louvre Paris) by Paolo Uccello; School of Athens (1509-11, Fresco, Stanza della
Segnatura, Vatican) by Raphael; The Surrender of Breda (1635) by Velazquez; The Third of May, 1808 (1814, Prado, Madrid) by Goya; The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931,
Metropolitan Museum, NY) by Grant Wood; and Guernica (1937, Reina Sofia) by Pablo Picasso.

The Greatest History Paintings

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