Neoclassical painting is the style that borrowed its heroes and its look from ancient Greece and Rome. It spread across Europe in the late 1700s, after digs at Herculaneum and Pompeii uncovered whole Roman houses. Painters chose sharp outlines, smooth paint and stage-like scenes.
These pictures did more than decorate. Most set out to prove something: a citizen's virtue, a ruler's power, a painter's standing. In France the crown used the style before the Revolution did. The Revolution kept it, and so did Napoleon.
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How These Were Chosen
A painting needed to clear one of three tests. Virtue: it holds up a model citizen of Rome, Greece or the Revolution.
Power: a ruler or a government ordered it, or a ruler is its subject. Judgment: critics, an academy or a client rejected it or walked away.
David takes eight places because he led the style.
12. Angelica Kauffman, Cornelia Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures (1785)
A visiting lady shows off her jewelry and waits to be admired. Her host, a Roman widow named Cornelia, answers by gesturing toward her two young sons. Angelica Kauffman, a Swiss-born painter who built her career in London, painted the scene in her studio in Rome.
The story comes from Valerius Maximus, a Roman writer of the first century. In his telling, Cornelia kept her guest talking until her children came home from school. Only then did she say, "These are my ornaments."
The boys grew up to be Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, elected tribunes who fought to give public land to poor Roman citizens. Both died in the political violence their reforms set off. For eighteenth-century viewers, Cornelia stood for the mother who serves the state by raising its citizens.
The Neoclassical setting keeps that message easy to read. The corner of a Roman wall splits the group, with the women on one side and the boys on the other. All the figures wear Roman dress, from the women's long robes to the younger boy's short tunic.
Kauffman's quietest figure moves me most: Sempronia, the boys' sister, holding her mother's hand. She stays on the women's side of the wall while the famous gesture goes to her brothers.
The painting was commissioned by George Bowles, an English collector who ordered more than one history picture from her. Kauffman had opened a studio near the Spanish Steps in 1782. Her clients came from all over Europe.
Subjects like Cornelia were the hardest ground for a woman painter. In 1768 Kauffman became one of two women among the founding members of London's Royal Academy. History painting, with its heroes and ancient stories, ranked highest in the Academy's teaching.
That rank rested on drawing the nude, and women were not expected in the life class. In 1771 and 1772, the German-born painter Johan Zoffany painted thirty-four early members of the Academy gathered around a nude male model. Kauffman and Mary Moser, the other woman founder, appear only as portraits hanging on the wall.
At a Glance
Artist: Angelica Kauffman (Swiss, 1741 to 1807)
Painted: About 1785, in Rome
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
About This Painting
Is it Kauffman or Kauffmann?
Both spellings appear in museums and books. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts lists her as Kauffmann, with two n's.
Did Kauffman paint the subject more than once?
Yes. She painted another version of Cornelia and her children for the Queen of Naples.
Was Kauffman the only painter drawn to this story in the 1780s?
No. The French painter Jean-François-Pierre Peyron painted Cornelia in 1781. A preparatory version is in the National Gallery in London, and the finished picture is in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse.
How did Kauffman's Cornelia reach the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts?
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts bought the painting through the Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund.
11. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808, reworked 1827)
Oedipus, naked but for a strip of red cloth, leans toward the Sphinx to answer her riddle. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted him in Rome in 1808, as a student who had to prove his progress to the official art academy in Paris every year. The academy was unimpressed, and almost twenty years later Ingres went back to the same canvas to make it bigger.