Comparative analysis and contrasting perspectives

¶ … paintings by David and Raoux would have to begin by pointing out that, although both painters dealt with scenes from classical antiquity, they did so almost 100 years apart. As a result, each artist brought to whatever story he was illustrating the preferences and styles of his own generation, not to mention a hint at the political situation in which he found himself.

Raoux (born 1677, died 1734) lived during The Enlightenment, an intellectual movement associated with the 18th century. Paris was, along with London, a center for the growing belief that human reason "could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world." (WSU Web site) Particularly, the thinkers of The Enlightenment wanted to be free of the constraints of religion as practiced then, and of the domination of society by an hereditary aristocracy. (WSU Web site)

Raoux, in his painting Orpheus and Eurydice, painted in oils on canvas circa 1718-1720, was certainly aware of the movement. He chose as a subject not the aristocracy itself, perennially a favored subject in portraiture, nor a story from Scripture, but rather a mythic one from what might be called the pagan era.

In the painting itself is a fully developed story, with most of the players present. Moreover, they are present in half-clothed forms, the breasts and faces of the women catching the light, the age of the men obvious in their hair (or lack thereof) and the way their musculature is carefully drawn. The definition of the younger men is sharper; the older men appear a bit more flaccid, although still classically formed. There is also a great deal of passion in the painting, partly conveyed by the expressions of the figures, and partly by Raoux's use of extreme contrasts between lights and darks, creating a tableau of enormous depth.

A hundred years later, Jacques-Louis David (born 1748, died 1825) also chose to deal with subjects from classical antiquity, in his case, Telemachus and Eucharis. Like Raoux, David makes good use of lights and darks to express deep emotion. But here, the emotion is only between one man and one woman; in the Raoux painting, an entire population was involved in the lives of the lovers. It isn't surprising that David has pared the story down to its bare essentials, nor that he chose to include only two very finely drawn characters to express it. David had been a revolutionary, agitating for the sorts of removal of the aristocratic power structure that had first been thought about in Raoux' time. For David, humanism -- the concept of the supremacy and dignity of man -- had taken hold of the mass consciousness in general, and David's in particular.

In the David work, Eucharis presses her very clean profile against Telemachus' bare shoulder. While the lovers run away, moving through time and space in the Raoux painting, these lovers, although in a farewell setting, are still attached, and erotically so. While Raoux exposes a lot of bare skin in his work, it is does not tell a specific tale as the skin-to-skin caress does in the David work. And, too, David uses intense color in draping the bodies, bright red and blue. Raoux used a gentler palette, not infused with intensity and, arguably, desire.

In this way, Jacques-Louis David contrasts masculine rectitude with female emotion," writes Mary Vidal. (2000)