Quelle 2: Unbekannter Autor 1785 über den Horatierschwur von David (Bild)

Anonym: Der Schwur der Horatier, in: Memorie per le belle Arti, September 1785, Bd. 1, S. 136-141, Übersetzung in: Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (Hrsg.): The Triumph of Art for the Public: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics, Garden City 1979, S. 24-28.

Few examples will be found in the history of this century's painting that have been awaited with such expectation and have excited such universal curiosity as the large painting representing The Oath of the Horatii, which was exhibited to public view last month by Sig. Giacomo Luigi David, the famous painter from Paris. (...)

It is possible to say that this painting, which combines great beauty and a tragic scene, moves us in the same instant to compassion and terror and seems to be composed with the highest measure of perfection. The group of weeping women, besides being well arranged, has a great sense of expression. (...)

This painting has been designed with unusual exactness, and nature's beauty is often coupled with the ideal; the appearance of the heads of the three brothers is beautiful, their extremities are handled with precision, and every part of the nude shows an understanding of anatomy and of the decisiveness the spontaneous movements of our body have. The draperies are conceived and disposed with a fine sense of symmetry and a grandiose manner of folding, but they lack any sense of exaggeration, those of the females being graceful without affectation. We see here imitation of the antique, but not in the false manner of some who believe that they have perfectly acquired the character of the antique by leaving all the hardness of marble in their figures, which, as a result, seem mere coldly colored statues. (...)

The critics begin by finding fault with the choice of subject because the painter has shown an event the historians have not recorded. One could almost say that this imperfection is extrinsic to painting itself; nevertheless, in our opinion, that could reasonably be excused. Since the poet is permitted to introduce some episode into the history that he is ornamenting with his verse, the painter ought to have the same liberty, for this is the license which the two orders of nature's imitators have in common, as was already accorded them by the poet Horace. Further, we are dealing with a historical fact of such obscurity that we are not sure whether the defenders of our liberty were indeed called Horatii or Curiatii. (...)