Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) studied in Rome between 1775 and 1780, immersing himself in Roman sculpture and Caravaggesque light. Back in Paris he received a royal commission in 1784: a scene from Roman foundation legend — the Horatii brothers swearing before their father to die for Rome.

The story comes from a seventh-century BCE war between Rome and Alba Longa. Rome chooses the three Horatii brothers, Alba Longa the three Curiatii; the fate of both cities will be decided by a duel among the six. David set his canvas at the moment of the oath — the instant before action: the three brothers stretch out their arms, the father raises the swords, and on the right a group of women (one of the brothers is married to a Curiatius daughter, another engaged to one) sits in mourning. The triangular composition, the three-arched interior, the geometry of the classical uniforms — all are a deliberate rejection of Rococo's ornamented softness.

The political reading was immediate. Although the commission came from the crown, when the painting was shown at the Salon of 1785 the educated public read it as the suppression of private feeling (the women's mourning) by public duty (the men's oath) — a visual manifesto for the Enlightenment ideal of 'virtue'. Five years later the Bastille would fall, and David would become the official painter of the Revolution, applying the same compositional logic to *The Death of Marat*.

The painting hangs today in the Louvre. It is treated as the founding monument of Neoclassicism; nineteenth-century European academic painting derived its core template from it. The work is also one of the clearest examples of how history painting can serve as an ideological instrument.