Dido, Queen of Carthage

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Two studies for Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates (top, c. 1782, and middle, 1786) and the finished painting (bottom, 1787). In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

This sheet is a study for the pose and drapery of Crito, a wealthy Athenian disciple who, in the painting, sits by Socrates’ side and beseeches him not to drink the poison. The grid drawn in black chalk, known as squaring, would have assisted the artist in transferring the design from paper to canvas. 

Before painting his Neoclassical masterpiece The Oath of the Horatii (Musée du Louvre, Paris), David explored many episodes of the story in sketches. In this sheet, David portrays the death of Camilla in the aftermath of the battle between the ancient Roman and Alban tribes. To spare lives, each tribe had delegated three warriors to settle the dispute. The lone survivor of the contest, Horatius, has returned to find his sister, Camilla, grieving for her slain fiancé, a member of the Curiatii clan. In his anger over her unpatriotic display of emotion, Horatius kills her on the spot. 

David based this drawing on the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (Musée du Louvre, Paris), a celebrated antique sculpture that he may have seen in the collection of the Villa Borghese in Rome or at the Musée Napoléon in Paris, where it was transferred around 1810, after Napoléon purchased it. The marble sculpture, probably a Roman copy of a bronze Greek original of the second century B.C, was unearthed in Rome in the early seventeenth century. In 1620 the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini restored the work, creating the mattress and sheet. In rendering the back of the sculpture, David chose a low vantage point near the foot, creating a foreshortened figure with more defined musculature than that of the marble. 

Othryades was a Spartan hero. The sole survivor of a battle, he killed himself so as not to outlive his companions. Just before he died, he engraved his victory on his shield. The lively modeling of the clay expresses the tension of his body in this final surge of pride. The statue is a rough model for the plaster that Sergel, a Swedish sculptor who had made his name in Rome, presented to obtain admission to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in January 1779.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the 1640s, Castiglione produced a group of etchings that bring to life the world of Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, in which Pan is frequently invoked as lord of the flocks and patron of pastoral poetry. In this etching, the resting god, wearing his usual crown of pine, receives a second crown of grape leaves. The volcano must be Etna, for the rustic verse of both the Greek Theocritus (ca. 300–260 B.C.) and the Roman Virgil (70–19 B.C.) is set in Sicily.