If we look more closely we can discern an alien spirit behind the apparently suave portrayal. Despite his subject the young artist’s combative vein emerges. True, Mars is overthrown, but with what ill grace he accepts his fate. It might be Danton himself, the great revolutionary, overthrown by his enemies. A face expressing such fury of despair, so spasmodically clenched a hand was never portrayed by any of the playful Rococo painters, and can we not discern something of the energetic Napoleonic spirit in Minerva’s conquering pose? David must have been of a naturally passionate and excitable temperament--possibly inherited from his father who was killed in a duel when the boy was eleven years old. As a young artist he applied for the Prix de Rome, and when he did not at once receive it from the Academy, was about to take his life in despair and was only persuaded by a friend to abandon the idea of starving himself to death after three days of fasting with that purpose in view. Later on, in extenuation of this episode, he said: “This postponement of my journey to Italy was prejudicial to my development, as I was four years too late in abandoning the bad style of the French painters.” Like all reformers he believed that everything produced by the generation preceding him was bad, although today all that we can say is that it was different! When, in 1775, he did actually set out for Rome, and his friends at parting advised him to beware the influence of the antique, he replied proudly, “Antique art cannot seduce me--it lacks fire and passion.” Before long, however, he was in thrall to the classic art of Italy, and within a few years his art had undergone a complete transformation, not only in form but in subject. One of the first pictures that he sent from Italy in 1781 to be exhibited in Paris was “The Blind Belisarius,” now in the Museum at Lille (a later version, painted in 1784, in the Louvre) (Fig. 5). Belisarius, once an all-powerful general of the Roman Emperor Justinian, crouches, old, blind and poor by the side of the road. The saviour of Rome and conqueror of Carthage has fallen into disgrace with a master jealous of his fame, and is reduced to beggary. A rich Roman lady, with tears in her eyes, is placing alms in the old man’s helmet held out by a youth, while a passing soldier recognizes his old commander with surprise and pain. Our artist has turned his back on the cheerful Olympian themes of the allegoric-mythological school, and with this tragic subject descends to that world of sorrow and misery in which, but a few years later, he was to see his own nation engulfed. He is still preoccupied, however, with classic themes seen through the eyes of that antiquity in which he had submerged himself. He has not yet completely achieved his individual style, and Boucher’s influence is superseded by that of another French painter who represented the classic style one hundred years earlier--Poussin.