_Jacques Louis David_ first satisfied the new requirements, and in so doing lent to French classicism, if only for a few years, a certain touch of far greater vivacity. He it was who carried through, in all its consequence, that reformation in taste which Vien had sought in externals, in costume, furniture and decoration; who inspired the gems painted by Vien with republican pathos, and became in this way the great herald of that age which read Plutarch and made Paris into a modern Sparta. David, _Prix de Rome_ after three successive failures, still came from that "corrupt epoch" against which Republican prudery was so excited. At the age of twenty-six he had already painted Soffits, in the manner of his kinsman "Boucher, to say it with respect." But the journey to Rome converted Saul into Paul. In 1775 Vien, on his appointment as director of the Roman Academy, had taken him to Italy as his best pupil, and hardly dreamt at that time that this young man would strike out on such an entirely new path from his Roman studies. He did not wait for the Revolution to be converted; when the hour struck he was ready. Thus his first pictures were in a manner the prelude to the Revolution. In them he had already quite consciously entered upon the road along which he was to go later. His "Oath of the Horatii" and his "Brutus," both painted in Rome in 1784, proclaimed his programme. The little, rosy loves, the doves of Venus, and all the charming frivolity and gallantry of _rococo_, received their final dismissal, and rough men walked in their stead. He broke his staff over all that he had previously venerated, and declared loudly that he had sinned when in his youth he had believed in the flowery palette of _rococo_, and completed in tender tones those ceiling frescoes which Fragonard had commenced in the house of Mdlle. Guimard. Capricious frivolities had to make way for a manlier art, matter "that was worthy to rivet the gaze of a free nation upon itself." Already, long before the taking of the Bastille, the painting of young David was valued by the rising generation as the artistic embodiment of their political ideas, imbibed while they were still at school. When the "Horatii" was completed it was not only old Pompeo Battoni who exclaimed, when he saw the picture in David's Roman studio, "_Tu ed io soli siamo pittori, pel rimanente si puo gettarlo nel fiume._" In Paris his success was universal; all the critics were unanimous in praise; David was the man after the heart of the age, for his picture was the first which spoke clearly and perceptibly of the pathos of the revolution which stood at the threshold. People saw in it an "example of patriotism which knew no obstacles," since not even love for their sister, who was betrothed to the enemy, prevailed upon the Horatii to refrain from combat with the Curiati. His next picture, "Brutus" as he received the lictors, when they bring him the bodies of