学习笔记丨雅克-路易•大卫

读英语看中文，略读，有时间看一下这位艺术家的作品，结合法国历史来看。20220906

No, monsieur. Because you are a great lord, you think you're a great genius?

Nobility, rank, position, fortune, how proud they make a man feel. What have you done to deserve such advantages?

Put yourself to the trouble of being born, nothing more. For the rest. you're a very ordinary man.

Avoiding bankruptcy meant more taxes. So, awkward questions were being asked about why the nobility and the clergy were tax-exempt, while the scarecrow poor were supposed to empty their pockets

Hope and desperation in equal parts. Hope from a representative assembly, the Estate's General elected from thousands of meetings all over France. But desperation too, because it was happening at the worst possible time. Harvest wipeouts, soaring prices. Put hope and desperation together, and what do you get? The political equivalent of nitroglycerine

Would the deputies do it the old way, meeting as three separate orders, nobles, clergy and commoners, or would they do it the new way, and for the first time come together as a single national assembly

For the first time, aristocrats, clergy and bourgeoisie were meeting together without the king's permission. Arms stretch, bodies embrace, life had caught up with art. David's Rome reborn was the new France

Why the anger? Because people were still hungry. Bread prices had gone through the roof, and people had discovered you couldn't eat votes. Someone was to blame