Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews an exhibition of the paintings of Jacques-Louis David at the Louvre in Paris

SIMPLICITY is the key - the sudden, stunning clarity of a picture that seems, at a stroke, to do away with the old order of painting and inaugurate the new. In a cold, forbidding atrium, three Roman youths are making a pledge to their father. The physical act that seals their oath looks to the modern viewer like a pro-totype of the Nazi salute. The embodiment of martial valour, they are presented as a virtual frieze - a single, gesturing silhouette presented in triplicate.

The salute is also a reaching out: those three hands, groping in space, await with evidently itchy fingers the three swords that the father holds aloft. To the side, a trio of women swoon or cower with their children, the feminine antithesis to this display of steely masculine resolve.

The Oath of the Horatii, centre-piece of the Louvre's 'Jacques-Louis David', bore no more than a coin-cidental relationship to the French Revolution, which this show is meant to celebrate. David, brilliant propa-gandist as he was, would later claim a political significance for the painting, as a proto-Republican manifesto, that it never originally possessed. The Oath is, rather, a brilliant, summary image of the Enlightenment, the product of a secular age virtually obsessed with the definition of secular virtue. A great painter's response to the ethical climate of his times, it is, too, a subversive, difficult picture, and it is this - rather than its status as revolutionary harbinger or supposed invocation to virtue and amor patria - that accounts for its power, its shocking singularity.

Consider the tale that it illustrates. It is not pleasant, nor does it score particularly high on the scale of moral edification. The warring kingdoms of...

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