How Neo-Classicism Gave Birth to Leftism

What the Oath of Horatii can teach us about the dangers of “Facts over Feelings”

“Midway upon the journey of our life

  I found myself within a forest dark,

  For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Everything in nature yearns for balance. When an imbalance appears in any natural structure, such as in human societies, its equal and opposite imbalance is the culprit. 

Leftism is a convenient label to describe the irrational and the profane direction that modern society has taken. It describes environmentalists who advocate for veganism to reduce pollution, without considering the immense harm that monocrop agriculture and factory made foods do to the ecosystem. It describes feminists who find it debasing work to serve their family but empowering to do the same work for a corporation that will discard them when they are no longer useful. It describes men who believe they can turn into women and vice versa. Leftism is, in essense, a politics of the destruction of hierarchy and is simply the Gen Z word for Marxism. 

But Leftism and Marxism alike, have roots in another imbalance that incited them in the first place. This imbalance is the rejection of the human soul and subjectivity, and the over-glorification of material reason and rationality. If we wish to write a politic that is truly aligned with our better natures, we must first understand what gave birth to the diseases of society we face today, lest we are trapped perpetually a cycle of re-creating the problems we wish to solve.

There is one artist whose work perfectly encapsulates the era that gave birth to Leftism. Jaques Louis David’s work is the aesthetic of modern “right wing” circles, an impotent group whose entire existence is about reacting rather than creating. However, let us not conflate the painter himself, with the movement that has pastiched his work into their propaganda.

David, The Painter of the Enlightenment

Jaques Louis David was a French neo-classical painter born in 1748 and was an active supporter of the French Revolution. He later aligned himself with Napoleon Bonaparte and his paintings formed a major part of Napoleon’s propaganda campaign. When David was a child, his father was slain in a duel and his mother sent him away to be raised by his uncles. He trained at the Royal Academy in Paris, which today is called the Louvre. 

There is one painting in particular by David that captures the origins of leftism in the west. In 1784, David painted “The Oath of the Horatii,” a masterful painting that celebrates reason and diminishes the human heart. This painting is not only about the fomenting resentment preceding the French Revolution, but also about our world today and its reaction to Leftism. 

It is said that war is no place for feelings. There is no room for emotions when men must be slain and blood must be spilled. This is how men think about the morbid task of the defender of the realm. However, I resist this idea strongly (perhaps because I am a woman, but so be it!) The heart is what guides the individual toward justice, and thus tells him what it is honourable to kill and die for. If the warrior did not have a heart, he would not be stirred to defend his city or his family. If the cool and calculated general making rational decisions did not listen to his heart initially, he would not deny his comfort and subdue his fear to undertake the bloody labours of war. 

This painting by David depicts a story from the first book of Livy in Roman Antiquities by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. In this story, there are two waring cities: Rome and Alba. Instead of the entire city going to war, each city agrees to choose three men to defend the city in a duel to the death. The city with the victorious fighter would win the war. Rome sends three brothers from the Horatii family, and Alba sends three brothers from the Curiatii family. Unfortunately, the families have already intermarried. A Horatii brother has a Curiatii wife and a Curiatii brother has a Horatii wife. As a result, no matter the outcome of the fight, there will be tragedy for the family. David depicts the juxtaposition of the masculine and the feminine responses to the sacrifices of war in the composition of the characters in his painting. 

“Il y a des gestes sublimes que toute l’éloquence oratoire ne rendra jamais”

“There exist such sublime gestures that all of oratory eloquence can never capture”

Diderot, Essais Sur la Peinture

In this painting, David had invented a new way to paint human emotion and philosophy through gesture alone. Before David, the pervading school of thought in the arts was that the facial expression was the primary place where emotion is expressed. This was described in detail by LeBrun in “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière” (1698). David resisted this argument by demonstrating how emotion can be displayed in every line and gesture of the whole body of the individual. 

The men in The Oath of Horatii are painted with severe, straight lines. Every line from the leg to the cloak, the foot to the calf muscle, the harsh lines of the high contrast shadows, are straight and unbending. There is no grey area where the viewer may interpret the detail. The straight lines are a visual metaphor for the strictness of the brothers’ principle that does not capitulate to their emotions.

The women on the right side of the painting languish in pain, in curved lines and low contrast shadows. The lines that form the arm and head of one woman flow to the head of her Curiatii sister in law leaning against her shoulder. Their bodies are so heavy they can barely support their own weight. The woman’s arm hangs down at her side. Their bodies and their poses are curved and round, a stark juxtaposition against the hard composition of the men, discarded to the side as a distraction unbalancing the painting.

This depiction of the women denigrates their emotions and casts them as something weak to be overcome. Rather, the deaths that the women mourn should be visually illustrated as equal to the cause for which the men fight. In a different story, their love for their husbands would be a strength that motivates and strengthens them. The visual language of this painting does the opposite. The woman are visually weighed down by their love for their husbands as if it is a liability and a flaw. Herein lies the flaw of the nineteenth century enlightenment that returns, transformed and perverted, into what we know today to be Leftism.

A hypothesis on the Birth of Leftism

Any emotional truth that is suppressed transforms and festers into something sinister, and when it eventually resurfaces, it takes revenge for being locked away. Leftism is the ugly perverted face of the emotions of the people suppressed and locked away because they were seen as a hinderance to reason, rather than an intuitive spiritual antennae that can evaluate ideas on a different level. By ignoring the importance of family and the emotional world in the making of good societies, this painting’s subject reflects the enlightenment era’s idolisation of rationality. The idolisation of rationality and reason is Man’s Pride. It is this Pride, arguably that we are paying for today. 

The enlightenment and neo-classicism are inextricably linked, as any true artistic movement is linked to the pervading philosophy of the people it emerges from. The enlightenment was a period of time in which man made a false idol of his reason. This idea shaped the art work that was done in this time period in serious ways. Artists glorified material reality, while denigrating or omitting the influence of the spiritual. This was true both in the subject matters chosen, as well as in the execution.

Post-modernist thinking is the direct schizophrenic outcome of these suppressed emotions crawling back out of humanity’s psyche with a vengeance. Where once there was only one objective truth that ignored subjectivity and intuition completely, there are now billions of “truths” as each claims his own version of reality is equal to everyone else’s. Where once the grey area in subjective experiences and ideas was ignored completely in favour stark contrasts and severely cut definitions, today there is nothing but grey area and to define anything is a thought crime. Where once man did nothing but think and excoriated feeling, now thinking is outlawed. Post-modernism is an unconscious revenge of the collective psyche against the unfeeling severity of the enlightenment.

Unbalanced Composition, Unbalanced Thinking

In order to properly understand any work of art, it must be viewed as a whole and not as little pieces cut up to accentuate its most aesthetic details. Modern people tend to cut images when we look at them. When viewed in its entirety, the imbalanced composition of The Oath of Horatii becomes unavoidable and uncomfortable. Step back and look at this painting again. Where is the centre of the painting? It is the father holding the swords. The figures to the left of the painting are large, painted high in contrast, and overpowering. The figures to the right of the father are diminutive, further back, and low in contrast. The whole painting, if put on a scale, would tip to the left. The three hallways in the background of the painting serve to remind us of this very fact.

The painting is like a frozen tableau with actors rather than a natural scene captured from life. This is because the subjects are detached from the background in stark relief. The background is a stage set and their clothes are merely costumes. Their poses are so exaggerated because enlightenment thinking banishes nuance as a liability. The unidimensional emotions of the subjects reminds one of characters in a stage-play rather than real people facing a real situation.

Impressionism was, in many ways, a rebellion against this very severity as it blended backgrounds and subjects into an indecipherable soup. Faces and gestures became so blurred and gained so many dimensions that the scene lost its meaning altogether. Impressionism was a temper tantrum against the enlightenment.

The Marriage of Intuition and Reason

David himself reveals how the philosophy of his era is imbalanced and therefore incomplete. The masculine and the feminine must complete each other, as do reason and intuition. Neither is more important than the other, and neither is more valuable. Yet enlightenment (neo-classical) art paints the feminine and the emotional as less important. Today, the opposite extreme occurs in art where the masculine is diminished and the scientific method is not only overturned but it is largely ignored. This too is not healthy. 

Art cannot lie and often reveals truths of which the artist himself was not consciously aware. The Oath of the Horatii is a masterful painting that is true art because it is of its time. It preserves the issues of the enlightenment and it would be foolish of us not to take heed from its warning. When we pursue extremes, we reject reality and what we rejected may not take it so lightly.

In our battle against Leftism today, let us not be pulled into an eternal mimetic battle of overcompensation. So long as Leftism feeds humanity's desire for nuance, reason cannot reign except as a heartless tyrant. We must marry intuition and reason again so they can temper one another.