Description
Book SynopsisOne of Jacques-Louis David's most ambitious and darkly enigmatic paintings, "Leonidas at the Pass of Thermopylae", hangs in the Louvre, largely ignored. Focusing on this painting, this work embarks on a discourse about the perception of the body, sexuality, and subjectivity in early nineteenth-century European art.
Trade Review“An outstanding work of great importance. . . . Chains uses art to make broader claims about subjectivity in general and gay subjectivity in particular that are entirely novel and provocative.”
—Ewa Lajer-Burcharth,Harvard University
“This is an unusually intelligent and original study. It offers, by way of a detailed discussion of David’s most significant and ideologically charged late painting, Leonidas at the Pass of Thermopylae, a truly novel perspective on the larger significance of new tendencies in French neoclassical painting and aesthetics in the complex and politically fraught postrevolutionary period of the early nineteenth century.”
—Alex Potts,University of Michigan
“The writings are thoughtfully arranged and the images included are mostly color. Substantive notes and an appendix enhance the text.”
—T.L. Wilson Choice
“Kantian and psychoanalytic versions of subjectivity sit back-to-back. To read this lucid and complex book-–also beautifully produced-–is to feel how these chains, intertwining, tug at us still.”
—Brendan Prenderville Art History
“Intellectual historians will no doubt have much to say, pro and con, about the claims that surround Padiyar’s account of Leonidas at Thermopylae. Whatever their arguments, however, they will learn a great deal about art along the way. Art historians, for their part, will encounter an important emerging voice in the discipline that defies safe predictability.”
—Thomas Crow Journal of Modern History
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Heroism After the French Revolution: Davids Leonidas at Thermopylae
2. Inheriting Greek Eros: Anacreontism and Homosexual Desire
3. Kant and the Postrevolutionary Subject: The Aesthetics of Freedom
4. Subject and Surface: Canova and the Reinvention of Classical Sculpture
5. Sade/David, in Chains
Appendix
Select Bibliography
Index
