The Intervention of the Sabine Women — Jacques-Louis David
One of the great moments of a pre-modern feminism, a demonstration of the power of women to stop even a bitter war and thirst for revenge.
Paintings often manage to be vehicles of vindication, works in which the authors operate to transmit to a broader public their requests, desires, or wishes for the world they observe.
Jacques-Louis David was no exception, and he lived through convulsive times in which he used his art to give voice to his ideas and thoughts.
In the case of The Intervention of the Sabine Women, the French painter deals with one of the most famous episodes in Roman history: the abduction of the Sabine Women.
Drawing on such outstanding sources as Titus Livy’s History of Rome or Plutarch’s Life of Romulus, David narrates a little-known passage of the myth through his painting.
Usually, the most represented part of that legend corresponded to the moment in which some incipient Romans decided to attack the Sabines to take their women and thus be able to found a people with a lineage and a future in successive generations. That particular passage, that bloody scene, is the best known of the story.
