What Is Apollo And Diana Attack The Queen Of Thebes?

Jacques-Louis David, a French painter during the neoclassical art period, began his art career painting a few mythology figures and narratives and then later on became an active supporter of the French Revolution therefore influenced the stories for which he depicted in his paintings. In this essay, I will analyze the formal qualities or elements of art such as color, implied motion, and space used as well to analyze the historical/religious context of one of his early paintings before the big transition to the creation of politically influenced paintings.
Jacques-Louis David created the painting of, Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe, in 1772 (Figure 1). This painting is oil on canvas with an approximate size of 48 by 61 ½ inches. At first glance, this painting had no visible brush strokes and had a very smooth and glossy surface. The art canvas is medium-sized and details were fairly visible, but it required me to look closer to see more detail. At the center of the canvas, there is a woman dressed in white and wearing a red cloak and surrounding her are the dying bodies of about 13 individuals. She …show more content…
Why did they murder these individuals? How are these individuals related to the woman? To help visualize the brief description in the previous paragraph and better understand what I will analyze throughout this paper, this painting conveys the story of Niobe and her 14 children. In this painting, “Niobe, the queen of Thebes, shelters her youngest daughter from the arrows of Apollo and Diana, who have already slaughtered her other children. Their corpses litter the foreground of the painting. This violent scene, drawn from Ovid 's Metamorphoses, illustrates what ensues when Niobe refuses to sacrifice to the goddess Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, and boasts about her own wealth, power, and fertility. As punishment, the goddess orders her children to kill Niobe 's seven daughters and seven sons” (Dallas Museum of