Mars von Venus entwaffnet

Jacques-Louis David had spent his life painting the stern virtues of Rome and, later, the glory of Napoleon, so when the emperor fell David was pushed out of France and settled in Brussels, unwilling to go back. He began this in 1822, past 70, and told friends it would be his last picture and that he meant to surpass himself in it. What he chose was not a battlefield but its opposite. Mars, the god of war, sits with his weapons being lifted away from him by Venus and the three Graces, one of them slipping the sandal from his foot. The old painter of soldiers was disarming his own subject. He sent it to Paris in 1824, where younger Romantic painters now held the Salon and the cool clarity of his style already looked like the past. He died the next year, struck by a carriage in Brussels.