Patroklos

David painted this in Rome in 1780, three years into the scholarship that had taken him there as a Prix de Rome laureate. It is an academie, a life study of a hired model, the sort of exercise every student did to master the human body. He set the figure seen from behind, foreshortened and twisting against a rock, with a bundle of arrows scattered on the ground. Only later did viewers attach the name Patroclus, the companion of Achilles killed at Troy, to that anguished pose. When David sent the study to the Paris Salon of 1781 it was already admired as more than a class exercise. Within a decade he would be the painter of the Revolution, and the clean, sculpted light he practiced here on a nameless model is the light he brought to those first great history pictures.