阿波罗与狄安娜射杀尼俄柏的孩子

Jacques-Louis David painted this in 1772 to win the Prix de Rome, the scholarship that sent the best young French painters to study in Italy. He lost. The jury turned him down in a vote that seems to have been settled in advance, one of a run of rejections that left the ambitious young man so despairing he is said to have tried to starve himself. The style here is the soft Rococo he would later reject completely on his way to becoming the stern painter of the Revolution. The subject is a warning against pride. Niobe had boasted that her many children made her greater than the goddess Leto, who had only two. Those two were Apollo and Diana, and you see them in the sky, shooting Niobe's sons and daughters down one by one.