In his paintings of the early 1780s, culminating in his celebrated Oath of the Horatii (1784-5), David challenged the prevailing classicized rococo aesthetic in which he had been trained, by proffering works that presented a new system of corporal signs and signification. Influenced by his study of sculpture and Enlightenment precepts of the body described in the scientific and medical literature as well as by the gestural theories of Diderot, David forged a powerful new aesthetic of the human form in which every element of the body radiated meaning. In his paintings of the 1780s, the eloquent body served to communicate not only the narrative but a complex nexus of ideas. Critics of the time often alluded to the multiple meanings of David's paintings as well as to what appeared to be a puzzling moral ambiguity that challenged the viewer to consider the multivalent implications of content.

For David, the quintessential artist of the Enlightenment, painting was a branch of knowledge, a visual language that could lead, like other forms of philosophical inquiry, to a higher understanding of the human condition. Because he wanted his paintings both to express and inspire thought, he typically chose themes from antiquity that were characterized by moral or ethical conflicts, often involving a clash of the political and private spheres. This is certainly the case in works such as Belisarius Begging Alms (1781), Andromache Mourning Hector (1783) and the Oath of the Horatii (1784-5).

For the Salon of 1787 David decided to make the expression of moral and ethical meanings more complex by presenting two pendant paintings that were seemingly very disparate in theme and style as well as narrative source: the Death of Socrates inspired by Plato and the Loves of Paris and Helen from the Illiad. Due to illness David could not complete the Paris and Helen in time and the pendants were not exhibited together. As a result, their inter-related meanings remained unnoticed and unexamined. In this paper I will explore the philosophical content of these pendants that their inter-relationship reveals, beginning with the significant contradistinction in embodiment of the respective protagonists--the powerful, heroic Socrates and the ephebic Paris. Corporal configuration and style in these paintings in conjunction with narrative content constitute a visual language rich in meaning. As we shall see, David's pendants engage directly a number of Enlightenment ideas about the nature of the body and the mind/spirit it contains.