History Painting

About

History painting tells a significant story through human figures in action: episodes from the Bible, classical myth, ancient or national history, or great literature. Leon Battista Alberti praised such narrative, the istoria, in 1435, and the French Royal Academy placed it formally above portraiture, genre, landscape and still life in the 1660s. The pictures were usually large and meant to teach virtue.

Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) distilled patriotic sacrifice into a few taut gestures. Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe (1770) provoked debate by showing a recent battle in modern uniform, and Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) turned a national story into spectacle. Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) gave the grand format to a contemporary scandal. Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) showed that the tradition could survive into modernism, and artists still borrow its scale and rhetoric.