In 540 BC, three Roman boys, Titus Tarquin, Arruns Tarquin, and their cousin Brutus – so dubbed because he was considered as dumb as a brute – were trekking to the Oracle at Delphi. Surely the oracle would predict that one of the Tarquin boys would be king; after all, they were the sons of Tarquin the Proud, Rome’s ruling monarch. Brutus was only brought along so that the ruling family did not look arrogant.
The boys entered a misty cave and laid eyes on the Pythia the priestess. She rolled her eyes back, muttered the words “kiss” and “mother,” and it was decided – whoever kissed his mother first would be the next king of Rome. The Tarquin brothers spent the trip home strategizing and arguing about how best to get hold of their mother while Brutus rode along behind them.
Titus and Arruns reached the palace and darted off to kiss the queen. Behind them stood Brutus, his face plastered with dirt. Once the brothers caught sight of him, they laughed and mocked their oaf of a cousin for slipping off his horse – until they realized that the fall was very much intentional. When the trio entered Roman territory land hours earlier, Brutus had fallen to the earth and kissed his motherland. That is how Lucius Junius Brutus became the next king of Rome and the founder of the Roman Republic.
Victoria Coates’s new book, David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art, is a monument to great men like Brutus, who were willing to sacrifice anything, including themselves, for liberty. In each chapter, Coates uses an array of sources to tell the story of exceptional artists and statesmen from ancient Athens to 20th century Spain who either fought for freedom or enshrined it through art. She interprets works like The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and The Last Breath of Marat as tributes to the free political system that encouraged their existence, whether through prosperity and trade as in Rembrandt’s Dutch Republic, or through the inspirational force of democratic ideals as in Jacques-Louis David’s France.
Though David’s Sling is a compelling review of glorious works and men, it is neither a history of democracy nor an analysis of the character of art in democracies. That is, it does not consider the nuances and maladies of democracy itself. Coates understands artworks from antiquity to modernity using a singular, contemporary conception of freedom – the freedom to pursue one’s ends –, which she sees as the defining feature of democracy generally. In some cases, this simplifies the works profiled and confuses their meaning.
Simultaneously, the book appears to be what Tocqueville would call an aristocratic history of free societies: Rather than analyzing “general causes” or the general character of art in a democracy, it seeks to understand democracy by examining the outstanding works that commemorate it. This emphasis on individual greatness, political and artistic, has the welcome consequence of demonstrating the necessity of infusing democracy with features of aristocracy.
Tocqueville, unlike Coates, was critical of democratic art because he was wary of aspects of the democratic character. Democrats, he wrote, “want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.” They also tended to materialism, individualism, and lived turbulent lives with little time for leisure. If left uninstructed, Tocqueville warned, these “natural inclinations” would result in submission to a despotic government and mediocrity. As an antidote to the effect of certain democratic mores on culture, he tacitly suggested infusing democracy with touches of aristocracy, a regime that he wrote treasured glory, “heroic virtues,” leisure, “a certain loftiness to the human spirit,” and “enjoyments of the mind.”
David’s Sling opens with the sculptor Phidias’s Parthenon, a work that exemplifies Tocqueville’s argument for infusing democratic culture with elements of aristocracy. The Parthenon was a massive, airy complex featuring images of god-like Athenians as well as a magnificent centerpiece: a statue of Athena adorned with gold and ivory. It would not have come into being without the great statesman Pericles, who so masterfully controlled the virtues and vices of Athenian democracy that Thucydides dubbed Athens a “democracy in name only.” Like Pericles’ funeral oration, which reminded Athenians of the superiority of their government, the Parthenon served as a physical political education: It documented founding myths and portrayed civic rituals, all while telling citizens of Athenian exceptionalism.
It should be noted that this work, like others discussed in this volume, is exceptional. The Parthenon is further from Plato’s description of art and closer to his description of philosophy: Like philosophy, which is able to break out of the political boundaries in which it occurs and consider other regime types, the Parthenon is a self-aware reflection on the regime in which it was created. Art, on the other hand, is confined to the “horizons” of the regime in which it occurs; that is why Plato did not much like democratic art, which tended to appeal to the mass tastes of its audience.
Successive chapters of David’s Sling illustrate nicely how artists and politicians alike built on the Athenian model, often by immortalizing those who died for democratic ideals. One section describes a statue of Brutus aforementioned, who as consul killed his own traitorous sons for the sake of Roman freedom. Napoleon, Coates writes, would later place this bust in his palace, thinking that no one would accuse him of tyranny if they saw that he modeled himself on Brutus. The bust had obvious symbolic power: The mere ownership of it, in Napoleon’s eyes, legitimized him as the rightful heir to republican greatness.
Other works that Coates examines, like Michelangelo’s David and Monet’s Water Lilies, seem to be less about reminding citizens of modern democratic freedom and more about inspiring national pride by praising economic or military success. These works, Coates writes, could not have come into existence without the free political system that nurtured them, and so, they are monuments to this system. It may be that these works could not have been created in oppressive conditions, but great works have been created under political systems that are not democracies. It is odd to praise these works as monuments to democracy when it seems they could have just as easily been created in an aristocracy. Moreover, they do not explicitly praise democracy.
Coates brings together an assortment of exceptional artworks that are today considered bastions of national pride, and her end is a noble one. By cataloging great art that occurred in free societies, she reminds democrats to hold on to their freedom, which is hard won and easily lost, and which has, with the guidance of great statesmen, allowed them great happiness.
Jenna Lifhits is a Public Interest Fellow at the Washington Free Beacon.
