The Death of Camilla

Jacques Louis David

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Before painting his Neoclassical masterpiece The Oath of the Horatii (Musée du Louvre, Paris), David explored many episodes of the story in sketches. In this sheet, David portrays the death of Camilla in the aftermath of the battle between the ancient Roman and Alban tribes. To spare lives, each tribe had delegated three warriors to settle the dispute. The lone survivor of the contest, Horatius, has returned to find his sister, Camilla, grieving for her slain fiancé, a member of the Curiatii clan. In his anger over her unpatriotic display of emotion, Horatius kills her on the spot. Although he would ultimately choose an earlier and less unsavory moment of the story, David carried over into the final painted version the idea of using the female expression of grief as a counterpoint to male acts of bravery and patriotism. Themes of love and duty opposed held a strong attraction for David and would gain resonance during the political turmoil of the late eighteenth century.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art