DAVID d'Angers

French sculptor (original name Pierre-Jean David) called after his birthplace to distinguish him from the painter Jacques-Louis David. The son of a sculptor, he won the Prix de RomeGLOSSARYA scholarship, founded concurrently with the French Academy in Rome (1666), that enabled prize-winning students at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris to spend a period (usually 4 years) in Rome at the state's expense. Prizes for architecture began to be awarded regularly in 1723, and prizes for engravers and musicians were added in the 19th century. The prizes were meant to perpetuate the academic tradition and during the 18th and 19th centuries winning the award was the traditional stepping stone to the highest honours for painters and sculptors. Many distinguished artists (as well as many nonentities) were Prix de Rome winners, notably David, Fragonard, and Ingres among painters and Clodion, Girardon, and Houdon among sculptors. The prizes are still awarded and the system has been adopted by other countries. in 1811 and was in Rome until 1816, when he returned to France via London, in order to see the Elgin marbles (which had just been bought for the British Museum) and to meet Flaxman, to whom he carried a letter of introduction from Canova. Canova was the main influence on him and his rather chilly classicism is redeemed by his great technical skill. His Bourcke and Foy monuments (1821 and 1825, both in Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris), the bloodless Racine (1827, La Ferté Milon, Racine's birthplace), and the bombastic Philipoemen (1837, Louvre) are examples of the Pompier (pompous) style, against which younger painters (though not sculptors) were already rebelling.

After the 1848 Revolution he was imprisoned and then exiled to Brussels. He visited Greece in 1852, but was horrified by the neglect of ancient monuments, the total absence of any surviving artistic impulse, and by the vandalism perpetrated upon his Greek Girl Mourning (1827), which he had given as a monument to the patriot Botzaris, who had died with Byron at Missolonghi. He was allowed to return to Paris in 1853, but ill-health prevented further work.

His most important works are the 500-odd portrait medallions, representing almost every major figure of the time. He presented a cast of each, with casts of his other works, to his native Angers. Many other French museums have works: there is a portraitGLOSSARYThe Roman portrait bust survived in the form of life-sized reliquaries of saints, but it was in 15th century Florence that the individual features and character of a contemporary sitter were accurately recorded by sculptors such as Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Mino da Fiesole and the Rossellino. A similar degree of realism occurs in 15th century tomb sculpture. The equestrian portrait, based on antique statues such as the Marcus Aurelius monument (Rome, Campidoglio), was revived in the 14th century. Two examples in fresco are Simone Martini's Guidoriccio (c. 1328; Siena, Palazzo Pubblico) and the posthumous portrait of Sir John Hawkwood (1436; Florence, Cathedral) by Uccello, which gives the illusion of a 3-dimensional statue seen from below. The Venetian Republic ordered imposing monuments from Donatello (1447; Gattarnelata, Padua) and Verrocchio (14799; Colleoni, Venice), whilst other statesmen ordered their own images to be erected in public places, directly relating themselves to the military heroes of ancient Rome. Another form of political portraiture derived from antiquity was the commemorative portrait medal designed by artists such as Pisanello. The carved or painted profile portrait became popular in the 1450s. The realism of the clear, flattened image, painted under the influence of Flemish examples by the Pollaiuolo brothers, Piero della Francesca and Botticelli, was superseded by the three-quarter and frontal portrait, psychologically more complex, such as Leonardo's enigmatic Mona Lisa (Paris, Louvre) with her momentary smile or Andrea del Sarto's arresting Portrait of a Man (London, National Gallery). The 16th century portrait became generalized, Lotto's Andrea Odoni (1527; Royal Collection) being an idealized concept of a collector rather than an individual. Group portraits, decorating whole rooms, include the narrative scenes of the Gonzaga court painted by Mantegna (completed 1474; Mantua, Palazzo Ducale) and the elaborate schemes commissioned by the Farnese family in Rome from Vasari (1546; Palazzo della Cancelleria) and Salviati (after 1553; Palazzo Farnese). Portraits were also incorporated into religious narratives, as in Ghirlandaio's fresco cycle painted for Giovanni Tornabuoni in S. Maria Novella, Florence (1486-90). bust of Jeremy Bentham in the Senate House of the University of London.