Jacques Louis David and Beethoven: art and music in the late eighteenth century

I would also say that Beethoven, like David, continued to use form and traditional mediums from the Classical era in music, but with more personal flair and freedom. Do you think the same could be said of David?

This question suggests yet another reason that Beethoven tends to be classified as a Romantic Neoclassicist composer while David tends to be classified as a Neoclassicist artist whose work shows early Romantic flourishes. Beethoven began his career with a more controlled use of sound, while he gradually moved to displays of greater individualism, freedom, and open emotionalism in his work. In contrast, David's earlier paintings, especially the work he did that was inspired by the French Revolution, like "The Death of Marat" shows a favoring of openly emotional themes, albeit rendered with a formulaic and balanced Neoclassical sense of proportion. However, as David's career wore on, to the modern eye, his work seems more and more conservative in its subject and style. His depictions of Napoleon, although they often have striking and emotional lines in places, seem heroic in a fairly standard manner rather than challenging to the status of the emperor in any way, while "Marat" is much more ambiguous in terms of how the artist feels about the subject. Because David became a court painter of Napoleon, he could not openly challenge the leader's beliefs or position of authority. Art in the service of politics to some extent requires the artist to stifle some of his or her iconoclastic feelings. Neoclassicism shows a great deal of obedience to form, and as David's ideology became more obedient to another man's will, he lost rather than gained freedom as an artist. Unlike Beethoven, his flair and freedom was dimmed, although he still remained a great artist and a master of his technique and all of his works have the power to excite and inspire the viewer, even if they did not challenge the artistic assumptions of the day, as did Beethoven's later compositions, which often moved listeners to unexpected tears.