The French Revolution as blasphemy

About this book

"In this book William Pressly analyzes Zoffany's two extraordinary works on the French Revolution - Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792, and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers - both painted in about 1794."--BOOK JACKET. "Pressly places both paintings in their historical contexta time of heightened anti-French hysteria - and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral themes, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes."--BOOK JACKET. "From his profoundly conservative point of view, the Revolution turned "rightful" hierarchies upside down - the domination of men over women, of whites over blacks, of aristocrats over the rest of society, and Christianity over atheism and blasphemy. Zoffany's paintings, Pressly shows, have a religious dimension that transforms them, giving them a higher symbolic purpose. By alluding in them to such sacred subjects as the Crucifixion, the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Last Supper, Zoffany broke new ground, conveying Christian themes in a radically new format."--BOOK JACKET.