Figure 2.1 Noël Hallé: Trajan Showing Mercy, oil on canvas, 265 × 302 cm, 1765. Musée des Beaux
Arts, Marseille.
Source: Musée des BeauxArts, Marseille, France/Bridgeman Images.History painters were expected to engage in a suitably elevated and elaborate form of creativity that
involved erudition (the study of history, literature, geography), drawings from antique prototypes
(especially sculptures), initial figure sketches from the live model and compositional sketches, as
preparation for their highly complex works (Percy, 2000, 462–463). Although their inspiration can be
traced back to the forms and subjects of antiquity, these sources had been mediated and codified in the
seventeenth century by artists such as Poussin and Charles Le Brun; the work of the latter providing a
paradigmatic academic approach. In sculpture, the example of the ancients was again paramount, in, for
example, funerary monuments, allegorical and mythological subjects. The baroque idiom of Gian Lorenzo
Bernini (1598–1680) was commonly emulated and was felt to provide the “grandeur” required for large
public or funerary commissions. Due to its association with liberal education, reason and abstract thought,