Oath of the Horatii pupil Jean-Germaine Drouais who had himself recently won the Prix de Rome. Ultimately, David's picture manifests a progressive outlook, deeply influenced by Enlightenment ideas, that eventually contributed to the overthrow of the monarchy. As the French Revolution approached, paintings increasingly referred to the loyalty to the state rather than the family or the church. Painted five years before the Revolution, the "Oath of the Horatii" reflects the political tensions of the period. In 1789, David painted "The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons", a picture that was also a royal commission. Shortly afterward, the king went up
Tennis Court Oath the Third Estate, such as reforms that threatened the privileges of the nobility and clergy. In France at that time, the deputies' fears, even if wrong, were reasonable and the importance of the oath goes above and beyond its context. The oath was both a revolutionary act, and an assertion that political authority derived from the people and their representatives rather than from the monarch himself. Their solidarity forced Louis XVI to order the clergy and the nobility to join with the Third Estate in the National Assembly in order to give the illusion that he controlled the National Assembly.