History

History is a subject in art. The gallery holds 28 works in this subject in art, including works by Ștefan Popescu, Constantin Găvenea and Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

In the academic theory of art, "history" denoted the most ambitious form of painting and sculpture: the depiction of significant human events drawn from the Bible, classical antiquity, mythology, and allegory. The genre crystallised in the Italian Renaissance around Leon Battista Alberti's ideal of the *istoria*, a morally elevated multi-figure narrative, and was formally codified by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648 under Charles Le Brun. In 1669 the Academy's secretary André Félibien published the famous hierarchy of genres, placing history painting above portraiture, genre scenes, landscape, and still life on the grounds that only it could combine all the others while teaching virtue through noble subjects.

A history painting was judged by its capacity to stage a complex action legibly and movingly. It demanded mastery of the idealised human figure, expressive gesture, balanced composition, and learned iconography, often on a monumental scale. In Britain, Joshua Reynolds promoted these standards through his *Discourses* at the Royal Academy, defining the "Grand Manner" that lent the dignity of history to portraiture. The genre also rewarded erudition: viewers were expected to recognise episodes from Livy, Homer, or scripture.

Its canonical masters span two centuries. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) set the standard of restrained classicism that French artists revered as the *grand goût*. Jacques-Louis David recast that austerity into revolutionary Neoclassicism with the *Oath of the Horatii* (1784) and *The Death of Marat* (1793), the latter dubbed the "pietà of the Revolution." His pupil Antoine-Jean Gros chronicled the Napoleonic campaigns, while Eugène Delacroix shifted the genre toward Romantic colour and emotion in the *Barque of Dante* (1822) and *Liberty Leading the People* (1830).

Though history painting declined as an academic ideal after the mid-nineteenth century, its commemorative impulse migrated into public sculpture and the war memorial. The catastrophe of the World Wars produced a vast monumental culture—some 176,000 memorials were raised in France alone—shifting emphasis from "great men" to the ordinary fallen. This lineage survives in works such as the Romanian First and Second World War monuments and military cemeteries held in this collection, where the old grand genre's mission of public memory endures in stone.