Alcibiades Receiving the Lessons of Socrates

François-André Vincent's Alcibiades Receiving the Lessons of Socrates of 1777 was one of the major Salon submissions of its year, demonstrating the French Neoclassical school's programmatic turn toward moralizing subjects drawn from Greek and Roman antiquity. Vincent was among the most gifted painters of his generation and a direct rival of David; this painting, showing the dissolute Athenian general as a young man being instructed by the philosopher Socrates, participates in the Enlightenment project of using ancient history to advocate civic virtue. The subject was particularly resonant in the decade before the French Revolution, when the reform-minded public read lessons for the present in classical examples. The picture in the Musée Fabre at Montpellier is a key work of pre-Revolutionary French Neoclassicism.

Vincent organizes the composition around the contrasting figures of the aged, plain Socrates and the beautiful young Alcibiades, their physical opposition embodying the moral tension of the subject. The handling is smooth, sculptural, and cool in the Poussin-Davidian tradition, with figures modeled like animated statuary against a classical architectural background.