File:David Ligare Achilles and the Body of Patroclus.tif

Painting by David Ligare, Achilles and the Body of Patroclus (oil on canvas, 60" x 78", 1986). The image illustrates a key body of work David Ligare's art beginning in 1980 when he turned to conceptual narrative and history paintings that directly referenced classical themes, myths, aesthetics and compositions. In this work, Ligare typically referenced both historical (Greco-Roman and Classical) ideas and stories and contemporary themes and issues. This depicts the ancient mythical hero Achilles mourning his inadvertently causing the death of his friend and lover, a theme that resonated in the 1980s with the era's AIDS crisis. This body of work and individual piece were publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions and discussed by critics in major art journals and daily press publications.

Artist David Ligare. Copyright held by the artist.

David Ligare

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key, longstanding body of work in David Ligare's career: his realist and conceptual history paintings, which employ formal principles, ideas and narratives from Greco-Roman and Classical art in the service of philosophical contemplations of contemporary existence. These works celebrate idealized human forms and landscapes and arose in response to 1970s conceptualism and the dominant modernist emphasis on originality, self- expression and irony, and instead privileged a then-unfashionable connection to the past, classical formalism, and aspirational humanist narratives and ideas. They often featured athletic men in togas, arranged in carefully orchestrated poses in nature, ruins or ancient architecture, and drew upon mythological sources by writers such as Virgil and Homer, and compositional arrangements from Renaissance and neo-classical paintings. Because the article is about an artist and his work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this key body of work, which brought Ligare longstanding recognition through traveling exhibitions, coverage by major critics and publications and museum acquisitions. Ligare's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by David Ligare, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.