Jacques-Louis David's fellow students at the French Academy at Rome find him difficult to get along with, but they recognize his genius.

Born into a prosperous family in Paris on August 30, 1748, when he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother had left him with his well-off architect uncles.

They had seen to it that he received an excellent education at the Collège des Quatre-Nations, University of Paris, but he was never a good student: he has a facial tumor that impedes his speech, and he was always preoccupied with drawing.

He had covered his notebooks with drawings, and he once said, "I was always hiding behind the instructor's chair, drawing for the duration of the class".

Soon, he desired to be a painter, but his uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect.

He overcame the opposition, and had gone to learn from François Boucher (1703–1770), the leading painter of the time, who was also a distant relative.

Boucher was a Rococo painter, but tastes were changing, and the fashion for Rococo was giving way to a more classical style.

Boucher decided that instead of taking over David's tutelage, he would send David to his friend, Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809), a painter who embraced the classical reaction to Rococo.

There David attended the Royal Academy, based in what is now the Louvre.

Each year the Academy awards an outstanding student the prestigious Prix de Rome, which funds a three- to five-year stay in the Eternal City.

The culmination of the Academy's educational program, the Rome trip provides its winners the opportunity to study the remains of classical antiquity and the works of the Italian Renaissance masters at first hand.

Each pensionnaire is lodged in the French Academy's Roman outpost, which from the years 1737 to 1793 is the Palazzo Mancini in the Via del Corso.

David had competed for, and failed to win, the prize for three consecutive years (with Minerva Fighting Mars, Diana and Apollo Killing Niobe's Children and The Death of Seneca), each failure contributing to his lifelong grudge against the institution.

After his second loss in 1772, David had gone on a hunger strike, which lasted two and a half days before the faculty encouraged him to continue painting.

Confident he now had the support and backing needed to win the prize, he had resumed his studies with great zeal—only to fail to win the Prix de Rome again the following year.

Finally, in 1774, David is awarded the Prix de Rome on the strength of his painting of Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus' Disease, a subject set by the judges.

In October 1775 he makes the journey to Italy with his mentor, Joseph-Marie Vien, who had just been appointed director of the French Academy at Rome.

While in Italy, David especially studies the works of seventeenth-century masters such as Poussin, Caravaggio, and the Carracci.

Although he declares, "the Antique will not seduce me, it lacks animation, it does not move", David fills twelve sketchbooks with drawings that he and his studio will use as model books for the rest of his life.

He is introduced to the painter Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), who opposea the tendency in Rococo painting to sweeten and trivialize ancient subjects, advocating instead the rigorous study of classical sources and close adherence to ancient models.

Mengs' principled, historicizing approach to the representation of classical subjects profoundly influences David's pre-revolutionary painting, such as The Vestal Virgin, probably from the 1780s.

Mengs also introduces David to the theoretical writings on ancient sculpture by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the German scholar held to be the founder of modern art history.

In 1779, David tours the newly excavated ruins of Pompeii, which deepens his belief that the persistence of classical culture is an index of its eternal conceptual and formal power.

While in Rome, David also assiduously studies the High Renaissance painters, Raphael making a profound and lasting impression on the young French artist.