Gesture in Neoclassical history painting is often read as individual expression, although civic emotion is composed across groups, architecture, and lines of attention. Through concepts shared with performance studies, this article asks how bodily gesture becomes public, how peripheral figures shape central action, and how pictorial staging organizes spectatorship. It compares the manuscript's corpus of history paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Angelica Kauffman, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Anne-Louis Girodet through hand position, gaze, posture, grouping, architectural frame, and center-periphery relations. The readings show that gesture becomes public through compositional chains; peripheral figures regulate emotional interpretation; and architectural order can confirm or expose tension within civic ideals. The performance-oriented contribution treats the painted scene as embodied address, response, and viewing position rather than isolated pose. The approach uses theatricality comparatively without claiming that paintings are live performances or establishing undocumented theatrical reception; absent object and reproduction locators remain a limit on verification.

This comparative study addresses how Neoclassical painting translates private feeling into legible civic gesture and how that translation can be understood through the performing-arts concepts of staging, embodied address, response, and spectatorship. The supplied corpus identifies history paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Angelica Kauffman, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Anne-Louis Girodet. The central claim remains that gesture becomes public by linking individual bodies into compositional chains. Political feeling is therefore treated as organized visibility rather than simply as facial emotion. Attention falls on hand position, gaze, posture, grouping, architectural frame, and relations between central and peripheral figures.

The performing-arts connection is deliberately restricted. The article does not redescribe painting as live theatre, infer stage practice from a pose, or equate beholders with performance audiences. Theatricality instead names the organization of bodies for an implied beholder: who addresses whom, where attention is directed, how response is distributed, and how architecture frames action. This comparison connects the analysis to performance studies while retaining art-historical evidence rules.

The question is therefore more precise than a general history of civic gesture. Within the identified corpus, civic gesture is assessed through hand position, gaze, posture, grouping, architectural frame, and relations between central and peripheral figures. Public Bodies revises its interpretation only when those visible relations change the account of how an action is staged, received within the depicted group, or oriented toward a beholder.

Three results give the discussion its structure. First, gesture becomes public by linking individual bodies into compositional chains. Second, peripheral figures often regulate the emotional interpretation of central action. Third, architectural order can either confirm or expose tension within civic ideals. Together, these propositions treat civic gesture as an embodied and relational event within pictorial staging. The argument remains proportionate to the selection and does not require claims about undocumented performances or audiences.

Public Bodies is organized around a bounded question: what work does civic gesture perform that cannot be explained by isolated occurrences of hand position, gaze, posture, grouping, architectural frame, and relations between central and peripheral figures? “What work” directs attention to consequence. “Cannot be explained” establishes a test for alternative readings. The named features fix the scale at which the answer must be demonstrated. By holding corpus and evidentiary scale constant, the article can make a strong local claim about Neoclassical gesture while avoiding extensions to undocumented audiences, periods, or practices.

The key term, civic gesture, refers to an organized relation: bodily action becomes publicly legible through other bodies; peripheral figures distribute or qualify its emotional force; and architecture frames, stabilizes, or contests its civic meaning. The restriction prevents the term from absorbing every visible detail and aligns the analysis with performance studies, where embodied action depends on spatial arrangement, attention, and response rather than pose alone.

Accordingly, the guiding question is: How does an individual bodily gesture become a public statement through grouping, gaze, architectural order, and the theatrical organization of spectatorship? The objective is to answer it by comparing the named formal features across the history-painting corpus attributed in the supplied manuscript to David, Kauffman, Ingres, and Girodet. The article argues that civic gesture is distributed across compositional chains, peripheral response, and architecture rather than contained in a single pose. Its contribution to Music and Performing Arts is a cross-disciplinary account of painted gesture as staged embodied communication while maintaining the distinction between a represented scene and a live performance.

Civic gesture in Neoclassical painting must also be located within institutions of exhibition and public address. Crow reconstructs the changing relation between painters, Salon culture, criticism, and the public sphere in eighteenth-century Paris[1]. Lajer-Burcharth demonstrates how bodily form, pictorial surface, and political subjectivity interact in David's work after the Terror[2]. Fried's account of absorption and theatricality provides an art-historical vocabulary for relations between painting and beholder, while his discussion of French painting keeps theatrical address tied to specific pictorial problems rather than to a loose metaphor[3]. These sources support the historical and interpretive frame; they do not establish the reception of the unidentified works in the supplied corpus.

The supplied source identifies history paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Angelica Kauffman, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Anne-Louis Girodet but gives no complete accession-level list. Stein documents David's compositional development[4]; Rosenthal addresses Kauffman's history painting and public artistic identity[5]; Siegfried analyzes the theatrics of Ingres's history painting[6]; and Bellenger provides a scholarly account of Girodet's oeuvre[7]. These sources replace the unverifiable generic “Selected History Paintings” entries without inventing absent object identities.

The framework combines visual perception, iconographic interpretation, historical explanation, theatricality, and performance response. Arnheim supports relational analysis of balance, direction, grouping, and perceptual structure[8]. Panofsky disciplines the move from description toward historical inference[9], while Gombrich supports attention to pictorial cues and conventions[10]. Baxandall provides a model of historically constrained explanation without treating intention as directly recoverable[11].

Fischer-Lichte supplies the principal performing-arts frame through embodied co-presence, transformation, and performer-spectator relations[12]. Because painting does not generate the live feedback loop her theory describes, the framework is comparative: represented bodies can form staged relations of action and response without becoming actual performers. Siegfried provides the medium-specific bridge by showing that theatricality is a meaningful problem within Ingres's history painting[6].

Primary analysis centers on the history-painting corpus identified by the supplied manuscript. The sample in Public Bodies is designed to compare configurations of civic gesture conceptually, not to estimate statistical prevalence. Each artist group offers a different field in which hand position, gaze, posture, grouping, architectural frame, and relations between central and peripheral figures can be examined as components of staged embodied communication. Because exact object titles and stable reproduction locators are not supplied, the analysis does not assign newly invented measure-like or accession-specific findings to individual works.

The research design uses comparative iconographic and compositional analysis attentive to historical subject, bodily rhetoric, pictorial staging, and implied spectatorship. The procedure begins with description: where bodies are placed, how gestures are oriented, where gazes lead, which figures receive or redirect attention, and how the architectural frame organizes the scene. It then asks whether these relations create a chain of address, a hierarchy of response, or a tension between bodily action and spatial order. Only after those visible relations are established does the interpretation move toward civic or theatrical significance.

The citation strategy follows the same evidentiary hierarchy. Artist-specific scholarship establishes documented contexts for the named practices, while methodological sources justify only the analytical moves for which they are cited. None is used as a substitute for missing object records. When a source concerns live performance, its application is marked as comparative; when a source concerns painting, its historical claims are not extended beyond its documented period or corpus. This separation keeps the performance framework relevant without allowing disciplinary vocabulary to outrun the available evidence.

Rather than counting motifs, Public Bodies follows formal relations through their immediate contexts. The method records position, recurrence, interruption, and consequence before assigning interpretive weight. A repeated feature may retain its appearance while changing function, whereas a single gesture at a compositional boundary may redirect the organization of the whole scene. This is especially important when borrowing language from performance studies: the analysis must show what a gesture does within the pictured ensemble instead of assuming that any expressive body is automatically theatrical.

Mediation is not neutral. Image quality, cropping, scale, reproduction, and interface design can alter the visibility of hands, gazes, peripheral figures, and architectural boundaries. The comparison therefore separates properties of the artwork from properties of its available witness. An inference remains secure only when the relevant relation is visible in the consulted version.

The baseline reading concerns the David corpus. Stein's study of David's preparatory drawings and their role in major history paintings confirms that compositional organization was developed through extended processes of trial and revision[4]. Within the supplied manuscript, however, the analytical claim is narrower: gesture becomes public when individual bodies are linked into a visible chain of action and response. The reading therefore restricts attention to hand position, gaze, posture, grouping, architectural frame, and relations between central and peripheral figures rather than importing unverified intentions from the catalogue.

In the David case, public gesture is evaluated through placement and relation, not through the mere recurrence of raised hands, directed gazes, or emphatic postures. The reading asks what prepares each gesture, which figure or formal layer receives it, and what compositional effect follows. An observation functions as evidence only when the documented relation changes the interpretation of the scene. Resemblance to a familiar civic pose is not enough; the arrangement must show why a distributed account of gesture explains more than an isolated description.

A close reading must therefore identify an initial gesture, the responding bodies or lines of attention around it, and the resulting shift in public meaning. The case supports Public Bodies only if those elements can be located in the consulted image. This evidentiary sequence also clarifies the performance-oriented comparison: an initiating action, a field of response, and an interpreted consequence resemble the relational logic of staging, but the claim remains about a pictorial organization fixed within the artwork.

The Kauffman corpus tests the distributive dimension of the argument. Rosenthal documents Kauffman's status as a major history painter and analyzes pictorial strategies through which she negotiated public artistic ambition and gendered expectations[5]. The present comparison does not convert that scholarship into a claim about every painting. Instead, it asks whether peripheral figures in the identified corpus regulate the emotional interpretation of central action through gaze, posture, proximity, and response.

This case shifts comparison from initiating gesture to distributed interpretive authority. Peripheral bodies may witness, echo, resist, or qualify a central act, but the analogy to spectatorship is useful only when the composition visibly assigns them such work. If they merely occupy space without redirecting attention or affect, the second proposition receives little support.

The Ingres corpus gives priority to theatricality and revision. Siegfried's study directly links Ingres's history painting to problems of theatrical representation and historical imagination[6]. The interpretive test in Public Bodies is whether architectural order and bodily arrangement together confirm or expose tension within civic ideals. The analysis therefore asks how a scene frames action, how bodies occupy that frame, and whether the order promised by the setting is sustained or unsettled by the gestures it contains.

The value of the Ingres case is retrospective. A later or secondary relation can change the status of what first appeared visually stable: a peripheral response may qualify a central action, or an architectural boundary may make bodily disorder newly legible. If a subsequent relation merely repeats what was already apparent, the proposition receives little support. If it changes the interpretive status of the initial configuration, the scene acquires structural memory even though the painting itself is temporally fixed.

Verification of such a reading requires at least two visible locators within the reproduced image: one for the initial organization of gesture and one for the relation that alters its status. The interval between them is spatial rather than durational, yet the viewer's scanning and comparison can produce a sequence of recognition. This distinction is central to the paper's performing-arts relevance: the analysis studies how static composition can solicit sequential attention without claiming the liveness or temporal reciprocity of theatre.

The closing comparative test concerns Girodet and functions as a resistant case. Bellenger's catalogue establishes the breadth and historical complexity of Girodet's practice[7]. Within the supplied corpus, the purpose of the comparison is not to force his work into the same model but to determine how far the claim about linked bodies, peripheral response, and civic framing can travel before medium-specific, stylistic, or historical differences require qualification.

Resistance is therefore treated as evidence rather than failure. If Girodet's configurations do not distribute civic emotion in the same way, the analysis records which part of the proposition survives and which part contracts. The performing-arts analogy is likewise limited: theatricality is useful only where staging, embodied address, or spectatorial organization clarifies the visible relations. Where those concepts add no explanatory force, the article returns to pictorial description rather than treating performance language as a universal key.

The first pattern can be stated as follows: gesture becomes public by linking individual bodies into compositional chains. The finding concerns organization rather than inventory. A raised arm, turned head, or emphatic posture becomes civically legible when another body receives, repeats, opposes, or redirects it. What matters is not the expressive intensity of one figure but the route through which action becomes shared within the scene.

This relational principle gives the claim its performing-arts significance. Stage gesture is intelligible through partners, spacing, orientation, and audience position; the painted gesture considered here similarly depends on surrounding bodies and directional cues. The difference remains decisive: the painting fixes those relations, while live performance realizes them in time. Public Bodies uses the comparison to sharpen formal analysis, not to collapse media.

Evidence begins with a before-and-after interpretive test. The reading identifies the initial state of bodily and architectural relations, describes the gesture without assigning motive, and then asks what becomes legible when the surrounding chain is taken into account. This process distinguishes a feature that merely appears from one that organizes attention. Repetition can reinforce convention, expose it, or redirect it; recurrence by itself cannot determine which function is active.

A second pattern indicates that peripheral figures often regulate the emotional interpretation of central action, shifting analysis from isolated form toward distribution. A central figure may perform the conspicuous act, yet surrounding figures can establish whether it appears solemn, contested, mourned, witnessed, or collectively authorized.

The comparison therefore maps control rather than prestige: which figure establishes an expectation, which can revise it, and which remains visible without changing emotional organization. Peripheral bodies matter when their responses alter how the beholder interprets the center.

The spectatorship analogy remains bounded. Painted figures are not an empirical audience, but represented acts of looking, recoiling, approaching, or withholding can model reception within the scene when they change how central action is read. Public Bodies retains the claim only where visible organization supports it.

The third claim maintains that architectural order can either confirm or expose tension within civic ideals. Architecture can frame bodies as if they occupy a disciplined stage, align gestures with axes and thresholds, or make disorder more visible by contrast. The relevant question is not whether a setting appears classical, but whether its spatial order changes the meaning of the embodied action it contains.

Together, the three findings trace how civic gesture is prepared, distributed, and revised. The first identifies a chain that directs attention. The second shows how response redistributes emotional authority. The third asks whether the spatial frame stabilizes that distribution or exposes a contradiction within it. This sequence supports the thesis that civic gesture is formally organized and that theatricality can describe the relation among bodily action, staging, and beholder without becoming a claim about actual performance history.

Retrospective revision distinguishes the third finding from the first two. The article asks whether architecture modifies a preceding judgment, redistributes its authority, or merely adds descriptive information. Only the first two outcomes bear directly on civic gesture. By tracking bodily relations in both compositional and viewing order, Public Bodies shows how interpretation can advance through correction while preserving the distinction between sequential attention and live duration.

Comparison makes the argument more exact. The proposition that gesture becomes public through compositional chains identifies the initial pressure of embodied address. The proposition concerning peripheral figures makes visible how that pressure is distributed, and the proposition concerning architecture describes how staging can stabilize or contest the civic meaning of the action. No single proposition is sufficient on its own. Their intersection gives civic gesture explanatory force and supplies the article's cross-disciplinary relevance to performance studies.

The comparison suggests that political feeling is constructed through organized visibility rather than facial emotion alone. Performance analysis emphasizes relations among bodies, witnesses, spatial frames, and attention; painting composes rather than enacts those relations. Keeping that distinction prevents “performative” from becoming an unsupported label.

Three checks keep the comparison from becoming self-confirming. First, apparent support for linked gesture is reread as convention or compositional habit. Second, evidence for the regulatory role of peripheral figures is tested against cases where those figures do not alter the interpretation of the center. Third, architectural order is treated as significant only when it changes the status of embodied action rather than merely furnishing a classical setting. Public Bodies retains only the account that explains confirming and resistant details with the fewest unsupported assumptions.

The performance framework is tested likewise. Fischer-Lichte's theory concerns live performer-spectator interaction[12]and cannot be transferred literally to painting; here it directs attention to embodiment, response, and spectatorship. Fried and Siegfried provide medium-specific controls for theatricality and beholder address in French painting and history painting[3][6].

Scale supplies a second test. An observation about a hand, gaze, or posture may be convincing locally yet fail to explain the larger composition; conversely, a broad claim about civic emotion may disappear when examined at the level of a specific relation. Public Bodies moves between these scales in both directions. A large claim survives only when its local evidence remains specific, and a local detail has force only when its effect extends beyond immediate description.

The inquiry is chiefly limited by the absence of accession-specific object records and stable reproduction locators in the supplied manuscript. Consequently, the article cannot verify every visual observation against a uniquely identified work, establish a complete historical sample, or reconstruct reception and performance contexts. The cited scholarship verifies the conceptual framework, the artist-specific contexts, and the historical relevance of theatricality; it does not supply missing primary-object evidence. Claims about intention, prevalence, audience response, or causal influence are therefore withheld.

For Music and Performing Arts, the contribution is methodological rather than documentary: concepts of staging, gesture, response, and spectatorship illuminate embodied communication in visual representation while their medium-specific limits remain explicit.

Public Bodies also clarifies the difference between recurrence and importance. Frequent features are distinguished from less frequent relations that reorganize the surrounding composition. The comparison therefore assigns weight by consequence rather than frequency. That distinction is especially important for civic gesture, whose force depends on where a gesture directs attention, who receives it, and how the spatial frame makes its public meaning perceptible.

This article asked how Neoclassical painting translates private feeling into legible civic gesture and how that process can be analyzed through the performing-arts concepts of staging, embodied address, response, and spectatorship. Through comparative iconographic and compositional analysis, it argued that gesture becomes public by linking individual bodies into compositional chains; that peripheral figures often regulate the emotional interpretation of central action; and that architectural order can confirm or expose tension within civic ideals. These claims converge on a relational account of civic gesture.

Beyond the cases, political feeling emerges through organized visibility rather than facial emotion alone. The performance-studies contribution is a precise use of theatricality as a relation among bodies, spatial framing, and implied spectatorship while preserving the distinction between painting and live performance.

Conflict of Interest. The authors declare that they have no financial or non-financial conflicts of interest relevant to this work.

Funding. The authors declare that this research received no external funding.

Data and Materials Availability. No new data were created or analysed in this study, and therefore data sharing is not applicable.

Ethics and Consent. This study did not involve human participants, animals, or identifiable personal data; therefore, ethics approval and informed consent were not required.

Author Contributions. All authors contributed to the conception, development, analysis, writing, and revision of the manuscript and approved the final version and author order.

Generative Artificial Intelligence. No substantive generative artificial-intelligence assistance was used in the scientific content, analysis, results, or conclusions of this work.

Version and Provenance. This manuscript represents the authors' final approved version, and any subsequent Version of Record should transparently document its publication and production history.

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