The Death of Marat: The Revolutionary Paintings of Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was a renowned neoclassical artist and politico, with much of his most famous work being produced during the throes of the French Revolution in the late 1700s.
In his 1793 work, The Death of Marat, David details an idealized death of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical populist and journalist linked to the revolution and the Jacobins, as David himself was. The painting highlights the effect of class warfare and friction between the aristocracy, clergy, nobility, and third estate, and juxtaposes posh, bourgeois portrayals of an increasingly despotic ruling class from the harsh reality that is the blood and grittiness of revolution.
The painting itself is visually bleak and lifeless, yet a stunning display of hyperreality and humanity, in contrast to some of the other paintings of David during this time of revolutionary upheaval. At the same time, it is in keeping with familiar elements from the artist in the forms of his signature symbolic idealization of the subject.
The Death of Marat features a cinematic scene — a bloody knife, a crumpled letter, and a pale corpse majestically draped over the side of a bathtub. This shocking frame is missing the murderer, Charlotte Corday of the Girondin Party, who saw Marat as partially at fault for the destruction…
