Death of Marat

How the revolutionary artist David helped to create a secular religion, with its own martyrs. To quote:

This painting, a species of partisan propaganda which is currently on display at Tate Liverpool, was executed by a man who could easily be denounced as a brilliant cynic. Having been elected to the National Convention as a Deputy, and then enthusiastically supported the guillotining of Louis XVI, David later accepted the role of Court Painter to a new Emperor, that sometime upstart from Corsica, and aggrandised him in a series of unforgettable paintings. But just for now, in the summer of 1793, Jacques-Louis David is a revolutionary zealot and friend to Robespierre.

Here we have the death of a secular martyr on our hands, a Swiss journalist and agitator by the name of Jean-Paul Marat. He was killed by a woman called Charlotte Corday – a fragment of her letter, to him, slightly bloodied, is held in the dying man's left hand. She too was a revolutionary – but the wrong sort.

She belonged to the Girondists and he to the Jacobins, and so, in her opinion, he had betrayed the spirit of the great cause, and the knife went in – you see it laid out, rather neatly, on the ground beside the tub, painted, smearily reddened, with such loving care.

Almost immediately, David, ever the man to seize the moment, saw in the death of his friend and fellow deputy an opportunity for political propaganda on a grand scale. The painting itself was hung in the assembly hall of the National Convention of Deputies. An engraving was made from it, images widely disseminated. (Read more.)

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