The Death of Marat

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The Death of Marat
Jacques-Louis David, 1793
oil on canvas
162 × 128 cm
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts

The Death of Marat is a 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David, and is one of the most famous images of the French Revolution.

1 Context
2 Style : an iconographic paradoxe
3 From silence to stardom
4 References

[edit] Context

The painting represents the 1793 "unusually cruel" fate of Jean-Paul Marat, the writer of the radical newspaper L'Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People) and prominently associated with the Jacobin faction during the Reign of Terror, although he was never an outright member. Marat was stabbed on the 13 of July while writing in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, a supporter of the more moderate Girondist faction who came to Paris from Normandy obsessed with the idea of killing the man she perceived as a "beast", in order "to save France", and got to approach him using the subterfuge of reporting traitors to the cause of the Revolution.

Marat often sought the comfort of a cold bath due to a skin disease long said to have been contracted years earlier, when he was forced to hide from his enemies in the Paris sewers. More recent examination of Marat's symptoms has led to the assertion that Marat's skin eruptions came not from a disease contracted in the Paris sewers but from coeliac disease, an allergy to gluten, found most commonly in wheat.

David was a close friend of Marat, as well as a strong supporter of Robespierre and the Jacobins, being overwhelmed by their natural capacity of convincing crowds by their speeches, something he hadn't easily achieved through painting so far (not to mention his difficulty to speak, due to a deformation on his face caused by an injury during a duel). Determined to memorialize his friend, David not only organized for him a lavish funeral, but painted his portrait soon afterwards, being called to do it because of its previous painting of The Death of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau (a work nobody saw since 1826, representing the first martyr of the Revolution, a deputy murdered on the 20th of January, this officialy for having voted the death of the king Louis the XVIth).

Despite the haste in which the portrait of Marat was painted (the work was complete and presented to the National Convention less than four months after Marat's death), it is generally considered as David's best work (David himself, and many of his pupils, long before us, already thought so), as a definite step towards modernity (still challenging us), as an inspired and inspiring political statement (resulting from discussions between David and Robespierre).

[edit] Style : an iconographic paradoxe

Although the figure of Marat himself is idealized -- for example, none of the skin problems from which he suffered are obvious in David's depiction -- the details surrounding the subject are considered largely true-to-life. David, to quote him, had visited Marat the day before his assassination and remembered seeing the sheet, the green rug, the papers, and the pen, saying to his peers of the Convention later on he would depict their murdered friend as he had seen him : écrivant pour le bonheur du Peuple (writing for the good of the People). The name of the assassin, Charlotte Corday, can be seen on the paper held in Marat's left hand; but notably enough, the murderer has been withdrawn, although we literally watch Marat at his last breath, in other words : when Corday and many others were still around (it's established that Corday didn't try to escape). In this sense, for realistic as it is in its details, this painting, as a whole, from its start, is a methodical construction focusing on the victim, a striking set up regarded today by several critics as an "awful beautiful lie" - certainly not a photograph in the forensic scientific sense. And barely the simple image it may seem.

First and above all, of course, this painting is a portrait of the man Charlotte Corday killed on the 13th of July. But there is more here than meet the eye. The painting as we know it has often been compared to Michelangelo's Pietà - note, in particular, the elongated arm hanging down in both works. David was also a known admirer of Caravaggio's works , especially for their composition and light, and The Entombment of Christ (1602-1604), kept in the Vatican's Pinacotheca, is another often quoted reference. The similarities may be the result of a "unconscious mental alchemy" in the brain of an artist reputed for his extended visual culture, but they may be deliberate : that David sought, in Art, to transfer the sacred qualities long associated with the monarchy and the Catholic Church to the new French Republic is indisputable - no doubt he was expected to do so by the leaders of the Terror. Consequently, he painted Marat, martyr of the Revolution, in a style reminiscent of a Christian martyr, with the face and body bathed in a soft, glowing light, but as Christian Art had done it from its beginning, he also played here with multileveled references including Classical Art, this in order, not only to respond to an immediate political event (aspect that "ate" the literature on the subject, probably due to the impact of French Revolution on occidental imagination), but as well, to compete with Rome as Capital and Mother City of the Arts, the French revolutionairs being thrilled with the idea of forming a kind of new Roman Republic.

In that perspective, more models, having a Roman origin (as a student of the Academy of France, David spent many years in Rome where he made more than 1000 drawings he later kept in 12 albums, copied from the ancient masters) possibly interfered. Quite interesting is to observe that almost all of these models (the relief of Il letto di Policletto from the Palazzo Mattei, the statue on the façade from the jesuit church Il Gesu, the Giuditta with the head of Holoferne painted by Guido Reni or the copy made by Carlo Maratta, etc.) were to be seen in the same Roman neighbourhood, precisely the one were David stayed at the Academy of France (which was then located in the mythical Via del Corso, close to the Capitole). Doing so in the long hot summer of 1793 (this heat being the reason of the rapid decay of Marat's corpse which gave so much trouble for the funeral), David actually continued a fascinating regeneration process (of the Arts and of himself) he initiated earlier in the year with his Death of Lepelletier, an image achieved in less than three months, quoting his own previous Hector from his Andromaque mourning the body of Hector (his 1783 reception work to the Academy), both images (Hector, Lepelletier) reprocessing previous works such as The Testament of Eudamidas by Poussin (the most Roman of the French painters) before 1650, and the saint Sebastien carved by Giuseppe Giorgetti before 1672 (for the basilica San Sebastiano fuori le Mura in Rome).

Therefore, rarely has a painting been such a paradoxe, for this "multifaceted" image is simultaneously a portrait, an historical painting in the highest sense (the way David himself emphasized it in the lists he later left of his own works), an historic one too, a realistic image, an idealized one, a burning topical act, a scholarly condensation of multiple ancient models. The key of the artistic achievement being of course to succeed in this " meticulous mix", this to elaborate a powerful and haunting "icon for the masses". Which David did.

[edit] From silence to stardom

Widely admired during the Terror whose leaders ordered several copies of the original work (copies made in 1793-1794 by David's pupils to serve propaganda), The Death of Marat had fallen into disfavor at the time of Robespierre's fall and execution. It was returned to David in 1795, himself being prosecuted for his involvment in the Terror as a close friend of Robespierre (he'll have to wait for Napoleon's rise to become prominent in the Arts once more, but never again will he paint such a spartan image referring to current affairs and reprocessing at the same time ancient models tied to ancient myths and faith). From 1795 to David's death, the painting languished in obscurity and fell into oblivion. In 1826 (and later on), the family tried to sell it, with no success at all. It was rediscovered by the critics in the mid-nineteenth century, especially by Charles Baudelaire whose famous comment in 1846 became the starting point of an increased interest. In the XXth century, the paintig will inspire several painters (among them Picasso who delivered his own version), and writers (the most famous being Peter Weiss with his play Marat/Sade).

The original painting is currently displayed at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, being there as a fortunate result of a decision made by the family to offer it, in 1886, to the city where the painter had lived quietly and died in exile after the fall of Napoleon. Some of the copies (the exact number of those completed remains uncertain) made by David's pupils (among them, Serangeli and Gérard) survived, notably visible in the Museums of Dijon, Reims, Versailles.

[edit] References

Delécluze, E., Louis David, son école et son temps, Paris, (1855) re-edition Macula (1983) - First-hand testimony by a pupil of David
David, J.L., Le peintre Louis David 1748-1825. Souvenirs & Documents inédits par J.L. David son Petit-Fils, ed. Victor Havard, Paris (1880)
Holma, Klaus, David. Son évolution, son style, Paris (1940)
Starobinski, Jean, 1789, les emblèmes de la raison, ed. Flammarion, Paris (1979)
Kruft, H.-W., An antique model for David's Marat in The Burlington Magazine CXXV, 967 (october 1983), pp.605-607; CXXVI, 973 (avril 84)
Traeger, Jorg, Der Tod des Marat : Revolution des menschenbildes, ed. Prestel, München (1986)
Thévoz, Michel, Le théâtre du crime. Essai sur la peinture de David, éd. de Minuit, Paris (1989)
Simon, Robert, David’s Martyr-Portrait of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau and the conundrums of Revolutionary Representation in Art History, vol.14, n°4, december 1991, pp.459-487
David contre David, actes du colloque au Louvre du 6-10 décembre 1989, éd. R. Michel, Paris (1993)
Malvone, Laura, L'Évènement politique en peinture. A propos du Marat de David in Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, n° 106, 1 (1994)
Robespierre, edited by Colin Haydon & William Doyle, Cambridge, (1999)
Aston, Nigel, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780-1804, McMillan, London,(2000)
Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, edited by William Vaughan & Helen Weston, Cambridge (2000)
Rosenberg, Pierre & Louis-Antoine Prat, Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825. Catalogue raisonné des dessins, 2 volumes, éd. Leonardo Arte, Milan (2002)
Vanden Berghe, Marc & Ioana Plesca, Nouvelles perspectives sur la Mort de Marat : entre modèle jésuite et références mythologiques, Bruxelles (2004) / New perspectives for David's Death of Marat, Brussels (2004), online on www.art-chitecture.net/publications.php
Vanden Berghe, Marc & Ioana Plesca, David a-t-il vu à Rome Giuditta con la testa di Oloferne de Guido Reni?, Brussels (2005), online on www.art-chitecture.net/publications.php
Vanden Berghe, Marc & Ioana Plesca, Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort par Jacques Louis-David : saint Sébastien révolutionnaire, miroir multiréférencé de Rome, Brussels (2005), online on www.art-chitecture.net/publications.php
Coquard, Olivier, Marat assassiné. Reconstitution abusive in Historia Mensuel, online on www.historia.presse.fr/data/mag/691/69105801.html
Sainte-Fare Garnot, N., Jacques-Louis David 1748-1825, Paris, Ed. Chaudun (2005)