Marat

The mid-nineteenth-century political activist and art critic Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) offered his opinion of David’s Marat :

“The expiring Marat is a light in the storm of Revolution. I don't know what kind of criticism one could have of this painting; perhaps it is just a depiction of a reality that he witnessed one hour after the event. This setting conveys a better understanding of the unfortunate message of the artist's idea. When I think of Marat, friend of the common man, I too disregard his enemies and don't concern myself with such details either. The truth that remains, and that of which I am in awe, is that this corpse will become the symbol of the Terror, that everything seems to have been put together by an infernal genius in order to excite pity and anger, and to give the plotters and criminals of the Revolution a context for their conspiracies. This popular journalist lives in a cave, his exhausted body in the service of the sans culottes in a poor lodging with cold walls, a frail man who's been assassinated in the bath where he ceaselessly works. He has just corrected his last writing. This sad vengeance of a vulnerable person by the hand of an elegant aristocrat, finally, this Marat who was a monster yesterday is today a martyr, a saint. That's what art could not have invented and what comes spontaneously from the palette of David; the political insanity of a woman....Seventeenth-century Dutch painting, which produced more accomplished works, never produced anything this powerful."

Pierre-Joseph Prudhon, Du Principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale (Paris : Garnier Frères, 1865), pp. 120-1.

Jörg Traeger argues for the path-breaking status of David’s Marat :

“…David’s Marat is not a reportage, but a political interpretation of the attack. instead of actual events, the picture introduces new elements in all decisive aspects. Each of these elements is ambiguous from an iconographical viewpoint. The Christian aspect is complemented by the pagan element, the sacred by the profane. The two aspects cannot be separated from one another, but are intricately entwined. The image of the dying republican is one and indivisible from the republic itself, for which he has sacrificed himself. Marat is the man of Nature, and thus the man of a new era of universal history. The fundamental ethical category of this man is called ‘bienveillance’; the corresponding religious system is that of ‘civic religion’. The creed of this new religion is the articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Supreme divinity is now the Supreme Being. The ‘man’ and the ‘citizen’ attain immortality through the republican martyr.”

Jörg Traeger, "Marat: La Religion Civile,“ in Régis Michel, ed. David contre David, 2 vols. (Paris: La Documentation française, 1993), p. 414.

Similar subjects by Other Artists

Léopold Boilly, Triumph of Marat, 1794. drawing (Château de Versailles)

Paul Baudry, The Assassination of Marat, 1860 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes)

Jules-Charles Aviat, The Death of Marat, 1880 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen)

Web Resources

smarthistory: David, Death of Marat