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Almost all the famous works of art keep, sheltered from their years, decades, or centuries, a history worth knowing. Although, most of the time, this story is too opaque, full of gaps, and, significantly, mysteries that can hardly ever be discovered.
The great works and small ones, treasure trips, ascriptions, and episodes that sometimes condition their own subjective nature or, in other words, their essence and character. Sometimes, that essence is so vivid and powerful that it surpasses the original significance and motif of the work and alters the very historical flow that supports the long-lived frame.
A Revolutionary Context
In this sense, The Death of Marat, painted by David in 1793, is born in historical circumstances and from a brush very well known, documented, and discussed throughout its more than two centuries of existence.
Jacques Louis David, a painter of definite political affiliations and author of the Court of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, represented in this canvas the death of his esteemed and admired Marat, the shrewd editor of the newspaper Ami du peuple, stabbed in the hands of his famous enemy Charlotte Corday, who, under the excuse of delivering to the revolutionary a list of enemies of the Fatherland, was able to enter the journalist's house and commit the crime, on July 13, 1793.
David, therefore, stages the death of his friend, which occurred while writing and taking one of his cold baths (it has been considered that Marat suffered from psoriasis). Also, this painting represents in a manifestly allegorical way what he considered a crime against France and against a patriot. In this last sense, the painter builds a political work of the first order, staging for the people a martyr of the Revolution, providing an iconic image with which to feed the revolutionary symbolism of the classes for which the martyr, Marat, had coined a name, "le petit peuple."
A Great Artistic and Historical Interest
This work, from a formal point of view, has an enormous historical interest: ascribed to neoclassicism (the author represented on other occasions scenes of mythological inspiration), it has been considered a painting of the new modernity, especially for that surprisingly large abstract surface that occupies the upper half of the canvas, a kind of "terra incognita" that gives rise to multiple interpretations (one, equally plausible like others, it could refer to the sullen emptiness that accompanies death, ineluctably).
Its composition, structured in vertical and horizontal lines, fixes two elements that are compensated: Marat's face, perhaps showing a slight smile, and an austere wooden box, with the inscription "A Marat, David. L'an deux", testimony to the idea of homage with which the painter created this magnificent work.
The illumination, gimmicky and tenebrist in the manner of the Caravaggist chiaroscuro, determines the drama of the scene, which is nourished, on the other hand, by some elements of enormous symbolic significance: the dagger on the ground and the pen that still holds the deceased: the sharp iron against the written word, the weapon of the fallen revolutionary. The chromatic arc, austere, broken only by the red of the spilled blood, is enough to emphasize the strength of what is represented.
According to the observation of this Death of Marat, David knew to paint something that really differentiates the masters from other artists: at the end of the ages and their rigors something intangible remains in this masterpiece, within reach of the eyes that rest on the canvas: his soul.