Jacques-Louis David’s shocking painting was no mystery story
when it first went on public display three months after the assassination of
Jean-Paul Marat, a radical populist and crusading journalist who was already the
focus of an emotional mortuary cult in Paris. Whatever explanatory notes it may
need today, the Death of Marat still
stands on its own as a powerful image of strange, repellent beauty.
Cherchez la femme:
missing from the picture is Marat’s murderer, Charlotte Corday, a tall,
attractive, and articulate twenty-five-year-old who had traveled from Normandy
to strike this daring political blow. A fervent supporter of the moderate
Girondin Party, Corday blamed Marat for the carnage then consuming the French
Revolution, as faction warred against faction. Modeling herself on the heroes
of antiquity whom she studied in Plutarch, she had planned to assassinate
Marat, like Julius Caesar, in a public forum – the floor of the National
Convention,. But when illness made Marat
stay home, Corday tracked him to his apartment and, after several tries, won a
private audience.
Because of his “leprous” skin condition (probably arthritic
psoriasis), Marat worked and wrote while bathing his emaciated body in sulfur
salts, a vinegar-steeped Rag (to sooth the fiery itching) wrapping his
head. This was how he had received his
friend and ally David just the day before.
After conversing with Marat about the Girondins, whom she pretended to
denounce and he promised to guillotine, Corday stabbed him once in the chest with
a butcher knife she had purchased in a Paris shop. The six-inch blade pierced
his lung and heart, and he was dead within minutes.
The picture shows none of the tumult that erupted after
Marat’s cry for help. Here time has stopped: the gently smiling bather seems
asleep and pleasantly dreaming. But in
the first angry rush, Corday was knocked to the floor and soon arrested. She spent four days in prison before her
trial, where she never wavered in her defense of the righteousness of the
murder. She was convicted the same day
and immediately sent to the Guillotine.
It was said that when the executioner held up her severed head and
slapped it on the cheek, the other check blushed. Madame Tussauds made on-site
wax death masks of both Marat and Corday.
David, who was a militant Jacobin deputy at the National
Convention, organized a lavish mass spectacle of Marat’s funeral procession and
service. Because of the scorching midsummer heat, heavy perfumed were used to
mask the corpse’s decay. A portrait of Marat was commissioned from David to
adorn the Convention’s great hall, one of a pair of icons of martyrs of the
Revolution framing the lectern. Coincidentally,
on the day The Death of Marat was
first shown to the public in the courtyard of the Louvre, Marie Antoinette was
guillotined. David sketched the haggard
queen as she rode by in the cart with her hands bound behind her back. The following year, when David and other
partisans of the regicidal Maximilien Robespierre were arrested, the two martyr
paintings were removed.
After his release from prison, David reacquired The Death of Marat but never showed it
again. Indeed, within a few years, he made a sharp career turn and became a
supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he commemorated in a glamorous series of
heroic portraits. Though he disliked
Napoleon’s metamorphosis from idealistic First Consul to megalomaniacal
emperor, David’s chameleon-like shift opened him, then and now, to the charge
of political opportunism. The Marat
painting was hidden away until it was briefly seen among the contents of David’s
studio, auctioned after his death in 1825.
Exhibited two decades later, the picture cause a sensation and was
hailed by the poet Charles Baudelaire as David’s “masterpiece.”
David’s breakthrough painting, Oath of the Horatii (1784), had triggered one of the most momentous
shifts in style in the history of art: three athletic Roman brothers, blessed
by their father, fling out their arms in a militant salute as they vow to
sacrifice their lives for the nation.
The picture, painted in Rome, symbolized dawning neoclassicism and
electrified everyone who saw it. Rococo suddenly seemed empty and frivolous
compared with this vigor of assertion, rendered with austere colors and hard sculptural
contours. With this one work, David
revived history painting and contributed to an urgent sense of purpose that would
sweep France toward revolution.
Neoclassicism (new classicism) was inspired by the recent
excavations of the Herulaneum and Pompeii, ancient Roman resort towns buried by
the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. There was a sudden craze for antiquity that
influenced everything from fashion to interior décor. The Death of Marat has a
sharp, clear neoclassical design. The
grisly narrative has been reduced to simple shapes and blocks of color,
anticipating modern abstract art. The
plain background, like the marble wall of a Roman temple, is daringly diffuse,
as if dissolving in the raking light. (It reproduces not Marat’s bleak apartment
but David’s Louvre studio with its high windows.” The colors are subdued,
except for drips and smudges of blood.
The picture is a parable of frugality and civic devotion: L’Ami du people (Friend of the People)
was the newspaper published by Marat on a printing press in his apartment. The white sheet ,lining the tub (to cushion
his sores) is old and patched, while the nicked wooden crate, converted to a
humble side table for ink pot and quills, is rudely studded with nails. David
streaked brown paint over white primer to achieve the box’s rough yet
beautifully glowing surface.
David has reworked the scene. Marat is more muscular here than in real
life, and his raw blisters and scales have been erased. Distracting objects shelved on the wall are
gone, and the ebony knife handle and boot shape of the tub have been altered.
(Both the tub and knife survive in a Paris museum.) Marat was not nude but wore a dressing gown
over his shoulders. Nor did he die
holding Corday’s letter, whose language David has revised to highlight her
treachery and sophisticated cadences, at odds with the brusqueness of the urban
working class (sansculottes) whom Marat championed. Seemingly poking from the canvas is a note
Marat has just written, donating money to a widowed mother of five. The competing letters pit one type of woman
against another: the eloquent elite of the ancient regime versus the voiceless
poor for whom Marat speaks. At first
glance, the sight of the naked man slain in his private quarters might pique
suspicions about romance and revenge. Indeed, the erotic subtext was luridly
dramatized by Edvard Munch in two 1907 versions of this painting, where the
nude Corday has become a warrior-like femme fatale and the tub a bloody bed
cradling a castrated Marat.
David’s beatific treatment of Marat’s body recalls Italian
paintings of the dead Christ being laid in his tomb. But the heaviness of composition, with
everything falling to the bottom, conveys the finality of mortality. The wood box is like a tombstone with its
maker’s signature and dedication (“To Marat,” carved in Roman letters), also
subtly sinking. The date in tiny letters (“ Year Two”) uses the short-lived
Republican calendar, not yet in effect at Marat’s death. David’s original; title was Marat at his last breath, capturing the
fleeting moment between life and death.
The quill still loosely grasped in Marat’s right hand suggests his words
taking wing and living beyond him. Like
the dove of the Holy Spirit, revolutionary ideas will illumine and
inspire. Marat would one day become a
hero of international Communism. But it
is an open question whether this ruthless activist, author of so many massacres,
was a saint or a monster.
Glittering Images; A
Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia; Pantheon Books,
N.Y. 2012
". . . a mass of bought-off pens have represented the constitution as the most sublime work ever given birth to by the human spirit; as an eternal monument to wisdom and virtue, as the infallible guarantor of the nation’s happiness. These pompous elegies have been circulated throughout the empire, while no occasion has been missed to flatter the self-love of the people by presenting to it a false image of its strength and its freedom, at the very moment when new chains are being forged for it. In the midst of the cries of enthusiasm that filled the air the voice of the Friend of the People vainly spoke out to reveal the trap and recall you to wisdom. What he said to you then – and what he said a hundred times – I repeat to you today: the constitution is a failure, a complete failure and so completely failed that it forms the most dreadful of governments, for in the last analysis it is nothing but an administration of royal commissioners still connected to the noblesse de la robe and followed by armed satellites, i.e., a true military and noble despotism.”
ReplyDeleteIllusion of the Blind Multitude on the Supposed Excellence of the Constitution L'Ami du Peuple No 334, January 8, 1791