Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat is a deceptively simple image of a real-life murder. But a closer look at David’s iconic painting reveals the political messages contained within.

Great art makes us do a double take. It makes us look, then look again. Take The Death of Marat, 1793, perhaps the most famous crime scene depiction of the past 250 years. At first glance, the portrayal of the murdered body of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed to death in his bath on 13 July 1793, could hardly be simpler. The slain journalist, who had agitated for the execution of King Louis XVI, slumps towards us – his body framed by the vast flickering emptiness that stretches above him.

Warning: This article contains descriptions and images of violence that some readers may find upsetting

Lean in closer, however, and Jacques-Louis David’s iconic painting begins to break down into a complex puzzle of double details that unsettle the bottom half of the canvas – two quills, two dates, two letters, two absent women, two boxes, two signatures, two dead bodies. The cacophony of contrary clues draws us in, transforming us from passive observers of a straightforward snapshot of history to forensic detectives actively engaged in solving a deeper mystery, one in which the artist himself is suspected of having tampered with the evidence.

David’s portrait exalts Marat, transfiguring him from a sickly real-life person into a sacrificed secular Messiah

Everywhere you look in The Death of Marat, one of the masterpieces featured in a major exhibition of David’s work at the Louvre in Paris, there is proof of the artist’s dual determination to create both an intimate personal elegy for a murdered friend, whose radical politics the artist shared, as well as a piece of potent public propaganda. In David’s hands, Marat is much more than simply a Jacobin journalist into whose chest a French woman, Charlotte Corday, plunged a kitchen knife, believing he was poisoning public discourse. Marat is glorified: a second Christ.

David’s portrait exalts Marat, transfiguring him from a sickly real-life person, who required lengthy medicinal baths to soothe a chronic skin disease, into a sacrificed secular Messiah. To amplify that elevation from infirmed mortal to mystical martyr, David laces his painting with decodable ciphers and echoes of art history that keep our eyes firmly fixed on the myth he is weaving before them. So implicated is the artist in the choreography of the scene, it is easy to see how Sébastien Allard, curator of the Louvre exhibition, could reach the conclusion in his essay for the catalogue that “the monument David erects to Marat is also a monument that he builds for himself… Marat acts with his pen, the painter with his brushes”.

The two hands

Our gaze is torn in two directions as it tries to trace the curiously contrary activities of the dead man’s moribund hands. In Marat’s right hand we find the quill with which he was writing when stabbed with the pearl-handled knife that lies only inches away. Knuckles to the floor, that hand dangles lifelessly downward in a manner that recalls Christ’s drooping arms in both Michelangelo’s monumental marble sculpture, Pietà, and in Caravaggio’s affecting painting The Entombment of Christ, 1603-4. Meanwhile, Marat’s left hand, rigid with rigor mortis, steadies a blood-smudged letter from the assassin, suggesting an entirely different focus of his attention. One hand clings to life, the other succumbs to death. Between these two diverging gestures, the painting’s spirit swivels, flexing forever between the world of the living and the world of the dead – this one and the next.

The two quills

Compounding that friction between the restless flux and sombre stillness of Marat’s discrepant hands is David’s seemingly redundant decision to insert into the stripped-down scene not one ink-dipped quill, but two. Between the lifeless fingers of his right hand, Marat pinches a writing feather, still wet with ink. Follow its shaft upwards from the floor, past the white plume, to the upturned crate that Marat was using as a desk, and we discover a second quill lying beside the crouching inkpot. This quill’s dark nib points menacingly in the direction of the fatal stab wound, and poses a pointed question: was it a knife that killed Marat or words? In times of heated politics, it is never clear which is mightier, the pen or the sword. As we’ll see, in David’s painting the quill and blade are themselves doppelgängers. They sharpen each other.

The two letters

Once detected, the doubling of evidence in the painting suddenly multiplies. Side-by-side at the centre of the canvas we find not one letter but two, each composed by a different hand. Between the lines of these two documents, the entire plot of the painting is written. The note that Marat clutches in his left hand is positioned by the artist in such a way that we can easily read how Corday, unknown to Marat, baited him into inviting her in, and took advantage of his benevolent nature: “It is enough that I am very unhappy”, Corday disingenuously pleads in her letter, “to have a right to your kindness.” The message is clear: it is Marat’s kindness that killed him.

Just below Corday’s letter, teetering on the edge of the box, is another missive composed by Marat himself – the document he was apparently writing when she struck. This note is held down by an assignat (or revolutionary money), thought by scholars to be the first-ever depiction of paper currency in Western art. In his letter, Marat selflessly pledges five livres to a suffering friend of the Revolution: “that mother of five children whose husband died in defence of the fatherland”. Even in death, we’re told, Marat bleeds generosity.

The two women

The two letters do more than draw the axes of luring and lying, kindness and redemption, against which the painting’s story twists. The two letters conjure ghosts – two of them. First is Corday’s, the conniving assassin who slipped into Marat’s home with a long knife beneath her shawl. The second, also unseen, is that of the suffering widow whom Marat was intent on helping, whose husband died fighting for the Republic. The face-off between female forces, one personifying good and the other evil, has a long tradition in art history. For centuries artists have staged the struggle between saintliness and sinfulness as a bitter contest between strong women. Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese’s famous Allegory of Virtue and Vice, c 1565, portrays one woman beckoning Hercules towards honour while another, a long knife hidden behind her back, tempts him towards pleasure. David updates the allegory for the era of Revolution. In The Death of Marat, it is the soul of a nation that is at stake.

The two signatures

Every painting ends with a signature – that final flourish with which the artist gives consent to the story that he or she has told. The Death of Marat has two, ensuring the work is never complete, but a confounding cold case that our eyes will forever crack open. One, scrawled askance at the centre of the canvas, belongs to Corday and is forged by David in the recreation of the letter she wrote to Marat. Elsewhere, near the bottom of the painting and seemingly chiselled into the wooden box as if it had been carved in stone, is the signature of the artist himself, formally dedicating the work to his assassinated friend, whose name he magnifies beyond the scale of his own: “To Marat, David”. 

By carving his name into the very furniture of the work, David inserts himself into the scene of the crime. Once again he’s echoing art history. In the only painting Caravaggio ever signed, he did the same. At the bottom of his colossal canvas, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, Caravaggio assembles the syllables of his first name “f. Michelang.o” from a pool of blood that spills from the severed neck of the priest. It’s a grisly gesture that seems to assume some responsibility for the murder. By recalling Caravaggio’s self-incriminating signature, David isn’t confessing to Marat’s assassination but declaring allegiance to his political agenda. He’s asserting “we’re all Marat now”.

The two dates

Look closely below David’s signature and you will see a silent struggle not just between two different dates but between two contrary conceptions of time. Under his own name, David has chiselled “L’an deux”, denoting the second year of the Revolutionary Calendar which began in 1792, when the Republic was founded. That crisp and legible date sits between the prised apart and partially erased digits of the Christian calendar’s calibration for the year of the work’s creation: “1793”. In the bottom two corners of the box, David has inserted and scrubbed away “17” and “93”, indicating an utter abolition of Christian time in favour of revolutionary measurements.

Yet again, Marat may be making a rich allusion in his curious conflation of competing systems of time. Like Caravaggio, Botticelli too only signed one painting: his Mystic Nativity, into which he embeds a riddling inscription that brings into close adjacency the Christian calendar and an apocalyptic one that is synchronised to the Book of Revelations: “This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, painted in the half-time after the time, according to the eleventh chapter of Saint John in the second woe of the Apocalypse…” In David’s Death of Marat, Botticelli is summoned and superseded as the priorities of revelation are usurped by those of revolution.

What, ultimately, does all this doubling add up to in David’s famous painting, a work that, by fusing passion with principle, would redefine the texture and intensity of history painting, and influence everything from Delacroix’s Raft of the Medusa to Picasso’s Guernica? By relentlessly refracting the evidence left at the scene of Marat’s murder through the dense prism of his imagination, David projects a double portrait. Before our eyes the artist transforms murder into myth as the physical body of the slain polemicist is alchemised into a mystical second figure we more feel than see. Marat the Messiah’s haunting presence disturbed the imagination of the French poet Baudelaire, who famously observed of the painting “in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, around this cold and mournful bathtub, a soul hovers”.

Jacques-Louis David is at The Louvre in Paris until 26 Jan 2026

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Acclaimed new film The Mastermind, starring Josh O’Connor, tells the story of an art robbery gone wrong. It’s inspired by a wave of similar thefts during a decade known for upheaval.

In May 1972, two men walked into the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and hurried out carrying four paintings by Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso and a supposed Rembrandt (now believed to be the work of one of his students), holding a group of visiting high school students at gunpoint and shooting a security guard in the process. With the stolen artworks’ worth tallying up to $2m (£1.5m), the New York Times ranked it among “the largest art robberies in modern times”. Some say it even inspired a far more famous crime nearby: the 1990 heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in which $500m (£370m) of art was looted, making it the costliest theft in US history full stop, with the crime remaining unsolved. 

The Worcester heist was orchestrated by career criminal Florian “Al” Monday, but the game was up after the two thieves he hired for the raid boasted about their exploits in their local bar. Within a month, the paintings were safely retrieved from a pig farm in Rhode Island and returned to the gallery. “Ironically, Monday – before he was an art thief – had a band, and I have the 45 of his record,” writer-director Kelly Reichardt tells the BBC. Her new film The Mastermind, which is released in the US this weekend, is loosely inspired by the chain of events that followed the Worcester robbery, as well as the wave of art heists that followed over the course of that decade.

Praised by The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw for locating “the unglamour in the heist”, Reichardt’s thoughtful art crime caper dismantles the usual rules of the glitzy, sensationalised heist movie. Blockbusters have long popularised the idea that there is something classy about this category of crime, particularly when it involves art: think, for example, of the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair, in which Pierce Brosnan plays a very suave billionaire orchestrating a raid on New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Reichardt’s take on the genre adopts a slower pace and more exacting eye for the way in which its art robbery cataclysmically unfolds. Josh O’Connor takes the title role as the brains behind the operation: JB Mooney, a middle-class, well-educated art school drop-out now ailing as an underemployed carpenter in Massachusetts. Under pressure from his well-to-do parents – a retired judge (Bill Camp) and a socialite (Hope Davis) – to repay their loans to him, he cases the fictional Framingham Art Museum for a heist. But from the moment that one of his henchmen asks how he plans to sell on the stolen paintings – which would be difficult due to their recognisability – the scheme begins to go awry.

If you start to get down into the minutiae of a robbery like this and don’t concentrate on the bigger strokes, then by nature it becomes de-glamorised – Kelly Reichardt

Reichardt came across an article about the 50-year anniversary of the Worcester Art Museum robbery while working on her previous film, Showing Up (2002), a comedy drama about two rival sculptors, and decided to use the story as the foundation of her next feature. All that was left to do was to create the character of JB. “The political ideas, the genre ideas – these are things you think about and study, but then you have to let go of all that and concentrate on the details of the film you’re making with what your character situation is like,” says Reichardt. “If you start to get down into the minutiae of those things and don’t concentrate on the bigger strokes, then by nature it [becomes] de-glamorised.” 

Reading about the 1972 robbery brought back memories for Reichardt of the “many smash-and-grabs at the time” that frequently appeared in newspaper headlines. Mere months after the Worcester Art Museum heist, a robbery since dubbed the “skylight caper” took place in Canada – the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was raided by three armed robbers, who clinched $2m (£1.5m) of paintings, jewels and valuable objects, marking the largest theft in the nation’s history. Across the Atlantic, in 1976, 119 of Picasso’s final works were pilfered from France’s Palais des Papes by three thieves while they were on show during a visiting exhibition.

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Then there was the case of Rose Dugdale, an Oxford University graduate and heiress turned fierce Irish republican, who was the focus of Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s high-octane 2023 art-heist drama Baltimore. In 1974, together with several IRA members, she took 19 paintings by the likes of Johannes Vermeer and Peter Paul Rubens from Ireland’s Russborough House, and held them to ransom, hoping for the release of imprisoned IRA members. Lawlor told Cineuropa: “There was something incredibly well organised about it and really badly thought out. They are so driven but completely blind to the wider political reality.”

The history of art theft

Before this spate of burglaries, history had seen countless other lootings and plunderings of prized art pieces, from the 1473 theft by pirates of Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment from a ship bound for Florence, to the infamous purloining of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia, an embittered former employee at the gallery. When he was caught two years later, he only served a six-month prison sentence.

Yet the Massachusetts robbery undeniably signalled a gear change for the art heist industry. According to art historian Tom Flynn, the surge in heists in the 1970s “coincides with the boom of the art market”. Citing the 1977 launch of Antiques Roadshow – the long-running BBC TV show in which a team of experts appraise art pieces and objects – and its ensuing popularity, Flynn adds: “It’s a cultural change where we start to see works of art as the equivalent of money.”

Meanwhile, criminals were becoming aware of the flimsiness of museum security, making works of art seem an easy target. News reports in the early 1970s warned of funding “crises” for museums and cutbacks in security, particularly amid high inflation. Smaller-scale thefts, such as the stealing of Francisco Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery in 1961 and the disappearance of three Rembrandts from Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1966, revealed how straightforward it could be simply to lift a painting from gallery walls undetected.

Part of the appeal of these characters is their outsmarting the establishment. The fact that art heists usually don’t involve private individuals makes it more acceptable – Susan Ronald

Like the guard injured during the Worcester Art Museum robbery, security employees rarely carried arms – and, as portrayed mockingly in The Mastermind, they could often be dozy “retirees” or “acid heads”, as Reichardt says, with limited training. She adds: “Museums used to have these cool circular drives out front, which made the getaway pretty handy.” And, while the film features an FBI art crime investigator reminiscent of real-life agent Robert Wittman – who recovered $300m (£225m) worth of art over the course of his career – the actual FBI Art Crime Team was only founded in 2004.

But as Flynn notes, while museums may have been slow to appreciate the threat of robbery in the past, the robbers have not generally displayed the sharpest acumen either. “The history of art crime and major art heists has been one of opportunist idiots who don’t really understand the nature of works of art themselves,” he says, referring to their potential for damage, “or indeed the market for works of art. [Then] these guys suddenly discover, to their horror, that the objects they’ve stolen are very difficult things to shift.”

The allure of the art robber

An archetype in fiction of the art robber as lovable rogue also started to emerge during the 1960s and ’70s. Amid unrest driven by the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, disillusionment and discontent reached high levels, especially among younger generations in the US. Simultaneously, films such as 1964’s Topkapi (where a band of art thieves attempt to steal from a palace in Istanbul), 1966’s How to Steal a Million (where Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole plan a heist to altruistic ends) and the same year’s Gambit (starring Michael Caine as a plucky cat burglar stealing an antique bust) helped to glamorise such characters.

According to historical author Susan Ronald, who specialises in art crime, the rise of the art robber in pop culture reflects the time’s anti-authority mentality. “Part of [the appeal of these characters] is [their] outsmarting the establishment,” she explains. “The fact that art heists usually don’t involve private individuals makes it more acceptable. It’s an institution, and there’s something quite daring about it.”

Perhaps it’s partly down to the glorification of these art stealers that misconceptions about arts heists have taken root – for example, the idea of them being a “victimless crime”. “We don’t take it seriously enough,” says Flynn, “which is why the criminals quite often get ridiculous [short] sentences when you consider that they’ve committed a serious cultural crime. But because it’s art, we don’t think it’s so important.”

The Mastermind works in many ways to upend entrenched ideas about art robbers. From Caine in Gambit to Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge (1970), such a figure was often represented as a heartthrob in the films of that time. But, with JB, Reichardt hoped to subvert that. “These guys are [actually] such jerks. They’re misogynist. They can afford to break away and do what they want. They’re not pinned down with kids. Just the idea of being able to be the outlaw is a privilege, but in the end you root for them, it’s just a narrative thing.”

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We get a nuanced perspective on JB’s character through his long-suffering wife, Terri (Alana Haim), and unimpressed fellow graduate Maude (Gaby Hoffman), both forced to put up with his antics. “There is an added, more objective look at him at times through the women in JB’s life who he counts on, who are taxed by his freedom. Personal freedom being a huge theme in American politics today – but at what cost and who carries the weight of that?”

Today, robberies of public museums and galleries are far less frequent, with criminals now “cottoned on to the fact that these are essentially non-fungible objects”, says Flynn. However, recent funding cuts by the US government could spell a troubling future for museum security again – even if there are bigger threats to paintings these days, says heritage consultant Vernon Rapley. “It’s not just security that will suffer – it will be the very fabric of the buildings as well. If you don’t invest in your roofs and windows, then ultimately, weather and climate change are probably a greater risk to objects, in fact, than criminals are.”

The Mastermind is released in US cinemas on 17 October and UK cinemas on 24 October

Paris (Imran Y. CHOUDHRY):- Pakistani folk, sufi and spiritual singer, Sanam Marvi enthralled a jam-packed audience on Sunday with her performance at the Theatre de la Ville, Paris. The concert, which was co-organized by Embassy of Pakistan and Theatre de la Ville, provided a rare opportunity to Parisians to listen to a Pakistani singer known not just for her powerful singing but also as a symbol of the spiritual heritage of Pakistan.

Ambassador of Pakistan, Madam Mumtaz Zahra Baloch appreciated the mesmerizing performance of Madam Sanam Marvi and her team and thanked the management of the Theatre de la Ville for bringing Pakistani music to life once again in Paris – the city of lights. She acknowledged the role played by Theatre management led by Soudabeh Kia, Conseillere Musique du Monde in patronizing art and music from around the world as earlier late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has also performed at the theatre.

Ambassdor Madam Baloch emphasized that in today’s world, ‘cultural diplomacy’ connects people, societies and countries. She expressed delight at the success of the sold-out concert of Sanam Marvi at the Theatre de la Ville and expressed the hope that further collaborations will take place in performing arts between Pakistan and France.

Speaking about her experience, Sanam Marvi said that ‘music is the spice of life and we love our traditional music’. She was overwhelmed by the presence and appreciation of a large international crowd. Born in the province of Sindh, Pakistan, Sanam Marvi started singing at an early age and has gained international recognition for her unique style of singing folk and sufi music.

The management of Theatre de la Ville highlighted that performances like that of Sanam Marvi provide an opportunity for music lovers in France to enjoy international music. They highlighted that ‘music has no boundaries’ and the main aim of the programme was to reinforce love for international music among the French audiences and to introduce to them foreign artists and the countries they represent.