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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