Neoclassicism and the New History Painting

1 Political Painting, Modern Life, ands the Birth of Modern Art

Robert Baldwin Associate Professor of Art History Connecticut College New London, CT 06320 [email protected]

(This essay was written in 1990 and has been revised a few times since then, most recently in February, 2016. It is indebted to the teaching of T. J. Clark in whose courses I served as a teaching assistant in the early 1980s. His ideas on David have recently been published in his book, Farewell to an Idea, 1999. I have also drawn on an article by Erica Rand published in 1990. See note 3 below.)

Revolutionary Patriotism and Duty: A Prologue to the “Death of Marat”

David’s Death of Marat is the first European painting other than a portrait to lionize a single citizen of a modern republic. Its theme of patriotic self-sacrifice first appeared in David’s art nine years earlier in the Oath of the Horatii (1784). Here a father eagerly sent his three sons forth to fight to the death to defend the monarchy of Rome. When the sole surviving son was rebuked by his sister for killing her fiancée, he murdered her on the spot and was successfully defended in a trial by his father. Although none of this violence appeared in the image, it was well understood by the thousands who thronged the Salon to see the wildly successful painting. In his Brutus of 1789, finished just weeks before the storming of the Bastille, David went much further by placing at the center of his canvas the violent conflict between sentimental family ties and higher political loyalty. The Brutus shows the architect and first leader of the Roman republic brooding over his decision to have his sons executed for conspiring to restore the Roman monarchy. As the corpses are carried in behind him, his wife and daughters wail. In many ways, the Brutus can be seen as a later episode in the story of the Horatii when two sons and a daughter eventually lie dead at the feet of their patriotic father. On the other hand, the Brutus did something David was unwilling to do in the more upliftingly patriotic Oath of the Horatii; it faced the tragic consequences of patriotism head-on for the horrified father, not just for the “emotional women”. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, life soon seemed to imitate art. Oath-taking emerged as a major theme at the Oath of the Tennis Court (July 20, 1789) when deputies of the second and third estates (the clergy and all commoners) suddenly proclaimed themselves to be a National Assembly and swore an oath to write a national constitution. Patriotic oath taking by citizens quickly spread all over France. David took up the Oath of the Tennis Court in 1791 in a huge painting which was never finished. By that year, he had become the chief designer of the mass rallies and revolutionary festivals now needed to sway the citizens of the new French republic. In September, 1792, he was elected a deputy in the National Convention and quickly became a self-appointed propaganda painter for the revolution. The patriotic duty of individual citizens heralded in the Horatii, the Death of Socrates (1787), the Brutus, and the Tennis Court had become a reality for the artist. After siding with the most radical faction, the Jacobins, David was even elected to the dictatorial Committee of Public Safety which met secretly, made laws for the nation, and signed thousands of arrest warrants which led to the guillotine. David had become his own Brutus, unwilling to intervene as former friends and clients were arrested and executed (including the patron of the Death of Socrates). He had not become a Horattii or a Socrates, or for that matter, a Marat or a Corday. In general, we can see how the French Revolution and the call for ordinary citizens to participate in the new republic gave a wide array of ordinary human beings, from lowly priests and craftsmen to lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, and journalists a new freedom to participate in the public sphere and to shape ongoing discussions and disputes. This sphere emerged from earlier eighteenth-century public institutions and spaces such as the Salon where artists were able to speak directly to the public. Prior to that, artists worked for the church or for private patrons, especially rulers and nobles. In short, the French 2 Revolution opened the door much wider for the assertion of individual voices and for the creation of a more individualized human identity in art, literature, and music.

David, Death of Marat, 1793

Who was Marat? The basic historical background on Marat is essential to understanding David’s painting. Born in 1743 in French-speaking Switzerland, Marat was a self-taught intellectual and amateur physician. He spent a decade in England (1765-1776) publishing essays on medical, political, and philosophical topics. After moving to Paris in 1776, he focused on scientific research and on judicial reform until the sweeping developments of the approaching French Revolution swept him up in 1788. From then on, Marat pursued the case of radical revolution, attacking both royalists and moderates and making many enemies even in the new National Convention which he joined as an elected Deputy. He also started his own newspaper called L’Ami du Peuple (Friend of the People) which he used to denounce the many perceived traitors in and outside France. In a pamphlet of July, 1790 entitled “We’re done for”, he called for the execution of hundreds of enemies of France.

Five or six hundred heads would have guaranteed your freedom and happiness but a false humanity has restrained your arms and stopped your blows. If you don’t strike now, millions of your brothers will die, your enemies will triumph and your blood will flood the streets. They'll slit your throats without mercy and disembowel your wives. And their bloody hands will rip out your children’s entrails to erase your love of liberty forever. 1

When Prussian troops threatened to invade France in late 1792 and destroy Paris if the royal family were harmed, Marat was one of many populist voices calling for the slaughter of thousands of political prisoners who had been arrested that summer on vague charges of royalism and counter-revolutionary plotting. When Prussian invasion began in late August, French revolutionary fear and paranoia triumphed. In early September, 1782, small, revolutionary tribunals convened in all of the prisons of Paris. With trials ranging in length from a few minutes to a few hours, some 1,500 political prisoners, forgers, common criminals, and 233 priests were tried and convicted. They were shoved out into the street where they were immediately killed by a mob armed with pikes, clubs, and cutlasses. 2

After the execution of Louis XVI in January, 1793, Marat stepped up his attacks on moderate revolutionaries, especially the Girondin party which he accused of betraying the revolution. As president of the Jacobin club, Marat issues a call in April, 1793 for all Girondin deputies to be expelled. With support from Marat’s many enemies in the National Convention, the Girondins brought Marat to trial in the Revolutionary Tribunal on April 24, 1793, only to see him acquitted and paraded through the streets by his working class supporters. Greatly empowered by this victory, Marat joined forces with radical parties and the populist civic militia of Paris to oust twenty-two leading Girondin deputies from the National Convention. On June 2, thousands of heavily armed, working class soldiers surrounded the national assembly hall and ordered the government to expel the deputies so they could be arrested for “treason”. In response to this lawless act, the president of the national assembly ordered the troops to withdraw. Training his artillery onto the assembly hall, the populist commander replied, “Tell your fucking president that he and his Assembly are fucked, and that if within one hour he doesn’t deliver to me the twenty-two, I’m going to blast it.” 3 This brutalizing language of revolutionary rage and violent intimidation lay at the core of Marat’s power as one of the chief demagogues of the early revolution. Marat himself told Robespierre, 3 “Learn that my reputation with the people rests, not on my ideas, but upon my boldness . . . my cries of rage, of despair and of fury . . . I am the anger, the just anger, of the people, and that is why they listen to me and believe in me.” 4

Interestingly, Marat’s power declined significantly in the weeks after this shameful incident. Once the more extremist Jacobin party had eliminated the rival Girondins, they no longer needed Marat. The purge of the leading Girondin deputies brought civil war to large parts of France as revolutionary moderates, royalists, and conservative peasants and bourgeoisie rose up to resist the growing authority of an increasingly radical national government and an even more radical city government (Commune) which was taking the law into its own hands. The growing threat enabled the Jacobin radicals controlling the national government to concentrate power further by getting the Convention to cede judicial and legislative authority to the new Committee of Public Safety whose decrees were absolute.

From the Girondin stronghold of Caen in Normandy, a young, moderate revolutionary named Charlotte Corday decided to take direct action by assassinating Marat. She knew it was a suicide mission yet she embarked with a remarkable determination and tranquility which she maintained through her own guillotining. She originally planned to kill Marat on the floor of the Convention with the kind of public, theatrical action favored by French revolutionaries. When Marat's skin condition flared up, confining him to medical baths at home, Corday made new plans to kill him privately. To gain his confidence, she sent him a letter posing as a radical and the widow of a man killed in the revolution who had uncovered a Girondin plot. The second letter which she brought with her (dated 13 July, 1793) stated:

"I have secrets to reveal that are most important to the health of the Republic. I have already been persecuted for the cause of liberty. I am miserable; it is enough that I am so to have the right to your protection".

As Marat received her, supposedly commenting, "They shall soon be guillotined", Corday stabbed him fatally in the chest. Though she hoped to destroy Revolutionary extremism with this action, she unwittingly set the stage for the radicals to assume complete and total power in Paris for the next year and to institute Terror as their official policy. If parts of France were already plunged into civil war at the time of Marat’s death, his killing increased the climate of violence and extremism. Led by Robespierre, the Jacobins used Marat’s death to demonstrate the “reality” of the mortal threat faced by the Revolution from within and the urgent need to kill thousands of internal enemies. The biggest names were subjected to show trials followed by public executions by guillotine in the Place de la Revolution (later renamed the Place de la Concorde). The first big show trial was given to Corday on July 14, the day after Marat’s death. The prosecution insisted no woman could have done anything like this on her own and accused her of acting at the behest of more powerful men. Corday calmly maintained she had acted on her own to save the revolution from populist fanaticism. Three days later, she was guillotined and her body dissected with particular interest paid to her sexual organs which doctors assumed would be abnormal in confirmation of what they saw as her monstrous, unnatural femininity. For the next year, Paris was gripped by trials and public executions with 30-50 people guillotined daily. In the countryside, thousands of conservative peasants and bourgeoisie were massacred including many hundreds drowned at night on barges sunk in freezing rivers. It took a full year before the paranoid madness of Jacobin extremism burned itself and then only when terrified deputies acted for fear of their own lives. In a two day period, moderate deputies arrested and guillotined twenty-eight leading Jacobins without trials. In the following week, sixty officials in the radicalized municipal government of Paris were also executed. David was arrested but spared.

The ’Death of Marat’ and the Problems of Modern Politics as an Artistic Subject

With the Death of Marat, David broke with the history painting he had revitalized more than anyone else. Although he continued to paint important history paintings, David turned his attentions toward modern 4 politics. In some important ways, this painting marks a major turning point in Western art since the Renaissance. In it, David became the first artist to declare a radically new, individual mission for the artist: to find and represent great truths out of modern life. Ancient myth, Christian narratives, middle class or aristocratic family images, and even ancient political history would henceforth appear increasingly unworkable as a coherent language adequate to express the great issues and dramas of modern life. Truth for artists and writers would increasingly be located in modern life where they could only be discovered and presented, as the Marat implies, by a bold act of individual artistic vision.

So too, the artist would increasingly be working directly for a public, in the new public spaces of national exhibitions like the Salon and new museum spaces like the Louvre, seized from the monarchy by the revolutionary government and converted from a royal palace to a national art museum in the early nineteenth century. David himself organized a revolution in the operating principles and governance of the Royal Academy of Art before it was disbanded in 1793. He also democratized the Salon by opening it to a much wider array of artists. 5

It was David who found significant political meaning in the death of a contemporary revolutionary. It was David who came up with the idea for a large painting of Marat which he had hung in the revolutionary assembly hall. Placed in the highest national and revolutionary arena, David hoped to make Marat into a national martyr and hero of the revolution, a figure much like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln in our national monuments. The erection of a large painting in the Hall of Deputies would also help cement the recent triumph of the Jacobins over the Girondins.

Needless to say, any national icon commemorating Marat faced enormous problems. For the painting appeared in a nation divided into multiple factions with each side mounting a propaganda war to capitalize on Marat’s assassination. For the extreme left (Jacobins), Marat became a martyr, his bust placed in the Convention, his ashes buried in the Pantheon, his heart kept in an urn in the radical Cordeliers Club. Streets, squares, and no less than thirty-seven French towns were immediately renamed after him. Poems and hymns were composed in his honor, and school children were told to make the sign of the cross when hearing his name. One poem even compared him extensively to Jesus.

Like Jesus, Marat loved ardently the people, and only them. Like Jesus, Marat hated kings, nobles, priests, rogues and, like Jesus, he never stopped fighting against these plagues of the people. 6

His funeral oration started that way but quickly swerved into standard secular rhetoric.

“Oh heart of Jesus, O heart of Marat . . . Jesus was but a false prophet but Marat was a god.” 7

At the same time, no revolutionary leader was more despised in France in the summer and fall of 1793 than Jean-Paul Marat. The royalists in and outside France working to restore the monarchy hated him as a revolutionary. Moderate revolutionaries such as the Girondins hated him for his extremism and demagoguery. For different reasons and in different ways, these groups celebrated Marat's death in pamphlets and prints published safely, outside France. One English print hailed Corday as a second Joan of Arc delivering France from its enemies.

David’s Painting

For the Jacobin painter, David, the problem was to stabilize the meaning of Marat's death, to reveal the "truth" of Marat once and for all as the heroic martyr to the revolution. Here David used his somewhat Caravaggesque style of incisive, stark realism set against a simple, timeless background with strong lighting. He carefully avoided the overtly propagandistic, sensationalism of blood and gore, choosing instead the more truthful seeming language of understatement. Thus David transformed an unheroic death 5 into something grand, timeless, and tragically evocative of a Pieta or a fallen classical warrior. He had painted both of these subjects in his early days in Rome. 8Above all else, his painting offered itself as a "true" account, "true" because here were the plain, stark, seemingly unmanipulated "facts" as simply and insistently presented as the trompe-l'oeil still-life of Marat's writing table.

To stabilize the meaning of the painting and of Marat's death further, David orchestrated a highly staged public unveiling of the Marat in the courtyard of the royal palace in Paris (the Louvre) on the very day Queen Marie Antoinette was guillotined. In this way, the martyrdom of Marat helped celebrate and legitimize the execution of the queen. The apparent victory of counter-revolutionary forces over a revolutionary leader was reversed and transformed into the revolution's larger triumph over its most symbolically important enemy, the monarchy.

Further confirming the truth of the painting was the funeral festival organized and designed by David in the Cordelier’s Club. The body of Marat was embalmed and exhibited in his bathtub with his writing table nearby. Since Marat's real arm had frozen in rigor mortis, the arm of another corpse was used and the bathtub raised on a pedestal to hide the deception and to elevate Marat further above the common citizen. 9

L'an Deux and the French Revolutionary Calendar

David signed the Death of Marat at the bottom with words arranged in three levels, using differently sized letters to elevate the importance of Marat while underscoring his own political accomplishment as an artist. Á MARAT.

L’AN DEUX

By dating his work "L'an deux" (The Year Two), David used the new French Revolutionary Calendar which began on Sept 22, 1792, the autumnal equinox and the day after the proclamation of the French republic. This new calendar was instituted by Revolutionary decree on Oct 5, 1793, just before David finished the painting. The new calendar removed time from Christianity, started it anew from zero, and gave it a secular, mathematical order. The year was divided into twelve equal months of thirty days with five political feast days, no weeks, and a rest day every tenth day.

In its attempt to restart history, culture, politics, and morality all over again, to sever the present and the future from the past, and to create a rational, secular world from scratch, the French Revolutionary calendar showed an extreme version of Enlightenment utopian ideals of secular reform and progress. David was immediately drawn to the new calendar not just because he was a political radical but also because he was a radical painter. And no painting produced in the West thus far was more radical than the Death of Marat. In it, David stepped outside traditional institutions and subject matters and spoke directly to the People as a free individual, a citizen-deputy-painter eager to made modern politics into the highest subject of art. "L'an deux" boldly announces a brave new world of modern art-making, a work made independently by one citizen in homage to the memory of another independent voice.

The Appeal of Modern Politics as the New History Painting 6 For some forty years (1789-1830), many of the greatest artists in Europe and America (David, Goya, Gericault, Delacroix, Copley) made contemporary political events the subject of large, grand compositions with many of the aesthetic qualities of traditional history paintings except their ideal subjects. The appeal of modern politics depended on a number of factors. For one, politics offered the most ambitious artists an irresistible seriousness and an urgency and immediacy not found in the new, political subjects from classical antiquity which David had reintroduced in the 1780s (Oath of the Horatii, Death of Socrates, etc.). As contemporary dramas of the highest magnitude, modern politics also held out the promise of a greater universality than that claimed by traditional history painting which sometimes took obscure subjects known only to educated elites and indulged in recondite allegories. Third, modern politics allowed the artist to stride boldly into the public arena him or herself and to go beyond recording events by shaping public opinion as contemporary events unfolded. With political art, the ambitious artist could dream of changing the world instead of just representing it. David’s Marat is a case in point as a major piece of Jacobin propaganda hung in the National Convention hall at a time when the Jacobins tried to use Marat’s death to rally France to their cause. Political art allowed artists to become important political actors and public voices. They could even dream of creating national icons in the emerging secular political culture of modern nationalism. By portraying Marat as a Christ-like martyr, David was eager to fashion a national icon for all of France down through the ages.

The Problems of Modern Politics as the New History Painting For reasons explored below (and later), contemporary politics was problematic from the start as an artistic subject and eventually disappeared as a major, ongoing artistic category after 1830. It reappeared as a major category only in the 1980s. In general, artists who grappled with political subjects between 1789 and 1830 tended in their later years to retreat into safer, more stable vocabularies, generally more imaginary, private, or escapist. If we look at the nineteenth century as a whole, we shall see this pattern in the eventual shift, after 1880, to an increasingly self-reflective abstraction. At least four problems helped make such political painting short-lived as the primary vocabulary of great art, all of them clear with David (and in different ways, with Goya, Gericault, and Delacroix).

First, political subjects were likely to be too controversial to offer stable meanings shared by wide audiences. Often initiated by artists themselves, political paintings were works of art in search of a common audience and often finding a hostile one. David's Marat, for example remained as controversial as the dead man himself. In this sense, it was just one image in a sea of contentious images and discussions surrounding the man and his death. By leaping into the controversy of politics, modern artists also risked having the aesthetic qualities of their works completely overlooked as viewers responded passionately, pro and con, to the political subject. Here, political art risked being overlooked entirely as art.

Second, politically committed artists risked imprisonment, exile, and death, their works, suppression or destruction. With the collapse of the Jacobins and the guillotining of all important Jacobin leaders, David was arrested and sentenced to death and some of his works were destroyed. (He escaped with his life only through important personal connections.) As Clark notes, the Death of Marat disappeared soon after Robespierre’s fall and surfaced only two decades later in Brussels. With Napoleon's later rise, David again became prominent as a political painter but when the dictator eventually fell, the painter was again arrested and this time exiled to Brussels. With its considerable personal risks, political painting was not the most feasible path for modern artists to follow.

Third, today's political headlines could easily become tomorrow's forgotten stories, thereby undermining the artist's hope that politics might offer enduring, universal vocabularies. Outside France, most of the small number of people who have heard of Marat today probably know him more from David's painting than for the actions which made him infamous in his day. 7 Forth, political art had no visual tradition on which artists could draw. One had to work much more from scratch in choosing the most important moments and inventing a composition with aesthetically powerful forms and groupings, gestures, settings, lighting, color, and so forth. Without the guidelines of a visual tradition to use and revise, without audience expectations to satisfy or challenge, political subjects were much more likely to lead to mediocre art. The solution, adopted by every painter of politics at this time, was to borrow quietly from the traditional language of history painting to give political events an appropriate heroic quality, visual grandeur, and "timelessness". Despite the radically mundane, factual naturalism of David's Marat with its trompe l'oeil fiction of journalistic truth, David composed Marat in the posture of the dead Christ from Michelangelo's well-known Pieta to transform the decidedly non- heroic death of a murderous fanatic in an eczema bath into something more tragic and timeless (especially with the carefully neutral setting). In this way, David tried to make an assassination into a secular martyrdom.

No one knew the problems of making art out of modern politics better than the elderly David, exiled to Brussels after the fall of Napoleon. There he turned to traditional artistic forms which were completely safe: portraits and erotic, heterosexual, classical mythologies.

Sexual Politics in David's Marat

Until recently, the politics of the David's art was discussed solely in terms of left vs. right, of conflicts between monarchists, moderates, and extremists. This completely ignored the impact of women in the French Revolution and the sexual politics of David's art which transcended notions of left, middle, and right. Thus historians missed the way David's Marat reinterpreted the event to defuse the threat of female activists assuming an important role in the Revolution.

In the confusion and disorder of the first two years of the Revolution, women capitalized on the power vacuum by assuming a new importance, by forming new women's clubs, marching as groups, and pressing for improvements in their conditions as women. By the time of Marat's death, the male deputies to the Revolutionary Convention had succeeded in outlawing almost all female participation in revolutionary activities, all women's clubs and organizations, and even all public gatherings of more than five women. The proper "revolutionary" sphere for women was redefined in strictly domestic terms as mothers of (male) heroes and citizens and as loyal wives and widows. By banishing women to the home, the Revolutionary Convention worked to remove them from active involvement in policy making and street action, to prevent them from mobilizing as groups. Confined to the home, women could remain isolated and divided individuals further controlled by citizen-fathers and husbands. In short, the very male revolutionaries who were the most eager to restructure society along radical lines were also eager to perpetuate traditional gender relations, especially since all of them had an immediate stake in preserving such relations in their own homes and in the larger political arena. Interestingly, women were primarily extolled in Revolutionary art after 1792 in the safe, depoliticized form of personifications such as Liberty, France, or Nature. How did David's Marat work to defuse and contain Corday's activism and to rewrite political history? 10

First, David rewrote the letter Corday brought with her dated 13 July, 1793. Behind the artistic mask of documentary truth conveyed through a incisive, trompe l'oeil verisimilitude, David altered Corday's letter and the meaning of her action by eliminating the whole first half referring to her political ruse. He left only that section invoking her (feminine) weakness and misery and need for his (male) protection: Thus David's version reads, "It is enough that I am truly miserable to have the right to your good will".

To reinterpret Corday's action further and prove the truth to Marat's revolutionary nickname as "friend of the people", David added a small bill of revolutionary money and a note from Marat on the table which reads, "You will give this bill to this mother with five children whose husband has died defending the 8 country". This small bill also underscores Marat’s patriotism, charity, republican family values, and what David called Marat’s “honorable poverty” as Tim Clark notes. 11

David's second, fabricated note implicitly rebuked Corday's direct political involvement by hailing the ideal woman as a wife and mother dependent on men (first her husband, now Marat). Since this feminine dependency overlaps exactly with the rhetoric of Corday's letter which David chose to include, Marat's fictitious note works to comment directly on the false, monstrous "femininity" of Corday. It suggests she used "feminine" virtue and domestic dependency only as a ploy to manipulate benevolent, virtuous heroes like Marat. In short, Marat's fictitious letter works to distinguish between a true and false femininity and attributes the latter to Corday. To the extent that Corday still appears as a political actor, she appears as a woman who has lost her true femininity.

The converse is also true whereby the woman remains but the political agent disappears. By picturing Corday only in the traditional role of a helpless, dependent woman (however false the rhetoric), David's Marat also works to remove Charlotte Corday, woman, from the realm of political action and thinking. She is reduced to the less discomforting stereotype of a "deceptive woman" rather than the revolutionary activist she was. Thus David's painting represents a political sphere focused almost entirely on Marat. Gone is any sense of the larger political clash between extremist Jacobins (Marat's party) and moderate Girondins. Most importantly, David avoids seeing the event as a struggle between Marat and Corday, a political event where a woman emerged as a citizen and played a decisive role in political history.

In numerous representations and discussions, Corday was usually seen either as a political actor without femininity (a monster spewed forth from time to time by nature as noted by the Jacobin deputy, Chabot) - or as a woman without political agency (as in her prosecutors' insistence she was the female puppet of a secret group of men.). The latter view also informed one print which showed her all dressed up in the latest fashions with a slim waist and enticing decolletage. It was all but impossible for the dominant culture to unite woman and political actor in Corday. Indeed, most contemporaries worked hard to split the two and restore a reassuring gender politics of male/female, public/private. In this way, politicians and artists made Corday's highly public example support and reinforce patriarchal norms. One official Parisian printed account even commented on Corday:

"Sentimental love and its soft emotions no longer approach the heart of a woman who has the pretension to knowledge, to wit, and to free thought, to the politics of the nation. ... Sensible and amiable men do not like women of this type."

Eager to discredit this unexpected Girondin heroine, a Jacobin newspaper denounced Corday as a monstrous she-male.

“This woman, said to be very pretty, was not at all pretty; she was a virago, brawny rather than fresh, without grace, untidy, as are almost all female philosophers and eggheads . . . Charlotte Corday was 25 years old: in our customs that is practically an old maid, especially with a masculinized bearing and boyish look . . . Thus, it follows that this woman has thrown herself absolutely outside of her sex.” 12

David's painting both removed and defeminized the female political actor. Thus it accomplished both of the prevailing strategies for reinterpreting the assassination. In doing so, it also helped renew what was for almost all men a reassuring patriarchy in the midst of revolutionary uncertainty and unpredictable social transformation. 1 Taken from the Wikipedia article. The original source is XX.

2 David Andress, The Terror, New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 93-115.

3 Andress, op. cit., p. 176.

5 Antoine Schnapper, David, New York: Alpine Books, 1980, 97-102.

6 Wikipedia,.

8 See David’s Andromache Mourning the Dead Hector (1783), (Schnapper, op. cit., p. 71, and the Dead Patroclus (Schnapper, p. 53), and the Dead Christ (identified as a “Nude Study” in Schnapper, p. 39).

9 See Clark. I have not yet seen Marie-Hélène Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793- 1797, trans. Robert Hurley, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

10 My discussion here draws heavily on Erica Rand’s insightful article, "Depoliticizing Women: Female Agency, the French Revolution and the Art of Boucher and David," Genders, 7, Spring 1990, 47-68. For more on gender and David’s Marat, see Helen Weston, “The Corday-Marat Affair: No Place for a Woman,” in William Vaughan abd Helen Weston, eds., Jacque-Louis David’s Marat, Cambridge Univ Press, 2000, 128- 152.

11 See Clark, op. cit. David’s plans for Marat’s funeral decreed that “Marat’s burial place will have the simplicity that befits an incorruptible republican dying in honorable poverty.” See Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, New York: Holt, 2006, p. 275.

12 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Berkeley, 1992, p. 82