The Death of Marat

Jean-Paul Marat was one of the loudest voices of the French Revolution, a journalist who called for the enemies of the Republic to be dealt with hard. On the 13th of July 1793 a young woman named Charlotte Corday talked her way into his rooms and stabbed him while he sat in his bath. Marat had a painful skin disease and worked half-submerged in water to ease it, a green cloth soaked in vinegar wound round his head. His friend Jacques-Louis David, a leading revolutionary himself, painted this within months as a memorial, and it was hung in the hall where the revolutionary government met. David cleaned everything up. He gave Marat smooth healthy skin, left out the disease, and arranged the slumped body and the dropped arm to echo old paintings of Christ taken down from the cross, turning a divisive politician into a martyr. In Marat's hand is Corday's letter, the note that got her in the door. On the wooden crate beside the bath David signed and dated the picture and added three words, to Marat, David. Corday went to the guillotine 4 days after the killing.