San Rocco che intercede presso la Vergine

This is early Jacques-Louis David, years before he became the painter of the French Revolution. He made it in 1780 in Rome, where he was studying after winning the Prix de Rome, and you can see how hard he was looking at Italian masters like Caravaggio and Guercino, with their heavy shadow and gritty realism. Saint Roch was the saint people prayed to against plague, and David shows him kneeling to beg the Virgin and Christ Child for mercy on the sick sprawled around him, a plague sore visible on his own thigh. The bodies are limp and hopeless, one of them staring out at us. The commission came from the health board of Marseille, a city that had buried tens of thousands in the plague of 1720, and the painting still hangs there today.