(Learn more in the Khan Academy video above.) This is one of three canvases David made of “martyrs of the Revolution”-the other two are lost to history. Indeed, we can see David’s work as a visual precursor to philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle’s theories of “the heroic in history.” (Carlyle also happened to write the 19th century’s definitive history of the French Revolution.) In 1793, David took his visual great man theory and Neoclassical style and applied them for the first time to a contemporary event, the murder of his friend Jean-Paul Marat, Swiss Jacobin journalist, by the Girondist Charlotte Corday. He was also “elected a Deputy form the city of Paris, and voted for the execution of Louis XVI.” Historians have identified over “300 victims for whom David signed execution orders.” The severity of his earlier classical scenes comes into greater focus in The Death of Socrates around the central figure, a great man of history, one whose heroic feats and tragic sacrifices drive the course of all events worth mentioning. But Puschak’s vague historicizing doesn’t quite do the artist justice, failing to mention David’s direct part in the wave of bloody executions under Robespierre.ĭavid was an active supporter of the Revolution and designed “uniforms, banners, triumphal arches, and inspirational props for the Jacobin Club’s propaganda,” notes a Boston College account. The Nerdwriter summation of the painting’s angles and influences does help us see it anew.

In The Death of Socrates, David refines his moralistic tendencies, and Puschak ties the composition loosely to a sense of prophecy about the coming Terror after the storming of the Bastille. Here, David has Plato, already an old man, seated at the foot of the bed, the scene arranged behind him as if “exploding from the back of his head.” There are echoes of da Vinci’s Last Supper in the number of figures and their placement, and a distinct reference of Raphael’s School of Athens in Socrates’ upward-pointing finger, which belongs to Plato in the earlier painting. Nonetheless, as Evan Puschak, the Nerdwriter, shows us in the short video above, The Death of Socrates situates itself firmly within the traditions of European art, drawing heavily on classical sculptures and friezes as well as the greatest works of the Renaissance. Created two years before the start of the French Revolution, the painting “gave expression to the principle of resisting unjust authority,” and-like its source, Plato’s Phaedo-it makes a martyr of its hero, who is the soul of reason and a thorn in the side of dogma and tradition.

But let us put aside this prejudice and consider David’s 1787 The Death of Socrates. There’s something debased about the term-it stinks of insincerity, staginess, emotional manipulation, qualities that cannot possibly belong to great art. When we think of political propaganda, we do not typically think of French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David.

Plato on the death of socrates