A Revolution at Rest: The Death of Marat and the Moral Ambiguity of History

Exploring the complex legacy behind Jacques-Louis David’s haunting masterpiece; a painting so beautiful it moved me to tears.


I didn’t think The Death of Marat, my favorite painting from my high school AP European history class, was in the Louvre. So, when I turned a corner and saw it, I stopped in my tracks. In the dimly lit painting, Jean-Paul Marat’s head rolls sideways, eyes closed, fingers gently curled around a quill and a note. Painted in 1793 by Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, both the oil painting’s title and the inscription on the wood podium, now rests in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, but a replica is displayed in a hall of the Louvre Museum in Paris, where I was lucky enough to notice it.



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