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What is most surprising in this very unusual visual poem is that it was painted very quickly. When one thinks of the beauty of the lines, this quickness is bewildering. This is food for the strong, the triumph of spiritualism. This painting is as cruel as nature but it has the fragrance of ideals. Where is the ugliness that hallowed Death erased so quickly with the tip of his wing? Now Marat can challenge Apollo. He has been kissed by the loving lips of Death and he rests in the peace of his metamorphosis. This work contains something both poignant and tender; a soul is flying in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, around this cold funerary tub.
As Baudelaire is considered by many to be the father of Modernism, it is both prescient and generous of him to characterize David's painting as a work of "modern" art.
It is largely thanks to the Death of Marat that David is now regarded as one of the great painters of the French Revolution. This painting also has the distinction...
1793's the Death of Lepeletier would be destroyed in the Thermidorian events. David would not live to finish the Death of Bara.
The Death of Marat would go on to be cherished by many artists in the 20th century. Picasso rendered his homage to David's great painting by creating his own version of it. Peter Weiss would also pay homage to the painting in his play Marat / Sade.
Currently, the Death of Marat can be found in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, although copies of the painting, created in the revolutionary fervor that followed its unveiling, are on display in museums throughout France.
Bibliography
Simon, Robert. 1991. David's Martyr-Portrait of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau and the conundrums of Revolutionary Representation. Art History 14 (4): 459-487.
Vaughan, William, and Helen Weston, eds. 2000. Jacques-Louis David's Marat. Cambridge:
Bibliography
Simon, Robert. 1991. David's Martyr-Portrait of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau and the conundrums of Revolutionary Representation. Art History 14 (4): 459-487.
Vaughan, William, and Helen Weston, eds. 2000. Jacques-Louis David's Marat. Cambridge:
De La Croix, 865-66. Artists in the nineteenth century were confronted by three innovations that fatefully affected their craft: the camera, the mass produced print, and the printed reproduction. The collective techniques of an industrial age forced nineteenth century artists to analyze their function and to study closely the physical nature of their medium. Hyde, Minor, Art History's History. 32-35. Baroque Art emerged in Europe around 1600, as a reaction against
The exoticism and escapism of Romantic Art is manifest by the focus in the features of Napoleon on the bright or the wider scenes of the battlefield. However, it is the works of Francisco Goya that perhaps most perfectly epitomizes the intense individualism and emotion of Romantic art. Even the titles of Goya's works like "Yo lo Vi (This I saw)" and "Para Eso Yo Nacido (for this I
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The most famous genre painting by David is undoubtedly the Death of Marat (1793) which depicts French radical Jean-Paul Marat slumped over in his bathtub while holding a letter which he obviously was writing just before being killed by Charlotte Corday. The overall narrative of this painting -- the knife/murder weapon lying on the floor, the entry wound just above Marat's heart, his right arm draped over the edge of
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