The Death of Marat

Oil on canvas, 165 × 128 cm, painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1793, weeks after Charlotte Corday murdered the revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his bath on 13 July that year. Marat lies dead over the tub he lived in because of a skin disease, the pen still in one hand and his killer’s letter in the other. The composition deliberately echoes the lamentations over the dead Christ: David made him a secular martyr of the Revolution. It is now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels.