Date of Award

7-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Art in Art History and Visual Culture

Department

Art

First Advisor

Trenton Olsen

Second Advisor

Esperanca Camara

Third Advisor

James Hutson

Abstract

This thesis posits a reinterpretation of Jacques-Louis David’s late-eighteenth-century martyr-portrait, The Death of Marat, within its French Revolutionary political function and theological associations. The revolutionary body in Marat is rendered from a corporeal language of antique heroic figures and Renaissance depositions David observed during his study in Rome. It is especially in the iconography of the hanging arm that David illustrates Marat’s association with heroic and sacrificial deaths of antique and Christian imagery. These references convey the artist’s exploration of death within religious beliefs germane to the sociocultural contexts of the revolutionary period. Within antique and Christian theologies, David explores the notion of reward for one’s virtuous deeds and the concept of immortality or the continuation of the soul. David’s own words, as well as rhetoric from the 1793–94 National Convention, convey these very notions in the propagandistic rituals and paintings of revolutionary bodies. It is within these immortalizing designs that David and other Jacobin leaders persuaded the French sections to sympathize with their revolutionary cause and sacrifice their lives for the good of the French Republic. Through a formal examination of antique and Renaissance studies undertaken while David was in Rome, a comparative analysis of theologies relevant to the martyr-portrait of Marat, and an evaluation of the speeches and conversations of the National Convention, this thesis uncovers the manifestation of an immortalizing reward within David’s Death of Marat.

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