Simon Schama's Power of Art (2006) s01e04 Episode Script
David
A funeral cortége clatters its way through the cobbled streets of Brussels.
Inside the carriage is the body of the most powerful French painter there had ever been.
Jacques-Louis David.
Following the carriage is a solemn procession of art students, holding up placards with the names of his paintings.
All but one, which happened to be the greatest of them all.
It was a picture which hadn't seen the light of day for 30 years.
No one, least of all the man who painted it, dared show it.
No wonder.
It was the most spellbinding thing he had ever made.
A painting before which people had once swooned.
A painting both beautiful and repulsive.
But the picture was also a guilty secret, the real reason why David's body was refused burial in France.
So, what was it about this painting which made it both his unforgettable masterpiece and his unforgivable crime? On the 19th September, 1783, an enormous taffeta spheroid wobbled its way unsteadily above the palace of Versailles.
In the basket were a sheep, a duck and a rooster.
When a violent gust of wind made a tear near the top of the balloon, there were fears for the barnyard aeronauts.
In the end, though, the balloon survived and it was judged the animals had not suffered.
This was, though, a major breach of protocol.
Versailles had been built to control spectacle.
That way, the mystery of absolutism was preserved.
On the ground, it was still, to some extent, an aristocratic vision.
In the air, it'd become democratic.
In Paris, a more down-to-earth thrill.
Beaumarchais'play, The Marriage of Figaro, is about to open after several government bans.
The king had called it detestable.
That guaranteed a crowd.
No, monsieur.
Because you are a great lord, you think you're a great genius? Nobility, rank, position, fortune, how proud they make a man feel.
What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born, nothing more.
For the rest you're a very ordinary man.
There were no signs that the bravos died on the lips of the nobility, even as they began to realise the significance of the attack.
Talk about signing your own death warrant.
But then, how were they to know that, in under 10 years, they'd be on the receiving end of something far more wounding than words.
Look, citizens, at the glorious destiny that awaits us.
You have a whole nation to mobilise.
No more Still, the French Revolution could never have happened without this sense of theatre.
Its great orators, like Danton, were performers, shamelessly playing to the gallery, milking the cheers and the hisses.
Reason fights on your side, and you have not even begun to astonish the world.
And if they were really going to create a new France, they needed someone to create images to go with the words.
That someone was Jacques-Louis David.
It was David who would give people the vision of what a true citizen was.
His art, then, wasn't meant as gallery fodder.
It was an entire way of life.
Or death.
I'm not sure how I feel about this painting, except deeply conflicted.
Yes, it's tragically beautiful.
But to say that is to separate it from the appalling moment of its creation.
This is Jean-Paul Marat, the most paranoid of the Revolution's fanatics.
He's been assassinated in his bath.
Marat was someone for whom there could never be enough terror, never enough killing.
But for David, Marat isn't a monster.
He's a saint.
This painting transforms Marat into a paragon of virtue.
Breathtaking? For sure.
But maybe also just a little mad.
Which isn't to say that Jacques-Louis David was some sort of malevolent crackpot.
All his life, he was really only looking for virtue.
There was something painfully earnest about him, resolute, self-contained.
One, two, three.
Not surprising, really.
When he was seven, his father, an iron merchant, had been killed in a pistol duel.
Something iron must have entered the boy's soul.
He was looked after by friendly uncles who wanted him to be a lawyer or an architect, but David would hear of nothing but painting.
So the uncles sent him on to his mother's cousin, who just happened to be the most successful painter in France.
Francois Boucher knew exactly what art was supposed to deliver for the nobility.
The pinkest, flossiest eye candy imaginable, rosy bums romping on frothy pillows.
But perhaps Boucher saw in the sober, young David someone for whom melting beauty was not going to be the point of art.
So he sent him on to another master.
But Boucher said to David, ''Come and see me from time to time, and I will teach you my warmth.
'' But David would never be at home in the pleasure industry.
He was a loner.
Once he got involved in a swordfight, and took a vicious slash on his cheek.
The wound grew into a benign tumour.
That was the first thing anyone noticed about him.
His enemies would call him, ''David with the swollen cheek.
'' Accidents like this happened every day.
Walk down any Paris street or into any salon, and you would have seen a rich gallery of the deformed and the disfigured.
Terrible smallpox scars, club feet, harelips, the lot.
But some accidents matter to people and some don't.
This one did.
David's disfigurement meant he couldn't talk properly.
Few people could understand what he was saying, so he ended up not saying very much.
When he did talk, he was painfully conscious of being a stammerer.
If there was ever a moment in history when wit and banter really mattered, it was surely in 18th-century France.
But David of the swollen cheek couldn't talk, he couldn't chat, he just mumbled.
Maybe there was one consolation, for there was someone else who was famous for his handicaps in the wit department, and he happened to be the king.
Louis XVI was born to worry about happiness.
His grandfather, Louis XV, had designed Versailles around its pursuit.
But for his young successor, happiness would always be hard work.
When Louis came to the throne in 1775, he wanted the best for everyone, but he just didn't know how to get it.
The saddest thing about Louis XVI was that the king who went down in history as the reactionary symbol of the old regime actually thought of himself as thoroughly modern, deeply into science and technology.
Balloons? Couldn't get enough of them.
His reign, which ended in catastrophe, began in a sunburst of giddy optimism, and a change in taste, too.
Out went gold ormolu, in came modesty, the cult of nature.
Even Louis XVI's young Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, was a devotee.
She built a toy farm here at Versailles, went off milking cows in the royal dairy.
So, no more couches and courtesans.
Instead, tenderness, simplicity.
Tears were especially prized as evidence of feeling.
Paintings like this went down well.
Girl Weeping Over Dead Canary by Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
People wept when they saw it.
Feelings mattered to David, too, but not the shallow kind embraced by the fashionable elite.
No, David was in search of something steelier.
It was amidst the stones of Rome that he found it.
Everything changed for David here.
Not just what he thought about art, but what he thought about the future of his country.
So what were the stones telling him? ''This is what happens to decadent empires, '' they said.
Once there had been a free Rome, the Republic, austere,just, virile, packed with flinty heroes.
But effeminate luxury had killed it.
Liberty had surrendered to despotism and the Romans had become slaves.
How that message from history echoed in David's fertile brain.
And in 1785, David delivered that message, like a package of bad news for the complacent and the over-powdered.
Welcome to the first public art show in the world, in the palace of the Louvre, no less.
This wasn't always a hushed museum.
Every two years, it staged the greatest public entertainment in Paris, and it was free.
Word had got out there was something sensational to see.
Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii.
It's a painting about a country in crisis.
To avoid war, the Romans have chosen three of their men to fight with three from the enemy.
Last one standing wins.
The cruel twist is that one of the Roman boys is married to an enemy girl.
Widowhood and orphanhood beckon.
But none of the men are paying the slightest attention to that.
This is a boys' bonding picture, a tight-packed display of muscle, veins and steel.
The only splash of colour is the blood red of that cape.
The father solemnly swears them to conquer or die, his naked hand on the sharp blade.
At least 60,000 people would have come to the exhibition to see this painting, and not just the bigwigs either, but shopkeepers, fishwives, the whole sweaty, growling public.
They would be David's people.
And they looked at that strange line dance of death, and they didn't know whether to be thrilled or scared.
It felt like a call to arms in the face of a great crisis.
And that crisis was happening not in ancient Rome, but here and now, in Louis XVI's France.
It began, as so many revolutions do, with a financial meltdown.
France had taken pride in helping America to win independence, but it had come at a huge cost.
Avoiding bankruptcy meant more taxes.
So, awkward questions were being asked about why the nobility and the clergy were tax-exempt, while the scarecrow poor were supposed to empty their pockets.
Wasn't the nation all in it together? The nation? Well, that was a new idea.
And while we're at it, how about elected representatives, too? Oh, it went without saying that the new France would still be a monarchy.
The queen, with all those diamonds, needed putting in her place, but the king was a good fellow.
No reason to assume a social apocalypse around the corner.
For a while, that's how David himself felt, which didn't mean a little reform wouldn't help.
There was a lot of deadwood around.
For a start, those non-entities at the Academy of Painting, they'd have to go.
When he was a struggling artist, they'd rejected him four times.
Now he was successful, they barely tolerated him.
Well, their time was up.
Anyway, he didn't need them any more.
Now he had intelligent, liberal-minded followers.
Here are two of those good eggs, rich, smart and affable.
Mr and Mrs Charming, Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.
He is a famous experimental chemist.
That flask on the floor is for measuring gases.
Marie-Anne, who'd married him at 13, was more than a wife.
That casual hand on his shoulder tells us she was a true partner, translating articles from English for him, designing illustrations for his books.
He's filthy rich, but he does have a social conscience.
A lot of his money has been put into draining swamps to eradicate malaria, that sort of thing.
To look at the portrait, you'd think David has captured a vision of the kind of people who ought to be governing France, humane, affectionate and modern.
Well, for 7,000 livres, he wasn't even going to hint at the other Lavoisier, the one who made money collecting taxes with the help of a private army.
No, David took his fee, but when the time came for him to show the painting at the Louvre, he ended up withdrawing it.
But then he would, wouldn't he? Between the paint drying and the show opening, everything in France had changed.
It was 1789.
Hope and desperation in equal parts.
Hope from a representative assembly, the Estate's General elected from thousands of meetings all over France.
But desperation too, because it was happening at the worst possible time.
Harvest wipeouts, soaring prices.
Put hope and desperation together, and what do you get? The political equivalent of nitroglycerine.
When the Estate's General met here in Versailles, in the spring of 1789, it all boiled down to one question.
Would the deputies do it the old way, meeting as three separate orders, nobles, clergy and commoners, or would they do it the new way, and for the first time come together as a single national assembly? The commoners, among them a young lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre, forced the issue, declaring themselves the only legitimate body, priests and nobles welcome to join.
A surprising number of them did.
It's the 20th June, 1789, and it's one of those late-spring torrential downpours.
And the 600 deputies of the Third Estate, the commoners, plus their new allies among the nobles and the clergy, have been locked out of their meeting hall.
A certain Doctor Guillotin knows a tennis court quite close by.
The mayor of Paris, Sylvain Bailly, is suddenly the star of the show.
Swear an oath to God and the fatherland never to separate, until we have made a sound and just constitution.
For the first time, aristocrats, clergy and bourgeoisie were meeting together without the king's permission.
Arms stretch, bodies embrace, life had caught up with art.
David's Rome reborn was the new France.
A year later, David got to work on his depiction of the Tennis Court Oath.
It's a picture filled with noise.
The roar of the oath.
The crash of a great electrical storm.
The Revolution as an unstoppable force of nature.
And at the centre of it all, an enormous space.
Except it's not empty at all.
It's filled with light and rushing wind, the furious energy of liberty.
It's an idea.
An idea so big, it dwarfs the humans who enact it.
The drawing was supposed to be turned into a huge painting.
This is just a small section of it.
But as you can see, it was never finished.
Before David even had a chance to put clothes on these nude models, many of them would be dead or disgraced.
The great message of unity and freedom would soon be quaintly out of date.
Instead of arms outstretched, there was an epidemic of finger-pointing.
July 1789 ought to have been a moment of golden optimism for the reborn France.
Louis XVI seemed finally to have accepted the results of the Tennis Court Oath, that there was now a National Assembly in France.
But here in the Palais Royale, the Speaker's Corner of Paris, nobody actually believed him.
People said the king had secretly stocked the fortress of the Bastille with gunpowder, so Paris was literally a powder keg waiting to happen.
On the morning of July 14th, a crowd of about 900 converged on the grim fortress.
It's always the same, isn't it? Someone panics, there's a first shot.
No one knows from where.
Cries of ''Massacre!'' Then, a serious exchange of fire.
It took an afternoon of chaos and 83 lives before the governor yielded the Bastille.
He was promised safe conduct.
What he got was his head cut off with a fruit knife.
But then, whoever said revolutions were going to be bloodless? Here's David's contribution to the decapitation campaign.
It's the darkest thing he ever did.
It's a Roman father again.
Brutus, brooding in the darkness, has ordered the execution of his sons, for plotting to bring back the monarchy.
Their headless bodies are brought to him, and he literally doesn't look back.
Only that right foot is a sign of his repressed emotion.
Brutus has gone to the dark side.
Light floods the boys' mother, who sees only her headless children.
You feel the tug of the heart.
There's something chilling about this painting, like all David's great pictures.
Even as you marvel at its brilliance, your blood runs cold at what it's saying.
Look what's at the dead centre of the picture, a pair of sharp scissors, the hard, cold metal that's cut the family ties.
David seems to have a thing about blades.
They've marked his face and now they've marked his mind.
From father to fatherland is but a short step.
The first two years of the Revolution swung wildly from mass euphoria to paranoia, orgies of public hugging, spasms of vindictive lynching.
Why the anger? Because people were still hungry.
Bread prices had gone through the roof, and people had discovered you couldn't eat votes.
Someone was to blame.
''The baker and the baker's wife', the jeering market women called them, as they dragged Louis and Marie Antoinette out of the safety of Versailles, to Paris.
The queen, they said, was no better than an Austrian whore.
David thought the same.
''The rioters should have strangled her, cut the carcass to pieces, ''he wrote.
He was at this time an odd mix of dogma and uncertainty.
Like millions of his countrymen, he thought the queen was a monster, but he hadn't given up on the idea of Louis as citizen king.
He even signed up to do a portrait of him.
So he was still very much a political ingénue, until, that is, he met the likes of him.
Jean-Paul Marat, balloonist, failed inventor, newspaper editor, fanatic.
Here he is in his bath, the only place he could get respite from the excruciatingly itchy skin disease that left him raw and scaly.
Marat played on hysteria like a drum.
His paper, The Friend of the People, yelled and cursed and denounced, ripping off the masks of false patriots whom he fingered as traitors.
''There are plots everywhere, ''he screamed.
The street, caught between fear and hyperventilation, ate up the conspiracy theories.
Marie Antoinette, malevolent slut, plotting with her brother, the Emperor of Austria, against France.
Imagine.
Except it was true.
In June, 1791 , the royal couple was caught in their escape bid and taken back, virtual prisoners, to Paris.
Austria threatened France with dire consequences should anything happen to the king and queen.
Now, the royal couple seem like the enemy within.
The following year, war broke out, and their days, and the days of the French monarchy, were numbered.
Now, fighting for France meant fighting against royalty.
Five days after the war started, in April, 1792, there was a dinner in the garrison town of Strasbourg, near the front.
The idea was to boost the shaky morale of the army.
So, there were toasts, there were speeches.
''Long live liberty'', ''Death to tyrants'', the usual thing.
What was missing, though, was a good song that would send a surge of self-belief right through the camp.
It was Rouget de Lisle, regimental engineer and part-time composer, who came up with that song.
You belong to something glorious now.
You belong to the Patrie, the fatherland.
MAN: Everything is in motion.
Everyone burns to fight.
To conquer our enemies, we must have daring, more daring, always daring.
And France will be saved! In August, 1792, the guards protecting the royal family were slaughtered, Louis, Marie Antoinette and their children were taken to prison.
One must never compromise with tyrants.
One can only strike at kings through the head.
I vote for death of the tyrant.
You're a very ordinary man.
On January 21st, 1793, Louis XVI was executed.
Among those in the newly formed National Convention who voted for the death of the monarch, was the artist who'd once taken commissions from him, Jacques-Louis David.
So France had been reborn as a republic, and David, now a model citizen, sat proudly on the benches of the convention as MP for Paris, along with his political idols, Marat and Robespierre.
There was no going back.
From now on, David and his art belonged to the Revolution.
Wherever it lead, he would follow, and where it lead was dictatorship.
The country was at war, its enemies were outside and inside France.
This was no time for tender feelings.
Countless people who had thought of themselves as friends, not enemies, of the Revolution, were fingered and denounced.
Among the first to be arrested were his old friends and patrons, Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.
She survived the guillotine, he didn't.
For Marat and Robespierre, there could never be enough guillotined heads to feel safe.
In 1789, Marat had called for a few hundred.
Now, he called for hundreds of thousands.
Someone had to stop it, and that someone was Charlotte Corday, 25 years old, from the town of Caen in Normandy.
No royalist.
A revolutionary, in fact.
But a bitter enemy of Marat and his followers.
The dictatorship, she thought, had made a mockery of the Republic of Liberty.
She cast herself as a tragic heroine whose destiny was to save her country.
On the 9th July, 1793, Charlotte Corday got on a coach bound for Paris.
When she arrived, she came here to the Palais Royale, bought a black hat with green feathers and a six-inch knife.
In a cheap hotel room, she wrote a speech explaining why she had to kill Marat and sewed it to her dress, along with her certificate of baptism.
And as Corday was planning the murder, David was paying his friend Marat a visit.
He found him propped up in his bath, using an upturned wooden box as an improvised desk.
So little time, so many traitors to denounce.
Did the Friend of the People ever rest from his patriotic toil? The next day, Charlotte Corday walked over to Marat's house on the rue des Cordeliers.
Barred at the door, she tried delivering a handwritten note warning him about plots, hoping he was gonna rise to the bait.
No reply.
That evening, she tried again.
As she arrived, two men were delivering bread and newspapers.
She was in.
Corday pretended she was an informer and gave Marat a list of traitors.
''I will have them guillotined in a week'', he said.
And that was it.
Out came the knife, straight into Marat's chest.
So the Friend of the People was lost to the Revolution.
Inside the National Convention, grief-stricken deputies cried their eyes out, authentically or not.
What they most wanted, I think, was for Marat to come back to them.
''Come back, come back.
We need you, all of France needs you.
'' And then one of the most theatrical deputies rose to his feet and shouted, ''David, where are you? There is one more job for you.
'' And David of the swollen cheek miraculously found his voice.
I shall do it.
''I shall do it, ''he said.
''I will paint Marat.
'' It was midsummer, the hottest in anyone's memory.
The embalmers, under David's direction, were working overtime, preparing Marat's body for the funeral.
But his normally ghastly red-flesh colour was rapidly turning green.
David had wanted Marat displayed sitting upright, working for the good of the people.
But the decomposing corpse refused to co-operate.
Drenched in perfume, it had to be laid flat out for the grieving public to file past.
The funeral would inevitably fade in people's memory.
The painting, though, would never fade.
It was Marat's best revenge, for it would make sure that he would always be around.
Here was someone transfigured by goodness, honesty and patriotic selflessness.
''Look upon him,'' David is saying, ''And you will see the highest type of humanity.
'' He's cleaned Marat up, of course.
The skin has the colour of cool stone, the wound is unmissable, yet at the same time almost delicate, like the incision in the side of Christ on the cross.
The white sheets seem shroud-like, ghostly wrappings of the great man as he hovers between our world and posterity.
It's a cult image, and it tells you to believe.
Its genius lies in the fact that it's also a story for the people.
For once, the hero isn't Roman, he's one of them.
It's the first great work for the faces in the crowd, the singers of the Marseillaise.
You can almost feel David imagining whole families in front of this painting, a father saying to his children, ''Look, there's his inkwell.
" ''Look, there's the letter of the wicked Corday, stained with the blood of the good Marat.
'' But David is not showing the letter that got Corday into Marat's house, the one with the list of traitors.
It's a different letter.
One that would make Marat seem like a victim of his own kindness.
''It's enough that I am truly unhappy to have the right to your benevolence, '' it says.
On top of the box is another letter, from the widow of a soldier fallen in battle.
With it is a donation Marat is about to send her.
Two women, then, the good mother and the bad Corday.
There's no attempt to give a sense of Marat's room here.
No crossed pistols hanging on the wall, no fake columns.
Instead, the entire top half of the painting is filled with loose, feathery strokes that could be wall or just indeterminate space.
The space of forever.
But then that box, grainy, solid.
''He was one of you, '' the box says.
''One of the poor and suffering.
''But now you can't reach him.
''No one can, except through this.
'' But even while you're held spellbound, another voice inside your head says, ''Hold on a minute," ''this is the purest witchcraft.
'' What David has done here is to glorify a paranoid, whose greatest satisfaction was the persecution of thousands of people whose only crime was to be lukewarm about politics.
This is an accomplice of terror.
Of course, it never occurred to David that he was betraying art.
''Oh, no,'' he would have said.
''I'm fulfilling its highest, noblest purpose," ''that of moral re-education.
" ''That's what all those altarpieces that once hung in churches did," ''but those were all lies and fairytales.
" ''We have a new church now, the church of revolutionary virtue.
'' So why do I like David? Well, I don't.
He's a monster.
But he makes ideas blaze in dry ice.
He is a fantastic propagandist, no one better.
Albert Speer could just as well roll over and die.
And what was the point of it all? Well, it's a revenge on wit, on chat and on banter.
But it was more than that.
This is art designed to make those who saw it virtuous citizens.
And it's all so perfect, so tragic, so poetic you almost believe it.
But like a lot of art designed to improve humanity, it has the opposite effect.
Because it's a lie.
Three months after the assassination of Marat, on October 16th, 1793, Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine.
David saw her tumbrel going down the street, while people spat in their hands and tried to throw the gobs on the woman who'd been queen.
He sketched her impassively.
But David's got more important things on his mind than the fate of Marie Antoinette.
He's now the official director of revolutionary propaganda, to the exclusion of practically everything else.
When his wife disapproved of his zeal, he divorced her.
David has become an enforcer, sitting on the Committee for General Security, hunting down the treacherously half-hearted, signing warrants for their execution.
The terror had begun, and David had become part of the great engine of killing.
And as the tempo of the guillotine got faster, David busied himself with ever more extravagant spectacles to educate the people.
Casts of thousands, massed singing virgins, statues on the site of the Bastille.
A festival of the supreme being, starring the high priest of the Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre.
In the end, David was a victim of his own success.
The hard-nosed men who were running the war knew that bread and guns mattered, and virgins and doves didn't.
So David wasn't just a distraction, he was a menace.
Get rid of him.
And David's downfall was inextricably linked to the fate of Robespierre.
Increasingly, Robespierre was spoken of not as saviour of the Revolution, but tyrant, and David, the window-dresser of his tyranny, was going down with him.
Robespierre was attacked in the Convention, the dreaded words ''outside the law'' uttered.
Incredulous, David made a spectacle of himself.
''Robespierre,'' he shouted.
''If you drink the hemlock, I will drink it with you.
'' But of course, he didn't.
The next day, David was suddenly indisposed, so he missed his own date with martyrdom.
He was not there beside Robespierre when he was guillotined and the blade at last came down on the terror.
But they came for David, nonetheless.
Vilified as tyrant of the arts, David tried to stammer a defence.
No one could understand what he was saying, but they noticed how pale he was, how the sweat ran through his clothes and dripped onto the floor.
In prison, he managed to get hold of some paints and he painted this self-portrait.
You can see the famous tumour and the twist it gives to his face, but that's as far as the truth goes.
Because what we're seeing is not the old propaganda master, that's for sure, but young David, 20 years at least taken off, all innocent, hair romantically dishevelled, coat open to expose his pure, transparent heart.
And he's done himself with palette and brushes.
''Why me?'' it says.
''I'm just a painter.
'' Yeah, right.
Led astray, were you? Just doing your job? I don't think so.
But guess what? The art plea worked.
David got out of prison, and spent the next years doing spectacular, uncontroversial portraits like this.
Monsieur Seriziat, his brother-in-law.
This is what the Revolution of the virtuous had become, the Republican tricolour reduced to a fashion accessory.
When he does do history paintings, they're pleas to stop killing.
No more politics, then, for Jacques-Louis David, right? Wrong.
The old demon never really goes away.
Once bitten by power, you stay bitten.
He airbrushed Marat, why shouldn't he airbrush Napoleon? When Napoleon was crowned emperor in 1805, David was slavishly at his side, official glamoriser.
But then, of course, Napoleon was defeated, the monarchy restored.
Lots of Napoleon-lovers were forgiven, but not David.
He'd done something that could never be forgiven.
He'd done this, the most notorious image produced by the terror.
France had had enough of Jacques-Louis David.
Banished from his own country, David ended up here in Brussels, where he did paintings of increasingly high-gloss weirdness, a big fish in a very small pond.
In France, they mostly talked about him as a back number, ''Oh, David, Brutus and all that.
Isn't he dead?'' When he did die, in December, 1825, the government in Paris refused permission for his family to bring the body home.
No king-killers allowed.
David's paintings, though, were up for sale.
Before that, they were put on public display.
Not, however, the notorious Marat.
That was kept under guard at the artist's son's house.
Admission by private arrangement.
And you take a look at it and you know why.
If ever there was a work of art that says that beauty can be lethal, it's Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat.
Inside the carriage is the body of the most powerful French painter there had ever been.
Jacques-Louis David.
Following the carriage is a solemn procession of art students, holding up placards with the names of his paintings.
All but one, which happened to be the greatest of them all.
It was a picture which hadn't seen the light of day for 30 years.
No one, least of all the man who painted it, dared show it.
No wonder.
It was the most spellbinding thing he had ever made.
A painting before which people had once swooned.
A painting both beautiful and repulsive.
But the picture was also a guilty secret, the real reason why David's body was refused burial in France.
So, what was it about this painting which made it both his unforgettable masterpiece and his unforgivable crime? On the 19th September, 1783, an enormous taffeta spheroid wobbled its way unsteadily above the palace of Versailles.
In the basket were a sheep, a duck and a rooster.
When a violent gust of wind made a tear near the top of the balloon, there were fears for the barnyard aeronauts.
In the end, though, the balloon survived and it was judged the animals had not suffered.
This was, though, a major breach of protocol.
Versailles had been built to control spectacle.
That way, the mystery of absolutism was preserved.
On the ground, it was still, to some extent, an aristocratic vision.
In the air, it'd become democratic.
In Paris, a more down-to-earth thrill.
Beaumarchais'play, The Marriage of Figaro, is about to open after several government bans.
The king had called it detestable.
That guaranteed a crowd.
No, monsieur.
Because you are a great lord, you think you're a great genius? Nobility, rank, position, fortune, how proud they make a man feel.
What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born, nothing more.
For the rest you're a very ordinary man.
There were no signs that the bravos died on the lips of the nobility, even as they began to realise the significance of the attack.
Talk about signing your own death warrant.
But then, how were they to know that, in under 10 years, they'd be on the receiving end of something far more wounding than words.
Look, citizens, at the glorious destiny that awaits us.
You have a whole nation to mobilise.
No more Still, the French Revolution could never have happened without this sense of theatre.
Its great orators, like Danton, were performers, shamelessly playing to the gallery, milking the cheers and the hisses.
Reason fights on your side, and you have not even begun to astonish the world.
And if they were really going to create a new France, they needed someone to create images to go with the words.
That someone was Jacques-Louis David.
It was David who would give people the vision of what a true citizen was.
His art, then, wasn't meant as gallery fodder.
It was an entire way of life.
Or death.
I'm not sure how I feel about this painting, except deeply conflicted.
Yes, it's tragically beautiful.
But to say that is to separate it from the appalling moment of its creation.
This is Jean-Paul Marat, the most paranoid of the Revolution's fanatics.
He's been assassinated in his bath.
Marat was someone for whom there could never be enough terror, never enough killing.
But for David, Marat isn't a monster.
He's a saint.
This painting transforms Marat into a paragon of virtue.
Breathtaking? For sure.
But maybe also just a little mad.
Which isn't to say that Jacques-Louis David was some sort of malevolent crackpot.
All his life, he was really only looking for virtue.
There was something painfully earnest about him, resolute, self-contained.
One, two, three.
Not surprising, really.
When he was seven, his father, an iron merchant, had been killed in a pistol duel.
Something iron must have entered the boy's soul.
He was looked after by friendly uncles who wanted him to be a lawyer or an architect, but David would hear of nothing but painting.
So the uncles sent him on to his mother's cousin, who just happened to be the most successful painter in France.
Francois Boucher knew exactly what art was supposed to deliver for the nobility.
The pinkest, flossiest eye candy imaginable, rosy bums romping on frothy pillows.
But perhaps Boucher saw in the sober, young David someone for whom melting beauty was not going to be the point of art.
So he sent him on to another master.
But Boucher said to David, ''Come and see me from time to time, and I will teach you my warmth.
'' But David would never be at home in the pleasure industry.
He was a loner.
Once he got involved in a swordfight, and took a vicious slash on his cheek.
The wound grew into a benign tumour.
That was the first thing anyone noticed about him.
His enemies would call him, ''David with the swollen cheek.
'' Accidents like this happened every day.
Walk down any Paris street or into any salon, and you would have seen a rich gallery of the deformed and the disfigured.
Terrible smallpox scars, club feet, harelips, the lot.
But some accidents matter to people and some don't.
This one did.
David's disfigurement meant he couldn't talk properly.
Few people could understand what he was saying, so he ended up not saying very much.
When he did talk, he was painfully conscious of being a stammerer.
If there was ever a moment in history when wit and banter really mattered, it was surely in 18th-century France.
But David of the swollen cheek couldn't talk, he couldn't chat, he just mumbled.
Maybe there was one consolation, for there was someone else who was famous for his handicaps in the wit department, and he happened to be the king.
Louis XVI was born to worry about happiness.
His grandfather, Louis XV, had designed Versailles around its pursuit.
But for his young successor, happiness would always be hard work.
When Louis came to the throne in 1775, he wanted the best for everyone, but he just didn't know how to get it.
The saddest thing about Louis XVI was that the king who went down in history as the reactionary symbol of the old regime actually thought of himself as thoroughly modern, deeply into science and technology.
Balloons? Couldn't get enough of them.
His reign, which ended in catastrophe, began in a sunburst of giddy optimism, and a change in taste, too.
Out went gold ormolu, in came modesty, the cult of nature.
Even Louis XVI's young Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, was a devotee.
She built a toy farm here at Versailles, went off milking cows in the royal dairy.
So, no more couches and courtesans.
Instead, tenderness, simplicity.
Tears were especially prized as evidence of feeling.
Paintings like this went down well.
Girl Weeping Over Dead Canary by Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
People wept when they saw it.
Feelings mattered to David, too, but not the shallow kind embraced by the fashionable elite.
No, David was in search of something steelier.
It was amidst the stones of Rome that he found it.
Everything changed for David here.
Not just what he thought about art, but what he thought about the future of his country.
So what were the stones telling him? ''This is what happens to decadent empires, '' they said.
Once there had been a free Rome, the Republic, austere,just, virile, packed with flinty heroes.
But effeminate luxury had killed it.
Liberty had surrendered to despotism and the Romans had become slaves.
How that message from history echoed in David's fertile brain.
And in 1785, David delivered that message, like a package of bad news for the complacent and the over-powdered.
Welcome to the first public art show in the world, in the palace of the Louvre, no less.
This wasn't always a hushed museum.
Every two years, it staged the greatest public entertainment in Paris, and it was free.
Word had got out there was something sensational to see.
Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii.
It's a painting about a country in crisis.
To avoid war, the Romans have chosen three of their men to fight with three from the enemy.
Last one standing wins.
The cruel twist is that one of the Roman boys is married to an enemy girl.
Widowhood and orphanhood beckon.
But none of the men are paying the slightest attention to that.
This is a boys' bonding picture, a tight-packed display of muscle, veins and steel.
The only splash of colour is the blood red of that cape.
The father solemnly swears them to conquer or die, his naked hand on the sharp blade.
At least 60,000 people would have come to the exhibition to see this painting, and not just the bigwigs either, but shopkeepers, fishwives, the whole sweaty, growling public.
They would be David's people.
And they looked at that strange line dance of death, and they didn't know whether to be thrilled or scared.
It felt like a call to arms in the face of a great crisis.
And that crisis was happening not in ancient Rome, but here and now, in Louis XVI's France.
It began, as so many revolutions do, with a financial meltdown.
France had taken pride in helping America to win independence, but it had come at a huge cost.
Avoiding bankruptcy meant more taxes.
So, awkward questions were being asked about why the nobility and the clergy were tax-exempt, while the scarecrow poor were supposed to empty their pockets.
Wasn't the nation all in it together? The nation? Well, that was a new idea.
And while we're at it, how about elected representatives, too? Oh, it went without saying that the new France would still be a monarchy.
The queen, with all those diamonds, needed putting in her place, but the king was a good fellow.
No reason to assume a social apocalypse around the corner.
For a while, that's how David himself felt, which didn't mean a little reform wouldn't help.
There was a lot of deadwood around.
For a start, those non-entities at the Academy of Painting, they'd have to go.
When he was a struggling artist, they'd rejected him four times.
Now he was successful, they barely tolerated him.
Well, their time was up.
Anyway, he didn't need them any more.
Now he had intelligent, liberal-minded followers.
Here are two of those good eggs, rich, smart and affable.
Mr and Mrs Charming, Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.
He is a famous experimental chemist.
That flask on the floor is for measuring gases.
Marie-Anne, who'd married him at 13, was more than a wife.
That casual hand on his shoulder tells us she was a true partner, translating articles from English for him, designing illustrations for his books.
He's filthy rich, but he does have a social conscience.
A lot of his money has been put into draining swamps to eradicate malaria, that sort of thing.
To look at the portrait, you'd think David has captured a vision of the kind of people who ought to be governing France, humane, affectionate and modern.
Well, for 7,000 livres, he wasn't even going to hint at the other Lavoisier, the one who made money collecting taxes with the help of a private army.
No, David took his fee, but when the time came for him to show the painting at the Louvre, he ended up withdrawing it.
But then he would, wouldn't he? Between the paint drying and the show opening, everything in France had changed.
It was 1789.
Hope and desperation in equal parts.
Hope from a representative assembly, the Estate's General elected from thousands of meetings all over France.
But desperation too, because it was happening at the worst possible time.
Harvest wipeouts, soaring prices.
Put hope and desperation together, and what do you get? The political equivalent of nitroglycerine.
When the Estate's General met here in Versailles, in the spring of 1789, it all boiled down to one question.
Would the deputies do it the old way, meeting as three separate orders, nobles, clergy and commoners, or would they do it the new way, and for the first time come together as a single national assembly? The commoners, among them a young lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre, forced the issue, declaring themselves the only legitimate body, priests and nobles welcome to join.
A surprising number of them did.
It's the 20th June, 1789, and it's one of those late-spring torrential downpours.
And the 600 deputies of the Third Estate, the commoners, plus their new allies among the nobles and the clergy, have been locked out of their meeting hall.
A certain Doctor Guillotin knows a tennis court quite close by.
The mayor of Paris, Sylvain Bailly, is suddenly the star of the show.
Swear an oath to God and the fatherland never to separate, until we have made a sound and just constitution.
For the first time, aristocrats, clergy and bourgeoisie were meeting together without the king's permission.
Arms stretch, bodies embrace, life had caught up with art.
David's Rome reborn was the new France.
A year later, David got to work on his depiction of the Tennis Court Oath.
It's a picture filled with noise.
The roar of the oath.
The crash of a great electrical storm.
The Revolution as an unstoppable force of nature.
And at the centre of it all, an enormous space.
Except it's not empty at all.
It's filled with light and rushing wind, the furious energy of liberty.
It's an idea.
An idea so big, it dwarfs the humans who enact it.
The drawing was supposed to be turned into a huge painting.
This is just a small section of it.
But as you can see, it was never finished.
Before David even had a chance to put clothes on these nude models, many of them would be dead or disgraced.
The great message of unity and freedom would soon be quaintly out of date.
Instead of arms outstretched, there was an epidemic of finger-pointing.
July 1789 ought to have been a moment of golden optimism for the reborn France.
Louis XVI seemed finally to have accepted the results of the Tennis Court Oath, that there was now a National Assembly in France.
But here in the Palais Royale, the Speaker's Corner of Paris, nobody actually believed him.
People said the king had secretly stocked the fortress of the Bastille with gunpowder, so Paris was literally a powder keg waiting to happen.
On the morning of July 14th, a crowd of about 900 converged on the grim fortress.
It's always the same, isn't it? Someone panics, there's a first shot.
No one knows from where.
Cries of ''Massacre!'' Then, a serious exchange of fire.
It took an afternoon of chaos and 83 lives before the governor yielded the Bastille.
He was promised safe conduct.
What he got was his head cut off with a fruit knife.
But then, whoever said revolutions were going to be bloodless? Here's David's contribution to the decapitation campaign.
It's the darkest thing he ever did.
It's a Roman father again.
Brutus, brooding in the darkness, has ordered the execution of his sons, for plotting to bring back the monarchy.
Their headless bodies are brought to him, and he literally doesn't look back.
Only that right foot is a sign of his repressed emotion.
Brutus has gone to the dark side.
Light floods the boys' mother, who sees only her headless children.
You feel the tug of the heart.
There's something chilling about this painting, like all David's great pictures.
Even as you marvel at its brilliance, your blood runs cold at what it's saying.
Look what's at the dead centre of the picture, a pair of sharp scissors, the hard, cold metal that's cut the family ties.
David seems to have a thing about blades.
They've marked his face and now they've marked his mind.
From father to fatherland is but a short step.
The first two years of the Revolution swung wildly from mass euphoria to paranoia, orgies of public hugging, spasms of vindictive lynching.
Why the anger? Because people were still hungry.
Bread prices had gone through the roof, and people had discovered you couldn't eat votes.
Someone was to blame.
''The baker and the baker's wife', the jeering market women called them, as they dragged Louis and Marie Antoinette out of the safety of Versailles, to Paris.
The queen, they said, was no better than an Austrian whore.
David thought the same.
''The rioters should have strangled her, cut the carcass to pieces, ''he wrote.
He was at this time an odd mix of dogma and uncertainty.
Like millions of his countrymen, he thought the queen was a monster, but he hadn't given up on the idea of Louis as citizen king.
He even signed up to do a portrait of him.
So he was still very much a political ingénue, until, that is, he met the likes of him.
Jean-Paul Marat, balloonist, failed inventor, newspaper editor, fanatic.
Here he is in his bath, the only place he could get respite from the excruciatingly itchy skin disease that left him raw and scaly.
Marat played on hysteria like a drum.
His paper, The Friend of the People, yelled and cursed and denounced, ripping off the masks of false patriots whom he fingered as traitors.
''There are plots everywhere, ''he screamed.
The street, caught between fear and hyperventilation, ate up the conspiracy theories.
Marie Antoinette, malevolent slut, plotting with her brother, the Emperor of Austria, against France.
Imagine.
Except it was true.
In June, 1791 , the royal couple was caught in their escape bid and taken back, virtual prisoners, to Paris.
Austria threatened France with dire consequences should anything happen to the king and queen.
Now, the royal couple seem like the enemy within.
The following year, war broke out, and their days, and the days of the French monarchy, were numbered.
Now, fighting for France meant fighting against royalty.
Five days after the war started, in April, 1792, there was a dinner in the garrison town of Strasbourg, near the front.
The idea was to boost the shaky morale of the army.
So, there were toasts, there were speeches.
''Long live liberty'', ''Death to tyrants'', the usual thing.
What was missing, though, was a good song that would send a surge of self-belief right through the camp.
It was Rouget de Lisle, regimental engineer and part-time composer, who came up with that song.
You belong to something glorious now.
You belong to the Patrie, the fatherland.
MAN: Everything is in motion.
Everyone burns to fight.
To conquer our enemies, we must have daring, more daring, always daring.
And France will be saved! In August, 1792, the guards protecting the royal family were slaughtered, Louis, Marie Antoinette and their children were taken to prison.
One must never compromise with tyrants.
One can only strike at kings through the head.
I vote for death of the tyrant.
You're a very ordinary man.
On January 21st, 1793, Louis XVI was executed.
Among those in the newly formed National Convention who voted for the death of the monarch, was the artist who'd once taken commissions from him, Jacques-Louis David.
So France had been reborn as a republic, and David, now a model citizen, sat proudly on the benches of the convention as MP for Paris, along with his political idols, Marat and Robespierre.
There was no going back.
From now on, David and his art belonged to the Revolution.
Wherever it lead, he would follow, and where it lead was dictatorship.
The country was at war, its enemies were outside and inside France.
This was no time for tender feelings.
Countless people who had thought of themselves as friends, not enemies, of the Revolution, were fingered and denounced.
Among the first to be arrested were his old friends and patrons, Antoine and Marie-Anne Lavoisier.
She survived the guillotine, he didn't.
For Marat and Robespierre, there could never be enough guillotined heads to feel safe.
In 1789, Marat had called for a few hundred.
Now, he called for hundreds of thousands.
Someone had to stop it, and that someone was Charlotte Corday, 25 years old, from the town of Caen in Normandy.
No royalist.
A revolutionary, in fact.
But a bitter enemy of Marat and his followers.
The dictatorship, she thought, had made a mockery of the Republic of Liberty.
She cast herself as a tragic heroine whose destiny was to save her country.
On the 9th July, 1793, Charlotte Corday got on a coach bound for Paris.
When she arrived, she came here to the Palais Royale, bought a black hat with green feathers and a six-inch knife.
In a cheap hotel room, she wrote a speech explaining why she had to kill Marat and sewed it to her dress, along with her certificate of baptism.
And as Corday was planning the murder, David was paying his friend Marat a visit.
He found him propped up in his bath, using an upturned wooden box as an improvised desk.
So little time, so many traitors to denounce.
Did the Friend of the People ever rest from his patriotic toil? The next day, Charlotte Corday walked over to Marat's house on the rue des Cordeliers.
Barred at the door, she tried delivering a handwritten note warning him about plots, hoping he was gonna rise to the bait.
No reply.
That evening, she tried again.
As she arrived, two men were delivering bread and newspapers.
She was in.
Corday pretended she was an informer and gave Marat a list of traitors.
''I will have them guillotined in a week'', he said.
And that was it.
Out came the knife, straight into Marat's chest.
So the Friend of the People was lost to the Revolution.
Inside the National Convention, grief-stricken deputies cried their eyes out, authentically or not.
What they most wanted, I think, was for Marat to come back to them.
''Come back, come back.
We need you, all of France needs you.
'' And then one of the most theatrical deputies rose to his feet and shouted, ''David, where are you? There is one more job for you.
'' And David of the swollen cheek miraculously found his voice.
I shall do it.
''I shall do it, ''he said.
''I will paint Marat.
'' It was midsummer, the hottest in anyone's memory.
The embalmers, under David's direction, were working overtime, preparing Marat's body for the funeral.
But his normally ghastly red-flesh colour was rapidly turning green.
David had wanted Marat displayed sitting upright, working for the good of the people.
But the decomposing corpse refused to co-operate.
Drenched in perfume, it had to be laid flat out for the grieving public to file past.
The funeral would inevitably fade in people's memory.
The painting, though, would never fade.
It was Marat's best revenge, for it would make sure that he would always be around.
Here was someone transfigured by goodness, honesty and patriotic selflessness.
''Look upon him,'' David is saying, ''And you will see the highest type of humanity.
'' He's cleaned Marat up, of course.
The skin has the colour of cool stone, the wound is unmissable, yet at the same time almost delicate, like the incision in the side of Christ on the cross.
The white sheets seem shroud-like, ghostly wrappings of the great man as he hovers between our world and posterity.
It's a cult image, and it tells you to believe.
Its genius lies in the fact that it's also a story for the people.
For once, the hero isn't Roman, he's one of them.
It's the first great work for the faces in the crowd, the singers of the Marseillaise.
You can almost feel David imagining whole families in front of this painting, a father saying to his children, ''Look, there's his inkwell.
" ''Look, there's the letter of the wicked Corday, stained with the blood of the good Marat.
'' But David is not showing the letter that got Corday into Marat's house, the one with the list of traitors.
It's a different letter.
One that would make Marat seem like a victim of his own kindness.
''It's enough that I am truly unhappy to have the right to your benevolence, '' it says.
On top of the box is another letter, from the widow of a soldier fallen in battle.
With it is a donation Marat is about to send her.
Two women, then, the good mother and the bad Corday.
There's no attempt to give a sense of Marat's room here.
No crossed pistols hanging on the wall, no fake columns.
Instead, the entire top half of the painting is filled with loose, feathery strokes that could be wall or just indeterminate space.
The space of forever.
But then that box, grainy, solid.
''He was one of you, '' the box says.
''One of the poor and suffering.
''But now you can't reach him.
''No one can, except through this.
'' But even while you're held spellbound, another voice inside your head says, ''Hold on a minute," ''this is the purest witchcraft.
'' What David has done here is to glorify a paranoid, whose greatest satisfaction was the persecution of thousands of people whose only crime was to be lukewarm about politics.
This is an accomplice of terror.
Of course, it never occurred to David that he was betraying art.
''Oh, no,'' he would have said.
''I'm fulfilling its highest, noblest purpose," ''that of moral re-education.
" ''That's what all those altarpieces that once hung in churches did," ''but those were all lies and fairytales.
" ''We have a new church now, the church of revolutionary virtue.
'' So why do I like David? Well, I don't.
He's a monster.
But he makes ideas blaze in dry ice.
He is a fantastic propagandist, no one better.
Albert Speer could just as well roll over and die.
And what was the point of it all? Well, it's a revenge on wit, on chat and on banter.
But it was more than that.
This is art designed to make those who saw it virtuous citizens.
And it's all so perfect, so tragic, so poetic you almost believe it.
But like a lot of art designed to improve humanity, it has the opposite effect.
Because it's a lie.
Three months after the assassination of Marat, on October 16th, 1793, Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine.
David saw her tumbrel going down the street, while people spat in their hands and tried to throw the gobs on the woman who'd been queen.
He sketched her impassively.
But David's got more important things on his mind than the fate of Marie Antoinette.
He's now the official director of revolutionary propaganda, to the exclusion of practically everything else.
When his wife disapproved of his zeal, he divorced her.
David has become an enforcer, sitting on the Committee for General Security, hunting down the treacherously half-hearted, signing warrants for their execution.
The terror had begun, and David had become part of the great engine of killing.
And as the tempo of the guillotine got faster, David busied himself with ever more extravagant spectacles to educate the people.
Casts of thousands, massed singing virgins, statues on the site of the Bastille.
A festival of the supreme being, starring the high priest of the Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre.
In the end, David was a victim of his own success.
The hard-nosed men who were running the war knew that bread and guns mattered, and virgins and doves didn't.
So David wasn't just a distraction, he was a menace.
Get rid of him.
And David's downfall was inextricably linked to the fate of Robespierre.
Increasingly, Robespierre was spoken of not as saviour of the Revolution, but tyrant, and David, the window-dresser of his tyranny, was going down with him.
Robespierre was attacked in the Convention, the dreaded words ''outside the law'' uttered.
Incredulous, David made a spectacle of himself.
''Robespierre,'' he shouted.
''If you drink the hemlock, I will drink it with you.
'' But of course, he didn't.
The next day, David was suddenly indisposed, so he missed his own date with martyrdom.
He was not there beside Robespierre when he was guillotined and the blade at last came down on the terror.
But they came for David, nonetheless.
Vilified as tyrant of the arts, David tried to stammer a defence.
No one could understand what he was saying, but they noticed how pale he was, how the sweat ran through his clothes and dripped onto the floor.
In prison, he managed to get hold of some paints and he painted this self-portrait.
You can see the famous tumour and the twist it gives to his face, but that's as far as the truth goes.
Because what we're seeing is not the old propaganda master, that's for sure, but young David, 20 years at least taken off, all innocent, hair romantically dishevelled, coat open to expose his pure, transparent heart.
And he's done himself with palette and brushes.
''Why me?'' it says.
''I'm just a painter.
'' Yeah, right.
Led astray, were you? Just doing your job? I don't think so.
But guess what? The art plea worked.
David got out of prison, and spent the next years doing spectacular, uncontroversial portraits like this.
Monsieur Seriziat, his brother-in-law.
This is what the Revolution of the virtuous had become, the Republican tricolour reduced to a fashion accessory.
When he does do history paintings, they're pleas to stop killing.
No more politics, then, for Jacques-Louis David, right? Wrong.
The old demon never really goes away.
Once bitten by power, you stay bitten.
He airbrushed Marat, why shouldn't he airbrush Napoleon? When Napoleon was crowned emperor in 1805, David was slavishly at his side, official glamoriser.
But then, of course, Napoleon was defeated, the monarchy restored.
Lots of Napoleon-lovers were forgiven, but not David.
He'd done something that could never be forgiven.
He'd done this, the most notorious image produced by the terror.
France had had enough of Jacques-Louis David.
Banished from his own country, David ended up here in Brussels, where he did paintings of increasingly high-gloss weirdness, a big fish in a very small pond.
In France, they mostly talked about him as a back number, ''Oh, David, Brutus and all that.
Isn't he dead?'' When he did die, in December, 1825, the government in Paris refused permission for his family to bring the body home.
No king-killers allowed.
David's paintings, though, were up for sale.
Before that, they were put on public display.
Not, however, the notorious Marat.
That was kept under guard at the artist's son's house.
Admission by private arrangement.
And you take a look at it and you know why.
If ever there was a work of art that says that beauty can be lethal, it's Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat.