Abstract
The two paintings that I am going to study are Charlotte Corday, painted by Paul Baudry in 1860, and in the Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David in 1793. It seems to me that those two paintings are extremely interesting to analyze side by side for several reasons; firstly and most obviously because they have the same subject: the murder of Jean-Paul Marat, a French revolutionary, member of the Convention, in the "Montagnard" side, and author of a popular newspaper, La voix du peuple. This allows us to study how a same event can be told in different ways.
Furthermore, Marat was and is not a consensual figure. When he was alive, and after his death, he was both deeply loved and hated. Therefore, the way this murder is shown depends on the opinion of the painter about Marat. This one is not a neutral character. Secondly, I've chosen those two paintings because they were not painted at the same time; this difference of context really influences the way in which the murder of Marat is pictured.
