The Death of Socrates
Jacques Louis David (1748 to 1825) · 1787
In a bare stone prison an old man sits upright on his bed, one hand raised to the sky, the other reaching without looking for a cup of poison. Around him his followers weep, cover their faces and turn away, while at the foot of the bed an older figure sits with his back to the scene, lost in thought. The old man is Socrates, condemned to death by Athens in 399 BC for corrupting the young and doubting the gods. He has refused to escape, and he spends his last hour arguing calmly that the soul is immortal. Even the jailer who hands him the hemlock cannot bear to watch.
David composed the scene like a frieze, with the figures pressed into a shallow space against a wall of grey stone and the light falling from the left. Every gesture is clear and every emotion is legible. Look at the contrast between the taut, muscular body of Socrates, far younger than the seventy years he actually was, and the slumped bodies of his grieving pupils. The man seated at the end of the bed is Plato, who was in fact absent, and David places his name and his own signature on that bench. The scroll and inkwell at Plato's feet suggest that what we see is his memory.
The picture was painted two years before the French Revolution and was read immediately as a call to put principle before life. Thomas Jefferson saw it in Paris and praised it, and the painting became a model for a generation of revolutionary art. The Met bought it in 1931, and it remains the finest Neoclassical painting in the United States.
Did You Know? David signed his name twice, once on Plato's bench and once under the young man clutching Socrates' leg, as if placing himself among the disciples.
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