The Death of Socrates / La Mort de Socrate

By Jacque-Louies David

Title: The Death of Socrates

Artist: Jacques Louis David (French, Paris 1748–1825 Brussels)

Date: 1787

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 51 x 77 1/4 in. (129.5 x 196.2 cm)

Provenance Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art NY

Introduction

Jacque-Louies David was a neoclassicist painter who received a direct private commission for the work in 1786 from the wealthy Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière, the youngest son of Trudaine de Montigny and was just around 20 years old at the time. In this landmark neoclassical painting from just before the French Revolution, David took up a classical story of resisting unjust authority and rendered it in a sparse, frieze like composition. He debuted the painting at the Paris of 1787, the official art exhibition of the time and received prompt acclaim among his contemporaries. The English painter Joshua Reynolds wrote that The Death of Socrates was "the greatest work of art since the Sistine Chapel and Raphael's Stanze in the Vatican.” He had almost singlehandedly invented the Neoclassical period in France with his painting Oath of the Horatii, painted two years prior in 1785, a style which emphasized a stark simplicity against the Rococo which was the dominant style previously.

Decoding the Work of Art

The death of Socrates was told famously by Plato in his dialogue on the soul. The Phaedo. The Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399 BCE) was convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth by the Athenian courts, he was sentenced to death by the poison hemlock. As Plato made clear in another dialog, the Craeto, Socrates could have escaped into exile but instead he chose death to teach his final lesson that death is not to be feared by the philosopher but to be embraced as the apotheosis of the soul as he had  been discussing at length the immortality of the soul with his students.

So then, in the painting, just at the moment as as he was grabbing the poison draft,  he seemed not to care that he is about to take the implement of death in his hand. On the contrary, he is defiant, gesturing towards the afterlife to which he hastens.

The Death of Socrates is a striking picture which has a clarity of scenes never before seen. The fierce gesture of the man at the center, the interplay of the chalice and the hand, the angle of the light and the men with soft draping garments, the bare flat stone walls. (David consulted antiquarian scholars to create an archeologically exacting image, including details of furniture and clothing. )

David idealized Socrates as he would have been 70 at the time but is depicted as somewhat muscular and beautiful, and the  light from the top makes him the brightest figure in the tableau. The colors are muted on the side, bright in the center, the executioner in red, and Socrates in white, as well as the figure on the left. For David, Socrates is the symbol of strength over passion, of  stoic commitment to an abstract principle in the face of death.

The background is flat making the subject appear as in a frieze, and can be read from side to side.  Through a network of gestures and expressions, David’s figures act out the last moments of Socrates’s life. Those dedicated to principle are depicted with angular geometry, while those ruled by passion are curbed and weak. The anguish of his followers curling and twisting opens up onto the calm expression of Socrates and flows through his right arm which hovers over the poison cup. The space between the poison and the hand, the exact center of the image is the seat of maximum narrative charge that it falls back into the pain of the man which delivers the poison and turns his gaze away from Socrates and finally comes to rest on the man sitting at the foot of the bed, unengaged.

David does not account for anyone in the painting, but in the background is Socrates’ wife, Xianthippe, being led away in distress. To the right, clutching Socrates’ leg is his oldest and most faithful student, Crito. Under Crito, David had signed his name, conceding himself to the man. David was weaker than his ideal of moral strength and the act of grabbing Socrates shows him holding on to that symbol of strength.

David consulted Father Jean Adry, a Hellenist and scholar on the subject, on the circumstances of Socrates death and he recommended that Plato should be shown as immobile, that Crito be shown with more emotion, and that Appolodorus should be visibly filled with emotion. Just behind Socrates’s right leg is the form of an ancient lyre, a musical instrument that figures metaphorically in Plato’s text as a proposed analogy for the relationship of the human soul (music) to the body (instrument).

There are several historical liberties taken by David as he shows a young Socrates, with a strong physique, decreasing the number of people present from 15 to 12, mirroring Da Vinci’s last supper. Then there is the addition of the character at the foot of the bed, the man who popularized Socrates’ teachings by staging him as the protagonist in 30 philosophical dialogs. They say that without Plato there would be no Socrates.

Reading the painting from left to right, it becomes obvious that the scene seems to explode at the back of Plato’s head, reimagining it as a memory. Socrates gestures in the exact same way as he does in Raphael’s  School of Athens.

Plato is positioned apart from the flat background where the frozen lateral moment gives way to the death of time and reality. This is the way memories often fall out, restates with smooth edges and perfect light, too dimensional, idealized, arranged to serve the needs of the present. Plato even as rigorous as he was at the core reality of the scene is betrayed by his own self awareness as a construction. If we take the figure of Socrates and over impose it on Plato, the viewer realizes that the two figures are constructed almost totally alike.

In only a few short years the noble ideals of the French Revolution will be betrayed as well by the terror that is to follow, that is why David signs a second time  on the tableau which is severe and blunt. So much is happening in the picture, and an interplay of his personal, philosophical, historical, political ideals, and esthetic elements rendered both forcefully and subtly.

In other words, a work of genius.

In other words, a work of genius.