Person
Jacques-Louis David
Arts, Music & Media
History & CivilizationsWho is Jacques-Louis David in the Agency editorial?
Jacques-Louis David was a French painter, the leading name of Neoclassicism, who painted The Death of Socrates in 1787. The Agency editorial names him twice and only for that painting: Issue.10 reproduces it with a caption about the values of the Enlightenment, and Issue.26 recalls it to say that heroes are immortalized by artists.
In short
Jacques-Louis David is named in two editions of the Agency editorial, both times as the painter of The Death of Socrates. Issue.10 shows the painting, dated 1787, in its passage on the Enlightenment. The caption says it depicts the final moments of Socrates, who drinks hemlock and accepts his death surrounded by grief-stricken students, and calls it a powerful representation of Enlightenment values: reason, critical inquiry and individual liberty. Later the same edition refers to the painting above when it says a bank account cannot make someone worth remembering like a hero. Issue.26 returns to it in an aside: "heroes are always immortalized by artists", as Socrates was by David, and notes that a previous issue already spoke of it.
Key facts
- Which painting by David do the editions show?
- The Death of Socrates, from 1787. Issue.10 reproduces it as an image with a long caption, and Issue.26 names it again without showing it.
- What does the caption in Issue.10 say?
- That the painting depicts Socrates drinking hemlock and accepting his death among grieving students, and that it shows him as a heroic figure, firm in his commitment to truth and rational inquiry.
- Why does Issue.26 mention David?
- In a parenthesis after the author jokes about being made to drink the hemlock. He says heroes are always immortalized by artists, like Socrates was by Jacques-Louis David in that painting.
Who was Jacques-Louis David?
Jacques-Louis David was a French painter of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the leading figure of Neoclassical painting in France. The Death of Socrates, painted in 1787, is one of his best known works. The years and the other card facts of this entry come from outside the editions and are marked for verification.
How do the editions use Jacques-Louis David?
Issue.10 places the painting at the end of its summary of the Enlightenment, after the paragraph on the classical music of the period. The caption credits the work to him with its date and reads the scene as an image of reason and individual liberty. The edition then uses the painting, not the painter, in its argument about numbers: history does not remember numbers, it remembers names and words, and Socrates is remembered as he was pictured there.
Issue.26, on pharmakon, comes back to the same image while the author explains why he writes although Socrates did not. The mention is one sentence inside a parenthesis and points the reader to the earlier edition. Neither edition says anything about David's life or his other works.
Source editions
Where this entry comes from in the Agency editorial.