The Death of Socrates
Jacques Louis David French
Not on view
It was likely several years after his initial sketch of the subject (hanging nearby) that David made this study for The Met’s Death of Socrates painting. In a frenzy of reworking, he tried out various ideas for the architectural setting before deciding to pierce the stone backdrop with an arched hallway leading to a set of stairs, using a compass and straightedge to establish the perspective. The vanishing point is placed to draw attention to the bent head of Plato, who wrote—many years later—the account of Socrates’s death. But David’s clear obsession was with the center of the composition, where fanned-out options for the placement of limbs draw the viewer’s eye to the critical vignette: the passage of poison from one hand to another.
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