The hand that painted some of the most orderly, virtuous images in Western art also voted to execute the King of France. This episode follows Jacques-Louis David through six political regimes, from monarchy to revolution to the Terror to Napoleon’s empire, and asks how one man served as visual propagandist for all of them. We begin with a traumatic childhood in which his father was killed in a duel, a facial tumor and fencing wound that left him with a speech impediment and the cruel nickname David of the Tumor, and a Prix de Rome campaign so desperate that he went on a hunger strike after his second rejection before finally winning on his fourth attempt in 1774.

From there we trace the paintings that primed Paris for upheaval, including The Oath of the Horatii and the Brutus canvas the royal court tried to suppress, and his transformation into a Jacobin, friend of Robespierre, and member of the National Convention. We examine The Death of Marat as a piece of political myth-making, the festivals he designed to replace Catholic ritual, the convenient stomach ache that kept him away on the day his allies were arrested, and the mirror he installed opposite The Intervention of the Sabine Women. The story ends with his service to Napoleon, his refusal of amnesty from the restored Bourbons, and his death in exile in Brussels in 1825.

• How disfigurement and exclusion from salon culture turned visual communication into his only path to power
• The composition of The Oath of the Horatii as a lesson in civic duty and rigid gender roles
• Why the royal attempt to censor the Brutus painting backfired and made David a public hero
• The grim reality of Marat’s funeral versus the flawless, Christ-like body David painted
• Napoleon Crossing the Alps and the mule that became a rearing stallion at the emperor’s request