My familiarity of Marat has always arisen completely from the painting, “The Death of Marat.”

To me, Marat has been a figure murdered, an image of vulnerability and pain. Here, the brush of Jacques-Louis David has told me, is a man of letters, violated in the privacy of his warm bath.

When did the death occur? Why? I never knew because I first saw David’s painting in an art survey course, not in a history text. I never connected Marat with a particular moment in history, though I suspected it involved a time of fervor, of war. And I knew he was French.

So my ears perked when Marat’s name surfaced in William Doyle’s The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Aha! Now I can know the man, know why he was murdered with his quill in hand, his work unfinished.

But, oh my, this is not the Marat I thought I saw. In the French Revolution, this Marat, Doyle explains, was a radical journalist who “at last found his vocation after years of failure and rejection. Marat throve on an atmosphere of plots and suspicion, and called for the Assembly to be purged of unreliable members. The lesson of the previous July was that the people should never shrink from direct action in the public interest.”  Direct action meant mobs, murders, and intimidation. It meant impatience with political process and systems of justice. Later, Doyle describes Marat as “the self-styled friend of the people but hitherto too extreme and bloodthirsty in his opinions to command much support.” But by 1792, when the revolution encountered resistance to its republican dreams, people became receptive to “his solution to the crisis,” which “was massacre, both of the suspects herded together in the prisons and indeed of selected ministers and deputies.”

Marat was assigned to a committee in charge of the prisons, and in September 1792, in a series of purges, around half the prison population of Paris was murdered—between 1,100 and 1,400 people, most of them common criminals rather than political dissidents.

David, Wikipedia tells me, was an ally of Marat’s who had voted for the execution of the king, so it is no wonder I had viewed Marat with such sympathy when the painting was all I knew of him.

But the art as well as the man is a finished product, now left for me to interpret, and as I read Doyle I find it gruesomely poetic that David depicts Marat lying in a bloodbath. Surely David would disagree that the bath is ultimately of Marat’s own making, but that quill he holds possesses power for evil as well as good. While he may have wielded no sword, it was pens and words that offered to pay the “ordinary Parisian tradesmen and artisans” for their work in carrying out the killings.

Yet even with my new revulsion at Marat, I see poignancy in the painted figure. I see a man vulnerable to invasion, to force. He is no god. He is a victim of his own perspective, his own ideas about solving problems and conflict.

And so, the painting’s power over my ideas is no longer exclusive. But my fuller understanding, while detrimental to my estimation of Marat, has only increased my admiration for David’s portrait.