In Plato's Phaedo, the narrator lists the friends who were with Socrates on his last day and adds, almost in passing, that Plato was ill. Plato was not there. Jacques-Louis David painted him anyway, as an old man hunched at the foot of the bed, turned away from the cup. At the time of the execution, Plato was about 28.
David finished the painting in 1787, two years before the French Revolution. A collector named Trudaine de la Sablière had commissioned it, and the subject was a perfect fit for the age. A man condemned by an unjust city meets death calmly, still arguing about the soul. The painting fed straight into the mood of the Enlightenment, and viewers read it as a stand against tyranny.
The composition is unusually clear. Socrates sits upright on a bed, one finger raised toward the heavens, while his hand reaches for the cup of hemlock, and he does not look at it. His friend Crito grips his thigh. The jailer turns his back in grief. The colors fall into stages, with the red cloaks warming the center and the cold stone closing in around them.
The pose of Socrates, with his finger raised, makes him a teacher until the last second. Everyone else in the room is falling apart while he explains the immortality of the soul.
David was a stern neoclassicist, and he later threw himself into the Revolution. This painting, though, shows what he was really after, which was a picture where every figure has a job and every gesture is a clue.
David's The Death of Socrates appears on our: