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  ...