These twelve paintings, made between about 1415 and 1887, all show a poisoning. The list runs from Niccolò di Pietro's Saint Benedict and the Poisoned Wine to The Death of Socrates, which Jacques-Louis David painted in 1787.
A poison leaves no wound and often no visible drink, so each painter had to make it readable through something else: a crack in a glass, a plant, a turned head.
The list also holds a death that may not have been a poisoning at all. The poet Thomas Chatterton, painted dead by Henry Wallis in 1856, was long said to have taken arsenic, and a 2020 analysis suggests he may have died of something else.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
A poisoning gives a painter what a battle cannot: two people face to face over a cup, and often only one of them knows what is in it. Painters can stop at the moment before death, when the motive can still be read on the faces and no one yet knows how it ends.
Each painting here turns on a poison that was given, tested, suspected or blamed, and on the reason someone had for using it.
A snake counts when its venom is the means the story chooses, as in the death of Cleopatra. So does a bottle of absinthe, because of what Paris thought of that drink at the end of the nineteenth century.
Most of these stories come down from Roman historians such as Tacitus and Livy, from the life of a saint and from Greek myths, and those sources rarely agree. Where they disagree, the entry says so.
A rumor is told as a rumor, and a detail that no text mentions is given back to the painter. The list counts down from number twelve to number one and opens with its oldest picture, a panel painted six centuries ago.
12. Niccolò di Pietro, Saint Benedict and the Poisoned Wine (about 1415 to 1420)
That panel shows a wine glass with a thin crack running down its side, at the very moment a monk raises his right hand to bless it. The hand belongs to Saint Benedict, seated with two brothers at a refectory table, the long dining table of a monastery, while a server in a green hat still holds out the cup.
Niccolò di Pietro, a Venetian painter of the early fifteenth century, made this panel around 1415 to 1420. Benedict had lived in Italy nearly nine centuries earlier. His story was set down at the end of the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great in the Dialogues, a book of the lives and miracles of Italian holy men.
In Gregory's telling, Benedict was then living alone as a hermit in a cave. The monks of a nearby monastery, who had lost their abbot, begged him to lead them, and he warned them for a long time that their ways and his would not agree.
He was right. Once he was their abbot, his discipline proved too strict for them, and "taking counsel together, they agreed to poison his wine." When the glass was offered for his blessing, he made the sign of the cross, and it "broke in pieces, as though the sign of the cross had been a stone thrown against it."
Niccolò sets the motive for the plot on the table itself, which can be read as a sign of how comfortably the monks lived before Benedict arrived. That comfort is exactly what his rule threatened. The painter freezes the instant the plot fails, with the server's arm still outstretched and the crack already running through the glass.
Benedict understood at once what the glass held. Gregory calls it "the drink of death, which could not endure the sign of life." The saint told the monks, "Almighty God have mercy on you, and forgive you," and left them to find "some other father suitable to your own conditions."
At a Glance
Artist: Niccolo di Pietro (Venetian, active early 15th century)
Painted: About 1415 to 1420
Medium: Tempera on wood
Size: 109 × 62 cm (43 × 24.5 in)
Where to see it: Uffizi Galleries, Florence
11. Albert Maignan, The Green Muse (1895)
A woman dressed in green rises out of a broken bottle and digs her fingers into the head of a young writer. She stands for absinthe, which the French called the green fairy, and Albert Maignan finished La Muse verte, The Green Muse, in 1895. Her victim has the face of someone Maignan knew.