Jean-Baptiste Tierce

In the early 1780s Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese was redoing the interiors of his villa on the Pincian hill, and one room was given over to heroes and fighters around its star piece, the ancient marble known as the Borghese Gladiator. For its walls he ordered two tall canvases, three metres high, from Jean-Baptiste Tierce, a landscape painter from Rouen who had settled in Rome in 1777 after years in Florence and Naples.

Tierce made them a pair, Morning and Dusk. In one, Polydamas, an ancient champion, kills a lion with his bare hands under a rosy dawn. In the other, the Greek wrestler Milo of Croton is trapped when his hands stick in the tree trunk he tried to split, and dies. The old story has wolves, and Tierce painted a lion. The Gladiator went to Paris in 1808 and is now in the Louvre. The two canvases left the villa in 1891 and returned when the Italian state bought them in 2003.