Battle of the Amazons

Feuerbach finished this enormous battle in 1873, the year he moved to Vienna to become professor of history painting at the Academy. It is nearly seven metres wide, and he counted it among his best work. The subject comes from Homer: the Amazon queen Penthesilea and her women fighting the Greeks at Troy, laid out as four smaller struggles around a foreground of fallen figures. But Feuerbach was painting solemn classical epics at a moment when younger artists were turning to everyday life and open air, and no buyer ever came for it. After he died his stepmother Henriette gave the canvas to Nuremberg. His friend the composer Brahms wrote a choral lament, Naenie, in his memory.