Belisarius Begging for Alms

The Salon of 1785, held in the Louvre, was where Paris first saw David's Oath of the Horatii. This smaller Belisarius hung there too. It is a reduced version, with changes, of the picture that had made his name four years earlier, ordered by the count d'Angiviller, director of the king's buildings, for his own collection. Its later life ran straight through the Revolution. It passed to the elderly maréchal de Noailles, who emigrated in 1791 and left it behind, and on 15 April 1794 it was seized from his widow's house on the rue Saint-Honoré as émigré property. In 1799 David borrowed it back from the state to have it engraved, and two years later the museum had to write asking for its return. On the stone block beside the blind general, the painted Latin asks passers-by to give Belisarius a coin.