Gyges and Candaules

Herodotus tells this story near the start of his Histories, and not long before this canvas was painted it had been put into Italian. The humanist Lorenzo Valla translated the Greek into Latin, and the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo turned Valla's Latin into Italian for Duke Ercole I d'Este. Candaules, king of Lydia, is so proud of his wife's beauty that he makes his bodyguard Gyges look at her undressed. She finds out and gives the bodyguard a choice, to die himself or to kill Candaules. He kills him and takes the throne. Here the crowned, bearded king points her out, the young Gyges at his shoulder, while the queen stands nude between two columns with her eyes lowered. The gallery dates the small canvas to 1508 to 1510 and counts it as the earliest known painting of this subject.