Hersilia Separating Romulus and Tatius

In 1645 Guercino painted this for a Paris town house he never saw. Its owner, Louis Phélypeaux de La Vrillière, a French secretary of state, had the architect François Mansart build a long gallery there and filled it with ten large canvases by Italian and French painters, among them Guido Reni, Pietro da Cortona and Nicolas Poussin. Almost all showed the history of ancient Rome. Guercino was given the Sabine women. Carried off by the first Romans and married to them, they watch their own people march on the city to take them back. Hersilia, wife of Romulus, steps between her husband and the Sabine king Titus Tatius to stop the fight. The canvas was seized in 1794, during the Revolution. The building is now the Banque de France, and a copy hangs in the gallery in its place.