Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius

Delacroix finished this in 1844 and showed it at the Paris Salon the next year. It catches the Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius on his deathbed in the 2nd century, lifting a hand to commend his young son Commodus to the grave Roman elders gathered around him. The awful irony, which every educated viewer of the day would have caught, is that Commodus, the flushed youth in red at the center, would grow into one of Rome's cruelest and most erratic rulers. The old men seem to know it already. Their faces are heavy with a duty they sense is hopeless, while the dying emperor's pale body glows against the deep shadow of the room.