Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors

Joseph Wright lived in Derby among the industrialists and natural philosophers of the early Enlightenment, and he usually painted their world, experiments, furnaces, the wonder of a new machine. Here he turned to an older kind of lesson. The Persian nobleman Miravan has read the inscription on his ancestor's tomb, promising a treasure greater than the wealthy king Croesus ever held. He has just ordered it broken open, and inside are only bones and dust. A second inscription, revealed too late, tells him the real treasure was eternal repose, which his greed for gold has now destroyed. Wright lights the scene the way he lit his scientific ones, a hard beam falling across shattered masonry and across a face that is beginning to understand what it has done.