The Battle of Vercellae

Of the ten Roman scenes Tiepolo made for the great hall of the Dolfin palace in Venice, this is one of just two that never had a Latin caption. The others carried banners naming their episode. The two battle pieces, set either side of the main door, had none, so the subject has always had to be read from the picture itself. When its Viennese owner sent the canvas to the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in April 1876, it was catalogued as the Siege of Palmyra and came back unsold. Today it is usually identified, tentatively, as the consul Gaius Marius defeating the Cimbri, a people from the north who had crossed the Alps, near Vercellae in northern Italy in 101 BC. A Roman eagle rides above the standards at the upper left. The curved outline follows the painted architecture of the wall recess the canvas once filled, and it was altered when the series left the palace in 1872.