The Death of Julius Caesar

Camuccini was the leading Neoclassical painter in Rome around 1800, and this enormous canvas of Caesar's murder took him more than a decade to get right. He built it up from a cartoon in 1793, painted a first version he disliked so much that he destroyed it, and only finished the picture you see in 1806. By then his patron, the Earl of Bristol, had died and the heirs refused to pay, so Camuccini sold it to Joachim Murat, one of Napoleon's marshals, who was about to be made King of Naples. There is a grim symmetry in that. A vast image of senators knifing a dictator hung in the palace of a soldier lifted to a throne by Napoleon, and later put before a firing squad himself when the empire fell.