The Death of Virginia

As a young resident of the French Academy in Rome in the late 1780s, Lethière planned four huge paintings of early Roman history. He finished two. The first, completed in 1811, hangs in this same room. This is the second, and he worked towards it for most of his life, with studies going back to 1795, before signing it in 1828.

The story comes from the historian Livy. In 449 BC Appius Claudius, one of the ten magistrates then ruling Rome, tried to have the girl Verginia declared a slave so he could take her. Her father, the soldier Verginius, snatched up a knife in the Forum and killed her rather than give her up, and the revolt that followed brought the ten down. Lethière paints the raised knife, the officials and the crowd.

He sent the canvas, nearly eight metres wide, to the Salon of 1831, the same exhibition where Delacroix showed Liberty Leading the People. He died the following year, and in 1848 a collector, Édouard Boyard, gave the picture to the Louvre.