The Death of Viriatus, Chief of the Lusitanians

Madrazo painted this in Rome in 1807 on a royal stipend, and within a year the king who granted it had abdicated, French troops held Madrid, and Spain was fighting an occupation. His subject fitted that turn better than he could have planned. Viriatus led the Lusitanians of ancient Iberia and held off Roman armies for most of a decade, until three of his own men, bought by the Roman command, killed him in his sleep. The canvas runs over four and a half metres wide and shows the body being found, the figures ranged along a single plane with the tent curtain pulled back on the camp behind. Madrazo meant it as the first of a series on Iberian resistance to Rome. Only one more was ever painted, on the destruction of Numantia. He himself refused to swear loyalty to Joseph Bonaparte, the king Napoleon gave Spain, and was shut up with other Spanish artists in the Castel Sant'Angelo. The picture was on show when the Prado opened in 1819, spent most of the 20th century in Madrid's museums of modern art, and came back in 1971.