The destruction of the temple of Jerusalem

Hayez spent seven years on this, from 1860 to 1867, and the timing is the point. Those were the years Italy was pulling itself into a single nation, and an Italian audience looking at Roman soldiers storming the Second Temple in Jerusalem was meant to feel their own recent history of foreign rule. He built the scene from the eyewitness account of Josephus, the ancient historian who watched the city fall in the year 70. The Temple burns at the centre while priests and defenders are cut down around it. Hayez had trained in Venice half a century earlier, and in 1868 he gave the finished canvas back to the academy there, a picture nearly three metres across, where it still hangs.