The Excommunication of Robert the Pious

In 996 King Robert II of France married his cousin Bertha of Burgundy, and church councils in Pavia and Rome ordered them to part on pain of excommunication. The scene Laurens painted comes from Peter Damian, an Italian churchman writing decades later. According to him, the court deserted the king, and the only two servants who stayed threw his leftovers into the fire rather than touch what an excommunicate had touched. Many historians now doubt that the pope ever actually pronounced the sentence. Laurens gives the story an almost empty hall. The king and queen sit alone on the throne, his sceptre has slipped onto the step, and the clergy are filing out through the arch. The state bought the canvas from him at the Salon of 1875 and sent it to the World's Fair of 1878.