The Massacres of the Triumvirate

The killing shown here took place in Rome in 43 BC, when the three rulers of the Triumvirate, Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus, drew up lists of enemies who could be killed on sight. Antoine Caron stages it in a Rome crowded with temples, obelisks and statues, with severed heads set out in rows along a low wall. The historian Frédéric Hueber has suggested that it may have been ordered by Augustin Lemousse, an apothecary who lived next door to Caron in 1566, the year beside the signature. The two vertical seams you can see belong to a later chapter. The scene was painted as one piece and later cut into three, possibly for a folding screen. It surfaced at a London sale in 1823, and a French marquis who bought it there in 1913 gave it to the Louvre in 1939.