Timoclea Brought Captive before Alexander

Around 1615 Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, great-nephew of Pope Sixtus V, was decorating the main hall of the palace in his family's villa beside the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, a vast estate of gardens inside the walls of Rome. This oval, painted on wood, was Domenichino's part. Its story comes from Plutarch's life of Alexander. When Alexander's army sacked Thebes in 335 BC, a Thracian officer forced his way into the house of a noblewoman named Timoclea, assaulted her and demanded her gold. She led him to a well in the garden, and as he leaned over to look she pushed him in and stoned him to death. Brought bound before Alexander, she told him that her brother had died commanding the Thebans against his father at Chaeronea. Alexander let her and her children go free.

She stands at the centre, upright and composed, while Alexander points at her from his seat and soldiers lead her children in behind. The villa itself is gone, cleared in the second half of the 19th century for the Termini railway station and the streets around it. The painting had left long before, sold to Louis XIV in 1685, and in 1768 it was transferred from its wooden panel onto canvas.