La muerte de César

Gérôme leaves out the murder. We arrive a moment too late, on the Ides of March, 44 BC, in the hall attached to the Theatre of Pompey where the Senate was meeting that day. Caesar lies crumpled and abandoned in the lower left, and the conspirators are already rushing away toward the exit at the back, daggers raised in something between triumph and panic. The room does most of the storytelling. A cloak dropped in the scramble, scrolls scattered on the floor, senators fleeing in the distance, and near the front one lone man still seated as if too stunned to move. Gérôme spent years on this, working on it between 1859 and 1867, and he researched the Roman setting like an archaeologist. The statue presiding over the empty benches is Pompey, Caesar's old rival, at whose feet the body has come to rest.