El triunfo de Mario

Venice in 1729 had not won a war in a long time. Eleven years earlier the Republic had signed away the Morea in southern Greece to the Ottomans and settled into permanent neutrality. In that city, in those years, the Dolfin family had the main room of their palace on the Grand Canal hung with ten enormous canvases of Roman armies winning.

This is the last of the ten and it carries the date 1729. The Latin line across the top is from the historian Florus and tells you what you are watching, the people of Rome looking at the Numidian king Jugurtha loaded with chains behind the general Gaius Marius, a procession held on the first day of 104 BC.

Tiepolo was 33 and put his own face into the crowd on the left. The ten canvases were sold out of the palace in the 1870s and are now divided between New York, Saint Petersburg and Vienna.