Sémiramis construisant Babylone

Before Degas became the painter of dancers and laundresses, he wanted to be a maker of grand history pictures. He worked this one up around 1860, in his mid-twenties, drawing the figures nude first and then draping them with the patience he had learned from copying Italian masters. The scene is legendary: Semiramis, the queen said to have founded Babylon, stands above the Euphrates surveying her rising city. He had recently seen the quiet frescoes of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, and a close friend, the painter Gustave Moreau, was urging him toward subjects like this. He left it unfinished, and by the end of the 1860s he had given up grand history painting altogether.