Apelle dipinge Campaspe alla presenza di Alessandro Magno

David painted this near the end of his career, around 1814, the year Napoleon fell and the painter lost the emperor who had been his great patron. The subject is an old story from Pliny the Elder. The Greek painter Apelles was set to portray Campaspe, the favourite of Alexander the Great, and fell in love with her as he worked. Alexander, seeing it, gave her to the artist. It is a story about a ruler who valued a painter above his own desire, and it is hard not to picture David, first painter to a fallen emperor, turning it over in his mind. He never finished the picture. It stayed in his studio, parts of the background and figures left thin and bare, so you can watch a Neoclassical master building an image up layer by layer.