Mercato degli schiavi a Roma

Gérôme built his reputation on making the ancient world look like something you could walk into, and by the 1880s he was returning again and again to the slave markets of antiquity. He painted several of these scenes, some set in Rome, some in a 19th-century Istanbul he had visited himself. This version, from around 1884 and now in the Hermitage, places you at the back of the crowd. You look over the heads of the buyers toward a raised platform where the dealer displays two naked women to the room. Gérôme worked like a stage director, arranging the spectators so your eye is carried straight to the goods on offer, exactly as a bidder's would have been. The polished, almost photographic finish makes the cruelty of the transaction easy to look at, which is part of what still unsettles people about him. The two figures on the dais have their backs turned to us and their faces toward the buyers.