기독교도 디르케

The subject is a piece of theatre staged as an execution. In the amphitheatre of Nero's Rome, a condemned Christian woman has been made to act out an old Greek myth, Dirce, the queen tied to the horns of a wild bull and dragged to her death, for the entertainment of the crowd. Siemiradzki paints the aftermath: the bull felled, the girl's pale body on the sand, and the emperor strolling over with his retinue to inspect the result, incurious and satisfied. It was the Polish painter's last great history canvas, more than five metres wide, finished in 1897. He built his career on exactly this kind of sunlit, meticulously staged ancient world, and he gave this one to the nation, where it hangs in Warsaw.