Cave Canem

By 1881, when Gérôme painted this, slavery had been gone from French soil for more than 30 years, and Rome was safely in the past, a place a Paris audience could look at without discomfort. He set the scene at a doorway, and above the chained man he put a sign every visitor to Pompeii knows, Cave Canem, beware of the dog. In Roman houses those words were spelled out in floor mosaic at the entrance, sometimes with a picture of a dog on a chain. Gérôme kept the chain and swapped the dog for a person. He had traveled through Egypt and the Near East and built his reputation on this kind of cold, exact finish, every stone and shadow described. The two words over the man's head are doing the work the rest of the picture only frames.