Múcio Cévola diante de Porsena

Tiepolo was about 30, and had only just begun getting the commissions that made him, when Dionisio Dolfin, the patriarch of Aquileia, asked him to fill the great reception room of the family palace in Venice with scenes from Roman history. Ten canvases went up, each of them several metres high, and this was one. It shows Gaius Mucius, a young Roman who had failed to assassinate the Etruscan king Porsenna and then held his own right hand in the fire in front of him to show that threatening Rome was pointless. Venice in the 1720s liked to tell itself it had inherited that kind of constancy. The Dolfin sold the set in 1872 and the room was broken up. Five of the ten canvases, this one among them, ended up in Saint Petersburg, three in New York and two in Vienna.