罗马奴隶市场

Gerome presents this as a scene from ancient Rome, a slave auction with a nude young woman on the block shielding her face while buyers raise their hands to bid. He painted it in 1884, and though the setting is antique the picture belongs very much to its own century. Gerome made about six of these slave-market scenes, some Roman, some set in contemporary Istanbul, and they sold widely as prints and photographs. Their appeal to nineteenth-century buyers was frankly the nude figure, the brutal subject notwithstanding. Some scholars connect the recurring image of a fair-skinned captive to the Circassian women sold into slavery after Russia's conquest of the Caucasus in the 1860s, news of which reached French readers as Gerome worked.