Description:
outdoors; romantic landscape in background of large stone buildings and aqueduct, crowd of figures in Roman dress at right, priests burning a sacrifice at an altar at upper left, figure on white horse jumping off a large rock into dark pit with fire in foreground
Label Text:
The subject of this painting is the death of the young Roman soldier Marcus Curtius. According to the ancient Roman historian Livy, a chasm had opened in the Roman Forum in 362 BCE that could only be closed by casting the city’s greatest treasure into it. Marcus Curtius interpreted this treasure to be Rome’s citizens, and sacrificed himself by leaping, fully armed on horseback, into the gap, which closed over him.
This picture combines aspects of two contrasting movements in French art of this period: Neoclassicism, with its subject of a classical legend set in ancient Rome, and Romanticism, in the high drama of the frightened horse flying out of the picture toward the viewer. A different treatment of the same subject may be seen in another painting in the collection by the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Paolo Panini.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2010.7 |
