Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/133

 GEROME 285 ever his subject may be, it is always set forth in the clearest manner, so that every- one may understand the story without the need of an interpreter. Leaving out of view the few pictures he painted illustrating passages in Na- poleon's career, it may be said that Gerome's taste led him away from scenes of modern life ; for even his many oriental subjects so relate to forms of life belong- ing in reality to the past, that they make no exception to the statement. He did not therefore follow up "The Duel " with other comments on the follies of mod- ern society — for in the temper of that time this picture, like Couture's " Roman Orgie " and Millet's " Man with the Hoe," was looked upon as a satire and a warning, and owed its popularity as much to this conviction on the part of the public as to its pictorial merits — but returned to antique times, and showed in his treatment of themes from that source an equal, if not a greater power to interest the public. Ge"r6me's two pictures, the " Ave Caesar ! Morituri te Salutant," " Hail, Caesar ! Those about to die, salute Thee," and " The Gladiators," are so univer- sally known as to need no description. Whatever criticism may be made upon them, they will always remain interesting to the world at large ; from their sub- ject, from the way in which the discoveries of archaeology are made familiar, and, not least, from the impression they make of the artist's own strong interest in what he had to say. In both pictures he succeeded in showing the Colosseum as no longer a ruin, but as, so to speak, a living place peopled by the swarm of the Roman populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the Ves- tal Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are " butchered to make a Romai, holiday." Another picture that greatly increased G£r6me's repu- tation, was his " Death of Julius Caesar," though it must be confessed there was a touch of the stage in the arrangement of the scene, and in the action of the body of senators and conspirators leaving the hall with Brandished swords and as if singing in chorus, that was absent from the pictures of the amphitheatre. There was also less material for the curiosity of the lovers of archaeology ; no such striking point, for instance, as the reproduction of the gladiators' helmets and armor recently discovered in Herculaneum ; but the body of the dead Caesar lying " even at the base of Pompey's statue " with his face muffled in his toga, was a masterly performance ; some critic, moved by the grandeur of the lines, said it was not a mere piece of foreshortening, it was " a perspective." Ge"r6me made a life-size painting of the Caesar in this picture. It is in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington. Gerdme painted several other pictures from classic subjects, but none of them had the interest for the general public of those we have described. In 1854 he exhibited a huge canvas, called " The Age of Augustus," a picture suggested, perhaps, by the " Hemicycle " of his master Delaroche, on which he himself had painted. It represented heroes, poets, sages, of the Augustan age, grouped about the cradle of the infant Christ ; it procured for Gerome the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and is now, as the artist himself jestingly says, "the 'greatest ' picture in the Museum of Amiens." In the same year G£rdme went