A large canvas hanging in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, depicts an epic historical scene set in the Roman Colosseum. In the center of the composition, a group of gladiators raise their arms toward the presiding emperor, inaudibly crying a line that becomes voiced only in the painting’s title: “Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant” (“Hail Caesar! We Who Are About to Die Salute You”).
Mirroring History
Evocative of a modern-day football stadium, the vista of the painting opens to an expansive view of the architecture, filled with spectators, which is nevertheless but a small section of the gigantic oval structure implied around us. We the viewers are placed at ground level, right in front of the imperial salute, close enough to see the disdainful expression of the ponderous emperor and the shiny armor of the gladiators, soon to be stained with blood like those lying in the sand before us. Indeed, while the narrative tension resides in the interaction between the soldiers and the emperor, Gérôme takes pains to show us the other, seemingly insignificant actions that are happening in this painting—subtle details that momentarily distract us from the main subject matter but extend the time of the drama depicted.
Turning to the left foreground, we see a foreshortened body contorted in a painful death, lying amid signs of fighting and bloodshed. Behind him, more bodies are being laboriously dragged away by what we might call the stage crew of the show, the friction of the sand obviously posing some difficulty.
To their left a man strides forth, seemingly oblivious of the tumultuous surroundings of the arena but rather focused on his job of re-sanding the bloodstained ground. Posed like Jean-François Millet’s “Sower,” which had just been exhibited at the Salon in 1850, the man almost assumes the identity of a farmer performing a most mundane activity.
Behind him, two staff members in mythological costumes walk toward the gate, one turning back as if to check when the stage will be ready for the next fight. Meanwhile, on either side of the emperor, a few priests and aristocrats among the audience casually converse with each other, paying no heed to the dying address of the men in front of them.
The presence of these subsidiary characters brings the main drama into its larger context. It reminds us that despite the courage that the gladiators must put up for their last fight, it is but another insignificant episode among a sequence of daily spectacles. While some audience members might be captured by the excitement of the fight, others are simply accustomed to such gruesome scenes.
This, Gérôme shows us, was everyday life in Rome in the last days of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. During the 19th century, classical scholarship thrived in Europe as scholars studied the texts and artifacts that survived from antiquity. As an academic painter, Gérôme not only mastered the portrayal of human figures but also was fascinated by history—which he meticulously researched and re-created in such historical scenes. But rather than setting the scene under the reign of Claudius as described by ancient authors, he designated the ruler to be Vitellius—one of the four emperors during the turbulent civil war in A.D. 69, who died a gruesome death himself only eight months after ascending the throne.
In “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776–1789), Edward Gibbon refers to the “beastly Vitellius” among “the unworthy successors of Augustus,” noting that “Vitellius consumed in mere eating at least six millions of our money in about seven months. It is not easy to express his vices with dignity, or even decency.” Gérôme was attentive in capturing that image of the ponderous emperor. In picturing the cruelty and vice of the collapsing dynasty, the artist links the moral failure of the ruler with the decadent life and declining mores of the entire society, presenting it viscerally to posterity as if a mirror.
When the art world was stirred by the nascent interest in impressionism, Gérôme held the ground, insisting that the traditional, academic mode of pictorial representation still had much to offer even in the age of photography. Indeed, his paintings such as “Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant” show the artist as a master storyteller, and it was exactly pictures like this that inspired emulation by cinematographers, from the earliest days of filmmaking to the present.
