Marius at Minturnae
Germain-Jean Drouais (1763-1788) · 1786
An old man sits on the edge of a bed in a bare prison room, wrapped in a red cloak, and turns on the soldier who has come to kill him with a single outstretched arm. The soldier, sword lowered, recoils and hides his face behind his cloak. The old man is Gaius Marius, seven times consul of Rome, captured at Minturnae while fleeing from Sulla. According to Plutarch, the Cimbrian soldier sent to execute him fled at the words: do you dare to kill Gaius Marius? Look at the light striking the general's hard, bearded face and the sweep of his arm across the dark wall.
Germain-Jean Drouais was David's favourite pupil and had helped him paint the Oath of the Horatii in Rome. He made this canvas in Rome in 1786, at twenty-three, as his second-year submission from the French Academy; it was shown at the Palazzo Mancini and sent to Paris in the autumn. He died of smallpox in Rome in 1788, and the picture passed to his mother and then to his aunt, from whom the administration of Louis the Eighteenth acquired it in 1816 in exchange for a life annuity.
Did You Know? Drouais painted it at twenty-three and died of smallpox in Rome two years later.
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