Nero's Torches
Henryk Siemiradzki (1843 to 1902) · 1876
On a marble terrace in the gardens of the Roman emperor Nero, a crowd of courtiers, dancers and slaves has gathered for an evening's entertainment. Nero himself is carried in on a golden litter at the left, surrounded by women in silk and flowers. Across the picture, on the right, stand tall wooden poles wrapped in straw, and tied to each is a man or woman. They are Christians, and they are about to be burned alive as torches to light the party. A slave with a flaming taper is already climbing towards the first. Between the two groups the marble glows in the last daylight.
Siemiradzki painted this vast canvas in Rome in eighteen seventy six and it made him famous across Europe. He was a master of the academic style: look at the perfectly rendered marble, bronze and silk, the archaeological detail of the columns and lamps, and the way the composition divides into the decadent left and the martyred right, with the light of the setting sun uniting them. The Christians are calm; the Romans are bored, curious or drunk. The painter took the story from the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote that Nero blamed the Christians for the great fire of Rome and had them killed in the gardens as a spectacle.
In eighteen seventy nine Siemiradzki gave the painting to the city of Kraków, and that gift founded the National Museum, the first Polish national museum in a country that had been erased from the map. It was entered as number one in the inventory and has been the centrepiece of the Sukiennice ever since. For Poles under foreign rule the image of the persecuted but unbroken also carried a message that everyone understood.
Did You Know? This is the painting that founded the museum: it carries the inventory number one, given in eighteen seventy nine.
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