Caesar Dictates His Commentaries

The episode, inspired by the biography of Plutarch, is set in the closed space of a tent that opens towards the camp crowded with soldiers, as shown by the sumptuous cloth raised on the wooden fence. Wrapped in a luminous white cloak, Julius Caesar, seated near a tripod with zoomorphic legs sprinkled with kneecaps and surrounded by scribes, he turns to the two scribes bent over the tablets in the act of dictating the Commentaries, holding a stylus. Imperatore ”, the fulcrum of his apartment, the painting depicts the great leader in the likeness of Napoleon, an unusual subject that has a precedent in the painting by Giorgio Vasari (c. 1560) for the“ Scrittoio ”of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.