This splendid bit of kitsch is Morte de Cesare by Vincenzo Camuccini, a lesser known adherent of the Romantic Realist school. It's appropriate to display this piece today, of course, because it's March 15th, known as "the Ides" to the Romans and forever associated with the warning "beware the Ides of March" given to Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's eponymous play by an aged soothsayer, to whom Julius says, joshingly,on the morning of that day, "Well, the Ides of March have come." "Ay, they have come, but they are not gone," cackles the old hag. Not long after that: "Et tu, Brute," 23 knife wounds, and the long republican era yields to the Empire....
He may or may not have been the noblest Roman of them all, but he's certainly the most famous.
