No painter saw Rome fall. Every picture here was invented centuries later, from old histories and ruins, and many of the painters used the fall to talk about their own time. One of the strangest scenes on the list shows the moment the news reached the emperor, and what he answered.
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How These Were Chosen
The fall of Rome has a traditional date, 476, when a Germanic warrior named Odoacer deposed the last emperor in the West. Behind that date lies a slow collapse, with the city sacked by the Visigoths and then the Vandals in the 400s.
No painter saw any of it, so each picture of the fall is built from texts and ruins. In the 1700s and 1800s, painters used it to talk about their own countries, their luxury and their fears, while painting banquets and burning cities.
The list keeps scenes of Rome failing from within, scenes of the city under attack, and the ruins left behind. Ancient statues return in many of them, and they often tell the story better than the people around them.
12. Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins (1796)
In this view of the Louvre, a young man sits among fallen columns, drawing a statue that is still whole. Above him the vault of the Grande Galerie has caved in, clouds drift through the gap, and shrubs have taken root along the tops of the walls. Hubert Robert imagined this ruin in 1796, in a room he knew well.
Before the Revolution he had been keeper of the king's paintings. After 1795 he was one of the curators of the public museum that had opened in this very gallery on August 10, 1793.
That job explains the picture. At the Salon of 1796, the state exhibition of living artists held inside the Louvre, Robert showed two views of the gallery. Number 392 was his plan for it, lit from above through the vault and divided without blocking the long view. Number 393 was listed simply as "Ruins, after the preceding picture." The curator had painted his own project, then the same room fallen in.
Wreckage was familiar ground for him. He had learned to paint it in Rome, where he lived from 1754 to 1765 among the ancient ruins. One of his teachers there was Giovanni Paolo Panini, whose own capriccio of Roman ruins stands at number 10.
In the Louvre, too, Robert puts people back to work in the wreck. Two figures dig through the rubble at the left, and in the middle distance a woman stands beside a small fire with a pot over it. Somebody has moved into the ruined museum and is cooking dinner a few steps from the statues.
The statue the young man is copying hides one last liberty. It is the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient marble that in 1796 still stood in the Vatican. It reached Paris only in July 1798, among the works of art the Pope had to hand over after Napoleon's victories in Italy, so Robert set it in the Louvre two years early.
At a Glance
Artist: Hubert Robert (1733 to 1808)
Painted: 1796
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 115 × 145 cm (45 × 57 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris (Sully wing, Room 932)
11. John William Waterhouse, The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius (1883)
A young emperor sits alone at the left with a gold dish of grain on his knees. Pigeons and guinea fowl peck at the carpet around his feet, and across the marble floor a line of courtiers in white robes bows low toward him. John William Waterhouse chose this quiet room, in 1883, to paint the fall of Rome. The city appears nowhere in it, and the man feeding the birds is the emperor who was supposed to defend it.