Eugène Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus shows an Assyrian king lying on his bed while his guards kill his women and his horses on his orders, so that nothing he owns outlives him. Delacroix painted it for the Salon of 1827, the big Paris exhibition, from a play by the English poet Lord Byron. The massacre is Delacroix's own addition, and the king is a legend, not a recorded ruler.
In the painting, the king does not move. A cupbearer waits to light the pyre, a guard drives a dagger toward a woman bent backward in his arms, and the man who ordered it all watches.
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Byron's play Sardanapalus, published in 1821, ends differently. The king dies beside one woman, his favorite concubine Myrrha. She lights the pyre herself, says "'Tis fired! I come," and steps into the flames.
Delacroix kept the king and the fire and changed everything else. One woman who chose her death became a room full of women who did not. I think that is why the picture still unsettles: a play gave him a death, and he turned it into a murder.
The legend behind Byron's play
The story is much older than Byron. It comes from the Persika of the Greek writer Ctesias, which tells of Sardanapalus, the last king of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. Besieged by rebels, he orders his palace and his treasures burned rather than surrender. Later Greek and Roman writers repeated the story.
Nobody could check any of it. Nineveh had not been excavated, so no one in Paris knew what an Assyrian palace looked like. Delacroix's picture came from his imagination. It was not a commission.
The Salon booklet, which described the pictures on show, carried an account of the scene that was probably written by Delacroix himself. It begins: "Lying on a superb bed, atop an immense pyre, Sardanapalus orders his eunuchs" to kill his women. The critics who saw the picture at the Salon did not let that pass, and an official went further in a letter the public was never meant to read.
What You'll Discover
What the critics could not forgive.
What an official wrote in private.
Why Delacroix painted it twice.
What the cupbearer is about to do.