Eugène Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus shows an Assyrian king stretched out 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, from a play by Lord Byron. The king is a legend, not a recorded ruler.
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 Sardanapalus did not die like that. In the play, published in 1821, 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. The massacre that made the painting infamous is his own, and the Salon of 1827 punished him for it. I think that is why the picture still unsettles: a play gave him a death, and he turned it into a murder.
What You'll Discover
Whose massacre this really is.
What the critics could not forgive.
What an official wrote in private.
What the cupbearer is about to do.
Why Delacroix painted it twice.