La Mort d’Agis

The scene, taken from Plutarch, is set in a prison: Agis, king of Sparta, just strangled on the orders of Leonidas, lies on the ground with bared torso. His mother Agesistrata, leaning over his body, holds his right hand; before the entrance where two men stand, the body of Agis’s grandmother Archidamia lies covered with a cloth at the right. Nicolas-André Monsiau painted this history of antique virtue and martyrdom in 1789, the year of the Revolution, with the severe gravity of the Neoclassical school. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.