collecting colours over a cup of coffee...

If you are a lover of printed words, you would know how much of your time is taken by books alone. Then one day, sooner or later, you discover a huge vacuum within that you know next to nothing about other art forms. This blog is an attempt to fulfil one such lacunae in the art of painting. We intend to look up a random painting and upload it with a link here every day whilst having our daily cuppa coffee. In this way at least we hope to be better acquainted with colours, colourers and the schools than what we are now.If you wish to be a part, you know where to shout.
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Thursday, November 17, 2011

Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar

I had to post this, as It has been on my mind a lot. Vercingetorix Throws Down his Arms at the Feet of Julius Caesar  is a great moment in history, as great and rare as any when history herself chooses to change her own course.

 

 

Unlike, say Hannibal, Caesar was no great tactical genius at battle, neither was he a great commander. Caesar was, in one word, will. Pure and unadulterated, not fancy resolve or ambition, just raw will.

Imagine being surrounded on all the sides by an enemy who outnumbered you 1 : 5 , in a land distant and unfamiliar, with your own troops  battle-weary, running out of ration and hopelessly homesick, how on earth would you even conceive of succeeding against such a volley of unbeatable odds ? Well, that's Caesar, starving his men out, starving himself, and blinded by only one thing - Victory. It was a pure display of will, that I have never known or heard of in history. As Cicero so eloquently put it to Julius Caesar: Your spirit has never been content within the narrow confines which nature has imposed upon us.

The painting is the famous Oil Painting by a less known painter of his time - Lionel-Noël Royer, The grandness aptly captures the moment  when Vercingetorix, having recognised that he has been beaten comes out of his fort in Alesia  and lays his arms before the Caesar in his encampment,  thus handing his greatest victory which in due course would end up changing the pathway of the entire western world.

Curators |Finny| [ A ] | Sunil | [ S ] | Lavanya | [ L ]
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