The Family of Darius before Alexander the Great

Author: Surya Stemerding

This drawing consists of two scenes that Polidoro da Caravaggio (c. 1499-1543) painted in 1526-27 as part of a fresco cycle for the façade of Palazzo Milesi in Rome. He separated them in the frieze with an ornamental section containing two vases and a cuirass.^[1] That section is missing in the drawing, in which the two scenes have been merged into one.^[2]

On the left the Persian King Darius III stands before the Macedonian-Greek general Alexander the Great after the Battle of Issos in 333 BC, as described by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives from the end of the first century. The scene is often confused or even equated with depictions of The Magnanimity of Scipio, an event from Roman history that was recorded by Livy. Both stories tell of a general who showed clemency to a defeated enemy by returning a woman who had been seized as a prize of war without raping her. On the right two senators are in conversation with Darius.

The subject of the clemency of classical rulers was a popular one in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which is why these two scenes were among the most copied of Polidoro’s façade frescoes.^[3] The Rotterdam copy is a rather inferior work and was probably not made on the spot after the frescoes but after an existing drawing or print. The lines are deeply impressed in the paper and appear to have been indented to prepare the scene for transfer to a print. Judging by the watermark, the copy was made not long after 1527, possibly on paper that had been kept in the artist’s stock.