Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (French, 1750–1819)
Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus the Great
INV-1000
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (French, 1750–1819)1796
Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus the Great
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (French, 1750–1819) →18th Centuryoil on canvasfrench
Date
1796
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
42 × 91.1 cm (16 9/16 × 35 7/8 in.); Framed: 59.3 × 107.7 cm (23 5/16 × 42 3/8 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. Harold T. Martin
This landscape and its companion piece, Mount Athos Carved as a Monument to Alexander the Great, reflect the late-18th-century enthusiasm for the antique, as well as the cult of sensibility that made the tomb in a landscape a favored subject for art in this period. Here Alexander, who overthrew the Persian Empire, arrives at the tomb of its founder, Cyrus the Great (590/580–c. 529 B.C.), only to find that it has been desecrated. In choosing the subjects of this pair of moralizing landscapes, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes was doubtless suggesting the transitory nature of empire and of life itself.
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