Jean-Léon Gérôme
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Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. His paintings were so widely reproduced that he was "arguably the world's most famous living artist by 1880."
Photograph by Nadar
Birthplace of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Vesoul, France
The Cock Fight (1846; Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ, c. 1852–1854, Musée de Picardie
Pollice Verso (Gérôme)
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Pollice Verso is an 1872 painting by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, featuring the eponymous Roman gesture directed to the winning gladiator.
Jean-Léon Gérôme
…art. Henri Oulevay made a caricature where Gérôme is depicted in front of the wall with the art critics as the firing squad. In 1872 Gérôme produced Pollice Verso, a painting of bloody gladiators and blood-thirsty Vestal virgins in the Colosseum that became one of his most famous works. Alexander Turney Stewart…
Jean Leon Gerome Pollice Verso
Detail: the Vestal virgins signal death for the defeated gladiator.
Title page with illustration from "Pollice Verso": To the Lovers of Truth in Classic Art, This is Most Respectfully Addressed, 1879.
Detail: close-up of the gladiators