In the main hall of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, beneath the vast iron-and-glass vault of the former railway station, stands a bronze that makes explicit what Gérôme’s paintings kept implicit. A man in contemporary nineteenth-century dress — smock, trousers, the clothes of a working artist — stands beside a Roman gladiator. The gladiator is armored, helmeted, standing over a fallen opponent whose arm is raised in the gesture of submission. The contemporary figure reaches toward the gladiator with a sculptor’s tool. This is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s self-portrait with his own creation: the artist inside the ancient world he spent his career constructing, the boundary between the nineteenth century and the Roman arena dissolved by the act of making.

Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs, his Israel in Egypt, and his Lesbia, along with the Roman paintings of his contemporaries John William Waterhouse and Edward John Poynter, belong to a specific Victorian sub-genre that might be called moral archaeology: the use of meticulously researched ancient settings to explore contemporary anxieties about gender, sexuality, empire, and the relationship between civilization and decadence. These paintings are not straightforwardly about Rome or Egypt or Greece. They are about Victorian England, using the distance of antiquity as a frame that permitted the examination of subjects that contemporaneity made difficult.

Frederic Leighton, Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy from 1878 until his death in 1896, was the dominant figure in British academic painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his engagement with classical antiquity — primarily Greek and Roman — was the defining subject of his career. Unlike Alma-Tadema, whose classical paintings were organized around the reconstruction of material culture, or Poynter, whose Romans served moral arguments, Leighton’s classicism was organized around a single overriding concern: beauty as an end in itself, the human figure in relation to drapery and landscape, the moment of formal perfection that painting could capture and sustain.

Jacques-Louis David painted the Oath of the Horatii in 1784, five years before the French Revolution, and the painting arrived in Paris as a political event rather than simply an aesthetic one. Three Roman brothers swear to their father to fight to the death for Rome against the rival city of Alba Longa, their arms extended toward the swords their father holds, their posture rigid with civic resolution. Behind them, the women of the family — who are connected by marriage to the enemy side — collapse in grief that the oath requires be subordinated to duty. The painting is a lecture on republican virtue delivered at the exact moment when the French intelligentsia was developing the vocabulary of republican revolution, and it was received as such.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted marble better than anyone who has ever lived. The cool translucence of Pentelic and Carrara stone, the way light passes through alabaster, the specific warmth of Cipollino against the blue of the Mediterranean sky — these qualities are rendered in his canvases with a trompe l’oeil precision that makes the painted marble appear to be the thing itself. This is not a small achievement. It is also a precise description of what his paintings of ancient Rome accomplish and where their limitations lie: extraordinary on the surface, and the surface is the point.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, has been painted repeatedly across five centuries of European art, and the accumulated versions constitute a case study in how the same historical event can be made to mean entirely different things depending on the visual choices made around it. The event is fixed: Caesar was killed in the Theater of Pompey by a group of senators. The meaning of the event — was it tyrannicide or murder, liberation or catastrophe — has been contested ever since, and the paintings rehearse that contest in visual terms.

The Roman triumph — the procession through the city in which a victorious general displayed his captives and the spoils of conquest before depositing the latter in the treasury and offering thanks at the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus — was the most spectacular public ritual of the Roman world, and its visual representation has served as propaganda for European rulers from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. The triumph’s logic — the hero returns, the enemy is displayed, the city is made to feel the extent of its power — was available for appropriation by any ruler who needed to communicate the same things, and the painters who rendered ancient triumphs for modern patrons understood they were serving both historical documentation and political argument simultaneously.