The Death of Julius Caesar

La mort de Cèsar or The Death of Julius Caesar is an 1806 painting by Vincenzo Camuccini, originally commissioned in 1793 by Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, for whom he had already produced a copy of Raphael's Deposition. He completed a cartoon for the work in 1793 which was favourably received by art critics active in Rome at the time. However, when he produced a first version of the painting in 1796, it was less well-received and so he destroyed it and started again from scratch, completing the surviving version in 1806. The Earl had died in 1803 and his heirs refused to pay for the work, so Camuccini instead sold it to Gioacchino Murat in 1807. After Murat's fall, it was acquired by Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies and relocated to the Palazzo Reale in Naples. In 1864 it entered its present home, the National Museum of Capodimonte in Naples.