Massacre under the Triumvirate

The theme of the Massacres under the Triumvirate is famous in the oeuvre of Antoine Caron because it is the subject of the artist’s only known signed and dated work. This painting, dating to 1566, is now in the Louvre, Paris. Another version of the subject, dated to circa 1562, also by Caron is in the musée départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais. However, Caron was by no means the only artist who chose to depict this rather violent subject. There is a group of approximately twenty paintings that follow the exact model of the present painting, which all date to the 1560s. These all seem to be executed by different hands, and further relate to a woodcut attributed to Jean de Gourmont, of which an example is in the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris (inv. no. 23453). The exact chronology of these various versions has not been established, but it can be assumed that the prime is that from which the engraving was taken.

The reason for the sudden interest in the subject, the massacres carried out in 43 BC by the newly founded Roman Triumvirate consisting of Octavius Caesar, Mark Anthony and Lepidus, was that the bloody scenes had found an upsetting parallel in contemporary life. In a continuation of the religious persecutions that began after the ascension of Henry II to the French throne in 1547, April 1561 saw the entrance into Paris of the ‘Triumvirs’ made up of the duc de Montmorency, the duc de Guise and Jacques d'Albon, Seigneur de Saint-André, following the duc de Guise’s massacre of a group of protestants worshipping in Wassy, the act which can be identified as the first real event in the French Wars of Religion.

The inscription on the plaque at centre left of the present painting reads, ‘Cum tribus infoelix serviret Roma tyrannis haec rerum facies quam modo cernis erat’, which can be translated as ‘Events unfolded as you see them here shown, at the time when unfortunate Rome obeyed its three tyrants’. It is unclear from this what the political and religious persuasion of the original artist would have been, especially as examples of this subject can be found in contemporary inventories of both catholic and protestant families.