Pollice Verso

The story of Pollice Verso

A gladiator in a crested helmet stands with one foot on his fallen opponent and looks up at the box where the Vestal Virgins are leaning over the rail with their thumbs turned down. Behind them the Colosseum rises in tier after tier of faces, and the awning throws colored light across the sand. Gérôme painted it in 1872, researching the armor so carefully that his mistakes became the way everyone pictures Rome. Ridley Scott was shown this painting before he agreed to make Gladiator. It hangs in the Phoenix Art Museum.

On a wall, Pollice Verso is a warm, theatrical picture. The dominant colors are the gold of the sand, the terracotta and cream of the stone, a scatter of red in the awning and the Vestals' robes, and the deep bronze of the armor. It suits a den, a study, a home theater, a hallway, or a boy's room, and it fits classical, masculine, traditional, and library-style interiors. Our source image supports the Mini at 11.9 × 8 in, so treat it as a close-up print: above a desk, on a bookshelf, or as one panel in a wall of history paintings where the detail rewards a lean-in.

Gérôme's The Death of Caesar is his other great Roman crowd scene, Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr is the Academic showpiece painted the following year, and Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa is the earlier French painting that taught this generation how to stage a spectacle. More from Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Phoenix canvas, with the crowd in the stands left sharp enough to read.