A picture (Vaseul, Musee Garret) by the 19th-century French history painter Jean-Leon Gerome shows a man chained to a wall with the label Cave Canem attached to it. Figures in Roman costume in the background. Who is this? Where is the story?
I’m afraid a don’t know, but a link to the painting may help others here: http://www.kingsgalleries.com/1024x768/galleries/gerome/expanded/picture-59.htm
Are you sure it’s a story or is it just art? I would guess he is making a statement that the man is the dog, but it could very well be something from literature.
Thanks for the hints!
Hmmm… he’s definitely an academic painter, they tended to base their paintings on Latin or Greek mythology, but that’s not what this is so really I don’t know. Maybe literature, but I think (I don’t know that much about art history, though) he did just make it up.
Petronius, Satiricon, 29 :
Ad sinistram enim intrantibus non longe ab ostiarii cella canis ingens, catena vinctus, in pariete erat pictus superque quadrata littera scriptum
CAVE CANEM.
“On the left side when you enter the house, not far from porter’s lodge, there was a huge chained up dog painted on the wall and above there was an inscription in capital letters reading CAVE CANEM - Beware of the dog !”
Such a chained up dog was represented on a mosaic at the entry of the Casa di P. Paquio Proculo at Pompeii (Insula 9, n° 1), but without inscription.
The moulding of a once real chained up dog that died in the eruption of the Vesuvius can be seen at the Antiquarium of Pompeii.
So the Romans often chained up dogs outside of their homes?
Life was hard at the time. But paintings or mosaics don’t shiver the whole night through.
All very true, but irrelevant to the painiing/