Death of Sardanapalus

The Assyrian king Sardanapalus reclines impassively on his great red bed as, on his orders, his concubines, slaves, and horses are slaughtered around him before his own funeral pyre, the canvas a churning chaos of writhing nude bodies, gold, and blood. Delacroix unleashes pure Romantic excess - violence, sensuality, exotic luxury, and swirling color in defiance of all classical restraint. Now in the Louvre, the Death of Sardanapalus scandalized its first viewers with its tumultuous cruelty and abandon, a fevered fantasy of destruction staged as a riot of flesh and crimson.