The Death of Tiberius
painting by Jean-Paul Laurens
The Death of Tiberius (French: La Mort de Tibère) is an 1864 history painting by the French artist Jean-Paul Laurens. It depicts a dramatic version of the death of Tiberius, the Roman Emperor. The elderly Tiberius is murdered by his nephew Caligula, who is shown taking the imperial signet ring. Laurens had a low opinion of the character of Tiberius, whose death contrasts with the heroic suicide of Cato the Younger depicted in a painting he had exhibited at the Salon of 1863.
The painting was displayed at the Salon of 1864 held at the Palace of Industry in Paris. Today it is in the collection of the Georges Labit Museum in Toulouse.
References
Bibliography
Beard, Mary. Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. Princeton University Press, 2021.
Fugelso, Karl.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Death of Tiberius” is painting by Jean-Paul Laurens. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Death, Tiberius and painting, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18221756. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1864, 1863 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Death of Tiberius” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.