PROVENANCE: Mr. and Mrs. Eric LeVin, Bellefonte, PA, 1992; BJU, 1993.

Little is known about the painter Félix Louis Leullier, who studied with one of the most notable Romantic French artists Antoine-Jean Gros. After training with Jacques-Louis David, Gros came into contact with Napoleon and was appointed his official battle painter. When David went into exile after the demise of Napoleon, Gros took over his studio, where Leullier would have become his student. This able artist's works are virtually unknown outside of France.

Leullier beautifully translates the influence of Gros's romantic fervor and penchant for battle scenes into this stunning combat of another kind. The stage and subject Leullier presents illustrate some characteristics of Romantic art. First, an exultation of emotion over reason is dramatically present in the very act itself where thronging crowds watch such inhuman atrocities for sport. Also, the scene highlights the experience of each individual. The details help portray a range of human personalities and capacities from the man momentarily surviving with a triumphant ride atop a raging elephant to the heroine Perpetua (center) who triumphs in her spiritual reliance upon God to ultimately deliver her. The artist's imagination transcends reality in an effort to bring the viewer a vivid illustration of spiritual truth.

In the first centuries A.D., gladiatorial games were commonplace under Roman rulers. During the games, this damnatio ad bestias scene would have taken place during the "lunch break" of the day, between a morning of mock battles and animal displays and an afternoon of the highlighted gladiatorial combats. Intending to deter others, the rulers executed criminals and Christians by throwing them into the arena with fierce and exotic animals. Christians were found guilty of sacrilege and treason because they denied the divinity of the emperor and refused to participate in state rituals that brought worship to him. Such is the case with Vibia Perpetua, who was executed with her handmaid, Felicitas, and fellow catechumens, Revocatus, Saturninus, and Secundulus in the Carthage arena on March 7, 203. The story is known from Perpetua's own account, Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, preserved as one of the earliest pieces of writing by a Christian woman. She writes, "And I saw that I should not fight with beasts but with the Devil: but I knew the victory to be mine." She then added, "I have written this up to the day before the games. Of what was done in the games themselves, let him write who will." Here, Leullier dramatically "writes" in paint the rest of the story, based on an extant eyewitness account. Details from the account include Perpetua's aiding Felicitas after she was crushed to the ground (center) and Saturninus's being bitten by a leopard (right). Such histories formed the basis for the fertile imaginations of 19th-century French Romantic painters.