UNKNOWN MASTER, Italian
(active 1630s in Naples)

Suicide of Cato

1630s
Oil on canvas, 134 x 176 cm
Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna

The picture shows the Roman senator Cato, who, after Caesar's siege of Carthage, committed suicide by thrusting a dagger into his chest and ripping open the wound with his own hands. The painting is a work of an unknown follower of Caravaggio, whose style dominated the arts in the first quarter of the seventeenth century in Naples.