# Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus the Great

- By: Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (French, 1750–1819)
- Date: 1796
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Classification: Painting
- Dimensions: 42 × 91.1 cm (16 9/16 × 35 7/8 in.); Framed: 59.3 × 107.7 cm (23 5/16 × 42 3/8 in.)
- Culture: France
- Credit line: Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. Harold T. Martin
- Museum: [Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/100060)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/web/5b0fb7b5552f3aabea1bac0c65be64e5.jpg
- Who can see it: Teens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

This landscape and its companion piece, Mount Athos Carved as a Monument to Alexander the Great, reflect the late-18th-century enthusiasm for the antique, as well as the cult of sensibility that made the tomb in a landscape a favored subject for art in this period. Here Alexander, who overthrew the Persian Empire, arrives at the tomb of its founder, Cyrus the Great (590/580–c. 529 B.C.), only to find that it has been desecrated. In choosing the subjects of this pair of moralizing landscapes, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes was doubtless suggesting the transitory nature of empire and of life itself.

Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0