The Battle of the Pyramids

Antoine-Jean Gros's The Battle of the Pyramids of 1810 commemorates Napoleon's July 1798 victory over the Mamluk cavalry at Embabeh, which opened Egypt to French conquest and was accompanied by Napoleon's famous exhortation that forty centuries of history looked down upon his army. Gros depicted the battle with the compositional dynamism he had developed in his plague and Eylau paintings, the Mamluk cavalry's desperate charge against French infantry squares creating a scene of violent Oriental color. The Egyptian campaign's failure was retrospectively transformed by such paintings into a chapter in a continuous imperial epic.

The panoramic format captures the sweep of the battlefield with the pyramids visible in the distance. Gros combines precise military detail with the exotic spectacle of Mamluk horsemen and the Egyptian landscape.