Rome: eternal, but also extraordinarily fragile. On July 18, 64 AD, the city that aspired to rule the world came face to face with its own vulnerability in a flash of flames. This was no ordinary catastrophe, but the Fire, etched into collective memory as an urban tragedy with questions that hardly separate history from myth. Tacitus, the sharp-eyed and unsparing historian, tells us of this event in his Annals with the cool clarity of someone who understood the ephemeral nature of human constructions. Hell, he tells us, began at the very heart of the Circus Maximus, where the Palatine and Caelian hills nearly touch. It was not a gradual burn, but an eruption. The market stalls, crammed with flammable goods, provided the perfect ignition, while the wind, complicit, turned a spark into a mad rush. Rome, in all its grandeur, was unprepared. There were no “mansions screened by boundary walls,” no “temples surrounded by stone enclosures”—in short, no meaningful obstructions to bar its progress. The flames followed no pattern, respected no structure—divine or aristocratic. They rose, fell, encircled, and consumed. An unimaginable speed, a scourge that anticipated every attempt to contain it, reducing millennia of ambition and achievement to ash. And soon, as always happens in the face of the inexplicable, suspicion arose: “None ventured to combat the fire, as there were reiterated threats from a large number of persons who forbade extinction.” There were those who hurled torches, shouting that they were following orders—perhaps to plunder, or perhaps because the orders truly came from above. This was the fertile ground, the dark matter from which myth would take root: the black legend of Nero the arsonist. A narrative as powerful as it was devastating, portraying him not only as the one who caused the destruction, but worse, as the one who stood to gain from it. An accusation that, with calculated opportunism, also served to cast the Christians into the flames.
Rome in flames
In the summer of 64 AD, Rome burned, and with it the dark myth of Nero was born. Centuries later, painters like Piloty and Siemiradzki would turn that moment into a powerful allegory of the fragility of power and human cruelty.

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- Valentina Petrucci
- 18 July 2025

The 19th century, with its hunger for Roman grandeur and the obsession with archaeological rediscovery, revived that myth, reinterpreting it through art and reflective storytelling. Karl Theodor von Piloty, a German painter with the soul of an epic narrator, created The Fire of Rome. The scene is theatrical, almost operatic. Every detail contributes to a palpable dramatic tension. The lighting in the painting is not natural, it is distorted, artificial, drawn from the flames themselves, consuming all in their path. It is not merely a matter of technique, but pure symbolism: destruction as its own source of illumination. A sublime darkness, where classical order begs for mercy in the face of total disintegration. And Nero. Piloty does not place him at the geometric center of the canvas, but rather at its interpretative core. Not a faithful likeness, but an archetype, the visionary tyrant. His gaze is enigmatic and ambiguous—a mixture of icy cynicism and perverse aesthetic delight in the spectacle of devastation. It is the embodiment of hybris, the destructive madness inherent in power, a metaphorical assertion of imperial responsibility in the face of urban chaos. The flames become active agents in the composition, expressions of a primordial violence unleashed upon human creation. The ruins become fragments of former grandeur, crumbling under the weight of annihilation. A stark reminder of the transience of civilizations, the vulnerability of all human constructions before overwhelming force.
Destruction as a prelude to rebirth—an eternal cycle that binds us still to that night of fire and madness. History repeating itself—its patterns hauntingly mirrored in our own troubled present.
Henryk Siemiradzki, a Polish master of the late 19th century, painted a work that addresses the same historical moment, but from a different angle: Nero’s Torches. A plunge into the most refined horror—not an exploration of the vastness of catastrophe, but of an emperor in grandiose pose, presiding over the perverse magnificence of Roman spectacle, culminating in the persecution of Christians. We are in the lush gardens of the Domus Aurea, on a night that is not quite night—but soon will be. An imperial banquet at its peak, a crowd hungry for spectacle. And at the center of this macabre anticipation: the Christians. Covered in pitch, raised on stakes. Not yet burning—but already doomed. Human torches. Nero, wrapped in his court of flatterers and musicians, arrives on a golden litter—like a pagan deity. Slaves stand ready to light the flames that will illuminate a depraved orgy. But there is a dialectic at play here—a paradoxical irony of history: that very fire, for all its barbarity, would help dispel the shadows of paganism, spreading, through the atrocity of martyrdom, the light of a new doctrine: Christianity. Christian flames or The flames of Christianity—even in the title of Siemiradzki’s work lies the tension between the brutality of power and the unstoppable force of faith.
Siemiradzki’s monumental canvas becomes a theater of cruelty: Nero’s court, steeped in decadent languor, while the emperor presides as an arbiter over this macabre liturgy. Around him unfolds the majestic scenography of the gardens—painstakingly reconstructed through rigorous historical and archaeological research. A triumph of compositional eclecticism, referencing triumphal arches and artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Exquisite askoi, gladiatorial arms, cymbals, silver goblets—even sphinxes and centaurs modeled after ancient sculptures.
The success was immediate and resounding. Siemiradzki, with his academic precision and a romantic sensitivity to pathos, compels the viewer into a direct confrontation with one of the darkest chapters of Roman history.
Both works—though differing in visual language—go far beyond the didactic retelling of a historical event. They offer instead a meditation on human cruelty, on the inherent fragility of civilizations. They are warning acts of vigilant remembrance against the pull of dehumanization. Because, in the end, as Tacitus himself wrote, “appearances suggested that Nero was seeking the glory of founding a new capital and endowing it with his own name.” Destruction as a prelude to rebirth—an eternal cycle that binds us still to that night of fire and madness.
History repeating itself—its patterns hauntingly mirrored in our own troubled present.