#history

They say he painted a lot of these big public murals around Brazil — I couldn't track down the specific story behind this one, but it hangs in a government building in Minas Gerais.

The story goes that a Turkish sultan sent these men a demand to surrender and they wrote back something so filthy it stayed famous for centuries — nobody seems sure the letter ever really existed. Repin kept at this for something like a decade, from what I can find, using friends and neighbours as models; the one bent over the paper was apparently a historian he knew who fed him the details.

It's mounted on the wall of a supermarket built on old railway land — which is apparently why the transport history ended up there at all.

Carybé was actually born in Argentina, but adopted Brazil so completely he ended up carving its history into the side of buildings like this one.

Painted in Rome on a commission from the French crown, from what I can find, and people queued to see it. The oath itself doesn't seem to appear in any of the old Roman accounts — it looks like he made the moment up — and it got read later as a call to give everything up for your country, which supposedly wasn't the plan back when a king was footing the bill.