Belisarius Begging for Alms

Belisarius Begging for Alms (Bélisaire demandant l'aumône) is a large oil-on-canvas history painting by Jacques-Louis David, completed in 1780–81 and measuring 288 × 312 cm; it is in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

David began the picture in Rome and finished it on his return to Paris in 1780 after five years at the French Academy in Rome. It served as his application piece to the Royal Academy, which accepted him unanimously on 24 August 1781, and it was a great success at the Salon of 1781, his first. In hindsight it is regarded as his first major Neoclassical painting. David sold it in 1786 to the Elector of Trier, Clemens Wenceslaus of Saxony, after which it entered the collection of the elector's brother, Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen; it was seized in 1792 during the Revolutionary wars, bought by Lucien Bonaparte in 1802 and acquired by the Lille museum in 1863.

The subject draws on Jean-François Marmontel's novel Bélisaire of 1767. Belisarius, Justinian's general who defeated the Vandals in North Africa, was said, in a legend with no basis in fact, to have been blinded by the emperor and reduced to beggary. David shows the old, blind hero seated against massive columns, holding a boy who stretches out a helmet for coins, while a woman in a wide cloak gives alms and, behind them, a former soldier throws up his hands in shock as he recognises his commander. The stone at right bears the inscription Date obolum Belisario, give an obol to Belisarius. The picture has also been read as an allusion to a recent affair, that of General Lally-Tollendal, beheaded in 1766.

In 1784 David, with his pupils François-Xavier Fabre and Anne-Louis Girodet, painted a reduced and slightly altered replica, 101 × 115 cm, for the comte d'Angiviller, Director of the King's Buildings; shown at the Salon of 1785, it is now in the Louvre, with a wider composition and lighter, honey-coloured tones.