Caligula depositing the Ashes of his Mother and Brother in the Tomb of his Ancestors

Dated 1647 and now in the Royal Collection, this painting depicts the young Emperor Caligula performing the filial act of depositing the ashes of his mother Agrippina and brother Nero — victims of the elder Tiberius's political persecutions — in the family tomb. The subject, drawn from Suetonius's "Lives of the Twelve Caesars," presented seventeenth-century French painters with a nuanced historical moment: Caligula, who would later become a byword for tyranny, here appears as a grieving, pious son honouring the victims of political injustice. Le Sueur's choice of this moment emphasises filial virtue and dynastic piety rather than imperial power. The Royal Collection's acquisition of this work reflects the European aristocratic appetite for French classical history painting in the period. Le Sueur renders the funerary procession with the same restrained gravity he brought to his religious subjects — the emotional weight carried by posture and drapery rather than by theatrical gesture.

On canvas, the processional composition is organised horizontally, the figures moving from right to left in a rhythm that evokes ancient frieze relief sculpture — a visual strategy that Le Sueur shared with Poussin and that aligned both painters with the French classical tradition's engagement with antique form. Drapery colours are deliberately subdued for mourning context — greys, dark ochres, muted purples — with the urns carrying the ashes as the compositional focal objects.