Great Dane with sausages: "Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant"

Wilhelm Trübner's 1877 painting titled 'Great Dane with sausages: Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant' is one of the most singular works in nineteenth-century German painting — a large dog facing a plate of sausages, the title quoting the gladiatorial salute to Caesar. The ironic application of imperial rhetoric to a dog confronting its food creates a deflating wit that sits at odds with the serious German academic painting of the period. Trübner's occasional humor and his willingness to paint undignified subjects with total technical seriousness placed him outside conventional hierarchies of genre. The Alte Nationalgalerie holds this as an example of German Realism's capacity for self-deflating humor alongside its more earnest ambitions.

Trübner paints the dog with the same direct, confident observation he applied to his plein-air landscapes — no condescension, no caricature, simply a large dog rendered with tonal honesty. The sausages presumably receive equally serious treatment. The irony is entirely in the title; the painting itself is painted straight.