Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada

Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada (French: Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade) is an oil on canvas painting by Henri Regnault.

[4] His emotional detachment and relaxed gesture contrast with the gruesome foreground in which the blood drips down the steps from the lifeless body lying at his feet to its just-severed head.

The power of these works drew on the contrast between what was depicted and contemporary European ideas about reducing the scope and barbarity of judicial execution, thus making the representation of the act both thrilling and terrifying.

[5][7] They were also part of a wider tendency in orientalist art to choose disturbing subjects such as slave markets or acts of violence and present them in a style that was both “real” and escapist.

[2] It has been exhibited on loan many times:[1] Roger Marx [fr] wrote that Regnault was often drawn, while in Rome, towards the unusual and the bizarre, such as the beheading in Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa.