According to Plutarch: [He] gave them leave to bury whom they pleased of the Persians, and to make use for this purpose what garments and furniture they thought fit out of the booty.

"[3] The painting focuses on a misunderstanding involving Sisygambis, Darius's mother, which was not mentioned by Plutarch, but was recounted by several late Classical writers, among them Arrian, Valerius Maximus and Quintus Curtius Rufus.

[1] Generally the scholarship is in agreement that Alexander is the young man in red, who gestures as if in the act of speaking while referring to Hephaestion at his left, though some historians dispute that interpretation and reverse the two figures' identities.

[4][1] While it has been suggested that the figures were modelled after members of the Pisani family,[4] for whose estate the picture was made, it has alternatively been proposed that the kneeling girls are Veronese's daughters, and the courtier who presents them is the artist's self-portrait.

[1] The art historian Nicholas Penny has written that the painting's characterizations of cultivated nobility were based on no particular models, and were products of the artist's imagination.

Immediately behind them are a diverting company of pages, halberdiers, dwarfs, dogs and monkeys, and in the further distance looms an architectural screen, an arched promenade parallel to the picture plane and supporting more spectators.

[11] Supposedly the enormous canvas was painted at the villa in secret, and rolled up and left under a bed when the artist departed;[11][6] the account has since been regarded as fanciful.

[14] The price was thought exorbitant, and in July 1857 the purchase was debated in the House of Commons, when Lord Elcho attacked the painting as a "second-rate specimen".

[15] Henry James wrote in 1882: You may walk out of the noon-day dusk of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see the family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of Alexander.