A roaring lion in the Colosseum.

Painted in 1886, right in the middle of Irminger's Italian scholarship years (1884 to 1887), this work captures a lion inside the Colosseum in Rome. The setting is charged with history. The Colosseum was, of course, the arena where wild animals including lions were pitted against gladiators and condemned prisoners for the entertainment of Roman crowds, so placing a roaring lion there in 1886 carries a kind of layered irony and poetry. By this point in the 19th century, the Colosseum had become one of the great romantic ruins of Europe, drawing artists from across the continent who saw in its crumbling arches a meditation on the rise and fall of empires.

Irminger was working in a Realist style during this period, before his turn toward Romanticism in the 1890s, so you can expect the animal to be rendered with close observation rather than idealization. Animal painting was part of his range, and the choice of subject here fits neatly into that strand of his work. The roaring lion also reads as a kind of symbol: power surrounded by ruin, life inside a monument to death. For a young Danish painter on scholarship abroad, absorbing the grandeur of Italy, this image speaks to both ambition and awe.