 In the wake of Etty 's elevation to Academician , he exhibited two paintings at the Summer Exhibition in 1829 , Benaiah , David 's Chief Captain and Hero , Having Thrown Herself from the Tower at the Sight of Leander Drowned , Dies on his Body . Benaiah is on the same large scale as The Combat at 398 cm ( 13 ft 1 in ) wide , and is a very similar composition , although in place of the woman begging for mercy is the body of a dead soldier . Hero recycles the pose of the dead soldier from Benaiah as the dying Hero as she lies on the body of her dead lover . Unusually for Etty , Hero is painted in intentionally neutral tones rather than his usual Venetian colours , and the composition uses foreshortening of the bodies to create a single diagonal across the canvas . For the rest of his life , Etty considered Hero to be " the finest of my fine pictures " . 
