Moammar Gadhafi's penchant for extravagant uniforms, gold regalia and Bedouin tents provided a theatrical backdrop for four decades of harsh repression at home and a foreign policy that made him a bete noire of the West.
On Tuesday night, those props were smashed, pilfered and paraded in mockery when rebels stormed his fortified compound. One man wore the familiar braided hat he said he found in his house. The tent where he received foreign dignitaries was set ablaze. The decapitated golden head of his statue was trampled.
Gadhafi, who has been fighting a rebellion for six months, was nowhere to be seen.
In tandem with his eccentricity, Gadhafi had a charisma which won him support among many ordinary Libyans. His readiness to take on Western powers and Israel, both with rhetoric and action, earned him a certain cachet with some in other Arab states who felt their own leaders were too supine.
While leaders of neighboring Arab states folded quickly in the face of popular uprisings, Gadhafi had put up a bloody six-month fight, taking on NATO as well as local insurgents who quickly seized half the country.
For most of his 42-year rule, he held a prominent position in the West's gallery of international rogues, while maintaining tight control at home by eliminating dissidents and refusing to anoint a successor.
Gadhafi effected a successful rapprochement with the West by renouncing his weapons of mass destruction program in return for an end to sanctions. But he could not avoid the tide of popular revolution sweeping through the Arab world.
The Libyan leader, his son and his spy chief are wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for planning the violent suppression of the uprising.
As his oil-producing North African desert country descended into civil war, Gadhafi's military responded with the deadly force that he had never been afraid to use, despite the showman image that captivated many.
When the insurgency began in mid-February, protesters were gunned down in their hundreds. As his troops advanced on Benghazi he famously warned rebels there would be "no mercy, no pity." They would be hunted down "alley by alley, house by house, room by room."
Those words may have been his undoing. Days later the United Nations passed a resolution clearing the way for a NATO air campaign that knocked out his air force, tanks and heavy guns.
'Mad dog'
Raids also targeted his own headquarters in Tripoli. One raid killed his youngest son and three grandchildren. It was not the first time that the West had killed a Gadhafi family member.
President Ronald Reagan called Gadhafi a "mad dog" and sent warplanes to bomb his Bab al-Aziziyah compound in 1986, after the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque he blamed on Libyan agents. One of the 60 people killed was Gadhafi's adopted daughter.
Gadhafi used the Tripoli building bombed in the raid, left unprepared for 25 years, to deliver one of his first defiant speeches of the war, standing beside a memorial in the shape of a giant metal fist crushing an American warplane.
On Tuesday night, some men climbed atop the fist amid celebratory gunshots and hacked at it.
In televised addresses in response to the rebellion in the east, Gadhafi blamed the unrest on rats and mercenaries and said they were brainwashed by Osama bin Laden and under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs used to spike their coffee.
There was repeated speculation that Gadhafi has either been killed or wounded in NATO air raids, but he made carefully choreographed television appearances in response to the rumors.
In May, Gadhafi taunted NATO, saying its bombers could not find him.
"I am telling the coward crusaders that I am at a place you cannot reach and kill me," he said in a broadcast audio recording. His later speeches were also delivered as audio recordings, presumably to conceal his whereabouts.
'I will die here'
"I am not going to leave this land, I will die here as a martyr ... I shall remain here defiant," he said in one broadcast.
One of the world's longest serving national leaders, Gadhafi had no official government function and was known as the "Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution."
His love of grand gestures was on display on foreign visits when he slept in a Bedouin tent guarded by dozens of female bodyguards.
In Italy last year, Gadhafi's invitation to hundreds of young women to convert to Islam overshadowed the visit, which was intended to cement growing ties between Tripoli and Rome.
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Libya's uprising against Gadhafi
U.S. diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website shed further light on the Libyan leader's tastes.
One cable posted by The New York Times describes Gadhafi's insistence on staying on the ground floor when he visited New York for a 2009 meeting at the United Nations and his reported refusal or inability to climb more than 35 steps.
Gadhafi was also said to rely heavily on his staff of four Ukrainian nurses, including one woman described as a "voluptuous blonde." The cable speculated about a romantic relationship, but the nurse, Galyna Kolonytska, 38, fled Libya after the fighting started.
Gadhafi was born in 1942, the son of a Bedouin herdsman, in a tent near Sirte on the Mediterranean coast. He abandoned a geography course at university for a military career that included a short spell at a British army signals school.
Colonel Gadhafi took power in a bloodless military coup in 1969 when he toppled King Idriss, and in the 1970s he formulated his "Third Universal Theory," a middle road between communism and capitalism, as laid out in his "Green Book."
Oil wells and desert
Gadhafi oversaw the rapid development of Libya, which was previously known for little more than oil wells and deserts where huge tank battles took place in World War Two. The economy is now paying the price of war and sanctions.
One of his first tasks on taking power was to build up the armed forces, but he also spent billions of dollars of oil income on improving living standards, making him popular with the low-paid.
Gadhafi poured money into giant projects such as a steel plant in the town of Misrata -- the scene of bitter fighting -- and the Great Man-Made River, a scheme to pipe water from desert wells to coastal communities.
Gadhafi embraced the pan-Arabism of the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt to join Libya and Tunisia ended in acrimony.
In 1977 he changed the country's name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah (State of the Masses) and allowed people to air their views at people's congresses.
However, for much of his rule he has been shunned by the West, which accused him of links to terrorism and revolutionary movements.
He was particularly reviled after the 1988 Pan Am airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, by Libyan agents in which 270 people were killed.
U.N. sanctions imposed in 1992 to pressure Tripoli to hand over two Libyan suspects, crippled the economy, dampened Gadhafi's revolutionary spirit and took the sting out of his anti-capitalist, anti-Western rhetoric.
Gadhafi abandoned his program of prohibited weapons in 2003 to return Libya to international mainstream politics.