The present work, depicting the Athenian statesman Aristides and one of the citizens who voted for his ostracism, has been recently and convincingly ascribed to the nineteenth-century painter Luigi Mussini, a figure in the Italian Purismo movement. Born in Berlin to the chapel-master at the Prussian court, Natale Mussini, Luigi was sent as a child to Florence, where he was schooled in art, music and literature. He undertook his earliest artistic training from his older brother Cesare Mussini and later studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence. Early on, Mussini turned away from the academic practice of copying from classical casts that had defined the Neoclassical tradition, preferring direct study of the great Tuscan masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose works he admired for their expressive dignity and purity.
In 1840 Mussini won a scholarship to Rome, where he painted his first significant work, Holy Music (1842, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence), clearly inspired by Raphael’s iconic Saint Cecilia. After fighting in the Revolutions of 1848, Mussini traveled to Paris, where he became close friends with Ingres and many of his school. Holy Music and another painting, the Triumph of Truth (1848, Accademia del Brera, Milan) were exhibited at the Salon in 1849 and proved so successful that Mussini was commissioned by the Ministry of Fine Arts to make copies of them as well as to create another painting on a subject of his choice. For this he chose a theme particularly close to the hearts of the artists of the Purismo movement: the Commemorative Celebration of the Birth of Plato Held at Lorenzo the Magnificent’s Villa di Careggi (1851, Musée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse). Rendered in an austere manner of drawing derived from Ingres coupled with a rich and luxurious palette inspired by the masters of the sixteenth century, Mussini’s painting emphasises the importance of Neo-Platonic thought to the formation of Florentine humanism. In 1851 Mussini became director of the Istituto d’Arte in Siena and remained there for the rest of his life, playing a prominent role in the artistic and cultural life of the Tuscan city. He was celebrated by a grand monographic exhibition staged in 2007–8 at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, Nel segno di Ingres: Luigi Mussini e l’Accademia in Europa nell’Ottocento.
Aristides (530–468 BC) rose to political prominence in ancient Athens, his good reputation leading to his nickname ‘the Just’. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described him as “the best and most honourable man in Athens”, and he is similarly cited in Plato's Socratic dialogues. A proponent of policies aiming to maintain Athens’s status as a land power, he came into conflict with his political rival Themistocles, who advocated a naval policy. Their bitter dispute eventually led to the ostracism of Aristides in circa 482–485 BC, expelling him from the city for ten years. The present painting depicts a moment in Plutarch’s account of the life of Aristides. Votes for an ostracism were cast using shards of pottery, or ostraka. According to Plutarch, during the vote an illiterate man approached Aristides without recognising him, asking him to write the name of Aristides on his ostrakon. Astonished, the statesman asked what wrong Aristides had done him. The voter replied, “None whatever, I don't even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called ‘The Just.’” Without revealing his identity, Aristides then wrote his own name on the ballot.
Posed at the steps of a Doric temple against a pure blue sky, we see Aristides seated and deep in thought as he writes his name, the oblivious illiterate citizen standing beside him. The painting bears striking stylistic, compositional and thematic similarities with a well-documented work Mussini painted in 1846, the Two Plinys (Fondazione Monte dei Paschi, Siena), in which the ancient thinkers Pliny the Younger and his uncle Pliny the Elder converse in a landscape before Vesuvius, whose eruption caused the death of the latter. At the same time, both the Two Plinys and the present work might be viewed as presaging the Triumph of Truth and the Celebration of the Birth of Plato, in which great men of history who have contributed to the search for philosophical, scientific, artistic, religious and moral truth gather in landscapes punctuated classical architectural forms and fragments. Thus, a date somewhere in the late 1840s seems appropriate for the present work.
The two figures seem to be loosely adapted from the famous philosophers of the School of Athens in the Vatican Stanze, painted by no less than Mussini’s greatest hero of Renaissance art, Raphael. While the pairing of one seated, writing figure with another standing one closely resembles two figures to the far right of the School of Athens, the pose of the seated figure in Mussini’s painting owes something to Raphael’s portrait of Michelangelo as Heraclitus in the left foreground. Meanwhile, the juxtaposition of an older man with a younger one is reminiscent of the central figures of the School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle, whose seminal ideals and ideals had reverberated down through the centuries, finding their most recent incarnation in the coolly classical yet vibrant revival of classical and Renaissance forms and themes in Mussini’s canvas.
We would like to thank Dr Philippe Bordes for kindly sharing his thoughts on the attribution of the present work.
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