Cesare Maccari

Cesare Maccari painted the fresco that everyone pictures when they think of the Roman Senate, and he did it in 1888. He was born in Siena, trained there and in Rome, and worked in the academic history-painting manner that the new Italian state wanted for its public buildings: the kingdom had existed for a generation and was busy commissioning a visual past for itself. His major commission was the decoration of the Sala Vittorio Emanuele II in Palazzo Madama, the seat of the Italian Senate, on the theme of the Roman Senate's history. The panel called Cicero Denounces Catiline shows the consul standing to speak while Catiline sits alone on an empty bench with the rest of the chamber drawn away from him, and it is reproduced in more textbooks than any actual Roman source. It is also wrong in almost every particular: the Senate did not meet in that hall, the setting is imagined, the togas and the architecture are nineteenth-century, and the meeting was held in the temple of Jupiter Stator. None of that has dented it, because the composition does in one image what the First Catilinarian does in a speech - it isolates the accused. He also frescoed the Loreto basilica and worked at the Vatican. He suffered a stroke and stopped painting years before he died. The fresco's afterlife is the interesting part. It was painted to give a young parliamentary state a Roman ancestry, and it has been reproduced ever since as though it were evidence about Rome rather than about 1888. Almost every illustrated account of the Catilinarian conspiracy uses it. Maccari also decorated the Palazzo di Giustizia and won the commission for Loreto against strong competition.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history