Over the weekend, my dad sent me an email with this painting. It is a fresco from ca. 1464 by Vincenzo Foppa (1427 – 1515) called “The Young Cicero Reading”. It is now in the Wallace Collection in London.
I tried to get more info from the site of the Wallace Collection, but I got an error message every time I went too far in the site. I’ll add the link if I get to the page I wanted to open. This is the blurb my dad sent me, which I believe comes from the museum’s site:
The Young Cicero Reading is the only surviving fresco from the Banco Mediceo, Milan In 1455 Francesco Sforza gave the Palazzo to Cosimo de’Medici, who had it lavishly restyled. Foppa, the leading Lombard master of the quattrocento period, was commissioned to fresco the courtyard. The Young Cicero Reading may have been intended to accompany the Virtues as an emblem of Rhetoric, one of the Liberal Arts. Set in the open courtyard for four hundred years, the fresco was removed, c.1863, framed and extensively retouched, which explains some of the compositional inconsistencies which are now apparent.
Isn’t it a a lovely painting? I just wanted to share it with you.
BTW: I should be back to more regular blogging soon.
A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction - Virginia Woolf
Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger
What an awesome painting! Thanks for sharing.