Giovanni Pratesi: The Florentine Eye
Giovanni Pratesi: The Florentine Eye
The Death of Seneca
Auction Closed
March 22, 07:15 PM GMT
Estimate
20,000 - 30,000 EUR
Lot Details
Description
Luca Giordano, called Fa Presto
Naples 1634 - 1705
The Death of Seneca
oil on canvas
unframed: 82 x 75 cm.; 32¼ x 29½ in.
framed: 106 x 100 cm.; 41¾ x 39⅜ in.
In the fifteenth book of the Annals, Tacitus relates the suicide of the Stoic philosopher and advisor to the Emperor Nero, Seneca.1 According to this account, Seneca was implicated in a conspiracy instigated by the plebeian Piso against the emperor, who subsequently gave the imperial order that he commit suicide.
Giordano depicts Seneca to the right of the composition, propped up by a figure behind him, as blood slowly drips from his severed arteries. His weakened voice draws his saddened pupils close, writing tools in hand to record his final teachings, as life slowly drains from his aged body.
This work is a reduced replica of the celebrated work in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, dated to the mid-1660s.2 This appears to be the earliest treatment of a subject repeated by Giordano a number of times in versions datable to the 1680s onwards.3
1 For a detailed account of this episode see Tacitus, The Annals, Book XV, pp. 60–65, G.G. Ramsey (ed.), London 1904, pp. 296–301.
2 Inv. no. 516/3677; oil on canvas; 259 x 241 cm; https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/en/artwork/A9xlePgLWv/luca-giordano/der-sterbende-seneca
3 For a discussion about the dating of the different versions see Prohaska in Naples, Vienna and Los Angeles 2001, p. 152.
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