Luigi Mussini
We present today's painting thanks to Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, where until March 17th you can visit the exhibition Romanticism.
This allegorical painting was commissioned in 1847 by the liberal aristocrat Filippo Ala Ponzone. It illustrates the “great men who contributed to spreading the light in the world fighting error and falsehood.”
Truth is a naked young girl holding a torch. On her right is Saint Philip baptizing a black man. Behind him are the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as Alexander, Alcibiades, Aeschylus, and Confucius. In the foreground is the sculptor Phidias (from the back) and Giotto “who paved the way to Truth and Beauty.” On the left of the altar, the scientists Copernicus and Galileo (in green in the center), Newton, Kepler, Pascal and Couvier, together with Christopher Columbus (holding the globe), discoverer of a new world, and Herodotus, who represents the historical truth. Behind Galileo there is Dante, as “the highest expression of the poetical truth.”
The painting is a manifest of the secular values of the Enlightenment on the threshold of 1848.
P.S. Read more about the Enlightenment and Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ here.