Alcide Segoni
1847–1894 · Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Kingdom of Italy · Academic art
The story
The Roman historian Sallust ends his account of Catiline's conspiracy with a body. After the battle near Pistoia in 62 BC, Catiline was found far in front of his own line, among the enemy dead, still faintly breathing and wearing the same defiance he had alive. Alcide Segoni painted that scene in 1871, at 24, fresh out of the Florence academy and the studio of Antonio Ciseri. The picture won the gold medal at the triennial competition that year and went into the academy's gallery of modern painting, the collection that now hangs at Palazzo Pitti.
He stayed with subjects of that kind for the rest of a short career. Another of his canvases at Pitti shows Corradino di Svevia, the 16-year-old Hohenstaufen heir, waiting in prison for the sentence that had him beheaded in Naples in 1268. In 1881 he sent a genre piece called The Ambush to the national exhibition in Milan, and in 1889 he delivered a commissioned Battle of Austerlitz that Florentine critics liked. He died in 1894, aged 47.
