Diogenes

Around 1650 the wandering Greek was everywhere. Jordaens sent Diogenes through a crowded market with a lamp, hunting for one honest man. Poussin put him in a wide landscape, throwing away his last drinking cup because he had just watched a boy drink from his hands. Pierre Puget took up the story too. Painters liked the anecdotes, and Dolci removed them. The museum's record on this canvas says he cut away every detail that might take something from the image, and left the founder of the Cynic school as a figure closed in on himself, with no relation at all to the person standing in front of him. The head was not invented for this picture alone. The same heavy brow and the same features carry his Moses in this gallery, and the priest Zacharias in his Sleep of the Infant Saint John. It was already hanging in the palace by the inventory of 1700, and a list drawn up in 1723 records where it came from, the estate of Grand Prince Ferdinando.