Diomedes Flees Hiding the Palladium

The subject here is a theft that, in the old story, decided a war. The Palladium was a small wooden image of Pallas Athena, and Troy was said to be safe as long as it stood inside the walls. So the Greeks sent Diomedes to steal it, and Giacomelli catches him in flight, the sacred figure pressed against his body as he gets clear. Take the statue and the city falls, which is how the Greeks finally took Troy. The painter was a young man from Friuli who had come to study at the Venice Academy, and this canvas, dated 1839, was the work that first made his name there. It is history painting in the grand academic manner of its moment, a single charged instant from antiquity, muscular and theatrical, the kind of ancient episode Venice liked to see its students master. Giacomelli went on to spend much of his career on scenes like this, a good deal of it on the vanished glory of Venice itself.