Rienzi vowing to obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions

Holman Hunt began this picture in 1848, the year revolutions broke out across Europe, when he was 21. He chose a hero of popular revolt, Cola di Rienzi, the 14th-century Roman who rose against the great baronial families of his city, as the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton had told his story in 1835. Rienzi kneels with the body of his young brother, killed in a skirmish between the rival Colonna and Orsini, across his knee, and raises his fist to the sky in an oath. His face was painted from drawings of Hunt's friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the knight at the far left from Rossetti's brother William. Hunt painted the landscape out of doors on Hampstead Heath, with red anemones, blue hyacinths and daisies in the grass. At the Royal Academy in 1849 it hung beside John Everett Millais's Isabella, and it was the first of Hunt's pictures to carry the initials PRB. It is on loan to the National Gallery from the Ramsbury Manor Foundation.