The Death of Pietro Aretino

In 1854 the young German painter Anselm Feuerbach, barely 25, reached Venice on a stipend from the Grand Duke of Baden and set out to learn from the old Venetian colourists. That same year he painted this canvas, over two and a half metres tall, of a death that had happened in Venice three centuries earlier: the last moment of Pietro Aretino.

Aretino was the most feared writer of the 16th century, a satirist whose pen could flatter a prince or ruin him, and he spent his final years in the city. The story people told was that he died laughing. A guest was recounting a bawdy joke about Aretino's sisters, and he laughed so hard he tipped backwards off his chair. What actually reached the Duke of Mantua, in a letter from his ambassador in Venice, was soberer. Aretino had fallen from his chair and died of a stroke. The laughter is what stuck.

Feuerbach stages that instant of the fall as grand history painting. Aretino had died in 1556, at 64. The picture belongs to the Gottfried Keller Foundation and hangs today in Basel.