The Discovery of the Body of Catiline after the Battle of Pistoia

Catiline, the Roman senator whose conspiracy Cicero broke in 63 BC, died the following winter with his army in the hills near Pistoia, some 30 km from Florence. Alcide Segoni painted the searching of that battlefield in 1871 and sent it to the triennial competition of the Florence academy, which gave it the gold medal. The prize put the canvas straight into the academy's gallery of modern pictures, and that collection is the one that later moved into Palazzo Pitti. It hangs there now on the second floor, in the Gallery of Modern Art, reached on the same ticket as the Palatina rooms downstairs. Cicero's speeches against Catiline were standard schoolroom Latin at the time, so the subject needed no explaining to the jury, and the academy's old inventory number, 451, still follows the picture.