The Execution of Savonarola (sketch)

Stefano Ussi painted this around 1850, in oil on a sheet of glass, in an octagonal field 43 centimetres wide. It shows Piazza della Signoria seen from low down, with the scaffold in the middle, Savonarola and two fellow friars being led up to it, the Loggia dei Lanzi at the right and the Palazzo Vecchio behind.

Savonarola was the Dominican preacher who dominated Florence after the Medici were driven out in 1494, and who was hanged and burned on that spot in 1498. Ussi was in his late twenties when he took the subject up, and Tuscany had just been put back under its grand duke with Austrian soldiers in the city, so a friar executed for a Florentine republic was an argument in progress rather than a safe old story. No larger painting was ever recorded from this study. It stayed in the city's own collections and was deposited at the gallery in 1920.