The Shades of Great Florentines Protesting against Foreign Rule

Agneni painted this in exile. He had fought for the Roman Republic in 1849, and when it fell he left Italy for France, and in 1857 he showed this canvas at the Paris Salon under the title Dream of an Exile. The dream is set in Florence, by moonlight, along the portico of the Uffizi. Between 1842 and 1856 the niches of that portico had been filled one by one with marble statues of famous Tuscans, and here the great men themselves rise up along it, among them Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli and the friar Savonarola. They surge against an enemy who is not shown. In 1857 Tuscany was ruled by a grand duke of the Austrian house of Habsburg-Lorraine, who had been brought back to his throne in 1849 with Austrian troops, and Agneni marks the foreign power only by what it has left behind, a rifle and a soldier's cap thrown down on the ground.