The Two Foscari

Hayez came back to the two Foscari six times between 1827 and 1859. This is the fifth, painted for the poet Andrea Maffei between 1852 and 1854, and he knew while he worked on it that it was going to Venice.

That shaped it. Venetian taste then followed the critic Pietro Selvatico, who had little appetite for theatrical history painting, so Hayez cooled the colour and held the gestures down. The subject stayed grim. The old Doge Francesco Foscari has to pronounce sentence on his own son Jacopo, condemned on charges of betraying the republic. Jacopo kneels in front of him, his wife and children beside him, his mother asking for mercy.

Byron had turned the story into a play in 1821 and Verdi into an opera in 1844, and the gallery suggests Hayez had the opera in mind. Maffei kept the painting until his death and left it to the Florentine galleries.