Il simposio di Platone

Feuerbach finished this in 1869, at a time when German art was turning toward realism and scenes of modern life, and he set his face firmly the other way. He lived in Rome, steeped himself in antiquity, and gave nearly a decade of thought to this single canvas, almost six metres wide. The moment is from Plato's Symposium, a drinking party in the house of the poet Agathon, into which the beautiful, half-drunk Alcibiades has just burst with his crown of ivy, breaking up the philosophers' talk of love. Feuerbach kept the colours cool and stony, like tinted marble. Critics found the figures stiff and cold, and the painting sold into private hands rather than a museum, which wounded him. He returned to the same subject once more a few years later.