람푸냐니의 음모

Hayez painted this in 1826, in a Milan ruled from Vienna, where an old story of killing a tyrant carried a charge everyone in the room could feel. The scene is the eve of 26 December 1476, when three young Milanese noblemen would stab their duke, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, to death inside the church of Santo Stefano. Hayez found the plot in Machiavelli's Histories and staged it like theatre, the conspirators gathered in shadow before the strike. At the front kneels their old teacher, the humanist Cola Montano, who had filled their heads with Roman ideas of liberty, praying at the foot of a statue of Saint Ambrose. The duke himself is nowhere here. What you get is the long minute before, when the plan is still only words.