Cesare Maccari

• 1. Introduction

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  Cesare Maccari painted a scene that has shaped how millions of people picture ancient Rome. His 1888 fresco of Cicero denouncing Catiline in the Roman Senate now appears in textbooks and histories across the world, fixing a version of that fateful day in 63 BC into popular imagination. But the image is not quite accurate, and Maccari knew the scholarly debates well enough to have chosen his version deliberately. How did a sculptor's apprentice from Siena become the painter of one of the most reproduced political images in Western history? And what does it mean that his mistakes may have taught the world what Rome looked like?

• 2. From Siena to Florence

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  Maccari was born in Siena on the 9th of May 1840, in what was then the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. His earliest training was at the Institute of the Fine Arts in Siena, where he worked alongside the sculptor Tito Sarrocchi. The two of them contributed to completing the Monumento Pianigiani in Siena, giving Maccari an early grounding in three-dimensional form before he turned fully to painting.

  He moved on to the atelier of Luigi Mussini in Florence, where institutional patronage first reached him. In 1864, an English society commissioned him to copy works by Bernardino Pinturicchio in the Cathedral of Siena. That commission was a direct sign of the appetite among foreign patrons for Italian devotional painting.

  Around the same time, the Marquis Pieri-Nerli became one of his earliest private patrons. The Marquis commissioned Maccari to paint frescoes of the four evangelists for a private chapel in his home in Quinciano, a hamlet in the comune of Monteroni d'Arbia. A stipend to study in Rome followed, with the added benefit of allowing Maccari to travel through Italy. That stipend set his trajectory for the rest of his career.

• 3. Building a Roman Reputation

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  Rome transformed Maccari from a provincial talent into a competitor for major state commissions. Among his first large oil canvases there, he painted Vittoria Colonna meditates on the Poetry of Michelangelo. Another canvas, Sira che sacrifica la propia vita for the padrona Fabiola, won a medal at the Exhibition of Termini in Rome.

  His canvas Un palpito del passato went further, earning a gold medal at the Exposition of Parma. He also worked in tempera, producing Love crowning the three Graces. At the 1878 Turin Exposition, he sent an oil canvas depicting The Deposition of Pope Silverius by Antonina, wife of Belisarius; the prize-winning painting was purchased for the Civic Museum of Turin.

  From 1870 to 1873, Maccari was occupied with fresco work inside the church of the Sudario in Rome, decorating its entire interior. He also painted the lunette above the tomb of the Lombardi in Campo Verano, and accepted a commission for a Deposition from the marchesa di Cassibile. Back in Siena he decorated the Sala del Risorgimento in the public palace with frescoes that critics received warmly.

  A painting he made in 1863, Leonardo che ritrae la Gioconda, depicting Leonardo da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa, won an award in 1865. By the time he entered his most ambitious phase, the accumulation of medals, church decorations, and civic frescoes had prepared him for the grandest public canvas of his career.

• 4. The Senate Frescoes

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  Between 1882 and 1888, Maccari undertook one of the most demanding decorative programs in contemporary Italian public art: a series of frescoes depicting famous events in the history of the ancient Roman Senate, painted for the Sala Maccari in the Salone d'Onore of the Palazzo Madama in Rome, the seat of the Italian Senate.

  The scenes he chose tell a story about Roman civic virtue under pressure. He painted Appius Claudius Caecus being led into the Senate to persuade Rome to reject the peace terms offered by Pyrrhus of Epirus's ambassador Cineas. He depicted the elder senator Marcus Papirius sitting motionless and unflinching before the Gauls who had occupied Rome after the Battle of the Allia. There is a scene of Samnites attempting to bribe Curius Dentatus into steering the Senate toward peace.

  One of the most charged panels shows Marcus Atilius Regulus, captured by Carthage during the First Punic War and sent back to Rome to deliver a peace offer, instead urging the Senate to reject the offer and then voluntarily returning to Carthage as a prisoner, knowing he would be executed there.

  Taken together, the cycle presents the Senate as a body of men who choose principle over survival. The setting was not incidental: Maccari was painting these moral scenes on the walls where the modern Italian Senate conducted its own business. The culminating work in the cycle was his Cicero Denounces Catiline, completed in 1888.

• 5. Cicero, Catiline, and the Canvas

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  The subject of Maccari's most famous work is Cicero's Oratio in Catilinam Prima in Senatu Habita, the first speech Cicero delivered against Catiline in the Roman Senate in 63 BC. The speech ultimately drove Catiline from the city.

  Maccari captured what ancient sources describe: Catiline sat alone, avoided by his fellow senators, while Cicero attacked him. Critics have praised precisely this quality, the way the composition communicates the social ostracism as much as the oratory. Catiline's isolation in the painted hall is as eloquent as any word.

  Yet the painting also carries documented historical errors. Maccari set the scene in the Senate House, the Curia Cornelia, when the Senate actually met in the Temple of Jupiter Stator on that occasion. Cicero was 43 years old at the time but appears older in the fresco; Catiline, who was two years older than Cicero, looks considerably younger. Whether Maccari lacked the historical detail, or chose a more dramatic visual contrast, the record does not say.

  The consequences of those errors have been far-reaching. The painting has been reproduced in so many textbooks and histories of Rome that its depictions have shaped how nonfiction books present the Roman Senate. One image, with its inaccurate setting and swapped apparent ages, has become a default visual for an entire institution spanning centuries.

• 6. Loreto and Later Years

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  After completing the Palazzo Madama cycle, Maccari took on the cupola of the Basilica di Loreto, a project that occupied him from 1890 to 1907. The work replaced frescoes by Cristoforo Roncalli that dated from the second decade of the 17th century and had badly deteriorated. Maccari's designs depict the events that led to the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. The museum adjacent to the Basilica holds his preparatory studies and paintings.

  In later life he joined the faculty of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome as a lecturer, passing on methods he had refined over decades of fresco and oil work. His pupils there included Cesare Bertolotti and Giuseppe Aureli.

  In 1909, while working on the Palace of Justice in Rome, Maccari was paralyzed. He stopped working as an artist as a result, and died in Rome on the 7th of August 1919. The preparatory studies for the Loreto cupola, preserved in the museum beside the Basilica, remain the most accessible record of how he built compositions that were meant to endure for centuries, even as Roncalli's earlier work had not.