Attributed to Luigi Mussini

Private collection, Europe.

Rendered in an austere manner of drawing derived from Ingres coupled with a rich and luxurious palette inspired by the masters of the sixteenth century, Mussini’s paintings emphasise the importance of Neo-Platonic thought to the formation of Florentine humanism. 

The present painting depicts a moment in Plutarch’s account of the life of Aristides. Votes for an ostracism were cast using shards of pottery, or ostraka. According to Plutarch, during the vote an illiterate man approached Aristides without recognising him, asking him to write the name of Aristides on his ostrakon. Astonished, the statesman asked what wrong Aristides had done him. The voter replied, 'None whatever, I don't even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called ‘The Just.’' Without revealing his identity, Aristides then wrote his own name on the ballot.  

Posed at the steps of a Doric temple against a pure blue sky, we see Aristides seated and deep in thought as he writes his name, the oblivious illiterate citizen standing beside him. The painting bears striking stylistic, compositional and thematic similarities with a well-documented work Mussini painted in 1846, the Two Plinys (Fondazione Monte dei Paschi, Siena), in which the ancient thinkers Pliny the Younger and his uncle Pliny the Elder converse in a landscape before Vesuvius, whose eruption caused the death of the latter. At the same time, both the Two Plinys and the present work might be viewed as presaging the Triumph of Truth and the Celebration of the Birth of Plato, in which great men of history who have contributed to the search for philosophical, scientific, artistic, religious and moral truth gather in landscapes sourrounded by classical architectural forms. Thus, a date somewhere in the late 1840s seems appropriate for the present work.