Flemish painter active in Italy;17th century. "The flight of Cicero". Oil on panel.

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Old Masters

By Setdart Auction House

Jun 30, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-06-30 08:30:00 2021-06-30 08:30:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Old Masters https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/old-masters-7134
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• Lot Description
  Flemish painter active in Italy;17th century. "The flight of Cicero". Oil on panel. It has repaints, restorations and a frame from a later period. Measures: 89 x 158 cm; 117.5 x 181 cm (frame). Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, and academic skeptic who established himself as an important figure in the politics of the late Roman Republic and defended the principles of the republica during the crisis that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy, and politics, and he is considered one of Rome's finest orators and prose stylists. His influence on the Latin language was immense: he wrote more than three-quarters of the surviving Latin literature of the period of his adult life, and it has been said that later prose was a reaction against or a return to his style, not only in Latin but in European languages until the 19th century. Cicero introduced into Latin the arguments of the main schools of Hellenistic philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary with neologisms such as evidente, humanitas, qualitas, quantitas and essentia, distinguishing himself as a translator and philosopher. After Caesar's death, a political crisis began that resulted in the persecution of Cicero and his death sentence. The philosopher was viewed with sympathy by a large part of the public and many people refused to report that they had seen him. He was captured on December 7, 43 B.C. leaving his villa at Formiae in a litter bound for the beach, where he hoped to embark on a ship bound for Macedonia. When his assassins, Herennius (a centurion) and Popilius (a tribune) arrived, Cicero's own slaves said that they had not seen him, but that he was delivered by Philologus, a libretto of his brother Quintus Cicero. As reported by Seneca the Elder, according to the historian Aufidius Bassus, Cicero's last words are said to have been "There is nothing proper in what you are doing, soldier, but try to kill me properly." In this work, the moment in which Cicero is taken to the beach is depicted. All the action takes place in a vast landscape populated by numerous figures performing different tasks. These characteristics are typical of the Flemish school, where it was common to represent a landscape described by a high horizon, which reveals a lot of land, pointed and fantastic rocky mountains, mixing the real with the symbolic, and with the use of the subjects as a mere pretext to show these views (thus anticipating the landscape as an independent genre).
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