Prospero Piatti, 1842 – 1902, zug.

THE BURIAL OF CAESAR Oil on canvas. 25 x 40 cm. Fully executed bozzetto for a probably very large-format painting depicting an excited crowd in a Roman square. In the center is a priestess showing the people Caesar's tattered toga, with the corpse lying in state behind her. A man from the crowd points jubilantly towards the golden figure of the goddess of victory on a column, while a man in a toga moves away from the crowd in front. On the left, the palanquin of a high-ranking figure moves into the picture. In the background are magnificent Roman buildings, in front of which the bronze she-elf can be seen at the top left as a symbol of Rome. Piloty's remarkable psychological empathy for the figures in his paintings is evident in every one of his works, especially in his famous monumental painting "The Torches of Nero", which Theodor Fontane described in a novel (1877, Nat. Mus. Krakow). A.R. Siemiradzki is one of the highest-ranking history painters who became important beyond Poland. His paintings mainly depict subjects from antiquity. As a graduate natural scientist, he preferred to study at the Academy in St. Petersburg, then went to Paris and Munich in 1870, where he became a student in the history class of Carl Theodor von Piloty (1826-1886) in 1871. He settled in Rome in 1871. Literature: Cf, Theodor Fontane, Romane und Erzählungen in acht Bänden. The Poggenpuhls. Berlin/ Weimar 1973, p. 372 (1401663) (11)