Side wall picture: Apollo, Pegasus, and the Muses

1777 · Villa Poggio Imperiale, Arcetri, Florence

mythological

The picture shows one of the side wall pictures in the Segretaria del Granduca, the most important room of the grand duke's official rooms in the west wing. Apollo, Pegasus, and the nine Muses, furnished with their traditional attributes, are arranged in a barren landscape enlivened by a single tree, and on the right four poets in classical garb and crowned with laurel are deep in conversation.

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Side wall picture: Apollo, Pegasus, and the Muses

About the Artist

Giuseppe Antonio Fabbrini

1740 – 1795

Italian painter. There are known frescoes by him in on the vault of the nave of he church in the monastery of Vallombrosa. In 1780 he painted an Assumption of the Virgin on the polygonal cupola in the same church. Between 1771 and 1774 he was a pupil of Anton Raphael Mengs in Rome, and under his influence he adopted the Neoclassical style that had captivated the Florentine court after Meng's sojourns in Rome in 1770-71 and 1773-74. In Rome Fabbrini won third prize in a competition of the Accademia San Luca. In 1777 Fabbrini painted the Segretaria del Granduca in the Villa Poggio Imperiale near Florence. With his monumental painting here, Fabbrini was a precursor of a new, austere style that would become established in Florence in the following decades. Between 1791 and 1792 he painted the frescoes on the two sides of the choir of the cathedral of Arezzo.

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