The Battle of Pharsalus and the Death of Pompey

Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni · c. 1455

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

40.5 × 127.5 cm (16 × 50 1/4 in.); Framed: 67.3 × 151.8 cm (26 1/2 × 59 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This densely populated panel crackles with the energy of one of antiquity's most decisive confrontations, packing an entire arc of Roman history — from the clash of armies at Pharsalus to Pompey's murder on an Egyptian shore — into a single compressed composition. Apollonio di Giovanni ran one of the most productive workshops in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, specialising in the painted cassoni, or wedding chests, that wealthy families commissioned to celebrate marriages. His atelier had an exceptional fluency with classical subjects, drawing on ancient texts and humanist scholarship to produce narratives that felt simultaneously learned and visually immediate. The figures here move with the stiff, tapestry-like energy characteristic of the workshop — crowds rendered as almost sculptural frieze, the landscape minimal, the storytelling relentless. Apollonio's workshop is documented in a contemporary account by Vespasiano da Bisticci, who praised the painter's skill in rendering stories from Virgil and other classical authors for Florentine patrons hungry for ancient subjects. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original tempera's precision and jewel-like colour into a medium suited to modern display, preserving the narrative intensity and the workshop's distinctive figure style while giving the piece the warmth and depth that oil brings to panel compositions of this scale.