The Continence of Scipio

Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni · c. 1455

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

41.8 × 137.7 cm (16 1/2 × 54 1/8 in.); Framed: 45.1 × 141 × 5.8 cm (17 3/4 × 55 1/2 × 2 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

The Continence of Scipio presents one of antiquity's most celebrated acts of moral restraint in the vibrant, narrative-rich style that made Florentine cassone painting so admired in fifteenth-century Italy. Apollonio di Giovanni ran one of the most productive workshops in Renaissance Florence, specialising in painted panels for the decorated marriage chests — cassoni — that were central to Florentine wedding culture. His figures are animated and compressed, drawing on both Gothic elegance and the emerging classical revival, with processions of brightly costumed characters set against architectural backdrops that feel simultaneously ancient and Tuscan. The tempera medium gives the panel its characteristic jewel-like clarity, with colours that have retained their intensity across more than five centuries. The workshop's distinct visual language was identified and named in the twentieth century by art historian E. H. Gombrich, who traced its output across dozens of surviving panels — making Apollonio one of the few cassone painters we can now speak of as an individual artistic identity. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates the scene's narrative energy and decorative richness into the deeper tonal range of oils, preserving the compositional drama and pageant-like atmosphere of the original while giving the work a luminosity suited to display in the home.