A boy reading while the evening light lasts. In the niches, more books. On the lectern, another, left open. His love of reading is clear to see. Foot up on the bench, his posture is relaxed. He's perhaps no older than twelve, but there's precocity in his demeanour.
His supposed identity has changed more than once since the nineteenth century. Known today as The Young Cicero Reading, it is one of the treasures of the Wallace Collection in London. Painted around 1464 as part of a programme of frescoes for the open courtyard of the Banco Mediceo in Milan by Vincenzo Foppa (c.1427–c.1515), it was saved in 1863 when the bank was demolished. The fresco, with its layer of plaster, was removed, and signs of this process can be seen in the uneven lower edge.
From the time of its removal until the mid-twentieth century it was thought to depict Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the grandson of Francesco Sforza who commissioned the fresco, but this was never a convincing identification. For one thing, Gian Galeazzo was born in 1469, a few years after the current dating of the work.
Just like Foppa's boy, the Roman orator, philosopher and politician Cicero was a keen scholar from an early age, and his name, though misspelled, is inscribed on the back of the boy's bench: M. T. CE CIRO: Marcus Tullius Cicero. It takes a short leap of imagination to identify this boy with Cicero himself. But the question is, what is the connection?
In Plutarch's Life of Cicero we read that 'he was conspicuous for his natural talent and got a name and reputation among the boys, so that their fathers used to visit the schools out of desire to see Cicero, and to inquire of his famed quickness and capacity for learning'. It was this passage that led the art historian E. K. Waterhouse, in 1950, to conclude that Foppa's boy was Cicero himself. According to Waterhouse, it should be obvious that the boy is a youthful Cicero, represented 'as the model of schoolboy industry, sitting on the bench inscribed with his name'.
However, in 2007, the classicists Howard Jones and Ross Kilpatrick argued that a later passage from Plutarch's biography of Cicero supported a different identification. To understand this theory, we need to know a little Roman history.
The famous rebellion which led to the assassination of Julius Caesar is well known from Shakespeare's play. After Caesar's death, Mark Antony became one of the ruling triumvirate, along with Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) and Lepidus. Cicero made a series of powerful speeches attacking Mark Antony, accusing him of dishonest scheming.
Cicero became a marked man. Fearing the worst, he departed for his villa on the coast with the aim of sailing to Macedonia, but was pursued and killed. His head and hands were cut off and displayed on the platform where he had made his speeches.
Years later, according to Plutarch, Augustus visited his daughter's house and found one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. Because he knew his history, the boy feared Augustus's reaction and tried to hide the book. However, as Plutarch reports it, Augustus 'took the book and read a good part of it while he was standing, and then returning the book to the boy said, "A wise man, my boy, a wise man and a lover of his country."'
Jones and Kilpatrick claim that the scene of The Young Cicero Reading shows the viewpoint of Augustus in the moments before the boy realised he was being watched. In their view, a more accurate title might be Young Boy Reading Cicero.
They argue that the decorative programme for the Banco Mediceo would merit 'a more serious theme' than a depiction of Cicero reading. Better to consider a boy reading Cicero – as such, it is Cicero's achievements as represented by his works that are honoured. Augustus's words on giving the book back to his grandson reflect his acceptance of Cicero and a desire for reconciliation, which Jones and Kilpatrick see as being in keeping with the subject of human Virtues which the fresco cycle is said to have depicted.
We might wonder why Foppa spelt 'Cicero' incorrectly. Might this be a playful, but easily deciphered, disguise? The wish to allude to Cicero without naming him has a certain consistency with Jones and Kilpatrick's theory. Just as the boy unsuccessfully attempted to hide his reading matter, so the name of the author cannot be easily hidden – the great Cicero will be found, will be read. His eloquence will last – as Augustus himself acknowledged in reflecting on the wisdom and patriotism of Cicero as he handed back the book.
There might be a more prosaic reason. Let us imagine that the artist decided to add the inscription to the back of the bench after he had painted the seated figure of the boy. The fresco is itself quite small and was placed well above head height, so the letters would have had to be large enough to read, making it difficult to write CICERO in one line. Perhaps in writing the name in two lines the spelling became slightly jumbled.
Cicero (106 BC–43 BC)
(after the antique) 1746–1783
Francis Harwood (1726–1783) 
Things would surely have worked out differently if Cicero had avoided politics in favour of philosophy, as the Renaissance scholar Petrarch believed he should have. He addressed Cicero rhetorically, asking: 'Why such countless enmities and rivalries bound to prove of absolutely no benefit to thee? Wherefore didst thou forsake that peaceful ease so befitting a man of thy years, and of thy vocation, and of thy station in life?' It was the contemplative life that Petrarch valued, and Foppa's Wallace mural is imbued with the contemplative spirit.
'Grey is the colour everyone remembers in Foppa,' as the art historian Roberto Longhi wrote. 'This halfway point between white and black is essential to him, serving to veil, ensnare, and subdue the whole colour spectrum; his work is thereby based on luministic gradations of tone, rather than on those positive chromatic relations that remain the foundation of Venetian painting down to the end of the Cinquecento.'
This is certainly true of The Young Cicero, where the failing light of dusk subdues all brightness of colour, and only adds to the restful quality of the work. We can imagine the boy's eyes slowly closing as they tire in their reading, a drowsiness brought on by the growing darkness.
Or is it the subdued colours which lead us to see the time of day as nightfall? In its brand-new, fresh state, perhaps an earlier time of day was evoked. After all, this work lived outdoors for four centuries, in all weathers. It must have lost something of its lustre.
The Adoration of the Kings
perhaps about 1500
Vincenzo Foppa (c.1427–c.1515) 
And natural fading appears to account for the 'silvery-grey cast' in the complexions of the figures in Foppa's The Adoration of the Kings in The National Gallery, according to research carried out into the paint layers. The greyness that Longhi refers to is clear to see in the complexions of Mary and the Christ Child. It is a bloodless tone that lends a sculptural seriousness.
According to Longhi, the 'gem-like, elemental beauty' of other Italian painters is absent in much of Foppa's work. Even the reds, which blaze brightly in the works of the Sienese masters and contemporaries such as Mantegna and Bellini (such as his Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and Donor), are restrained. Instead, colour 'awaits the random influence of light and ambience.'
Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and Donor
1505
Giovanni Bellini (1431/1436–1516) 
Grey pervades the portrait of Saint Louis of Anjou (made by another artist in the style of Foppa), and Foppa's desolate image of Christ in Ecco Homo.
Saint Louis of Anjou (1274–1297), Bishop of Toulouse
Vincenzo Foppa (c.1427–c.1515) (style of) 
The dark tones set the mood perfectly at this moment of Christ's torments, after his flogging and before he is presented to the crowd: a private moment of reflection in the shadows before his public humiliation.
Similarly, the disappearing light of dusk fits the subject of our young boy reading. It speaks of his persistence and appetite for learning. In a pre-electric age, whether Renaissance or Roman, his eyes strain, as his whole soul does, to learn from books, to know and have his strength from that.
Standing before it, we are enchanted. But charming as the image is, it has a certain poignancy when we think of what became of him, at least in one interpretation: some fifty years later, as an alleged enemy of the state, that boy would be killed, his body mutilated. His tongue, the organ of his oratory, would be pierced with hairpins by Mark Antony's vengeful wife. All those years of learning, and the powerful eloquence that it wrought, would make him a victim of assassination.
Adam Wattam, writer
Further reading
Jill Dunkerton and Carol Plazotta, 'Vincenzo Foppa's 'Adoration of the Kings'', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, vol. 22, 2001
Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes, Vincenzo Foppa of Brescia, Founder of the Lombard School, his Life and Work, Legare Street Press, 2022
Howard Jones and Ross Kilpatrick, 'Cicero, Plutarch, and Vincenzo Foppa: Rethinking the Medici Bank Fresco (London, the Wallace Collection, Inv. P 538)' in International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 13, no. 3, 2007
Roberto Longhi, Three Studies, Stanley Moss-Sheep Meadow Press, 1995
Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch's Letters to Classical Authors, translated by Mario Emilio Cosenza, Project Gutenberg, 2015
Plutarch, Life of Cicero in The Project Gutenberg eBook of Plutarch's Lives, translated from the Greek by Aubrey Stewart and George Long
E. K. Waterhouse, 'The Fresco by Foppa in the Wallace Collection' in Burlington Magazine, vol. 92, no. 567, 1950
