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Mussini, Luigi
(b Berlin, 19 Dec 1813; d Siena, 18 June 1888). Italian painter and administrator. The son of Natale Mussini, chapel-master at the Prussian court in Berlin, he was sent to Florence, where he was educated in art, music and literature. He first studied art under his older brother Cesare Mussini (1804–79) and later, at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, he attended courses given by Pietro Benvenuti and Giuseppe Bezzuoli. He was more attracted by a direct study of the great Tuscan masters of the 14th and 15th centuries, whose works he admired for their purity and expressive dignity, than by the practice of copying from classical casts according to Neo-classical teaching. In Saul Anointed by Samuel (1835–6), Mussini already displayed a sensitivity towards the theories of Purismo through his commitment to studying from nature and ignoring the practice of copying. In 1840 he won a scholarship to Rome, where he was introduced to Ingres and painted his first serious work, Holy Music (1842; Florence, Pitti), clearly inspired by Raphael. He returned to Florence in 1844 and, with his friend Franz Adolph von Stürler (1802–81), opened a small art school based on the workshops of the early Renaissance, where they practised a form of ‘free teaching’ in opposition to the strict rules of the academies. He fought in the Revolutions of 1848 and the following year decided to leave for Paris, where he became close friends with Ingres and those of his school, including Hippolyte Flandrin, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Auguste Gendron and the engraver William Haussoullier (c. 1818–1891). His paintings Holy Music and the Triumph of Truth (1848; Milan, Brera) were exhibited at the Salon of 1849 and were so successful that he was commissioned by the Ministry of Fine Arts to make copies of them (e.g. Holy Music, c. 1873–5, priv. col.) as well as to do another painting on a subject of his choice. For this he chose a theme particularly dear to the artists of the Purismo movement: the Commemorative Celebration of the Birth of Plato Held at Lorenzo the Magnificent’s Villa di Careggi (1851; Bourg-en-Bresse, Mus. Ain). In this work he decided to emphasize the importance of the ideals of Neo-Platonism and of Florentine humanism and to render the painting in an austere manner of drawing derived from Ingres. At the same time he employed a rich and luxurious colour inspired by the masters of the 16th century, quite unlike the dry quality in Nazarene painting. In 1851 he became Director of the Istituto d’Arte in Siena. While there he painted modern interpretations of Purismo, responding to the theories of Ingres and to a new faith in the absolute value of form, as in the difficult Eudoro and Cimodoce (Florence, Pitti), inspired by Chateaubriand’s prose epic Les Martyrs (Paris, 1809). It was exhibited at the Salon of 1857 in Paris and later in Florence in 1861 and was admired by critics for its emotional content, formal qualities and deep velvety tones. During the 1860s he executed the Mater dolorosa (1856; Siena, Pal. Pub.), a work painted on panel against a gold background, and produced various copies of the Commemorative Celebration of the Birth of Plato (e.g. 1862; Turin, Gal. Civ. A. Mod.). Other paintings done during these years in Siena include Spartan Education (1869; Montauban, Mus. Ingres), exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and later bought by the French government for the Musée du Luxembourg, and the characteristic St Crescentio (1867), an altarpiece for Siena Cathedral. He also took part in the artistic and cultural life of Siena, in particular helping to restore the ancient monuments of the city, and he set up a school of Purismo, whose best representatives were Alessandro Franchi, Angelo Visconti (1829–61) and Amos Cassioli (1832–91). His wife Luigia Mussini-Piaggio (1830–65) and daughter Luisa Mussini-Franchi (b 1864 or 1865) were also painters.
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