Cesare Mussini

Cesare Mussini (June 5, 1804 in Berlin – May 24, 1879 in Florence) was a German-Italian painter.

He moved to Florence as a young man with his younger brother, Luigi Mussini (born 1813),[1] and there sought training at the Florentine Academy of Fine Arts.

[3] Among his paintings are Leonardo da Vinci dies in the arms of Francis I (1828); Tasso reads poetry to Eleonora d'Este; Raphael and the Fornarina; Death of Atala; Stanislaw Poniatowski frees his Polish Slave; Archangel Saint Michael (1868); and Imelda de' Lambertazzi with Bonifacio de'Geremei.

[4] Mussini moved to Rome in 1828, where he became friends with French intellectuals and artists such as François-René de Chateaubriand, who was the incumbent ambassador, and Horace Vernet, the director of the French Academy.

That same year he was commissioned by Raphael Finzi Morelli to paint frescoes in his house in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella.