Cicero, Plutarch, and Vincenzo Foppa: Rethinking the Medici Bank Fresco (London, The Wallace Collection, Inv. P 538)

The Medici Bank Fresco (ca. 1463) by Vincenzo Foppa (ca. 1428–1515) is this artist’s only surviving secular work. It had survived three centuries of wind and weather before the Medici Bank palazzo in Milan was demolished in 1863, and its acquisition by Sir Richard Wallace in 1872. E. K. Water-house identified the subject in 1950 as “The Boy Cicero Reading,” attributing its literary invention to Plutarch’sVita Ciceronis (2.3), the interpretation …