£995.00
TESTA, Pietro (1612–1650). The Symposium [Plato’s Symposium / The Drunken Alcibiades Interrupting the Symposium]. Rome, 1648.
Original etching by the Italian Baroque artist Pietro Testa, depicting the celebrated scene from Plato’s Symposium in which the drunken Alcibiades enters the philosophical banquet. Socrates and his companions gather around the table while Alcibiades appears at the left, crowned and partially nude.
Signed and dated within the plate “Petrus Testa 1648”, with Latin inscriptions and a dedication to Fabrizio Cellesio, Knight of St Stephen. The composition is recorded by Bartsch and later authorities; an impression is held by the Wellcome Collection, while the original preparatory drawing is recorded in the Louvre.
In 1648, Pietro Testa turned to one of the great texts of Western philosophy for this ambitious composition: Plato’s Symposium.
The dialogue takes place during a banquet at which Socrates and his companions debate the nature of love, beauty and virtue. Testa chooses one of its most theatrical moments—the arrival of the intoxicated Alcibiades, who interrupts the gathering and ultimately delivers his extraordinary praise of Socrates.
At the left, Alcibiades enters crowned and dishevelled; across the centre, philosophers converse around the banquet table, while servants, vessels, smoke and architectural details fill the scene.
Testa reinforces the philosophical message with the Latin inscription on the wall:
“Vina, dapes onerant animos, sapientia nutrit”
— essentially contrasting the burden of wine and feasting with the nourishment provided by wisdom. The lower inscription dedicates the work to Fabrizio Cellesio and explicitly refers to the discussion of love at the symposium.
It is therefore much more than an elaborate classical banquet scene: it is Testa’s visual interpretation of the conflict between physical appetite and intellectual wisdom.
This is a compelling intersection of classical philosophy and Italian Baroque printmaking.
Pietro Testa was both the designer and engraver of the composition, and the surviving preparatory drawing is held by the Louvre. The work is also represented in major institutional collections and recorded in the standard literature on Testa.
For a collector, it combines several highly desirable elements: an important seventeenth-century Italian artist, a direct connection with Plato and Socrates, a dramatic classical subject, extensive contemporary Latin inscriptions, and the artist’s name and 1648 date incorporated into the plate.
