Aemilia the Vestal Virgin, Rhea Silvia and Caecilia Metella form a single group in terms of format, subject matter and collecting history. The three women were all major figures in ancient Rome in the days of the Republic, the paintings depicting episodes that capture the tragedy of each woman’s fate.
The story of Aemilia the Vestal Virgin is a famous episode in Roman history, mentioned by both Cicero and Plutarch, in which three Vestal Virgins were accused – possibly unjustly – of betraying their obligation to remain chaste (“incesta Vestalium virginum”). Their spectacular trial (114-113 BC) ended with all three Vestal Virgins, thus including Aemilia, being sentenced to death. It has been pointed out that trials of Vestal Virgins were staged on more than one occasion in the history of ancient Rome at times when the state’s very survival was at risk, and thus they always had a political, expiatory connotation rather than a moral character.
Vestal Virgins, figures of the pagan world torn between the freedom of their own feelings and the behavioural obligations forced upon them by their role in society, were a source of fascination for the nascent Romantic sensibility in the second half of the 18th century, being chosen as the subject matter for several paintings shown at the Salon and for a melodrama set to music by Gaspare Spontini in 1805 and subsequently revisited by both Beethoven and Rossini. A number of Italian painters also turned their hand to the torment of the Vestal Virgins, including Giuseppe Cades, Vincenzo Camuccini and Giuseppe Bossi, who were struck by the excessive cruelty that an advanced society such as that of ancient Rome had proven capable of devising.
Giani, too, felt a particular attraction for the Vestal Virgins and depicted a number of episodes involving them, for instance in the Numa Room in Palazzo Milzetti in Faenza and in the Vestal Room in Palazzo Mancinelli in Jesi.
In this small picture, Giani has chosen not to show the condemnation itself, the key moment in the story, but rather the most emotionally intense moment from a human standpoint, when Aemilia, in the grip of anxiety, prays for her impossible, sacrilegious love to be spared.
The image, like those of the other two pictures in the Pinacoteca group, is handled economically and the composition is skilfully set in an elegant oval. Adopting an effective theatrical style, Giani places his figure in the cella of a temple, prostrate before a statue of the goddess, a true coup de théâtre that offers the observer the illusion of furtively witnessing a secret moment of intimacy.
