The Symposium

The Symposium (Das Gastmahl, after Plato) of 1873, in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, is the most ambitious painting of Feuerbach's career and one of the grandest history paintings produced in Germany in the nineteenth century. The first version was completed in 1869; this second, larger version was shown in Vienna in 1873 and became the defining statement of Feuerbach's ambitions as a history painter in the tradition of Raphael and the Venetian Renaissance. Plato's Symposium — the philosophical dialogue on the nature of Love (Eros) — provided Feuerbach with both a literary text of supreme importance and a visual subject that allowed him to combine the classical figure ideal with psychological depth and compositional grandeur. The arrival of the drunken Alcibiades disrupts Socrates's discourse on love, and Feuerbach captures the moment of transition between philosophical contemplation and Dionysian intrusion.

The monumental canvas required Feuerbach to manage an extended frieze of over a dozen individually characterized figures in a coherent compositional structure. He solved this through a combination of horizontal rhythms derived from ancient relief sculpture and the warm, unified light system of Venetian painting. The smooth, polished surface reflects months of careful finishing.