Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryDiogenes Seeking an Honest Man
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Find the lantern among the clutter on the ground, then the owls and the monkey watching from the right.
Diogenes the Cynic, who lived in Plato’s time, mocked convention and lived simply, believing that virtue shows in action rather than theory. Castiglione shows him searching by lamplight in the middle of the day for an honest man, but the barefoot philosopher finds only bones, vegetables, broken statues, owls and a monkey. A long dedication runs along the bottom margin of the plate.
Etching on cream laid paper · Image: 21.9 × 30.6 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Baroque
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Diogenes Seeking an Honest Man
- Artist
- Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione Italian, 1609-1664
- Date
- 1645–47
- Medium
- Etching on cream laid paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 21.9 × 30.6 cm (8 5/8 × 12 1/16 in.); Plate: 22 × 31 cm (8 11/16 × 12 1/4 in.)
- Credit line
- The Charles Deering Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.