Andrea Appiani

When a young French general named Napoleon Bonaparte entered Milan in 1796, he sat for a quick portrait in charcoal and chalk by a local painter, Andrea Appiani. Napoleon was pleased with it, and that sitting shaped the rest of Appiani's life. When Bonaparte became emperor in 1805, he named Appiani the official painter of his court in Italy, and honours and commissions followed for years.

By then Appiani was already the leading Neoclassical painter in Milan, trained at the Brera Academy and admired above all as a fresco painter. Contemporaries called him the painter of the Graces and reached for comparisons with Raphael. His grandest commission was a cycle of frescoes glorifying Napoleon in the Sala delle Cariatidi of the royal palace in Milan.

Then the story turned. When Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy collapsed in 1814, Appiani lost the state pension that had come with the post, and his final years were poor ones. A stroke had already forced him to stop working, and he died in Milan in 1817.