Carlo Ademollo

On 26 May 1859 Garibaldi's volunteer corps, the Cacciatori delle Alpi, fought Austrian troops for the town of Varese. Carlo Ademollo was in that campaign as a volunteer himself and painted its episodes afterwards. The canvas in the modern gallery at Palazzo Pitti shows one of them, a man named Pasquale Cova firing from behind a tree at Varese, an Austrian trooper already down in front of him.

He was born in Florence in 1824, a nephew of the painter Luigi Ademollo, and entered the city's Academy of Fine Arts at 14 under Giuseppe Bezzuoli, the leading history painter in Tuscany. In 1854 he went out with a group of painters to work from nature around Staggia in the Sienese hills, and he was a regular at the Caffè Michelangelo in Florence, where the young Macchiaioli were working out how to build a picture from patches of light and shade. He stayed with the detailed historical manner he had been trained in.

The war of 1866 found him in uniform again, as an aide-de-camp of the Florentine National Guard, and the king appointed him painter to the Italian army. His Breccia di Porta Pia, the storming of the Roman walls in 1870, is in the Risorgimento museum in Milan. He died in Florence in 1911, aged 86.