Francesco Hayez

Stand in front of Hayez's most famous painting and you see a couple in a stairwell, a young man in a cloak bending a woman back into a kiss, his foot already on the step as if he has to go. Milanese audiences in 1859 read it as more than romance. The man is leaving to fight, and the picture came to stand for the Risorgimento, the movement to drive out Austria and unite Italy.

Hayez, born in Venice and long the leading Romantic painter in Milan, had learned to hide his politics inside history and love scenes, which let him slip past Austrian censors. He painted this one the same year a French and Piedmontese alliance beat the Austrians in Lombardy. Look at the colours of the two figures' clothes, the pale blue and white of the woman's dress against the red and green of the man: together they gather up the flags of France and of the coming Italian nation.

He returned to the composition more than once. The best-known version hangs in the Brera in Milan, the city where Hayez taught for decades and where he died in 1882, at the age of 91.