Francesco Mosso
1848–1877 · Kingdom of Italy · Verismo
The story
In his memoirs Francesco Mosso wrote that he knew his life was, for the moment, useless, and that he was full of restlessness and bitterness. His friend and fellow student, the landscape painter Marco Calderini, gathered those writings after Mosso's death and became his first biographer.
Mosso was born in Turin in 1848 and was meant to study law. He chose the Accademia Albertina instead, where his teachers included the history painter Andrea Gastaldi and the genre painter Alberto Maso Gilli, and he wrote as well as painted. In 1876 he settled in Rome and worked under the painter Cesare Maccari. Most of his short career went into one large canvas, La femme de Claude, which caused a stir at the Turin Promotrice in 1877. That August he died at Rivalta, near Turin, at the age of 29.
