Giuseppe Abbati

In 1860, Giuseppe Abbati put down his brushes and marched south with Garibaldi's volunteers, the fighters trying to unite Italy. At the siege of Capua he was hit and lost his right eye. He came back to Florence half-blinded and joined the crowd of young painters arguing over coffee at the Caffè Michelangiolo — Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and the others soon nicknamed the Macchiaioli, the 'spot-makers', for building pictures out of patches of light and shade.

Abbati's own gift was for quiet interiors and courtyards seen against hard Tuscan sun. He liked to look from a dim room or a shaded cloister toward a doorway flooded with light, so the whole painting turns on that one bright opening. The cloister at Santa Croce and the little town of Castiglioncello, where the group painted together, gave him his best subjects.

War caught him again in 1866, when he enlisted for the third war of independence and was captured by the Austrians and held for a time in Croatia. He died in Florence in 1868, at the age of 32, six weeks after his own dog bit him and gave him rabies.