Giuseppe Bertini
1825–1898 · Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, Kingdom of Italy · Romanticism, History painting, Academic art
The story
The coloured windows of Milan cathedral are largely 19th-century work, and a good part of that came out of one family. Giovanni Battista Bertini made glass for the great windows of the apse. His son Giuseppe designed and his son Pompeo executed, and between 1852 and 1859 their workshop produced the windows of Saint Charles and Saint Ambrose and the Archangel Michael on the façade.
Giuseppe Bertini was a painter first. He won the Brera academy's grand prize for painting in 1845, at 19, with a picture of Dante meeting the monk Fra Ilario, and he went on working in history subjects. The best known is a fresco of Galileo demonstrating his telescope to the doge of Venice. In 1862 he was among the painters who made the new stage curtain for La Scala.
He was born in Milan in 1825, when Lombardy was Austrian, and died there in 1898. He had taught at Brera since 1860, and when the picture gallery was separated from the teaching academy in 1882 he became its first director. Among his pupils was Lodovico Pogliaghi, who designed the bronze central doors of the cathedral the Bertini workshop had glazed.
