Ludovico Lipparini

When Ludovico Lipparini was a young man, much of literate Europe was gripped by the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule. The English poet Byron had sailed off to die at Missolonghi in 1824, and Greek independence became the great romantic cause of the age. Lipparini, born and trained in Bologna, caught that enthusiasm and kept it for the rest of his life.

By the 1820s he had settled in Venice, where he taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti and later held its chair of painting. From there he produced large history canvases on Greek subjects, the most famous being the death of Marcos Botsaris, a Greek commander killed leading a night raid on the Ottomans in 1823. For Italian audiences, themselves living under Austrian rule and dreaming of unification, a distant war read as a version of their own hopes.

He was also a busy portraitist, and among his sitters was the composer Gioachino Rossini, then the most performed opera writer in Europe. Lipparini spent nearly two decades at the Venice academy, teaching there until his death in 1856.