Massimo d'Azeglio

Massimo d'Azeglio is in the history books for things other than painting. He was Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia from 1849 to 1852, the office his rival Cavour took over from him. He wrote Ettore Fieramosca, a historical novel of 1833 that readers took as a patriotic argument. He married Giulia, daughter of Alessandro Manzoni, the most celebrated Italian writer then alive. The sentence usually quoted from him, that Italy had been made and Italians still had to be, comes from memoirs published unfinished after his death in 1866.

Painting came first. Born in Turin in 1798 into a conservative aristocratic family that was horrified by the choice, he went to Rome in 1820 and kept himself there for about eight years on what his landscapes brought in. His father's death in 1830 pulled him north to Milan, into the Manzoni household and then into politics.

He carried on painting through all of it. The small picture in the modern gallery at Palazzo Pitti, Arab horsemen in a skirmish, signed AZEGLIO in the lower left corner, is dated by the museum to around 1850, which would put it in the middle of his premiership. Other catalogues place it a decade earlier. His Death of Zerbino, a scene from Ariosto's poem Orlando Furioso with tiny figures in deep woodland, hangs at the Brera Academy in Milan.