Pietro Saltini

In 1870 Italian troops entered Rome, and Florence's turn as the capital of the new kingdom was effectively over. That same year Victor Emmanuel II bought two large history paintings straight from the artists for his apartments in the Pitti Palace. One of them was by Pietro Saltini and shows the 14th-century painter Simone Martini, known then as Simon Memmi, drawing Laura's portrait at Petrarch's request. Saltini had painted it in 1863. It still hangs in the Queen's Salon.

Pictures of that kind were the proving piece for a graduate of the Florentine academy, where Saltini had studied scenography with Agostino Lessi, perspective and decoration with Raffaello Martini, and the figure with Enrico Pollastrini. He was born in Florence in February 1839 and stayed.

The rest of his work went to smaller rooms. A grandmother telling a story, a lesson, two friends at a table, an old shoemaker with his cat. La favola della nonna went to the Museo Revoltella in Trieste, Tra due amici was bought by the same king and sent to Capodimonte in Naples, and a lithograph of the grandmother subject took a bronze medal at the Florence exhibition of 1877. He died in Florence in 1908.