Raffaello Sorbi

In 1863 Vittorio Emanuele II, two years the king of a country that had just been assembled, ordered a large canvas from a 19-year-old Florentine, and Raffaello Sorbi gave up a study place in Rome to paint it. The subject was medieval Florence: Piccarda Donati dragged out of her convent on the orders of her brother Corso, a story that reaches most people through Dante. Sorbi signed and dated the picture in 1866, at 22.

He had been trained for exactly that kind of painting by Antonio Ciseri, the most exacting history painter in the city, and at 18 he had already taken a prize at the Florentine Triennale with a scene from the same medieval family. Then the market for history at that size thinned out. From the 1870s Sorbi worked small and mostly for the Paris dealer Goupil, who passed him on to English buyers. Figures in 18th-century silk, games in a garden, the occasional ancient Roman scene in the Pompeian taste.

He kept at it for six decades, teaching and exhibiting in Florence, and died there in 1931 at 87. The picture the king ordered stayed crown property, and it hangs today in the Royal Apartments at the Pitti.