Silvestro Lega

In the early 1860s, with Italy barely stitched together into a single kingdom, Silvestro Lega left the noise of Florence for Piagentina, a quiet stretch of farmland along the Arno just outside the city. He had fought for the Risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy, and had followed the republican Giuseppe Mazzini. Now, in his mid-thirties, he settled into painting small, sunlit scenes of the household around him.

He belonged to the Macchiaioli, a group of Tuscan painters who built their pictures from patches of tone they called the macchia, the "blot," working in the open air years before the French Impressionists did anything similar. Lega was the gentlest of them. His best-known canvas, The Trellis of 1868, shows women taking coffee under a vine-covered pergola on a bright afternoon, the light falling in flat, calm blocks.

His later years were hard. His eyesight failed, the family he had painted broke apart, and he died in a Florentine hospital in 1895, poor and half-blind, decades after those calm afternoons at Piagentina.