Pasquale Cova at the Battle of Varese

On 26 May 1859 Garibaldi's volunteer corps, the Cacciatori delle Alpi, fought Austrian troops for the town of Varese and took it. Among the people who joined in was a young townsman, Pasquale Cova, who was not a soldier and had no uniform. Published descriptions of this canvas say he is the figure in civilian clothes picking up a rifle from a man who has fallen. Ademollo finished it in 1861, and that date matters: the Kingdom of Italy had been proclaimed in March, and in September Florence opened the first national exhibition of the new state, where the picture was shown. The choice of subject fits that moment, a full-size history canvas named after a private individual rather than a general. It then spent more than a century out of sight in the stores of the Risorgimento museum in Florence before coming up to the modern gallery at Palazzo Pitti in the 1970s.