Pietro Micca

On the night of the 29th to the 30th of August 1706, during the French siege of Turin, enemy grenadiers broke into one of the tunnels dug beneath the city's citadel. Pietro Micca, a miner in the Piedmontese army, sent his companion away, lit a short fuse and was killed in the explosion that closed the passage. The siege was broken about a week later. Gastaldi's full title names the moment he chose, just before the fire: Pietro Micca, about to set fire to the mine, turns his last thoughts to God and to his country. Under King Charles Albert the story had been told as an act of loyalty to the sovereign, and by the 1850s Piedmont read it more and more as a patriotic sacrifice. The canvas won the Accademia Albertina's Breme prize, endowed by the Marquis di Breme, and helped bring Gastaldi the academy's chair of painting.