Pietro Rossi Called to Command the Venetian Army

At the Brera exhibition of 1820, this was the canvas people argued about. The subject came out of Sismondi's history of the medieval Italian republics. Pietro Rossi, lord of Parma, stripped of his lands by the Scaligeri of Verona, has been asked by Venice to command its army, and his wife and two daughters are in tears, begging him not to go. Milanese painting still ran on gods and Romans at the time, so a scene from the Italian Middle Ages, full of family grief, was taken as the arrival of Romantic painting in Italy. The man who bought it, Giorgio Pallavicino Trivulzio, was arrested in December 1821 for conspiring against Austrian rule in Lombardy. From 1824 he was serving 20 years in the Spielberg fortress at Brno. The painting stayed in private hands until Brera bought it in 2000.