Portico

Florence in 1861 sat inside a country that had only just been proclaimed, and the painters who met at the Caffè Michelangiolo were working on scraps of cardboard, small enough to carry outdoors and finish at a sitting. This is one of those, 14 by 21 centimetres, a portico with sunlight laid across it in flat patches. Vito D'Ancona had gone to Venice five years earlier with his friend Telemaco Signorini and come back interested in the way the Venetians loaded their colour, and that dense handling turns up here at a scale of a few centimetres. The gallery on the upper floor of the Pitti reads the picture as the point where he dropped the historical subjects his academy training had prepared him for. The date the museum prints on its own page is a flat 1861, against an older state record that spread the picture across 1859 to 1861.