Portrait of Signora Morrocchi

1859 was the year Tuscany stopped having a grand duke. Leopold II left Florence in April without a shot being fired, and in March 1860 the Tuscans voted to join the Piedmontese kingdom that became Italy a year later. Puccinelli painted this portrait in the middle of all that. The sitter is traditionally identified as the young wife of the man who kept the Caffe Michelangiolo in via Larga, the street running north from the cathedral, and that cafe was where the painters later called the Macchiaioli met and argued, and from which several of them went off to the fighting that summer. The portrait keeps a cool, tightly finished surface, closer to the academy than to anything those customers were attempting. It hangs two floors above the old grand-ducal rooms, in the Gallery of Modern Art on the top floor of Palazzo Pitti, reached on the same ticket as the Palatina downstairs.