Portrait of Ugo Foscolo

The young man here is the poet Ugo Foscolo, about 23 when he sat for this, and he is doing something specific: cutting a name into the bark of a tree with a stylus. The name is Teresa.

Foscolo had come to Milan after soldiering for the French-backed republics in Italy, and in 1802 he published there the finished version of his novel, the Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, whose hero loves a Teresa he cannot have. Milanese readers matched that name to Teresa Pikler, wife of the poet Vincenzo Monti, for whom Foscolo had an unhappy passion of his own.

Appiani painted his portraits faster and warmer than his mythologies, and it shows in the open shirt collar and the hair left in disorder. The gallery's record lists the picture's only inscription as that one word on the trunk.