Self-portrait

1861 was the year the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, when the patchwork of old states was finally pulled into a single nation. Silvestro Lega was 35, and he had fought as a volunteer in the wars that made it happen, a committed follower of the republican Giuseppe Mazzini. He painted this self-portrait that same year. Lega belonged to the Macchiaioli, a group of Tuscan painters who built their pictures from patches of light and shadow, the macchie that gave them their name, working outdoors and against the polished academic manner taught in the schools. That same year, 1861, he also painted a group of Italian sharpshooters leading Austrian prisoners away, a small record of the fighting he had just lived through.