Sharpshooters Leading Austrian Prisoners

Italy was proclaimed a kingdom in March 1861, and that same year Florence put on both its usual Promotrice art show and the new state's first national exhibition. Lega sent this. A file of bersaglieri, the Italian light infantry with the plumed wide hats, is walking Austrian prisoners back from the war of 1859. Lega had volunteered himself in the earlier war, at Curtatone in 1848.

He had first called it Return from an expedition. His friend Telemaco Signorini told him to put the prisoners in the title, and under the new one the government bought the canvas. The uniforms carry most of the picture, blocks of dark blue and pale grey set against the field. It went on to be one of the works around which the gallery of modern painting was built when it opened upstairs in the Pitti in 1914.