The Carroccio (The Battle of Legnano)

In 1176, at Legnano, north-west of Milan, the cities of the Lombard League defeated the army of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. At the heart of the Milanese ranks stood the carroccio, a heavy ox-drawn cart carrying the city's standard and an altar, which was defended at all costs. In 1831 Massimo d'Azeglio, newly settled in Milan, showed a large Battle of Legnano at the Brera exhibition, and this canvas is a smaller version of it. In a Milan governed from Vienna, a story of Lombard towns throwing back a German emperor did not need to be spelled out. D'Azeglio had been turning the subject over for years, and sketches for it appear in his notebooks of 1823 and 1824 and of 1828 to 1830. The light falls on the standard of the carroccio and on a German knight in white armour who may be Barbarossa himself.