The Unnamed (L'Innominato)

In Alessandro Manzoni's novel The Betrothed, the most feared lord in Lombardy is a man the book never names. He has the young Lucia kidnapped and brought to his castle, and then he cannot sleep. Through the night that follows he is alone with what he has done, and in the morning he goes to find the cardinal of Milan, Federico Borromeo, and is changed. Italian painters of the 19th century came back to this conversion again and again. Gastaldi keeps to the solitary man, and the gallery's catalogue points to the unusual realism of his melancholy, with little of the stage drama such scenes often had. In 1860, at the exhibition of Turin's Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti, the canvas was bought by the Ministry of the Interior.