La risposta dei cosacchi zaporoghi

Ilya Repin worked on this on and off for more than a decade, from 1880 into the 1890s, chasing a piece of folklore he found irresistible. The story goes that the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV demanded the Zaporozhian Cossacks submit to him, and the Cossacks answered with a letter so crude and mocking it became legend. Repin painted the moment of writing it, a scrum of men roaring with laughter as the scribe takes it all down. He hunted for real faces, traveling to Cossack country and using historians and friends as models, because he wanted the laughter to look earned rather than staged. Every man laughs differently, from the wide-open bellow to the sly grin at the edge. The bare-chested man in the center thumps the table.