Ответ

On the morning of June 5, 1880, during the War of the Pacific, a Chilean officer rode into the besieged Peruvian port of Arica to demand its surrender. The garrison was small and the situation close to hopeless, but its commander, the elderly Colonel Francisco Bolognesi, answered that he would fight to the last cartridge. Two days later the town fell and he was killed. Lepiani painted this scene of the refusal in the 1890s, more than ten years afterwards, when Peru was still coming to terms with a war it had lost and looking for figures to honour. He shows Bolognesi among his officers inside the house where he was quartered, caught at the moment of the reply.