To better analyze the different ways of narrating and depicting the events of 1849, it is necessary to analyze Lecchi’s photographic narrative alongside the iconographic production of his time, which had in common with his images the subjects depicted and often the same observation point. This makes it possible to see details that the photographer observed during the summer of 1849, but that the technical methods that he used did not enable him to depict.
There were many images produced during the time of the Roman Republic, and very many were produced after its fall. Drawings, watercolors, engravings, paintings, and sketches were produced by artists who had participated in or witnessed the episodes, or who wanted to fix the images of certain protagonists. To these should be added the visual accounts that were submitted to foreign periodicals, often published as an accompaniment to chronicles of the events.
The similarity, when a comparison is made between different images and techniques, is only partially related to the object depicted. In some cases, the artist’s sensitivity to the landscape did not exclude certain documentary or compositional considerations.
Different, however, is the attention that distinguishes the photographers' way of working from that of other artists, who had at their disposal a greater amount of time to organize and elaborate the image even at a distance of time, perhaps making use of sketches fixed on places or referring to works by other artists.
After the fall of the Roman Republic, there was an accelerated circulation and commercialization of images produced by various artists, with different goals and using different techniques. For example, while Domenico Amici made his engravings based on the watercolors of Carlo Werner, his son Aurelio painted a view of the battery at the Aurelian Wall, dated 1850, appropriating an engraving of the identical subject that had been produced by his father. Alessandro Faure's paintings are also made from sketches made by his father.
For some painters (the brothers Domenico and Gerolamo Induno, Nino Costa, Johan Philip Koelman, Wilhelm Palm) it was a matter of transposing what had been their patriotic experience into images while other fighters of the Republic, such as the Swiss Gustav von Hoffstetter and Giovanni Cadolini, included sketches, plans or portraits in their memoirs.
The images of Roman monuments and classical ruins were intended above all for an audience made up of tourists and foreigners; but after the fall of the Roman Republic, the new ruins that resulted from the fighting attracted a new kind of tourism and a new market in addition to the original one. This was the case of painters like Cicconetti, Alborghetti, and the more famous Giovanni Battista Bassi, who produced small-scale oil paintings related to wartime events, depicting places and buildings that had been destroyed.
It is interesting, for example, to note that Pietro D’Atri “Frenchizes” the name of his firm, calling it “chez Pierre D’Atri rue du Cours n. 142.” The captions to his images, also in French, were probably intended for the French troops who had remained garrisoned in Rome after the fall of the Republic.
Part of the art market was constituted by collectors, including those who had participated in various ways or witnessed recent events. At times, painter-soldiers such as Alessandro Castelli and Antonio Moretti produced drawings and watercolors that were faithful depictions of the landscape in the outskirt of the city.
Perhaps during moments of truce, or in the days following the fall of the Republic, Castelli paints on site his views which provide rich written references about place names, including at times brief annotations on them. The desire to emphasize the fact that the drawings were made from life is also present in the images by Moretti, and in general this was a tendency shared by all the artists active in Rome at the time. For example, some of the images by Pietro D’Atri read underneath their captions “dessiné le même jour sur le lieu du combat.” [drawn the same day of the battle]. Many works, dated1849 and executed by artist-soldiers were made as pencil drawings executed in the immediacy of events and then and retouched in white lead, watercolor or processed to become oil paintings.
Pictorial depictions that draw on the classical canons of vedutismo are flanked by works that, in form and content, adhere to the genre that can be called contemporary history painting and that sees its birth precisely in the Risorgimento period. Thus, the characters and fighters of the Republic rise to prominence. Gerolamo Induno paints the Legionario garibaldino a Porta San Pancrazio, Domenico Induno portrays Orsola, sutler of Spoleto, at Ponte Milvio, Rudolf Edward Hauser portrays Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Andrea Fleissner fixes in watercolor scenes of combat, draws the funerals of the fallen or the departure from Porta San Giovanni of Garibaldi and the combatants leaving the city.
An interesting case is a painting by Filippo Vittori, a draftsman and painter from Milan. His painting depicts the Lombard bersaglieri and lancers of death carrying Luciano Manara seriously wounded at Villa Spada. In the painting the scene is set in a fantasy landscape on which, however, in the background stand out the depictions of the Casino dei Quattro Venti (on the left) and the Vascello (on the right) that have now become symbolic places of the Republic. Lithographs were taken from this painting including one printed by the Doyen Brothers of Turin. But it is interesting that a photograph of Stefano Lecchi that I found in the iconographic fund of the Museo del Risorgimento in Rome, with the inscription "S. Lecchi 1851" depicts precisely the central part of that painting (Critelli 2001).
(Maria Pia Critelli)
