Greek Privateer (c. 1840-1845)

Bolognese by birth but Venetian by adoption (in 1831 he became the holder of the chair of Elements of Figure, in 1846 that of Painting), a man of wide cultural interests, a friend of Francesco Hayez, Leopoldo Cicognara, Pietro Giordani, Gioachino Rossini and Giacomo Leopardi, Ludovico Lipparini was for about two decades – starting with the Costantino Ipsilanti (commissioned by Count Francesco Arese veteran of the Spielberg Prison, and presented at the Brera in 1834) – the undisputed “storyteller” of the Hellenic revolutionary epic, as Felice Rovani well points out: “Hearing that mythology had been apostrophised with the quousque tandem by all the competent courts, seeing that Hayez and others were consuming the Middle Ages, he turned to Modern Greece, where the new heroes celebrated by all of Europe had such richly picturesque forms of dress that the same armour and velvet of the Middle Ages must have looked nothing in comparison”.

It is therefore a fortunate achievement to be able to translate the historical genre into costume painting, ideologically neutral and formally appealing, so much so that he is appreciated in Greece itself, where he is appointed a member of the Athenian Fine Arts Society. In evocative and well-documented settings, Lipparini is in fact capable of re-proposing to the cultured European public the best-known episodes and characters of the recently concluded Greek national drama, with a “sharp and rigorous painting of an academic structure but at the same time pervaded by the quivers of romantic patriotism” (A. Villari, in Romantici e macchiaioli: Giuseppe Mazzini e la grande pittura europea, exhibition catalogue, curated by F. Mazzocca, Milan 2005, p. 248); capable of combining the moral suggestions of history painting and the exotic charm of the Near East.

The painting, previously unpublished, is one of the studies of  “Greek heads” made by Lipparini during the fourth decade of the century on the basis of numerous sketches taken from life (“He sketched from nature I don’t know how many heads of Greek sailors”, recalls Murani in the Public exhibition in the I.R. Accademia Veneta, in “Giornale Euganeo”, I, 1844, p. 638). He later used these studies to give expressive and physiognomic fidelity to the various characters that populate the surviving compositions of philhellenic inspiration – from Suliotto meditating on the conditions of his homeland in 1838 to Archbishop Germanos planting the flag of the cross on the cliffs of Calavrita in the same year; from The Death of Marco Botsaris of 1840 to Lord Byron Swearing on the Sepulchre of Marco Botsaris of 1850 -, not always appreciated by critics, but which well reflect that feeling of choral participation in a tragedy so close to the Italian one, and considered exemplary since the 1820s.

“Insurrection: I see for those peoples no other possible advice; the energetic, general insurrection; the insurrection of the multitudes; the holy war of the oppressed; the republic to create republicans; the people in action to begin progress”. Thus Giuseppe Mazzini wrote in Fede e avvenire (Faith and Future) in 1835, taking the Greek revolution, the Klefti (the guerrilla fighters who took refuge in the mountains in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion), and the patriot Marco Botsaris as a very good example of constructive and drastic revolt. And Mazzini again three years earlier in D’alcune cause che impedirono finora lo sviluppo della libertà in Italia (Some Causes that Hitherto Prevented the Development of Freedom in Italy) recognised the presence in our country of those ‘multitudes’ necessary for the overthrow of the established order, and that it was precisely “from the relics of Missolungi that Greece arose” (see G. Talamo, D’Azeglio e Mazzini: riflessioni sulla guerra d’indipendenza greca, in Risorgimento greco e filellenismo italiano. Lotte, cultura, arte, exhibition catalogue, curated by E. Lucarelli, C. Spetsieri Boschi, Rome 1986, pp. 105-107).

Stefano Bosi