Francesco Hayez’s Meditazione: Inventing Italian Identity?

Natalizia, Giorgia

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Francesco Hayez’s Meditazione: Inventing Italian Identity?

Natalizia, Giorgia

Abstract

Nominated Professor of Painting at the Brera Academy in 1850, Francesco Hayez (Venice, 1791 – Milan, 1882) is commemorated today as the first painter of unified Italy. Defined by contemporaries as the artist who “made Italians,” he promoted ideals of national identity in a historical period when the country was fragmented socio-politically and under foreign rule. Praised by the Italian activist Giuseppe Mazzini as the “democratic genius” and protagonist of Italian Romanticism during the Risorgimento, Hayez used history painting and portraiture to create a new imagery that filtered the glorious events of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance through modern values. Among his copious allegorical portraits, mainly produced during the 1840s and 1850s, his most famous is the second version of "Meditazione", dated to 1851. Following the first version of 1850, and closely related to his "Malinconia" (1840–41) and "Un pensiero malinconico" (1842), the second "Meditazione" portrays a seated semi-nude young woman as the allegory of Italy after the failed First War of Independence (1848–49). The new Risorgimento history movement of the 1990s and 2000s led to a revision of this complex period by numerous academics, including Alberto Mario Banti, Paul Ginsborg, John Foot, Adrian Lyttelton, Silvana Patriarca, and Lucy Riall. However, the active role that art played in shaping the history of the Risorgimento has been overlooked, and a reconsideration of the icons of the nation is yet to be treated. Hence, through a hybrid methodological approach that combines visual and contextual analyses with memory and museum studies, this thesis’ aim is to fill a gap in the study of Italian unification. In the first half of this thesis, the function of Hayez’s second "Meditazione" as an icon of pre-unified Italy is closely examined in relation to the concepts of "italianità" [Italianness] and "piccola e grande patria" [small and great fatherland]. This distinction between regional and national identity—which Mazzini’s idea of the nation-state tries to bridge—raises the 2 question of how to construct an image of Italy that is able to shape collective memory when the country is still marked by a strong political, social, economic, and cultural divide between the North and the South. Furthermore, issues including the role of patronage, political censorship, the building of foreign and regional Italian stereotypes, and religious imagery—at a time when the Catholic Church had become an obstacle to Italian unification—are closely examined. The second half of this thesis seeks to study how the Risorgimento is treated today in Italy, by analyzing the function and reception of Hayez’s work from 1938 to present, as part of the permanent collection of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti in Verona. By referencing his portraits for the Habsburg Empire, we raise questions regarding the treatment of Hayez’s patriotic engagement during the Risorgimento. Through these inquiries, we suggest that he was mythically elevated to painter of the national cause by Mazzini and his followers, who were trying to invent and establish the image of a unified Italy. Therefore, this research has a trifold objective: to apply the recent advancements in Risorgimento historiography to the study of "Meditazione"; to analyze how "Meditazione" functions as a "lieu de mémoire" for regional and national identity; and, ultimately, to examine how "Meditazione" is displayed and continues to serve as the most iconic image and personification of the nation. In order to do so, primary sources—including Hayez’s "Le Mie Memorie" and local periodicals—are studied in relation to secondary sources such as catalog raisonnés, recent exhibition catalogs on the Risorgimento, monographic exhibitions about Hayez, and new Risorgimento histories.