Skip to content

Episode from the Battle of Custoza. The Wounded Prince Amedeo Is Escorted to an Ambulance

Technical Details
  • Title
    Episode from the Battle of Custoza. The Wounded Prince Amedeo Is Escorted to an Ambulance
  • Author
    Giovanni Fattori
  • Year
    1870
  • Dimensions
    cm 100 × 265
  • Inventory
    6319
  • Room
    XXXVIII

The picture was painted in 1870. Before entering Brera, it was shown at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1872. Fattori’s realistic and anti-rhetorical approach transforms the illustration of one of the fundamental episodes of the Risorgimento into an occasion for depicting the less flamboyant and high-flown aspects of war and military life.
The celebratory and patriotic intent, clearly linked with the tackling of a subject of this kind in the year when the city walls of Rome were breached at Porta Pia, seems to have been pushed into the background here, and Fattori has decided not to represent a precise action (the wounding itself or the moment when people rush to his aid) but to portray a moment of apparent calm shortly after the arrival of the ambulance: the protagonist, at the center of the canvas supported by attendants, is almost invisible in the throng of men and horses that surrounds him, while the observer’s gaze is distracted by the depiction of the soldiers and the brightly lit landscape in which the scene is set, where it is only after a few moments that the eye starts to pick out the bodies of the fallen.

Support Us

Your support is vital to enable the Museum to fulfill its mission: to protect and share its collection with the world.
Every visitor to the Pinacoteca di Brera deserves an extraordinary experience, which we can also achieve thanks to the support of all of you. Your generosity allows us to protect our collection, offer innovative educational programs and much more.

Cortile d'onore di Brera