Baldassare Verazzi

Baldassare Verazzi (6 January 1819 in Caprezzo, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, Piedmont – 18 January 1886 in Lesa) was an Italian painter.

He studied at the Academy of Brera at Milan from 1833 to 1842, then under the Venetian Romantic painter Francesco Hayez (1791–1882) in 1851, and participated in several exhibitions in Turin and Milan.

He took his inspiration from history (painting a fresco on The life of Leonardo da Vinci) and religion (The Holy Family in Egypt, the 1851 The parable of the Samaritan and the 1854 Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino presented by Bramante to Pope Julius II). His masterpiece (now at the Museum of the Risorgimento in Milan) is considered to be Episodio delle Cinque Giornate (Combattimento a Palazzo Litta) - known in English as Episode from the Five Days (Fighting at Palazzo Litta).

Heavily involved in the Risorgimento, he was hunted down by the Austrian authorities in 1848 and forced to live under severe proscriptions. He left for Argentina in 1856, where he taught (the Argentine painter Cándido López was his student) and painted local personalities, scenes of everyday life and history paintings of political or military events. He returned to Italy and installed himself near Lake Maggiore, and the landscape of that area proved a new source of inspiration for paintings that he then produced with his son Serafino (1875–1945).

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