Giuseppe Bossi

Giuseppe Bossi (11 August 1777 – 9 November 1815) was an Italian painter, arts administrator and writer on art. He ranks among the foremost figures of Neoclassical culture in Lombardy, along with Ugo Foscolo, Giuseppe Parini, Andrea Appiani or Manzoni.

He was born in the town of Busto Arsizio, near Milan. He was educated at the college of Monza; and his early fondness for drawing was fostered by the director of the college. He then studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts at Milan, and spent the years 1795–1801 in Rome, where he drew Roman remains and honed his skills in drawing anatomy at the morgue of a hospital and formed an intimate friendship with Canova, who made a portrait bust of Bossi [1]. He met Jacques-Louis David in Lyon in 1802, though his own style employed a less rigorously classicizing technique.

On his return to Milan he fell in with the circle of progressive young artists that formed the Cameretta Portiana He became assistant secretary, and then secretary (1802–1807) of the Brera Academy, whose collection of paintings, the Pinacoteca he essentially founded. In 1804, in conjunction with Barnabo Oriani, he drew up revised organizational rules for the three academies of art of Bologna, Venice and Milan, which lent weight to the need for public collections of great examples of the arts, which were being supplied from the dissolved monasteries and secularized churches of Lombardy, under Napoleonic administration. He was rewarded with the Order of the Iron Crown. On the occasion of the visit of Napoleon to Milan in 1805, Bossi exhibited at the Pinacoteca a drawing of the Last Judgment of Michelangelo, and paintings representing Aurora and Night, Oedipus and Creon, and the Italian Parnassus.

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