Giuseppe Bossi (Busto Arsizio 1777- Milan 1815), Portrait of a young girl

Giuseppe Bossi (Busto Arsizio 1777- Milan 1815)

Portrait of a young girl

Oil on canvas, 72 x 58 cm

With frame 98 x 84,5

Signed lower right: “Gio. Bossi”.

Thanks to the signature we can connect its production to the hand of the Milanese painter Giuseppe Bossi, one of the most important protagonists of Milanese neoclassicism alongside Ugo Foscolo, Giuseppe Parini, Alessandro Manzoni and Carlo Porta. The family supported his early inclinations towards painting by enrolling him in the Brera Academy, established in 1786. There he had teachers Traballesi, Knoller, Appiani and G. Franks. Thanks to a scholarship he was able to travel to Rome, at a particularly favourable time for the spread of neoclassical poetry, here he met Agincourt, Raimondo Cunich, Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, Angelica Kauffmann and Marianna Dionigi. He was friends with Felice Giani and with Canova; for him he also designed the bust for the Monument in his honor in the courtyard of the Brera Academy (now preserved at the Accademia Ambrosiana), while Bossi himself created a youthful portrait of Canova preserved at Villa Carlotta. Returning to Milan in 1801 he was appointed secretary of the Bera Academy, a role he held until 1807. He developed a reform plan for the Academy that was modeled on that of the Accademia di San Luca but also aimed to give the institution unitary guidelines in order to better regulate the fragmented world of artists. He initiated annual exhibitions in which the best students and teachers participated with their works. He was the first to propose the establishment of the Academy Library to promote study. For the education of young people and those who loved art, he obtained from Napoleon the permission to bring to Brera many paintings confiscated from suppressed convents and churches, giving life to the first public art gallery in Milan. Thanks to his intervention, the government decided to purchase Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin and upon his death the art gallery bought Mantegna's Dead Christ from his heirs. In 1807, the viceroy Eugene de Beauharnais commissioned him to make a copy of Leonardo's Last Supper in mosaic: Bossi undertook a passionate study of Leonardo's work which resulted in the volume Del Cenacolo di Leonardo da Vinci, while the mosaic made by Giacomo Raffaelli, after the fall of Napoleon, was taken by the Austrians to Vienna (Minoritenkirche). Bossi was a great scholar, passionate about antiquity, Raphael and Michelangelo, as well as literary works; from the Divine Comedy to Petrarch, to the Greek classics. A man of the world, a man of letters, an orator, a collector, he was also a skilled painter and designer, but above all as demonstrated by the paintings and drawings preserved in various national and temporary institutions; such as the cartoon of Parnassus purchased by the Duke of Weimar Charles Augustus and placed in the Academy of the city, the cartoon of Oedipus the colonist of the Ambrosiana, The Burial of Themistocles of the Pinacoteca di Brera. Although many of his creations were lost or destroyed during the Second World War. He was very attracted by portraits, both of others and of himself, not only as a figurative motif but also as an essay in psychological introspection and “excavation” of the character.