Patriot: Carmine Crocco Drawing

It is a charcoal on paper, with painted frame. It is a portrait of Carmine Crocco, one of the best known "Brigante" of the Italian Risorgimento period. Notes on the work This work was made to participate in the exhibition held at Teano, on the occasion of the historic celebrations for the meeting of Giuseppe Garibaldi with Vittorio Emanuele. I was asked to produce a thematic artwork and I thought I would propose a controversial and provocative reading of the Italian Risorgimento and of the invasion of the Regno delle due Sicilie, very prosperous at time, in 1861 by the Piedmontese army. The civil war that came out of it, the resistance of the people, the overwhelms and rapes by the Piedmontese invading army, their mass shooting, the lager and the attempts of deportation of the southern Italian population are arguments that are not dealt with by history books, which instead describe the phenomenon of "brigandage" simply as armed robbery or extortion, omitting the partisan reading key. The choice of charcoal is dictated by the need to obtain an image that resembles an old nineteenth-century portrait and the intervention on the frame with the Italian flag colors at the beginning had to be such as to cover part of the glass as well as to try to erase with the tricolor, the Crocco image (here used as a symbol). Then I changed my mind and left the image clean because the "Briganti" and the Italian flag where not in contrast. In fact, often, among the so-called "Briganti" there were also the "disappointed": men and women who had run the dream of a revolution and supported the war to unify Italy, but at the end they only saw changing the King and worsening the general conditions of population. For these, the tricolor was the symbol of a desire for revolution that passed from the union of all the peoples of the Italian "boot" under a single flag. I am not a historian, but I firmly believe that the Italian Risorgimento should be thoroughly reshaped and the aspects (the brigandage) and controversial figures (such as Crocco's) should be put to the center of the debate. Starting from art. There are so many films, essays, works of art on the fascist Italian period for example. The total void (apart from some timid attempt) on the Risorgimento which is, in my opinion, the exact moment in which the problems of our nation started, just when it was born (badly). This is my humble and modest artistic attempt to bring attention to these issues during the celebrations for the meeting at Teano, 2017.

Drawing:Charcoal on Plastic

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:15.7 W x 33.5 H x 0.8 D in

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