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, cm 72 x 58

With frame 98 x 84,5

Signed lower right:" Thu. 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 Milan’s neoclassicism alongside Ugo Foscolo, Giuseppe Parini, Alessandro Manzoni and Carlo Porta. The family seconded his early inclinations for painting by enrolling him in the Brera Academy established in 1786. There he had teachers Traballesi, Knoller, Appiani and G. Franchi. Thanks to a scholarship he was able to travel to Rome, at a particularly favorable time for the spread of neoclassical poetry, here he met Agincourt, Raimondo Cunich, Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, Angelica Kauffmann and Marianna Dionigi. He was in friendship with Felice Giani and Canova; for him he also designed the bust for the monument in his honor in the courtyard of the Brera Academy (now kept at the Accademia Ambrosiana), while the same Bossi realizes a youthful portrait of the canova preserved at Villa Carlotta. Returned to Milan in 1801 he was appointed secretary of the academy of Bera, a role he held until 1807. He drew up a reform plan for the Academy modelled on that of the Accademia di San Luca but also aimed to give the institution unitary guidelines in order to better regulate the dilapidated world of artists. He started the annual exhibitions in which the best students and teachers participated with their works. He was the first to propose the establishment of the Library of the Academy to encourage study. For the education of young people and those who loved art, obtained from Napoleon to converge in Brera many paintings seized by convents and churches suppressed, giving life to the first public Milanese pinacoteca