Portrait of Ettore Lega

The portrait of Ettore Lega (1845-1928), the youngest of the artist’s many siblings and the only one to survive him, is a work of great quality and documents, in a meager, early period, the high level at which Lega managed to reach.

Dario Durbé, Vitali’s friend and a guest in his home whenever he happened to pass through Milan, was the first to call attention to the painting. Echoing perhaps common evaluations and discourses derived from their love for the Macchiaioli to whom they both devoted part of their studies and interest as connoisseurs, Durbé happily pointed out how the painting, in its singular and apparent simplicity actually stems from a complex and mature culture in which curiosity about the Florentine Mannerists is grafted onto a sensibility akin to that of Degas but also of Mussini, Lega’s master, and Ingres, so that it is “the most representative and most summarizing work of Lega’s youth and absolutely one of his greatest masterpieces.”

The painting was part in the early twentieth century of Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Florentine collection auctioned in 1929 in Milan, when in a climate of economic recession there was the dispersal of the major historical collections of Macchiaioli painting. Vitali bought it on that occasion, and the pencil annotation “Lam 1300” can still be read next to No. 120 in the copy of the auction catalog that was in his library.