Revival e riuso nella miniatura dell’Ottocento: Ettore Sampaolo

This article examines an unpublished miniature signed by the painter Ettore Sampaolo dated 2 June 1882. The parchment is inserted in an album commissioned by the citizens of Sansepolcro and kept in the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento in Rome. The album is dedicated to Giuseppe Garibaldi on the first anniversary of his death (1883). The image shows seven medallions with famous people of Sansepolcro: Piero della Francesca in the center and around him from above the painter Santi di Tito, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, the lieutenant of Giovanni dalle Bande black Giovanni Turini, the military engineer and cartographer Giovan Francesco Cantagallina, the painter and engraver Cherubino Alberti and finally the brave captain Carlo Graziani. The figures are surrounded by rich grotesque decoration. The choice to portray illustrious men is part of a very widespread illustrative taste in the Italian peninsula of the second half of the nineteenth century, but the iconographies adopted by Sampaolo reveal themselves, as in the case of Luca Pacioli, to be very peculiar. In the municipal deposits of Sansepolcro 6 round paintings are preserved that reproduce the same figures and the same iconographies of the parchment; therefore the problem of the attribution to Sampaolo himself and of the chronological relationship between the two works arises.