The departure for the field
This canvas represents an ideal watershed and an absolute summit in Induno's artistic parable. The complementary aspects of his production, the emotional realism of the battle canvases painted on the true and the private sentimentality of the genre canvases, are now summarized in an ideological realism that rediscovers a dimension of absolute modernity. In the aftermath of unity, it was necessary to transfer the forces of the Risorgimento to the general level of national belonging. Precisely in this collective dimension there was an answer to the spiritual sense of the Risorgimento struggle that allows us to interpret the compositional system and the dosage of space and pathos within a classical order: the vertical partition of the floors corresponds to a skilful alternation of solids and voids and sudden perspective cuts. If the Indunian research focuses on important details - the musket and the leather gibern of the bandolier, the sword of the saber, the saddle bundled with the blue cloth overcoat, the pistol, the straw bundle, the mess tin and the royal figures embroidered in white thread on the ends of the saddle cloth - it is to empathize with the spiritual meaning of military life. The choral and ideological universe of this work would thus have represented in the eyes of contemporaries and clients the independence aspirations of an entire people, namely the collective conscience of the nation.
(Description taken from the site)
