Hayez's The Kiss shows a young man and woman in medieval dress, locked in an embrace on a stone staircase. Francesco Hayez painted it in Milan in 1859 for Count Alfonso Maria Visconti di Saliceto, and it has been read ever since as a patriot's farewell to the woman he loves, painted in the year Italy went to war against Austria.
The Pinacoteca di Brera, which owns the original, reads the scene as a volunteer leaving for the fight, with love of country placed above private feeling. The man has a dagger at his belt and one foot already on the stairs.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
That is the reading. The label on the wall in 1859 said something else. When the canvas went on show at the Brera Academy on 9 September, it was called The Kiss. Episode of Youth. Costumes of the Fourteenth Century. It named no war, no volunteer and no Italy.
Nor was there anything left to hide from. Three months earlier, French and Piedmontese armies had beaten the Austrians at Magenta and taken Milan, and by July Austria had agreed to give up Lombardy. Venice, the city where Hayez was born, was another matter. It stayed Austrian.
So why does a picture painted in a freed city still look like a code? Hayez left clues in the clothes, in the man's posture and in the colors, and I think the patriotic story explains less of them than it claims.
What You'll Discover
Why the lovers wear medieval clothes.
What the man's foot gives away.
What the colors were meant to say.
How many Kisses Hayez painted.