Hayez's The Kiss is read as a patriot's farewell: a young volunteer embraces the woman he loves before leaving to fight Austria, with love of country placed above private feeling. Francesco Hayez painted it in Milan in 1859, the year Piedmont and France went to war against Austria, for Count Alfonso Maria Visconti di Saliceto. The reading rests on the medieval costume, a dagger and a foot on a staircase, and colors that echo two flags.
The painting shows a young man and woman in medieval dress, locked in an embrace on a stone staircase. The original hangs in the Pinacoteca di Brera, the art gallery of Milan.
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The first title said nothing of that reading. When the painting went on show at Milan's Brera Academy on September 9, 1859, it was called The Kiss. Episode of Youth. Costumes of the Fourteenth Century. The title names no war, no volunteer and no Italy.
By then Milan was no longer Austrian. Three months earlier, French and Piedmontese armies had beaten the Austrians at the battle of 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.
The patriotic title came later. In 1872, the writer Federico Dall'Ongaro called the picture The Volunteer's Kiss, with in mind the volunteers who fought Austria at the battles of Curtatone and Montanara, in the first Italian war of independence. I think the volunteer was named after the fact, but Milan had been reading Hayez's pictures this way for years.
Why Hayez put the lovers in the Middle Ages
Hayez had spent decades speaking about the present through the past. Born in 1791, he moved to Milan in 1823 to teach painting at the Brera Academy, in a Lombardy ruled by Austria, and his career ran on historical subjects that carried a political edge.
In 1848 Hayez took part in the Five Days of Milan, the street uprising against the Austrian garrison. After it, his work leaned toward allegories with strong political connotations, such as the Meditation on the History of Italy of 1850.
By 1859 that caution was no longer needed in Milan, but the public still knew how to read a historical scene as a comment on the present. The painting was an extraordinary and immediate success, helped by its expression of love of country and the young nation's desire for life, and by its medieval subject, a model of Romantic taste.
I read the costume less as a disguise than as a language Milan already spoke. It sets the century and nothing more. The mood comes from the man's left foot.
What You'll Discover
What the man's left foot gives away.
What the colors were meant to say.
Who else seems to be in the building.
How many Kisses Hayez painted.
Which chocolate box the lovers ended up on.