During 1847 he attended Luigi Mussini’s school, where the teaching emphasized the 15th-century Florentine principles of drawing and orderly construction.

As a Garibaldian volunteer, Lega participated in the military campaigns for Italian independence (1848–49) before resuming his training, this time under Antonio Ciseri.

Serious by nature, Lega was an infrequent visitor of the Caffè Michelangiolo, a favorite meeting place in the 1850s for the young painters who later became known as the Macchiaioli.

In spite of the discussions that went on nightly in the crucible of the Caffè Michelangiolo, Lega's art, until 1859, remained conspicuously academic.

[4] Together with his Macchiaioli friends Odoardo Borrani, Giuseppe Abbati, Telemaco Signorini and Raffaello Sernesi, he started painting landscapes en plein air.

[3] In 1875, he and Borrani established a modern art gallery in Florence, but it quickly failed, and Lega's financial problems worsened.

Efrem Gisella Calingaert says:the originality of Lega’s style lies in the way he adapted a contemporary use of colour, based on direct experience of the motif, to a traditional type of composition and carefully defined forms.

In the Singing of the Ballad the simplicity and balance of the composition, the transparency of the colours and rendering of atmosphere, the monumentality of the figures in profile and their pyramidal forms invest the scene with the solemnity of a painting by Piero della Francesca.