Teofilo Patini

At the age of 20 years, Teofilo, along with Antonio Tripoti, enlisted in the volunteer forces of Garibaldi: the Cacciatori del Gran Sasso, which was organizing an insurrection in Abruzzo.

Later he was to join for four months in the National Guard of Castel di Sangro, with forces attempting to repress the rampant rural brigandage.

This canvas depicts a peasant, sprawled dead on a mat on the foreground, while to his side, his wife grieves in a corner while her naked baby lies supine.

The bleak reality of rural poverty prompted a contemporary critic, to label this a protest work, a legitimate descendant of the Proximus Tuus.

In 1884 at Turin, Patini exhibited Vanga e Latte (a breast-feeding mother and her working man), and finally at Venice: Beasts of burden, in which three peasant women recall the pose and exhaustion of Proximus Tuus, and the paintings of Millet.

he painted canvases of the Crucifix for the basilica of San Pelino, near Corfinio; Il Purgatorio o Redenzione, The Guardian Angel, St Carlo Borromeo among the plague victims, L’Immacolata e Santi.