Portrait of Franco Grassi

Franco Grassi (1910-1930) does not directly benefit the Maggiore Hospital. Son of Irene Sburlati and Bassano Grassi, he died at the age of twenty after having shown his great passion for literary and artistic studies. The mother, in 1935, makes a 200,000 lire donation to the Ospedale Maggiore, destined for the construction of the new Niguarda Hospital, to remember both her son and her husband, died six years before, asking for a portrait of the two loved ones and not her own. The portrait of the boy is commissioned to Leopoldo Galeota Russo, a name explicitly suggested by the benefactor. That of her husband Bassano to Giuseppe Amisani. The painting is an example of the vast activity of portrait painter of the Galeota, an active landscape artist; it has soft colors in shades of brown and violet; the young man is represented in a romantic attitude with a wide landscape in the background.