Portrait of Eugenio Grisetti

Eugenio Grisetti (1822-1874) does not directly benefit the Ospedale Maggiore, although he was dedicated in life to philanthropy, as evidenced by the correspondence with Laura Solera Mantegazza, a great philanthropist, patriot, educator and pioneer of women's associations in Italy. Grisetti, patriot in 1848 on the barricades of the Five Days Milan, supporter of Mazzini and Garibaldi, goldsmith, illuminator and chiseller, married Angela De Barnardi (1830-1874). They have four children. In the back room of the shop, first in Piazza dei Mercanti and then in Largo Santa Margherita, passed writers, politicians, and philanthropists; Grisetti also designs and builds a machine that could recover the gold lost in the sands of the rivers. Experienced in the waters of the Serio, it should have interested the American market in the territories of the "gold fever", when its inventor dies. His wife follows him three months later. The couple did not stand up to the death of the third daughter after having lost two other teenage boys. The only supersitite of the family, Elvira, is just six years old. In 1933, now a widow of Luigi Radaelli, Elvira Grisetti Redaelli destined 400,000 to the Ospedale Maggiore, suggesting the names of Piero Gaudenzi and Augusto Colombo as the authors of parents' portraits. Wishing to recall also her husband Luigi, she asks that he be portrayed in the commemorative portrait that the Hospital will dedicate to her, for the execution of which she proposed the painter Giuseppe Amisani. In the portrait of Eugenio Grisetti, Gaudenzi, which in recent years is in great demand by high-middle-class clients, and not only as a portraitist, shows that he has opened up to the new artistic requirements of the twentieth century, but still maintaining a solid bond with the nineteenth-century tradition.