Portrait of Giovanni Miani

The painting, of unknown artist, features a portrait of Giovanni Miani, the Venetian explorer who, between 1859 and 1861, organized an expedition to Africa in search of the Nile sources, unknown at that time. He sailed up the river and reached the village of Galuffi, in today’s Uganda, the farthest point ever attained by a European, but could not reach its goal. The portrait probably dates back to the early sixties of the nineteenth century when Miani was about fifty-five, it is in fact already present in his exhibition arrangement of the collection, shown in a lithograph commissioned by Miani himself and included in his publication of 1865 "The expedition to the sources of the Nile" (G. Miani African collection).