Portrait of Pietro Avoledo

Pietro Avolvedo, born in 1859, in a patriots family (his father Francesco participates in the defense of the Republic of Venice and the Roman Republic and, a fewd ays after hisson birth, is also arrested by the Austrians on charges of collaborating with Piedmontese; his daughter's brother-in-law is a fervent Garibaldian), he studied medicine and graduated in Padua. Otolaryngologist, enters to work at the Ospedale Maggiore, attends master classes in Paris and London, then constitutes the Otorhinolaryngology Department at the Place Pio di Santa Corona, administered by Ca' Granda, where he works for decades with passion and competence, after having also obtained the teaching qualification in Rome, but renouncing university teaching. In 1934, by now retired from the profession, in the will he nominates heir of all his assets the Ca 'Granda, providing a life annuity for himself and his wife. The commission of the portrait is entrusted to Augusto Colombo, who creates a very interesting work from a historical-descriptive point of view, representing the primary, in a cross-section of everyday reality, working on the hospital's high windowed cruise, next to the bed of a patient, with one of the nuns-nurses who hands him the front mirror lamp and a tuning fork, and from the stylistic point of view shows his phase of "italic" and highly personal adherence to socialist realism.