_G. Costa_ (Italian: born 1826).
Giovanni Costa, Professor in the Florentine Academy of Fine
Arts, is distinguished alike as a painter and a patriot. He
fought in the Venetian campaign of 1848, was a follower of
Mazzini, in 1853 joined the Piedmontese regiment of lancers
known as the Aosta Cavalleggieri, served on Garibaldi's staff
at Mentana, and in 1870 fought his way through the streets
of Rome at the head of the Italian army, and was the first
to enter the Capitol. This ended his military career; but
he afterwards served on the Municipal Council of Rome and
interested himself specially in the prevention of inundations
of the Tiber. It was in 1852 that Costa first began the study
of landscape painting, in which he was destined to become the
greatest ornament of the modern Italian School. His home was
in the Alban Hills, near Rome, and afterwards at Florence,
where in 1859 he inaugurated the "open-air school" in Italy.
In 1864 he returned to Rome, and in 1870 was appointed to
his professorship at Florence. In the earlier portion of
his artistic career, Costa exhibited at Paris (with Corot,
Troyon, and others); afterwards he found in England his chief
patrons, and many of his pupils. In 1853, at Rome, he made the
acquaintance of Leighton, whose intimate friend he remained
until the President's death. Another celebrated English artist
with whom Costa was intimate was Mason; there is considerable
affinity in some respects between the work of the two men.
The Italian painter has depicted almost every part of his
beautiful country. He has been called "the Italian Millet,"
for the feeling of sublimity which he knows so well how to
impart to the simplicities of peasant life; while in works
of pure landscape he especially excels in giving to blue
mountains, reedy banks, and olive-grown shores a poetical
charm. (See an interesting account of Professor Costa,
largely autobiographical, in the _Magazine of Art_, vol. vi.
His personal reminiscences of Mason and Leighton have been
published in the _Cornhill Magazine_, March 1897.)
The scenery of the Carrara Mountains is a favourite subject of the
painter. In his pictures of these mountains, "seen across a broad
expanse of plain through a misty atmosphere, he invests forms
undeniably grand in themselves with a more solemn splendour and a
deepened poetry."