The great popularity in Casalmaggiore of the hero of the two worlds and the involvement of many people from Casalmaggiore in Garibaldi's exploits are the premise to frame the presence of this portrait dedicated to a local hero, Giovanni Vaghi, second lieutenant adjutant of General Simonetta (Southern Army), veteran of the campaign of 1859, fallen in the battle of Volturno on October 1, 1860.
It is evidently a post mortem portrait, where the idealization of the figure and the pictorial style are perfectly in line with that "oleographic aesthetics" which, through the chromolithographic printing technique, had a considerable part in conveying the image of Garibaldi and his exploits.
The painting, although unsigned, can reasonably be attributed to the painter Anselmo Gorni, whose Self-portrait is in the Diotti Museum, an artist who, in the first half of the 1960s, enjoyed a certain fame locally. Belonging to a family of Garibaldi's followers, Gorni had joined the Circolo Patriottico Garibaldi (Garibaldi Patriotic Circle), thanks to which he had the annual task, between 1861 and 1862, of teaching in the Scuola Festiva di Disegno (School of Drawing).
He participated in the great Industrial Exhibition of Cremona in 1863 with a Portrait of Garibaldi (perhaps sketched live on the occasion of the visit of the General in Casalmaggiore in 1862), a work proposed again at the Casalmaggiore’s Agrarian-Artistic-Industrial Exhibition of 1865.
