The analysis of the images relating to the episodes of 1849 makes it possible to detect a series of elements and data essential to the understanding of that frontier that divides the French or more generally pro-papal mode of observation from the republican one.
A French reading is offered by the illustrations that Auguste Raffet made on the sketches and notes taken in Rome and published beginning in 1852 in his Souvenirs d'Italie. Expédition de Rome 1849.
Raffet was a painter and lithographer who had followed Prince Demidoff to Rome and dedicated the Souvenirs to him. The artist was famous for his illustrations of the French Revolution, and he had gone to the battlefield at Novara and witnessed the conquest of Livorno by the Austrians. After July 3rd and the entry of the French into Rome, Raffet went to that city, where he remained until June of 1850, producing sketches, drawings, and watercolors with the intention of publishing a work whose original plan had been intended to include one hundred lithographs.
Comparison between Raffet's prints and Lecchi's photographs makes clear another difference besides the obvious one of the presence of the figures of the combatants. The captions of the prints enucleate the desire to extol the valor of the French soldier, the corps to which he belongs and his commander, while at the same time emphasizing the close ties between the expeditionary corps and the clergy, including those residing in Rome. For example, Table No. 7 extols the devotion of the French clergy who saved the lives of numerous French soldiers who had been wounded and imprisoned.
Very often the iconographic documents on the part of the French reflect a political message intended to influence public opinion at a moment that was particularly delicate from an institutional point of view. This helps to understand how they wanted to make this historical event also appear, and thus be used, in the becoming of the internal political situation in France.
There is often a fusion of the French and Italian armies on the battlefield, not only to show the mingling of the forces, but also to record the braveness of the adversaries in order to make more evident the courage and glory of the victors.
The comparison of the images made it possible, not only to recognize in one of the many country houses photographed by Lecchi the little house of Merluzzetto, but also to observe how behind the two ways of depicting the same building, there was a distinct way of observing it and standing in front of it, conditioned by the position on the field of the two different armies. "La maison des six volets verts" present in Auguste Raffet was the house faced by the French in their advance toward the walls; the house with the five windows in Lecchi's was the one seen by the defenders of the Republic.
These different perspectives were related to the struggle, to the victories or defeats of the two opposite forces. The house is thus divided into two exact halves: the back with the six green shutters was immortalized by the French and cited as “the maison des six volets vertes” in the historical accounts. The front of the building was photographed by Lecchi with its five shutters, its orchard, and its seasonal plants supported by stakes stuck into the ground. The only human presence is the figure of a boy.
(Maria Pia Critelli)