Colma Discovering the Dead Bodies of Salgar and her Brother 1809

Bartolomeo Pinelli created this ink and wash drawing entitled 'Colma Discovering the Dead Bodies of Salgar and her Brother'. This Italian artist illustrates a scene of mourning from the poetry of James Macpherson, whose Ossian poems were an international sensation. The fame of Ossian fueled the Romantic movement's taste for wild landscapes and extreme emotions. Pinelli probably encountered Macpherson's popular verses through an Italian translation. In the image, Colma confronts the slain bodies of her betrothed and her brother, a dramatic scene of familial and romantic loss. The subject connects to a broader phenomenon: the cult of feeling in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when literature and art promoted the open and extravagant display of sensibility. To truly understand works such as this, we turn to period literature, popular culture, and the history of taste. Art history thrives on the intersection of the image and its wider world.