 In 1861, he received a gold medal at an exhibition in Florence for his painting of the Battle of Magenta, but gave it up in solidarity with the painters who had been overlooked.After unification had been achieved, his genre works tended to focus on scenes from the seventeenth century and he began to exhibit paintings on a wider variety of topics outside Italy, including Vienna (1873), Paris (1878), Antwerp (1885) and London (1888).His best-known work from this period is "A Game of Chess", a scene from a play of the same name by Giuseppe Giacosa.