Angelo Morbelli’s ties with Milan began when he arrived there in 1867 with a grant from the town of Alessandria to study at the Accademia di Brera, with which he was connected up to 1876, not least through participation in its annual exhibitions. It was indeed through these that he first became known as a genre painter. The new focus of the 1880s on humanitarian realism emerged in his views of the city and depictions of labour as well as the silent life in the Pio Albergo Trivulzio home for elderly paupers. Moreover, it was the Milanese Galleria Grubicy that had the painter under contract from 1887 to 1893 and promoted his appearance on the international exhibition circuit. The optical and chromatic theories of Chevreul and Rood were made known through the gallery’s owner Vittore Grubicy de Dragon in the same period and Morbelli adopted the Divisionist technique in 1890, becoming the most rigorous by far of the Divisionists in virtue of his protracted experimentation and painstaking execution, always with the support of drawing and photography. His career reached its peak at the turn of the century, when he was awarded a gold medal at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. 

The last few years of Morbelli’s life, which saw no diminution in terms either of exhibitions or of technical experimentation, attested as always by numerous working notes, were marked by an increasing interest in landscape. The mountain landscape made its appearance in his work in 1896 in conjunction with a number of stays in the area of Alta Valtellina for his health. The specific problems of this genre were discussed in correspondence with his friend Giuseppe Pellizza in connection with the painting A 2000 metri (At 2,000 Metres), shown that year at the Esposizione Nazionale in Florence: how to render the particular quality of the air at high altitudes, the effect of the whiteness of snow on the power of the other colours, and the use of Divisionism to capture the opacity of the rocks. The work in the Cerruti Collection is one of many depicting the mountains of the Ortles-Cevedale range in Valtellina with views of the peak of San Matteo, the Forni glacier and the summit of Pizzo Tresero, which dominates the panorama seen from Santa Caterina Valfurva, the town where Morbelli stayed. The variations demonstrate the difficulty of framing the mountain, solved in this case by the autonomy of the white expanse with respect to the milky clouds and the opaque repoussoir (framing device) of the woods in the foreground, animated by painstaking division into primary colours. A painting of 1912 with the same viewpoint, now in a private collection, differs from the one of 1914 in the arrangement of the clouds and the fewer patches of snow. The interval between the two works attests to the artist’s use of photographs and long meditation on the subject. Removal of the frame in connection with the exhibition of 2001 at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin revealed that the gilded arch covered part of the painting, thus correcting the original rectangular format. 

After remaining initially in the artist’s possession, the work came onto the market in Milan and was bought by Edmondo Sacerdoti, owner of the Galleria Sant’Andrea as from 1950 and a keen collector of 19th-century Italian masters, especially Zandomeneghi, the Scapigliati group and Morbelli. Cerruti purchased the work between 1993, the year the inventory of his collection was drawn up in which the canvas does not appear, and 2001, when the accountant loaned it to the aforementioned retrospective curated by Aurora Scotti at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. 

Filippo Bosco